We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by
overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more
general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that
shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent
reports that he consistently misspells `wrong' as `worng'. Others
have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by
observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) "This sentence no
verb", or "Too repetetetive", or "Bad speling", or "Incorrectspa
cing." Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often made of
phrases relating to confusion or things that are confusing; `dain
bramage' for `brain damage' is perhaps the most common
(similarly, a hacker would be likely to write "Excuse me, I'm
cixelsyd today", rather than "I'm dyslexic today"). This sort of
thing is quite common and is enjoyed by all concerned.
Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like
parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if
"Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock
groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going",
"Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to
standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas
and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is
counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with
characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples
that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style
quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating
command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a
real pain in the neck.
Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:
Then delete a line from the file by typing
"dd".