:asbestos cork award: /n./ Once, long ago at MIT, there was a
{flamer} so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed,
had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had
been nominated for the `asbestos cork award'. (Any reader in
doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the
etymology under {flame}.) Since then, it is agreed that only a
select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn
this dubious dignity -- but there is no agreement on *which*
few.

:asbestos longjohns: /n./ Notional garments donned by
{Usenet} posters just before emitting a remark they expect will
elicit {flamage}. This is the most common of the {asbestos}
coinages. Also `asbestos underwear', `asbestos overcoat', etc.

:ASCII:: /as'kee/ /n./ [acronym: American Standard Code for
Information Interchange] The predominant character set encoding of
present-day computers. The modern version uses 7 bits for each
character, whereas most earlier codes (including an early version
of ASCII) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of
lowercase letters -- a major {win} -- but it did not provide
for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English
(such as the German sharp-S
or the ae-ligature
which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse,
though. It could be much worse. See {{EBCDIC}} to understand how.

Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than
humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about