At 10:10 AM +0100 2/19/10, Dave Long wrote: >>Hacks are not a way to get more free time, they're a way to get more >>time to hack! > >Unfortunately google isn't helping me find an old FoRK post that goes into >greater detail and gives references. > >I believe 'hack' originated from the hack-box used for young hawks (here hack >refers to the hacked meat that keeps them coming back to the box); while 'at >hack' young hawks would get useful hunting experience in a relatively >unstructured environment. > >Later hacking became used for both hounds and horses, again with the sense >that going out on a hack is enjoyable and can certainly be useful but is >contrasted with directed work. > >How it might have made the leap from hawks, hounds, and horses to humans (of a >demographic largely distinct from hunters) is still a mystery to me.
At first, I thought "hackney." http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hack <<c.1700, originally, "person hired to do routine work," short for hackney "an ordinary horse" (c.1300), probably from place name Hackney (Middlesex), from O.E. Hacan ieg "Haca's Isle" (or possibly "Hook Island"). Now well within London, it was once pastoral. Apparently nags were raised on the pastureland there in early medieval times and taken to Smithfield horse market (cf. Fr. haquenée "ambling nag," an Eng. loan-word). Extended sense of "horse for hire" (late 14c.) led naturally to "broken-down nag," and also "prostitute" (1570s) and "drudge" (1540s). Special sense of "one who writes anything for hire" led to hackneyed "trite" (1749); hack writer is first recorded 1826, though hackney writer is at least 50 years earlier. Sense of "carriage for hire" (1704) led to modern slang for "taxicab.">> Then I came across this, which seems on more solid ground: http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/appb.html >>Regardless of the width or narrowness of the definition, most modern hackers trace the word back to MIT, where the term bubbled up as popular item of student jargon in the early 1950s. In 1990 the MIT Museum put together a journal documenting the hacking phenomenon. According to the journal, students who attended the institute during the fifties used the word "hack" the way a modern student might use the word "goof." Hanging a jalopy out a dormitory window was a "hack," but anything harsh or malicious-e.g., egging a rival dorm's windows or defacing a campus statue-fell outside the bounds. Implicit within the definition of "hack" was a spirit of harmless, creative fun.>> etc. -- Heather Madrone ([email protected]) http://www.madrone.com http://www.sunsplinter.blogspot.com I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me access to the source code.
