May 15, 2003

glark

/glark/ vt.

To figure something out from context. The System III manuals are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the meaning from context. Interestingly, the word was originally ‘glork’; the context was This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked [sic] from context (David Moser, quoted by Douglas Hofstadter in his Metamagical Themas column in the January 1981 Scientific American). It is conjectured that hacker usage mutated the verb to ‘glark’ because glork was already an established jargon term (some hackers do report using the original term). Compare grok, zen.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:45 AM

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