Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Glitch
A glitch is a brief technical fault, such as a transient one that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, in circuit bending, as well as among players of video games, although any purposely organized structure, such as speech, may experience glitches.
A glitch, which is slight and often temporary, differs from a more serious bug, which is a genuine breakdown in function. Videogame writer Alex Pieschel says that although the two words are often used interchangeably when describing software, the more "blameworthy pejorative" of bug indicates something that can be reliably diagnosed and corrected, while glitch describes a situation "more transient, abnormal, illogical, impermanent, or unreliable", caused by unexpected inputs or something outside of the code.
Some reference books, including Random House's American Slang, state that the term comes from the German word glitschen 'to slip' as well as the Yiddish word glitshn 'to slide, to skid' and glitsh, meaning "slippery place". Glitch was used from the 1940s by radio announcers to refer to an on-air mistake. During the following decade, the term became used by television engineers to indicate technical problems.
According to a Wall Street Journal article written by Ben Zimmer, the Yale University law librarian Fred Shapiro came up with the new earliest use of the word yet found: May 19, 1940. That was when the novelist Katharine Brush wrote about glitch in her column "Out of My Mind" (syndicated in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and other papers). Brush corroborated Tony Randall's radio recollection:
When the radio talkers make a little mistake in diction they call it a "fluff," and when they make a bad one they call it a "glitch," and I love it.
Other examples from the world of radio can be found in the 1940s. The April 11, 1943, issue of The Washington Post carried a review of Helen Sioussat's book about radio broadcasting, Mikes Don't Bite. The reviewer noted an error and wrote, "In the lingo of radio, has Miss Sioussat pulled a 'muff,' 'fluff,' 'bust,' or 'glitch'?" And in a 1948 book called The Advertising and Business Side of Radio, Ned Midgley explained how a radio station's "traffic department" was responsible for properly scheduling items in a broadcast. "Usually most 'glitches,' as on-the-air mistakes are called, can be traced to a mistake on the part of the traffic department", Midgley wrote.
In the 1950s, glitch made the transition from radio to television. In a 1953 ad in Broadcasting magazine, RCA boasted that their TV camera has "no more a-c power line 'glitches' (horizontal-bar interference)". And Bell Telephone ran an ad in a 1955 issue of Billboard showing two technicians monitoring the TV signals that were broadcast on Bell System lines: "When he talks of 'glitch' with a fellow technician, he means a low frequency interference which appears as a narrow horizontal bar moving vertically through the picture".
A 1959 article in Sponsor, a trade magazine for television and radio advertisers, gave another technical usage in an article about editing TV commercials by splicing tape. "'Glitch' is slang for the 'momentary jiggle' that occurs at the editing point if the sync pulses don't match exactly in the splice". It also provided one of the earliest etymologies of the word, noting that, "'Glitch' probably comes from a German or Yiddish word meaning a slide, a glide or a slip".
Hub AI
Glitch AI simulator
(@Glitch_simulator)
Glitch
A glitch is a brief technical fault, such as a transient one that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, in circuit bending, as well as among players of video games, although any purposely organized structure, such as speech, may experience glitches.
A glitch, which is slight and often temporary, differs from a more serious bug, which is a genuine breakdown in function. Videogame writer Alex Pieschel says that although the two words are often used interchangeably when describing software, the more "blameworthy pejorative" of bug indicates something that can be reliably diagnosed and corrected, while glitch describes a situation "more transient, abnormal, illogical, impermanent, or unreliable", caused by unexpected inputs or something outside of the code.
Some reference books, including Random House's American Slang, state that the term comes from the German word glitschen 'to slip' as well as the Yiddish word glitshn 'to slide, to skid' and glitsh, meaning "slippery place". Glitch was used from the 1940s by radio announcers to refer to an on-air mistake. During the following decade, the term became used by television engineers to indicate technical problems.
According to a Wall Street Journal article written by Ben Zimmer, the Yale University law librarian Fred Shapiro came up with the new earliest use of the word yet found: May 19, 1940. That was when the novelist Katharine Brush wrote about glitch in her column "Out of My Mind" (syndicated in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and other papers). Brush corroborated Tony Randall's radio recollection:
When the radio talkers make a little mistake in diction they call it a "fluff," and when they make a bad one they call it a "glitch," and I love it.
Other examples from the world of radio can be found in the 1940s. The April 11, 1943, issue of The Washington Post carried a review of Helen Sioussat's book about radio broadcasting, Mikes Don't Bite. The reviewer noted an error and wrote, "In the lingo of radio, has Miss Sioussat pulled a 'muff,' 'fluff,' 'bust,' or 'glitch'?" And in a 1948 book called The Advertising and Business Side of Radio, Ned Midgley explained how a radio station's "traffic department" was responsible for properly scheduling items in a broadcast. "Usually most 'glitches,' as on-the-air mistakes are called, can be traced to a mistake on the part of the traffic department", Midgley wrote.
In the 1950s, glitch made the transition from radio to television. In a 1953 ad in Broadcasting magazine, RCA boasted that their TV camera has "no more a-c power line 'glitches' (horizontal-bar interference)". And Bell Telephone ran an ad in a 1955 issue of Billboard showing two technicians monitoring the TV signals that were broadcast on Bell System lines: "When he talks of 'glitch' with a fellow technician, he means a low frequency interference which appears as a narrow horizontal bar moving vertically through the picture".
A 1959 article in Sponsor, a trade magazine for television and radio advertisers, gave another technical usage in an article about editing TV commercials by splicing tape. "'Glitch' is slang for the 'momentary jiggle' that occurs at the editing point if the sync pulses don't match exactly in the splice". It also provided one of the earliest etymologies of the word, noting that, "'Glitch' probably comes from a German or Yiddish word meaning a slide, a glide or a slip".