A small linguistic analysis of frustrated programmers.

[brooksmoses]

Inspired by a link off Reddit, I decided to try putting various phrases that people use when frustrated and/or speaking very informally into Google's code search.

It turns out that a Google code-search for "damn" turns up an endless supply of amusing comments. Clearly this is the expression of choice for annoyed, aggravaged, or generally cranky programmers; I can't find anything else with nearly so many results.

(The phrase "breaks loose" also leads to some gems, but only 11 pages before they run out.)

Comments

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Does anything break loose other than hell?

[brooksmoses]

Well, there's variants such as "all hell", "all sorts of hell", "other kinds of hell", and a couple of specific sorts. And two "heck"s and one "you know what".

Also, a few things from games, such as a "Second war of the Shifting Sands", a dog on a leash, a skeleton, and a circle of glass cut from a window. But mostly it's hell.

[rosefox]

I quite literally LOL'd. That's fantastic.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

:-)

...and happy birthday!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Of course, in Nethack, "damn" is apparently the number of damage dice that are rolled, apparently. DamN. Which, I guess, makes it a false positive.

[mschlock.livejournal.com]

Ha. Other words that are amusing:

"fuck"
"sucks"
"crap"

Oh, any swear word, I guess. It's more amusing when there are people naming functions after swear words and not just commenting them.

[somewherebean.livejournal.com]

I love the first hit: "...except lock is a verb and a noun, so we already have ne_lock the function. Damn the English language."

Heh.

When I teach technical writing, I have students to think about simplified English by asking them use any given work to mean only one thing. Thus:

Monitor = The noun, not the verb. So what do you then use for the verb?

Watch = The verb, not the noun. What do you use for the thing on your wrist?

Clock = The noun, not the verb. How do you describe timing something?

Timing = The action of keeping track of how long something takes. How do you talk about the pace at which something happens, or whether events coincide in time?

And so on.

Their heads don't *quite* explode.