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hairy
(redirected from hairy caterpillars)

    Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical 0.01 sec.
1.hairy - Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is incredibly hairy."
2.hairy - Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy."
3.hairy - 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.

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.
4.(topology)hairy - hairy ball.
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Byline: EUAN STRETCH SUPER hairy caterpillars which cause breathing trouble and nasty rashes are on the march.
THE INVASION OF THE HAIRY CATERPILLARS; Move sparks allergy alert by The Mirror (London, England)
The hairy caterpillars of this species, popularly called 'Woolly Bears', used to be a common feature 30 or 40 years ago, but it is thought that milder, wetter winters do not favour this species.
The moths of Tees Valley's industrial sites; Robert Woods reports on ... by Evening Gazette (Middlesbrough, England)
There's nowhere to put a grand piano, even if I could afford one, because my spare room is a midden of bits of wood, empty CD cases, dolls made out of wooden spoons (a present from Romania, don't ask), old trainers, Elvis Viewmasters, undeveloped film, crockery and small strips of sticky-backed Velcro, which seem to be breeding like an army of hairy caterpillars, even though I've no idea what they're for.
Lucy Sweet : I can't help obsessing over people's houses by Daily Record (Glasgow, Scotland)
 
 
 
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