Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization, anthropomorphization, and (especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite general; but soundalike slang is still largely confined to MIT and other large universities, and the `-P' convention is found only where LISPers flourish.

2.1.1. Verb Doubling

A standard construction in English is to double a verb and use it as an exclamation.

E.g. "Bang, bang!" or "Quack, quack!»

Most of these are names for noises. Hackers also double verbs as a concise, sometimes sarcastic comment on what the implied subject does. Also, a doubled verb is often used to terminate a conversation, in the process remarking on the current state of affairs or what the speaker intends to do next. Typical examples involve win, lose, hack, flame, (see Glossary of Terms) culture has one *tripling* convention unrelated to this; the names of `joke' topic groups often have a tripled last element. The first and paradigmatic example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork.

Other infamous examples have included:

alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg
alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk
sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom
alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill

2.1.2. Soundalike Slang

Hackers often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase in order to achieve a humorous effect. It is considered particularly flavorful if the phrase is bent so as to include some other jargon word. For instance, the computer hobbyist magazine "Dr. Dobb's Journal" is almost always referred to among hackers as `Dr. Frob's Journal' or simply `Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in fairly wide use include names for newspapers

E.g.: Boston Herald - Horrid (or Harried)

Boston Globe - Boston Glob

Houston (or San Francisco) Chronicle - the Crocknicle (or the Comical)

New York Times - New York Slime

However, the following terms are often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard examples include:

IBM 360 - IBM Three-Sickly

Government Property -- Do Not Duplicate (on keys)

р Government Duplicity -- Do Not Propagate

for historical reasons - for hysterical raisins

Soundalike slang has been compared to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the past (see the Glossary of Terms). They are not really similar because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent.

2.1.3. The -P convention

The –P convention means turning a word into a question by adding the syllable `P'. It originated from the LISP convention of appending the letter `P' to denote a predicate. The question expects a yes/no answer.

E.g.: 1) At dinnertime:

Question: "Foodp?"

Answer: "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!"

2) Instead of «How are you doing?»:

Question: "State-of-the-world-P?"

Answer: (Straight) "I'm about to go home."

Answer: (Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state."

3) On the phone to Florida:

Question: "State-p Florida?"

Answer: "Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?"

Once, when Bill Gosper, a famous hacker, was at a Chinese restaurant with his friends, he wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" It is known to be one of the best hacks.

The most frequently used positive reply to a question using ) is «T’, which is taken from the LISP terminology and means «true’. Some LISP hackers use `T' and `NIL' (New Implementation of LISP) instead of `Yes' and `No' almost reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings. For example, when a waiter or flight attendant asks whether a hacker wants coffee, he may absently respond `T', meaning that he wants coffee; but of course he will be brought a cup of tea instead.

2.1.4. Generalization

A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the frequency with which techspeak items such as names of program tools, command language primitives, and even assembler codes are applied to contexts outside of computing wherever hackers find amusing analogies to them. One of the best-known examples of generalization is that Unix hackers often grep (see the Glossary of Terms) for things rather than search for them.

Hackers enjoy generalization on the grammatical level as well. They add the wrong endings to various words and them make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to non-uniform cases (or vice versa).

E.g.: porous - porosity

generous - generosity

Hackers successfully generalize:

mysterious - mysteriosity

ferrous - ferrosity

obvious => obviosity

dubious => dubiosity

Another class of common construction uses the suffix `-itude' to abstract a quality from almost any adjective or noun. This usage arises especially in cases where mainstream English would perform the same abstraction through `-iness' or `-ingness'.

E.g. win => winnitude (a common exclamation)

loss => lossitude

cruft => cruftitude

lame => lameitude

Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation. For example, they argue, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be called `lats' because they measure latitude!

Also, hackers noun verbs.

E.g.: "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over".

This is only a slight overgeneralization in modern English that all verbs can be nouned. In hackish, however, it is good form to mark them in some nonstandard way.

E.g.: disgust => disgustitude

hack => hackification

English as a whole is already heading in the direction towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese; hackers are simply a little