“Dragon Tracks”. I was thinking about this phrase after hearing it on a Car Talk rerun a few months ago, and it suddenly seemed appropo again last week as I was doing some bug fixes in our legacy code base at work.
The Urban Dictionary defines the term as “Said of an object that may have had a shady history, or was possibly used in a crime, in a previous owner’s hands.” I feel that “has potentially massive hidden issues” might be another useful definition.
I don’t really have anywhere else that I’m going with this. It’s more just interesting because I’d never heard the term until a few months ago, then suddenly I’ve heard it in a bunch of places, referring to everything from sketchy old cars, to nasty things hidden in legacy code, to sketchy people.