vanilla adj.
[from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] Ordinary
flavor, standard. When used of food,
very often does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla
extract! For example, `vanilla wonton soup' means ordinary wonton
soup, as opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup. Applied to hardware
and software, as in "Vanilla Version 7 Unix can't run on a
vanilla 11/34." Also used to orthogonalize chip nomenclature; for
instance, a 74V00 means what TI calls a 7400, as distinct from a
74LS00, etc. This word differs from canonical in that the latter means
`default', whereas vanilla simply means `ordinary'. For example,
when hackers go on a great-wall,
hot-and-sour soup is the canonical soup to get (because that is what
most of them usually order) even though it isn't the vanilla
(wonton) soup.