The Appropriately Messy Etymology of ‘Kluge’
Computer science lingo, on its way to becoming mainstream, has a way of picking up legendary origin stories.
Consider, for instance, the tale of the software “bug.” The most popular etymological backstory isn’t exactly accurate, but that hasn’t stopped people from retelling it. The term emerged, the story goes, when the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper discovered a moth—an actual bug—trapped between two components of the enormous Mark II machine she was working on at Harvard in 1947.
The insect was removed and taped into a log book with a little note: “First actual case of bug being found.” All this on its website, engineers were griping about bugs as early as the 1870s, when Thomas Edison complained of them in his work on electrical circuits.
