Local Word Flu

[plumtreeblossom]

A big buzzword these days in my local social circles is "decrufting." I'd never heard the word before last year, and now I see and hear it constantly. It means to dispose of clutter in your house, office, etc. But it's not in any dictionary I can find (except Urban Dictionary, which doesn't make it a word) so I don't know where it came from.

Prior to this, the epidemic buzz phrase was "signal boost," which is still big (it means to spread the word on behalf of someone else). In both cases, once I'd heard it 50,000 times within a short period I started to recoil from it. I don't use either, myself. I "spread the word" or I "throw shit out."

Wikipedia doesn't have an article for "decrufting," but it has this for the noun "cruft:"

Cruft (occasionally kruft) is computing jargon for "code, data, or software of poor quality".[1] The term may also refer to debris that accumulates on computer equipment. It has been generalized to mean any accumulation of obsolete, redundant, irrelevant, or unnecessary information, especially code. An alternative usage is becoming more generalized to refer to any unneeded or unwanted computer hardware or obsolete equipment.[2]

Comments

[muffyjo]

I've been using the word cruft since the late 80s/early 90s so I'm pretty certain it pre-dates computers. In my head it's always been the stuff larger than tchotchkes and of somewhat equal import. De-crufting being the equivalent of spring cleaning where you de-clutter your stuff.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I wonder why the word is just now coming into heavy use. Maybe I just missed it for all these years, I don't know.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

I've certainly been using it regularly for two decades, along with eit, spooge, kludge, frob, sigh, lose, vad, up (as a name for a stairway, ladder, or other way to go up), and probably other jargon file stuff, as well as arguing about the signal to noise ratio of discussions, so while "signal boost" has had increased usage recently, it doesn't seem especially strange to me.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Ahem. Late 1980s doesn't predate computers. >:-)

"Cruft" is hacker jargon, so indeed the usage is tied to geek culture and even particularly to MIT (don't know whether that's where you picked it up, Jo).

"Signal boost" is likewise a techie term (think ham radio). So, PTB, I fear this may just be the [linguistic] price you pay for living among geeks. :-}

[muffyjo]

It certainly doesn't predate computers, but it DOES predate the common terminology of computers seeping into the English language and I lived in NYC, far away from the MIT crowd.

There was a world before Personal Computers. I promise.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

But my point is that hacker culture was quietly brewing away in places like MIT (not *so* very far removed from NYC) even in the '60s and '70s. So I theorize that this particular usage could have spread out from there -- language having a mind of its own as it does -- even before the wide appearance of personal computers in mainstream culture.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

I certainly was exposing people on Wall St to the word cruft by 1990-1992, how many of them outside the IT departments used it, I have no idea.

[resk.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of decruft. I've used decluttered loads of time. Didn't know there was a synonym.

I gotta say, though, I like the word crufty.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I think it's either local to the Boston area, or tied to geek culture (which is to say, Boston). I never heard it until recently, but it's used so frequently that it gets under my skin. Next year it will be another new word or phrase, it always is. If that's going to happen, I feel entitled to a turn at coining the word we will ride into the ground like a rented mule, but I'm not likely to get it.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_mattt/]

There are roughly 600,000 plus words in the English language, depending on who you ask and how you count.

None of those other words work?

Why do we have to either fabricate a neologism and/or repeat a single one of those over and over and over?

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Fabricating neologisms is fun! And how many of those 600,000+ English words started out as neologisms, anyway?

[beowabbit]

Dictionaries trail reality, though. Speakers (and writers) define a language, and dictionaries run after panting and out of breath.

I love decrufting, because it’s one of those words whose meaning is immediately obvious when you hear it in context (if you know the word “cruft”) and which lets you say in few syllables what would otherwise take many.

(Wiktionary doesn’t have an entry for decrufting, but does have a possible explanation for the origin of the word cruft.)

PS — I love you.

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

I've been hearing 'cruft' used at MIT for ages to mean 'clutter'--not just for computer equipment, but for anything that's old and crappy and taking up more space than it's worth. I hadn't heard 'decrufting', but it was only a matter of time.

[bedfull-o-books.livejournal.com]

I had never heard the word cruft until I started hanging out with MIT folks in the mid to late 80s. I wonder if that is where the word originated....

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Not to mention it's also used to describe MIT graduates who still hang around MIT. :)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

HAHA! I love that!

[bedfull-o-books.livejournal.com]

*snerk*

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

Hm. I say 'cruft' frequently, as well as using the adjectival form, 'crufty.' I tend, however, to say 'outcrufting' rather than 'decrufting.' They mean the same thing in my experience, but I've always used the former. Weird.

[dpolicar]

I went through a phase of referring to organization tasks as "defragmenting." It never caught on, though.

[infinitehotel.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing "cruft" in the Hacker Dictionary back in the mid-80's but didn't start using it in everyday conversation until I started working in tech and hanging out with MIT folk in 1992. At the time, I was told there was cruft (which was dry fodder, dust, papers, etc.) and spooge, which was wet, greasy, or grimy. I believe there was some discussion of how there could be crufty spooge, but in general, once spooge enters the equation it supersedes cruft.

I use outcrufting rather than decrufting, but I've heard both used for years.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

When I was completing my bachelor's degree around 1996-97 the two buzzwords in popular use and soon to become cliches were "paradigm" and "segue". People who used them were very affected to my way of thinking, so I avoided using them, instead using the words "model" and "follows". I am an advocate of simplicity in language, so I like your "throw shit out" or "spread the word" very much.
Interesting isnt it that we pick our on line friends on a hunch, maybe because of one thing they said as a comment on someone else's journal, and then over time find out that we have much more in common with them than that.
Although a whole generation separates us, we think very much alike.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I remember "paradigm" and "segue!" Back then I used to do dictaphone transcription for my boss, and he used "paradigm" in just about every paragraph. It was ridiculous overuse. A later boss used "value add" constantly. I used to write down a hash mark every time he said it in meetings.

"Segue" is a theatre word and I felt like corporate culture stole it from us.