haha, there's a wiki entry for it:
Hack and Slash
Yeah, that's sounds pretty accurate.
I certainly remember a lot of hack and slash campaigns back when I used to roleplay. When I was younger, I liked them a lot most of the time
Lots of XP and lots of loot - with a minimum of boring talky bits. Hehe, but as I grew older - I came to appreciate more cerebral campaigns with lots of talking and puzzle solving.
Icewind Dale is like a carbon copy of some of the H&S campaigns I used to play - because beyond the initial area - it's almost nothing but combat. One of the most appropriate examples of hack and slash as it's based on a PnP system.
For the most part, the first Neverwinter Nights campaign is also very hack and slash - but to be fair, there's a decent chunk of talking and story exposition as well.
That said, seeing as how the term is now being applied to all kinds of video games - which have always been completely different from PnP - it makes sense that people might think hack and slash is exclusively about games like Diablo, Dungeon Siege or Titan Quest - because those games take the concept to its extreme, where combat is basically the entire game.
But I tend to call those games either action RPGs (the broad term), Diablo-clones or Rogue-likes - depending on what I want to emphasize. Hack and slash is applicable to all games with RPG elements that are focused around combat - except for games that have zero melee combat (wouldn't make much sense), whether they're turn-based or real-time. Another example of almost pure hack and slash would be Temple of Elemental Evil - which obviously isn't a Diablo clone or an action RPG.