Kludge

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jan Hensley, Arlington, Texan.

Hello, Jan. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

My mother used a word that used to drive us absolutely crazy, my sisters and I.

Kluge.

Kluge.

And I assume it’s, yes, K-L-U-D-G-E. I assume that’s the way it’s spelled.

Okay.

But she would use it for, the freeway was Kluge today.

This paperwork’s all cluged up, you know, to mean something like that.

Or, wow, look at that cluge, you know, things like that.

To mean a big mess.

She used it in so many different ways, it didn’t make sense as to what the definition was.

And what was her background?

She worked for my father.

She was his administrative assistant.

She’d been a housewife.

We were military.

My dad was career military, Air Force.

Okay.

What was his business, though?

What kind of industry did they work in?

Burgers and acquisitions.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, kind of investment banking.

How interesting.

The reason we asked about this is that there’s a word that started in computing circles in the 1960s to refer to any kind of like not very good solution where you had,

Let’s say that you replaced the part with something that you made out of cardboard when it should be made out of metal,

Or you used a bit of software that you kind of just wrote on the spot and barely works but does work, and you kind of leave it in place.

And so it came up in a journal called Datamation several times, used by a guy by the name of J.W. Granholm.

And from there, it spread into the larger computing circles.

And even today, Kludge, or Kludge, as some people say, is used to refer to any kind of half-assed solution that really is just not the way that things are done.

Yeah, that’s kind of the way she used it.

It’s kind of ugly.

It’s kind of ugly, imperfect.

Put together with duct tape and wire.

Inelegant and messed up, yeah.

Yeah, it sounds a lot like clogged, too, when you’re talking about a freeway.

But that’s why we’re wondering if she picked it up from the computing world or if when she worked with your father that they were in somehow big data systems or anything.

Not really. She had gone to an executive secretarial school when my father started his business.

Interesting. Yeah, for a long time it was kind of stuck in the engineering and electronics world and didn’t really enter the mainstream until the 1970s.

Okay, that may be an explanation.

My dad was in armament electronics and engineering in the Air Force.

There we go.

There you go.

I think that’s your connection.

For Jack.

Jan, I wouldn’t be surprised if he probably subscribed to these very journals where the term first became popular, because they were kind of like a big deal in the industry at the time.

Wow, okay.

The guy who invented the word kind of mixed together the words bodge, which is a form of botch, B-O-D-G-E-N.

And fudge, which is a form of a word we can’t say on the air.

Yes, I understand.

He kind of mixed them together to kind of create this new word.

But there’s a funny fake story about the origin of kludge, that it’s the noise that a machine that’s broken that you’ve tried to fix with a kludgy solution makes when you drop it into the ocean.

It goes, kludge.

I like that one, too.

That’s not the real one, but it’s a better one, I think.

Thank you for calling today, Jan. We’re glad to help, all right?

Well, thank you.

Okay, take care, Jan.

We will.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

That’s interesting what you said about throwing it into the ocean.

I once met somebody from Beloit, and she said that the name of her town is the sound of a corridor in a toilet.

Bloit?

Bloit.

No offense to the folks in Beloit, but that’s just what somebody from Beloit told me your town’s name sounds like.

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