Word: hacker
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That odd word, which describes how a gweep feels when he meets a phrog (see below), generally applies to anything so bad that the computerist cries out, "Bletch!" (the equivalent of the layman's "Yecch!"). This and much else can be learned from a remarkable work called The Hacker's Dictionary, which, as might be expected, is not a book but a computer printout that can be acquired only by accessing the right data base. The term hacker is itself an example, for underground languages like to reverse the connotations of words; in black English, for instance...
...territory for slang is computer technology. That is unexpected. Slang is usually thought of as a kind of casual conversation in the street, not as a dialogue between the human brain and a machine. Those who go mountaineering up the interface, however, are developing a wonderfully recondite vocabulary. Hackers (computer fanatics) at M.I.T. and Stanford maintain a Hacker's Dictionary to keep their common working language accessible to one another. Input and output have long since entered the wider language. So have software and hardware. The human brain in some circles is now referred to as wetware. When...
...Hacker's Dictionary, one finds gronk (a verb that means to become unusable, as in "the monitor gronked"), gweep (one who spends unusually long periods of time hacking), cuspy (anything that is exceptionally good or performs its functions exceptionally well), dink (to modify in some small way so as to produce large or catastrophic results), bag biter (equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently) and deadlock (a situation wherein two or more processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for the other to do something. This is the electronic equivalent of gridlock, a lovely, virtually perfect word...
Perhaps the most surrealistic vision of how to cope with a nuclear war is offered by Mark Hacker, a graduate student in architecture at Princeton University. He has designed the ultimate fallout shelter: an underground city, complete with apartments and trolley cars, for 30,000 people. The metropolis would be 300 ft. to 500 ft. underground and be able to survive any nuclear blast, save for, possibly, a direct hit. Once residents entered the city, however, the exits would be sealed, and they would never again return to the earth's surface. Robert Kingsbury take note...
...oversized racket, simply grew out of its creator's desire to better his own game. Millionare inventor Howard Head '36. who revolutionized the skiing industry by introducing the aluminum ski in the '50s, began tinkering with the idea of a bigger racquet in the early '70s. Head, a typical hacker, became frustrated with his frequent off-center hits which would cause racket and wrist to turn, spraying the ball awry. Reasoning that the laws of physics dictate that the wider something is, the more resistant it is to twisting. Head figured bigger might be better. After some years of labwork...