crock

v. break, damage, injure; make dirty

n. clay jar; someone or something that is old and decrepit (person, horse, etc.); lie, nonsense

Especially in engineering, a crock is a botched attempt or design to achieve something. An automobile with intentionally designed square wheels would be a crock. (Crock itself is a slang word meaning something which is broken down or worn out or which is nonsense.)Most of Rube Goldberg's or Heath Robinson's unlikely machines were crocks. Because they were crocks, they were funny. In absolute contrast, there is little more condemnatory in an engineering context than to declare something a crock.A kludge, by contrast is typically something that works, however clumsily. A kludge'd design which didn't actually work, will probably also be a crock.
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Noun
1. nonsense; foolish talk; "that's a crock"
(hypernym) nonsense, bunk, nonsensicality, meaninglessness, hokum
2. an earthen jar (made of baked clay)
(synonym) earthenware jar
(hypernym) jar
Verb
1. release color when rubbed, of badly dyed fabric
(hypernym) run, bleed
2. soil with or as with crock
(hypernym) dirty, soil, begrime, grime, colly, bemire
(derivation) earthenware jar

(v. t.)
To soil by contact, as with soot, or with the coloring matter of badly dyed cloth.
  

(v. t.)
To lay up in a crock; as, to crock butter.
  

(v. i.)
To give off crock or smut.
  

(n.)
The loose black particles collected from combustion, as on pots and kettles, or in a chimney; soot; smut; also, coloring matter which rubs off from cloth.
  

(n.)
Any piece of crockery, especially of coarse earthenware; an earthen pot or pitcher.
  

(n.)
A low stool.
  

[American scatologism "crock of shit"] 1. An awkward feature or programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. For example, using small integers to represent error codes without the program interpreting them to the user (as in, for example, Unix "make(1)", which returns code 139 for a process that dies due to segfault).
2. A technique that works acceptably, but which is quite prone to failure if disturbed in the least. For example, a too-clever programmer might write an assembler which mapped instruction mnemonics to numeric opcodes algorithmically, a trick which depends far too intimately on the particular bit patterns of the opcodes. (For another example of programming with a dependence on actual opcode values, see The Story of Mel.) Many crocks have a tightly woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure. See kluge, brittle. The adjectives "crockish" and "crocky", and the nouns "crockishness" and "crockitude", are also used.
[Jargon File]