A wildly offensive analogy.

I assume he means like a red-headed step-child.

PC police might be on to terms like this nowadays, but by using the term I understood them to mean:

- A less loved resource - A potentially ugly resource - A resource that causes trouble

Think "red-headed stepchild". The weird ones.

When I was a freshman in HS, a friend and I were playing Betrayal at Krondor late one night, just talking randomly about the stupid things that nerdy freshman talk about. At some point he just turns to me with this weird look on his face and says, completely ernest, "I just realized... I'm literally a red-headed step-child."

There was this long pause and then we both just started laughing.

File under: shit that doesn't happen any more because nobody plays single-player games side-by-side, late at night any longer.

Entities that one doesn't normally think of as a resource, such as an algorithm.