under the hood
prep. [hot-rodder talk] 1. Used to introduce the
underlying implementation of a product (hardware, software, or
idea). Implies that the implementation is not intuitively obvious
from the appearance, but the speaker is about to enable the
listener to
grok it. "Let's now look under the hood to see
how ...." 2. Can also imply that the implementation is much
simpler than the appearance would indicate "Under the hood, we
are just fork/execing the shell." 3. Inside a chassis, as in
"Under the hood, this baby has a 40MHz 68030!"
