I was on a business flight to Canada recently.
The in-flight movie was preceded by a cheerful young mum, dishing out "Travel Hacks".
The actual content of her advice was just normal common sense, that anyone with an IQ higher than a gone-off yoghurt would have been able to figure out for themselves.
What she should have called her common sense holiday comments was "travel advice", "travel tips", or "common sense comments about booking a holiday, that really, you should already know".
Amongst other similar meanings, a Hack is an activity carried out by a seriously intelligent person (a "Hacker") to find a way into a supposedly secure IT system to view, extract, or alter data.
This activity highlights any security holes in the system, which then have to be plugged.
A Hack is not some tips on general day-to-day life / household issues, that is known as advice.
A Hack is not plugging a cable into something it's designed to plug into, that's simply using a device for it's intended purpose.
A Hack is not making a modification to an item, or repairing it, while this can be a relatively intellectual thing to do, you are not hacking, you are modifying or repairing something, and writing about it is a "project diary".
If you are someone who has some advice to give, great, that can help others, but please call it "advice", you are not a Hacker, and you are not performing a Hack.
Do we blame the websites like hackaday.com where people get to submit techy project diaries, which while most do involve some degree of ingenuity and intellect, are not "Hacks".
Or is lifehacker.co.uk the culprit? Honestly, an article on the frigging mundane activity of how to tie a tie is so far removed from Hacking it drives me mad.
And thetravelhack.com is just a plain pi$$ take of the word.
I'm not a hacker, I enjoy computing, I also enjoy tech projects, but I'd never claim to be a hacker, or that any of my projects were hacks. I also would never claim a guide to spreading butter on toast is a Hack either... it's frigging advice, get over it.
A language is a common framework of words and structures that we all use so we can communicate in a common manner. While new words are occasionally invented and added to our dictionaries, there is no need to take an existing word and abuse it.
People have a habit of taking techy words and tying to associate themselves with them for the wrong reasons... Like the all to often heard phrase "I'm a geek"... no, you're just someone who spends too much time on facebook, but just because you're looking at a computer screen, it doesn't qualify you as a geek. It seems to have become socially acceptable to be a "geek" probably because the word now can mean anyone who chooses to label themselves as such. A true geek has been awarded the label by others, by being techy type of person. I should do another page on "Not A Geek"..