24 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
24 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
hairy
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adj. 1. Annoyingly complicated. DWIM is incredibly hairy. 2.
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Incomprehensible. DWIM is incredibly hairy. 3. Of people, high-powered,
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authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except
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in context: He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry
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about. See also hirsute. There is a theorem in simplicial homology theory
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which states that any continuous tangent field on a 2-sphere is null at
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least in a point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term
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hairy with the informal version of this theorem; You can't comb a hairy ball
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smooth. (Previous versions of this entry associating the above informal
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statement with the Brouwer fixed-point theorem were incorrect.) The
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adjective long-haired is well-attested to have been in slang use among
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scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern
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hairy senses 1 and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In
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fact the noun long-hair was at the time used to describe a person satisfying
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sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted
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as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish hairy as a
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sort of stunted mutant relic. In British mainstream use, hairy means
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dangerous , and consequently, in British programming terms, hairy may be
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used to denote complicated and/or incomprehensible code, but only if that
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complexity or incomprehesiveness is also considered dangerous.
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