What the heck is a Glorkum?

So I'm still here playing Nethack, trying to unlock Wizard Mode, and I get to my inevitable death early on in the game.

The twist? Everything I had equipped has become a Glorkum.

Google has nothing for me, referring only to "gorkums".

So, what I'm asking here is, what on God's green earth is a Glorkum, and why have my items turned into them?


glorkum is part of a debug message used for an object of unknown type in xname, the function Nethack uses to figure out what an object should be called. If you see it, you've encountered a bug.