drop

[Dave Wilton]

It's a ubiquitous term in the software world. I always imagined it was from
a postal or espionage drop, a dump of information that others can come along
and pick up.



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Jesse Sheidlower
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 9:07 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: drop

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 01:36:37PM +0000, Lynne Murphy wrote:
> A blog-reader emailed me today to ask whether this sentence was good in
> general American English (or whether it's geekspeak):
>
> 'Mozilla dropped the Firefox 4 release candidate for developers yesterday,
> but as of this afternoon the release candidate is available for everyone
to
> download and test out. '
> From:
>
<http://lifehacker.com/#!5780393/firefox-4-release-candidate-now-available-t
o-everyone>
>
> Is this a basketball metaphor? Is it marketing jargon or geek speak? Does
> it require less processing effort for you than for me? :)

This is originally hip-hop slang, and refers to releasing a recording or
the like. OED has this to 1992 (following HDAS):

1992 _Rap Masters_ Jan. 58 In 1979...the Sugarhill Gang dropped their
first rap album.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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