A fascinating picture-blog called There, I Fixed It: Epic Kludges had a photo last week of a whiteboard competing for space with a light switch, reproduced in reduced size at right. Kludge or inspired work-around?
(A kludge, pronounced KLOOZHE, is a term for an ungainly quick-and-dirty solution to a knotty problem. It started in the tech world but is now seeing currency elsewhere.)
So the whiteboard: kludge or inspiration?
I think it depends on your goal… which is the point of this post. How can you judge something like this in a vacuum?
Let’s start with an assumption on how it got there. The whiteboard arrived after the light switch was installed, and either the employee in the office wanted the biggest whiteboard that would fit or the whiteboard was pre-ordered and the installation person took installing it as a challenge.
I suspect different people might have different takes on it:
- Buildings and Grounds manager: Ugly, inappropriate, next time get the right-sized whiteboard.
- Installer: Well, I got it up there. I hope my manager doesn’t find out.
- Employee in the office: Thank you! I now have extra whiteboard space to sketch out ideas, space I wouldn’t have had if the board had been a foot shorter (stopping to the right of the switchplate).
As in inveterate whiteboard user, I’m with the employee. I have whiteboards up all over the place. Frankly, I wish I’d thought of this in my last office at Microsoft!
(And if I were the B&G guy, I’d applaud the installer for ingenuity, unless perhaps this was in a customer-facing lobby.)
Hmmm. Have I been pronouncing kludge wrong for many years? The way I say it, it rhymes with “fudge”. My Shorter Oxford dictionary agrees with me, giving its orgins as “probably symbolic; cf. BODGE, FUDGE verb.” The American Heritage Dictionary (4th Ed.), however, gives both pronunciations as alternatives and states the origin of the word as “From ironic use of earlier kluge, smart, clever, from spelling pronunciation of German ‘kluge’.” This would make your pronunciation more true to its origin.
Further investigation indicates that you and I are spelling the word incorrectly. It should be kluge, but became confused in WWII with the kludge as used in the U.K.:
Oops…I forgot to cite the quote, Wordsmith Words, via Answers.com: http://www.answers.com/topic/kluge
The answers.com source pronounces it KLOODZHE. I’ve heard it both with and without the “D”-type sound that begins many J words, KLOOZHE (rhymes with rouge or Bruges) and KLOODZHE/KLOOJ. I’ve never heard the rhymes-with-fudge version, at least not in association with Microsoft and the customers I dealt with. That said, the rhymes-with-fudge pronunciation has an immediately dismissive feel to it that fits the way most programmers use the word.
Australian pronunciation is in the “rhymes-with-fudge” camp.
I suppose they’re Down UHN-der instead of Down OOHN-der…