Chipping the web: October 27th

5 Responses to “Chipping the web: October 27th”

1. Ole Phat Stu says:

   October 27, 2008 at 8:52 pm

   From the german :-
   klug(adj) = clever =
   kluge(adj, as applied to feminine nouns).

   hard G, btw.

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   • Sterling Camden says:

     October 28, 2008 at 9:42 am

     The wikipedia article quotes from the first known usage:

     The building of a kludge..is not work for amateurs. There is a certain, indefinable, masochistic finesse that must go into true kludge building.

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2. apotheon says:

   October 28, 2008 at 11:40 am

   The proper spelling for hacker jargon is “kludge”. I’ve noticed a nontrivial number of people spelling it “kluge”, though — probably because that’s the spelling they imagined it had, having never seen it in print before.

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   • Sterling Camden says:

     October 28, 2008 at 11:55 am

     … or perhaps because they know German?

     Even the wikipedia article says that it’s derived from the German klug, as Stu noted. I think perhaps “kluge” began to be pronounced with the soft g in English, and the “d” was added as a kludge to reinforce that pronunciation.

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     • apotheon says:

       October 28, 2008 at 12:10 pm

       By the time the Jargon File was created, though, “kludge” was the entrenched spelling — which means that “kluge” is probably being adopted by some for reasons other than the actual origin of the term in the hacker jargon context. That was where I was going with my first comment.

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