zorch

See also: zórch

English

Etymology 1

Verb

zorch (third-person singular simple present zorches, present participle zorching, simple past and past participle zorched)

1. (intransitive, transitive, slang) To destroy or ruin, especially by electronic means.
   • 1990 November 30, Jim Burnes, “"ZOG"?”, in alt.conspiracy‎^[1] (Usenet):

     I was well on my way to zorching my GPA as a sophomore and becoming quite the computer hacker when Luis my mentor took me aside. He told me that my grades werent up to snuff when I told him I was getting C's in Spanish (that was my best subject that month).

   • 2002 April 3, John Schilling, “Interstellar Flight Today”, in rec.arts.sf.science‎^[2] (Usenet):

     Assuming you are willing to live with the consequences, which include obliterating everything within a hundred kilometers of your launch site, dumping a hundred tons of fallout into the stratosphere, and zorching every piece of electronics sight^[sic].

   • 2002 May 20, Timothy A. McDaniel, “ConJose planning”, in rec.arts.sf.fandom‎^[3] (Usenet):

     […] I probably just wasn't inserting the memory DIMM correctly, not that it was intrinsically unseatable; I zorched the motherboard myself when trying to remove disk drives […]

   • 2003 May 7, Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr, “AKICIF: Browser bafflement”, in rec.arts.sf.fandom‎^[4] (Usenet):

     But if you're doing disk-to-disk backup you want at least two backup disks, since it's kind of a nightmare if your good disk zorches right in the middle of the backup, giving you a zorched backup disk as well.

   • 2011 July 15, Curt, “First Rule of Liberalism”, in seattle.politics‎^[5] (Usenet):

     Zorching the economy so badly we still haven't dug out two years after he's gone ..

Related terms

• zorched

 

Etymology 2

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Noun

zorch (uncountable)

1. A numerical factor used to limit semantic searches in cognitive modelling.
   • 1987, John McDermott, Artificial Intelligence: 10th International Joint Conference, volume 1, page 152:

     This is done by using a numerical constant, called zorch, to start marker-passing and dividing it by outbranching […]

   • 1989, Noel E. Sharkey, Models of Cognition: A Review of Cognitive Science:

     […] it and all its first set of descendants can be marked, but the zorch runs out quickly.

   • 2008, Richard Trent Llewellyn, Annotating the Biological Process of Proteins with Functional Linkages, page 39:

     In order to quantify network connectivity between one protein and others, we adapted the idea of zorch originally used to describe cognition (Hendler, 1989).

Further reading

• Guy L[ewis] Steele Jr., Donald R. Woods, Raphael A. Finkel, Mark R[eed] Crispin, Richard M[atthew] Stallman, Geoffrey S. Goodfellow (1983) “ZORCH”, in The Hacker's Dictionary: A Guide to the Computer Underground, New York: Harper & Row, →ISBN, page 126