Back in the 90’s before the days of Windows 3.0 I had to debug a memory manager written by a brilliant but somewhat odd guy. Among other thing I stumbled across:

• A temporary variable called “handy” because it was useful in a number of situations.
• Another one called son_of_handy, used in conjunction with handy.
• Blocks of memory were referred to as cookies.
• Cookies had a flag called shit_cookie_corrupt that would get set if the block of memory was suspected of being corrupt.
• Each time a cookie was found to be corrupt then the function OhShit() was called.
• If too many cookies were corrupt then the function OhShitOhShitOhShit() was called, which would terminate everything.

The stuff me and my friends have written in private code bases we worked on before… Now those were some words we used. could never make anything like that public these days, too much softies would go crazy because of it.

We’re talking about a kernel whose user-visible error messages have historically included things like “lp0 on fire” . . .