Why is a glitch in a computer program called a bug?
(I suppose this belongs under "questions about words". But I put it here in case folks want to digress into other uses of "bug" like "to bug a room" and "this really bugs me." Curious how these uses might have grown out of "bug" as an insect.)
The Dictionary.com Web site at http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=bug has a long discussion of the use of "bug" in programming, and earlier. You need to scroll halfway down the page first...
I'd asked, "Why is a glitch in a computer program called a bug?"
The word glitch ties into my interest in astronomy, for it has an astronomical meaning with an nice bit of etymology.
When a pulating star suddenly changes the regular period of its pulse, the scientific term for such a change is a glitch. The word arose when a jewish astronomical observer noticed such a change, as though there had been a sudden slip. In referring to theis colloquilally he used the Yiddish word for "slip," which is glitch, and the designation stuck.
The dictionaries are not good on the above point. Current astromomical theory that the pulse-change is due a change in the star's period of rotation, and the word is used to refer both to the visible (pulse change) and to the cause (rotation change). But Amer. Her. Dic. gives only the former meaning.
The same dictionary notes that "glitch" came into the langauge only recently, in 1962, and gives its etymology as being speculative. It does not note the above story, which I found in a book (by Asimov) but cannot find on-line.
Dictionary.com has three meanings, including the astronomical one. It quotes the American Heritage Dictionary:
quote:Although glitch seems a word that people would always have found useful, it is first recorded in English in 1962 in the writing of John Glenn: "Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was 'glitch'." Glenn then gives the technical sense of the word the astronauts had adopted: "Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current." It is easy to see why the astronauts, who were engaged in a highly technical endeavor, might have generalized a term from electronics to cover other technical problems. Since then glitch has passed beyond technical use and now covers a wide variety of malfunctions and mishaps.
