“Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was ‘glitch.’ Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit….” Perhaps one of these engineers later joined NASA and began using glitch around a freckle-faced aviator from New Concord, Ohio: In Into Orbit, a1962 book by the Mercury Seven, John Glenn mused about the word, which he evidently hadn’t used before joining the space program. By the 1950s, the term had migrated to television, where engineers used glitch to refer to technical problems. Glitch was in use in the 1940s by radio announcers to indicate an on-air mistake. Glitch is derived from glitsh, Yiddish for slippery place, and from glitshn, meaning to slide, or glide. One word derived from Yiddish, glitch, was also introduced in radio, and found its way to the world of electrical engineering and, from there, to the hallowed halls of 1960s NASA, and thence, everywhere.
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