WhatIs

/F-O-D/

v. [Abbreviation for Finger of Death, originally a spell-name from fantasy gaming]

To terminate with extreme prejudice and with no regard for other people. From MUDs where the wizard command FOD <player> results in the immediate and total death of <player>, usually as punishment for obnoxious behavior. This migrated to other circumstances, such as "I'm going to fod the process that is burning all the cycles."

Compare gun.

/F-O-A-F/

[USENET]

n. Acronym for 'Friend Of A Friend'. The source of an unverified, possibly untrue story. This was not originated by hackers (it is used in Jan Brunvand's books on urban folklore), but is much better recognized on USENET and elsewhere than in mainstream English.

/flītrap/

n. See firewall machine.

/flī-ˌspek thrē/

n. Standard name for any font that is so tiny as to be unreadable (by analogy with such names as 'Helvetica 10' for 10-point Helvetica). Legal boilerplate is usually printed in Flyspeck 3.

/fləsh/

v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an operation.

"All that nonsense has been flushed."

2. [UNIX/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an 'fflush(3)' call. This is *not* an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a demand for early completion!

3. To leave at the end of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for a meal).

"I'm going to flush now."

"Time to flush."

4. To exclude someone from an activity, or to ignore a person.

/flau̇(-ə)r kē/

[Mac users]

n. See command key.

/flō-ˌchärt/

[techspeak]

/flip'ee/

n. A single-sided floppy disk altered for double-sided use by addition of a second write-notch, so called because it must be flipped over for the second side to be accessible. No longer common.

/flā-vər/

adj. Full of flavor; esthetically pleasing.

See random and losing for antonyms.

See also the entries for taste and elegant.

/flā-vər/

n. 1. Variety, type, kind.

"DDT commands come in two flavors."

"These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green ones."

See vanilla.

2. The attribute that causes something to be flavorful. Usually used in the phrase "yields additional flavor".

"This convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down."

See vanilla.