September 8: Kludgy

On a conference call this afternoon, one of my business partners used the term "kludgy" in reference to an educational PowerPoint deck that the Instructional Designer for our project had developed. I'd never heard the term before, and she couldn't really define it clearly, but we all had a chuckle over her recurring use of it on the call. This evening, I decided to look the word up to see what it really means, and thereby determine whether or not I should be offended by her choice of words. Kludgy is in reference to a badly assembled collection of parts hastily assembled to serve some particular purpose. It's often used to refer to computing systems or software that has been badly put together. So, I guess I should take it as an insult, huh? Especially since the aforementioned PowerPoint deck was the proposed learning solution for about 5,200 bank associates. By the way, the first known use of the word was in 1962. If you want to learn more, I recommend this site.