"whack whack"

In the old days of uucp email routing, we had addresses like ihpn4!uunet!mtndew!steve. Saying "exclamation point" out loud several times when telling somebody your address is very tedious, so (somehow) this evolved to "bang":

"My email address is ihnp4 bang uunet bang mtndew bang steve"

(of course, some wise guy named his computer "bang")

While at the Microsoft MVP Security Summit last week, I found that another character has developed its own alter-spoken-ego: "backslash" is spoken as "whack".

"My F: drive mounts from whack whack server whack data" (\\server\data)

It seems perfectly natural for something like this to have developed, but I'm surprised I'd never run into this before. It's not in ESR's Jargon File.

I've been informed that the primary usage is for a forward slash, so perhaps the provenance of this term is not entirely clear.

This is delightful.

Comments

[Doug]

I do miss the old days sometimes.
My first newsgroup posting that I made was in 1987 or 1998 and my address was pretty entertaining then.

[jjl]

I was an intern at Microsoft some time ago and was also a bit amused to see a bunch of people going "whack whack" (I've only seen it being used in place of backslashes, not forward slashes). The interns took note of this--one time, there was an intern event, and before the speaker got up to talk, a bunch of people in the audience randomly started to say "whack whack whack whack." Sounded like a giant auditorium full of ducks.

[Scott Walters]

* = splat

# = hash (still common usage)



These pre-date MS-DOS, going back to at least CPM.



-scott

[chris]

I'm not sure that there is an absolute designation of whack being a forward or a backward slash.

Interesting that you've just run into it. I've heard it off and on both within and outside of ms since 96 or so