<jargon> 1. Read The Fucking Source. Variant form of RTFM,
used when the problem at hand is not necessarily obvious and
not answerable from the manuals - or the manuals are not yet
written and maybe never will be. For even trickier
situations, see RTFB. Unlike RTFM, the anger inherent in
RTFS is not usually directed at the person asking the
question, but rather at the people who failed to provide
adequate documentation.
2. Read The Fucking Standard; this oath can only be used when
the problem area (e.g. a language or operating system
interface) has actually been codified in a ratified standards
document. The existence of these standards documents (and the
technically inappropriate but politically mandated compromises
that they inevitably contain, and the impenetrable legalese
in which they are invariably written, and the unbelievably
tedious bureaucratic process by which they are produced) can
be unnerving to hackers, who are used to a certain amount of
ambiguity in the specifications of the systems they use.
(Hackers feel that such ambiguities are acceptable as long as
the Right Thing to do is obvious to any thinking observer;
sadly, this casual attitude toward specifications becomes
unworkable when a system becomes popular in the Real World.)
Since a hacker is likely to feel that a standards document is
both unnecessary and technically deficient, the deprecation
inherent in this term may be directed as much against the
standard as against the person who ought to read it.
