[buu700]

Kind of reminds me of the term "hackathon" between my circle of friends. When the term first entered our lexicon, it specifically meant "a 24-hour software design and implementation competition in which participants form teams, chug unholy amounts of energy drinks, and show off their demos to the audience at the end of it all". It was brilliant, wondrous, and not a concept to be trifled with more than once every few months.

Slowly, very slowly, what was once a special event became, over time, "hey, I have a project idea we could work on together and no homework this weekend; hackathon Saturday?". That became "let's meet up Friday night for a hackathon and each figure out a project to work on until the morning". That became "I have some code I need to work on, and can't stay up past 4, but hackathon tonight anyway?". That became "fuck Maine, we need to get this CS lab done; dinner then hackathon for a few hours".

Et cetera, et cetera, until "hackathon" had become sufficiently bastardised at our hands so as to solely entail taking over a conference room of an academic building for two hours one night with four six packs of beer and loud music and not a single one of us even opening a text editor. After that incident, we finally looked back upon the previous year and understood how our flippant use of what was once a cool and exciting term had rendered it devoid of any real meaning.

For a while afterward, unless we were discussing an official sponsored event, we would make a point of only using the term facetiously as in "party hackathon tonight!" or "dinner hackathon at Subway".