Accepting the previous conclusions about choice of language, I'm rolling with "janky" to describe things that look like they shouldn't work, but do anyways (and as such, these are among the best moments for fond recollection in years to come).
You wouldn't know it by looking at our more recent robots, but 862 was once defined by our mastery of all things jank. With inconsistent availability of build spaces and a complete lack of precision tooling (our first in-house drill press was a pretty big deal), we promoted ourselves based on our "old school" build philosophy (if it requires any more tooling than a hacksaw and drill, it can't be done).
During my rookie year in '06, our team had an expanding hopper to hold poof balls; the walls of the hopper were made of fabric, which naturally kept getting torn. In between each match, we patched up any new holes with zip ties, until eventually we ended up with no fabric left at all; just a sheet of zip ties linked together like chainmaille.
(I would also call out our collection roller system from the same year, but that wasn't really all that janky; it just sucked.)
The next year in '07, we initially didn't give our claw enough leverage to consistently clamp onto the inner tubes and hold them stable; a couple of gel insoles zip tied to the claw helped to solve that problem with better friction.
(Don't even get me started on the janked-out ramp we concocted for other bots to climb on top of;
alumalite sign panels were never meant for use as weight-bearing elements, much less with 2.5" swiss cheese holes drilled through them!)
During the '08 competition season, we discovered that we had vastly underestimated the side loads that our elbow joint would be subjected to; we managed to get by for a while, bending it back into shape in between each match with a pair of vise grips and our trusty dead-blow hammer... But when it snapped clean in two near the end of the competition season, we ended up needing to replace the whole assembly.
Later during the post-season, we wanted to protect our nice expensive mecanum wheels during demonstrations on concrete; for a while there, we ran the bot with strips of carpet zip tied to the wheels as sacrificial treads.
(We also ended up using the same carpet-tread technique a year later in '09, of course, to protect the FRC-mandated slick wheels!)