Who taught: Amber

kinks

Hello, my friends! It’s been a while. My excuse is that I have been pretty busy with my course that I am teaching this summer. But, I have never forgotten you at all.

As a software engineer, I have developed many applications in which I had so much fun. But, sometimes, it brings a lot of headaches. When there is an issue, we usually say that it has a bug. But, when we talk to our clients, we also use another word, glitch. It is a euphemism in comparison to a bug.

For that reason, I can confess that I have used this word, glitch, pretty often.

I told you that I am teaching a course this summer. Last semester, the school decided to upgrade its course registration system to a new one. And, as soon as the course started, I got some emails from some students that they cannot register for my course for some reason.

So, I sent an email to Amber, asking what is going on with the system. In her reply, she said , “The school is fixing the new system. There are still kinks.”

Great! I was happy to hear that they are working on it. But, that wasn’t it. I noticed a new word here, kinks. I have never seen that word before. From the context, I can easily understand but what is the exact meaning of it?

Literal definition is a twist or curl. For example, you could have kinks in your hair. Or in wires or ropes. Normally, it would not be good to have those kinks in your hair or rope unless that is what you want, right?

So, due to this kind of reason, kinks mean flaws or imperfection. I think it is basically the same to glitch. What do you think my native English speaking friends? Is my feeling correct?

Also, you can say “iron some kinks” to mean “fix some issues or problems.” That makes very sense because kinks are curves and we do need to iron to remove them.

I actually like this expression and feel like I will use this a lot in the future. Oops! Does it mean that I will have many kinks in my future. Hope not! Let’s not jinx! 🙂