<div dir="ltr"><div>+1<br><br></div>detritus is another<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 8:02 PM, Beddingfield, Allen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:allen@ua.edu" target="_blank">allen@ua.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
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<font style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">It is a word I use frequently when looking at some of the legacy junk around my workplace!<br>
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<font style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif""><b>From</b>: Sean Kilpatrick [mailto:<a href="mailto:kilpatms@gmail.com" target="_blank">kilpatms@gmail.com</a>]
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<b>Sent</b>: Friday, March 21, 2014 06:58 PM Central Standard Time<br>
<b>To</b>: <a href="mailto:ale@ale.org" target="_blank">ale@ale.org</a> <<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org" target="_blank">ale@ale.org</a>> <br>
<b>Subject</b>: [ale] cruft <br>
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This is a word I have used for years.</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-right:0px;text-indent:0px">
When I used it tonight at dinner my wife asked me what it meant.</p>
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And, as we are both liberal arts types, she wanted to know its origin.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-right:0px;text-indent:0px">
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.</p>
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WTF</p>
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But Google is your friend. :)</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-right:0px;text-indent:0px">
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!</p>
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It -- perhaps -- arose out of MIT's Cruft Laboratory (c. 1915) which was used as a radar lab during WW II.</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-right:0px;text-indent:0px">
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?</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-right:0px;text-indent:0px">
Sean</p>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr">-- <br>James P. Kinney III<br><i><i><i><i><br></i></i></i></i>Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you
gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his
own tail. It won't fatten the dog.<br>
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain<br><i><i><i><i><br><a href="http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/</a><br></i></i></i></i></div>
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