From TechTarget, s.v. cruft:
Cruft is a collective term for the elements of a program, system or product that are either useless, poorly designed or both. In computing, cruft describes areas of redundant, improper or simply badly written code, as well as old or inferior hardware and electronics. Cruft may also be used to describe a group of hackers, just as “pod” describes a group of whales, “exultation” a group of larks and “murder” a group of crows. […]
Cruft may also be used as a verb, describing the process of putting together a program, network or physical system in a poorly designed or implemented way. Crufting together a solution to a client’s specifications or organization’s needs may be necessary due to time, budget or staffing constraints. It is, however, rarely a well-respected practice in consulting, though more commonly encountered than many system administrators, VARs or information architects would prefer.
Urban legend in Cambridge, Massachusetts holds that the term “cruft” was coined by MIT students as a derisive comment on the electronics-filled windows of Cruft Hall at Harvard University. Cruft was part of the old physics building at Harvard, where it served as the department’s radar laboratory during WWII, which led to the existence of many kinds of wonderful but quite obsolete technological gadgets remaining on display.
Back in 2005, Andrew Dunbar commented here as follows:
Another word I can’t find in any dictionary seems more common to me: cruft
It’s not in my Shorter Oxford or my Macquarie. It’s not on the online Collins, Merriam-Webster, or Encarta. It’s not even on etymonline or WordOrigins. It is in the Jargon File.
I am happy to report that as of March 2007 it is in the OED Third Edition:
Etymology: Origin unknown. Perhaps an expressive formation, perhaps recalling fluff n.1, scruffy adj., crust n. However, with crufty adj. perhaps compare Jamaican English crufty coarse-looking (1943), cruffy scurfy, rough (1868), cruff (adjective) scabby, scurfy, naturally rough, coarse, uncooth (c1915), all ultimately related to scruff n.1: see F. G. Cassidy & R. B. Le Page Dict. Jamaican English (1967) at cited words.
A number of other etymologies have also been suggested.Computing slang.
Something unnecessary, redundant, or poorly made; the fact or process of creating this; esp. poorly designed or unnecessarily complex computer software, e.g. that containing sections of obsolete code. Also: filth, esp. that which builds up over time; detritus.
1959 Abridged Dict. TMRC Lang. (Mass. Inst. Technol.) 2 Cruft, that which magically amounds [sic] in the Clubroom just before you walk in to clean up. In other words, rubbage [sic].
1981 CoEvolution Q. Spring 29/1 Crufty, poorly built, possibly overly complex… Hence cruft n. shoddy construction.
1981 CoEvolution Q. Spring 29/1 Crufty, unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup. Hence cruft n. disgusting mess.
1999 APC May 146/2 The cruft that accumulates in the front fan grille of a computer with no dust filter.
2003 Personal Computer World Mar. 192/2 Verity Stob has compiled a ‘Beaufort Scale’ of cruft, ranging from 0 (‘The Connect to the Internet shortcut is still on the desktop, and the How to use Windows dialogue appears at logon’) to 10.
2005 Wired Dec. 156/2 Tagger cross-references the acoustic fingerprint of each untitled tune… It was about 85 percent accurate with our playlist cruft.
In the OED etymology, note the odd spelling “uncooth” (which s.v. uncouth they give as “1500s–1700s”); I don’t know whether it’s a typo or copied from their source. (A tip of the Languagehat hat to mapache for the first link.)
Do we have any opinions about the appropriate past participle(s)?
Wiktionery suggests crufted.. What about cruft?
As to “rubbage” deserving (sic), The following is from the TMRC Abridged Dictionary, the source of the cited passage:
“ CRUFT: that which magically amounds in the Clubroom just before you walk
in to clean up. In other words, rubbage.
The word was in use at the club when I wrote this definition. The sense is of detritus, that which needs to be swept up and thrown out. The dictionary has no definition for “crufty,” a word I didn’t hear until some years later. Rubbage is a rare term for rubbish, but I had heard it used growing up in New England.”
source: http://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html
I’m sure it’s back-formation from crufty. Crufty morphology is what computer geeks of that age loved (cf. Vaxen).
@Y: Indeed, so claims the jargon file: http://catb.org/jargon/html/C/cruft.html
Is rubbage an eggcorn?
Is rubbage an eggcorn?
Merrimack-Webster:
Definition of rubbage
chiefly dialectal variant of RUBBISH
A report from c. 1915 on the origin of Cruft Laboratory (funded by a bequest from the late Miss Harriet Otis Cruft as a memorial to her brothers). http://waywiser.fas.harvard.edu/people/991/cruft-laboratory-harvard-university
Whether there are any existing Cruft descendants who could be approached for reaction quotes about whether they favor/disfavor their family name being linked to this etymology is not known to me.
I was never a Tech* Model Railroad Club guy, in part because their facilities were located in such a nasty place, in the basement of Building 20.** So I don’t know anything about their internal culture—and certainly not their internal culture in the 1950s—but I would suspect (based on my more general MIT knoweldge) that the intentional use of “amounds” and “rubbage” in that definition of cruft are there to imply that cruft itself is to be taken to be a fanciful alteration of more established terminology (like craft and crud, perhaps).
* Referring to MIT as “Tech” was obsolete by the 1980s or 1990s, but the usage survives in the names of a lot of student groups.
** The old Building 20 was, before it was torn down to make way for the Stata Center,*** the last surviving Second-World-War-era “temporary” structure north of Amherst Street. Several components of the Course 21 (the Department of Humanities), were located there, and I disliked disliked having anthropology classes there. However, while there was undoubtedly a certain amount of anti-humanities chauvinism involved, Building 20 was also where MIT’s LIGO operation was headquartered, because Rai Weiss had had his office (and molecular physics lab) there for decades, long before anybody thought he was going to win a Nobel prize.
Moreover, all the groups that had previously been in Building 20 got much nicer offices and facilities after they moved. The new space for the MIT LIGO group was really nice, fitting the high profile of the experiment. (Similarly, when—around the same time—one of the labs in the grimy back corner of the Research Laboratory for Electronics was among the first places to produce alkali metal Bose-Einstein condensates, the space was rapidly upgraded to become the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, with new floors, and furniture, and all.) The administration even pungled up to fully equip the new TMRC space according to the club’s designs, so they could construct a new state-of-the-art train setup to replace the old one in the basement of 20.
*** The Stata Center was a project that completely changed purposes well into the development and fundraising process. It was originally billed as a complex that would bring together all the campus groups that were working on understanding the mind, including the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Course 9), the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy (Course 24, Chomsky’s department), and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Somewhere along the line, however, the project morphed into a new facility entirely devoted to computer science. The AI Lab merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science, and together they occupied most of the space in the new Stata Center. I don’t know what kind of behind-the-scenes maneuvering led to this major change in direction, but after the change was decided upon, the Institute administration seemed set upon portraying the new plans as if they had always been the plans—sometimes seemingly taking the denial to kayfabe levels.
Course 9 did, around the same time, get its own brand-new facility, yet one street further north**** of the Stata Center. It was also really nice, and I got to tour it when I went back in 2008 for my younger brother’s graduation, since he was***** Course 9 and had been doing undergraduate research in the one of the labs there. The new building had been a long time coming though. When I took 9.20 [Animal Behavior] with Alan Hein in 1997 in the old Course 9 building (where the MIT Media Lab extension now sits), Hein would regularly joke about the terrible quality of the structure, especially the climate control systems. We were told there was no point in spending much money fixing the air conditioning, because, “This building is coming down in 1969.” He must have been using that joke for three decades, but by 1999, when I had him again for 9.88 [Origins of Behavior], they really were making preparations to demolish the old building; I think that the last day of 9.88 was the very last class or seminar session the building every hosted.
**** “North,” from the MIT campus standpoint, means the direction inland from the Charles River, which is generally closer to northwest than due north. Farther on along Massachusetts Avenue, “north Cambridge” similarly means “northwest Cambridge.”
***** “He was Course 9,” is a standard way of identifying somebody’s major at MIT, although, “He was majoring in Course 9,” is also fine, of course.
I’m as surprised as anyone to learn that cruft isn’t an ancient English word.
Merrimack-Webster
An inspired typo! Or if it was deliberate, I see what you did there. (The Merrimack River is in New England, as is Merriam-Webster, and the TMRC dictionary comment seems to imply rubbage is local there as well.)
m-w.com still hasn’t entered cruft, a little surprising considering they’re not that far from MIT. ahdictionary.com does have it, as does Lexico (content produced by OUP), but no other commercial dictionaries that I can find.
chiefly dialectal variant of RUBBISH
Dialectal *where*, I wonder? Only New England, or elsewhere?
Wiktionary has an entry for rubbage with several quotations, one of which is the TMRC dictionary, as well as Huckleberry Finn and Finnegans Wake. The OED (revised 2011) treats rubbage as a spelling variant of rubbish, “now regional” (still not saying which regions), with “remodelling of the ending after formations in -age suffix”; they have three quotations from Mark Twain, all spelled rubbage, so he apparently used it consistently.
W/ no disrespect intended to Brett and his fellow Tech-grad STEM-nerds, now that I think about it I am wondering whether the weirdly reductionist aspect of MIT campus culture wherein buildings and courses of study are abstracted to numbers rather than having proper names does perhaps suggest in hindsight that it should have been a Huge Red Flag to ever let the Course 24 people there have a leading role in the scholarly study of human language within the American (and not just American) academy. That the MIT outpost of the quasi-fraternity known on other campuses as St. A’s or Delta Psi should be the “Number Six Club” seems consistent with this overall problem, unless perhaps it’s a hipster reference to The Prisoner?
Chomsky caught it from Zellig Harris, who was at the University of Pennsylvania.
There’s a related concept called “kludge” (pronounced “klooj” in defiance of God and man) – in my job I often have to deal with systems that have grown massive through years of kludgy (kludgey? who knows) solutions and are now barely fit for purpose.
I just finished a puzzle hunt that had a chain of cross-referenced footnotes as a puzzle, reminiscent of Brett’s comment. Brett, did/do you hunt?
I would have thought cruft had died out as a term among younger programmers, for as little as I’ve heard it lately. “Technical debt”, a frequent byproduct of cruft, seems to be more common, but maybe I’m not in the right programming circles.
I most recently used “cruft” to refer to the unremovable useless apps that Samsung clutters its phones with.
I would have thought cruft had died out as a term among younger programmers, for as little as I’ve heard it lately. “Technical debt”, a frequent byproduct of cruft, seems to be more common, but maybe I’m not in the right programming circles.
I cannot speak to the facts, but I would say it’s a sad commentary on the younger generation if they’ve replaced a satisfying term like “cruft” with a, well, technocratic term like “technical debt.”
My mother has been know to exclaim “rubbage!” (in an affected accent which imitates inebriation rather than any region).
@nemanja: I’ve never heard kludge pronounced with anything but the STRUT vowel, /klʌdʒ/.
Do you have FOOT or GOOSE there?
I’ve never heard kludge pronounced with anything but the GOOSE vowel, despite the common spelling. I always write kluge.
I just wanted to say yay, nemanja!
Not entirely relevant, but since the subject of buildings at MIT came up, here’s an article someone just forwarded me on the house of once-prominent, MIT-trained architect, Walter Netsch.:
https://apple.news/Afz17So0sQJa8UuYR8ch0Hw
One of my first jobs was working for the campaign of his wife, the first woman to hold statewide office in Illinois.
His architectural ideas were geometrical and abstract as befitting a tech grad. The rooms of the house are defined not by walls, but by virtue of being at different levels, approached by shorter or longer stairways. Though the linked article is mostly pay-walled, you get a sense of this in the banner art before the jump.
He was also uncompromising. He felt that handrails would ruin the geometry of his stairs. His wife had an inner ear issue affecting her balance, making descents perilous. It’s said that his design for an annex at the Art Institute included reception hall with a stairway that narrowed as it went down into the room.
In addition to his architecture, he was an early fancier of modern art. I have a numbered Roy Lichtenstein print, an abstracted version of Van Gogh’s the Sower, which he had decorated the campaign office with and let me keep. Some online sources suggest values in the tens of thousands. Others estimate tens of dollars. I wonder whether there were different series of the print, in which case I’m sure mine is in the latter category. Or maybe the higher prices are just seller fantasies.
At any rate, his collection was certainly worth millions, so he was not only the architect, but also a major benefactor of the Art Institute, and they felt obligated to honor his wishes on the handrail issue. Until a crowded event at which as parties of people went down the stairs, the outer members would topple off the sides. It was a relatively low stairway and there were no serious injuries. But still.
I have no direct knowledge of this. The idea that it took an actual accident to force the change could be apocryphal.
I enjoyed his buildings, even the much criticized UIC campus. Their house was amazing, and looks like it still is.
…but not of etymology, in that Herrn Kluge’s u is in a stressed open syllable and therefore long. Still interesting that the second syllable got a merciless English spelling-pronunciation while the first didn’t…
(“it’s pronounced JIF, not GIF”)
I’ve never heard kludge pronounced with anything but the GOOSE vowel
Me neither.
He was also uncompromising. He felt that handrails would ruin the geometry of his stairs. His wife had an inner ear issue affecting her balance, making descents perilous.
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to rant about architects, but then I hear AJP’s voice in my head telling me to calm down.
Brett: the intentional use of “amounds” and “rubbage” in that definition of cruft are there to imply that cruft itself is to be taken to be a fanciful alteration of more established terminology (like craft and crud, perhaps)
The author does say that “rubbage” was something he’d heard in childhood, so that one might not have been intentional. “Amounds”, however, is not a likely typo and *is* an excellent pun, so this is a convincing argument!
Y, Peter: back-formation from crufty … so claims the jargon file
And the Jargon File is what the OED’s 1981 citations are. However, crufty has no earlier citations, which is undoubtedly why the OED dismissed this theory.
OED: with crufty adj. perhaps compare Jamaican English crufty …, cruffy …, cruff (adjective) … see F. G. Cassidy & R. B. Le Page Dict. Jamaican English
They’re not claiming Jamaican English as an influence on TMRC slang in 1959; presumably they were just trying to illustrate that it was easy to form from phonaesthemes? (Spell these things out, please, OED, don’t make me presume! You have the space!)
None of those Jamaican words were prominent enough to make it into the OED in their recent Caribbean English update (which did use the Cassidy & Le Page dictionary as one of its sources).
Some want to build houses, some want to build walk-in sculptures. They should not be confused. And they shouldn’t be given each other’s jobs.
Green’s earliest example of crufty is from The Harder They Come, the novel, ca. 1980.
ISTR back in the day that it was eventually decided that the kludge/kluge vowel difference was largely a UK/US difference, possibly with separate etymologies.
Walter Netsch’s wife at least survived the hazardous architectural experience – outliving her husband and dying at the age of 88, I believe from causes that could not have been alleviated by a handrail.
Green’s earliest example of crufty
… is marked “(W.I., Jam.)” and is from a Jamaican novel. That’s the word that was in Cassidy’s dictionary. Since the tech-jargon cruft goes back to at least 1959—and doesn’t have the same meaning—it’s safe to assume it’s of independent origin.
Archived usenet posting in which Eric S Raymond adjudicates on the kludge/kluge controversy: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.usage.english/c/SJ9_M86em2A/m/4dyObmalsF0J
In the OED etymology, note the odd spelling “uncooth” … I don’t know whether it’s a typo or copied from their source.
It’s “uncouth” in the second edition (1980) of Cassidy and Le Page’s dictionary. The best I can do for the 1967 edition, which is the one they cite, is a limited, search-only view on Hathitrust — which doesn’t find “uncooth”, and does find “uncouth” on the same page as “cruff”. So I feel confident that it’s the OED’s typo.
(and if I’m going to be this obsessive, I’d better send in that job application for bibliographer)
Archived usenet posting in which Eric S Raymond adjudicates on the kludge/kluge controversy
I started reading his misguided ideas on “language correctness” (reminiscent of that awful DFW essay) and bailed out before I got to kludge/kluge.
So I feel confident that it’s the OED’s typo.
Truly we are living in the End Times.
Skip the entire first post in the thread. The interesting stuff is all in the second post. In particular this:
Sounds good to me.
…but I do hate programmers believing the grave accent is called “backtick” and using it as a quotation mark.
I think this would be better referred to as “bloat” or “bloatware”.
huh! i’ve always assumed “cruft” was just a parodic long-ess spelling (with matching pronunciation) of “crust”. and i’m not sure the OED has changed my opinion, though hatters who know whether or not that was a joke genre at MIT in the 1950s certainly could.
and i wonder whether there’s some reinforcement for “kludge” from yiddish קלוג/klug [clever], which gets used sarcastically a lot. the vowel militates against it, i’d think (קלוג has [u] or [i], depending on dialect, and always [g]) – but my [ʌ] in “kludge” is definitely a spelling pronunciation, so what do i know?
bailed out
Can’t blame you, but a few screens lower there’s an outstanding, well-informed dissection from Roger Lustig — love the line “Actually, [prescriptivists] tend to carry nothing heavier than Fowler, and they generally haven’t read *that* closely either.” It’s good enough to be a guest post on Language Log, if they’d had Language Log in 1993.
Unsurprisingly, Eric Raymond replied with “la la I can’t hear you”. I hope the “professional linguist” he claimed to be corresponding with told him “I agree with every word Lustig wrote, and if you can’t be arsed to engage on his level, I’m not going to waste my time with you.”
Merriam-Webster first entered kludge, with that spelling and the GOOSE vowel, all the way back in the 1973 Collegiate edition. (GOOSE is the only way I’ve ever heard it, as well.) Later editions added the options for spelling kluge and pronunciation like fudge — but also for a pronunciation /kluːdʒi/, which (as pointed out in the Usenet thread) is certainly an error; I suspect somebody was trying to put down the pronunciation for kludgey and got mixed up.
American Heritage recognizes both spellings and only the GOOSE pronunciation; the online edition gives the origin as “mid-20th century American military slang”, which they likely got from the Jargon File.
I’ve never heard “kludge” pronounced except by my inner voice, which naturally rhymes it with “fudge”. I have no intention of changing now; it’s [checks M-W] Jackson W. Granholm’s fault for choosing that spelling.
Can’t blame you, but a few screens lower there’s an outstanding, well-informed dissection from Roger Lustig — love the line “Actually, [prescriptivists] tend to carry nothing heavier than Fowler, and they generally haven’t read *that* closely either.” It’s good enough to be a guest post on Language Log, if they’d had Language Log in 1993.
Unsurprisingly, Eric Raymond replied with “la la I can’t hear you”. I hope the “professional linguist” he claimed to be corresponding with told him “I agree with every word Lustig wrote, and if you can’t be arsed to engage on his level, I’m not going to waste my time with you.”
Wow, Lustig’s response is so good I think I’m going to save it.
an outstanding, well-informed dissection from Roger Lustig
Just read it — it is indeed excellent. Thanks for the pointer.
A bit over two thirds down the thread it dawned on me that these people were working in a world without Wikipedia. There were some pretty simple things they couldn’t just look up within a minute – at the very beginning of the Eternal September.
Far higher up, in Lustig’s first response, is this gem:
@J.W. Brewer: The “No. 6 Club” (how I think I always saw it written) name is, I think, older than the group’s association with the intercollegiate fraternity, and also older than MIT’s current Cambridge campus (which dates to the second decades of the twentieth century). So it may be one of the oldest things known by number rather than name around MIT.
No. 6 had a lot of international members when I was a student. “Most Eurotrash per square foot,” as one nearby dormitory resident put it.
@Craig: I never got really into the puzzle hunt genre, although I had plenty of MIT friends (including one of my younger brothers) who did things like the annual MIT Mystery Hunt every year. My decidedly mediocre spatial visualization skills make me a liability on teams of hardcore puzzlers (although I am fairly good at puzzles that are purely algebraic or linguistic).
@David
Imagine, the law was but three years old at the time.
Here in the UK, I’ve never come across ‘cruft’ as a word – I only know about Crufts Dog Show! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crufts – but I’m familiar with the dialect/humorous pronunciation which I would spell ‘rubbidge’. According to the Free Dictionary https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Rubbidge, Emily Brontë used it in ‘Wuthering Heights’.
I’m familiar with “cruft” in the Wikipedia meaning, which is to say, fancruft, listcruft, and example cruft. Offhand I actually can’t recall if I’ve seen the word in any other context.
@January First-of-May: That’s actually the primary meaning for me as well, although I certain am familiar with the antecedent programming sense.
“I’m as surprised as anyone to learn that cruft isn’t an ancient English word.”
But it is. Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon and English Dictionary (published by John Russell Smith, London, 1881) defines it as ‘A crypt, vault’.
OED s.v. croft, n.²:
Latin crypta is, of course, “< Hellenistic Greek κρύπτη vault, use as noun of feminine of ancient Greek κρυπτός hidden, concealed < κρύπτειν to hide.”
And then?
Confused with and replaced by Gruft f. “crypt, grave while open”: OHG grufti n. “engraving”, MHG gruft “tunnel, vault, cave”. Apparently that one’s native, from graben “dig”, whence Grab “grave/tomb” and Grube “pit”. And the Longobardic crime of crapworf (exhumation of a corpse, “throwing” a body out of a grave).
With the nickname suffix it gives Grufti: 1) “man who is too old” (as in “don’t trust anyone above _”), 2) “goth” (let’s not do the gravewarp again).
the Longobardic crime of crapworf
That is my new favorite crime.
Crypta ended up as grotte in Danish, IIRC through some Italian “dialect” (demoted language) grotta vel sim.
I sent ESR a lot of commentary on and corrections to his published works and later on his not-yet-published ones. As a result, there are occasional bits of my prose embedded in ESR’s work. He never, in all my experience of him (quite a bit, though it did not “extend over many nations and three separate continents”), never, I say, admitted to being wrong about anything. He would make corrections on occasion, as with the Kluge paper feeder[*] (though I had nothing to do with that), but that was it.
[*] The Jargon File now says: “There is in fact a Brandtjen & Kluge Inc., an old family business that manufactures printing equipment — interestingly, their name is pronounced /ˈkludʒi/! Henry Brandtjen, president of the firm, told me (ESR, 1994) that his company was co-founded by his father and an engineer named Kluge /ˈkludʒi/, 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.”
Oh, we have that in German, too, but it means “cavernous cave”. It’s a bit more poetic than Höhle (from hohl “hollow”).
…and it’s apparently unrelated to grottenschlecht “abysmal” (of movies and the like), which is instead traced to Kröte “toad”, which surfaces as Krot without umlaut in various dialects, some of which have various forms of Gonsonand Weagening.
It means much the same in Danish, including being a sort of hule — though it doesn’t have to be very large. And now I looked it up it came through German or French. Its doublet krypt is typically found under churches.
TIL that grotesque is an Italian derivation of the same word, reportedly because they found grotesques as decorations in the old Roman crypts in Rome when they dug them out.
through some Italian “dialect” (demoted language)
grotta is Standard Italian, actually, the regular* reflex of Late/’Vulgar’ Lat. crŭpta for Classical/learnèd cry̆pta < Greek κρύπτη.
*With the sporadic, but not exceedingly rare, Late Latin voicing of initial /k/, especially before /r/. The stressed vowel should be /o/, which is today a minority pronunciation; I myself have /ɔ/ in this word.
As seen in grease or group, doublets of crass and crop respectively
rozele: i’ve always assumed “cruft” was just a parodic long-ess spelling … hatters who know whether or not that was a joke genre at MIT in the 1950s certainly could.
I’m not *that* old, but I wasted too much of my youth reading old yearbooks and bound volumes of The Tech, and parodic long-ess spelling doesn’t sound like MIT humor to me. I think Brett nailed it.
Graham: awesome! Thanks!
Truly we are living in the End Times.
It’s not like every edition doesn’t have its own errors (as you know). For example, in the Second Edition under self-, prefix, sense 2. “Compounds with pa. pples. and ppl. adjs. in which self- denotes the agent”, you’ll find this quotation:
1849 M. Arnold Skakespeare 10 *Self-school’d, *self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure.
I admire the discipline it must have taken to retype the printed edition for computerization *without* correcting this error! In fact the poem, as published in Matthew Arnold’s lifetime, was titled Shakspeare.
“retype the printed edition for computerization *without* correcting this” — whoops, no, I misremembered the story. In fact what was retyped was the First Edition and the Supplements, which were then merged and sorted together, and the 1989 printed version was produced from that. “Skakespeare” was typed by hand only once, not twice.
in fact, `Kluge’ is a surname in German
…probably best known here on LH for Kluge’s law. Wonder how that gets pronounced.
@ktschwarz: thanks! i’ll take you & Brett’s local knowledges over the OED’s hypothesis, and certainly over my uninformed assumption (i’m the right kind of townie, but was raised in north cambridge, a world away).
I don’t think it gets pronounced in English often enough to do statistics with, if that’s what you mean. The Standard German pronunciations straightforwardly correspond to the spelling: /ˈkluːgɛ/, with regional variations in how /k/, /l/, /g/ and unstressed /ɛ/ come out.
It’s pronounced like that by the Americans I’ve known who had occasion to say it, except with schwa at the end.
Surely most English speakers who ever have occasion to talk about Kluge’s law know at least basic German, so it’s a very different situation from that for the computer jargon word.
It’s pronounced like that by the Americans I’ve known who had occasion to say it, except with schwa at the end.
That’s also how it would be pronounced by most Germans. Having anything but schwa for unstressed “e” is a regionalism.
The trick is that I don’t think a separate /ə/ needs to be set up for any Standard German accent; you can always get away with sweeping [ə], [ɘ], [ɵ], whatever under the rug and call it the unstressed allophone of /ɛ/. (I think I also had the accent in mind where the outcome is [ɐ], while in the others [ɐ] is either absent – in Switzerland – or an allophone of /r/ rather than of /ɛ/.)
To lack a separate unstressed allophone of /ɛ/ and use [ɛ] regardless of stress is a feature of the Austrian accent of Standard German. I can’t remember right now what they do in Bavaria (except I’m sure it varies).
I wanted to use slashes rather than brackets precisely so I could ignore this variation, along with presence vs. absence of aspiration of the /k/, laminal vs. apical articulation of the /l/, and presence vs. absence of voice (or even approximation) of the /g/.
Brett: The administration even pungled up to fully equip the new TMRC space according to the club’s designs
I overlooked this the first time round: pungled? That was new to me, but there it is in a few dictionaries, including MW, DARE, and the OED. No mystery, all agree that it is from 19th-century Spanish póngale ‘put it down’ and is regional to the Western US, and all cite an appearance in Huckleberry Finn: “All right. I’ll ask him; and I’ll make him pungle, too, or I’ll know the reason why.”
So, right register for Algernon Moncrieff, but wrong region.
… or maybe it did leak over to the other side, a little? Green’s has a couple of 1890s citations from UK sources:
The second one sounds like it could be a quote from (or caricature of) an American, but not the first.
I think of pungle as an obscure but not really rare word, although there are certainly lots of people who don’t know it—even if many of them have encountered in Twain. It didn’t become part of my own active vocabulary until some time in my twenties, I think.
I recall one episode of the radio show Sez You! in which the writers got a little too attached to the idea of doing their Fictionary game rounds with two very similar words. One of the words was truly rare—pingle, I think—but for the second round they used pungle, which was not obscure enough. One of the players on the guessing team actually knew it (although he didn’t just blurt that out).
The second one sounds like it could be a quote from (or caricature of) an American
A caricature of an African-American.
The Newcastle Courant is online at the British Newspaper Archive but you have to pay for it.
Kludge is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day for June 28, 2023. They’ve done this one before, but this is not a re-run, it’s a revision. They now stress that the word was not invented by Jackson W. Granholm (as the OED thought), though he popularized it with his Datamation article in 1962. From their revised etymology:
See also discussion at ADS-L, May 2019: a comment there references the book Technobabble (1991), which collects three more reminiscences that kluge was in use in the electronics or aerospace industries in the late 1950s. These are all memories recounted decades later, there’s no hard evidence, but the variety of independent sources is notable. Granholm’s How to Design a Kludge feels to me like a joke on a known word, rather than a made-up one.
Merriam-Webster continues with a more doubtful connection, also mentioned in the Jargon File:
But, as also pointed out at ADS-L, this follows a well-known folktale formula leading up to the punchline “it fell into the water and went ‘kush’/‘kletch’/etc.,” discussed at length by Alan Dundes, no less, in The Meaning of Folklore. So the story could be of independent origin.
Thanks for that report on progress in etymologizing kludge, ktschwarz!
The OED offers the following etymology for pungle:
I found some corpus studies of leísmo in earlier and later Mexican Spanish, and they show it to have been generally and continually on the wane through the centuries. I was surprised by its former occurrence in Mexico, since it is not now typical at all of any Mexican Spanish I have heard. (I have never encountered leísmo in New Mexican Spanish when conversing in Santa Fe.)
The OED’s first cite for pungle is
(It can be read in context in the article “Ups and Downs” in the middle of the third column here.)
Note also another early citation:
I wonder if the appearance of -le in póngale as a set phrase used at the Mexican monte table (see the OED’s first site) is really an instance of the use of le for direct object (in this locution, standing in for envite or dinero or the like). Rather, is it an early instance of the phenomenon known by such names as le expletivo mexicano and the like?
In their wonderful study of this feature of Mexican Spanish, Ía Navarro Ibarra and M. Teresa Espinal (2012) “Le-predicates and event modification in Mexican Spanish” (in Lingua 122, no. 4, p. 409–431; online here; doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2011.12.008, verbum sap) introduce this use of le as follows:
Navarro’s extensive recent dissertation on the topic is also available here. Other academic studies are here, here, and in English here.
There is a more popular description in Spanish here. In English, there is a scattershot description of this use of le as something like an intensive under the heading “Influence of Nahuatl” in the Wikipedia here.
Several of these articles quote the verses of the Spaniard José Sánchez Somoano from 1892 on this typical feature of Mexican Spanish:
So I wonder if the le in póngale could be motivated by the dealer’s urgency in getting the all players to place their bets in Mexican monte, a game that moved along speedily and allowed a large number of players jostling around the table to place bets.
(As an aside, note also Mexican ponerle “have sexual relations”.)
Antedated to 1850, in the Marysville Daily Herald:
The link is evident in examples such as this, starting in 1851:
There are also a few examples of pongle down, from 1853 on.
“the damnedest looking little thing you ever saw—wires and springs sticking out in every direction.”
That is not a kludge, whether deltoid or non-deltoid. That is an allamagoosa. Indeed, an offog.
@ktschwartz — Did anyone mention the Kluge Feeder (used in the Government Printing Office in at least 1952), or other equipment manufactured by Brandtjen & Kluge?
It’s all very well to say “The meaning of the German word is different, and /g/ does not magically turn into /dʒ/” (m-w), but I am pretty sure many non-German-speaking Americans looked at the name on the printing equipment and presumably thought something along the lines of “It looks like huge so it should rhyme with huge.” Indeed, the rhyme may have helped spread the pronunciation: “I’m putting more paper in the huge Kluge”.
I see the WikiP article does at least mentions Kluge printing.
Yes, the Kluge paper feeder was discussed in a couple of comments above; AHD considers it possible enough to mention as a “perhaps”. Your link is useful since it establishes that the Kluge feeder was actually used by Navy print shops in the right time period (the Jargon File didn’t give evidence of that, it just assumed).
I agree that MW is too quick to dismiss the German word and/or proper name Kluge. New words do occasionally arise from misreading of written words, isn’t mispronunciation as a subcategory of that? Also, as MW and the OED point out, there’s a little phonaesthetic cluster formed by bodge (British; I’m American and don’t know it), kludge, and fudge v., which all mean pretty much the same thing.
Embarrassingly, I forgot to re-read/re-search the thread. But I’m glad I did the Google Books search, and that the Navy training course guide from the GPO is freely accessible. I see that in the Jargon file, the claim that the Kluge feeder was “simple” is mentioned.
I offer the following, straight from the training guide, pages 314-316:
No-one seems to have uploaded a video of a Kluge feeder in action, alas. The best I can find is color photographs from someone hoping to give away one:
https://www.briarpress.org/50464
And some closeup pictures of the delivery system from someone who was having problems with it
https://www.briarpress.org/32561
And Brandtjen & Kluge are still around (the company, not the original individuals so named), although they’ve been acquired. They don’t make the paper feeder anymore, but do make related equipment.
https://www.kluge.biz/about-kluge/
Despite the German name, the Kluge brothers were from Norway, it says there.
The Kluge feeder
was probably a godsend
to a certain mindset.
Every day,
as part of normal operation,
this hardy worker
blew, sucked, and gave release.
Repeatedly. Unstintingly.
To as many as were in the pile
set by the control screw.
That’s a work ethic
you don’t see much
nowadays.
/probablytryingtoohard
Brandtjen & Kluge
In the video, the fourth-generation Brantjen pronounces his own name /ˈbræntʃən/ and the partner’s surname /ˈklugi/. The original Kluge brothers were named Abel (fine) and Eneval (what’s that?)
bodge (British; I’m American and don’t know it)
A variant of botch. The OED3 lists grutch/grudge, slutch/sludge, and hotch-potch/hodge-podge as analogous cases; in all four pairs the unvoiced variant is the original. In the fourth pair the OED speculates that it was influenced by the name Hodge < Roger (cf. Hob *< Robert/Robin, hick < Rick).
Thanks for those antedatings, Y!
I haven’t found any study devoted to the earliest evidence for “Mexican le” and the emergence of this grammatical feature. It’s nice to have more evidence that the locus of póngale was the furious activity of the monte table.
Eneval (what’s that?)
A local form of Enevald, or a mangling of that name at Ellis Island?
Eneval is just a variant spelling. The final d is silent. The surname is usually pronounced [²klʉːgɛ].
I find what seems to be close family but not the brothers themselves in the censuses of 1885, 1891 and 1900. Especially notable is Brynjulf Kluge, b. 1873, maskintrykker “mechanical printer”.