Never underestimate the power of vocabulary.

The following is a brief by ever-increasing glossary of words that I've adopted in talking about code.  Some of them I've made up, others that I've stolen from others.  If you have anything to contribute, please send it to me! zack _AT_ mine-control.com (spam prevention: replace the _AT_ with @)

• "Anna Karenin Function", noun:
  1) A function which returns zero on success and a variety of error codes otherwise.
  Example: Almost every Win32 function.
  Source: Zack Booth, 2001.
  Etymology: Inspired by the first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenin ("Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.") i.e. all happy function calls are alike, every unhappy function call is unhappy in its own way.
   
• "Dead beef": noun.
  1) A block of unused or de-allocated memory.
  2) A code used to mark or identify unused or un-initialized buffers.
  Source: Unknown, overheard from Craig Eisler at Microsoft, 1995.
  Etymology: Comes from the convenient hex value "0xdeadbeef";
   
• "Dredge": verb.
  1) To remove the old unused code from a system
  Source: Zack Booth, 2002.
  Etymology: See silt
   
• "Hoist": verb.
  1) To move functionality from a sub-class into a super-class.
  Source: Unknown; overheard at the Game Developer's Conference, 2002.
   
• "Lace": verb. "Lacing", noun.
  1) Connecting systems together by loosely bound messages as opposed to static or dynamic binding, especially using strings.
  2) "Lace": noun. A hash-table or other string-based message passed between sub-systems.
  Example: Many Perl packages are laced together by passing associative arrays full of arguments; those arguments that are not understood by the receiving side are typically ignored.
  Source: Coined by Zack Booth, 2002.
  Etymology: Intended to imply a delicately connected system.
   
• "Silt": noun.
  1) The unused code that is commented out in a file, usually old.
  Source: Zack Booth, 2002.
  Etymology: Like the silt that accumulates in a stagnant river
   
• "Simulacrum": noun.
  1) A hook that allows higher-level code to simulate the behavior of a lower-level system, especially for automatic testing.
  Example: a video camera driver into which higher-level code can stuff a pre-recorded video stream for testing purposes.
  Source: Zack Booth, 2002.
  Etymology: American Heritage defines "Simulacrum" as "An unreal or vague semblance"; Webster's as "a mock appearance; a sham"
   
• "Tighten", verb.
  1) The processes of improvement from below without changing an interface.
  2) Optimizing while maintaining backward compatibility.
  Example: Over the years, the Intel x86 architecture has added caches, branch predictions, and multiple pipes to improve performance all while maintaining backward compatibility on the machine code.
  Miscellaneous: A form of "refactoring".
  Source: Zack Booth, 2002.
  Etymology: Intended to conjure an image of plumbing since plumbers do not normally have the luxury of changing a poorly designed installation but instead must simply tighten leaky pipes.