Does anyone know how the phrase "hash it out" came about? I have found sites that have defined it, but nothing that will explain its origin.

Just a guess, but hash (the dish of chopped meat, potatoes, etc) < Fr hachier 'to chop' seems like a good explanation. Cf. ruminating 'chewing cud' and mulling (< ME mollen 'to moisten'), chewing the fat, stewing over something, etc. The idea seems to be to change ideas/concepts by some process (cogitation, deconstruction, what-have-you). Cooking and eating seem like apt metaphors for thinking. Just wild speculation ...

Well that certainly makes sense, jheem.

I haven't thought of 'chewing cud' for a long time. When I was a child living on a farm, I used to watch our cows chew the cud. Interesting to think of that being related to 'mulling' something over or 'chewing the fat.'

On a related note, does anyone know where the computer science concept of a "hashing function" comes from? Despite the numerous jokes about the origin created by 16 year olds, I don't think I've any explanation.

Seanahan, I'm not sure, but it's not a stretch from the French meaning of hash, cutting up, to the computer term. If you think about what a hashing function does, it kind of chops up the namespace you want to search into discrete pieces (i.e., hash buckets). Funny, but hack in the computer sense probably comes from a Yiddish/German verb of similar meaning.

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Funny, but hack in the computer sense probably comes from a Yiddish/German verb of similar meaning.

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What word is that?

What word is that?

The English computer term to hack from the Yiddish hakn or German hacken 'to chop (up)'. A lot of early computer jargon was influenced by Yiddish and came from the MIT AI lab.

I've heard that "giltch" was a yiddish term that became used in the NASA program.

And of course, there's the story that a "bug" in a software program comes from a moth that got into the machine, in the days when programs were hardwired.

Haven't checked out either of those stories.

I couldn't find anything on "hash out", by the way.

Admiral Grace Hopper told an anecdote about the fried moth being the first bug, but I think there are other contenders. Variations on gremlins if I remember correctly.

My personal guru, Michael Quinion, has this to say in his latest newsletter about bug in the computer sense:

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The most common version of this story is that bug results from an incident with the US Navy’s Harvard Mark II computer soon after the end of World War Two, in which a technician cured a fault by extracting a moth from between the contacts of a relay in the system. It is also said that this was the source of debug, the process of finding and removing errors from a computer program.

The incident really did happen: the log book, dated 9 September 1947, survives with the actual moth taped to it and is available online; that page says it happened in 1945 but recent research shows it actually happened two years later.

The log entry itself blows to pieces the story about this being the origin of bug by noting under the insect, “First actual case of bug being found”. This makes it clear that bug for a fault was already in use. Indeed, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (an early programmer who worked on the machine and who invented the computer language COBOL) used to tell this story in lectures and would remark that the word was applied to problems in radar electronics in World War II.

It’s actually older still. An early recorded use is in reference to the inventor Thomas Alvar Edison and appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1889: “Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his phonograph—an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble”. Edison is also known to have used the term in private correspondence. It seems it wasn’t new even with him: an electrical handbook of 1896 suggests it had long been used by telegraphers as a joke term to suggest noisy lines were caused by bugs getting into the cables.

Debug is also recorded before the moth incident: a writer in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1945 wrote “It ranged from the pre-design development of essential components, through the stage of type test and flight test and ‘debugging’ right through to later development of the engine.”

The story about the moth actually obscures an intriguing item of old American slang.

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World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2004. All rights reserved.

A lot of early computer jargon was influenced by Yiddish and came from the MIT AI lab.

That is really interesting. I hadn't known that before. Is it because of a Jewish influence in that particular lab?

Is it because of a Jewish influence in that particular lab?

Not sure. Some of the students in the lab were of Ashkenazic origin. The Jargon File has this to say in Appendix B (scroll down to Ethnicity):

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In the U.S., hackerdom is predominantly Caucasian with strong minorities of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals (West Coast). The Jewish contingent has exerted a particularly pervasive cultural influence (see Food, above, and note that several common jargon terms are obviously mutated Yiddish).

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