Meanings
- alternativeuncountableAlternative form of kludginess.
It’s worth remembering that despite all of its flaws, all of its architectural kluginess and insecurity and the costs associated with patching it, the Internet still gets the job done.
2005 December – 2006 January, David Talbot, “The Internet Is Broken”, in Jason Pontin, editor, Technology Review, volume 108, number 11, Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Review, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 68, column 12 more examples
Indeed, sometimes elegance and kluginess coexist, side by side. Highly efficient neurons, for example, are connected to their neighbors by puzzlingly inefficient synaptic gaps, which transform efficient electrical activity into less efficient diffusing chemicals, and these in turn waste heat and lose information.
2008, Gary Marcus, “Remnants of History”, in Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, →ISBN, page 11This doesn’t mean that things, once klugey, will always get klugier. But it does mean that kluginess can beget even more kluginess, and this is more than likely what happened with brains, as exemplified by following the changes throughout the tree of life and especially in the vertebrate part of the tree of life.
2018, Rob DeSalle, “Team of Rivals Meets the Kluge: Making Sense Out of Crossmodal Stimuli from the Outer World”, in Our Senses: An Immersive Experience, New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 161
Origin
Cite this entry
kluginess. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/kluginess
“kluginess.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/kluginess. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “kluginess,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/kluginess.
Source: kluginess on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.