[krok] 
| 1. | an earthenware pot, jar, or other container. |
| 2. | a fragment of earthenware; potsherd. |
[krok] | 1. | a person or thing that is old, decrepit, or broken-down. |
| 2. | Slang. a person who complains about or insists on being treated for an imagined illness. |
| 3. | an old ewe. |
| 4. | an old worn-out horse. |
| 5. | British Slang. to disable or injure. |
[krok] | 1. | British Dialect. soot; smut. |
| 2. | excess surface dye from imperfectly dyed cloth. |
| 3. | British Dialect. to soil with soot. |
| 4. | (of cloth) to give off excess surface dye when rubbed. |
[krok] | a lie; exaggeration; nonsense: The entire story is just a crock. |
| crock 1 (krŏk) n.
[Middle English crokke, from Old English crocc. Sense 2, short for crock of shit.] |
| crock 2 (krŏk) n. Soot. v. crocked, crock·ing, crocks v. tr. To soil with or as if with crock. v. intr. To give off soot or color. [Origin unknown.] |
| crock 3 (krŏk) n. One that is worn-out, decrepit, or impaired; a wreck. v. crocked, crock·ing, crocks v. intr. To become weak or disabled. Often used with up. v. tr. To disable; wreck. Often used with up. [Earlier, old ewe that has ceased bearing; probably akin to Norwegian krake, sickly animal, and Middle Dutch kraecke, broken-down horse.] |
crock
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crock (of shit)
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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.
[The Jargon File]