26 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
26 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
mumble
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interj. 1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate,
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or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or
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indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion. Don't you
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think that we could improve LISP performance by using a hybrid
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reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough
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and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use? Well, mumble.
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.. I'll have to think about it. 2. [MIT] Expression of not-quite-articulated
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agreement, often used as an informal vote of consensus in a meeting: So,
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shall we dike out the COBOL emulation? Mumble! 3. Sometimes used as an
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expression of disagreement (distinguished from sense 2 by tone of voice and
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other cues). I think we should buy a VAX. Mumble! Common variant: mumble
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frotz (see frotz ; interestingly, one does not say mumble frobnitz even
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though frotz is short for frobnitz ). 4. Yet another metasyntactic variable
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, like foo. 5. When used as a question ( Mumble? ) means I didn't understand
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you. 6. Sometimes used in public contexts on-line as a placefiller for
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things one is barred from giving details about. For example, a poster with
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pre-released hardware in his machine might say Yup, my machine now has an
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extra 16M of memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for Mumbleco. 7. A
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conversational wild card used to designate something one doesn't want to
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bother spelling out, but which can be glark ed from context. Compare
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blurgle. 8. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further
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discussion would be fruitless.
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