Dr. Metablog

Words of my Life: Hack

I cannot think of a word that has undergone greater change during the course of my lifetime than the plain monosyllable "hack."

"Hack" entered my language, like much of my early vocabulary, through the medium of baseball. "He took a good hack at that fastball;" "he's up there hacking away." A hack was a hard swing, not necessarily a successful one. [There was also Stan Hack, the great Chicago Cub third baseman whose career was just coming to an end as I was becoming conscious.]  In the days of my youth, "hack" was also slang for taxicab and a cab driver was a "hackie." I don't believe I've heard that particular use of the word in decades (except in 1940s movies). In seventh-grade "shop" class at PS 217, Mr. Kaminsky introduced me to the "hacksaw." The hack in hacksaw derives from a medieval word meaning "cut into pieces," but the taxi hack has an entirely dissimilar origin. It comes from hackney, a breed of horse and later the carriage itself that the horse drew -- the name of which then migrated to our big yellow taxi.

When did I first hear the expression, a "hacking cough"?  And why hacking? Perhaps because the noise of a cough is similar to the sound of the short sharp blows when one hacks through a forest or the jungle with a machete. Maybe that's how it originated-- but I'm not entirely convinced.

Hack has another older meaning -- mediocre or failing, or not good at one's trade, as in a "hack writer," or a "political hack." This usage is probably a shortened version of "hackneyed," meaning trite or overused. When you waste time, you're just "hacking around." In such cases,"hack" denoted incompetence.

Nowadays "hack" has come up in the world. To hack into a computer implies not laziness but skill. In this usage, "hack" is also malicious. Hackers may be smart but they're also dangerous; they can cause crashes when they illegally intrude to alter a program. 

The most common contemporary use of "hack," if I'm reading the data correctly, occurs in the recent coinage "lifehack," which is defined as "a strategy or technique adopted in order to manage one's time and daily activities in a more efficient way." I can't be the only person whose junk mail folder is regularly inundated with recommended lifehacks, most of which seem mighty silly or simplistic. 

And then there's an even more specialized use. Here's one that's new to me: "scientists announced that they had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently." This usage seems to retain something of the older meaning of cut or slash although it is a stretch to envision a genome being attacked by a sword or a snickersnee. 

Goodness gracious, it's a long road from waving at an inshoot with the old hickory to inserting bits of DNA in the tobacco genome. But here we are.

Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

Strangest Dream Yet

In this one, I was lying in restless sleep in my own bed, when a figure, a man, came at me. He tried to get under my covers, and I cried out, "You can't get into bed with me. I'm a married woman!"  Very theatrical -- and strange enough, but the details are even more peculiar.  Of course I'm not a woman -- I'm an octogenarian man -- but not in the dream. Secondly the man who was trying to attack me, though identifiably male, had the face of a stereotypical witch -- long crooked nose, verrucose almost echinulate skin, etc.  In addition, my bedmate, who in real life is a woman, was, in the dream, male. That's a heck of a lot of gender confusion for one dream fragment.

What is most memorable, however, is my plaintive cry -- "you can't get into my bed.  I'm a married woman."  How to interpret this sentence?  I can invent any number of bizarre "'Freudian" theories, but in fact I have no idea, except for the opinion that I've expressed before on this blog, that I'm a mighty dull, conventional fellow from 7am to 11pm, but from 11pm until morning, I'm crazy imaginative, unconventional, and possibly even interesting.

My Life with Telephones

In the course of my lifetime, the telephone has gone from relatively rare to ubiquitous, from wall to pocket, and from rotary dial to cell. From no intelligence whatsoever to smart and then to very smart. Revolutionary changes.

When I was growing up in Flatbush, our family was prosperous enough to have a telephone (not everyone did), but the device was only employed for local calls, never for "long distance." Non-local calls were prohibitively expensive and were only for deaths. To be called to the phone by long-distance was ominous.

Before the innovation of seven-digit dialing, we were Windsor 6-2077. Sometime after WWII, our exchange was altered from WI 6 to GEdney 6. To me, this was an early indication that the world was unstable and would be filled with ups and downs. One day we were a Windsor, a royal house, and the next day we were a Gedney, a brand of dill pickle. 

Every telephone in existence looked exactly like this one.  The idea that they would ever look otherwise was inconceivable.  

For a month of so in the late 1950s, I had a job operating an old-fashioned switchboard at the Sears warehouse on Utica Avenue -- definitely my most satisfying telephone-related experience, lifetime. Ah that lovely click when the plug fully entered its receptacle! A delight!  The one I sat at looked almost exactly like this:

In my short time at the console, I became quite a proficient operator, only cutting off important calls a handful of times. It's hard to believe that such an antiquated-looking machine was still in use when I was a lad.

We must also recall the almost extinct telephone booth -- often out of order, because someone wielded a crowbar to make off with nickels and dimes. And smelly. Plus, one never had the right change when needing it most.  I do not mourn the passing of the phone booth.

When we moved to Vermont in 1968, the Topsham Telephone Company had not yet switched to seven digit dialing. Our home number was high-prestige 21, but we were jealous of the family whose number was 9. Ours was a four-party line -- also a thing of the past. I wonder whether my grandchildren have ever heard the phrase "party-line."  Or "rotary dial," for that matter.

When AT&T was deregulated and the market was thrown open to innovation, there came a great explosion of telephone styles. Phones blossomed into many odd colors and configurations. For a while, we owned one of these:

The Simpson phone was not my initiative but that of one of the younger members of the family.

But more change was in the works. The prediction that there would be pocket phones in the future seemed fantastical science fiction-y.  All phones had to be connected with wires -- otherwise how could the sound get out of the wall and into the handset. I scoffed.

Nowadays, everyone carries a cell phone. But it's not just a phone -- it's a computer. It does everything -- perhaps too much. There is substance to the frequently heard complaint that some individuals, especially young 'uns, relate more readily to their cell than to the person sitting next to them. It's a paradox: with more potential communication comes more loneliness. I myself must admit that there's a fascination to the cell phone that is disarming.  I'm trying not be allow myself to be addicted. But there is something wonderful about a machine that lets you not only speak with but to actually see your daughter, who is a thousand miles away. Not a trick that a rotary phone could perform.

Not to be an alarmist or a Luddite, there's a serious downside to the cell. It seems as though the machine  might be reorganizing youthful brains-- with unknown consequences,

Scenes like this one have become scarily familiar:

Look up, children, look up! Please look up!