Mind your language | 16 July 2011

Hacking

One useful quality of the term phone hacking is its imprecision. Generally it refers to gaining access to voicemail messages, often by guessing the default personal identification. This differs from tapping a telephone conversation. Tapping (a metaphor from tapping drink from a barrel) was already in use in 1869, with reference to electric telegraph wires.

Hacking, we think of as breaking into a computer system. But the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that hacker first meant ‘a person with an enthusiasm for programming or using computers as an end in itself’. The earliest example in print is from 1976. Seven years later, Byte magazine gave this account: ‘Hacker seems to have originated at MIT. The original German/Yiddish expression referred to someone so inept as to make furniture with an axe, but somehow the meaning has been twisted so that it now generally connotes someone obsessed with programming and computers but possessing a fair degree of skill and competence.’ Uriel Weinreich’s Yiddish-English dictionary gives for hakn ‘to chop, hew, mince, slash’, but since that is the meaning of the English hack, the Yiddish origin seems unlikely. I suppose the metaphor was of a user hacking at the computer as if using a pick on a rock-face.

There is an association of ideas too between a hacker keen on computers and a hack keen on politics. The latter, though, is a development of the literary hack, a drudge whose services may be hired for any kind of work. I remember that in Oxford in the 1970s, there were Union hacks and there were Ouca hacks, who proved budding Conservative placemen. This is nothing new. There was a reference in the Times in 1895 to ‘the hacks and wire-pullers on his own side in politics’.