Never Mind the git
Sometimes, one can learn great things in the unlikeliest places. As a quick note about myself, to put this story in context, one of my favourite pastime activities is binge movie watching. As a general rule, I watch movies that are worth my time.
Every once in a while, though, when I’m feeling adventurous, I dip into a pile of old unwatched DVDs that I have collected along the years. Sometimes this digs up such wonders as The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and sometimes, very rarely, this turns up unnameable films. One of such is a Rhys Ifans film, in which one character, at one point, refers to another as a ‘git’.
As a general rule, I watch movies that are worth my time.
In my experience in the technological world, ‘git’ has always been a code management tool (initially developed by Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, in 2005). From what I can gather, this definition is not something you can actually call someone, no matter how much into programming they are, so I decided to look into it.
Looking past the uncited interjection meaning ‘get out’ that can be seen in some southern states, ‘git’ has British English origins. It refers to someone who is childish, silly or incompetent, perhaps even annoying.
Rather than using it as a form of self-effacing or disparaging his work, we can assume it was a joke on the fact that Torvalds tends to name his projects after himself. Please forgive the slight profanity, but in his own words: I’m an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First ‘Linux’, now ‘git’.
In any case, I’ll make sure not to call anyone a git in the near future, just in case.
