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The Jargon File, Version 2.9.10, 01 Jul 1992 by Various
page 23 of 712 (03%)
grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for
form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish
writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells
`wrong' as `worng'. Others have been known to criticize glitches in
Jargon File drafts by observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter)
"This sentence no verb", or "Bad speling", or "Incorrectspa cing."
Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often made of phrases relating to
confusion or things that are confusing; `dain bramage' for `brain
damage' is perhaps the most common (similarly, a hacker would be likely
to write "Excuse me, I'm cixelsyd today", rather than "I'm dyslexic
today"). This sort of thing is quite common and is enjoyed by all
concerned.

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much
to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase,
and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer
to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is
incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the
continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes);
however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings
with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples
that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting
can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or
small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.

Consider, for example, a sentence in a {vi} tutorial that looks like this:

Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".

Standard usage would make this
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