Crock
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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]]