The *nix world is full of dark-but-fun terminology. Daemons run the system. New files get 666 (before the umask takes away unnecessary permissions). Parents kill their children before killing themselves. And sometimes you have to kill zombies.

> We also assume that this is the meaning behind the daemon.co.uk, host to many United Kingdom web sites

Not sure if it was the origin of the company name, but the domain was demon.co.uk not daemon. E.g. I had pretence.demon.co.uk with them for a few years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Internet

I find the “a la mode” vs “au jus” discussion right under the daemon one very interesting!

I wasn’t familiar with both of these expressions but I looked it up and “a la mode” is an American culinary expression, meaning “served with ice cream”. And “au jus” is also an American culinary expression, meaning “gravy” or “broth”. Now, even though they are both derived from a French expression that is a prepositional phrase with à (meaning with), it does not matter any more when they were borrowed to English.

“A la mode” became a new adverbial expression meaning just that: “served with ice cream”. You can have pie a la mode = pie served with ice cream, but obviously not *pie with a la mode = pie with served with ice cream.

And “au jus” became a noun expression meaning “broth” or “gravy”. And you must say sandwich with au jus = sandwich with gravy and can’t say *sandwich au jus = sandwich gravy.

What is extremely interesting here is that it bothers the prescriptivist who wants language to be a certain way he feels it is supposed to be, also the author on that webpage.

"Warning: This paragraph is about science so, if this topic causes you undue alarm, please close your eyes until you've finished reading it."

Amazing.