Other Lexicon Conventions

Other Lexicon Conventions
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Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than
the letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common in
mainstream dictionaries), except that all entries beginning with
nonalphabetic characters are sorted after Z.  The case-blindness is a
feature, not a bug.

The beginning of each entry is marked by a colon (`:') at the left
margin.  This convention helps out tools like hypertext browsers that
benefit from knowing where entry boundaries are, but aren't as
context-sensitive as humans.

In pure ASCII renderings of the Jargon File, you will see {} used to
bracket words which themselves have entries in the File.  This isn't
done all the time for every such word, but it is done everywhere that
a reminder seems useful that the term has a jargon meaning and one
might wish to refer to its entry.

In this all-ASCII version, headwords for topic entries are
distinguished from those for ordinary entries by being followed by
":" rather than ""; similarly, references are surrounded by "{{" and
"}}" rather than "{" and "}".

Defining instances of terms and phrases appear in `slanted type'.  A
defining instance is one which occurs near to or as part of an
explanation of it.

Prefix ** is used as linguists do; to mark examples of incorrect
usage.

We follow the `logical' quoting convention described in the Writing
Style section above.  In addition, we reserve double quotes for actual
excerpts of text or (sometimes invented) speech.  Scare quotes (which
mark a word being used in a nonstandard way), and philosopher's quotes
(which turn an utterance into the string of letters or words that name
it) are both rendered with single quotes.

References such as `malloc(3)' and `patch(1)' are to UNIX facilities
(some of which, such as `patch(1)', are actually freeware distributed
over Usenet).  The UNIX manuals use `foo(n)' to refer to item foo in
section (n) of the manual, where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system
calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is games, and n=8 (where
present) is system administration utilities.  Sections 4, 5, and 7 of
the manuals have changed roles frequently and in any case are not
referred to in any of the entries.

Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are summarized
here:

abbrev.
     abbreviation
adj.
     adjective
adv.
     adverb
alt.
     alternate
cav.
     caveat
conj.
     conjunction
esp.
     especially
excl.
     exclamation
imp.
     imperative
interj.
     interjection
n.
     noun
obs.
     obsolete
pl.
     plural
poss.
     possibly
pref.
     prefix
prob.
     probably
prov.
     proverbial
quant.
     quantifier
suff.
     suffix
syn.
     synonym (or synonymous with)
v.
     verb (may be transitive or intransitive)
var.
     variant
vi.
     intransitive verb
vt.
     transitive verb

Where alternate spellings or pronunciations are given, alt.  separates
two possibilities with nearly equal distribution, while var. prefixes
one that is markedly less common than the primary.

Where a term can be attributed to a particular subculture or is known
to have originated there, we have tried to so indicate.  Here is a
list of abbreviations used in etymologies:

Amateur Packet Radio
     A technical culture of ham-radio sites using AX.25 and TCP/IP for
     wide-area networking and BBS systems.
Berkeley
     University of California at Berkeley
BBN
     Bolt, Beranek & Newman
Cambridge
     the university in England (*not* the city in Massachusetts where
     MIT happens to be located!)
CMU
     Carnegie-Mellon University
Commodore
     Commodore Business Machines
DEC
     The Digital Equipment Corporation
Fairchild
     The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto development group
FidoNet
     See the {FidoNet} entry
IBM
     International Business Machines
MIT
     Massachusetts Institute of Technology; esp. the legendary MIT AI
     Lab culture of roughly 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups,
     including the Tech Model Railroad Club
NRL
     Naval Research Laboratories
NYU
     New York University
OED
     The Oxford English Dictionary
Purdue
     Purdue University
SAIL
     Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (at Stanford
     University)
SI
     From Syst`eme International, the name for the standard
     conventions of metric nomenclature used in the sciences
Stanford
     Stanford University
Sun
     Sun Microsystems
TMRC
     Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model Railroad Club
     (TMRC) at MIT c. 1960.  Material marked TMRC is from "An Abridged
     Dictionary of the TMRC Language", originally compiled by Pete
     Samson in 1959
UCLA
     University of California at Los Angeles
UK
     the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland)
Usenet
     See the {Usenet} entry
WPI
     Worcester Polytechnic Institute, site of a very active community
     of PDP-10 hackers during the 1970s
XEROX PARC
     XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering
     research in user interface design and networking
Yale
     Yale University

Some other etymology abbreviations such as {UNIX} and {PDP-10} refer
to technical cultures surrounding specific operating systems,
processors, or other environments.  The fact that a term is labelled
with any one of these abbreviations does not necessarily mean its use
is confined to that culture.  In particular, many terms labelled `MIT'
and `Stanford' are in quite general use.  We have tried to give some
indication of the distribution of speakers in the usage notes;
however, a number of factors mentioned in the introduction conspire to
make these indications less definite than might be desirable.

A few new definitions attached to entries are marked [proposed].
These are usually generalizations suggested by editors or Usenet
respondents in the process of commenting on previous definitions of
those entries.  These are *not* represented as established jargon.