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

[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.