tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 19 13:03:12 2014
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Need a word for ...
All are good suggestions, with {lI'wI' Deq} scoring really high, but given the fully nuanced definition in Wikipedia, cruft really is a word more specific in meaning than any of these. For hardware, it can mean something that never was really useful, but it sure was high tech, and now the tech is completely useless.
Consider the supersonic, long-range bomber that the Air Force built and put in place briefly, before intercontinental missiles made it both obsolete and too expensive to justify maintaining. It looked cool, like an SST with hinged wings that would droop at the ends at high speed when it becomes important for the wings to NOT generate lift. It is one of the very few aircraft in history to exceed Mach 3. Now? Maybe there's one or two in a museum somewhere, but the rest are probably sitting in a military junkyard in a desert somewhere, partly stripped, corroding, awaiting a future age for archeologists to dig it up and wonder what it was, like a dinosaur, slowly sinking into a tar pit.
Or the Apple Newton. It was a brilliant idea that so many man-hours and so much money went into at a time when the end result could not live up to the expected functionality because of limits in the technology that could not be foreseen until the whole thing was assembled and tested by the public. Apple mass produced a thing that nobody wanted, and they couldn't know that nobody wanted it until they produced it.
Or Windows Compact Edition: The all-time prize winner in terms of its acronym: WinCE. It actually was sold with that acronym. What were they thinking?
For software, it can refer to badly written modules of code that need to be replaced before the whole software package can be properly functional, or modules that were well adapted to earlier versions of the software, but now because of feature shift or changing standards, it no longer functions well in the software package and need to be replaced or removed, or it can refer to complex and unnecessary codes in documents, as in the junk that MS Word puts in a document when converting it into a Web page.
These are not simple leftovers. This is not simple garbage or debris. These are things carefully constructed by misguided hands and minds, often lacking sufficient context at time of construction to comprehend why it would be so poorly adapted to the future it will become a part of. It's quite often expensive to create and difficult to remove.
It's geek poetry, not simple landfill material to be handled by a scullery maid.
cruft.
It's the tech version of Darwin's losers. When it was born, it couldn't know that it couldn't compete. They figured it was worth a try, right?
I'm sticking to it. I want a word for cruft.
lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh
Retired Door Repair Guy
> On Nov 19, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Felix Malmenbeck <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> chaq Qap «DI chuv», «lI'Ha'pu'wI'», «lI'wI' Deq» joq.
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Alan Anderson [[email protected]]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 20:17
> To: tlhIngan Hol mailing list
> Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Need a word for ...
>
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 2:05 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I have a new favorite word in English, and I really want an equivalent in Klingon:
>>
>> cruft
>>
>> If we have words for scalene triangle, we need a word for cruft.
>> It's such a glorious, perfect word for the warrior's tongue.
>
> qechvaD Qap <DI> qar'a'? veQ 'oHbe'law'. rut 'ut. vI' neH.
>
> -- ghunchu'wI'
>
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