Xah Lee's Unixism

[Charlie Gibbs]

In article <413f6044.512285562 at News.individual.net>, iddw at hotmail.com
(Dave Hansen) writes:

>A "dittohead" is someone who regularly listens to and agrees with Rush
>Limbaugh (popular conservative U.S. radio talk show host).  It is a
>tradition that callers on his show (at least those that agree with
>him) start their call with something like "Country redneck dittos to
>you, Rush," or "Hey, Rush, blues-pickin' Cajun dittos" before
>launching into the subject of their call.

The way I heard it (which I can't confirm since I've never actually
listened to Limbaugh's show) is that so many people were calling
in to say what amounted to nothing more than "I agree with you"
that Rush himself suggested they just say "ditto" to save time.
Thus were "dittoheads" born.

>ObPython: Rush could have been the basis of a great Monty Python skit.

What a thought!  That _would_ be fun.  Eric Idle, are you reading this?

>ObUnix: Max OS X has a "ditto" command that's the same as "cp" only
>different.

Wasn't "ditto" the name of one of those console-driven mainframe
utilities that would copy anything to anything?  (Another version
was known as DEBE, which stood for "Does Everything But Eat".)
I got my hands on some source code and got one working on the Univac
9400 and 90/30.  Thanks to our convention of prefixing such utility
program names with "UV" (for Univac Vancouver), it wound up being
called UVDITO (so that it would fit into the 6-character name limit).

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