On Wed, 20 Apr 2011 10:06:27 +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > Dan Stromberg <drsali...@gmail.com> writes: > >> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 4:03 PM, geremy condra <debat...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> > When you say 'hacking', you mean.... ? >> >> Presumably he meant the real meaning of the word, not what the press >> made up and ran with. > > To be fair, the press already had its own pejorative meaning of “hack” > before the engineering and computing term, so the association was > probably inevitable.
It's hardly just the press. "Hack" is a fine old English word: "The jungle explorer hacked at the undergrowth with his machete." "I was so hungry, I didn't take the time to neatly slice up the meat, but just hacked off a chunk and stuffed it in my mouth." "Good lord, have you seen the completely botched job that carpenter has done? He's such a hack!" Given the wide range of pejorative meanings of "hack" going back at least to the 19th century (to cut roughly without skill, a mediocre and talentless writer, a person engaged to perform unskilled and boring labour, a broken-down old horse, etc.), what's remarkable is that anyone decided to start use "hack" in a non-pejorative sense. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
