Dictionary definition of “spaghetti bowl”

spaghetti bowl

n. a mass of complicated relationships within a group, system, or process; an intersection or interchange of many lines, pipes, roads, or railways. Subjects: English, Automobiles & Transportation, Politics

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Citations: 1959 C.A. Mortenson Los Angeles Times (Dec. 13) “Awesome Interchange Rapidly Taking Shape”: Los Angeles’ four-level freeway interchange at Civic Center, sometimes called the Mixmaster, soon will have a companion complexity called the Spaghetti Bowl. Engineers already have hung that name on the $10 million East Los Angeles interchange now fast taking shape southeast of Civic Center. 1960 Hartford Courant (Connecticut) (Sept. 20) “Houston Booms On Oil, Mud” (in Washington) p. 27D: A complex web of pipelines known as the “Spaghetti Bowl” transports liquid and gaseous materials between the plants. 1983 William E. Geist New York Times (Mar. 9) “In Bronx, Commuters Learn ABC’s Of IRT”: Riding the subways was something many of the suburban commuters approached with trepidation—deciphering the psychedelic spaghetti bowl that is a New York subway map, 1983 James F. Clarity, Warren Weaver Jr. New York Times (July 2) “Briefing”: One of Washington’s most belabored cliches is “strange bedfellows,“ as applied to people labeled as liberals or conservatives who come together, however briefly or accidentally, in the normal course of earning a living in the ideological spaghetti bowl of national politics. 1985 Bruce Buursma Chicago Tribune (Mar. 9) “Religion Is Again An Earth-Shaking Force” p. 8: The intersection of religion and state has become increasingly hectic and hazardous, a spaghetti-bowl junction of conflict and uneasy collaboration on the twisting, global highway. 1994 Michael Stutchbury Australian Financial Review (Dec. 9) “Taste Test For Apec As Miami Serves Spaghetti” p. 27: Second, it will highlight how the North American Free Trade Agreement is helping turn the world economy into a “spaghetti bowl” of discriminatory regional free trade areas which do not sit easily with the vague APEC vision of “open regionalism.“ 1995 [Richard Eyre-Eagles] Usenet: rec.radio.amateur.misc (Nov. 3) “Re: Dealers in Vegas?”: From the strip, take [15] North to the [93/95] North (to “Mercury”) through the Spaghetti Bowl (just look for all those annoying Fitzgerald’s billboards), stay in the right lane and exit Rancho, turn Right, head up about 1/2 a mile and look for the beams on the right side of the street. 2006 Reuters (Nov. 10) “Africa trade pacts slow investment—W.Bank official” (in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania): In addition to several bilateral trade agreements, African countries belong to at least 12 regional trade agreements, each with a different set of rules that members and non-members have to follow while trading. Their memberships often overlap and diagrams illustrating them look like doodles, prompting economists to refer to them as a “spaghetti bowl.“

Posted 28 Nov 06 | Permalink | Tell a Friend

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Spaghetti bowl: teerm commonly used by programmers and technical writers in 80’s referring to untidy and unnecessarily complex code

by Doreen M Kowalczewski 28 Nov 06, 0509 GMT