diff --git a/entries/kluge.txt b/entries/kluge.txt index 1683c8c..6fd7131 100644 --- a/entries/kluge.txt +++ b/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. \ No newline at end of file