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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:kilpatms@gmail.com]
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<b>Sent</b>: Friday, March 21, 2014 06:58 PM Central Standard Time<br>
<b>To</b>: ale@ale.org <ale@ale.org> <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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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>
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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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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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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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Sean</p>
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