Talk:moby
Latest comment: 4 years ago by Equinox in topic Request for verification
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"(computing, slang) very large". Think this is one of ESR's words. There are a few books mentioning a "moby hack", but whether it means large is unclear. Equinox ◑ 00:05, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
- Deleted. Equinox ◑ 20:12, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
- My experience is that this usage is genuine, but should be noted as juvenile. The underlying idea is that it is interpreted as an adjective from Moby-Dick (which was classically regarded as a children's novel in the U.S. because of use in teaching), where "moby" means very large and dick is taken in the slang sense of penis. The "very large" sense is possibly used in Zork [1] "A moby ruby is in Ruby Room." But a formal meaning as "very large" rather than, say, "unusual-looking" is rarely if ever spelled out, as this is more a kid's joke than language. Wnt (talk) 14:06, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
- I just looked it up in the OED and they have a sense "U.S. slang (orig. College slang). Large, great, impressive; (in Computing) complex." But all of their citations are either direct from dictionaries, like the dubious "Jargon File", or from contexts where it's clear that somebody artificially took the word from one of those dictionaries to create dialogue etc. that would "sound like a hacker". There is no citation of real-world usage! Equinox ◑ 18:40, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
- It does appear in the Zork text adventure game from 1977 [2]: "There is a moby ruby lying here." / "On the floor lies a moby ruby." Equinox ◑ 20:18, 7 May 2020 (UTC)