:Hacker Speech Style:
=====================

   Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful
word choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively
little use of contractions or street slang.  Dry humor, irony, puns,
and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued -- but an underlying
seriousness and intelligence are essential.  One should use just enough
jargon to communicate precisely and identify oneself as a member of the
culture; overuse of jargon or a breathless, excessively gung-ho
attitude is considered tacky and the mark of a loser.

   This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally
spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical
fields.  In contrast with the methods of jargon construction, it is
fairly constant throughout hackerdom.

   It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative
questions -- or, at least, that the people to whom they are talking are
often confused by the sense of their answers.  The problem is that they
have done so much programming that distinguishes between

     if (going) ...

and

     if (!going) ...

that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it may seem to be
asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so to merit an
answer in the opposite sense.  This confuses English-speaking
non-hackers because they were taught to answer as though the negative
part weren't there.  In some other languages (including Russian,
Chinese, and Japanese) the hackish interpretation is standard and the
problem wouldn't arise.  Hackers often find themselves wishing for a
word like French `si', German `doch', or Dutch `toch' or `wel' - a word
with which one could unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question.
(See also {mu})

   For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double
negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows
them.  The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an
affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to disturb
them.

   In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering
questions containing logical connectives with a strictly literal rather
than colloquial interpretation.  A non-hacker who is indelicate enough
to ask a question like "So, are you working on finding that bug _now_
or leaving it until later?"  is likely to get the perfectly correct
answer "Yes!" (that is, "Yes, I'm doing it either now or later, and you
didn't ask which!").

