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A.Word.A.Day--GIGO

GIGO (GI-goh) noun

1. `Garbage In, Garbage Out' -- usually said in response to lusers who complain that a program didn't "do the right thing" when given imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data.

2. `Garbage In, Gospel Out': this more recent expansion is a sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have to put excessive trust in `computerized' data.

"The good part about the Web is that it makes everyone a publisher. The bad part is that it makes everyone a publisher. It is amazingly easy to put absolute drivel on display for the gullible. GIGO (Garbage In - Garbage Out) still holds true, even if the Garbage Out is done up in HTML with nifty graphics." Tim Green, Check out the teeth on that Web, Database Magazine, Oct/Nov 95.

This week's theme: words from the hackers' jargon.

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