object (see {frob}); often one that doesn't fit well into the
scheme of things. "A LISP property list is a good place to store
crufties (or, collectively, {random} cruft)."

This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of
its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at
Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it's
said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII.
To this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of random
techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the
term as a knock on the competition.

:crumb: /n./ Two binary digits; a {quad}. Larger than a
{bit}, smaller than a {nybble}. Considered silly.
Syn. {tayste}. General discussion of such terms is under
{nybble}.

:crunch: 1. /vi./ To process, usually in a time-consuming or
complicated way. Connotes an essentially trivial operation that is
nonetheless painful to perform. The pain may be due to the
triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000.
"FORTRAN programs do mostly {number-crunching}." 2. /vt./ To
reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that produces bit
configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such as
by a Huffman code. (The file ends up looking something like a
paper document would if somebody crunched the paper into a wad.)
Since such compression usually takes more computations than simpler
methods such as run-length encoding, the term is doubly
appropriate. (This meaning is usually used in the construction
`file crunch(ing)' to distinguish it from {number-crunching}.)