Remove excessive speculation and meandering

entries/kluge.txt

@@ -9,56 +9,4 @@ and verges on being a crock. 3. n. Something that works for the wrong
 reason. 4. vt. To insert a kluge into a program. I've kluged this routine to
 get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way. 5. [WPI] n. A
 feature that is implemented in a rude manner. Nowadays this term is often
-encountered in the variant spelling kludge. Reports from old farts are
-consistent that kluge was the original spelling, reported around computers
-as far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of hardware
-kluges. In 1947, the New York Folklore Quarterly reported a classic
-shaggy-dog story Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker then current in the Armed
-Forces, in which a kluge was a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial
-function. Other sources report that kluge was common Navy slang in the WWII
-era for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but consistently
-failed at sea. However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a
-decade older. Several respondents have connected it to the brand name of a
-device called a Kluge paper feeder , an adjunct to mechanical printing
-presses. Legend has it that the Kluge feeder was designed before small,
-cheap electric motors and control electronics; it relied on a fiendishly
-complex assortment of cams, belts, and linkages to both power and
-synchronize all its operations from one motive driveshaft. It was
-accordingly temperamental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly
-difficult to repair but oh, so clever! People who tell this story also aver
-that Kluge was the name of a design engineer. There is in fact a Brandtjen
-Kluge Inc., an old family business that manufactures printing equipment
-interestingly, their name is pronounced /kloogee/ ! Henry Brandtjen,
-president of the firm, told me (ESR, 1994) that his company was co-founded
-by his father and an engineer named Kluge /kloogee/ , who built and
-co-designed the original Kluge automatic feeder in 1919. Mr. Brandtjen
-claims, however, that this was a simple device (with only four cams); he
-says he has no idea how the myth of its complexity took hold. Other
-correspondents differ with Mr. Brandtjen's history of the device and his
-allegation that it was a simple rather than complex one, but agree that the
-Kluge automatic feeder was the most likely source of the folklore. TMRC and
-the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have developed in a milieu
-that remembered and still used some WWII military slang (see also foobar ).
-It seems likely that kluge came to MIT via alumni of the many military
-electronics projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's
-venerable Building 20, in which TMRC is also located) during the war. The
-variant kludge was apparently popularized by the Datamation article
-mentioned under kludge ; it was titled How to Design a Kludge (February
-1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling was probably imported from Great Britain,
-where kludge has an independent history (though this fact was largely
-unknown to hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate
-in the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers over the First and Second Edition
-versions of this entry; everybody used to think kludge was just a mutation
-of kluge ). It now appears that the British, having forgotten the etymology
-of their own kludge when kluge crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by
-lobbing the kludge orthography in the other direction and confusing their
-American cousins' spelling! The result of this history is a tangle. Many
-younger U.S. hackers pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly
-for its meaning and pronunciation, as kludge. (Phonetically, consider huge,
-refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to sludge, judge, budge, and
-fudge. Whatever its failings in other areas, English spelling is perfectly
-consistent about this distinction.) British hackers mostly learned /kluhj/
-orally, use it in a restricted negative sense and are at least consistent.
-European hackers have mostly learned the word from written American sources
-and tend to pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the wider American meaning! Some
-observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's meaning.
+encountered in the variant spelling kludge.