Wide Spread of Hackers Slang - Essay Example

Computer hackers' slang consists of non-standard use of English words or creation of new words among various computer specialists, not only hackers. This is special computer dialect aimed at excluding certain people from the conversation. It functions as encryption, so that the non-initiate cannot understand the conversation, or as a further way to communicate with those who understand it. Computer hackers' slang functions as a way to recognize hackers and to differentiate them from the society at large. (Hafner & Markoff, 1991, pp.203-256) Hackers' slang constantly renews its process of expression, and specifically its vocabulary, so that those not part of the group will remain unable to understand the slang. The existence of slang dictionaries, of course, cancels the effectiveness of certain words. Kelly-Bootle (1995) defines following methods of developing words of hackers' slang: Abbreviation. Hackers denote a word by only several of its component letters. For example: "RTFM" - "read the following manual", "IMHO" - "in my humble opinion", "BTW" - "by the way" or "LOL" - "lay of laugh". Verb doubling. Hackers 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, barf, and chomp, i.e. "The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose." Sound-alike slang. Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting, i.e. "Plug&Play" is transformed to "Plug&Pray", "Government Property - Do Not Duplicate" to "Government Duplicity - Do Not Propagate" or "Macintosh" to "Macintrash". Overgeneralization. Many hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to non-uniform cases (or vice versa). For example: "win" extends to "winnitude", "winnage", "disgust" to "disgustitude", "hack" to "hackification". "Marketdroid" is a member of a company's marketing department, especially one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement. "Careware" is a variety of shareware for which either the author suggests that some payment be made to a nominated charity or a levy directed to charity is included on top of the distribution charge. Spoken inarticulations. Words such as "mumble", "sigh", and "groan" are spoken in places where their referent might more naturally be used. It derives from the impossibility of representing such noises in a chat or by e-mail. Anthropomorphization. Hackers often anthropomorphize hardware and software, for example, it's possible to say, "the protocol handler got confused" or "the program is died". () Comparatives. Many words in hacker slang have to be understood as members of sets of comparatives. This is especially true of the adjectives and nouns used to describe the beauty and functional quality of code. Here is an approximately correct spectrum: "monstrosity brain-damage screw bug lose misfeature" or "crock kluge hack win feature elegance perfection". (Levi, 1984, pp.56-78) Numerization. Hackers often include soundalike numbers in place of words or parts of words, for example "4 you", "2 do". (Kelly-Bootle, 1995, pp.36-101) Terms of computer hackers' dialect are often particular to their subculture. Raymond (1996) writes, "The hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of 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. " (Raymond, 1996) As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold their culture together - it helps hackers 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 hackers' vocabulary) possibly even a suit. All human cultures use slang in this threefold way - as a tool of communication, and of inclusion, and of exclusion. Hackers lack expressiveness of the formal language to reflect the specific sense they want to show. So they invent new words or apply technical terms to the common life or vice versa. A simple example is the distinction between a "kluge" and an "elegant" solution, and the differing connotations attached to each. The distinction is not only of engineering significance; it reaches right back into the nature of the generative processes in program design and asserts something important about two different kinds of relationship between the hacker and the hack. Hacker slang is unusually rich in implications of this kind, of overtones and undertones that illuminate the hackers' spirit. But there is more. Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. (Kelly-Bootle, 1995, pp.7-14) Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence. Further, the electronic media, which knit them together, are fluid, hot' connections, well adapted to both the dissemination of new slang and the ruthless culling of weak and superannuated specimens. The results of this process give us perhaps a uniquely intense and accelerated view of linguistic evolution in action. Hacker slang also challenges some common linguistic and anthropological assumptions. For example, it has recently become fashionable to speak of low-context' versus high-context' communication, and to classify cultures by the preferred context level of their languages and art forms. It is usually claimed that low-context communication (characterized by precision, clarity, and completeness of self-contained utterances) is typical in cultures, which value logic, objectivity, individualism, and competition; by contrast, high-context communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded (Geoffrey, 1987, pp. 48-53)) is associated with cultures, which value subjectivity, consensus, cooperation, and tradition. Hackers' slang is themed around extremely low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily "low-context" values, but cultivates an almost absurdly high-context slang style. Numerous slang terms pass into informal mainstream speech, and thence sometimes into mainstream formal speech. For example, the word "mainframe" carries the sense of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built by IBM and the other great companies. Originally it was referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or "main frame" of a building-filling old batch machine. Now it means a high-performance computer designed for resource-capacious operation, such as bank transactions of NASA projects. (Raymond, 1996) A word "patch" (temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a quick-and-dirty remedy to an existing bug or misfeature) entered in computer users' lexicon thanks to corresponding update technology for Microsoft Windows. So hackers' slang is constructive certain form of language which not only parasitize on English but also produce new words or gives new life to old ones. With wide spread of computers words from language of computer professionals get into common language with confidence. References: 1. Hafner, K. & Markoff, J. (1991) Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster 2. Raymond E. (1996). The New Hacker's Dictionary. Retrieved June 13, 2005 from 3. Geoffrey, J. (1987). The Tao of Programming. Santa Monica: Infobooks 4. Kelly-Bootle, S. (1995). The Computer Contradictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 5. Levy, S. (1984) Hackers. New York: Anchor/Doubleday Read More