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SimpyJargon Lexicon
Search the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.
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Meat for the hacker's diet
The Jargon File is great by itself, but it also has plenty of references to invaluable resources, born from the quintessence of the hacker community. For your convenience we have compiled the list of all books that have been mentioned throughout the Jargon File. Here's a random example:
The New Hacker's Dictionary
Eric S. Raymond. MIT Press; 3rd edition. 547 pages. ISBN 0-262-68092-0.
The New Hacker's Dictionary, a common heritage of the hacker culture, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.
Over the years a number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to maintaining the File and been recognized by the net at large as editors of it. From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished, edited, and formatted for commercial publication with the cooperation of the volunteer editors and the hacker community at large. If you wish to have a bound paper copy of this file, you may find it convenient to purchase one of these. They often contain additional material not found in on-line versions.
This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Chapter 3. Revision History.
Random terms
pretzel key
pretzel key n.
[Mac users] See feature key.
mu
mu /moo/
The correct answer to the classic trick question “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”. Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer “yes” is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but “no” is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually “mu”, a Japanese word alleged to mean “Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions”. Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word ‘mu’ is actually from Chinese, meaning ‘nothing’; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also mean “have not” (as in “I have not done it”), or “lack of”, which may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use, which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer in the following well-known Rinzai Zen koan:
xor
xor /X´or/, /kzor/ conj.
Exclusive or. ‘A xor B’ means ‘A or B, but not both’. “I want to get cherry pie xor a banana split.” This derives from the technical use of the term as a function on truth-values that is true if exactly one of its two arguments is true.
