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more about hairy
hairy |
4 definitions found From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: Hairy \Hair"y\, a. Bearing or covered with hair; made of or resembling hair; rough with hair; rough with hair; rough with hair; hirsute. His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge. --Milton. From WordNet r 1.6 [wn]: hairy adj 1: having or covered with hair; "Jacob was a hairy man"; "a hairy caterpillar" [syn: {hirsute}] [ant: {hairless}] 2: hazardous and frightening; "hairy moments in the mountains" From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) [jargon]: hairy adj 1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about." See also {hirsute}. A well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem states that any continuous transformation of a 2-sphere into itself has at least one fixed point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term `hairy' with the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball smooth." The adjective `long-haired' is well-attested to have been in slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern `hairy' senses 1 and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use In fact the noun `long-hair' was at the time used to describe a person satisfying sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish `hairy' as a sort of stunted mutant relic. In British mainstream use hairy" means "dangerous", and consequently, in British programming terms, hairy" may be used to denote complicated and/or incomprehensible code, but only if that complexity or incomprehesiveness is also considered dangerous. From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (13 Mar 01) [foldoc]: hairy 1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about." See also {hirsute}. A well-known result in {topology} called the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem states that any continuous transformation of a surface into itself has at least one {fixed point}. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term hairy" with the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball smooth." The adjective "long-haired" is well-attested to have been in slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern hairy" and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use In fact the noun "long-hair" was at the time used to describe a hairy person. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish hairy" as a sort of stunted mutant relic. [{Jargon File}] (1995-04-16)
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