featurectomy /fee`ch*r-ek't*-mee/ n.
The act of removing a feature from a program. Featurectomies
come in two flavors, the `righteous' and the `reluctant'.
Righteous featurectomies are performed because the remover
believes the program would be more elegant without the feature,
or there is already an equivalent and better way to achieve the
same end. (Doing so is not quite the same thing as removing a
misfeature.) Reluctant
featurectomies are performed to satisfy some external constraint
such as code size or execution speed.