Crock 596319 217516875 2008-06-06T11:30:36Z Bigbluefish 457199 make clearer {{For|the dishware|Crock (dishware)}} {{For|the American comic strip|Crock (comic)}} Especially in [[engineering]], a '''crock''' is a [[botch]]ed 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<ref>Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Random House, 2006</ref> 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. The term was early used at the [[Tech Model Railroad Club|MIT Model Railroad Club]], and from there moved to computing and into computing terminology. According to the [[Jargon File]] the use of the word "crock" as engineering [[jargon]] is connected to its use for dishware by the American [[scatology|scatologism]] "crock of shit" for extreme forms of what would otherwise be called ''[[bullshit]]''.<ref>[http://catb.org/jargon/html/C/crock.html Crock], entry in the [[Jargon File]]</ref> ==References== <references/> ==See also== * [[Jargon File]] [[Category:Engineering]]