Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need(geekyschmidt.com) |
Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need(geekyschmidt.com) |
Companies like Valve can continue largely unshittificated because they are private. Once that is no longer the case, all our game rentals will be squozen away from us.
"Also 1600s squeez, squeaze, squease, squese, 1600s–1700s squeese. Also with dialect preterite and past participle 1800s– squoze, past participle 1800s squozen."
The OED cites quotations from the 1930s, 1870s, and 1860s that include 'squoze' and 'squozen', for example ‘Orange?’ repeated Waitress No. 1. ‘Do you want it squoze?’ in the Baltimore Sun, 1 Sep 1931.
[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/squeeze_v?tab=forms#21076314
For things that were intended good, but ended up bad, there's an English idiom: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
If you just say it as a logical series of making it worse while making it better you miss that the intention of the ‘better’ is the first place wasn’t even the intention to make it better for the user.
> etwas in der Absicht, es zu verbessern, schlechter machen > > https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern
"Making somewhere worse with the intention to make it better".
Better is the enemy of good.
Old Italian proverb: "il meglio è nemico del bene"
Shakespeare, King Lear: "Striving to better, oft we mar what's well".
That's not the same at all. The idea there is that if you try to make the best, you will stop advancing towards good, not that you will worsen it.
Doing something large, inventing a bunch of metrics, and showing that you improve on those metrics does.
That's largely a function of incentives.
If a startup could have been a 100 line PHP script, instead of 50 microservices, then you wouldn't be able to work on it for the next 10 years, and hire 5 of your buds from school.
Hmmm. So, the literal transation would be:
"Verschlimm" - worsen, negative, step back. "Besserung" - improvement, getting better than before.
So, I would translate it as "an effort to improve something but actually making it worse in the process".
There is an old video clip in german about this, actually; I think it was from Loriot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhj1xhv3rZI
Video quality is bad, there are probably better ones but it has english subtitles. The idea here is basically the guy tries to improve something, but in the end kind of causes the whole room to become devastated. That's kind of Verschlimmbesserung: meaning to do well, but failing to do so and causing more harm than good. (Also in the comments people connect this to Friedrich Merz; the guy is really losing popular support by the minute now. Just recently where he was unhappy how real people ask him critical questions.)
Unless I'm mistaken, Russian has a wonderful idiom for this: "bear job"
> The story... relates how a solitary gardener encounters a lonely bear and they decide to become companions. One of the bear's duties is to keep the flies off his friend when he takes a nap. Unable to drive off a persistent fly, the bear seizes a paving stone to crush it and kills the gardener as well
> [..]
> The fable has given to the French language the idiom le pavé de l'ours (the bear's paving stone) and to German Bärendienst (a bear's service), both used for doing somebody or something a disservice or bad turn and sometimes for any ill-considered action with an unfortunate result. The Danish and Norwegian word bjørnetjeneste (bear-service) has similar meanings and the idiom also appears in other European languages.
Apparently the source of Russian's, too: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B5...
Base: verschlimmbessern
Present conjugation: I verschlimmbesser[e], you verschlimmbesserst, he/she/it verschlimmbessert, we verschlimmbesser[e]n, (plural-)you verschlimmbessert, they verschlimmbesser[e]n
Past/perfect: verschlimmbessert (e.g. "it got verschlimmbessert")
Imperative: verschlimmbesser[e] (e.g. "don't verschlimmbesser that!")
The [e] at the end is leftover from an older form, in the cases where I omitted it it would sound archaic to a German speaker, but in the other cases it's equivalent or may even sound better. It's also regionally different. The archaic versions kinda sound south German (Swabian, Bavarian).
[ed. made some adjustments]
P.S.: "Verbesserung" means improvement, "Verschlimmerung" means worsening/aggravation. The combined word is understood quite specifically though, not just as a combination of the two. It's *not* a normal case of German "paste words together", that's for nouns (you can do it with the substantivization, e.g. Donaudampfschiffverschlimmbesserungskapitän = "captain of verschlimmbessern the steam ships on the Donau", which makes little sense of course). It's not identical to enshittification either, the latter (to me at least) implies intention; verschlimmbessern you can (and probably often will) do by accident.
And by the way I also started using Auftragstaktik as an anchor for a methodology of writing plans and prompts.
I’m told that’s because the language is designed to synthesize words. I wouldn’t know. I don’t speak German (but I speak English, which has German roots).
I once looked at an etymology diagram, and was surprised to see Low German is the root for a whole shitton of modern languages. I think that may be because it was a trade language.
The opposite is the more interesting word though: hit bug. A bug/mistake/fuckup that turns out to improve the software.
Via https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=49... and https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=16...
"disimprove" works much better.
The similar word "unimproved" implies you did nothing to make it better, "disimproved" implies you actively made it worse.
But this is still just effectively adding "not" to the word. If you must join two words that are the antonyms of each other (like verbessern and verschlimmern), the closest match I can think of is the vulgar pun "fuxed", a blend of "fixed" (repaired) and "fucked" (broke). https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuxed
Probably it would become "verskimbeserong".
Meanwhile I won't be able to remember that German word longer than it takes me to close this tab. Vershumthingsomething.
This also applies to changing something. If it was perfect, and you changed it, and now it's not perfect anymore, then the work itself didn't need to happen, and was therefore bloat.
Most work is bloat. But we have tied continued existence to work (mostly -- we mistake work for value), so we've made infinite bloating appear mandatory.
As an aside, most of the human psychology (assumptions, beliefs etc.) is also bloat, and similarly benefits from debloating.
Article discusses qualitative aspects a la "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
That's not what "worseprovement" conveys to me, you can worseprove a single part, intending to make it better, making that same thing actually worse by the very same change.
There's no reason to coin a new term at all, nor chasing this idea of using long German word as a replacement.
Also the genesis of the word works like this: "besser" -> "bessern" -> "verbessern" -> "verschlimmbessern" -> "Verschlimmbesserung" (better -> becoming better -> making better -> making better towards a worse state -> same, but as noun) So you append to the beginning, while keeping the existing prefix. If you want to end up with "worse" at the end, you need to start with it too. "schlecht" -> "verschlechtern" -> ??? But then "gut" doesn't fit, because that implies an absolute, that "schlimm" does not.
Note, that "schlimm" does not plainly mean "bad", that's "schlecht". It also contains the notion of pity, guilt and impotence. That doesn't really exist for the opposite.
"Verbesserschlimmung" isn't a word in active use & depending on how it (theoretically) were to enter use, its meaning might vary. It could enter usage with identical meaning, or it could mean the opposite: a change intended to worsen things that made them better. It's a bit like "inflammable".
(Also: this is why I pointed out it's not formed according to the agglutination rules that apply for concatenated nouns in German. For those, the meaning can be logically derived. This is a portmanteau, those don't quite follow rigid rules.)
Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.
"Enshittification" isn't the same thing. "Verschlimmbesserung" is when you try to fix a loose connection in a power cord and then no electricity flows at all, or when you try to fix a bad haircut with a trimmer and the haircut ends up looking even worse, etc.
I'd like to use "Schlimmprovement" for elevated communication.
There's a big difference between enshitification and "Verschlimmbesserung". The latter has the intent of actually improving things, while the first is making things knowingly worse for profit.
I probably haven’t used it once in the last 15 years and have heard it maybe twice.
Source: lifelong German speaker
Enshittification is when the perpetrator intentionally does make a product worse, like locking previously free features behind a paywall with a firmware update, or covers components of an electric device with some goop to make it unrepairable.
Verschlimmbesserung is when the perpetrator has good but ultimately misguided intentions. For example, so middle manager might think that replacing but buttons on a vacuum cleaner with app integration adds value, but ultimately it's replacing something simple, boring and reliable with an overengineered solution that causes more problems than it solves.
There is some overlap between the two: someone could make make a Verschlimmbesserung even though he knows no one wants the change, but he can pad his resume with it. In general I'd say enshittification leans more towards malice, while Verschlimmbesserung leans more towards incompetence.
> Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.
Yes, it is.
I do like the sound of Verscheissification.
As Picard said: Enshitify! (Apologies to my Trekkie friends.)
That already means "prank".
> Verschisserung
"Schisser" means coward.
(don't answer that, it does exist because people make shitcoins for everything: https://phantom.com/tokens/solana/4CF8Ek5DEiYtP1YuqomDdhkeSc...)
Source: Lifelong Prime
Improvement = Verbesserung
Worsening = Verschlimmerung
Worsening because you tried to improve = Verschlimmbesserung
Ask your local carpenter or plumber how many of their jobs have to do with people trying to fix a damage and make it worse
I see bloat mostly as "unnecessary dependencies." Things which, if you removed them, the product would improve.
e.g. importing a whole library for what could have been a simple function.
If something justifies its "weight", then it's not bloat. It's functional.
But there's also "feature bloat." If a feature or change doesn't need to exist, or makes things worse, then it's bloat. If you removed it, the project would improve.