The Word of the Day podcast for July 28th.
Today's word is kludge, also pronounced kludge and spelled K-L-U-D-G-E.
Kludge is a noun.
It's a haphazard or makeshift solution to a problem and especially to a computer or programming problem.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the News Gazette of Champaign, Illinois.
The advent of television in the 1940s allowed the movie industry to reconsider frame rates.
Unfortunately, primitive video technology limited dramatic improvements.
While the frame rate exceeded cinema, the resolution,
how much information each frame actually contained, paled in comparison to 35mm film.
Even worse, the kludge enabling color broadcasting further degraded video quality.
As long as the origins of the word kluge, also spelled K-L-U-G-E, are uncertain,
any attempt to pin them down will itself be a bit of a kluge, that is, a makeshift solution.
The writer Jackson W. Granholm, once thought to have coined the word,
offered his own when he wrote in this 1962 article, How to Design a Kluge,
that it came from the German word kluge, meaning smart or witty.
This connection is unlikely on both phonetic and semantic grounds, however, and in any event, the word already existed.
A decade earlier, in an article recounting military folklore acquired from ex-soldiers, Agnes Nolan Underwood
related a shaggy dog story about a sailor named Murgatroyd, whose civilian occupation is Klugemaker.
The meaning of kluge is withheld till the end of the tale,
when the object made by Murgatroyd turns out to be the damnedest-looking little thing you ever saw,