In the culture surrounding the game of golf, however, the applicability of the word "hacker" is immediately apparent. The term is used to describe an amateur player of mediocre skill but great enthusiasm. In golf, the choice of the word "hacker" is obvious, as the word instantly brings to mind an image of a man chopping away at the turf with a club in an effort to move the ball down the fairway. There is no mystery here, as there is when the word is used to describe a grown man playing with model railroads.

In golf culture, the word "hacker" is neither wholly good nor wholly bad in its connotations. On the one hand, it is used in a positive manner, implying affection for those who, though lacking talent or training, nonetheless manage to eventually land the ball in the cup. On the other hand, it is used negatively, to suggest that the person so described lacks the initiative to improve his game, or the consideration to replace the divots thrown up by all of that energetic flailing, thus leaving the course a mess for the next foursome.

The next piece of our puzzle comes from the history of computers, but it is a point often overlooked or conveniently omitted by those who seek to place strict language controls on the meaning and usage of the word "hacker." The piece of history in question is the fact that early computers were not constructed by undergraduates and amateur technology enthusiasts (in those days, these people would have been ham radio operators, or some such), but rather by highly trained, disciplined scientists and engineers with strict project requirements, accountable to budgetary oversight of the universities or government agencies in which they worked.

If these scientists and engineers had been caught using their allotted grants, time, and equipment to do something so frivolous as play space-fantasy games, they would have found their funding cut off in an instant, and all hopes of tenure dashed. These people would not have called themselves "hackers," as is implicitly confirmed by the very origin-myths advanced by modern-day computer enthusiasts, which always describe computers "becoming available to" or "arriving in" communities where the term had acquired its new technological meaning.

We must step back, now, and ask again: why on earth was the word "hacker" chosen to describe unconventional, amateur, and enthusiastic applications of technology? Whether this happened in an industrial WWII setting or an academic 1950s setting, it seems an inescapable conclusion that the term was borrowed from the golf culture.

During the war, golf was on the rise in the United States, in the process of transformation from a rich man's game to an everyman's game. At the same time, science and particularly engineering were developing into avenues whereby a poor man might become a moderately rich man. Golf and engineering were well suited to one another, and borrowing of terminology would have been quite natural.

In the 1950s, golf in the US was in its heyday, a fully integrated part of everyday life. Borrowing terms from the world of golf in this era would have been so widespread that it would have seemed odd if a given discipline didn't borrow language from the game.

In either scenario, the word would not have been appropriated to describe disciplined, knowledgeable, and responsible professionals and academics. It would instead have been used to describe unskilled but enthusiastic amateurs- employees driven by the necessity of war, or students with access to equipment but unburdened by immediate goals or requirements for its use.

The first such usage was most likely affectionate, and therefor adopted by those it was applied to as well as their foremen or academic advisors. The negative associations would have been imported from the world of golf as well, however, and so it would have been understood that someone described as a "hacker" might not seek knowledge or training beyond that needed to get the job at hand done, and such a person might leave a bit of a mess behind, as well. Since the people so described were mostly young, these faults would have been tolerated as youthful lapses rather than character flaws.

As time wore on, it became more and more clear that certain individuals did not outgrow the adolescent excesses of their technological tinkering, and so the negative implications of the word grew to greater significance. At the same time, the study and use of computers was expanding and establishing a place in the academic and professional world, and with this establishment came new titles: Programmer, Software Engineer, and Computer Scientist. People in positions of respect embraced these titles, distancing themselves from the word "hacker," and thus (perhaps unintentionally) accellerating the process of converting a somewhat benign term to a largely negative one.

By the early 1980s, this process was nearly complete. So when the press first learned of computer crime, and interviewed professional programmers and computer scientists, these respected members of the computing world referred to the new crop of criminal-minded home-computing enthusiasts as mere "hackers," implying marginal skill, lack of training, and total absence of the ethics present in respectable, established organizations and professions.

"Hacker" meant "computer enthusiast" before it acquired its present meaning of "computer criminal." It meant "amateur technologist" before it meant "computer enthusiast." And it meant "amateur golfer" before it meant "amateur technologist." Computer enthusiasts do not hold the first claim on the word. Nor, I suspect, will they hold the last.

Several theories have been advanced here at Adequacy to account for the persistence with which modern computer enthusiasts seek to whitewash the meaning and history of the word, and then take the laundered word to describe themselves. The origins of the word in the culture of golf suggest a new motive. Use of the word "hacker" creates and preserves an expectation of mediocrity in the listener. The user, in this light, is maneuvering for a large handicap.

This particularly true when the audience is of a generation raised in the heyday of golf in America, a generation that happens to be at the head of most businesses and academic departments in that nation. If a computer enthusiast manages to create and maintain low expectations, then he (for they are, statistically, male) is much less likely to be fired for writing brittle, inefficient, undocumented code, or using company time and resources to play video games.

Computer enthusiasts who are not explicitly aware of this causal chain certainly grasp it on a received cultural level. Thus, we might expect that those with the lowest levels of technical skill, discipline, and professional ethic should be the most vociferous in their efforts to be referred to as "hackers."

Does this prediction bear out? Until the results of controlled psychological studies are available, we’ll just have to look around us, and judge for ourselves.