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chapter and verse if you don't believe me." See also legalese, language lawyer, RTFS (sense 2). |
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quotient n. See coefficient of X. |
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quux /kwuhks/ n. [Mythically, from the Latin semi-deponent verb quuxo, quuxare, quuxandum iri; noun form variously 'quux' (plural 'quuces', anglicized to 'quuxes') and 'quuxu' (genitive plural is 'quuxuum', for four u-letters out of seven in all, using up all the 'u' letters in Scrabble).] 1. Originally, a metasyntactic variable like foo and foobar. Invented by Guy Steele for precisely this purpose when he was young and naive and not yet interacting with the real computing community. Many people invent such words; this one seems simply to have been lucky enough to have spread a little. In an eloquent display of poetic justice, it has returned to the originator in the form of a nickname. 2. interj. See foo; however, denotes very little disgust, and is uttered mostly for the sake of the sound of it. 3. Guy Steele in his persona as 'The Great Quux', which is somewhat infamous for light verse and for the 'Crunchly' cartoons. 4. In some circles, used as a punning opposite of 'crux'. "Ah, that's the quux of the matter!" implies that the point is not crucial (compare tip of the ice-cube). 5. quuxy: adj. Of or pertaining to a quux. |
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qux /kwuhks/ The fourth of the standard metasyntactic variable, after baz and before the quu(u )x series. See foo, bar baz, quux. This appears to be a recent mutation from quux, and many versions (especially older versions) of the standard series just run foo, bar, baz, quux, |
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QWERTY /kwer'tee/ adj. [from the keycaps at the upper left] Pertaining to a standard English-language typewriter keyboard (sometimes called the Sholes keyboard after its inventor), as opposed to Dvorak or foreign-language layouts or a space-cadet keyboard or APL keyboard. |
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Historical note: The QWERTY layout is a fine example of a fossil. It is sometimes said that it was designed to slow down the typist, but this is wrong; it was designed to allow faster typing under a constraint now long obsolete. In early typewriters, fast typing using nearby type-bars jammed the mechanism. So Sholes fiddled the layout to separate the letters of many common digraphs (he did a far from perfect job, though; 'th', 'tr', 'ed', and 'er', for example, each use two nearby keys). Also, putting the letters of 'typewriter' on one line allowed it to be typed with particular speed and accuracy for demos. The jamming problem was essentially solved soon afterward by a suitable use of springs, but the keyboard layout lives on. |
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