clobber
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈklɒb.ə(ɹ)/
ipa: /ˈklɑb.ɚ/
rhymes: -ɒbə(ɹ)
Forms: form: clobbers
form: clobbering
form: clobbered
form: clobbered
Etymology: British slang from 1941; possibly onomatopoeic of the sound of detonated bombs in the distance.
Senses: examples: text: So the temptation to clobber was always there, and it was sometimes more difficult not to strike than it would have been to strike, and the consequences be damned.
ref: 1954, Evan Hunter, The Blackboard Jungle, published 1984, page 201:
text: 2000 November 30, Kenya National Assembly Official Record (Hansard), page 3034,
Mr. Speaker, Sir, in the East African Standard newspaper we saw a picture of a man being carried away after being clobbered. We also saw women being clobbered by well-built policemen using big clubs. They were clobbering women who had already fallen on the ground.
text: Most of the job of the UNIX Oracle DBA is keeping the database running, and it does not come as a surprise when they see how easy it is to clobber a server.
The following script cripples the UNIX server by an implosion of incoming jobs. This is known as a denial of service (DOS) attack[…].
ref: 2002, Donald K. Burleson, Oracle9i UNIX Administration Handbook, page 395:
glosses: To hit or bash severely; to seriously harm or damage.
examples: text: It is therefore clear that the system itself must be truly "clobber proof"; that is, no user may be capable of changing anyone else's program or tying up the system in any way that would disrupt normal service to other users.
ref: 1965 November, Charles W. Adams, “Responsive time-shared computing in business its significance and implications”, in AFIPS '65 (Fall, part I): Proceedings of the November 30--December 1, 1965, fall joint computer conference, part I, New York, N.Y.: Association for Computing Machinery, archived from the original on 11 May 2022, page 486:
text: In the slang of computer programmers, the second re-entry address is likely to "clobber" the machine's memory of the original re-entry address.
ref: 1966, George A. Miller, “Thinking machines: myths and actualities”, in Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, editors, The Public Interest, volume 2, New York, N.Y.: National Affairs, Inc., archived from the original on 11 May 2022, page 104:
text: Inferences made in accordance with this reason are defeated by finding that the merged plan clobbers one of the causal-links in one of the constituent plans.
ref: 1999, Michael J. Wooldridge, Anand Rao, Foundations of Rational Agency, page 74:
text: The cp command does one thing as it clobbers a file; mv and ln do another.
ref: 2004, John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young, Unix for Dummies, page 314:
text: These functions collide, and we can see in Figure 7-1 that the debug() function for SexyWidgets clobbers the developer′s debug() function. The last function declared with the same name in the same scope will silently clobber the earlier function definition.
ref: 2007, Billy Hoffman, Bryan Sullivan, Ajax Security, unnumbered page:
text: If you create your own mood instance attribute without being aware of the name clash, you will clobber the mood attribute used by the methods inherited from Dog.
ref: 2022, Luciano Ramalho, chapter 11, in Fluent Python, 2nd edition, O'Reilly, →ISBN:
topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
glosses: To overwrite (data) or override (an assignment of a value), often unintentionally or unexpectedly.
Derived terms: clobberer
clobber passage
clobber text
clobber verse