Soundalike Slang

Soundalike slang

Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered particularly flavorful if the phrase is bent so as to include some other jargon word; thus the computer hobbyist magazine "Dr. Dobb's Journal" is almost always referred to among hackers as `Dr. Frob's Journal' or simply `Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in fairly wide use include names for newspapers:

    Boston Herald => Horrid (or Harried)
    Boston Globe => Boston Glob
    Houston (or San Francisco) Chronicle
           => the Crocknicle (or the Comical)
    New York Times => New York Slime
    Wall Street Journal => Wall Street Urinal

However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard examples include:

    Data General => Dirty Genitals
    IBM 360 => IBM Three-Sickly
    Government Property --- Do Not Duplicate (on keys)
            => Government Duplicity --- Do Not Propagate
    for historical reasons => for hysterical raisins
    Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford)
            => Marginal Hacks Hall
    Microsoft => Microsloth
    Internet Explorer => Internet Exploiter

This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.