crufty

/kruhftee/ , 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 thes 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.
