I use the verbal shortcuts as well when telling people things to type on the command line: "cat | grep dash n" instead of "cat | grep space hypen n."

I also have a (bad?) habit of thinking of | and > as "into," as in "cat myFile | grep foo | wc -l" or "echo 'I Rock! > myFile." In both cases I think "into," and the character that comes out of my fingers is context-dependent (going into a file, or going into another program).

I've never heard of the "whack" before. That's an interesting one.