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.