Monday 11 March 2013

Crufty bagbiters

Look what landed in my inbox on the first day of "The World's Greatest Dog Show" last week.

Date: 7 March 2013 01:30:00 GMT
Subject: "crufty, adj." - Word of the Day from the OED

OED Online Word of the Day


Your word for today is: crufty, adj.

cruftyadj.
[‘Of software: poorly designed, esp. unnecessarily or unintentionally complex; containing redundant code.’]
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈkrʌfti/,  U.S. /ˈkrəfti/
Etymology:Apparently <  cruft n.2 + -y suffix1: see discussion at cruft n.2
 Computing slang.
  Of software: poorly designed, esp. unnecessarily or unintentionally complex; containing redundant code.
1981 CoEvolution Q. Spring 29/1 Crufty, poorly built, possibly overly complex. ‘This is standard old crufty DEC software.’
1984  J. Varley in  S. Williams Hugo & Nebula Award Winners from Asimov's Sci. Fiction (1995) 178 Routines so bletcherous they'd make your skin crawl. Real crufty bagbiters.
2005  C. Stross Accelerando vii. 332 There's lots of crufty twentieth-century bugware kicking around under your shiny new singularity.



Was that really just an amazing coincidence?

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