An e-mail in my inbox had all the superficial characteristics associated with one of the banking institutions with which I do business, including an official-looking logo at the top of the message and copyright insignia at the bottom. The subject matter of the e-mail was “account verification.” I opened the e-mail and read that the sender wanted to verify an activity on my account, and gave me two “secure” links by which I could do that. The activity to be verified was something about “a second account.” When I finished reading the e-mail, I wanted to go back in time and punch a young man in the mouth. Well, not really punch him. In the mid-1990s, I was long out of the mouth-punching business, but I remember talking to the young man about this new(ish) computing phenomenon that was getting noticed: hacking.
My Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (6th edition), defines “hack” as to “gain unauthorized access to (a computer or system or the data held in one).” This definition dates from the period 1970 to 1999, and was the operative definition governing the conversation I was having with the young man while we drank beer. He was “into computers” (as his interest used to be termed) and I was being introduced to them through my position as designer and art director in the advertising department of a St. Louis, Missouri, department store. When the subject of unauthorized access came up, he earnestly contended that people who “hacked” other people’s computer data were providing a service. “It shows the weaknesses in their systems, and then they can get someone to fix them.” I had recently seen the movie, Pulp Fiction, and in my best Samuel L. Jackson voice, I barked, “Allow me to retort!” I asked him if, using his reasoning, “The best way to teach someone to lock his door is to STEAL HIS (STUFF?)” My example backfired: He liked it. “Yeah!” I’d like to believe that the young man went on to a Steve Jobs-like career, but when I recently read about a 17-year-old hacking the Twitter accounts of celebrities, I was not reassured.
Equifax’s lapse of security allowed my accounts to be accessed by cyberbandits, who daily try to trick me into clicking their dirty links. Long ago, when informed of the incursion into my privacy, I changed all applicable passcodes, so I am reasonably sure that if I am appropriately cautious, “phishing” e-mails need only to be carefully ignored. But the receipt of these attempts, often poorly worded and punctuated, with arbitrary capitalizations, is nonetheless, irritating.
The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology has the word hack variously as a verb — “cut roughly or unevenly;” a noun, “tool used for cutting up or chopping,” or “a carriage or vehicle for hire.” In The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the definitions include “a hesitation of speech,” and “a short dry hard cough.” Another definition is to “keep a young hawk … in a state of partial liberty.” But neither the OED nor the Chambers refers to “a better way to make muffins!” Or to do anything differently, or more efficiently. In no reputable source can there be found a reference to a spaghetti cooking “hack,” a biscuit baking “hack,” or a floor sweeping “hack.” None of my reference materials defines “greater efficiencies” as “hacks.” Stop it, people.
One of the definitions is “a person hired to do (especially) dull or routine work, a drudge (such as) a writer of poor or average quality literary or … journalistic work.”
I’ll just leave that here, a dead mackerel overlong on the cutting board.
cjon3acd@att.net