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wart n.

A small, [crock]y [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].