garbage: n. [by analogy with the North American term for domestic waste] 1. [borderline techspeak] In the context of memory management, memory which is allocated for storage but is no longer used and so needs to be reclaimed. The consequences of failing to reclaim it depend on whether the program is using GC or not. If GC is not being used, this is a memory leak. 2. Useless, wrong or invalid data. This is usually the result of human error, corruption or assuming the data is in a format which in fact it is not (such as interpreting a multibyte UTF-8 character as single-byte Latin1). See also GIGO. Although the Commonwealth term for domestic waste is "rubbish", this term is still used in its jargon sense there. ------------ 'go-faster stripes' comes from the stripes typically painted on racing cars and is mainstream in that sense (it extends to other cars too). I can't say in which areas it means this though, except that motor racing is popular largely in the south-eastern half of England. {} are generally called braces for brevity; () are often called round brackets or parens for disambiguation.