| n. | 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. |
| 1. | A low stool. | |
| 1. | Any piece of crockery, especially of coarse earthenware; an earthen pot or pitcher. | |
| 1. | a person who is worn out with age or illness. | |
| 2. | an old person who complains frequently about illness, especially imaginary ailments. | |
| 1. | nonsense; balderdash; humbug; - usually used in the phrase a crock. | |
| v. t. | 1. | To soil by contact, as with soot, or with the coloring matter of badly dyed cloth. |
| v. i. | 1. | To give off crock or smut. |
| v. t. | 1. | To lay up in a crock; |
| Noun | 1. | crock - nonsense; foolish talk; "that's a crock" |
| 2. | crock - an earthen jar (made of baked clay) Synonyms: earthenware jar | |
| Verb | 1. | crock - release color when rubbed, of badly dyed fabric |
| 2. | crock - soil with or as with crock |
| 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 "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. |