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Comment by jldugger | Hacker News Reader

Thats a long article for what amounts to "Dolphin now supports F-Zero AX" =)

Must have taken a heckin' amount of work!

What does "heckin" mean? I associate it with redditors' impersonation of dogs and I was surprised to see it here.

In context in this case, “hell of a lot of.” Seems we English speakers come up with myriad grammatical constructions to seem less offensive in certain forums.

Well, mostly I realized my first sentence was likely to come off more negative than funny (I just like, really enjoyed F-Zero GX back in the day!), so I decided to add a folksy salute to the effort to dilute that. And a smiley face, people heckin' love those =)

Interesting. I associate the term with reddit, not being folksy. I think the folksy term would be "fuckin lot" or "very lot" or "hella".

I think maybe you were trying to cater to the "christians" or snowflake conservatives

It's linguistically a minced oath[1], and they're pretty common in all manner of online contexts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath

Great reference; thank you.

"Heck" is to "Hell" like "Darn" is to "Damn" (or "Freaking" to “F--ing") - a word that sounds similar but is more polite, to be said in public in more religious places and times.

That can't explain "hecking", because there is no form "helling".

From Wiktionary entry for heckin':

Etymology

From heck as a euphemism for hell.

This still doesn't make sense as "hellin" isnt a term in wide use. What makes the most sense is transition from "fuckin". But why not simply use fuckin? Surely invoking sex is less taboo than invoking hell.

> What makes the most sense is transition from "fuckin". But why not simply use fuckin?

Indeed, you have a community that wants to be family friendly but high energy, and so the technique is to start with "fucking", one of the top tier swears, and replace its root word with the lowest tier swears. And part of the charm is that "hell" is barely a taboo topic -- it's part of the Apostle's creed and plenty of sermons, and there's no commandment against its use[1], yet it gets minced to "heck"!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_take_the_name_o...

It's a form of hella which is "hell of" but hecka sounds silly so you get heckin. (Heck is also used as a substitute for fuck sometimes and takes its forms.)

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