🚀 go-pugleaf

>From sources I have, "to hack," "a hack" and "hacker" come to us from the
literary world.  A hack writer was one who wrote "quick-and-dirty" material
for pulp magazines and such, usually being paid by the word.

  "A hack, or workaday riding horse is a b/f from the syn hackney, whence
  hackney (carriage) and hackney, a drudge, now hack, a literary drudge...
  The derivative 'to hackney' orig meant to use a horse for common purposes."*

  "But a style can be hackneyed and if it is, it is just as worn out as the
  broken down hackney horse of earlier days that gave it its name.  Now clip
  off the end of the word hackney and you have the literary hack who does the
  commonplace jobs that the old hackney horses used to do, thereby showing one
  way words are made."**

When correcting people in the print and visual media, it should help a lot to
relate the word to things close to their own.  Then explain how much better a
word "cracker" would be for people that break into computer systems by
linking it to "safe cracker."  (But don't mention saltines or white people.)



*Partridge, Eric. _Origins, A Short His Etymological Dictionary of Modern
English_. New York: Greenwich House. 1983.  p. 275.

**Funk, Wilfred, Litt. D. _Word Origins and their Romantic Stories_. New
York: Bell Publishing Company. 1950. p. 24
-- 
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