Usenet, as you'll soon find out, has lots of buzzwords and a wealth of colorful lingo and jargon. To help you decipher what some people are talking about, this section introduces you to the jargon you'll encounter most often in your Usenet voyages:

catch up A newsreader command that marks all the articles in a newsgroup as having been read. You normally do this when you have scanned the Subject lines in a group, read the ones you found interesting, and decided to ignore the rest. This wipes the newsgroup's slate clean, so you'll see only new articles the next time you open the group.

cross-post To post an article in multiple newsgroups.

expired article An article that no longer appears in a newsgroup because it was deleted by your access provider's system administrator. The volume of Usenet news is so huge that the only way most access providers can keep their heads above water is to purge articles after a certain period (usually anywhere from two to seven days). The moral of the story is that you should check your favorite newsgroups as often as you can. Otherwise, an interesting article could come and go, and you'd never know it.

NOTE: EXPIRATION = CONFUSION!

Article expiration is the principal cause of one of the biggest frustrations for Usenet rookies: the feeling that you've stepped into the middle of a conversation. That's because many of the articles you see at first are either follow-ups to an expired article or original posts com-menting on some previous state of affairs. The best thing you can do is muddle through and keep reading. After a while, you'll catch on to new threads, and you'll be an old hand be-fore you know it.

holy war A never-ending, unchanging (and very boring for the rest of us) argument in which the opinions of combatants on both sides of the issue never budge an inch. Common holy-war topics include religion, abortion, which operating system is superior, and the optimum way to dispense toilet paper.

lurk To read articles without posting any of your own. This behavior is considered de rigueur for Usenet newcomers, but because Usenet thrives on participation, everyone is expected to post eventually.

moderator Overworked, underpaid (read: volunteer) Usenet jockey who reads all submissions to a particular newsgroup and selects only the best (or most relevant) for posting.

Netnews Another name for Usenet news.

ob- This prefix means obligatory. For example, it's traditional that each post to rec.humor contains a joke. If someone writes in with some nonjoke material, they'll usually finish with an objoke, or obligatory joke.

ROT13 An encoding scheme in which each letter in an article gets replaced by the letter that is 13 positions away in the alphabet (A is replaced by N, for example). You mess up an article with ROT13 when your article contains offensive material or gives away a riddle answer or movie ending.

signal-to-noise ratio This electronics term is used ironically to compare the amount of good, useful information ("signal") in a newsgroup with the amount of bad, useless dreck ("noise"). The best groups have a high signal-to-noise ratio, whereas groups that have lots of flame wars and spamming (see spam) rate low on the signal-to-noise ratio totem pole. For example, the group rec.humor has a low signal-to-noise ratio because most of the jokes are bad and many of the posts comment on how bad the jokes are. By contrast, the moderated newsgroup rec.humor.funny has a relatively high signal-to-noise ratio because only jokes that are at least mildly amusing make the moderator's cut and appear in the group.

spam In general, irrelevant prattle that has nothing whatsoever to do with the current topic under discussion. In Usenet, this means to post an ad, chain letter, get-rich-quick scheme, or other superfluity to umpteen different newsgroups. A while back, a law firm posted an ad for its green-card service to hundreds of newsgroups. This created an unbelievable firestorm of controversy, and those poor lawyers are probably still trying to dig themselves out from the avalanche of nasty e-mail messages they received. That was a textbook example of a spam. This is a major Usenet no-no and usually elicits responses that are both ferocious and voluminous.

spewer A person who specializes in spam, trolling, and flame bait.

spoiler An article that gives away the ending to a movie or book, or contains the answer to a puzzle or riddle. Proper Netiquette requires that you put the word spoiler in the Subject line of such an article. (The next section gives you many more pointers on Usenet politeness.)

trolling To post a purposely facetious, flippant, or aggressively dumb article. Its purpose is to dupe the gullible or the self-important into responding with follow-ups that make them look foolish.

The artwork displayed throughout this primer is Copyright © Judd Winick.