meaning of crock
1. 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.
2. To soil by contact, as with soot, or with the coloring matter of badly dyed cloth.
3. To give off crock or smut.
4. A low stool.
5. Any piece of crockery, especially of coarse earthenware; an earthen pot or pitcher.
6. To lay up in a crock; as, to crock butter.
7. crock [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 "make1", 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] cron
8. an earthen jar made of baked clay
Related Words
crock | crock pot | crock up | crocked | crocker | crockery | crocket | crocketed | crocketing | crockett | crocking | crocky |
