Proxy's And Shells

I'm very new to all of this hacking stuff, I consider myself knowledged about computers but still dont know what half the stuff means. Two things that seem to be important though are proxy's and shells, can someone tell me what these two are?

A proxy is basically an I-Condom (sort of) as in it protects you by you configuring your computer to connect to it. When your comp connects to it, it stays with you so that if you hack a site, it will say the proxy's IP. If you didnt, it would say YOUR IP which is not good. A shell can do lots of things, from hosting a service to being used to hack a website. Just for kicks, there is alot of information on Wikipedia.com if you just type in shell or proxy in the search box.

I like the way you described proxys, lol.

lol nice comparison psycha