Originally published in The New Yorker, annotated with hyperlinks.

HACKERS CAN SIDEJACK COOKIES

by Heather McHugh
MAY 11, 2009
A collage-homage to Guy L. Steele and Eric S. Raymond.

A beige toaster is a maggotbox.
A bit bucket is a data sink.
Farkled is a synonym for hosed.
Flamage is a weenie problem.

A berserker wizard gets no score for treasure.
In MUDs one acknowledges
a bonk with an oif.
(There’s a cosmic bonk/oif balance.)

Ooblick is play sludge.
A buttonhook is a hunchback.
Logic bombs can get inside
back doors. There were published bang paths
ten hops long. Designs succumbing
to creeping featuritis
are banana problems.
(“I know how to spell banana,
but I don’t know when to stop.”)
Before you reconfigure,

mount a scratch monkey.
A dogcow makes
a moof. An aliasing bug
can smash the stack.

Who wrote these tunes,
these runes you need
black art to parse?
Don’t think it’s only

genius (flaming), humor (dry),
a briefcase of cerebral dust.
A hat’s a shark fin, and the tilde’s dash
is swung: the daughter of the programmer
has got her period. It’s all about wetware at last,

and wetware lives in meatspace.