{"id":10,"date":"2007-04-07T11:20:27","date_gmt":"2007-04-07T10:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=10"},"modified":"2009-03-23T08:28:55","modified_gmt":"2009-03-23T08:28:55","slug":"cut-the-cruft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=10","title":{"rendered":"Cut the cruft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Crud, yes, but &#8216;cruft&#8217;? Another word that was new to me this week, found in <a href=\"http:\/\/technology.guardian.co.uk\/weekly\/story\/0,,2049781,00.html\">The Guardian<\/a>: &#8216;Fill databases of valuable customer information with rubbish, to let the valuable names hide among the cruft.&#8217; My big Collins dictionary (old-tech, paper and a weight), the <a href=\"http:\/\/view.byu.edu\/\">British National Corpus<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.collins.co.uk\/Corpus\/CorpusSearch.aspx\">Cobuild<\/a> all drew a blank (apart from the inevitable dog show), but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.webcorp.org.uk\/\">Webcorp<\/a> led first to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slaw.ca\/2007\/02\/27\/purple-numbers-plinks-cruft-and-the-scc\/\">site<\/a> which, in February 2007, still felt it needed to use quotation marks and explain the word in brackets as &#8216;unnecessary code&#8217;. Then the links led to the ever-useful <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cruft\">Wikipedia<\/a>, where we learn: &#8216;In hacker jargon, cruft describes areas of something which are badly designed, poorly implemented or redundant&#8217;. There&#8217;s an interesting suggested etymology from Harvard University&#8217;s Cruft Laboratory: &#8216;if the place filled with useless machinery is called Cruft Hall, the machinery itself must be cruft&#8217;. The links goes on, as the page reminds me of the term <a ?href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Backronym\">backronym<\/a> &#8211; something for another time?<\/p>\n<p><em>Comments are now closed on this item<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Crud, yes, but &#8216;cruft&#8217;? Another word that was new to me this week<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}