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}.
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 can't
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" 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.
[{Jargon File}]
(1995-04-16)