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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).
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