I like the idea in theory. In practice it just means space deliberately made unavailable for books.
“Smoke test” is possibly a borrowing from the older typographical sense, where a new sort (an individual piece of type for a given character, ligature, or glyph) being carved is held over a smoky flame and pressed to a sheet of paper to test how it looks without needing to get ink on it. Metafont has an explicit smoke mode when designing a font.
The result of a failed electronics smoke test is a very characteristic smell, which in my experience is often called a “brown smell”.
I’ve heard it said that the mark of an experienced technician is that they know you have to hit it. The mark of an expert technician is that they know where to hit it. The mark of a master technician is that they know how hard to hit it.
Also to prevent tear out on the back surface.
And from the comments: Bodge is a technical term in woodworking for working with green wood.
(Edited to fix typos and image that were bugging me)
