I wish people would stop using that title. They seem to think it is a clever click-grabber, which is probably true for most people, but for those even remotely familiar with the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, opening up the article and finding no application of Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality is disappointing.

And what is clickbait, Phaedrus,

And what is not clickbait—

Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

The title of Pirsig's book is itself a riff on "Zen in the Art of Archery", published in 1948.

To be fair, I found the Zen in ZatAoMM to also be more pretense (whether this was intended by Pirsig or not)..

there's plenty of such things... "X considered harmful" seemed to have an uptick in usage for a while.

also "what we talk about whwn we talk about...", "the unreasonable effectiveness of ..."

And I might add, the book is worth reading!

Appropriation of eastern asian (particularly Japanese) cultural terms is an odd trend in the American tech community. I cringe a bit every time I see a listing for a Java/Javascript/.NET/$LANGUAGE "ninja", "samurai", or "sensei".

I know it's not done to be offensive, and maybe defended by saying "we're just honoring their culture" or something like that. It's just kind of awkward, can't we agree on that at least?

To be clear, I grew up in Cleveland and have been listening to a comparable debate my entire life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Indians_name_and_log...