May I have a word: Good ideas, lousy execution.

Boston Globe

08-04-2025

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Such problems can also occur on a much larger scale, as Naomi Angoff Chedd, of Brookline, reminded me. She wrote: 'I would call them
John Hancock-ups
, in honor of the
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I also heard from two correspondents who have lived experience with the kind of benighted products we're talking about. Bobbie Carlton, of Lexington, wrote: 'I ran Innovation Nights, a monthly startup event in the Boston area for more 11 years. We helped to launch more than 1,500 new products. As in any large group of anything, some products were less than exciting and well done. For ones that were not well engineered, I would submit
unnovation
.'
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James L. Sherley was a 'venture mentor at Northeastern University for six years' and is now 'an entrepreneur in residence in the university's accelerator for developing student-led business ventures.' His role, he reported, includes 'helping students (and faculty, too!) avoid the all-too-common pitfall of
innovat
ing in
iso
lation without real-world information about customer needs and wants,' which he deemed
isovation
.
Jeff Kaufman, of Needham, wrote: 'For something of poor or impermanent engineering, there is a traditional MIT term:
kludged
. It was in common use in 1968 at MIT.' The Oxford English Dictionary reports that indeed the noun
kludge
— 'an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole,' a term especially common in computing contexts — dates back to 1962. But not until the 1980s, apparently, did it occur to anyone to turn the noun into the verb
to kludge
and derive the, umm,
kludged
from that.
Pat Nicholson, of Falmouth, proposed: 'How about
misengineering
, where the design misses the mark.' Jack Tuttle, of Hyde Park, declared: 'Anything that was not engineered well is an example of fine
crapsmanship
.'
John Haneffant, of Boston, mused: 'The items we are talking about are Mickey Mouse, so I suggest these poorly engineered items be called
Mickey Mouse traps
. Marc McGarry, of Newton, proposed the portmanteau
concockamamied.
And
Karen Smith, of Wellesley, went with
malfunctioneering.
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The noun
crapsmanship
is clear and emphatic enough to earn its coiner, Jack Tuttle, bragging rights, and I'm naming Karen Smith runner-up for her gentler and more polite participle
malfunctioneering
. Good going, you two!
Now Darrell Katz, of Waltham, is waging a war on a particular kind of crapsmanship — namely, the so-called blister packs that are used for a wide range of consumer products. 'I really hate those things,' he wrote. 'I'm mainly thinking of what the industry calls 'plastic-paperboard blister packaging.' They look like you should be able to tear them open by hand, but it turns out to be almost impossible. You need to use a tool, a knife or scissors, and even then, it's difficult. That plastic is remarkably hard for how thin it is.'
Blister pack
is itself an off-putting name, but let's come up with an alternative that highlights how frustrating the things can be. Send your ideas for Darrell's word to me at [e-mail] by noon on Friday, April 18, and kindly tell me where you live. Responses may be edited. And please keep in mind that meanings in search of words are always welcome.
Barbara Wallraff is a writer and editor in Cambridge. She writes The Wordshop on Substack.