What is the "garbage adapter pattern"?

Back in 2009, an answer mentioned the "garbage 开发者_如何学运维adapter pattern", in reference to what happens when you try and add tests to a legacy code base that you are not allowed to radically modify. I was unable to find any other mentions of this phrase. Does any have some guesses as to what it was intended to refer to?

There is no such actual coding pattern at all; the person answering just means someone has written code to 'adapt' some 'garbage' code to something usable.