But there is more. Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very
conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to
be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are
pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us
before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of
the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers,
by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for
conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique
combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the
discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence. Further, the
electronic media which knit them together are fluid, `hot' connections,
well adapted to both the dissemination of new slang and the ruthless
culling of weak and superannuated specimens. The results of this
process give us perhaps a uniquely intense and accelerated view of
linguistic evolution in action.

Hackish slang also challenges some common linguistic and
anthropological assumptions. For example, it has recently become
fashionable to speak of `low-context' versus `high-context'
communication, and to classify cultures by the preferred context level
of their languages and art forms. It is usually claimed that
low-context communication (characterized by precision, clarity, and
completeness of self-contained utterances) is typical in cultures
which value logic, objectivity, individualism, and competition; by
contrast, high-context communication (elliptical, emotive,
nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded) is associated with cultures
which value subjectivity, consensus, cooperation, and tradition. What
then are we to make of hackerdom, which is themed around extremely
low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily