X-Mailer: PCElm 3.01 (1.3 gt)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Wed, 19 Aug 1992 17:27:54 BST
Reply-To:     gtoal@ed.ac.uk
From:         Graham Toal <gtoal@PIZZABOX.DEMON.CO.UK>
Subject:      No Subject specified
Comments: To: words-l@uga.cc.uga.edu

A long long long time ago, Bayla asked me which of the entries in
the hacker's handbook were mine.  Here's one of the postings I
submitted at the time.  See which ones you recognise.  I've been
feeling a bit nostalgic today, going through my 300Mb of disk archives
while transferring them off to tape so I can reformat the disk...

(btw there were a few major errors in this that we corrected in subsequent
mail.  I putt them right in time...)

--
To: jargon@com.think

Hi guys; this mail may be a little disconnected -- it's a
major brain dump and I don't really have time to tweak the
grammar etc.  Most of the things I've noted come from my
early Days at Edinburgh University (Edinboro, Scaatland to you :) )
and a few I heard from Cambridge University when I was working
in Cambridge (England of course; the real Cambridge) at Acorn
Computers -- Britains last resort of hackerdom in a commercial
company...

Firstly, metacomments: the 'phonetic' pronunciation is embarassingly
poor; OK - some of it comes from the differences betweek UK English
& US English; but a *lot* of pronunciations are inconsistent with
each other and even internally inconsistent.  I won't harp on at
it, but I'll note a few of the more glaring ones as I go through.

Secondly, ...
<braindump>

PRONUNCIATION:

  ie  life, sky
      Can't you hear a difference between life & sky? Life rhymes
      with wife, strife, etc; sky rhymes with die, try, etc.
      How about 'ai' for the 'sky' sound and 'ei' for 'life'

      This would mean that
  eir Their (bad example, by the way), software
      would need to be respelt as 'ai' or 'ay'


  ee  easy, ski
      Unfortunately you also use this for a 'y' suffix, as
      in 'Garply' and others.  You should distinguish the 'i'
      sound, say with 'ih', especially when followed by a glottal
      stop or syllable boundary.


  u   put, foot
      Ouch! 'put' as in golf? Better example please!  Anyway, it's
      redundant; you already have 'oo' for that sound; keep a simple 'u'
      for the 'uh' sound and change 'u's for 'oo's...

  Omitted schwa: Hmm... you can omit it when there is a single
    consonant at the end of a word and it is syllabic, but I'd
    recommend against it in more complex syllables such as
    LOGICAL (lo'ji-kl) -> loj'-ih-k@l)

  Wrong syllabification:
    ASSEMBLER (as'em-bler) -> @-sem'-bler
    Say it out loud *from the pronunciation you give* - Ass Embler?
    There are quite a few of these.  Maybe its just a difference
    between UK & US stress points, but it still looks weird to me.

STYLE:

Capitalisation of entries in the dictionary:
   Unfortunately since you're not using a formatter you can't use boldface
   etc., but using all caps has been shown to be A Bad Thing in any
   traditionally printed dictionary.  Take your very first entry --
   @Begin{} -- Vital information is lost in the capitalization.

ENTRIES:

@Begin

   <flame> ... </flame> and other similar uses are creeping in, from
   SGML usage.  Seen in UK TeX groups.

ACK
   Not just from the ASCII mnemonic, but from the protocol which
   inspired the mnemonic.  I can remember as far back as 77 usage such
   as: (trying to get someones attention at a terminal, when they appear
   to be in heavy hack mode) 'SYN SYN ENQ?' to which the reply would
   be either 'ACK' or 'NACK' depending on whether they were available
   or not.  (SYN is a SYNchronisation byte)

AD-HOCKERY
   I think you're being too generous; Ad-hockery in a program is
   a special-case made to fix some awkward input which throws the
   program, (whereas normal inputs are dealt with by clean & regular
   code/rules/whatever)

ASBESTOS LONGJOHNS

   We say Asbestos underpants

ASCII
   '#' ARGH!!!!!!!!!! Not ANOTHER one!!!! look, HASH IS HASH IS HASH.
   It is *not* POUND under any circumstances.  This is not a character
   used in Britain; the first we ever saw of it was in the late sixties
   when we first started importing American comics, and it was to be
   seen at the top (as in Issue #1234).  No one knew what it was
   called then. Then with usenet, we started to see it on computers
   and discovered it was called 'hash'. This is the only term used
   for it in the UK.  The confusion with 'Pound' arose because UK
   keyboards/computers used a variant of ascii where the hash sign
   was stolen and a Pound sign (a cursive majiscule L with a stroke
   though it) was placed in that slot instead.  Now with 8-bit ASCII
   we've moved that char up a bit and has is restored to its rightful
   place.   PLEASE don't perpetrate the myth that '#' is Pound!

   '?'  We say Query

ASSEMBLER/2

   NANOBOT? One of you guys doing the compilation must be heavily
   into this cyberpunk/nanotechnology stuff.  I'll bet it isn't
   mainstream hackerdom outside your local circle.  Also, who's
   the backgammon player?  Seems a strangely huge number of
   'straight' backgammon references.

AUTOMAGICALLY Pron: usually both the word 'magic' and the 'ally' ending
are fully pronounced, such as 'aw-toh-maj'ik-ali', although the 'normal'
pronunciation would be 'aw-toh-maj'-ikli' (not -ee)

BACK DOOR (bak dor)  'dor'? -> 'dohr'
   We also call these 'trapdoors', as in the trapdoor under the trojan
   horse which lets the soldiers out.

BAMF
   This is the sort of thing I was asking about above... is this
   virtual reality stuff really into hackerdom nowadays?

BELLS AND WHISTLES
   Really from trains?  I thought it was from the costume and behaviour of
   court jesters?  As in related to the expression 'All-singing-all-dancing'
   (A.S.A.D.) (which I don't think you've included).

BERZERKELY
   Ooops - I thought this was to be used when referring to Berkeley
   software in a *derogatory* fashion... I'll know better next time, he he :)

BIG-ENDIAN
   A little etymology could be useful here; it's from Swift's satire,
   Gulliver's Travels, and comes fom a war over which end of the
   egg should be broken in order to eat it.

   Apropos of nothing in particular, did you know that 'token rings'
   were invented in Literature by William Goldring in 'lord of
   the flies' before it was invented in cambridge?  The children
   in that story would sit in a circle at campfile meetings, and
   would pass a conch shell around; only the person holding the
   shell was allowed to speak.  This also led to the usage in
   Cambridge of 'conch shell' for the software token.

BIG IRON
   We say 'Heavy metal' :)

BINARY
   Also, people are described as 'binary' - especially some
   computer nerds who tend to answer strictly yes/no.

BLAST
   With high-power graphics making it down to street level
   (at least in the UK :) ) expressions like 'Raster-Blaster'
   are creeping in from the schoolboy-hacker group as a
   synomym for bitblt or a piece of hardware which does a bitblt.
   (It's a reverse formation from 'Rasta-Blasta' or what you'ld
   call a 'ghetto-blaster')

BLAZER (blay'zr) -> blay'-z@r Example of omitted schwa; not a syllabic
   terminal.

BLETCH  The German derivation sounds rather specious. Have you checked
   it with a native German?

*** Missing entry:
*** BIBLE:  Knuth Vols 1..3!!! (not to mention the missing vols
   he's still working on; apparently TeX was a sidetrack in order
   to get something good enough to set the remaining volumes ;-) )


BITTY BOX
   Also referred to as a 'calculator'...

BLT
   No reference to related BitBlt?

BNF
   Give a cross-reference to 'Parse'. (Commonly heard phrase, 'I can
   parse that', meaning 'I understand', especially when the speaker
   is being deliberately obscure to confuse people not intended
   to understand; recent example; "So is Joy attached?" - "Sorry,
   %sys-e-femalloc"* "I can parse that :-) ")

   (* VMS slang; System-Error; Female Already Allocated to Another User)

BOAT ANCHOR
   because of their shape & size, Sinclair home micros are usually
   referred to as 'book-ends'

BOGOSITY (boh-gos-@-tee) Must be your local pronunciation. Another
   dubious 'ee' pron.

BOGUS
   Double Blech.  This usage really grates on UK nerves; bogus
   has a precise meaning of false or counterfeit, so simply
   'wrong' is a severe devaluation of the meaning.  We would
   be wuite happy to talk about forged mail as 'bogus' but
   a 'bogus algorithm' would cause one to take a doublethink
   before realising it was the American meaning of 'incorrect.'
     (A real 'bogus' algorithm would be something like a
   tampered-with DES, being passed off as read DES with the intent
   of confusing the decoder)

BOHR BUG (bor buhg) -> bohr? Or do you pronounce it like that?

BOINK
   Actually, it was an invented word 'Bonk' which was used many years
   ago in a satirical BBC TV show, "Who Dares Wins" (I think; maybe it
   was the predecessor; I get confused as two shows had almost
   identical players)  It was *definitely* invented by them, rather
   than appropiated by them, because I remember them being interviewed
   saying so.  The word caught on in style, being used in the tabloid
   newspapers shortly afterwars in headlines like 'Bonking becker'...
   (That dates it! - just before Wimbledon :-) )

   [On a related note, SNOG has been mainstream UK slang for *years*
   - I can remember it as a five year old...]

BOTTLEDNECKED
   The most infamous being the von Neumann bottleneck.  Note that
   if you get into a bottleneck situation, you don't get out of
   it by code-tweaking (sory, 'Bumming' to you) - it just moves
   elsewhere.  You have to do a full data-flow analysis to
   remove a bottleneck properly.

BOOT
   Also 'IPL' (ei-pee-el)

BRAIN-DAMAGED

   We also have the expression 'Terminal Brain Death' - the state of
   mind induced by 24hrs in front of a terminal. (We also call
   stupid OS's like mess-dross 'Brain-dead')

BFI
   Actually, I object slightlt to the derogatory phrasing! - sometimes
   a BFI approach is worthwhile - say you have a list of thingies which
   can't ever get above say 20 items; then a linear trawl down this
   list is worthwhile as opposed to the effort of writing a sort/
   binary-chop code. It's just a case of knowing when BFI is appropriate.

BUM
   Not an expression used in the UK at all. (It means Arse)  We always
   say 'Tweak' which I see has a slightly different meaning for you.
   Sometimes people tune their code at an inappropriate level, eg
   by tweaking instructions in assembler to get the last cycle out
   (rather than by using a smarter algorithm) -- these people are
   called 'Bit Twiddlers' here.  The motivation for bit twiddling
   is usually because the person concerned is a 'Speed Freak'.
      Roger Wilson, designer of the ARM Risc CPU is an archetypal
   speak freak & bit twiddler.  Fortunately, he understands the
   algorithmic improvements too :-)

BUG
   Glad you resisted the temptation to trot out the Grace Hopper
   story - shamless self-publicist that she is ;-)

BUSY-WAIT
   We always called a busy-wait loop a 'Spin-lock'

CAN
   Abbrev of ASCII code CANcel - typed at keyboard of early systems.

CASTERS UP MODE
   %rms-e-prsefail, "try CASTERS-UP MODE" ?

CATATONIA
   Technically known as deadlock or deadly-embrace.  Actually you
   note somewhere that 'deadly-embrace' is the preferred European
   term.  I seldon hear it nowadays.  Actually I seldon heard it
   in 1976 when I first learned of it :-)

CDR
   Also various forms such as "CADADRADRDDRCDRCADRCADADR" reserved
   for the interesting noice a 'Superball' (tm) makes when bouncing
   off the underside of a table...

CELL-REPAIR MACHINES  Wot? *More* of this????

CHAIN
   meaning 2: Interception of vectors by more than one client.
   Each person to grab a vector (intercept a jump table) must
   make his code pass on the call to the original code; many
   utilities can chain together on the same vector.  This technique
   is enjoying a revival with the new generation of kiddy micros
   reinventing the operating-system wheel...

CHAR - UK pronunciation usually 'char' or 'kar'

CHASE POINTERS
   usually as a noun here, 'pointer chase' or 'pointer hunt' ...
   the process of going through a dump (intractively or o a large
   piece of paper printed with hex runes) following dynamic
   data-structures.  Only used in a debugging context.

CHROME
   At Acorn (UK's major micro manufacturer) the quondam boss,
   Hermann Hauser, had an eye for 'marketing features'; we
   tended to call them 'hermann-features'  i suspect the rest of
   the wold isn't interested in this though :)

   Oh yes - One term I heard from the marketroids seems to
   have caught on; 'Tick-list features' - stuff that buyers
   insist on but never use; for instance, the Acorn Risc Machine
   had a 'tick-list' feature of IBM-PC compatibility (via
   software emulation) -- it was official policy that machines
   for educational establishments (kiddy schools, not universities)
   were PC-contemptible, so they had to supply it.  In fact, it ran at
   something like a sixth of the speed of an AT. (Now it's getting
   faster after much judicious tweaking...)

CLONE
   Add a ref to the GNU project?  (Whose raison-d'etre is essentially
   cloning unix)

CODE POLICE
   When Apple II's first came out, there was a code-policeman at Glasgow
   University who would watch for people writing programs *at the terminal*
   and who would, if he found one, pull out the mains plug!

   I though this sort of idiotic behavious had died out, but there
   was an instance on usenet recently of an american professor who
   marked down exercised if they had *any* superfluous brackets in
   their C xpressions.  Cretins like that are positively dangerous.

COMPUTRON
   Also 'brains', 'oomph', 'cycles' etc.

COOKIE MONSTER
   Enjoying a comeback on windowed systems i hear.

COPYLEFT
   You must be friends of these guys - *everybody* else now calls
   it the GPV - Gnu Public Virus; the (ab)usage caught on rapidly
   since it was raised on usenet last year.  I've never heard anyone
   'GPL' in ages.

CORE
   Actually, some of us who used core computers avoid the word so
   as not to sound like geriatrics ;-) however there is a useful
   distinction between core & ram (as in 'Don't forget lunch
   at 12:30?' "Don't worry - I've got it in core!")  That being that
   core doesn't lose data when powered off, so 'remembering
   something in Ram' sounds a lot more worrying to those of
   us over 30 :)

CRANK
   Usage heard here: "can't you crank it up with a lookup table?"
   meaning to make it go faster.

CREEPING FEATURITIS.  Like it. We use Creeping featurism. I prefer yours.

CRIPPLEWARE
   Urk!  In the UK, shareware which asks you to donate to your favourite
   charity is becoming increasingly common; one of the major PD
   players is a ghod-freak; many people refuse to use software
   packaged like this and refer to it perjoratively as 'cripple-ware'.
   I don't approve, but pass it on f.y.i.  The ultimate in guiltware :-(

CRUNCH 4.  Reducing a source to equivalent program but with minimal
  number of chars (related to Compress meaning).  But specifically
  so it still compiles.  A c obfuscator might be called a cruncher,
  but the name came into being specifically for a famous program
  which crunched Basic source in order to make it run more
  quickly (it was a wholly-interpretive basic) [BBC Micro]

(CRUNCHA )3
   We tend to say 'Grind grind' which is always accompanied by
   hand movements imitating a gringer (eg a meat-mincer or
   probably more recognisable to kids today, a coffee grinder)
   Means 'isn't this machine particularly slow today :-)'


DAEMON pron dee'-m@n
   It comes from 'Maxwell's Daemon' (James Clerk Maxwell)
   Ask a physicist what the context was. I'm not sure. (Something
   to do with interference patterns & double slits perhaps?)
   (by the way, Brits are pretty consistent about the pronunciation)

DD
   I remember 'PIP' (from RSX11) used in this way many tears ago...

DIDDLE
   This is actually a mainstream English word for fuck, going back
   many centuries.  now archaic.

DISPLAY HACK
   What we now call Psychedelicware.  We used to do this sort of
   stuff on a pdp 6 with a scope display, running software
   emulated lissajous loops.  And the original Tanks game, ca 1974.
   2K used to go a long way...

DOWN
   I remember getting blank looks from my parents the first time I
   used 'down' at home, in a non-computing context.  ('Sorry, maw -
   couldn't get the paper; the newsagent is down')

DROP ON THE FLOOR
   Also 'down the bit-pit', 'in the bit-bucket' etc.  A loose
   wire or unconnected serial line is a 'bit-sink'.

DRUGGED
   refers to a slow system too.

EMOTICON/Smiley
   Overuse of the smiley in mail/news (often as many as one per
   sentance) is a Bad Thing and denotes a luser.  People forget
   how to be sarcastic in fun without driving the point home
   with a smiley.  Annoying, isn't it? ;-)

EPSILON
   Also 'Delta' used in simlar context; 'how much is that
   new blah?' 'Oh - 7 quid plus or minis delta...' (Or 'seven
   quid modulo nuppence')

ESSENTIALS
   You forgot the twinkies!  (Twinkies have taken on an almost
   mythical status in the UK after circulation several years back
   of 'real programmers don't eat quiche' -- dreams of amazing
   hacker mind-food are burst as soon as they see one)

FENCEPOST ERROR -> fens'-pohst er-@r by your taxonomy.
   (by the way, how is 9 better?)

*** Missing entry:
FIREFIGHTING
   Throwing manpower/late nights at a project (*always* commercial)
   to get it out on time for a deadline...

FRED
   Not because it is the easiest thing for a learning one-finger-typist
   to type?

FAX
   Used by computer people when sending physical objects because
   they hate to think it can't be done electronically ;-)
   'No, it's not a new bicycle - I got my folks to fax it down
    from home...'

GENDER MENDER
   A 'buzz-box' was a simple resistance tester with a buzzer; so
   a fancy comms-box (like the Interfaker - all good hardware
   hackers insist on it by name) became known as a 'fuzz-box'.
   Actually, I've never met a software hacker worth his salt who
   couldn't handle a soldering-bolt or a rs232 breakout box...

   This reminds me of 'LOGIC FLANNELISER' for Logic Analyser. ('Flannel'
   is an English verb meaning to baffle someone with technical bullshit)

GET A REAL COMPUTER
   ... could be a paraphrase of RMS's reply when people ask if GCC
   is running on Dross yet :-)

GNU see comment on copyleft.
   The word 'gnu' was used long before RMS, especially at Stanford.
   Look up some old Knuth monographs sometime...

GONK
   Gonking is an old British Army expression meaning grabbing some
   available sleep time.  We had a famous officer cadet in our unit
   called 'Gonker Gibson'; any time you looked for him & he didn't
   have any jobs to do, he could be relied on to be found asleep
   somewhere.  This usage goes back to before computing times.
   I'm sure that this is what became corrupted into hackerspeak GRONK OUT.

GONZO - scratch 'overwhelming' subs 'outrageous, over the top'
   (Gonzo journalism was where the reporter did something outrageous
   to generate a story which he would then report)

   It was always a wonder to me why HST, purveyer of the Mojo Box,
   never got into usenet.  It seems to me to be ideally suited
   to his style.  Don't expect he'll get a chance now, after being
   put away by the straights.

GRUNGY
   I thought this referred specifically to bits of code in a system
   which could never be accessed, but which people were too lazy,
   or usually, too afraid, to take out?

GUMBY
   Claymation?  I thought it was a Monty Python invention? (the characters
   with hankies on their heads who sing "I'm a lumberjack, and I'm OK".

GURU
   The early Atari's put up a box on the screen with variously a
   mushroom cloud or a picture of a guru, and the text "Guru meditation
   error 0x2345" (or similar; didn't see this myself but its famous)
   - ie an undealtwith trap address.

H-INFIX
   Stir stir! Don't muddy the waters worse, please!  The Dhrystone
   joke is independent of h-infixing.  Whetstone is a real word.
   (It's what you sharpen your Swiss Army Knife on...) The infix
   H as in Ghod is relatively little-known.

HACKER
   Boy, you guys are real die-hards. How old are you? 50's?
   Look, Hacker == malicious intruder is here to stay, and you are
   pissing against the wind trying to stop it.  Even die-hard hackers
   like myself find it the natural word to use in that context.
   Sorry, but the language has moved on.  If you don't believe in
   living language, read Chomsky; he's usually someone CS types respect...

   Likewise 'cracker' will die a death, if it hasn't already. Anyway,
   I hear some residents of Georgia object to this usage ;-)

   If you keep it in, you'll just come across as old fossils (qv)
   who can't keep up ;-)

HCF
   boy, has this been in the mythology for years! Ever actually SEEN
   it happen?  I heard the story from a FOAF back in 76, but
   it referred to an HP machine then, and already had hairs on.

HOME BOX
   4.*2*??? ha ha ha!

HOUSE WIZARD (hows wi'zrd)
   Hit me with that schwa man!

HUMOUR
   The only time the darkroom was empty in Edinburgh CS was when
   Doctor Who was on :)  This latter applied partially to
   Blakes Seven.  Star Dreck was never considered important
   enough to miss a major hack for... (Kirk was universally
   known as 'The Bozo' or 'The Brain-dead Moron')
      Radios were brought in to the darkroom (fighting the
   interference from the pdp15) whener HHGTTG was on. No-one
   watched the TV series of it.

   Max Headroom was followed avidly, even the Canadian version
   which was watered down for lusers.  The old timers had Big Laughs
   at the lusers who were convinced the 'computer graphics' were
   real...

IBM
   My favourite; Install Bigger Memories.

ICE
   go on, name ONE hacker who talks this sort of crap...

INCANTATION
   Also 'Casting the runes' - getting a guru to run a particular
   program and type at it because it never works for anyone else;
   yet no-one can ever see what the guru is doing different from
   Joe public does.

   Another one; 'Examining the entrails' - a debugging session,
   especially examining core dumps or hex dumps.

   RUNES in general describe any characters outwith the average
   Real Person's repetoire.  Although some systems might be
   described as 'runic' even by hardened hackers. (//C.SYSIN DD *)

IRON BOX
   We use the rather quaint expression "Locked up tighter
   than a Duck's Arse" in this context :-)

KLUDGE yes, we say 'kluhj' in preference to 'klooj', but I suspect your
   phonetic transcriptions has got a bit twisted here.

   (Better explain to Brits that Rube Goldberg == Heath Robinson)

LEXER

   I've heard "Lexer Fail" in similar curcumstances to "Parse Fail"
   especially when the talker is mumbling. (As opposed to saying
   'mumble mumble' :-) )

LINE EATER

   Well, for a *LONG* time now, the Line Eater has referred to
   the NSA trawling program which scans internation mail looking
   for keywords to detect subversion...

   So, when you seed 'Food for the line eater' nowadays it will
   contain words like "Iran-Contra" "S&L", "USAF cocaine drops" etc ;-)

LISP
   Got a Lisper among you, huh? Afraid to put in the standard
   explanation of 'Lots of Insipid Superfluous Parentheses'? ;-)

   I'm pretty sure Imp(AA)  (Atlas Autocode Systems Implementation
   language) predates both Lisp and Fortran, and is still in use
   in Edinburgh in the direct derivatives Imp77 and Imp80; it is
   a language which parallel Algol in development but was totally
   independent of it.  One of the authors is still around in
   Edinburgh if you want to check the facts on this; Peter
   Schofield <pds@ecsvax.ed.ac.uk> but you'd better be wuick; he'll
   be retiring soon.  He tells some good tales of early hackerdom
   (he was peripherally involved with Turing et al during the War
   I believe) although they may lose some value in email (the story
   of reading the paper tapes off the first compiler run in the train
   from Manchester to Edinburgh is hilarious, but probably only
   because of the pantomime of hand movements involved :-) )

MACRO
   reminds me of a generic hacker linguistic feature; putting
   prefixes on words which don't usually take them; MACRO-,
   MEGA-, META- etc.  Keep an open ear and snaffle some examples
   yourself; I can't think of any offhand, and if I don't finish
   typing this soon I'm aimed at a head-crash.

MAGIC
   Add a cross-reference to AUTOMAGICALLY

MAGIC SMOKE
  Frequently used excuse for intermittent failures (usually
  hunted down as uninitialised variables) is "Cosmic Showers".
  I've got very proficient at explaining these to lusers, with
  a straight face ;-)

MARKETROID
   Reminds me of one of ours; with so many firms spinning off
   from larger computing companies here, they tend to fall
   prey to VULTURE CAPITALISTS (=venture ...)

MEATWARE
   We use LIVEWARE, but usually only when it is small and green and
   appears unexpectedly in your salad. "Waiter, there's some liveware
   in my salad"...

MEMETICS
   there's a strong suspicion that elemets of usenet are actively
   creating urban rumours... The one about twinkies preserving
   corpses, and by inference keeping people younger, and also (!)
   slowing down brain functions seems pure hacker-inspired rumour.

MEMORY LEAK
   Our expression is 'Leaky Heap'

MENUITIS
   i know :-( This is why I never use BB's.  i have my doubts
   about 'rn' on this score too...

MESS-DOSS
   we say 'mess dross' (dross is the leftover stuff from
   burning coal etc; dunno if thats a known word in US?)

   or ... my favourite ... (from Ian Jack, now at Digital Research)
   'Domestos' ... which is a well-known UK disinfectant; the imagery
   coming from it being flushed down the toilet :-)))


META
   How about examples? Such as usenet meta-discussions on newsgroups?

META BIT
   Usually just 'TOP BIT' here.

MICROTAPE
   DEC TAPE also known as LINK TAPE (or was that LINC TAPE -- I have
   trouble remembering that far back...)

MOBY
   Usage being revived by US shareware as in 'Moby Words' etc - large
   spelling/pronunciation lists.

MONKEY UP
  lash up, cobble together

MUMBLE
   "Well, mumble?" - usually verb-doubled surely... "Mumble mumble"!

MUNCHKIN
   Unknown in UK; we have "TEENAGE WHIZZ-KIDS" (as reported in
   newspapers; used somewhat more sarcastically by hackers :) )
   and "SCHOOLBOY GENIUSES". (Ditto)

NANOACRE
   Talking of VLSI reminds me of a famous Carver Meadism from the VLSI
   design videos (You've been bored by the lectures, you've read the
   book, now see the movie...) -- "Aaand, unstructured design is a
   bit like treading in molasses; the deeper you get in, the harder
   it is to get out"  The hardware equivalent of spaghetti code.

NETWORK ADDRESS phon = net'-wuhrk not w*e*rk! Probably transcripted
   by a German ;-)

NETWORK, THE
   Indeed the "Friends Of Fernando Poo" is becoming a major
   force in UK politics, fighting the iniquitous Poll Tax.
   FOFP, the ringleader, runs the secret anarchistic organisation
   from the net; see "Friends of Fernando Poo <fofp@ed.ac.uk>"
   (HHOS) Actually, its not all that secret; we all have fofp
   teeshirts (complete with eye in pyramid etc...)

*** Missing entry
NIH  Not Invented Here syndrome.
   name a famous CS site who *hasn't* reinvented/rewritten every
   major utility...

NIL
   Also 'Mu' == "Please rephrase the question".  I also heard
   a theorist at coffee one day answer question with "Bottom"
   which I think was meant in the sense of your 'NIL'.

NP-
   Generalizes from terms "NP-Complete" and "NP-hard" I think;
   I'm not sure what could be described as NP-easy...

OBSCURE
   Also described as Baroque, Rococco, or Runic. (Unix is often
   called 'Runix' by VMS freaks)

NONTRIVIAL
   Famous quote "It's either trivial or its interesting"



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