The other day I was talking to my son, whose mother-in-law lives on a big piece of property out in the country. She mostly manages the place by herself, but sometimes, he said, she’s got woofers living there also.
I wasn’t sure I’d caught the word, so I asked him. Sure enough: woofers. Which does not, as it turns out, refer to dogs or speakers, and which introduced me to a new word.
Not long ago, I learned about workampers—people who live nomadic lives and pick up work here and there (work+campers). Woofers is kinda-sorta a similar idea, although it’s more of an internship or homestay for people who want to work on farms, and specifically on organic farms.
The term woofer derives from the name of an organization that connects farmers with people who want to experience the organic-farming life. The organization is World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or WWOOF for short (wwoof.org). You can see how it would be easy to get from WWOOF to woofer, or as some people spell it, Wwoofer. And there’s a verb: WWOOFing.
The organization was originally Working Weekends On Organic Farms and—here’s a surprise to me—was founded in 1971. (Why, it was something that I myself could have done in my unburdened youth.) Woofers are volunteers, and they don’t get paid as such; they get room and board and the opportunity to work hard. 🙂 As with homestay programs in general, some people have better experiences than others.
Anyway, the next time I run into my son or his MIL and they’re talking about woofers, I won’t have to stop and ask “What’s that?”
Origins. The other day at work we were talking about the names for different ways to capitalize words, or more specifically, objects like computer file names. In case you don’t know this (and haven’t seen an earlier Friday words about it), in the world of programming there are informal names for different casing options, like these:
- PascalCaseExample. Each word is capitalized.
- camelCaseExample. Each word is capitalized except the first one.
- snake_case_example. Words are separated using underscores.
- kebab-case-example. Words are separated using hyphens.
One of the editors said that kebab case is incorrectly named. This sent me to look up where kebab came from and how it relates to kebab case.
The casing got its name because the words look like they’re impaled on a spit—that is, they look like shish kebab. Shish kebab or shish kabob refers to a way of cooking that involves running a skewer through pieces of meat and then broiling the meat. Shish kebab is a term from Turkish; in that language, the shish part refers to a spit, and the kebab part refers to the pieces of meat.
My colleague’s point was that although the words in kebab case are “on a spit,” so to speak, kebab doesn’t refer to a spit, it just refers to meat.
English imported the term shish kebab as a unit in the early 1900s. Obviously, the meaning of the individual words is opaque to English speakers. But English also has the words doner kebab and just kebab that refer to different dishes involving meat. Do English speakers in general think of kebab as referring to meat, or just to a piece of meat?
The term kebab case is well established as an informal term in the programming world. As a poster notes on a programming forum, kebab case has even been written into (“baked into”) some programming languages and tools (example).
Still, the word kebab is also used sometimes as a derogatory term. In the programming world, we’ve done a lot of work in the last few years to identify and change terminology that can be offensive or triggering. So it’s possible that the term kebab case might someday be phased out. Stay tuned.
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