hairy

	This is the JargonFile ^(V4.00) entry for hairy - Next: HAKMEM, Prev: hairball
: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 theres nothing to worry about." See also hirsute. A well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem states that any continuous transformation of a surface into itself has at least one fixed point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term hairy with the informal version of this theorem; "You cant comb a hairy ball smooth." 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.
* (text is auto-included via JargonExtension by mutante using jargon with VERSION 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996* - JargonFile by Eric S. Raymond is in the public domain)*