Computing: A Hacker's Dictionary

Beard & McKie are back. The author and the illustrator who created Sailing (a New York Times bestseller with 710,000 copies in print), as well as Golfing, Fishing, and other well-defined dictionaries--which together have over 2.3 million copies in print--now turn their unflinchingly funny eye to America's newest obsession, computing. For frustrated Web surfers, confused number crunchers, for the crazed the possessed, and the befuddled, it makes perfect fun of the machine we love to hate. Computing covers it all, from hardware (any portion of a computer system that you can actually smack, thump, slam, punch, bash, whack, or clobber) to program ( a set of instructions for converting informational input into an emotional outburst). There are technical terms--Web browser (an Internet navigation program that gives computer users instant access to more than one billion advertisements); cultural phenomena--techie (a nerd with a Porsche); lingo--e-mail (a highly efficient method of wasting the countless working hours saved by the introduction of data-processing systems); and common words given new meaning in the computer age--instructions (a collection of Finnish proverbs with the words "User's Manual" printed on the cover).