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vanilla adj.
[from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] Ordinary [flavor], standard. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, `vanilla wonton soup' means ordinary wonton soup, as opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup. Applied to hardware and software, as in "Vanilla Version 7 Unix can't run on a vanilla 11/34." Also used to orthogonalize chip nomenclature; for instance, a 74V00 means what TI calls a 7400, as distinct from a 74LS00, etc. This word differs from [canonical] in that the latter means `default', whereas vanilla simply means `ordinary'. For example, when hackers go on a [great-wall], hot-and-sour soup is the [canonical] soup to get (because that is what most of them usually order) even though it isn't the vanilla (wonton) soup.
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