Commonwealth Hackish
n. Hacker jargon as spoken outside the U.S., esp. in the British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like 'char' and 'soc', etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix meta may be pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is often /bee't*/, zeta is often /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred metasyntactic variables include 'eek', 'ook', 'frodo', and 'bilbo'; 'wibble', 'wobble', and in emergencies 'wubble'; 'banana', 'wombat', 'frog', fish, and so on and on (see foo, sense 4).
Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes '-o-rama', 'frenzy' (as in feeding frenzy), and 'city' (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!"). Finally, note that the American terms 'parens', 'brackets', and 'braces' for (), [], {} and are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers 'brackets', 'square brackets', and 'curly brackets'. Also, the use of 'pling' for bang is common outside the United States.
See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console-jockey, fish, go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky heap, lord high fixer, noddy, psychedelicware, plingnet, raster blaster, seggie, terminal junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel, YABA, and notes or definitions under Bad Thing, barf, bogus, bum, chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nybble, proglet, root, SEX, tweak and xyzzy.
