Hacker Speech Style

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 seems to be
asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so merits 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' or German `doch' with which one could
unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question.

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!").