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 `jawel' - 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!").
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