memory hole

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See also: memory-hole

English

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WOTD – 8 June 2024

Etymology

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From memory +‎ hole. Sense 1 (“figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up”) is a transferred use of the physical slots which the English writer George Orwell (1903–1950) refers to in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), into which censored documents for destruction are dropped.[1][2]

Pronunciation

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Noun

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memory hole (plural memory holes)

  2. A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion.
    Synonyms: bit bucket, /dev/null
    • 1957, Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, with the assistance of Julius Jacobson, “The Cold War: Repression and Collapse”, in The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957), Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, →OCLC, page 453:
      As relations between the West and Russia grew worse, the party began to discard its patriotic draperies; everything that had been said during the war years was now quietly dropped into the memory hole.
    • 1969 July 2, John R[ichard] Rarick, “Challenge to America, 1969”, in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 91st Congress, First Session (United States House of Representatives), volume 115, part 14, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 18349, column 1:
      President [Richard] Nixon didn't even blush when he claimed that the raise in the debt limit was "in the interest of responsible management." If it were already 1984, all of Nixon's old speeches about the government squandering our money could be shoved into the "memory hole."
    • 1970 January–February, Hugh McLean, “Et Resurrexerunt: How Writers Rise from the Dead”, in Abraham Brumberg, editor, Problems of Communism, volume XIX, number 1, Washington, D.C.: United States Information Agency, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 17, column 2:
      [T]he innermost circle of the Stalinist limbo was occupied by the Damned. The Damned were by no means exponents of an alien ideology. On the contrary, they were numbered among the true believers—they were Communists. But despite superhuman efforts to obey the all-wise party, they nevertheless fell by the wayside and were swept into the memory hole.
    • 1986 October 1, John L[eslie] H[oward] Keep, Soldiering in Tsarist Russia (The Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History; 29), El Paso County, Colo.: United States Air Force Academy, →OCLC, page 1:
      After a few more years [Leon] Trotsky's name disappeared down the "memory hole," and the Red Army became a fully professional force in which certain selected values and traditions of the old army were resurrected and even made the object of a veritable cult.
    • 2001 May 24, Jasper Becker, “‘Comrade Jiang Zemin Does Indeed Seem a Proper Choice’ [review of The Tiananmen Papers (2001) by Zhang Liang]”, in Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor, London Review of Books‎[1], volume 23, number 10, London: LRB Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2022-12-06:
      Jiang Zemin has almost managed to make the event disappear down an Orwellian memory hole. Even in Western countries, sub-editors have taken to calling it the ‘Tiananmen crackdown’, rather than ‘massacre’, making it seem as insignificant as the endless stories about routine ‘crackdowns’ on smuggling, prostitution, counterfeit goods, VAT forms or corruption, which provide the stuff of daily reporting here in China.
    • 2011, Naomi Oreskes, Erik M[eade] Conway, “Denial Rides Again: The Revisionist Attack on Rachel Carson”, in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury Press, →ISBN, page 236:
      The painstaking work of scientists, the reasoned deliberations of the President's Science Advisory Committee, and the bipartisan American agreement to ban DDT have been flushed down the memory hole, along with the well-documented and easily found (but extremely inconvenient) fact that the most important reason that DDT failed to eliminate malaria was because insects evolved.
  3. (computing)
    1. A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory.
      • 1997, Stephen J. Bigelow, “System Questions”, in PC Hardware FAT FAQs: Troubleshooting, Upgrading, Maintaining, and Repairing, New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, pages 11–12:
        A memory hole provides performance improvement by reserving certain parts of memory for use by ISA cards. […] The memory hole is usually disabled because there are few ISA cards today that need to be mapped. If you have an ISA card that refuses to function properly in a PC with more than 16MB of RAM, you should enable the memory hole.
      • 2001 June, Alessandro Rubini, Jonathan Corbet, “Hardware Management”, in Andy Oram, editor, Linux Device Drivers, 2nd edition, Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly & Associates, →ISBN, page 245:
        We won't touch high ISA memory (the so-called memory hole in the 14 MB to 16 MB physical address range), because that kind of I/O memory is extremely rare nowadays and is not supported by the majority of modern motherboards or by the kernel.
    2. (rare) Synonym of memory leak (“any of several faults in the memory allocation logic of a computer or program whereby parts of memory become hidden or unusable”)
      • 1992 September 9, Andrew McRae, “C++ in an Embedded Environment”, in AUUG 1992 Conference & Exhibition: Maintaining Control in an Open World: World Congress Centre, Melbourne, Australia, 8–11 September 1992: Conference Proceedings, Kensington, N.S.W.: AUUG, →ISBN, paragraph 5.5, page 5:
        The use of new and delete, along with the scope related creation and deletion of objects, provide safer and more consistent management of the available memory pool. […] It also resolves common problems with passing incorrect pointers to free, or obtaining memory using malloc and then forgetting to free it (causing a memory hole). This typically occurs when a subroutine allocates some memory via malloc, and during some processing a premature return taken that does not free the allocated memory.
      • 2008, Andre Bogus, “Writing Lighttpd Modules”, in Lighttpd: Installing, Compiling, Configuring, Optimizing, and Securing this Lighting-fast Web Server, Birmingham, West Midlands: Packt Publishing, →ISBN:
        When Lighttpd finishes, it calls mod_helloworld_free to release the memory held by plugin_data. Beware that not freeing the plugin_data creates a memory hole.

Alternative forms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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References

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  1. ^ See, for example, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair] (1949 June 8) chapter 4, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001, part 1, page 37:
    In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. […] This last was for the disposal of waste paper. […] For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
  2. ^ “memory hole, n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2023; “memory hole, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further reading

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