wart n.

A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean design. Something conspicuous for localized ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For example, in some versions of csh(1), single quotes literalize 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.

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