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Comment by pacaro | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those surprisingly useful and obvious things that I'm surprised not to have seen before.

Knowledge of (including pronunciation) jargon is a classic gatekeeper

In my experience, I'm in the minority in pronouncing sudo as soodoo, the majority seem to say pseudo. OTOH I've never heard anyone say fsck as anything other than f-suck

From personal experience at Microsoft the backslash was frequently pronounced "whack" (hence whack whack for unc paths), and the ubiquitous error codes like 0xC0000005 were "c-bazillion-5"

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I was a su-dough person until I realise that sudo stands for 'super user do' or 'su do', so I switched to soodoo - it makes a lot more sense that way.

f-suck is a new one for me though. I would say F S C K to someone else, but I call it fusk in my head.

I've always said F S check in my head but never said or heard it on conversation. I started my computer journey with msdos so I think chkdsk is to blame for me saying 'check'.

I'm for su-dough - to my ear it evokes the martial art Judo which makes some kind of sense considering what it does.

On the other hand Soo Doo sounds like a pig farmer's wife calling the swine in for their slop. To my ear ;)

I'm a su-dougher, because "pseudo" reminds me I can be someone else.

I’ve always called it “fusck”.

That’s how I hear it in my head, probably from years of reading it as a stand-in for profanity on Slashdot and the like.

Yup put me down for "fusck" as well. I am probably inventing memories here but I think it is because whenever I saw a system announce it needed to fsck I would say "oh fuck" in my head (sometimes out loud).

I have always “heard” F sick in my head for fsck

Yeah, me also.

I tend to pronounce fsck as one syllable, like "fisk" without the 'i'.

Nitpick: su is “substitute user” (sometimes switch user), it merely defaults to root.

man su:

    su - run a command with substitute user and group ID

As for fsck I moved from F S C K to progressively bind the S and C in a slide of the tongue, which ends up sounding like F-ceek once I’ve eased in the audience with F-(s)ceek(ay) (parentheses get progressively toned down as I speak faster)

That or just “FS check”.

You're correct, of course. I don't know why I remember it as super user.

Because that's its most common use - to impersonate as a privileged user - so su quite naturally becomes super user

Because sudo really was “superuser do” and is unrelated to the UNIX utility “su” (at least by lineage.)

In my head I pronounce fsck "fuck" because that's normally what I say when I realize I have to use it. Around people? fs check or filesystem check.

> pseudo

I'm originally Italian and my English is now quite good. A very, very common mistake among most "mediterranean" and "romance languages" (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, Romanian) people when speaking English is to pronounce ps as in "pissed" without the "i", instead of just the "s" (the "p" is silent), which is the correct way to pronounce it in English.

Another very common mistake in my language group is the "gn", as in signal.

Correct English is sig-nal [0], while my group usually says it with a different "gn" sound [1].

Well, there's much more, of course, but I wanted to share these two just because, anecdotally, I hear the mistake very often.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whOXnmbOJvQ

[1]: https://forvo.com/word/segnale/

For Romanians, we pronounce signal correctly, though. We have "gn" as a sound in Romanian, for example "a răstigni" (to nail to a cross"), we don't change it to "ni".

But we do have the same problem as Italians with "pseudo": the "p" is right there, why are you skipping it?!? :-p

> the "p" is right there, why are you skipping it

Wait, they're skipping it?! Now that you mentioned it I think you're quite right, I don't remember hearing that many "p"s in front of "seudo".

Wait until you hear they don't pronounce the "e", either :-p

I think the ps thing has nothing to do with romance languages. Germans say it the same way. It's just because English is odd here.

> pronounce ps as in "pissed" without the "i", instead of just the "s" (the "p" is silent), which is the correct way to pronounce it in English.

I'm genuinely lost reading your comment as neither the p nor the i are silent in pissed (/pɪst/). The only weird part is the "ed" pronounced "t" but that's fairly common in English.

I also don't get the part about "ps" in romance languages. There is no special pronunciation rule regarding this group of letters in French. Are you sure it's not specific to Italian?

Edit: I think I now realized you might be talking about the pronunciation of words like pseudo and psyched where the p would indeed be pronunced where it French (and I guess in the same way in Italian).

In Spain we have the Real Academia Española that more or less serves as an authoritative source of correctness. The ps group was marked as deprecated, so you can pronounce s and be happy. The suggestion to also write sicología or setiembre (instead of psicología and september) didn't catch up though.

For gn we have ñ, so we're not tempted to interpret it a la francesa.

Also ex MS and I recall whack. I also heard a story about a server called paddy, so its shares were whack whack paddy whack.

Never heard bazillion. But many of us used to memorize a bunch of hexadecimal codes and know the symbolic names based on the visual of the hex digits. After repeat lookups the common ones just stay in your brain without effort. The one you shared looks like STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION.

> Knowledge of (including pronunciation) jargon is a classic gatekeeper

Indeed, the best example I can find is LateX. You can tell who's read the first pages of the docs from that.

TIL: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/17509

> English words like ‘technology’ stem from a Greek root beginning with the letters τεχ...; and this same Greek word means art as well as technology. Hence the name TeX, which is an uppercase form of τεχ.

> Insiders pronounce the χ of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’, so that TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh. It’s the ‘ch’ sound in Scottish words like loch or German words like ach; it’s a Spanish ‘j’ and a Russian ‘kh’. When you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist.

Likewise, LaTeX isn't pronounced as the rubber derivative, but as "Lah-tecchh" /ˈlɑːtɛx/ (IPA via Wikipedia)

Have you ever heard of people pronouncing it like that?

That is how I pronounce it.

From your link though, Leslie Lamport disagrees with Knuth (whom I like to pronounce "nuth" but is actually pronounced "ka-nuth").

I'm Greek and I pronounce LaTeX as "LAY-tek". I just tried pronouncing it "LAY-tech" with a Greek "chi" sound ("λέει-τεχ") and I sounded so silly I almost spat my coffee all over my monitor (only "almost" because I wasn't drinking any coffee). Ain't no way I'm calling it that.

And note that, being Greek, I can actually pronounce "χ" correctly. Most Native English-speaking folks I've heard trying to do the same sound like they're in immediate need of someone administering the Heimleich manoeuver to them.

Btw, I pronounce "Heimlich" with a Greek "χ" also. I bet most native English-speaking folks pronounce it elsewise. Perhaps as "Heimlick".

A Heimlicker, I can confirm.

Thanks. Also: elsewise --> otherwise. Oops.

I was asked the correct pronunciation of /etc in an interview once. Diabolical, if you ask me.

"Sorry, you're not a 'culture fit' here."

There's historical precedent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

I have only ever worked with people who call it etcetera.

I know a few people who pronounce fsck with what sounds like a combination of 'suck' and the expletive, which naturally leads to phrases like "it's fsck'ing the drive."

I pronounce fsck as f-sick.

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