you're damned fucking right

[rone]

"Blog" and "moblog" are not transparent words. "Televisor" was not as good a term as "television" or "television set", and so it went away. I expect the same to happen to "moblog", if not "blog", in ten years. Because they're geek words. They're codemonkey words. (I can hear Cory Doctorow yelling, "l337, damnit!") They are crap, artificial, ugly kludges of words.

        - Warren Ellis

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

ESR's Jargon entry (http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/K/kluge.html) suggests it's been in use for quite a while and predates the use of computers. Anyway, i can see calling it a codemonkey word in its origin, but by now it's certainly in somewhat widespread use. And if the "b" word is still around in 10 years, i'll gladly cop to its validity via usage. But i still hate its guts, because it smells like it was coined by a snappy marketroid.

[(Anonymous)]

No way, man. There is no way that the rest of my family, and most of my friends and filmmaking pals, would respond to the word "kludge" other than by giving me a blank stare. Maybe we have different ideas of what "widespread use" means. I'd agree with you that "kludge" has been around for a while and many, many geeks and near-geeks use it, but I can't agree that it's in general parlance.

-Michele G.