Word.ws English Dictionary

hairy arm

hairy arm noun: a purposeful flaw or obvious mistake introduced, usually to a graphic design, in order to bait or divert the attention of a boss or client who might otherwise focus on harder-to-fix or less trivial mistakes.

Noun

hairy arm (plural hairy arms)

  1. (slang) A purposeful flaw or obvious mistake introduced, usually to a graphic design, in order to bait or divert the attention of a boss or client who might otherwise focus on harder-to-fix or less trivial mistakes.
    • "You should always put a hairy arm into every project you work on, to give the client something to change. Of course, you've got to make the arm dumb enough."2000, Lawrence San, “inSANity by San: The Hairy Arm”, in 1099, archived from the original on 19 Mar 2025
    • […]is the hairy-arm story. This apocryphal tale has many versions in many industries, but they're all about the same thing - managing those who have power over you by leaving errors in your work. The first print version appeared in a blog[…]2013, Wendy Laura Belcher, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, Second Edition: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, University of Chicago Press, page 356
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see hairy, arm.
    • My brother has hairy arms.

Forms of hairy arm

pluralhairy arms

Questions about hairy arm

What does hairy arm mean?
Hairy arm means a purposeful flaw or obvious mistake introduced, usually to a graphic design, in order to bait or divert the attention of a boss or client who might otherwise focus on harder-to-fix or less trivial mistakes.
What part of speech is hairy arm?
Hairy arm is a noun.
What is the plural of hairy arm?
The plural of hairy arm is hairy arms.

Words near hairy arm in the dictionary

  1. hairworking
  2. hairworks
  3. hairworm
  4. hairworms
  5. hairy
  6. hairy arm
  7. hairy armadillo
  8. hairy armadillos
  9. hairy arms
  10. hairy ball theorem
  11. hairy balls

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hairy arm (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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