zap

1. n. Spiciness.

2. vt. To make food spicy.

3. vt. To make someone ‘suffer’ by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.) See zapped.

4. vt. To modify, usually to correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary patching tool. Also implies surgical precision. “Zap the debug level to 6 and run it again.” In the IBM mainframe world, binary patches are applied to programs or to the OS with a program called ‘superzap’, whose file name is ‘IMASPZAP’ (possibly contrived from I M A SuPerZAP).

5. vt. To erase or reset.

6. To fry a chip with static electricity. “Uh oh — I think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk controller.”