Soundalike slang
Hackers will often make rhymes or
puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more
interesting. It is considered particularly flavorful if the phrase is
bent so as to include some other jargon word; thus 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:
- 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, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment.
Standard examples include:
- Data General => Dirty Genitals
- IBM 360 => IBM Three-Sickly
- Government Property --- Do Not Duplicate (on keys) => Government Duplicity --- Do Not Propagate
- for historical reasons => for hysterical raisins
- Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford) => Marginal Hacks Hall
>
This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been
compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque
whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent.