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glitch /glich/
[very common; from German `glitschig'
slippery, via Yiddish `glitshen', to slide or skid] 1. n. A
sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or
program function. Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in
electric service is specifically called a `power glitch' (also
power hit), of grave concern because it usually crashes all
the computers. In jargon, though, a hacker who got to the middle
of a sentence and then forgot how he or she intended to complete it
might say, "Sorry, I just glitched". 2. vi. To commit a
glitch. See gritch. 3. vt. [Stanford] To scroll a
display screen, esp. several lines at a time. WAITS
terminals used to do this in order to avoid continuous scrolling,
which is distracting to the eye. 4. obs. Same as magic cookie, sense 2.
All these uses of `glitch' derive from the specific technical
meaning the term has in the electronic hardware world, where it is
now techspeak. A glitch can occur when the inputs of a circuit
change, and the outputs change to some random value for some
very brief time before they settle down to the correct value. If
another circuit inspects the output at just the wrong time, reading
the random value, the results can be very wrong and very hard to
debug (a glitch is one of many causes of electronic heisenbugs).
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
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