The colloquial layer of words is not infrequently limited to a definite language locality where it circulates.»

(Rayevska : 72)

Most of the scholars distinguish among the literary vocabulary

Common literary words;

Terms and learned words;

Poetic words;

Archaic words;

Barbarisms and foreign words;

Literary coinages including nonce-words.

The colloquial vocabulary falls into the following groups:

Common colloquial words;

Slang;

Jargons;

Professional words;

Dialectal words;

Vulgar words;

Colloquial coinages.

The Standard English vocabulary consists of common literary, neutral, and common colloquial words.

Common literary words are mostly used in writing and in polished speech.

The object of this paper is common colloquial vocabulary as it is considered to be a part of Modern Standard English and is constantly replenished by special colloquial vocabulary.

A lot of words from non-standard colloquial vocabulary are gradually losing their non-standard character and becoming widely recognized. However, they do not lose their colloquial association.

E.g.: guy (young man).

1.2.1. The Notion of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak

The term slang is extremely vague and ambiguous. There are a lot of distinctions of it but none of them is specified exactly. It is presented both as a special vocabulary and as a special language. So, in most of the dictionaries sl. (slang) is used as a convenient stylistic notation for a word or a phrase that cannot be specified more exactly.

Jargon is a recognized term for a group of words that exists in almost every language and whose aim is to preserve secrecy within a social group of people. The most well-known jargons in English are: the jargon of thieves, generally known as cant; the jargon of jazz musicians etc.

Some American linguists refer to informal language as slang and reserve the term jargon for the technical vocabularies of various occupations. Some linguists consider slang to be regional, and jargon – social in character.

Professionalisms are the words used in a definite trade, profession or calling by people connected by common interests both at work. Professionalisms are correlated to terms, which are coined to nominate new concepts that appear in the process of technical progress and the development of science.

In this paper we research the language used by hackers – a technical culture that appeared under the influence of computerization. Hackish (see Glossary of Terms) is traditionally the jargon though many linguists distinguish it as slang.

To make a confused situation worse, the line between hackish slang and the vocabulary of technical programming and computer science is fuzzy, and shifts over time. Further, this vocabulary is shared with a wider technical culture of programmers, many of whom are not hackers and do not speak or recognize hackish slang.

Accordingly, we tried to distinguish among three categories:

slang: informal language from mainstream English or non-technical subcultures (bikers, thieves, rock fans etc).

jargon: informal «slangy» language peculiar to or predominantly found among hackers; it is the language hackers use among themselves for social communication, fun, and technical debates.

techspeak: the formal professional technical vocabulary of programming, computer science, electronics, and other fields connected to hacking.

This terminology will be consistently used throughout the remainder of this research project.

The distinction between jargon and techspeak is extremely delicate. A lot of techspeak originated as jargon, and there is a steady continuing uptake of jargon into techspeak. On the other hand, a lot of jargon arises from generalization of techspeak terms (see 2.2.4.).

It is very difficult to research the apparent origin of technical terms, for several reasons. First, many hackish usages have been independently reinvented multiple times, even among the more obscure and intricate neologisms. It often seems that the generative processes underlying hackish jargon formation have an internal logic so powerful as to create substantial parallelism in different languages. Second, the networks tend to propagate innovations so quickly that `first use' is often impossible to trace.

In general, techspeak considers any term that communicates primarily by a denotation well established in textbooks, technical dictionaries, or standards documents.

1.2. Hackerdom

"The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings", according to MIT hacker Phil Agre.

Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. An important secondary meaning of hack is `a creative practical joke'.

The «hacker culture», or hackerdom is a loosely networked collection of subcultures that contains some important shared experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. Because hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves partly by rejection of `normal' values and working habits, it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional culture less than 40 years old.

As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold their culture together; it helps hackers to recognize each other's places in the community and expresses shared values and experiences. Also as usual, not knowing the slang (or using it inappropriately) defines one as an outsider, a mundane, or (worst of all in hackish vocabulary) possibly even a suit. All