"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.