Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered particularly flavorful if the phrase is bent so as to include some other jargon word; thus the computer hobbyist magazine Dr. Dobb's Journal is almost always referred to among hackers as 'Dr. Frob's Journal' or simply 'Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in fairly wide use include names for newspapers:
Boston Herald => Horrid (or Harried)
Boston Globe => Boston Glob
Houston (or San Francisco) Chronicle => the Crocknicle (or the Comical)
New York Times => New York Slime
However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard examples include:
Data General => Dirty Genitals
IBM 360 => IBM Three-Sickly
Government Property Do Not Duplicate (on keys) => Government Duplicity Do Not Propagate
for historical reasons => for hysterical raisins
Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford) => Marginal Hacks Hall
This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent.
The '-P' convention
Turning a word into a question by appending the syllable 'P'; from the LISP convention of appending the letter 'P' to denote a predicate (a boolean-valued function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.)
At dinnertime: Q: "Foodp?" A: "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!''
