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crufty: /kruhf´tee/, adj. [very common; origin unknown; poss. from ‘crusty’ or
‘cruddy’] 1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The
canonical example is “This is standard old
crufty DEC software”. In fact, one fanciful
theory of the origin of crufty holds
that was originally a mutation of ‘crusty’ applied to DEC
software so old that the ‘s’ characters were tall and skinny,
looking more like ‘f’ characters. 2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk.
Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup. 3. Generally unpleasant. 4. (sometimes spelled cruftie)
n. A small crufty object (see
frob); often one that doesn't fit well into the
scheme of things. “A LISP property list is a good place to store
crufties (or, collectively, random
cruft).” This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of
its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard
University which is part of the old physics building; it's said to have
been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early
1993) the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln
Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the
competition.
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