computer

23 August 2019

Computer has a rather straightforward etymology, although its usage may be a bit surprising. The word was originally applied to people, not machines.

Computer is derived from the verb to compute + -er, a standard suffix that denotes a person that does the task of the attached verb. The verb to compute comes to us from Norman French and in turn from the Latin computare, meaning to calculate. The verb appears in English by the late sixteenth century. So, a computer is one who calculates, and the noun appears in English by the early seventeenth century. From Richard Braithwaite’s 1613 Yong Mans Gleanings:

I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.

And many of these human computers were women, as calculation was considered mundane and repetitive work, beneath the dignity of men to perform, despite the fact that such calculations were often highly complex, requiring a high degree of mathematical skill.

Computer was being applied to machines by the mid nineteenth century. From Phemie’s Temptation, an 1869 novel by Marian Harland (the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune):

[Phemie] plunged anew into the column of figures. [...] Her pen was slowly traversing the length of the page, at an elevation of a quarter of an inch above the paper, her eyes following the course of the nib, as if it were the index of a patent computer.

The use of the modifier patent indicates that this mechanical sense is relatively new, and that readers would be accustomed to thinking of computers as people, not machines.

The use of computer to refer to a programmable, electronic, calculating machine appears shortly after World War II. The exact date is uncertain. During the war, the US and Britain made use of calculating machines to crack Axis codes, and the word computer was used to denote these machines. Most were mechanical apparatuses, but a few were electronic, although not yet fully programmable like a present-day electronic computer. In the early citations of the word’s use to denote an electronic machine, it’s often difficult to determine if the word is used for a mechanical or an electronic device.

For example, in 1945 mathematician John von Neumann wrote:

Since the device is primarily a computer, it will have to perform the elementary operations of arithmetic most frequently.

Here he seems to be referring to a mechanical computer, saying the electronic device will primarily serve the function of a mechanical device. But in 1946, Bell Labs researcher George Stiblitz wrote:

If the computer is such that new formulas are easily set up in it, it may be economical to use it in the solution of 5 or 10 problems.

Here Stiblitz is referring to a programmable, electronic device. And by 1947 the term digital computer appeared in the journal Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation. But by 1950, the term was, without modification, widely understood to refer to the programmable electronic devices we’re familiar with today. From Philosophical Magazine of that year:

The problem of constructing a computing routine or “program” for a modern general purpose computer which will enable it to play chess.

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Source:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s. v. computer, n., compute, v.

club sandwich

3 August 2019

The club sandwich, or club house sandwich, as it is usually prepared today, consists of three slices of bread, between which is layered turkey or chicken, ham or bacon, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. It is typically served quartered and held together by cocktail sticks.

But why club? How did it get its name? The answer is an unsatisfactory “we don’t know.” The sandwich originated in one or another social club or perhaps on the club cars of trains. The exact origin has been lost in the mists of time, but we do know that it originated in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.

The earliest use of club sandwich that can be precisely dated comes from the New York Evening World of November 18, 1889:

Have you tried the Union Club sandwich yet? Two toasted slices of Graham bread, with a layer of turkey or chicken and ham between them, served warm.

But before we declare the Union Club of New York as the originator of the sandwich, there is this from the menu of Kinsley’s Restaurant in Chicago, also probably from 1889 (the date is somewhat uncertain):

Sandwiches—Club

Club sandwiches start popping up on a lot of restaurant menus from about this date. (Menus often aren’t dated, so this makes a precise chronology difficult.) There is also this one from the Lehigh Valley Railroad from about 1890:

Club Sandwich, Double 50 cents, single 30 cents

If the sandwich arose on the railroad, as opposed to in a social club, then then the club in the name would probably refer to the club car of a train.

And by 1893 the sandwich had reached the Pacific Coast, as the Woodland Daily Democrat of 18 May of that year makes reference to a “Bohemian Club sandwich,” a reference to the Bohemian Club of San Francisco.

These early versions were not as complex as the sandwich we know today. Here is a description of one from the Bucks County Gazette of Pennsylvania from 27 December 1894:

Club Sandwiches.—These are very tasty for after-theatre suppers, and are made of very thin white bread and butter, with the cold white meat of chicken, salted and peppered and laid on a leaf of lettuce, between the bread. Again, chopped green peppers or capers may be sprinkled over the chicken when the lettuce is omitted.

The triple-decker club sandwich that we know today was in place by the 1940s. Here’s a recipe from the US Department of Agriculture from 1942:

Club Sandwich
Toast
Lettuce
Cooked bacon or ham
Cold sliced chicken
Large, ripe, skinned tomatoes, sliced thin
Thick salad dressing
Radishes, olives, or pickles
Make double-decker sandwiches with slices of toasted bread from which the crust has been removed and the other ingredients arranged in layers of lettuce, bacon or ham, chicken, and tomato, with enough salad dressing to moisten. Insert toothpicks to hold the sandwiches together and garnish with crisp lettuce and radishes, olives, or pickles.

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Source:

Barrypopik.com, retrieved 3 August 2019.

Meat…for Thrifty Meals, Farmers’ Bulletin no. 1908, US Department of Agriculture, 1942, 36.

Calvinball

2 May 2019

Calvinball is the name of a fictional sport coined by cartoonist Bill Watterston in his syndicated comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. In the strip, Calvinball is a sport where the participants make up the rules as they go along. But the word has not remained within the confines of the comic and is now being used in other contexts where the “rules” are constantly changing.

Panel from 5 May 1990 Calvin and Hobbes comic strip featuring the word calvinball, with a small boy, wearing a mask and holding a soccer ball, chasing a masked tiger holding a flag around a number of croquet wickets and posts with numbers on them

Calvin and Hobbes ran from 1985–95. The strip centers around the imagination of a small boy, Calvin, and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, who came to life in Calvin’s imagination. Enormously popular and critically acclaimed, the comic strip is recognized as one of the greatest of the genre. Calvinball first appeared in the 5 May 1990 strip.

True to its nature, Calvinball could not be restricted by the rule of remaining within the context of the comic and has broken free. For instance, this appeared on Public Radio International on 12 May 2011 discussing the problem of piracy in the Indian Ocean:

Over the past few years, Somali pirates have posed a bigger and bigger challenge to India, disrupting its trade, capturing its merchants, attacking closer to its shores and—like a game of Calvinball—changing the unwritten rules as they go.

Financial blogger Mike Konczal used the word on 10 June 2011 in reference to monetary policy, a use that was picked up and repeated by Paul Krugman in the New York Times. Konczal wrote:

A friend pointed out that post-crisis conservative economists talking about monetary policy in general, and QE2 specifically, is like watching a game of Calvinball—they appear to be making up the rules and the specifics of how to score points in the debate on the fly.

Or there is this from an Australian gaming blog from 20 December 2017, discussing how patches (updates) to video games alter the play:

Patches are one of the best parts of gaming; you get to play Calvinball in real time, over the span of years.

Use of Calvinball outside the context of the comic strip seems to have gained currency around 2010, some fifteen years after the strip had ended. The earliest I’ve been able to find is a discussion of socialism and the Democratic Party from 2010. It was made as a comment to a blog post by conservative commentator Ed Morrissey. It was captured by Brigham Young University’s News On the Web (NOW) corpus. The original blog post is archived and still available, but the comments seem to have been deleted:

Also, I can not and will not recommend the original form of socialism because it is unwise in the extreme. To put the whole matter very simply, it would be like going to a highly-charged political protest and trying to organize a baseball game out of participants chosen from the two sides. One would be lucky to have a civil game of Calvinball, let alone anything resembling official baseball.

Earlier uses almost certainly exist. I have found many, but these are references to the comic strip and don’t use the term in other contexts, such as this from a mediation on the hula hoop and the death of its creator, Richard Knerr, in the New York Times from 20 January 2008:

What gets lost, perhaps, is childhood. Dr. Hall expressed a preference for the anarchic sense of play that the cartoonist Bill Watterson depicted in “Calvin and Hobbes” and the crazed game of Calvinball: primitive, wild and playful.

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Sources:

Ingber, Hanna. “India steps up the fight against piracy.” PRI.com. 12 May 2011.

Konczal, Mike. “Rajan Plays Calvinball on Monetary Policy.” Rortybomb. 10 June 2011.

Krugman, Paul. “Monetary Calvinball.” New York Times. 10 June 2011.

Morrissey, Ed. “Gallup: Majority Of Democrats Have Positive Image Of Socialism.” Hot Air. 5 February 2010.

Schwartz, John. “The Joy of Silly.” New York Times. 20 January 2008.

Van Allen, Eric. “The Weirdest Patch Notes Of 2017.” Kotaku.com.au. 20 December 2017.

Watterston, Bill. Calvin and Hobbes. Andrews McMeel Publishing. 5 May 1990.

butler

8 August 2019

A butler is the chief servant in a household. The word comes to us from Anglo-Norman, the variety of French spoken in England following the Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman word was buteiller, a cup-bearer or servant who served wine. The word ultimately comes from the medieval Latin buticularius. It is cognate with the word bottle, which is from the Anglo-Norman botel and the medieval Latin buticula. 

The role of a butler has shifted over the centuries. Once simply a cupbearer, the butler would go on to acquire responsibility a household’s wine cellar, and eventually to become the chief servant.

Butler is recorded as early as c. 1300, when the poem Kyng Alisaunder in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 622 has:

Alisaundre [...] afenge faire þat present, And departed [...] Sum to kniȝttes [...] Sum mareschales and botlers, To ȝoman, page, and joglers.

(Alexander [...] received those present according to degree, and [they] departed [...] some to knights [...] some stewards and butlers, to yeoman, pages, and jugglers.)

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Sources:

Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2014, s. v. boteler.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. butler, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2016, s. v. bottle, n.3

bug (computer)

16 June 2020

Errors in computer code are known as bugs, but why? We can’t know for sure, but it is likely that the metaphor of an insect contaminating and gumming up the works of a mechanical or electric device is at its core. This particular use of the term arose in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The ordinary sense of bug is of an insect, or to entomologists an insect of the order Hemiptera. This sense appears in the closing years of the sixteenth century. From John Hester’s 1594 medical text, The Pearle of Practise:

This medecine caused many times, a certain blacke bugge, or worme to come forth which had many legs, & was quicke: & after that the cancker would heale quicklie, with any conuenient medecine.

The origin of the standard sense of bug is unknown, but it may be from the sense of bug meaning a monster or evil spirit. (See bogey.)

The word moved into the world of invention by 1875, when it appears in the pages of the 15 August issue of The Operator, The Journal of Scientific Telegraphy:

The biggest “bug” yet has been discovered in the U.S. Hotel Electric Annunciator.

Some sources ascribe this sense to Thomas Edison. He did use the term, as evidenced by this 18 November 1878 letter to Theodore Puskas:

It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition—and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing gives out and then that —“Bugs”—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success—or failure—is certainly reached.

But as the earlier citation shows, Edison did not coin the term. He was just using a term that was current in the technological slang of the day. And while I do not know if Edison read The Operator, it’s just the sort of thing he would read.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the sense moved out of technical circles and into more widespread use, as witnessed by this statement by New York City Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia in the 22 July 1937 New York Times:

“No building code or any code of that kind can be drawn up without bugs, defects or jokers,” [La Guardia] commented. “The only thing to do with this code is to try it and be ready to amend it as soon as the bugs, defects and jokers appear. It is exactly like the airplane motor which looked perfect on the drafting board and which will not fly.”

9 September 1945 page from the logbook of the Harvard Mark II computer with a moth taped to it

And of course, it moved into the world of computing as soon as that world was created. The earliest reference to bugs in computers that I’m aware of dates to 9 September 1945. At 3:45 pm on that date computer workers on the Harvard Mark II machine at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia found a moth in a relay of the machine. They taped the insect into their logbook and recorded it as:

1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found.

Computer pioneer Grace Hopper, who worked on the Harvard Mark II, was fond of telling this story, and many have understood that fact to mean that she coined the term. But as with the case of Edison, the Mark II workers were just using a term they already knew, and the first actual case is a joke. It’s the first actual bug (i.e., insect), not the first defect in the machine or its code.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bug n.4.

Hester, John. The Pearle of Practise, or Practisers Pearle, for Phisicke and Chirugerie. London: Richard Field, 1594, 14.

Hopper, Grace Murray. “Anecdotes: The First Bug.” Annals of the History of Computing, 3.3, July–September 1981: 285-86

“La Guardia to Sign New Building Code.” New York Times, 22 July 1937, 27.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2017, s.v. bug, n.2.

Shapiro, Fred R. The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale University Press, 2006, 226.

Photo credit: 9 September 1945, U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command photograph.