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frobbing that clasp; you'll break it". One also sees the construction to frob a frob. See tweak and twiddle. |
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Usage: frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes connote points along a continuum. 'Frob' connotes aimless manipulation; twiddle connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; tweak connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it, he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen, he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it. The variant frobnosticate has been recently reported. |
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frobnitz /frob'nits/, pl. frobnitzem /frob'nit-zm/ or frobnin. [TMRC] An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers to electronic black boxes. This rare form is usually abbreviated to frotz, or more commonly to frob. Also used are frobnule (/frob'n[y]ool/) and frobule (/frob'yool/). Starting perhaps in 1979, frobozz /fr -boz'/ (plural: frobbotzim /fr-bot'zm/) has also become very popular, largely through its exposure as a name via Zork. These variants can also be applied to nonphysical objects, such as data structures. |
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Pete Samson, compiler of the original TMRC lexicon, adds, "Under the TMRC [railroad] layout were many storage boxes, managed (in 1958) by David R. Sawyer. Several had fanciful designations written on them, such as 'Frobnitz Coil Oil'. Perhaps DRS intended Frobnitz to be a proper name, but the name was quickly taken for the thing". This was almost certainly the origin of the term. |
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frog alt. phrog 1. interj. Term of disgust (we seem to have a lot of them). 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See foo. 3. n. Of things, a crock. 4. n. Of people, somewhere in between a turkey and a toad. 5. froggy: adj. Similar to bagbiting, but milder. "This froggy program is taking forever to run!" |
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frogging [University of Waterloo] v. 1. Partial corruption of a text file or input stream by some bug or consistent glitch, as opposed to random events like line noise or media failures. Might occur, for example, if one bit of each incoming character on a tty were stuck, so that some characters were correct and others were not. See terminak for a historical example and compare dread high-bit disease. 2. By extension, accidental display of text in a mode where the output device emits special symbols or mnemonics rather than conventional ASCII. This often happens, for example, when using a terminal or comm program on a device like an IBM PC with a special 'high-half' character set and with the bit-parity assumption wrong. |
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