Sometimes the language we use bugs people, including technical terms such as virus, bug, and worm. Consider this e-mail about a story we posted in December, 1999 under the headline "Canada's computers ready for Y2K, officials say":

You correctly indicate that the Y2K problem is not, technically a 'bug'. However, in the next paragraph you go on to say that it is not a bug because it is not a computer virus. We're talking about three different things here . . . .

The Y2K problem is neither a bug nor a virus, although it is closer to a bug than a virus in its nature. The Y2K problem was created by a lack of foresight on the part of the program designers. In that it was a conscious decision to represent the year with two digits, it is not a 'bug' in the strict sense.

Humans may refer to the flu or cold virus as a 'bug', but this is not appropriate in the computer industry.

Just being picky.
Richard Homme

The criticism is valid. In fact you might say the CBC got stung by a bug in one of its stories, unless of course you're opposed to pesty puns. Here's a closer look at some words that have caused a few headaches in and out of flu season:

VIRUS

A computer virus is a hidden code intentionally designed to ambush people. Some are fairly benign (displaying silly messages on screens, for example), while others destroy files on hard drives.

Virus comes from a Latin word for "slimy, poisonous liquid." By the 1500s it referred to the venom of snakes, and was eventually adopted by the medical community to describe the spread of some diseases.

According to several dictionaries of computer terms, viruses cannot infect other people's files without help (usually when copies of programs are passed on to unwitting recipients.) This distinguishes them from worms, which are described in the next section.

Not all authorities insist on this last condition, even though it appears linked to the word's scientific meaning. Physicians, biologists, and others use virus to describe specific types of submicroscopic organisms that can multiply only inside living cells. Put another way, the viruses humans contract cannot go roaming around on their own.

WORM

A computer worm is an intentionally written program that reproduces itself as it spreads through a network. Unlike a virus, no one actually has to duplicate or transfer the file.

Although major dictionaries such as Oxford and Webster's now list this meaning, outside the computer industry the term remains less common than virus. The verb worm, however, is sometimes used to describe a destructive computer file snaking or worming its way through large networks.

To complicate matters, the acronym WORM stands for Write Once Read Many times — a special optical computer disk used to archive large amounts of information. (The record can't be updated without destroying the data already on it.) Some reference books, such as Barron's 1998 Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms, offer this as the only definition of worm.

The word worm is grounded in Greek and Latin. In Old English, it became wyrm, which meant "serpent" — describing a slithering creature that tormented or devoured. As already mentioned, virus once referred to the venom of a snake. So there's more of a connection between viruses and worms than some of us might think.

BUG

A computer bug is an unintentional flaw in a program. The most common errors include "syntax" (the rules of programming language are not followed), "semantics" (the meaning of the programming language is misunderstood), and "logic" (some detail of an equation or computation is not entered correctly.) The common thread is that someone made a mistake, it wasn't on purpose, and it's now causing problems.

BUG'S BEGINNING

The origin of computer bug is not known, although there are a few theories and at least one myth. First, the myth. Some people believe it comes from the U.S. military's documented account of a moth found squished between the points of an electromechanic relay of a computer in the 1940s. But virtually all dictionaries point out that bug was used to describe problems and defects years before computers were even invented.

In Thomas Edison's day, for instance, bugs were "little faults and difficulties" in new devices, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. In 1889, Edison described staying up two nights in a row trying to fix a bug in his phonograph.

Not long after telegraph wires were strung up, many operators blamed bugs for garbled noise. Some people thought they meant the sound of insects inside the lines, but the telegraphers were probably referring to the picture of a beetle that was on the trademark plate of a popular transmitting key — one that was especially fast but required extra finesse to use or the Morse code became impossible to understand.

ETYMOLOGY MEETS ENTOMOLOGY

It may be hard to believe, but scholars are not sure why we first started calling insects bugs. It appears to have happened in the 17th century. Some authorities think it's an altered version of the Old English word scearn-budda, which meant dung-beetle. But in 1966, Oxford's senior lexicographer C.T. Onions suggested bug might be tied to "fly in the sense of 'familiar demon' Baalzebub/Beelzebub, 'the prince of devils' being interpreted by some as 'lord of the flies'."

Bug has long been associated with "objects of dread" — a meaning that lives on in words such as bugbear and bugaboo, which are believed to come from the Welsh terms bwcibo ("devil") and bwci ("hobgoblin").

TROJAN HORSE

An ancient tale might help you tell if your dictionary is out of date. Check under "T" to see if the definition of Trojan Horse has been expanded beyond the fall of Troy, and the well known story of Greeks hiding in a hollow wooden horse. The Canadian Oxford English Dictionary (1998) lists a computer Trojan Horse as "a program that breaches the security of a computer system, especially by ostensibly functioning as part of a legitimate program, in order to erase, corrupt, or remove data." This, of course, is another term for virus.

The Computer Glossary, 8th Edition (1998) by Alan Freedman underlines the point, defining a virus as merely "a Trojan Horse that continues to infect programs over and over." Hollow horses aren't all people with computers have to worry about. Especially tricky viruses (referred to as "polymorphic") can change their binary patterns every time they infect a new file, making it very difficult to find and eliminate them.

GLITCH

A glitch is a "sudden irregularity or malfunction," according to the Canadian Oxford, which lists it as a 20th century word of unknown origin. Glitch was first used to describe unexpected surges of electrical currents.

Some reference books, including Random House's American Slang, say it comes from the German word glitschen ("to slip") and the Yiddish word gletshn ("to slide or skid"). Either way it's fairly new. So new, in fact, that on July 23, 1965, Time magazine felt it necessary to define it in an article: "Glitches — a spaceman's word for irritating disturbances."

In electronics and computers, glitch appears to have a narrower meaning. Freedman's 1998 Computer Glossary defines it as a "temporary or random hardware malfunction," adding that it's sometimes "hard to tell if the problem is with the hardware (glitch) or software (a bug or virus.)"

Barron's Dictionary is even more specific, limiting the word to electronic "signals that are supposed to be simultaneous" but which "arrive at slightly different times." To some people, however, this is a bit like taking a vague word such as "slip" and insisting that it can mean to fall only on ice.

KLUDGE

Not all computer terms roll off the tongue. Interface, for example, which has been around as a noun since the 1880s, became common as a verb in the 1960s. But not many poets picked it up. "Let's interface tomorrow" just doesn't have much appeal to lovers of language. As the editors at Oxford note: "Traditionalists object to it on the grounds that there are plenty of other words that could be used instead." Snobbish? Maybe. But let's face it, interface gets under some people's skin, and removing it from our vocabulary would be like clearing up some grotesque acne.

Kludge, on the other hand, has charm. It means a temporary, make-shift solution, a crude improvisation that works — a very useful word in an industry full of bugs, viruses, glitches, and other assorted problems.

Some lexicographers think it comes from the German term klug, which means "clever." Others believe its roots are in bodge and fudge. When Shakespeare was writing plays, bodge meant to repair something poorly, or to botch something up. In the late 17th century, fudge meant "to fit" in a quick or clumsy way. This might also explain why kludge rhymes with fudge in Britain. (In many parts of North America, it's pronounced "klooj".)

Gritch is another monosyllabic word that's fun to use in a sentence. As a verb it means to grumble about certain computer problems, especially glitches. As a noun it refers to such a complaint. Gritch appears to be a portmanteau coined on U.S. university campuses at least half a century ago. It is probably a combination of gripe and bitch, according to The New Hacker's Dictionary (Third Edition, published by MIT Press in 1996). Although kludge is listed in many mainstream dictionaries, gritch is still waiting for entry, without complaint.

CONCLUSION

In one of the more zany contortions of computer language, bigwigs from the Pentagon to Britain's Parliament issued news releases on May 4, 2000 about a love bug virus that had infected more than a million computers around the world. Perhaps the phrase "love bug" was just too irresistible. Or maybe some people wanted to cover all their bases, not sure if the insidious and destructive "I love you" e-mail was a bug or a virus.

It turns out, however, that it was a worm — at least according to the narrow, and useful, definition that applies only to hidden codes that can replicate on their own. But people aren't bitten by "love worms," and even some picky bookworms let "bug virus" pass by — a bizarre term that could wind up spreading even further.

Some maintain that this is what happened to millennium bug in the 1990s, which as mentioned at the outset was not technically a bug at all. Or was it? Thomas Edison, who lost sleep trying to fix bugs in his phonograph, might have used the same expression had he been asked to remove some potentially crippling limitations from one of his inventions by New Year's Eve. And given all the fear over possible Y2K problems, you could argue that bug's longtime association with "objects of dread" (such as goblins) made it a good choice. For whatever reason, millennium bug caught on, and by 1997 the American Dialect Society had chosen it as the organization's Word or Expression of the Year. (It beat out terms such as "duh" and "road rage".)

In the world of computers viruses aren't bugs, and the Y2K problem was neither, according to many authorities. But while acknowledging the value of being able to distinguish between various terms it's also worth remembering that English is not limited to small worlds. In fact the sky is the limit. As novelist Margaret Atwood once pointed out: "There are little constellations of language here and there, and the meaning of a word changes according to its context in the constellation."