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.
