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wave a dead chicken

Rating

wave a dead chicken v.

To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended. “I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug.” Compare voodoo programming, rain dance; see also casting the runes.

The Jargon File

Cartoons

The crunchly saga

The infamous Crunchly cartoons by The Great Quux are woven into the lexicon, each next to an appropriate entry. To read them in the sequence in which they were written, chase pointers from here using the ‘next cartoon’ information in the captions.