OddHack

"We are biological entities, designed by natural selection, which is a tinker, not an ideal engineer. Computer programmers call an ad hoc fix a "kludge," and the mixture of disdain and begrudged admiration reserved for kludges parallels the biologists' bemusement with the panda's thumb and other fascinating examples of bricolage, to use François Jacob's term.

"The finest inadvertent Spoonerism I ever heard was uttered by the linguist Barbara Partee, in heated criticism of an an acknowledged kludge in an AI natural language parser: "That's so odd hack!" Nature is full of odd hacks, many of them perversely brilliant, but although this is widely appreciated, its implications for the study of the mind are often found repugnant by philosophers since their traditional aprioristic methods of investigating the mind are relatively powerless to explore phenomena that may be contrived of odd hacks."

Daniel Dennett, in ''Consciousness Explained'' (1991)