@Moon The functions for printing kernel messages to the console in Linux evolved significantly over time and the x86 NMI code also became slightly more complex.

It did not always retrieve a reason for the non-maskable interrupt - in fact Linux probably predates the registers in Intel chipsets to pull a reason for an NMI from (not too sure about this though) - Linux also definitely predates SMP for x86, so there was no code to print the exact CPU the NMI originated from.

The code that prints this message had to be rewritten several times, at one point splitting the original single line message into two separate lines.

None of these opportunities to change the wording of this message was ever taken - on the contrary, even the "Uhhuh" part has always been carefully preserved.

x86 is also the only architecture where a Linux user is likely to ever see the kernel use a literal filler word in a kernel message, other platforms that use non-maskable interrupts usually stuck to wording gleaned straight from reference documentation.

"Dazed and confused" however is a multi-platform phrase, thanks to a fan of Linus' error-message-prose adopting it and putting it into eCryptfs's kernel code.