Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of `pirate boards' inhabited by [cracker]s, phone phreaks, and [warez d00dz]. These people (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.
Though crackers often call themselves `hackers', they aren't (they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems). Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's. Nevertheless, this lexicon covers much of it so the reader will be able to understand what goes by on bulletin-board systems.
Here is a brief guide to cracker and [warez d00dz] usage:
- Misspell frequently. The substitutions
- phone => fone
freak => phreak - are obligatory.
- Always substitute `z's for `s's. (i.e. "codes" -> "codez"). The substitution of 'z' for 's' has evolved so that a 'z' is bow systematically put at the end of words to denote an illegal or cracking connection. Examples : Appz, passwordz, passez, utilz, MP3z, distroz, pornz, sitez, gamez, crackz, serialz, downloadz, FTPz, etc.
- Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey Dudes!#!$#$!#!$").
- Use the emphatic `k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome") frequently.
- Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").
- Substitute `0' for `o' ("r0dent", "l0zer").
- TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE TIME.
These traits are similar to those of [B1FF], who originated as a parody of naive [BBS] users; also of his latter-day equivalent [Jeff K.]. Occasionally, this sort of distortion may be used as heavy sarcasm by a real hacker, as in:
> I got X Windows running under Linux!
d00d! u R an 31337 hax0r
The only practice resembling this in actual hacker usage is the substitution of a dollar sign of `s' in names of products or service felt to be excessively expensive, e.g. Compu$erve, Micro$oft.
For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see [lamer], [elite], [leech], [poser], [cracker], and especially [warez d00dz], [banner site], [ratio site], [leech mode].
Node:
, Next:
, Previous:
, Up:
How to Use the Lexicon
Pronunciation Guide
Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all entries that are neither dictionary words pronounced as in standard English nor obvious compounds thereof. Slashes bracket phonetic pronunciations, which are to be interpreted using the following conventions:
- Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or back-accent follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks a secondary accent in some words of four or more syllables). If no accent is given, the word is pronounced with equal accentuation on all syllables (this is common for abbreviations).
- Consonants are pronounced as in American English. The letter `g' is always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); `ch' is soft ("church" rather than "chemist"). The letter `j' is the sound that occurs twice in "judge". The letter `s' is always as in "pass", never a z sound. The digraph `kh' is the guttural of "loch" or "l'chaim". The digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of "bughouse" or "ragheap" (rare in English).
- Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names; thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/. /Z/ may be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.
- Vowels are represented as follows:
- /a/
back, that
/ah/ father, palm (see note) /ar/ far, mark /aw/ flaw, caught /ay/ bake, rain /e/ less, men /ee/ easy, ski /eir/ their, software /i/ trip, hit /i:/ life, sky /o/ block, stock (see note) /oh/ flow, sew /oo/ loot, through /or/ more, door /ow/ out, how /oy/ boy, coin /uh/ but, some /u/ put, foot /y/ yet, young /yoo/ few, chew /[y]oo/ /oo/ with optional fronting as in `news' (/nooz/ or /nyooz/)
The glyph /*/ is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded vowels (the one that is often written with an upside-down `e'). The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, `kitten' and `color' would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not /kit'*n/ and /kuhl'*r/.
Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found in standard American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken by TV network announcers and typical of educated speech in the Upper Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia). However, we separate /o/ from /ah/, which tend to merge in standard American. This may help readers accustomed to accents resembling British Received Pronunciation.
The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as possible to map the pronunciations into their local dialect by ignoring some subset of the distinctions we make. Speakers of British RP, for example, can smash terminal /r/ and all unstressed vowels. Speakers of many varieties of southern American will automatically map /o/ to /aw/; and so forth. (Standard American makes a good reference dialect for this purpose because it has crisp consonants and more vowel distinctions than other major dialects, and tends to retain distinctions between unstressed vowels. It also happens to be what your editor speaks.)
Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages. (No, Unix weenies, this does not mean `pronounce like previous pronunciation'!)
Node:
, Next:
, Previous:
, Up: