Glossary of American English Hacker Theocratese

Glossary Style Conventions

The style of this Glossary loosely imitates conventions used in the popular Jargon File, published by MIT Press under the name The New Hacker's Dictionary.^[14] Some points of style that may enhance your understanding follow.

[14] ISBN 0-262-68069-6. This delightful work is also available on the Web in an HTML rendition at http://sagan.earthspace.net/jargon/"

• Headwords are sorted alphabetically, without regard to case, and entries that start with a non-letter are at the end.. This is contrary to the normal hacker practice of {ASCII} collation, wherein upper case precedes lower case, and numbers precede them both. Where there are multiple comma-separated entries, the comma was taken into account in the sort. For instance, {Bethel service} precedes {Bethel, Bethel home}. This is not the most intuitive scheme, but it made it easier for me to keep things in order.
• Headwords are printed flush left in bold type,^[15] followed by defining text and commentary in hanging indented paragraphs.

  [15] In the ASCII extraction they are delimited by colons, e.g., :antediluvian:.

• Closely related terms explained in a single entry are delimited by commas within the headword.

• A headword that includes square-bracketed words like foo [bar, baz] means the entry contains definitions for foo bar and foo baz.^[16]

  [16] Don't bother to try looking that one up.

• Obvious grammatical variations are not specified in the headword, e.g., disfellowshipping does not include the adjectival form disfellowshipped.
• Cross references are enclosed in curly brackets, e.g., {robodog}. No rigorous attempt has been made to mark them all. In the HyperGlossary, cross references have been enabled as hyperlinks.
• Sometimes the curly bracketed reference has a different grammatical form from the headword label, e.g., it is in the plural or a different tense, so I can use it smoothly in the sentence the citation appears in.
• << ... >> These brackets signal that what is between is an example, like this: <<This is an example sentence.>> Some examples do not use any form of the headword. In all such cases the reason for the example should nonetheless be apparent.
• I have constructed example sentences so as to make idiomatic use of terms that demonstrate typical usage in a theocratic context.
• [obs], meaning obsolete, is a symbol that follows some headwords, inserted prior to the defining text. It means that the term was formerly used, but is no longer considered current.
• I tried to be careful about upper and lower case conventions. Where the expression appears in upper and lower case in the headword, as in :Governing Body:, it is generally seen that way in print within the Watch Tower Society's publications.
• Scriptures are quoted from the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. All book names use a three-character abbreviation, e.g., Act and 1Co, not Acts and 1Cor.
• References to the Society's publications are cited using the Society's {publication symbol} as used in the {Indexes}, enclosed in square brackets. <<The abbreviation [jv-E] refers to the English language edition of the book Jehovah's Witnesses---Proclaimers of God's Kingdom.>>

  NOTE: for HyperGlossary only: As shown in the previous quote, The TeX practice of discriminating between a normal hyphen and a dash, written as ``-'' and ``---'' respectively in TeX (because they print differently), has been retained in the hypertext rendition.

• Single quotes mark expressions and terms within definitions, and double quotes are used for quoting speech, usually contrived, as in the example sentences.
• Some punctuation has been put outside of quotation marks, but not all. This is contrary to traditional publishing practice, but has become standard among hackers, for defendable reasons well known to persons who deal frequently with computer code. Readers who get the impression that I don't know the syntactic conventions governing the use of quotes should be aware that this was done deliberately and according to a systematic policy that approximates the one explained in the chapter ``How Jargon Works'' in The New Hacker's Dictionary.
• I have included many more footnotes than is considered appropriate in formal writing.^[17]

  NOTE for ASCII text and HyperGlossary version only: To make the footnotes stand out I have put them in square brackets. Because the text version has no pages in the usual sense, footnote text was included with the bracketed number flush left as soon after the paragraphs they are found in as convenient.

  [17] They create melodramatic asides.

• I use slanted type for emphasis more often than is usually necessary in formal writing. It seems to give the writing a more hackerly conversational tone. <<You really should read the entire Glossary immediately!!>> (See {exclamation point}.) Italic type, which is different from slanted type, is used for all titles and foreign expressions.^[18]

  [18] In the ASCII extraction slanted type is emulated by putting asterisks on either side of the emphasized word or phrase, e.g., <<You really should read ...>>. Titles are rendered in standard double quotation marks.

• No attempt has been made to provide pronunciation guides except in a few cases. Most theocratic terms are quite plain. Any standard English dictionary lists pronunciations.

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