SWR: Cleaning hack

M

MLipton

Mark Lipton
I imagine that many of you, like me, have amassed a collection of Riedel, Zalto, Schott-Zwiesel and other glasses over the years, many of which are not easy to clean by hand because of the small opening. Because I tend to wash these glasses a day or so after use, they often need more than just a hot water riinse. Recently, due to rather bizarre circumstances, I ended up with a brush designed to clean baby bottles. Mirabile dictu! It's also a very effective wine glass scrubber and gentle enough for even the most delicate, hand-blown stuff. Available at your local Target or equivalent for about $2.

Mark Lipton
 
I appreciate the fluidity of language but when did the word hack come to represent a useful piece of practical advice? Particularly egregious is the “life hack.” I can hardly find a term more inane. And these days recipes are now being called kitchen hacks.

Removing the cassette tape drive from a Teddy Ruxpin and replacing it with microcomputer that controls the original servo motors and allows the audio processing of any entered text, that's a hack.
 
originally posted by Todd Abrams:
I appreciate the fluidity of language but when did the word hack come to represent a useful piece of practical advice
Click to expand...
.

More than 50 years ago, since I remember it from my adolescence, which, gods help me, predated personal computers.
 
You sure about that? All evidence points to a recent appropriation from computer culture to make a “tip” or “advice” sound hipper. If it's truly been in use for this purpose for as long as fifty years you'd think we might have seen a dictionary definition by now.
 
originally posted by Todd Abrams:
You sure about that? All evidence points to a recent appropriation from computer culture to make a “tip” or “advice” sound hipper. If it's truly been in use for this purpose for as long as fifty years you'd think we might have seen a dictionary definition by now.
Click to expand...

Memory is never sure. The OED is wonderful after the second edition edition and then again after it went online a few years ago, but less certain for the years between, at the moment--but, then again, I' m not entirely up to date with that anymore. Still, I think so. You can hack in to a shed with a hatchet. And I would guess that that is where computer hacking came from. But, even if my memory is off, I got my first PC in 1984-- a kaypro, can you believe it--and I' even less unsure that i didn' t know the word by then.
 
But not to represent a useful piece of practical advice, or a "tip."

Hacking into a shed would mean that you're cutting into the door or wall of the shed, not finding a better way in.
 
originally posted by Todd Abrams:
You sure about that? All evidence points to a recent appropriation from computer culture to make a “tip” or “advice” sound hipper. If it's truly been in use for this purpose for as long as fifty years you'd think we might have seen a dictionary definition by now.
Click to expand...

I agree, though I'd broaden "computer culture" to "tech culture". Steven Levy traced "hack" back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the late '50's or early '60's, and in the '60's there were references to phone hackers. A lot of the hacks in those days involved electronics, though not necessarily digital electronics. I don't recall examples of the more general use of hack from the '60's or '70's.

And the application of "hack" and "hacking" to computers long (at least relative to the history of computers) predates the advent of personal computers.
 
originally posted by Todd Abrams:
But not to represent a useful piece of practical advice, or a "tip."

Hacking into a shed would mean that you're cutting into the door or wall of the shed, not finding a better way in.
Click to expand...

These folks use the term when finding a cheaper, easy workaround to a problem - often adapting a tool for another purpose or creating a tool without paying a fortune: http://farmhack.org/tools
 
In my computer circles, as far back as the early 1980s, the verb "to hack" means "to approximate a complex result with simple components". It is not just a synonym for "invention" or "workaround" or "recipe".

Of course, those who hack may be called "hackers" and they are, typically, people who study the manuals (and running systems) very deeply because they are trying to do something complicated with only the simple operations available.

Electronic trespassers and burglars are probably also hackers but their lack of ethics is not intrinsic to that term.
 
Speaking of vocabulary drift, I read on a restaurant website that the chef had "curated" a special menu. Isn't the chef supposed to be cooking? Or is this some new level of outsourcing?
 
originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):
Speaking of vocabulary drift, I read on a restaurant website that the chef had "curated" a special menu. Isn't the chef supposed to be cooking? Or is this some new level of outsourcing?
Click to expand...

There's a prolific discussion of such (mis?)usage in Lou Amdur's FB page.
 
Todd, to answer your question, I was using the term in the sense of a creative and unanticipated solution to a problem. I agree that my usage here was a tad hyperbolic, but WTF.

Mark Lipton
(At least I didn't post in 1337)
 
originally posted by MLipton:
(At least I didn't post in 1337)
Click to expand...
Liptonus-1.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top