hysterical reasons

hysterical reasons

(Or "hysterical raisins") A variant on the stock phrase "forhistorical reasons", indicating specifically that somethingmust be done in some stupid way for backward compatibility,and moreover that the feature it must be compatible with wasthe result of a bad design in the first place. "All IBM PCvideo adaptors have to support MDA text mode for hystericalreasons." Compare bug-for-bug compatible.