[ale] cruft

[Beddingfield, Allen]

It is a word I use frequently when looking at some of the legacy junk around my workplace!


From: Sean Kilpatrick [mailto:kilpatms at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 06:58 PM Central Standard Time
To: ale at ale.org <ale at ale.org>
Subject: [ale] cruft


This is a word I have used for years.

When I used it tonight at dinner my wife asked me what it meant.

And, as we are both liberal arts types, she wanted to know its origin.

So I grabbed the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), Volume "C" only to discover that the word isn't there. It also isn't in my (weighty) American Heritage Dictionary.

WTF

But Google is your friend. :)

This word comes to us out of MIT, where it first appeared in the club dictionary of the (MIT) Tech Model Railroad Club in 1959!

It -- perhaps -- arose out of MIT's Cruft Laboratory (c. 1915) which was used as a radar lab during WW II.

So how many knew the origin of this word? And its meaning: detritus, left over crud, especially these days leftover code that leads to dependency hell?

Sean
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