wart

A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an otherwise

clean design. Something conspicuous for localised ugliness,

especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For

example, in some versions of "csh(1)", single quotes

literalise every character inside them except "!". In ANSI C,

the "?" syntax used for obtaining ASCII characters in a

foreign environment is a wart. See also miswart.

[Jargon File]