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 pound currency symbol (of course).
See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey,
fish, go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky
heap, lord high fixer, loose bytes, muddie, nadger, noddy,
psychedelicware, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun
lounge, 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, womble, and xyzzy.