k‐rad - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

A superlative adjective of the digital underground, whose emergence dates to circa 1984. There are numerous theories regarding its etymology, but the stronger hypotheses derive "rad" from California surfer/skater slang "radical" and "k-" from the metric prefix "kilo-", as in: a thousand times rad! (Seemingly unrelated are the kilorad measurement of radiation dosage, or the Nazi Kettenkrad motorbike/tank circa WWII.)

One could glom the k- prefix on to other positive words to emphasize them more highly (eg. "k-k00l" or "k-elite") but to fortify k-rad itself all you could do is add one or two plusses (in the spirit of newspeak's doubleplus prefix?) to its ending: nothing was more rad than something that was k-rad++. (The reason for this is that adding a third consecutive plus sign to a string being transmitted across phone lines was used by the [Hayes AT command set] to switch modems from data mode to command mode, disrupting two-way communications and, if not switched back, very possibly resulting in the user triggering their own disconnection.)