Why does hack mean something completely different to non techies?

Surely this causes a lot of confusion and even suspsion when the rest of the world thinks 'to hack' is to break in a system with malicious intent.

I thus never use the phrase 'I've been hacking some code' to avoid giving the impression I am some sort of virtual cyber criminal.

Seeing as the rest of the world is unlikely to start calling 'hackers' 'crackers' maybe techies should change their terminolgy for munging quick fix solutions. <\p> Hack is a negative word, it means to commit a dirty foul in football(soccer) or can be used in referance to machetes for instance. You will find no hacks in good code and if you do they won't stay there for long.