The other day I was on a WhatsApp video call with my 10-year-old daughter, and the call suddenly dropped. When I texted her “What happened?” she replied, “Don’t know, I guess it’s a bug in WhatsApp. It quit. I’ll call you back in a second.”
My 10-year-old daughter knows the word “bug.” My 69-year-old mother knows the word “bug.” They are far from IT, and yet they both know that “bug” means a defect. This made me think: where does this word that we use all the time come from?
Apparently, the use of the word “bug” in this context is at least 140 years old.
The origin of the word “bug”
The etymology of the word “bug” is uncertain, but linguists believe it referred to insects in the 1620s (with the earliest reference being to bedbugs). Around that time, people began to use “bug” as a term for insects to refer to them as an object of disgust and horror. The word likely originated from the Middle English word “bugge,” meaning “something frightening” or “scarecrow.” Mankind has never loved insects.
At that time, the word “bug” had no connotation of a defect in a machine; it simply described an insect, often an unwanted or even horrific one. Anthropologists suggest that humans evolved to develop disgust toward insects, particularly with the urbanization of our species. One theory explains that as society becomes more urbanized, the more “unwanted” an indoor bug becomes, as it indicates that the area is far from clean and may pose a health risk.
Modern culture often exploits this common disgust.
For instance, in propaganda, insects and bugs are frequently used to portray someone as a “bad person.” For example, during the second World War, a cartoon bug appeared in propaganda posters as a menace who encouraged shoppers to waste money rather than buy war savings certificates.
In games, when a director needs to create an enemy that will be almost universally hated, insects are often used as well.
Think about the last time you saw a cockroach in the bathroom — doesn’t that memory give you the shivers? It certainly does for me. It seems that almost no one likes bugs, especially when they appear unexpectedly.
How “bugs” became tied to software development
Why do we call defects in our work “bugs”? What do insects have to do with human mistakes or poorly organized work that results in unexpected defects?
If the name was chosen purely because of the disgust associated with their unexpected appearance, there are many other things people feel disgusted by as well. For instance, disgust toward spoiled food also has evolutionary roots, but we don’t call defects “rotten apples.”
The first occurrences of the word “bug” in engineering, with a meaning close to what we use today (a defect or an unexpected issue), are found in Edison’s letters from the late 19th century, when he was working on the Quadruplex telegraph system. One story suggests that this terminology originated when a cockroach covered in ink crawled across a tap of a rheostat on a duplex circuit, causing the circuit to go out of balance. Edison eventually invented the so-called “bug trap,” a clever workaround for unanticipated issues in telegraph communication.
In more modern engineering, a real bug (an insect) was found in 1947 when an electronic computer malfunctioned. A postmortem analysis revealed a moth in relay 70, panel F, causing a short circuit. This incident solidified the use of the term “bug” for defects and unexpected issues in computers and software.
Bugs are pesky things that we’ll never fully exterminate
One hundred and forty years after the term “bug” was coined in engineering, our systems are still plagued by bugs. Due to bugs, people are killed, flights are delayed, rockets fail, and companies lose money and clients’ trust.
Perhaps one of the reasons we continue to use the term “bugs” for defects in software is that they are just as persistent and impossible to fully exterminate as their real-life counterparts, insects.
I guess that makes QA professionals a form of pest control, always working to reduce the risk of bugs emerging and reaching our users.
