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- [00:07]
A
It's the Word of the Day podcast for July 28th. Get that AmEx gold cart ready. I'm way too tired to cook tonight.
- [00:15]
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You read my mind. With the gold cart, we can get up to $120 a year in statement credits. Are you feeling the Cheesecake Factory? Five guys? Either of those sound good?
- [00:26]
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Yes.
- [00:27]
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Which one? Both pay with the Gold card to receive up to $10 a month in statement credits of participating partners. Uncover more ways to reward yourself@americanexpress.com explored-gold enrollment required terms apply.
- [00:42]
A
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 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 35 millimeter film. Even worse, the Kluge enabling color broadcasting further degraded video quality. As long as the origins of the word kludge, also spelled K L u g e, are uncertain, any attempt to pin them down will itself be a bit of a kludge. That is a makeshift solution. The writer Jackson W. Granholm, once thought to have coined the word, offered his own when he he wrote in this 1962 article, how to Design a Kludge, that it came from the German word klug, 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 kludge maker. The meaning of kludge 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, wires and springs sticking out in every direction. Murgatroyd then accidentally drops the object. The kludge slipped out and went overboard down into the ocean and went kludge. This suggests a possible onomatopoeic origin for the word kludge. We note that kluge the Kluge spelling without the d better reflects its pronunciation, and it rhymes with the word huge, not usually with the word fudge. But again, nothing in this life is certain but death and taxes and these days also computer malfunctions. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
- [03:18]
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Visit merriam webster.com today for definitions, wordplay and trending word lookups.