I had no idea that the word “glitch” comes from Yiddish, the language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews that gave us words like “klutz,” “nosh,” and “shlep.” From Air & Space:
Glitch is derived from glitsh, Yiddish for slippery place, and from glitshn, meaning to slide, or glide. Glitch was in use in the 1940s by radio announcers to indicate an on-air mistake. By the 1950s, the term had migrated to television, where engineers used glitch to refer to technical problems…
In Into Orbit, a 1962 book by the Mercury Seven, John Glenn mused about the word, which he evidently hadn’t used before joining the space program. “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….”
image: glitch art by Michael Betancourt (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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