Commonwealth Hackish

n.

Hacker jargon as spoken in English 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 (especially two-component names) tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib´l/ rather than /sohsh wib´l/).

Preferred metasyntactic variables include blurgle, eek, ook, frodo, and bilbo; wibble, wobble, and in emergencies wubble; flob, banana, tom, dick, harry, wombat, frog, fish, womble 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! “).

All the generic differences within the anglophone world inevitably show themselves in the associated hackish dialects. The Greek letters beta and zeta are usually pronounced /bee´t@/ and /zee´t@/; meta may also be pronounced /mee´t@/. Various punctuators (and even letters - Z is called ‘zed’, not ‘zee’) are named differently: most crucially, for hackish, where Americans use ‘parens’, ‘brackets’ and \`braces’ for (), [] and {}, Commonwealth English uses ‘brackets’, ‘square brackets’ and ‘curly brackets’, though ‘parentheses’ may be used for the first; the exclamation mark, ‘!’, is called pling rather than bang and the pound sign, ‘#’, is called hash; furthermore, the term ‘the pound sign’ is understood to mean the £ (of course). Canadian hacker slang, as with mainstream language, mixes American and British usages about evenly.