Hairy
from
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Hairy \Hair"y\ (-[y^]), a.
1. Bearing or covered with hair; made of or resembling hair;
rough with hair; hirsute.
[1913 Webster]
His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge. --Milton.
[1913 Webster]
2. Very complicated, difficult, or involved; as, a hairy
problem; a hairy equation. [Colloq.]
[PJC]
3. Dangerous or frightening; as, a hairy encounter with a
mugger.
[PJC]
from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
hairy
adj.
1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."
2. Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."
3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or
incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this
hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about." See also
{hirsute}.
There is a theorem in simplicial homology theory which states that any
continuous tangent field on a 2-sphere is null at least in a point.
Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term `hairy'
with the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy
ball smooth." (Previous versions of this entry associating the above
informal statement with the Brouwer fixed-point theorem were
incorrect.)
The adjective `long-haired' is well-attested to have been in slang use
among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was
equivalent to modern hairy senses 1 and 2, and was very likely
ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun `long-hair' was at the
time used to describe a person satisfying sense 3. Both senses
probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature
trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish hairy as a sort of
stunted mutant relic.
In British mainstream use, "hairy" means "dangerous", and
consequently, in British programming terms, "hairy" may be used to
denote complicated and/or incomprehensible code, but only if that
complexity or incomprehesiveness is also considered dangerous.
from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
hairy
1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."
2. Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."
3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert,
and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context:
"He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry
about." See also {hirsute}.
The adjective "long-haired" is well-attested to have been in
slang use among scientists and engineers during the early
1950s; it was equivalent to modern "hairy" and was very likely
ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun "long-hair"
was at the time used to describe a hairy person. Both senses
probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a
signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish
"hairy" as a sort of stunted mutant relic.
4. <topology> {hairy ball}.
[{Jargon File}]
(2001-03-29)
from
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
145 Moby Thesaurus words for "hairy":
Herculean, abstruse, arduous, asperous, barbellate, barfy, bearded,
bewhiskered, bristled, bristling, bristly, brutal, bum, bushy,
capillary, chancy, cheesy, cirrose, cirrous, comate, complex,
complicated, confused, confusing, craggy, crappy, creepy, critical,
crummy, dangerous, delicate, demanding, difficile, difficult,
dirty, downy, exacting, fibered, fibroid, fibrous, flagelliform,
fleecy, flocculent, flossy, fluffy, formidable, frightening,
fringy, funicular, furry, fuzzy, glochidiate, godawful, goshawful,
gossamery, grim, hairlike, hard, hard-earned, hard-fought, harsh,
hazardous, hirsute, hispid, icky, intricate, jagged, jawbreaking,
jeopardous, knotted, knotty, laborious, lanate, ligamental, matted,
mean, nappy, nerve-racking, no picnic, not easy, operose, perilous,
pilose, precarious, problematic, pubescent, punk, putrid, rigorous,
risky, ropy, rough, rugged, scabrous, scary, scraggy,
set with thorns, setaceous, setose, setous, severe, shagged,
shaggy, shitty, silky, spiny, steep, stinking, stinky, strenuous,
strigal, strigate, strigose, stringy, stubbled, stubbly, studded,
taeniate, taeniform, tangled, thorny, threadlike, thready,
ticklish, toilsome, tough, treacherous, trichoid, tricky, tufted,
uncertain, uneven, unhealthy, unshaven, unshorn, unsmooth, unsound,
uphill, vomity, whiskered, wicked, wiry, woolly, worrying,
yecchy
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