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

[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?