The O.E.D. says the origin is uncertain, the meaning is perhaps 'a sheriff', and it's now used only in allusion to Shakespeare's 'great Oneyres'. However, it does seem to be sure that the -yer is the same as in lawyer; great oneyer is given as an example under the entry for the suffix.
T.H.E.: 'When a large number of departments in teaching-led universities were discovered by the 2008 research assessment exercise to be producing world-class work, a new phrase quickly entered the higher education lexicon.
'"Pockets of excellence" became a rallying cry for post-1992 universities keen to show that they could compete with the research elite. But a subtle rebranding of the "pockets" by the Higher Education Funding Council for England has raised eyebrows - and shown how politically sensitive the pockets have become.
'Last week, David Eastwood, chief executive of Hefce, confirmed that the funding body's preferred metaphor for the departments was now "islands of excellence", because it imbued them with a greater sense of isolation.'
WordNet lacks the sense 'resemble' (which the O.E.D. marks 'now colloq.'), as e.g. here: 'This girl kind of favored Kanako but it definitely wasn’t her'.
Spiked: 'Bored to death of the misery memoir, those endless books by adults claiming that their lives have been scarred by childhood abuse and neglect, normally at the hands of their parents? Well, now there’s a new, overgrown kid on the block. Welcome to the misery mum-oir, a book by a successful middle-class mother claiming that her life has been ruined by her abusive and unappreciative child.'
What it means: 'A number of UK and US media outlets, including the BBC, have called on Iran to allow independent access to detained American journalist Roxana Saberi.'
I wonder how it should be interpreted when people put definitions in the tag box (e.g. on tjuze). If it's because they want their definitions floating above the comments, that's a sign that some sort of dedicated definition-adding facility (with additions displayed under WordNet's?) might be useful; but if it's because they're new here and haven't worked out how it all works, having yet another way of adding data to word pages might confuse them further.
It sounds nicer than a storm/tempest in a teacup/teapot/other. 'There were a couple of scenes where there were these cross-like structures, and the whole thing was the most incredible temptress in a teapot, in that we were accused of censoring it. We even ran the screenshots side by side. But some random fan got hold of it and it turned into a firestorm. That to me served as a reminder of how sensitive the hardcore market is.'
B.B.C. News: 'Even these figures overstate the number of pirates that actually face trial because they include those handed over to the authorities in Puntland, the semi-autonomous region in the north-east of Somalia from which most pirates come.'
Telstar Logistics: 'Special Agent Oddwick recently enjoyed an Amphicar sighting in Florida, although he didn't fully realize it at the time. Instead, he reported seeing a "boat/car thingy" and noted that he didn't believe the propellers were functional.'
prolixpolymath managed to add this to the database as 'onomatopoeia that best describes prolixpolymath', but in spite of that the link from his/her profile breaks; you have to use %3f. I've added this to Wordie Paradox using that method, and the result is another entry that doesn't know it's on the list: 'appears in these lists' is empty. (Edit: ah, I realised this has already been done with blah ... does that count%3f. However, the profile links of the people who added them break differently: this one produces a 500 Application Error, whereas the other produces a 'nobody is listing' page.)
Sunday Herald: 'The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) "lost knowledge" of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million... Neither the NNSA nor the UK Ministry of Defence would say anything about the nature or function of Fogbank. But it is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear bomb. US officials have said that manufacturing the material requires a solvent cleaning agent which is "extremely flammable" and "explosive". The process also involves dealing with "toxic materials" hazardous to workers.'
B.B.C. News: 'Another problem facing legitimate firms is the practice of false association. This is when a domain name - with similar, but not identical wording to a popular website - is registered (and often made to look like) the legitimate site in order to direct unsuspecting users to bogus or offensive pages... The report says that the majority of illegal sites involved in so-called "brandjacking" are hosted in the United States, Germany and the UK.'
Galileo Project: 'If the Europa Orbiter finds a submerged ocean, we could look for landing sites where instruments could descend to the surface, melt through the ice, and deploy "hydrobots" --- submarine robotic explorers.'
Languagehat: 'Among the delightful trivia Sauer mentions are the "rare Latin lemma... bradigabo (badrigabo) in Épinal-Erfurt 131, the meaning of which is unknown; it was glossed as felduuop (Ép) / felduus (Erf), the meaning of which is also unknown"...'
As regards viewing words by initial letter, see my comment from about a month ago regarding wildcarding, which would be still more versatile.
Maybe if alphabetical searches are implemented there should be additional filters for searches, e.g. 'beginning with a AND listed by $username'. (And while we're on the subject of search and search filters, I wonder whether a search function for tags might be useful.)
B.B.C. News: 'One of the last World War II taboos is being lifted in France.
'So-called "Boche babies" - the illegitimate offspring of occupying enemy troops - are speaking openly for the first time about their family secret and hunting for long-lost German fathers.'
What it means: 'A new survey claims regional breeds of sheep face a heightened risk of disease because of their tendency to remain together in one location' (emphasis added).
Strange Maps: 'A pene-enclave is almost an enclave in the same way that a peninsulaalmost is an island. But only on a strictly lexical level. If we descend from the abstraction of definition to particular examples, things get messy — in an almost clintonesque way: all depends on what your definition of almost is.'
'Our analysts speak polysyllabically and in turn of five new processes: "deterritorialization" (culture as torn out of its geography and made homeless); "hybridity" (cultures as mixed up together); "liminality" (poor cultures shoved off the edge by rish ones); "diasporization" (cultures scattered worldwide but persisting in a mutant form); above all, analysts speak of "mediatization" (the stories of culture detached from their local habitations and carried largely abroad by the electronic media).'
~ Fred Inglis, Culture (Key Concepts series), p. 146
If you're now saying you're back on the bike, dare I ask what happened to the horse...? Please tell me it's living out its retirement in a pasture somewhere, or something--
Regarding list URLs based on the wrong titles: is it my imagination, or did http://wordie.org/lists/meta use to be a working URL? You can see me using it on this page, about four months ago. It's now got to be http://wordie.org/lists/metaphysics-buzz-words-2, so it seems this bug can actually cause previously existing links to break.
Times: 'It sounds like science fiction, but politicians, lawyers and advertisers are falling over themselves to buy into the latest scientific discovery: brainjacking. Soon our secret desires and not so innocent thoughts could become public knowledge.'
Spiked: 'Fish calls this process of intellectual interrogation “academicising�?, which he describes thus: "To academicise a topic is to detach it from the context of its real world urgency, where there is a vote to be taken or an agenda to be embraced, and insert it into a context of academic urgency, where there is an account to be offered or an analysis to be performed."'
Scientific American: 'February 28th is International Sword Swallower’s Awareness Day, according to practitioner Dan Meyer, who recently demonstrated the technique at the AAAS meeting in Chicago.'
The Escapist: 'In reverence of the wonderfully dark stories, the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society created its anti-Christmas album A Very Scary Solstice... Three years on, and George Taylor helps to add a little "Fred Astaire" charm, and a lot of CGI, to this anti-carol based on the book "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".'
B.B.C. News: 'A proposal to name the marionberry as the official berry of the US west coast state of Oregon has been scuppered by a grower of a rival berry type.
'The Oregonian newspaper said the resolution was removed from the state legislature's agenda at the request of a blackberry farmer, Larry Duyck.
D.R.B.: 'The "natural" theory of nature being responsible for the Majorly Mysterious Mima Mounds starts to crumble upon further investigation. Sure there’s plenty of things we don’t yet understand about how our native world behaves scientists do know enough to be able to say what it can’t do – and it’s looking pretty certain it can’t be as precise, orderly, or meticulous as the mounds.'
The Escapist: 'The UK government is advertising for a 'Director of Digital Engagement'. The job description? To create strategies for communicating over social networking sites... The job advertisement has understandably come under fire from the government's rivals. Susie Squire, the TaxPayers' Alliance campaign manager, said: "The Government should not be spending money on a Twittercrat during a recession..."'
Scarthin Books: 'In the absence of slug-pellets, old wives masquerading as gurus crowd in -beer traps, milk traps (for those who don't like wasting beer) or barriers of soot, sand, lime, crushed egg-shells or double-whammy combinations of the above are advocated but are tedious to install, can vanish in a night's heavy rain and are at best only partially effective. My preferred solution requires capital expenditure but is then almost maintenance-free and has a working lifetime of years, perhaps decades. It is the SCARTHIN SLUG-MOAT (or for Google's Sake SLUGMOAT).'
B.B.C. News: 'Mike Myers' comedy flop The Love Guru has dominated the Golden Raspberries, the spoof prizes awarded to the worst Hollywood movies of the year.
'The film won Razzies for worst picture, worst actor - for Myers in the title role - and worst screenplay, in the annual eve-of-Oscars mock-ceremony.'
Fireworks Glossary: 'A composition giving off hardly any light when it burns. It is used in stars to give a winking effect, or to separate colour changes.'
World Wide Words: 'This has appeared, like a dusty fly speck dotted across the review pages of the more upmarket British newspapers this month, because Altermodern is the name given to Tate Britain’s Triennial 2009 exhibition. The term was coined by the exhibition’s curator, the French cultural theorist Nicolas Bourriaud.'
Theis is already in the O.E.D. with the meaning thus (19th C.). It's apparently a nautical term, so I can't guarantee it's what the spammer had in mind.
The O.E.D. says an acquirement in the sense of 'that which is acquired' is 'usually a personal attainment of body or mind, as distinct from an acquisition or material and external gain, and opposed to a natural gift or talent'. So maybe something like accomplishment would be a better alternative, depending on the context.
B.B.C.: 'It was discovered that the man every member of the Irish police's rank and file had been looking for - a Mr Prawo Jazdy - wasn't exactly the sort of prized villain whose apprehension leads to an officer winning an award.
'In fact he wasn't even human.
'"Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence," read a letter from June 2007 from an officer working within the Garda's traffic division.'
From some new educational proposals: 'The domains would be: arts and creativity; citizenship and ethics; faith and belief; language, oracy and literacy; mathematics; physical and emotional health; place and time (geography and history); science and technology.'
Culture24: 'The organisation that oversees the reporting of archaeological finds by members of the public in England and Wales, the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), has moved to allay fears following media reports highlighting the rise of illegal metal detecting or ‘nighthawking’.'
Times: 'Summer is coming and the strolling season beckons. Or rather it does to those Italians, Bulgarians and Spanish who enjoy, respectively, the pleasures of the passegiattag; see bilby's comment on it'>edit: missing a g; see bilby's comment on it, the korso, and the paseo — which have been a part of European life for centuries.
'Summer? The paseo? Well, think of a favoured spot — square, garden, avenue — where people meet after work or at weekends to walk up and down. Men and women walk up and down, young and old walk up and down, rich and poor walk up and down. The activity is instinctive and inclusive. It has always had significance.'
You can get that feature easily enough by using a flat text file. After all, a Wordie list is just an ordered set of links to Wordie pages; if you don't want to share it or let people comment on it, all you need to do is write down some URLs in order.
As a verb: 'The conceit of death by laughter is a curious one and not restricted to the ancient world. Anthony Trollope, for example, is reputed to have “corpsed�? during a reading of F. Anstey’s comic novel Vice Versa.'
T.L.S.: 'It was, in fact, a firm rule of ancient “gelastics�? – to borrow a term (from the Greek gelan, to laugh) from Stephen Halliwell’s weighty new study of Greek laughter – that the joker was never far from being the butt of his own jokes.'
The Onion mocking the WordNet #1 sense: 'The holy and sacrosanct miracle of birth, long revered by human civilization as the most mysterious and magical of all phenomena, took place for what experts are estimating "must be at least the 83 billionth time" Tuesday with the successful delivery of eight-pound, four-ounce baby boy Darryl Brandon Severson at Holy Mary Mother Of God Hospital.'
'So why did Moses say things like, "And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean..." and, "Command the children of Israel, that they shall put out of the camp every leper..."? On top of everything else, it seems leprosy sufferers are the victims of mistranslation. The Hebrew word tsara'ath, translated as lepra in Latin and Greek, conveys the notion of one who is stricken or defiled, insofar as the concept is at all translatable into a modern idiom; it certainly does not mean leprosy, as we understand it. It is generally taken to be a generic term covering a range of dermatological diseases: leukoderma, vitiligo and psoriasis are among the most frequently cited.'
Tony Gould, Don't Fence Me In: From Curse to Cure: Leprosy In Modern Times, p. 3
B.B.C. News: '"They use abominable jargon - pupils have to be called apprenants or learners - and they promote this pedago-demago philosophy in which the teacher is supposed to be best mates with his class," she says.'
It would be nice to have some easy way of tracking which bugs are still open. Maybe I should extend the length of the features page with that suggestion.
Slashdot: 'The Harvard Law students defending accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum are doing their best to turn his upcoming trial into a media event. But when it comes to pure spectacle, they have nothing on The Pirate Bay. TPB is referring to the event as a 'spectrial,' a cross between a spectacle and a trial.'
Spiked: 'Hysteria over reclassification reached a fever pitch earlier this week, when the government’s chief drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, claimed that taking Ecstasy is about as dangerous as ‘Equasy’ – a condition he has made up to describe horse-riding. The number of deaths caused by the drug annually, Nutt asserts, is roughly equivalent to the number of those killed or injured riding.'
T.H.E.: 'While we were marching with lit torches across the croquet lawn to occupy the administrative building, we were led by a 'Tankist' (someone who joined the Communist Party when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968). The rest of us were all fooling around, having a laugh, half-pissed and asking who had the spliff, and suddenly he turned round and shouted "To the Winter Palace!" It was to the credit of most of the students that they fell about laughing.'
It's the " character messing things up. If you enter http://wordie.org/words/i thought you'd lost it when you added "haar".... *gg into your browser location bar you can enter through the back door and join in the fun.
Ian Creasey: 'Because I thought the story had a very British tone, I didn't bother sending it to any American magazines... First, I tried Interzone, who rejected it for being too funny. (In the David Pringle era, Interzone's steady diet of grey, depressing fiction earned it the affectionate nickname of Wrist-Slitters' Monthly.)'
Now there must be a list somewhere on which a name like this belongs...
Presumably a game suitable for fans of extreme ironing. Bradshaw of the Future: 'I really hope today's extreme etymology is true, because it's awesome.'
The Escapist: 'The problem, according to Stony Brook University Professor Dr. Joanne Davila, is that easy access to email, social networks and other forms of always-on communications leads to excessive and repetitive discussions of the same problem, also known as "co-rumination," which can worsen the mood of teenage girls and create negative emotions.'
Not a command: 'The Northern Island Assembly is set to debate a DUP motion calling for public representatives to be protected against having to name sources.'
B.B.C. News: 'A spokeswoman for the group, Nisha Susan, told the BBC it was giving chaddis (Hindi colloquial for underwear) as they alluded to a prominent Hindu right-wing group whose khaki-shorts-wearing cadres were often derisively called "chaddi wallahs" (chaddi wearers).'
Néojaponisme: 'By “haiku�? throughout this post I mean “haikoid works from both before and after the word haiku was invented�? in accordance with standard English usage.'
'Rose is famous for its unusual fauna. The balleron has a wooden spine. The dignipomp looks incredibly solemn. The musterach is very sensitive and sullen. The guggaflop is very, very, indeed very lazy.'
A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, entry on Rose (from Mervyn Peake's Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor)
'Among the bird species, the best-known are the gladdy-whingers, which lay their spotted eggs in basket nests in the booblow tree, and the flummywisters, a type of songbird usually seen in elm trees. In winter the young flummywisters wear warm underwear; to hear them singing as their mothers loosen their buttons in spring is a very good omen.'
A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, entry on Rootabaga County (from Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories).
Spiked: 'Insofar as there is any hint of a strategy in relation to tackling radicalisation, it always has a fantasy-like character. Often, the official discourse on radicalisation has much in common with attitudes that underpin the child protection industry. It warns that ‘vulnerable’ and ‘impressionable’ young people may be targeted on websites, campuses and at social venues, and ‘groomed’ by cynical operators. In November 2007, it was reported that the UK government’s Research, Information and Communication Unit would draw up ‘counter-narratives’ to the anti-Western messages on websites ‘designed to influence vulnerable and impressionable audiences here in the UK’.'
Just idly wondering: does anyone remember exactly what the banner text was for advertising on Tuesdays, before every day became Tuesday? It was something like: It's Tuesday, and we all know what that means: advertisements! Huzzah! Google's giant mechanical brain has decided that you, the consumer, might be interested in these fine products:
Improbable Research: 'In the June 28, 2008 issue of BMJ (the publication formerly known as the British Medical Journal) Barrie Smith, a retired physician from Birmingham, describes—though he does not name—a new form of the grand British tradition of otting. The proper name for it is obvious to anyone who reads Dr. Smith’s description: windowspotting.
'The best known of otting traditions is trainspotting. Some British citizens also practice planespotting, busspotting (a practice that now draws disapproval from the British Government, which views bus spotters as being possible terrorist spies) and other varieties of otting. These may all be descended from the ancient practice of bird spotting, also known as bird watching.'
'The LRC is an educational disaster. Here, where books are merely “learning resources�?, reading is about functional literacy instead of pleasure. A paperclip is a learning resource. Google Earth is a learning resource. But a book is “the distilled essence of a human soul�?. A book is something you take to bed with you. It is not a learning resource any more than a kiss is a coordinated interpersonal labial spasm.'
The O.E.D. defines stoled as 'wearing a stole'; stole as a verb in its own right, meanwhile, is listed with two senses, 'to provide (an altar, a church) with altar-stoles' and 'of a plant: to develop stolons'.
As a verb: 'All went well at first, with inflation, and therefore rent rises, staying low. Over the past year, however, the RPI has yo-yoed. In 2008 it rose steadily, hitting 5 percent in September before falling back to 0.9 percent by the end of the year.' (Private Eye #1229, p.6)
'A plan by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to launch an on-demand video service has been blocked because it posed "too much of a threat to competition".
'The Competition Commission said Project Kangaroo "has to be stopped" and that viewers would benefit if the three were "close competitors" rather than allies.'
This is actually a story about the possible use of legal restrictions called control orders on people removed from Guantanamo Bay and brought to Britain.
Telegraph: 'Turritopsis Nutricula is technically known as a hydrozoan and is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self.
Perhaps there's an attempt to offer ambiguous interplay through avoiding grammatical cues. 'Italy sent a woman...'? 'A woman sent Italy...'? 'In Italy, a woman sent...'? 'Italy is a woman sent...'? Or maybe the intention is to imply a subtext about the role of Woman in modern society, contrasting feminine-as-lifegiver-and-nurturer with the bluntness of clinical death.
Italy
Woman sent
To clinic
To die.
At a guess, though, someone used to writing things like 'Manchester man wins lottery' just took the form too far.
Given that Facebook status updates can be made externally accessible via an RSS feed, wouldn't it be easier to use something like a Google Reader shared tag, so as to automate the process?
The actual story: 'A woman at the centre of the right-to-die debate in Italy has been moved to a clinic where she will be allowed to die after 17 years in a vegetative state.'
HG101: 'The word zazz has being going around for a while on this site now, and that's probably exactly the "quality" the game lacks. No character ever spills out their entire angsty life story. There are no funky hairdos and over-the-top character designs. Nobody ever turns into an angel in a post-cataclysmic final battle in space while flying around in a wormhole (with a choir singing orgasmically in the background, no less). Just a boy and his dog going on an adventure. This is as close as it gets to zazz level 0. The zazz basement, if you will.'
Jargon File on brick: 'This term usually implies irreversibility, but equipment can sometimes be unbricked by performing a hard reset or some other drastic operation.'
Concurring Opinions: 'What strange confluence of laws and economic incentives produce all of this hyperpackaging of inexpensive goods? Do appliances break unless transported in a foot of protection? Do consumers injure themselves if they get the box home and the flatware is right at the surface and unsecured? Do labels deter theft of open-stock items (“We know that this isn’t your cereal bowl you have under your sweater because it has our label on it.�?)? Or ensure that things don’t get misplaced on store shelves?'
Cory Doctorow: 'Last December, Forbes published my latest article on Darren Atkinson, hands down the most exciting, thoughtful and skilled garbologist and dumpster diver I’ve ever heard of... Darren’s got the perfect zero-capital, socially conscious enterprise — drive around the industrial suburbs, collecting the scat of the wily corporation as it progresses through the twists and turns of its life-cycle, and panning out major cash in those fewmets.'
Quoted from David Stanley: '…Another unique Samoan characteristic is musu, to be sullen. A previously communicative individual will suddenly become silent and moody. This often bears no relation to what’s happening at the time, and when a Samoan becomes musu, the best approach is just to sit back and wait until they get a grip…'
Speaking of /lists/, why does it seem never to change, if it has the last 500 lists on the site? Every time I end up there I see my Cryptolects list at the top.
I'd forgotten about this beauty: it seems no longer to break my favourites list, which is nice, and of course we now have tags appropriate to its stature...
Edit: I see it still doesn't work properly on the comment feed...
Dwight Rodgers: 'Although German is not one of the languages I can speak, and I'm probably repeating urban legend, I once heard that the German word for "Tank" early in the 1900s was something like "Schützengrabenvernichtungsautomobil", perhaps meaning "automobile that shoots and moves in trenches". The time required to yell this phrase upon seeing a tank, was, of course, presented as the primary reason for Germany losing the war.'
Omniglot: 'The Batak are a negrito people, with kinky (curly) hair and dark skin. Their mother-tongue is called Binatak and is related to other regional languages of Malayic origin. While the Palawan and the Tagbanua tribes developed a unique alphabet, the Batak have never had a writing system. Anthropologists believe the Batak to be related to the Aeta people, found in other parts of the Philippines.'
Derick Pinto: 'The other day, a Maharashtrain friend of mine remarked, "Konkani is a dialect of Marathi. That is why Konkani does not have its own script." This set me thinking. I am a linguist and I am interested in language and linguistics. So I found me asking myself as to whether Konkani is a dialect of Marathi or an independent language by itself.'
Raymond Tallis: 'New technologies permitting imaging of the waking brain in humans have prompted increasingly extravagant claims about the extent to which advances in neurocience are casting light on human nature. The proliferation of new disciplines, such as neuro-aesthetics, neuro-ethics, neuro-law and neuro-economics, is a symptom of the widespread belief that the activity of the stand-alone brain explains our subjective experiences and our objectively observed behaviour.
'The talk will critically examine this central notion of neuromythology, demonstrate the inadequacy of neural accounts of human nature, discuss the reasons they command such wide support, and spell out the dire consequences they might have if they were truly believed.'
What it means: 'Assembly members sc. in Northern Ireland are to debate a controversial proposal to give the families of all those killed during the Troubles £12,000.'
Not a problem; if you want to add a comment to a word, just go to the word's own page, e.g. bargainous. Comments on a list page apply to a list, comments on a tag page apply to a tag, etc.
You're looking at regular hyperlinks in each case: ?Plethora (I think you meant Prolagus) linked to two tag pages, and chained_bear linked to a list page. Tags appear on word pages (e.g. 'meta' on this page), but they also have their own dedicated pages.
What it means: 'The government has rejected claims that partially-sighted people will suffer when new low energy light bulbs are introduced across the UK.'
'Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is - to speak Greek - Baubo?'
Nietzsche, preface to The Gay Science (2nd. Ed.). Translator's (Kaufmann's) footnote: 'A primitive and obscene female demon; according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, originally a personification of the female genitals.'
I'll lay out some more chairs, shall I...? (Male, by the way.)
Lists can be sorted alphabetically as viewers wish; tags are public meta-data, though, so protocols tend to emerge around them (see OCSJTS). Trying to use a general-purpose tag like an initial letter indicator as an alternative means of organising one's own lists won't work, because nothing's stopping other people using the same tags (edit: okay, a per-user filter exists, but since tags display without attribution on word pages, their function is necessarily to provide information about the word); it only makes sense if you're going to embark on tagging the entire site in that way, and frankly it takes enough obsession just to tag all the plural nouns one comes across...
moillusions.com: 'Pictures were photographed by Carl Warner, a photographer who works in London, and who made specialty of these food landscapes or how I like to call them - 'foodscapes'.'
Strange Maps: 'Those badges and the fast fading map of Oz constitute some of the more recent examples of a mysterious British tradition of geoglyphy (i.e. producing figures by exposing chalk substratum on hillsides). This tradition might date back to the Iron Age, although some, similarly undocumented examples probably are no older than the 17th century. Famous examples include the Cerne Abbas Man (a.k.a. the Rude Giant), the Uffington Horse and the Long Man of Wilmington.'
T.H.E.: 'When Catherine Carswell published her biography The Life of Robert Burns in 1930, it proved so controversial that one reader sent her a bullet in the post, asking her to make the world "a cleaner place" by using it on herself.
'And in the week of the bard's 250th anniversary, two scholars have ensured their place in the colourful history of Burnsiana by reigniting a longstanding scholarly feud.'
I know wildcarding is already on the 'someday' list; following my comment on tags/v, I just wanted to add it to the record that some current tagging practices on Wordie (e.g. -fold, phono- and so on) would be more effectively served by a wildcard search feature.
You know, 'an imaginative lively style (especially style of writing)' is also the third WordNet definition (click on 'more...'). With WeirdNet and the row of dictionary icons here, you'll be wasting your time if you add standard definitions for common words.
The Lexicographer's Rules: 'A decade or two ago, the Meritage Association of Napa valley created the “Meritage�?name so that they could label what are blended table wines as something other than, well, “table wine.�?
'The conventional wisdom about wines says that blended wines — those made from more than one kind of grape, like table wines — tend to be inferior, or at the very least too variable to be counted on from bottle to bottle, from case to case, or from year to year.
...
'To be a meritage wine, there are specifications as to the types of grapes that must be included (at least two of the grapes used in red wine from Bordeaux), and a vintner must be admitted officially as a member to use the name, which is jealously guarded.'
B.B.C.: 'A BMJ spokesman said the inclusion and subsequent debunking of "cello scrotum" had "added to the gaiety of life".
'The spoof was inspired by a similar report of a phenomenon called "guitar nipple", which happened when the edge of the guitar was pressed against the breast, causing irritation.'
That's odd: you'd expect the URL for this list to end in /lists/silver (which isn't taken), but in fact it's /lists/silverthread-s-words-2, as though it had been named the same as this list.
What it means: 'A report on the legacy of the Troubles is "irreparably damaged" by a proposal to compensate the families of all those killed, the NI first minister has said.'
How about the noun corresponding to the 'blather inconsequentially' sense? Writing advice for undergrads. in my Dept. (Durham, U.K.) tells them to avoid 'waffle: a waste of your time and the reader's'; I'd naturally read that as waffling in the sense of going on and on pointlessly.
It strikes me that you could replace therapeutic in the list description with, say, managementtraining and it would still be applicable to the list. Hmm.
The 1989 O.E.D. says the dither meaning is 'orig. Sc. and north. dial. Now colloq. or non-Standard.' Judging by Rolig's comment, maybe it's made a comeback since, though the only new addition from 1993 is a new sense: 'Of an aircraft or motor vehicle: to cruise along in a leisurely manner, usu. at low speed. colloq. (orig. R.A.F.).'
The 'talk verbosely and inconsequentially' sense is attested from 1701 and treated as current; it's the sense I'm familiar with too.
(The 'citation' box whichbe mentioned is the comment box under a word, not the tags/pos box. This would have made perfect sense as a comment, but as a tag it's rather lost because it can only ever be applied to one word. Compare, say, /tags/plural.)
What this pun is actually about: 'Comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop has fended off the vampires and werewolves of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans to stay top of the North American film chart.'
Spiked: 'The intolerance of formula-feeding on Facebook has its counterpart in real-world ‘lactivism’, which not only advocates for breastfeeding but also against bottlefeeding. Indeed, the free bottles of infant formula that used to be given out to new mothers are are now banned from public hospitals in many parts of the US, much to the delight of militant lactivists.'
Geofiction/geo-fiction seems mainly to be used to refer to fiction set in conworlds (elaborately imagined fantasy locations), but apparently there's another sense: Sarah Hall's 'agent and editor have coined this phrase for her writing -- "geo-fiction" -- because landscapes feature so strongly in the novels, be it Morecambe Bay, New York, or Cumbria'.
Courier-Mail: 'The Johnsons are angry, arguing that the State Government is bending over backwards to appease environmentalists whose supporters last year successfully lobbied to stop orchardists from shooting bats.'
epemag.com: 'The term Kalkül (calculus) is well known in mathematics, so he put "Plan" and "Kalkül" together to form Plankakül, meaning "calculus for a computing plan".'
WIkipedia's conlang list includes a Gelfling language, but none is mentioned here. Hmm. (Annoyingly, I have a DVD of this film, but I haven't got around to watching it and will probably have trouble finding it...)
It apparently has some known vocabulary, which I reckon is enough to put it on the Conlangs list. Other Dune communication methods, like Atreides battle language, I'm still unsure about.
B.B.C.: 'They were giving out the annual Prix de la Carpette Anglaise the other day. Literally it means the English Rug Prize, but doormat would be the better translation.
'As the citation explains, the award goes to the French person or institution who has given the best display of "fawning servility" to further the insinuation into France of the accursed English language.'
Is there a list anywhere for the names of prizes and awards? I couldn't find any with a quick search.
B.B.C.: 'In a meeting with colleagues from around the world, including an Englishman, a Korean and a Brazilian, he noticed that he and the other non-native English speakers were communicating in a form of English that was completely comprehensible to them, but which left the Englishman nonplussed.
'He, Jean-Paul Nerriere, could talk to the Korean and the Brazilian in this neo-language, and they could understand each other perfectly.
'But the Englishman was left out because his language was too subtle, too full of meaning that could not be grasped by the others.
'In other words, Monsieur Nerriere concluded, a new form of English is developing around the world, used by people for whom it is their second language.
'It may not be the most beautiful of tongues, but in this day and age he says it is indispensible. He calls the language Globish and urges everyone - above all the French - to learn it tout de suite.'
Do you by any chance want these definitions to appear on the actual word pages briale and monego? Adding them to list pages will probably create confusion.
T.H.E.: '"I'm bilingual. I speak English and educationese," said Shirley Hufstedler, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State for Education. In the academic world, it seems like a good combination.'
T.H.E.: 'New barriers are far more effective than class consciousness in keeping people apart and frustrating generous ambitions: the ghettoes of race and religion, websites of the like-minded, cliques of the merely rich, sodalities of the stupid.
'To climb out of the furrows and gutters of life, moreover, you need realistic targets and supportive structures. Chinese families used to club together to get bright youngsters the kind of education that would admit them to the mandarinate.'
ScienceDaily: 'A video of a new musical instrument created by a Queen’s University Belfast student has attracted over one million hits on the internet. PhD student Peter Bennett (26) from Stevenage, England, made the video to demonstrate the BeatBearing - his electronic musical instrument that uses ball bearings to create different drum patterns.'
With the site growing and John busy, I'm not surprised to see the suggestion made; but maybe we should explore the FAQ/tutorial options further before biting that bullet. At the moment, the FAQ page isn't a straightforward document, and you have to know where it is; it may still help to have a dedicated and fairly simple help or welcome page that isn't a regular word/conversation page, and make it a landing page to welcome new Wordies when they create their accounts, or even link it from the page headers/footers. (Maybe it could then link to Wordie for Dummies as a source of further information, since that list can be easily kept updated.)
Edit: okay, I just checked the footer: it already does lead to a page which links to help, FAQ and Wordie for Dummies (among others), but as it says, it isn't a formal help page itself. Also, help isn't really helpful unless you want to know about keyboards.
T.L.S.: 'A reference to the “Abjad-Hawwaz alphabet�? may suggest a secret or cryptic script; a note could have explained that it is the ordinary Arabic alphabet in the old “Semitic�? order, as still used in Hebrew.'
T.L.S.: 'The Arabic monorhyme (only one rhyme, maintained throughout a poem) is difficult to imitate in English for obvious reasons, and even an easier rhyme scheme will often compel the translator to resort to padding or distortion.'
T.L.S.: 'Burton’s language, too, is eccentric and pretty unreadable, such that a not unlikely title might be “The Shroff who Futtered his Cadette with the Two Coyntes�? (I am making this up, but the words are Burton’s). Such words may be useful for players of Scrabble; modern readers deserve something better.'
O.E.D. to the rescue: a shroff is 'a banker or money-changer in the East; in the Far East, a native expert employed to detect bad coin'. No luck with futter as a verb, though; it's given only (under futtah) as an early spelling of whata (Maori), 'a food-store raised on posts'. Wiktionary says, however, that it's Burton's own coinage, from foutre. A cadette is a younger daughter or sister... Coynte has been discussed before. And that, clearly, is how you get biologically improbable filth into the pages of a respectable newspaper.
T.L.S.: 'Michel Houellebecq’s opening shot in Ennemis publics, an exchange of letters between the two men over the first half of 2008, ranks up there with the very best anti-Lévy prose: “A master of the damp squib and the farcical media hype, you bring dishonour even to the white shirts you wear. Intimate with the powerful, you have bathed in obscene wealth since childhood and typify what slightly low-brow magazines such as Marianne continue to call the ‘caviar left’ . . . . A philosopher without thought but not without connections, you are also the author of the most ridiculous film in the history of cinema�?.'
T.L.S.: 'Hysteria is a rum sort of subject these days. It has officially disappeared as a disease, wiped out of existence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the bible of contemporary psychiatry, and hysterics themselves seem to have vanished from psychiatrists’ and neurologists’ waiting rooms. Lay people still use the term with abandon, generally with reference to women who make a spectacle of their extreme emotional lability. But an illness that has a history dating all the way back to the time of Hippocrates is no longer respectable or recognized in medical circles. In the words of one of its best-known modern historians, Etienne Trillat, “L’hystérie est morte, c’est entendu�?. '
Let me guess: someone entered 'To serve as the receptive partner in a sexual coupling, especially homosexual.' into the tag box. Since the comma is the tag delimiter, we got two dubious tags for the price of one.
Metapsychology Online: 'The idea, then, is that the book provides a balanced account of its topic, sensitive to the worries of the bio-conservative who, in contemplating our proposed genetic future, sees only potential disaster in the shape of eugenic programs, damaged family relations, harmed children, and mass social injustice. It envisions itself, then, as no unequivocally enthusiastic bio-liberal polemic, of the sort produced by, for instance, John Harris or Julian Savulescu.'
Metapsychology Online: 'Green's overall position on the issues he addresses is, at least officially, one of cautious bio-liberalism. That is, he thinks on balance that we ought to embrace the use of genetic science both to prevent disorder in, and to enhance, our offspring. At the same time, he is aware that possible risks--to individuals, families, and society at large--lurk in the shadows. He does not shy away from these risks, though he is optimistic that they can universally be overcome.'
Post-Gazette.com: 'Perhaps one day genetic enhancement will be considered routine, even expected -- a scenario suggested in the 1997 science-fiction movie "GATTACA," in which children conceived without genetic improvements were called "in-valids" or "faith-births."'
Post-Gazette.com: 'Last month's announcement that scientists have largely determined the spelling of the entire human genetic code carries the promise that they might someday understand its meaning. And that has only increased talk about making people who would be uniformly smart, caring, tall, strong, handsome, beautiful and charismatic.
'Maxwell Mehlman has even coined a word for them: the genobility, for "genetically enhanced nobility."'
Spiked in response to the sea kittens: 'Many commentators have noted that PETA’s proposal is preposterous and sets a potentially dangerous precedent. If the idea catches on, we might soon be referring to pigs as ‘pink land clouds’, trees might become ‘land coral’, and so on. It could get awfully confusing – imagine arriving in the rainforest wearing scuba gear. And masses of textbooks on species and fauna will have to be reissued.'
B.B.C. News: 'The sea lamprey, sometimes dubbed the "vampire fish", has parasitised native species of the Great Lakes since its accidental introduction in the 1800s.'
'The sea lamprey's mouth has garnered it the nickname "vampire fish"' (and the picture on the linked page shows why).
Dark Roasted Blend: 'The internal combustion engine put an end to the reign of the steam tractors. This is a Rumely Oilpull, which ran on kerosene. Kerosene was cheaper and more plentiful than gasoline in those days. The tractor was called the "Oilpull" because oil was used in the cooling system instead of water. The "smokestack" on the front is actually part of the cooling system.'
Spiegal Online: 'In 1576, the king of Denmark gave Tycho Brahe an island in the Öresund Strait, where Brahe built "Uraniborg" (Castle of the Heavens), complete with observatories. Massive pieces of astronomical equipment were kept in an underground station where the roof could be pulled aside with pulleys.
'For 21 years Brahe studied the heavens from Uraniborg. It's considered the world's first large research institute. Using data Brahe gathered, Kepler was later able to formulate his "Laws of Planetary Motion."
'But in 1596, dark clouds began to gather. Christian IV assumed the throne of Denmark and Norway... One of his first official acts was to humiliate his famous subject and to illegally deprive him of his estate... Within months the situation grew so tense that Brahe was at risk of imprisonment. He fled to Germany and took refuge with Emperor Rudolf II, an eccentric misanthrope who lived in the castle of Hradjin in Prague. Meanwhile, the young Danish king had Uraniborg torn down. Not a single stone of Brahe's observatory remains in place today.'
What it means: that they raped someone and threw caustic soda on her. (Not a pleasant addition for a light-hearted list theme, but it is an example of British Broadcasting Concision.)
Forgetomori: 'It’s a Yoshimoto cube, invented by Japanese Naoki Yoshimoto in 1971. Made up of eight interconnected cubes, it’s capable of unfolding itself in a cyclic fashion. That means you could keep folding, or unfolding it, indefinitely.'
Spiked: 'Many countries in the European Union have instituted laws against Holocaust denial. Sanctifying the Holocaust in this way has allowed European officialdom to claim moral authority on matters of good and evil, right and wrong, in relation to the present and the past.
'Regrettably, the elevation of the Holocaust in this way does little to help people make sense of that terrible event. Instead, many Europeans experience the politicisation of the Holocaust as a bureaucratic project, something that is distant from their lives.'
Spiked: 'At a time when Western powers cynically describe their military ventures as a disavowal of their own self-interest – apparently they fight for the humanitarian betterment of beleaguered peoples around the world – the Zionists’ use of force to express their right to exist, and to firm up their borders, is frowned upon.'
Spiked: 'Leon points out that when bourgeois national movements were flourishing, Jews tended to subscribe to an assimilationist outlook; because capitalism was relatively stable then, and thus anti-Semitism tended to be quite rare, they saw their place as being within already-existing societies rather than being nationally separate from them.'
Spiked: 'Those who argue today that Zionism is ‘an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology’ also distort the facts. It is true that, both before and more significantly after the Second World War, Zionism was reliant on the imperialist powers to make its dream of a Jewish homeland a reality. That is because the rise of Zionism was implicitly bound up with the imperialist era, and there were powerful forces in the West – most notably Britain and the United States – that were keen to exploit Zionism for political ends. In the current period, however, we have what we might refer to as ‘Defensive Zionism’ – a form of Zionism that is less interested in expanding than withdrawing behind security walls, and which justifies itself less by reference to future-oriented dreams of a Land of Zion than by appeals to a ‘Jewish identity’ of victimhood... Contemporary Zionism is defensive. It is underpinned not by visions of the future but by ideas of Jewish victimhood, by the necessity of halting ‘future Holocausts’ against the Jews from their various mortal enemies.'
It means that 'the number of foggy, misty and hazy days is diminishing across the continent', and this amplifies warming. Once you know that the headline makes a fair amount of sense, except that it's the loss of the mist that boosts heat, the mist itself having the opposite effect.
B.B.C.: 'Smiles are exchanged, tea sipped, and the contracts are signed to allow the Shah Abbass story to be told in London.
'It's a good story. The Shah is credited with unifying a culturally and politically splintered country by creating a new sense of nationhood.
'He decreed that the Twelver denomination of ShiaIslam - which reveres the twelve imams who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad - would be the state faith...
'Shah Abbas was not simply a successful theocrat. In establishing his capital in the centre of Iran, he set about claiming Isfahan as the crossroads of the world by inviting trade from the Far East and the distant west.'
erich13 added a deluge of irrelevant tags to admire, addon, adobeair and about, apparently while still unsure how to use the site; I asked him/her about 3 days ago to remove them, but it hasn't happened. Since s/he appears not actually to want them there, and the clouds are so huge and unrelated to the words, could you possibly use your admin. powers to prune them away? (Failing that, could large tag clouds be made to default to a smaller base font size, or to displaying as hidden, or something?)
There have been suggestions along these lines before (see tagging tutorial), but thus far FAQ is the most we've come up with. A tutorial would be good provided it's easy for newcomers to find: maybe a landing page for new accounts.
According to Room42: 'A slightly dangerous, incredibly stupid and highly amusing version of normal dodgeball, where bouncy balls are replaced with limes, steak knifes and occasionally a half-full black bin.' (Whether it's ever actually been played I've no idea, but that seemed no reason not to list it.)
Maybe the private note feature would be of use here...
I don't want to get embroiled in an argument, but I would like to point out that if the dictionary being quoted is still under copyright, copious quoting might prove legally awkward too.
B.B.C. News: '"It certainly suggests there was a significant settlement nearby. As far as we understand, it was occupied by wealthy tribes or subtribes," she said.'
I like to imagine that this is from a tragic love story in which some unrequited romancer is driven into madness which leads him to decapitate his spurner while muttering deranged yet strangely poetic observations. At any rate it's the best explanation I've got.
New York Times: 'Deep ecology, which called for population reduction, soft technology and non-interference in the natural world, was eagerly taken up by environmentalists impatient with shallow ecology — another of Arne Naess’s coinages — which did not confront technology and economic growth.
'It formed part of a broader personal philosophy that Mr. Naess called ecosophy T, “a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium�? that human beings can comprehend by expanding their narrow concept of self to embrace the entire planetary ecosystem. The term fused “ecological�? and “philosophy.�? The T stood for Tvergastein, his name for the mountain cabin he built in 1937 in southern Norway, where he often wrote.'
TastingTable: 'Bacon lovers take note: There's a new meat in town. Cured lamb belly is showing up on menus all over, cozying up to eggs at breakfast and standing in for its porcine counterpart in wintry dinners. Because it has a lower fat, lamb bacon doesn't crisp up as well as pork. But chefs like its meaty texture and the rich, gamey flavor it adds to hearty winter dishes.'
Got Medieval: 'I will also be attending the PCA/ACA's (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's) conference in New Orleans over Easter weekend. (Pop culturalists are an ungodly sort.) There, my topic will be "The Sword in the Stone in Outsider Arthuriana". The original title used the vulgar word for "psychoceramics" for the Arthuriana I mean--things like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and the Alano-Sarmatian hypothesis--but the session organizers rightly suggested I try not to piss off famous people who do actually come to the PCA/ACA conference from time to time.'
io9: 'The researchers also found that web filtering programs - often dubbed "censorware" - seemed to be an ineffective way of preventing children from seeing upsetting content online.'
The Ecomomist: 'European snobbery about money permeates the books. Villains are frequently showy arrivistes. Old money is good. A gift (as opposed to gainful employment) allows his best friend, Captain Haddock, to buy back his family’s ancestral mansion. The captain takes to castle life with relish. Enriched by a treasure find, he swaps his seaman’s uniform for an increasingly Wodehousian wardrobe involving cravats, tweeds and at one point a monocle.'
The Economist: 'Tintin has never been a big hit in the Anglo-Saxon world. In Britain, he is reasonably well known, but as a minority taste, bound within narrow striations of class: his albums are bought to be tucked into boarding school trunks or read after Saturday morning violin lessons.'
Apparently I'm a minority within a minority, since I can't say I find this image familiar.
As in the periodical. Crooked Timber: 'The Economist somehow manages to take an exquisitely Economistesque line, getting digs in at the French while backhandedly praising Americans for their peculiar issues, while allowing that the Brits are probably somewhere in the middle.'
I don't really recommend trying to reduce image size; squashed images can look awful without anti-aliasing to remove jagged lines, and Firefox seems to have trouble scrolling pages that contain them.
I've asked erich13 to remove the tagibunda, which he hopefully will do when he reads the explanation of how to do it. So then they won't be overtagged anymore...
What it means: 'A treatment thought to improve a premature baby's chance of fighting infection does not actually provide any benefit, a UK study suggests.'
Like mollusque said on my profile: to remove tags, go back to the word page (adobeair, admire, addon, about), click the 'add tags/pos' link and remove the tags from the box. (You seem to have deleted the words from your list, which won't de-tag them.) Cheers.
Warning from a fellow user: tagging a word (for example, about) with so many irrelevant tags is liable to get you accused of spamming and subjected to the Wordie treatment.
Relisoft: 'The GetMessage API is an interesting example of the bizarre Microsoft Troolean (as opposed to traditional, Boolean) logic. GetMessage is defined to return a BOOL, but the documentation specifies three types of returns, non-zero, zero and -1. I am not making it up!'
Would it bother people if I pointed out that Wordie declares itself to be XHTML, and therefore images are technically supposed to have a closing / as in <img="image location" alt="alt text (also technically required by the spec)" />, even if they work without? (Don't bother changing it; the page wouldn't validate anyway.)
1UP: 'Yet the same elements that make SaGa games so horrifying to those whose baptism into RPG fandom was Final Fantasy are the same qualities that make the series stand out in an increasingly stagnant genre. SaGa draws equally from three diverse inspirations: other Japanese RPGs, Western role-playing concepts -- computer and otherwise -- and creator Akitoshi Kawazu's sheer cussedness. The SaGa games tend to be fairly open and flexible, and they also have a habit of not holding players by the hand: they're full of unique systems and rules that are best learned through experimentation.'
Google seems to be going back to first principles in its efforts to entice Wordies: just now I saw an advert on a couple of pages which turned out to be for Make International Ltd.'s designer homeware, but which apart from the company's domain name just has a link reading 'a' and the descriptive text 'a a'.
No, it's usual enough (WordNet #5; edit: and with O.E.D. citations from c1384 to 2001); but in my examples there's no preceding sentence or clause to give context like that.
Science Daily: '“The Persians will have heard the Romans tunnelling,�? says James, “and prepared a nasty surprise for them. I think the Sasanians placed braziers and bellows in their gallery, and when the Romans broke through, added the chemicals and pumped choking clouds into the Roman tunnel. The Roman assault party were unconscious in seconds, dead in minutes. Use of such smoke generators in siege-mines is actually mentioned in classical texts...�?'
Science Daily: 'Dura-Europos on the Euphrates was conquered by the Romans who installed a large garrison. Around AD 256, the city was subjected to a ferocious siege by an army from the powerful new Sasanian Persian empire... The Sasanians used the full range of ancient siege techniques to break into the city, including mining operations to breach the walls.'
I can find dictionary references for both moonstruck and moon-stricken, but moonstrike seems not to have come into being except as the name of a B.B.C. television series. Presumably because only the moon can render people moonstruck, which it just does by striking them.
The Lexicographer's Rules: 'Our gathering is a more freewheeling affair (meaning, largely unstructured and without rules), and is meant to be fun. It’s whimsical.'
According to the O.E.D., 'a never-thriving of jugglers' is 'one of many alleged group terms found in late Middle English glossarial sources, but not otherwise substantiated'.
Charles Stross: '...it occurs to me that the Lovecraftian apocalyptic singularity is underexplored... What's the role of humour in this universe? Well, one might ask what Stanley Kubrick intended when he turned "Dr. Strangelove" into a theatre of the absurd... What happens in a survivable apocalypse? Lovecraftian apocalyptic fiction never actually explores the consequences of the Old Ones returning, let alone the human wreckage left behind in the aftermath... This isn't a manifesto. It's just an explanation of what I've been writing, and what I plan to write more of. It's probably best described by a portmanteau word: Strangelovecraftian (or, if you're in a hurry, Strangecraftian) fiction. Its goal is to use the eschatalogical horror of the Mythos much as recent SF has used the Singularity, to shed light on the human condition under circumstances that warp the soul.'
(Bo actually is an obsolete verb meaning 'cry bo' or generally 'shout', according to the O.E.D., which gives a citation from ?c1505. I doubt it had a bone form, admittedly.)
The Retro Blog, 'It's a Big Day for Cryonicists': 'Happy Bedford Day, everybody. On January 12th, 1967, University of California psychology professor James Bedford became the first man to have his body cryogenically frozen. As the first man to be preserved, the bill was paid by the Life Extension Society. He also earned the awesome title of “cryonaut,�? the term given to cryogenically preserved individuals. I like it. It sounds far more adventurous than what it actually describes.'
Improbable Research, quoting a U.C.L. press release: 'The sound of a jellyJello" in some parts of the world'>known as "Jello" in some parts of the world wobbling has been recorded for the first time ever in a soundproof chamber at UCL.
'The recording is being turned into a soundtrack for an architectural jelly banquet to be hosted at UCL at 8pm on 4 July 2008. The event, run by Bompas and Parr as part of the London Festival of Architecture, will see a troupe of dancers deliver a spoon-based performance to the soundtrack sampled from wobbling jellies and a delicious aroma of strawberries, and will feature jelly wrestling and other festive frolics.'
From a philosopher's dream: 'I was standing in a hall full of people who were listening to a speaker inveighing against synthetica priori propositions. The atmosphere owed a lot to speeches by Hitler on the Jews and Joseph McCarthy on Communists: the speaker was standing behind one of those old-style microphones, shouting: We must root out synthetic a priori propositions! We must eliminate them! The crowd was getting increasingly worked up. I was standing by the wall, watching, feeling deeply uneasy.'
If so, the wording is confusing: shouldn't it say bugs 'has been tagged some number greater than 1 times, has 5 total tags...' and not, as it does, 'has been tagged 1 time, has 7 total tags...'?
Edit: ah, meta does say bugs has been tagged 3 times, so you must be right. I stand by my comment about the confusing wording, though; I'd have expected the total number of tags to count types, not tokens.
'Robin Hood seems to hav been sometimes confused in kitchen tales with Robin Goodfellow, and so to hav been regarded in the light of a fairy—or in the dark of a goblin.'
Charles P.G. Scott, 'The Devil and His Imps: An Etymological Inquisition'
I tried to find out whether dooly or doolie is the usual singular, and failed to find anything about this imp at all. (It doesn't help that both have other meanings, and that Google is convinced I can't spell and the folklore I'm really interested in is of corn dollies.) What are doolies, and should we be afraid...?
'I began to write up the Devil and his Imps, placing at first no limit on their number. I had no sooner thrown open the doors than the air was darkend by a grisly flight of black-wingd demons, and the grounds was coverd by a trooping host of uncanny creatures of vague unseemly forms and unassorted sizes. Devils, Devilets, Devilings, Dablets, and other Imps...'
Charles P.G. Scott, 'The Devil and His Imps: An Etymological Inquisition'
According to its listing on /tags/bunny, bugs has seven tags (although listening device seems to have been removed at some point), but I see only five. This can't be down to an enforced limit, given how many tags are on overtagged, so I wonder whether one of the tags on this word is itself glitched...
I decided not to open this fully, in order to preserve an appearance of orderly, reliable meta-ness, but feel free to ask to be added as a contributor.
New York Times: 'The effect is grotesque, of a feline Tony Soprano brutalizing and carnalizing Carroll’s delicate surrealism. I imagine it would give children nightmares.'
New York Times: 'I didn’t read the stories because no child could — they are stomach-churningly, almost incomprehensibly saccharine. Here, for example, is how Sandburg describes the cost of an episode of militarism: “And the thousand golden ice tongs the sooners gave the boomers, and the thousand silver wheelbarrows the boomers gave the sooners, both with hearts and hands carved on the handles, they were long ago broken up in one of the early wars deciding pigs must be painted both pink and green with both checks and stripes.�?'
New York Times: 'Since this is a children’s story, the workers manage to defy Mr. His despite the false consciousness foisted on them by his mass media, whereupon he temporizes by trying to foment race hatred: “Wuxtry!�? he exclaims, hawking issues of his newspaper in person. “Blondes — your real enemy is brunettes!�? Unable to resist a villain who shouts “Wuxtry!�? I wandered off to the Internet to try to buy a copy of “Mr. His�? for my niece. None were for sale. By their reprinting, Mickenberg and Nel have rescued Mr. His from near-complete oblivion.'
Slashdot: 'It seems that a recent "reply-all storm" at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users "reply-all" to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic.'
'An epithet applied to Miss Elizabeth Baxter (d. 1972), philanthropist, from her custom of giving silver coins to the down-and-outs of the Embankment in London, used attrib. to describe a charitable organization (and its appurtenances) which distributes food and hot drinks to vagrants' (O.E.D.).
This turns up in some old compound forms: aver-silver, averpenny, aver-corn, averland. The O.E.D. quotes sources that associate it with average in this context, but frowns at their 'very doubtful value'.
The O.E.D. goes in for bracketeering with this one, since it's 'prob. a scribal error for laydsilver, an unattested variant of Middle English ladesilver, northern variant of loadsilver payment made in lieu of the manorial service of carrying loads'.
A bit of a mysery: 'Etym., sense, and form doubtful', sayd the O.E.D., which just marks it obs. without providing a positive definition, only a 1706 quotation which calls lef-silver 'a Duty paid by the Tenants to the Lord, for leave to plough and sow in the time of Pannage, or Mast-feeding'.
Another rhyme (chilver was pointed out a while ago) for silver, and it just happens to mean 'a person with whom one shares a strong interest in a particular topic, esp. that of words and wordplay' (O.E.D.). Shall we tag it meta?
I suppose if WeirdNet is determined to define the brothers separately, one of them has to be first; but why is the generic definition for author inserted after each one, pushing the elder brother down to the third definition?
A surname which, thanks to M. Eugène-René Poubelle, now has the general meaning 'dustbin'. Of course, when I learnt the word back in school French class, I learnt only the general meaning, and now my mind will forever parse 'M. Poubelle' as 'Mr. Dustbin'.
Pop Omnivore: 'What an uncanny parallel to American history! Our president used to be inaugurated in March, too—until the 20th Amendment, ratified in 1933, changed the date. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to take office on January 20. The reason for the change? To cut back on the long period of lame duckery.'
It might have been better hyphenated; I'm tempted to think a lame duckery ought to be a really unkempt duckpond.
FrakturWeb: 'Fraktur is a folk art form practiced by Pennsylvania Germans principally from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The name derives from that of a distinctive German script marked by "fractured" pen strokes and the form has clear roots in European folk culture.'
The 'try and' construction always struck me as odd anyway, since normally two verbs combined with and retain separate meanings (so to speak): stand and deliver, and so on. Even 'I shall go and see him' means something like 'I shall go to him and (accordingly) I shall see him'. (It's true that 'Whatever did you have to go and do that for?' isn't so neat, but I think that's because it's generally tricky to say exactly what job the go is doing in that example.)
A practitioner of sortilege; obs. and rare according to the O.E.D.
Edit: judging by the quotation the dictionary uses that's apparently sortilege as in divination, whereas sortiary is given as a synonym for sortilege as in ballot selection.
Clark Ashton Smith: 'Azathoth, the primal nuclear chaos, reproduced of course only by fission; but its progeny, entering various outer planets, often took on attributes of androgynism or bisexuality. The androgynes, curiously, required no coadjutancy in the production of offspring; but their children were commonly unisexual, male or female. Hzioulquoigmnzhah, uncle of Tsathoggua, and Ghizghuth, Tsathoggua's father, were the male progeny of Cxaxukluth, the androgynous spawn of Azathoth. Thus you will note a trend toward biological complexity. It is worthy of record, however, that Knygathin Zhaum, the half-breed Voormi, reverted to the most primitive Azathothian characteristics following the stress of his numerous decapitations. I have yet to translate the terrible and abominable legend telling how a certain doughty citizen of Comnioriom (not Athammaus) returned to the city after its public evacuation, and found that it was peopled most execrably and numerously by the fissional spawn of Knygathin Zhaum, which possessed no vestige of anything human or even earthly.'
How often does it appear in English? In an O.E.D. Online check, the only search results that weren't multiple words (e.g. ALT key) were Atkins and (from Russian) astatki. (Edit: okay, I missed the fact the results were returned on multiple pages...)
Science Daily: 'Although the spookfish was first discovered 120 years ago, no one had discovered its reflective eyes until now because a live animal had never been caught.'
Slate: 'Urban Dictionary tells me, for example, that overchicked is an adjective used to describe a man who is significantly less attractive than his female companion.'
Edit: hmm. When I first submitted this comment the link not actually to "popinjay was missing (the word was absent), but after editing it's apparently there.
It strikes me that we can view the thousand most recent tags, but as far as I know we have no way of viewing the most commonly used tags; it would be interesting, and possibly useful, to have a clear picture of which ones have made it into general use.
B.B.C. News: 'There were statuettes, just five or six inches high, representing Babylonian kings and Sumerian warriors and princesses. And there was a lamasu - the winged ox that was the symbol of Assyrian strength, and silverware and jewellery.'
Pink Tentacle: 'The clione, a.k.a. sea angel, is a cute, translucent swimming sea slug that glides gracefully through icy ocean waters by flapping a pair of appendages that resemble tiny angel wings. Don’t let the innocent, angelic look fool you, though — the clione is a vicious demon come feeding time.'
Word Spy: 'Products such as pens, coffee mugs, and T-shirts that are handed out to employees and that include the company's logo, motto, or mission statement.'
M.P.C.: 'Sliverware abstracts software into three distinct layers: the network communication layer, the group coordination layer, and the services layer.'
sltrib.com: 'Like many Japanese of his generation, the 28-year-old musician and part-time maintenance worker says owning a car is more trouble than it's worth... That kind of thinking -- which automakers here have dubbed "kuruma banare," or "demotorization" -- is a U-turn from earlier generations of Japanese who viewed car ownership as a status symbol.'
Channel Register: 'CPAL should drive some measure of consistency among the badgeware license crowd. Companies such as SugarCRM and Centric CRM - and many others - have crafted various versions of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) that include so-called attribution clauses unique to their wares. As a result, scores of attribution - or badgeware - licenses have been thrust at customers - none of them OSI approved... It's expected that companies such as SugarCRM will modify their old attribution licenses to fit CPAL. We've taken the liberty of dubbing CPAL a badgerware license in honor of Socialtext's fluffy nature.'
AnalogX: 'Unlike most of the other people out there that have useful utilities on their sites, I am giving away all of the programs on here, for free; not shareware or grovelware or whatever you want to call it.'
Market Opportunity: 'Define a new class of software known as "pairware". If "groupware" was the term given to software intended for group empowerment within structured organizations, "pairware" will be the term given to software intended for personal empowerment in the context of ad hoc relationships or tasks...'
Really slow bloatware. Download Squad: 'Elephantware. That is what we are talking about. Bloated programs that make brand new PCs boot like Pentium 2s with 64 MBs of RAM.'
Wikipedia reckons 'usage of the word bundleware in this context OEM pre-installation'>sc. OEM pre-installation was at its peak in the late 1990s', but offers no evidence.
OCRemix: 'But here's the nice thing. Someone wrote "Media Player Classic" (spiteware?). It looks identical to version 6 of Windows Media Player (keep it simple), and it includes codecs for RealAudio and RealVideo formats. But why stop there? There's also a QuickTime codec (!). Away, begone, buggy Apple QuickTime Player (hopefully for good).'
The Wikipedia entry says this 'term was coined by Peter Cassidy, Secretary General of the Anti-Phishing Working Group to distinguish it from other kinds of malevolent programs', but adds a citation needed.
Apparently this is 'the generic term used by Kaspersky Lab to describe programs that are legitimate in themselves, but that have the potential for misuse by cyber criminals'.
Software with one of those 'smart' interfaces that keeps changing, allegedly to suit the user's working habits but possibly according to the phases of the moon.
Right: that's what I intended to mean by saying 'it doesn't know it's on that list' (i.e. the paradox list—which is Asativum's open list, incidentally).
Hmm... It shows up on list pages as having been listed twice, but in fact it's on three lists, while the right-hand column here still names only one. I wonder what would happen if I removed it from 'VanishedOne's words'...
Mucking about trying to hex this onto the Wordie Paradox list, I managed to get a version of Գ that works normally except that it doesn't know it's on that list: %EF%BB%BF%D4%B3. The weirder Գ is %D4%B3.
@PLAY: 'One of the most frustrating things about it is that the interface has been changed just enough from roguelike standards to bring the learning curve back to old-hand roguelikers. It may first seem a positive thing that the game doesn't rely on a bunch of shifted, ctrl-ed, even alt-ed key combinations to access commands, but the solution arrived upon takes a bit of getting used to.'
@PLAY: 'The result is that the player must typically defeat a monster to gain loot instead of just happen upon it, a change that could be called slightly more realistic, if trapising your enchanted elf around throwing fireballs at cave pelicans isn't realistic enough for you. (Yes, cave pelicans, their feathers black as night, their floppy bills filled and dripping with the blood of the innocent.)'
killershrike.com: 'This site provides a comprehensive meta system of Magic referred to collectively as "Vancian Magic". It is patterned after the "fire & forget" style of casting described in some of the works of author Jack Vance, which became an integral part of how many people think of magic use in Fantasy RPGs as the basic idea was adapted to become the core of the D&D style of magic use. The Vancian Magic Systems presented on this site are all Charges based, organize Spells into Spell Levels, are able to use the concept of "Metamagic Feat" Talents, and by and large should be very usable by those who like the D&D X/Day/Spell Level style of Magic Use.'
Lingwë: 'Shades of Draytonesque “pigwiggenry�? again here... Fairies and goblins were indeed a much greater part of Tolkien’s early imagination than his later...'
@qroqqa: the O.E.D. entry for advisory actually says: 'f. ADVISE + -ORY, as if ad. late L. *advimacsomacrius, f. late L. advimacsor.', which makes it unclear (depending on the scope of the 'as if') whether late Latin advisor actually existed, or whether advisory is just formed as though it did. Is Latin advisor attested anywhere?
If I remember correctly, advisor is the product of false etymology by mistaken analogy with visor; it's just become commonplace enough to appear in the dictionaries anyway.
Lingwë: 'The meaning of “juxtalingual�? is obvious enough — but as much as I like it, I don’t think it’s a real word! I can’t find it in any dictionary (online of off; I don’t have access to the O.E.D. — anyone?), and a Google search yields absolutely no results — rare indeed! Searching Google books returned a couple of hits, but both of them were snippets of this very marketing blurb, from a series of high school and college book catalogs published in the 1960’s and ’70’s. So who exactly coined this interesting word? Was it an editor at Barron’s Educational Series, in Woodbury, New York? Or perhaps Vincent F. Hopper, who wrote the introduction for the reissue?
'And with all this fuss, what does a “juxtalingual�? translation look like? Basically, the lines of the original are split at the caesurae, producing a narrow column, facing which (on the same page) is a corresponding column in translation.'
B.B.C.: 'Forty years ago, the largest TV audience in history tuned in to watch the Apollo 8 crew reach lunar orbit.It was during this mission that the famous "Earthrise" image was captured, changing forever our perception of the planet and its place in space.'
BLDGBLOG: 'The forest, which covers 300 square miles and includes the foothills of the Awful Hand Range, rates as a 3 on the Bortle scale. The scale, created by John Bortle in 2001, measures night sky darkness based on the observability of astronomical objects...
'The IDA website itself contains everything that "locations with exceptional nightscapes" need to know to submit their application to be certified as "International Dark Sky Communities (IDSC), International Dark Sky Parks (IDSP), and International Dark Sky Reserves (IDSR)"... The Geauga Park District submitted their 34-page Lighting Management Plan... detailing various proposals for the reduction of local skyglow (as opposed to natural airglow), light trespass, and glare.'
'François Villon really was a delinquent and a killer, a crook and a convict, who even wrote ballads in the secret language, jobelins, of the gangs.' - The Book of Lost Books, p. 130
Besides Oddocomplete being a resource drain, the sorting algorithm pulled some unexpected things out of the database, and it had a nasty habit of forcing its own suggestions into the search box without asking nicely, so I don't think anyone grieved much when John removed it.
There was some talk of wildcarding 'someday' eight months ago on this page.
Annoyingly, the version of blah ... does that count? I managed to add here is operational, owing to the hexadecimal trickery used. However (as noted on bugs), when the random word feature took me to blah ... does that count? it proved unviewable. Try clicking on the links in this comment.
I got blocked from adding the version with the question mark to the Wordie Paradox list (though changing ? to %3F worked), but either the block on adding words containing ? doesn't apply to profile onomatopoeia, or it didn't when the page was added.
The tag page for /tags/scratch'n'sniff claims that 'nobody has used this tag', but in fact it can be seen on gunpowder: a problem with the ' character, maybe? (I wondered whether a deleted account might have put it there, but it turns out to be bilby's tag.)
Scientific American: 'For female squids, sex is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience—and an apparently horrible one at that. The female releases millions of tiny eggs into the water along with the sperm contributed by the one male who got his hooks into her, and usually never goes back for seconds, the researchers found. Afterward, they never let a male get close—a behavior that even has led to the technical term “traumatic fertilization.�?'
Strange Maps: 'I learned a new word today, but the condition it describes has been with me for quite some time: cartocacoethes - the compulsion to see maps everywhere. More on that here...'
Please, no. I'm sick of sites that take it upon themselves to make that decision for me, presumably believing I couldn't possibly want to close their pages when going somewhere else.
T.H.E.: 'Academics never had to worry about shareholders, but that mythical being, the stakeholder, now dominates their lives. Despite their diversity, there is no shortage of people who not only claim to know what stakeholders want, but are also determined to ensure that academics provide it.'
Seen in John's citation on achievatron: the only sense I could find in dictionaries was as a verb, 'to arch, to build in the shape of an arch'; but someone else found a definition for the noun sense.
For some reason, if 'nobody has listed' a tag, there's no comment facility on its page (though as I noted over on tags, those tags were in use once): kath 'n' kim, for example. I don't know whether this should be on bugs or whether commenting on ghost tags should be a feature request.
It strikes me that the 'nobody has used this tag' line, which appears on tags people have added and then all removed (e.g. kath 'n' kim), is always technically false, since those tags were in use at some point; genuinely never-used tags produce 500 Application Errors. It would be more accurate to say 'nobody is using this tag'.
Are there any other WeirdNet definitions that look quite so much like thesaurus entries? Edit: oddly enough, the definition for fulgent is nothing of the sort.
Also peg-boy, pegboy. The Straight Dope: 'First, terminology. I’ve seen peg = “copulate�? in a 1902 slang dictionary, and it’s easy to believe the expression was common long before that. But the earliest usage of peg boy cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words by Robert Anton Wilson (1972), perhaps not the most reliable source. Wilson writes: “A ‘peg-boy’ is a young male who prostitutes himself to homosexuals; ‘peg-house’, a homosexual brothel. There is an unsubstantiated story that boys in East Indian peg-houses were required to sit on pegs between customers, giving them permanently dilated anuses.�? Whatever you say, Bob.'
Slate: 'Lots of schemes are stock-market specific. There's the pump and dump, in which the perpetrator boosts the price of a stock through false or exaggerated statements, then sells his position at an artificially inflated level. And front-running, in which a broker buys himself shares of a stock right before his brokerage buys a much larger block of shares (or recommends the stock as a good prospect). In the jitney game, brokers trade a stock back and forth to give the impression that it's a hot commodity. Bucket shop is a common term for a brokerage that defrauds its customers, usually by selling worthless or highly speculative stocks that it wants to offload.'
Philosophy, et cetera: 'Singer promotes giving to Oxfam in public speeches because it's easier for most people to understand the direct benefits of their work, but in private conversation he agrees that it is far better to donate to meta-charities. For instance, you can donate directly to the Poverty Action Lab, which conducts rigorous controlled, randomized studies to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, often finding that billions of dollars are being wasted at low cost...'
B.B.C. News: 'The ram statues symbolise the god Amun, and include the first discovery of a complete royal dedication in Meroitic script, only found before in fragments. It is the oldest written sub-Saharan language and dates from the Meroe period of 300BC to AD450.'
Néojaponisme: 'This Time article places part of the blame on the Japanese people’s "structural pessimism" — a catchy phrase from Shirakawa Hiromichi, chief economist at Credit Suisse Japan. As the term suggests, the Japanese suffer from a general lack of confidence about the Japanese economy and the nation’s future, and as a result, are weary of big spending...
'It’s easy to blame this mass psychological disposition towards pessimism on some innate and unbending cultural characteristic. All those enka songs are in minor keys, right? And Kabuki is not one for happy endings. Must be something in the water. And listen to the phrase “structural pessimism�?: that doesn’t sound like it’s going away anytime soon. Japan would be much better off suffering from something like “faddish pessimism.'
B.B.C. News: 'While not entirely ditching the liberal reforms of "Thaksinomics" - a term used to refer to the economic set of policies of exiled former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra - he has argued for a more statist approach.'
If 'this website' doesn't exist, doesn't it follow that the words 'this website' don't refer to anything, and hence that the belief renders itself meaningless?
I'm hoping John will add the promised automatic marker soon and this method will never become popular enough for me to have to worry about it. (Besides, the right-hand column would become enormous if we all used this...)
Private Eye #1225: 'Richard Booth, the self-proclaimed King of Hay-on-Wye, is on the verge of being dethroned... Whereas he once drew a lot of welcome attention to Hay with his antics, such as declaring the town a independent republic with its own currency called the "Bootho", he now spends most of his time and effort denigrating the Welsh assembly as a force for evil.'
T.H.E.: 'A "spaceguard" system to scan the skies for asteroids heading for Earth has been mooted by leading scientists. The group, including Royal Society president Lord Rees, says the United Nations needs a system to destroy or divert dangerous asteroids, The Observer said on 7 December.'
bradshaw of the future: 'A thali is a dish served on a flat plate. It's from Hindi थाली th�?lī "flat metal plate", which is related to Sanskrit sth�?l�? "a vessel, plate" from Proto-Indo-European *steh₂- "to stand". '
I'd find the claim that words are being removed and others added to reflect 'multiculturalism' more believable if the added words reflected backgrounds other than Western Christianity, but words like interdependent suggest more of a commitment to the idea of multiculturalism.
Times Online: 'There will be many teachers who insist this does not matter; that children are picking up the concepts or themes, or developing understanding, or some such. But it does matter. So hard are educationists trying to keep the attention of every child with “varied and matched learning�?, to use some more jargon, that education has become frighteningly dumbed down.'
Bad Archaeology: 'Sitchin’s first book, The Twelfth Planet, was published in 1976, and according to his followers, it has transformed the field of ancient history. The inhabitants of Nibiru, the Anunnaki, form a link between Stonehenge, Tiahuanacu and the Sumerians; they were also responsible for creating modern humans by genetic engineering. Disagreement among the Anunnaki made them abandon Earth, but they are due to return shortly and will presumably pay a visit on the creations they abandoned (in other words, us).'
Especially since there is a definition for right. Searching for left on wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn does return results, so maybe the problem is with Wordie's implementation.
N.A.S.A.: 'When observing the great globular cluster NGC 4372, observers frequently take note of a strange dark streak nearly three degrees in length running near it. Unnamed, the streak, actually a long molecular cloud, has become known as the Dark Doodad Nebula. (Doodad is slang for a thingy or a whatchamacallit.)'
B.B.C. News: 'One ancient right all Sarkees can invoke if they believe their property is being threatened, is the Clameur de Haro.
'By falling to their knees in front of witnesses, they can recite the Lord's Prayer in French then cry out for justice; "Haro, Haro, Haro! A mon aide mon Prince, on me fait tort!" (Help me, my prince, I have been wronged).
'If the Clameur is registered with the Greffe (court) the alleged wrong must stop until it is dealt with by the court.
'The seneschal said he had dealt with only one Clameur in 1999, but they almost always involve a boundary dispute.'
Currently grr, grrr, grrrrr and grrrrrrr are listed on Wordie, but for some reason not grrrr or grrrrrr. (A previous version of this comment suggested it was an aversion to even numbers of Rs, which was a silly thing to say on grr.)
Web Ephemera: 'Do you have a green thumb? Then perhaps arborsculpture is for you. It may not be a word that is familiar to you – it does not yet appear in any dictionaries, but it is a combination of art and gardening which is quickly growing in popularity.
'Arborsculpture is the art of growing and shaping the branches of tress (and other woody plants) in to shapes never intended in the wild or even in the garden.'
I'm guessing the first WeirdNet definition, 'ostentatiously lofty in style', isn't the one it has in mind in its definition of a rant. Either that or I should be refining my ranting style.
I think it relies on prior familiarity with the work of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. I don't find it amusing, and I've spent enough time in philosophy classes to find the proofs that p funny; but I'm not even remotely familiar with this person.
Alternatively, glittous: obs. and rare according to the OED, which is a shame. 'a. Of a hawk: Affected with phlegm. b. Of persons: Filthy (in conduct). c. fig. ? Sticky, ensnaring.'
To complement WeirdNet's fine collection of adjectives...
Eric Hobsbawm: 'I have called my lecture ‘Barbarism, A User’s Guide’, not because I wish to give you instructions in how to be barbarians. None of us, unfortunately, need it. Barbarism is not something like ice-dancing, a technique that has to be learned—at least not unless you wish to become a torturer or some other specialist in inhuman activities... The argument of this lecture is that, after about a hundred and fifty years of secular decline, barbarism has been on the increase for most of the twentieth century, and there is no sign that this increase is at an end. In this context I understand ‘barbarism’ to mean two things. First, the disruption and breakdown of the systems of rules and moral behaviour by which all societies regulate the relations among their members and, to a lesser extent, between their members and those of other societies. Second, I mean, more specifically, the reversal of what we may call the project of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, namely the establishment of a universal system of such rules and standards of moral behaviour, embodied in the institutions of states dedicated to the rational progress of humanity: to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, to Equality, Liberty and Fraternity or whatever.'
Japan Times: 'Just as "China" became the common-use word for both porcelain and the country that produced it, so "Japan" entered the English language not only as the name of the country. Originally the word also referred to the lacquerware with which the country was associated, and the verb "japanning" meant "to varnish."'
Is this a misspelling of matriculate, or did someone need an erudite-sounding way of saying 'convert to metric'? There is an obsolete word metrificate, 'write in verse or metre' (OED).
Oe of those nonce-words according to the OED, which makes it a feminine form of Old french enquereour, a judicial inquisitor. (Presumably in modern English we'd say inquisitress or inquisitrix, both of which are attested in the OED.) One citation, from about 1430: 'Art thou meyresse? or a newe enquerouresse? Shewe thi commission.'
Jeremy Bentham: 'The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate.'
There's Rufai, which is in the OED ('A howling dervish, one of an order of Muslim friars pledged to poverty and self-mortification.'), but taken from Turkish.
Tufa, a geological term for a kind of pebble. Also tufaceous.
Wufan: 'Used attrib. to designate an official campaign launched in China in 1952 against bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, skimping on work and cheating on materials, and theft of state economic information.'
List deletion attempts can produce a 500 Application Error instead of a 404; that's only happened to me once, though. Either way, the list doesn't get deleted.
Neatorama: 'If you want to buy diamonds from De Beers, you've got to play by their rules: diamond are sold in events known as "sights." There are 10 sights held each year, and to buy, you have to be a sightholder (these are usually diamond dealers whose business is to have the stones cut and polished and then resold at diamond clearing centers of Antwerp, New York, and Tel Aviv).
'The diamonds are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. A sightholder is given a small box of uncut diamonds priced between $1 and $25 million. De Beers set the price - there is no haggling and no re-selling of diamonds in uncut form. It is rare for sightholders to refuse a diamond package offered to them, for fear of not being invited back. And those who dare to purchase diamonds from other sources than De Beers will have their sightholder privilege revoked.'
Neatorama: 'In 2005, physicists Natalia Dubrovinskaia and colleagues compressed carbon fullerene molecules and heating them at the same time to create a series of interconnected rods called Aggregated Diamond Nanorods (ADNRs or "hyperdiamond"). It's about 11% harder than a diamond.'
This ghost doesn't haunt the dictionaries I've tried, but I found one case of usage in which, as you'd expect, it's apparently a back-formation from uxorious: 'Would I have recognized, during that moment at the lake, what was happening if it had been spelled out to me? U-X-O-R-I-O-U-S. Would I have wanted to know, stripping the moment of its mystery? What I know now is that the apples on the trees were hard, heavy knots, and cat tails were blowing their starry filaments over the water. The towel around me was sienna-colored. You take your uxory where you can find it.'
Although at first glance it looks as though some resentful Wordie has ghosted this and flounced off, it turns out that this represents the hoot of the Barred Owl.
This seems, based on a little Googling, to turn up in both singular and plural forms (Frenchman and Frenchmen), followed by both disease and disorder; I don't know whether the medical literature is more consistent. D.I.: 'As part of the survival instinct, most animals (including humans) react to sudden, unexpected stimuli with a startle reaction... In a normal individual, the muscular reaction subsides within a couple seconds if no real threat is detected, but for a sufferer of the Jumping Frenchman of Maine Disorder, an unexpected stimulus results in a somewhat different experience.
'An individual with this disorder has a genetic mutation that prevents "exciting" signals in the nervous system from being regulated, which causes a number of bizarre irregularities in their startle response. Most notably, an event which might startle a normal person will result in an extended, grossly exaggerated response from a jumper, including crying out, flailing limbs, twitching, and sometimes convulsions. Because a jumper is almost immediately susceptible to another jump soon after an episode ends, there have been reports that sufferers are sometimes teased mercilessly by people who find the reaction amusing, and trigger it repeatedly.'
Edit: Null Hypothesis denies the genetic aspect: 'Originally described by G. M. Beard in 1878, Jumping Frenchman of Maine Disease is an exaggerated "startle" reflex. It was first noted among related French-Canadian lumberjacks in the Moosehead Lake area of Maine. Initially thought to be a neurological and even an inherited disorder, later researches now suspect the disorder to be psychological and brought on by the stressful conditions in the lumber camps.' (That article uses both the singular and the plural forms, incidentally.)
Apparently it's really played. 'While the wizards in the Potter series play Quidditch on flying broomsticks, Muggles (author J. K. Rowling’s word for nonmagical people) run holding a broom between their legs. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and just as awkward...'
htmltimes.com: 'And so it was defined in 1860 that a unit of candlepower was the light produced by "a pure spermaceti candle weighing one-sixth of a pound, burning at a rate of 120 grains per hour." Spermaceti candles weren't just an excellent source of oil, but were now a scientific instrument as well. When Michelson and Morley lit their spermaceti oil-filled lamps, they understood that it burned at a scientifically calibrated rate of eight candlepower units per hour.'
htmltimes.com: 'The head of a Sperm Whale is one fourth the length of it's entire body, and it is filled with a waxy white substance known as spermaceti. It is used by the whales as ballasts. When the fluid was first discovered in the 1700s, it reminded whalers of sperm, hence the name Sperm Whales. To collect this liquid, the whale's head would be cut off and lashed to the side of the ship. A whaler would then bore a man-sized hole in the whale's head and climb inside, chest deep in spermaceti, and hand out buckets— often up to three tons— of the of the waxy liquid. This messy job was done because spermaceti proved to have one exceedingly valuable property. It burned brightly, and it burned evenly.'
Arabic Calligraphy: 'Ghubar (or ‘dust’ in Arabic) is the name of a special kind of calligraphic script. As its name implies, ghubar can be as delicate as particles of dust on a piece of paper. Words written in this script can be as fine as a single hair.'
B.B.C.: 'But frontal assaults, usually carried out by two-man teams firing semi-automatic rifles and lobbing grenades, were the favoured tactic of the insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir between 1999 and 2003. Scores of such attacks were carried out by "fidayeen" (literally "death-defying") squads in Indian-administered Kashmir during that period.'
T.H.E.: 'Correctly used, the term "business-facing" indicates an institution that is focused on educating young people to become employable graduates, offering both vocational degrees and opportunities to get into industry for those studying for academic qualifications. These opportunities can include work placements, partnerships with major local employers and mentoring programmes... However, the Government's focus on skills and employability among graduates has led to almost all universities labelling themselves "business-facing" in an attempt to show they are hitting Whitehall targets.'
Ruddigore: 'Well, then, when I am lying awake at night, and the pale moonlight streams through the latticed casement, strange fancies crowd upon my poor mad brain, and I sometimes think that if we could hit upon some word for you to use whenever I am about to relapse—some word that teems with hidden meaning—like "Basingstoke"—it might recall me to my saner self.'
Lisa Star: 'What's an Elfcon you may ask? It's a Con(vention) of E(lvish) L(inguistic) F(ellows) who were at one time invited to participate in a group project to analyse and publish grammars, dictionaries, paleographical studies and the like of Tolkien's invented languages and alphabets. Participants were invited to provide their research in exchange for copies of the researches of others (and pay for the privilege). However, most of the people who participated never received copies of the publications, and the "cabal" that ran it became very secretive and accusatory. Current Elfcon members are Chris Gilson, Carl Hostetter, Arden Smith, Bill Welden and Pat Wynne (which is why they are referred to as Elfconners, a name coined by Pat Wynne).'
Spiked: 'International Babywearing Week (12-18 November) was marred for some by the launch of a new campaign for Motrin, a brand of the painkiller ibuprofen marketed in the United States. For the uninitiated, ‘babywearing’, as defined by Babywearing International, the folks who sponsor International Babywearing Week, is simply ‘holding or carrying a baby or young child using a baby carrier’. And how did the ad for Motrin impact on Babywearing Week? By suggesting that babywearing is painful, and therefore those who do it might like to stock up on an effective painkiller.'
Nina Burliegh: 'Ossuaries are quite common in Jerusalem. For about ninety years, Jews practiced ossilegium. This method of disposing of the dead involved first closing up body in a cave for a year. After the flesh had fallen away, the bones were removed from the cave and closed up in a small box — an ossuary — which was sometimes inscribed with a design or a name.'
According to the OED, it's a Northern English dialect word meaning 'downward slope; dip (of a coal-seam)' as a noun, and 'to slope downward, to dip' as a verb.
TLS: 'Then we need to inspect the term “philomath�?. The OED suggests that the primary meaning was “a student, esp. of mathematics, natural philosophy, and the like�?. The entry continues, “formerly popularly applied to an astrologer or prognosticator�?. This is putting the cart before the horse. The once respectable word underwent a precipitous decline around the early eighteenth century, from which it never fully recovered. Commonly it was applied to quacks, often by way of self-description. Writing on fortune-tellers in the Spectator in 1712, Joseph Addison referred scornfully to “some prophetic Philomath�?. A year later, the Tory periodical the Examiner spoke of the craze for French prophets in London in the previous decade, and remarked that “not a Philomath or Orthodox Astrologer�? could be heard in the din: even the famous almanac-maker John Partridge gave up and resolved to die a second time. (This of course refers to Jonathan Swift’s Bickerstaff pamphlets, which had predicted the death of Partridge so convincingly that most people were taken in. The Tatler had described Partridge himself as a “Philomath�?.) Leading almanacs like that of John Wing continued to use the label in an unselfconscious way. One or two land-surveyors clung on to it, and people entering puzzle competitions in magazines used it as a pseudonym. But by 1714 mathematicians and inventors pushing a serious idea found it risky to own up to this profession. The word was left to dodgy projectors and snake-oil salesmen.
'We could multiply examples from many sources. It was, however, Swift and his immediate circle who had done most to bring about this linguistic swerve. In 1709 a mock-prophecy appeared under the title of A Famous Prediction of Merlin, attributed to “T. N., Philomath�?, but really from the pen of Swift. In the following years the group of Scriblerian satirists, who also included Alexander Pope, John Gay and John Arbuthnot, wrote a series of pamphlets ridiculing vain and semi-literate projectors who promised the earth and delivered nothing. In 1717 “E. Parker, Philomath�? produced A Complete Key to the new Farce, call’d Three Hours after Marriage, a solemn pseudo-explication of the Scriblerians’ own farce.'
Spiked: 'During the Second Lebanon War of 2006, an American journalist coined the controversial phrase dead child porn to describe the media’s lust for photographing dead or brutalised children.'
Unfortunately it doesn't name the journalist, and I don't feel like Googling for the phrase.
Gauniad: 'UK group Lost Levels are hugely influenced by videogame music, and indeed, videogames in general, ploughing an intriguing furrow between indie pop and the US blipcore scene.'
'"Faction" is a hybrid genre, aiming at the factual accuracy of journalism on the one hand and the literary form of the novel on the other. There is a fundamental tension however between those two aims, given the constraints which factual accuracy places on characterization, plot, and thematic exploration characteristic of the novel. Further, faction cannot be defended on the grounds that factual accuracy is a literary value in faction. Finally, some aspects of faction, such as its inability to refer to sources or provide an analytic framework for a narrative, hinder rather than facilitate the communication of facts.'
~ abstract of 'The Case Against Faction' in Philosophy and Literature 32, pp. 347-358
Neatorama: 'MIT researchers led by chemical engineer Robert Cohen and mechanical engineer Gareth McKinley have created the world's first superoleophobic and superhydrophobic surface (let me translate for you: the "super surface" repels both water and oil)...'
APOD: 'Pictured above are anticrepuscular rays. To understand them, start by picturing common crepuscular rays that are seen any time that sunlight pours though scattered clouds. Now although sunlight indeed travels along straight lines, the projections of these lines onto the spherical sky are great circles. Therefore, the crepuscular rays from a setting (or rising) sun will appear to re-converge on the other side of the sky.'
Salon: 'A second major factor in the poignancy of the sad lolcat, I would argue, is the use of animals. The comic form is generally a prophylaxis against sentimentality. By articulating profound feelings through cats and marine mammals speaking garbled English, we're able to shroud genuine emotions in pseudo-irony -- which means those animals can evoke deeper emotions without fear of mockery or cheapness.'
Salon: 'There's lolcats magnetic poetry, lolcats translators, even a lolcats Bible Translation Project that renders familiar verses into Standard Feline English.'
Salon: 'What makes lolcats different from the cat porn of the past -- the motivational posters of the '70s and '80s featuring furry kittens hanging from tree limbs, covered in toilet paper or in some other kind of adorable predicament -- is that lolcats aren't trying to be cute. In the cat-based imagery of ages past, cats retain their iconic traits: curiosity, skittishness, the tendency to curl up in a ball and just lie there.'
The bug that messes up list pages after additions is afflicting John's own brand new Meat list, so whatever it is, it isn't just affecting older lists.
Not that I know of. Suggestions welcome, then: capostrophe, maybe?
I think there's also a vacancy for a tag to mark unruly double quotation marks (as mentioned on "pluralistic society", but you have to enter that manually into the address bar to reach the page).
Metapsychology: 'Grahek offers a prima facie dismissal of what many philosophers take to be a conceptual truth, i.e. that pain sensation and painfulness are inseparable. Actually, says Grahek, it doesn't require any a priori, philosophical, argument to tear apart such conceptual identification. All we have to do is to look at the clinical evidence concerning pain, specifically to two dissociation syndromes which seem to show that pain without painfulness and painfulness without pain, are possible. The book is mainly concerned with the syndrome called pain asymbolia, in which subjects report to feel pain deprived of its painful quality...'
Metapsychology: 'The eleven papers in this collection are concerned with practical reasoning, or reasoning about what to do. In particular, they address issues connected with a number of ways in which practical reasoning can go wrong. These include various aspects of akrasia (acting in a way you judge not to be best), failing to act in accordance with your resolutions (what Richard Holton calls weakness of will and distinguishes from the traditional understanding of akrasia), accidie (failing to be motivated by your value judgments), the role of emotions in practical reasoning, and prudence (whether we should take account of our future desires).'
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the aim of this 'is to be intelligible to persons of all languages', so it isn't really at home on the Cryptolects list. I'm going to make some other lists involving conlangs and writing systems, though, so I'm still glad to have had it brought to my attention.
But then you have to type just to run the app! (Unless you have it already entered from the last time; but I use Start -> Run -> msconfig and others quite often.)
Rock, Paper, Shotgun: 'Remarkably, for all this shift to the adrenal, the game does manage to realise, to a certain extent, what the film did best: that overwhelming sense of paranoia and loneliness. The latter is conveyed by the setting: Antarctica. Hardly a social hot-spot. Wander outside a building and into the snowy desolace and you’ll freeze to death within a couple of minutes.'
It's not in the dictionaries I've checked, but the intended meaning is plain enough.
Fn + Alt + numpad 0 brings up http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan#rcxdict in a new window under my Firefox install. I don't know why, but I'm not going to disable the browser extension that's causing it.
If I badly enough want a dash I open a new tab with Web Developer Toolbar and use Edit HTML with the appropriate character code (or, on Wordie, just stick the code into the comment box). In practice, however, I'm unlikely to want to open another tab, or to hold down two keys with one hand while entering a four-digit code with the other. So yes, I use the odd double-hyphen here and there; and yes, I also use / where �?� is strictly required. But if you know of any Firefox extensions that offer easy duplication of the Windows Character Map (annoyingly buried three submenus down from Start), I'll try them.
Néojaponisme: 'Naui 「ナウ�?��?was a mayfly of a word, declared dead almost as soon as it was born, reviled as a desperate attempt to squeeze a few more youth dollars out of an already-uncool borrowed English lexeme (�?now�?). As a word in its own right, nau had already demonstrated a tenacity rivaling Madeline Usher’s, but naui was fated to surpass its progenitor in every respect. It became a lexicographic Cartophilus ― cursed to wander the sentences of Japanese forever, scorned and reviled but never granted the peace of oblivion. Its unforgivable sin? To once have both been and meant “fashionable.�?'
The OED associates this with the -let suffix (as opposed to -et), although it's clearly formed through combination with ankle, so some letters have been cut off somewhere to avoid repetition.
Cory Doctorow: 'Indeed, copyists are busily building an elaborate ethos of what can and can't be shared, and with whom, and under what circumstances. They join private sharing circles, argue norms among themselves, and in word and deed create a plethora of "para-copyrights" that reflect a cultural understanding of what they're meant to be doing.
'The tragedy is that these para-copyrights have almost nothing in common with actual copyright law... It's not surprising that para-copyright and copyright don't have much to say to one another. After all, copyright regulates what giant companies do with each other. Para-copyright regulates what individuals do with each other in a cultural settings.'
Fair enough; I just read a terminal hyphen as a dash by habit, given the way a hyphen is frequently used as an ersatz dash owing to keyboard limitations. U+002D is in fact officially known as a hyphen-minus, so maybe hyphen-plus or plus-hyphen? Edit: or hyphen miners?
zompist.com: 'Though Syldavia is in the Balkans, Syldavian forms are usually closer to Dutch than to German (cf. güdd, nietz, wertzragh above). Extratextually the reason is simple: when he needed foreign words, Hergé regularly used Marols, the Brussels Flemish dialect his grandmother spoke. (Another example is the Arabian city of Wadesdah— "What is that" in Marols; and see the Arumbaya in L'oreille cassée.)
'Some readers conclude that Syldavian "is" Marols, but this is an exaggeration...'
I just want to add a note about other, before someone asks: on the face of it 'X is other than Y' does look equivalent to 'Y is other than X', maybe because it looks like a statement of non-identity, and identity is symmetrical. However, whereas XY (X and Y together) is clearly non-identical to X, it doesn't seem other than X, since it incorporates X; whereas X does seem to me to be other than XY, or at least sometimes so, on the assumption that e.g. my liver is other than me, since it could be a functioning transplanted organ in someone else after 'I' have ceased to be. However, I appreciate that needs further tightening up (am I maybe just conflating senses of other?); am I boring anyone yet? Maybe we should stop trying to save pterodactyl and try something completely different...
I agree that difference is about emphasising a metaphorical distance--hence my place in the from camp. But I further contended that usage of than in all suggested cases other than for different is not merely about difference but reflects a logical distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships: than appears in cases where the difference is expressed asymmetrically ('X is different from Y' is logically equivalent to 'Y is different from X'; 'X is greater than Y' isn't equivalent to 'Y is greater than X'). Once you extend than to symmetrical cases, it seems no less arbitrary to me to resist extending it to logically equivalent symmetrical cases ('X is different than Y and not similar than Y').
There's no Académie anglaise to prevent your making arbitrary choices to suit your sense of euphony, just as there's no authority to persuade me that 'the rules are different for men from those for women' is an unworkably clumsy construction (I already speak a language that uses the in order + inf. construction; am I right in thinking Chaucer's for to seeke is equivalent to French pour + inf., and we've somehow lost it?); but treating different and rather as expressing the same kind of difference seems to me logically mistaken, not just syntactically/semantically. Of course, as a philosophy postgrad. I have a particular interest in preserving any logical distinctions expressed in syntax.
Off the top of my head: the rather/other cases, like those with scales of comparison, seem to involve evaluating one thing against the standard set by another, relative to a given difference: e.g. X is cheaper than Y, so we'll buy X rather than Y (where Y is the standard). Whereas an assertion of difference doesn't involve comparing X with Y in respect of some difference, but rather asserting the respect in which they differ itself: difference is a symmetrical relationship (if X differs from Y, then Y differs from X to the same extent), whereas than is maybe suited to asymmetrical cases: if X is greater than Y, Y is lesser than X.
My diabolical advocacy in turn: if 'different than', also 'similar than'? Difference and similarity are both symmetrical relationships; they express degrees of resemblance...
T.H.E.: 'His rare fame as a Miltonist and his straight-talking style made Fish the natural choice as opening speaker at the Milton symposium, organised by the University of London's Institute of English Studies this July to mark the 400th anniversary of the poet's birth. He duly delivered a highly entertaining broadside against the "guerrilla Miltonists" and a younger generation of critics.'
T.H.E.: 'Dr Edgerton is a researcher in environmental psychology at the University of the West of Scotland with a key interest in the design of educational institutions. There is a dearth of research on the topic, but enough exists to indicate that it can have a huge influence on student performance.'
T.H.E.: 'And what about degree of difficulty? Should a first-year module designed to force students to locate the library be worth as much credit as a challenging final-year module on "Patagonian pre-history and its implications"?'
T.H.E. on modular academic courses: 'I kept encountering a story about a molecular biologist who opted to spend a year at a university in California and had been deflected from his true calling into drug-driven self-destruction by taking an optional ceramics module.'
Um... you should probably have a look at the Sound Lantern page on this site. And the abuse page. (Digest version: Basil put the same message on about a hundred people's profiles, and promptly got banned for spamming. But he did apologise, so you shouldn't necessarily be put off his site.)
I've always taken ^^ to be an abbreviation of ^_^ (although they always remind me of nekomimi), which I would tend to set apart from the main text as I would other emoticons.
Oddee: 'Patients who do not have an addiction to plastic surgery are satisfied when they leave; addicts think just one more procedure—and then another, and another, and another—will make them look perfect. This addiction can be the result of Body Dysmorphic Disorder, which is an unhealthy preoccupation with physical appearance or a specific body part.'
Oddee: 'CrackBerry: addiction to BlackBerry. Hearing a "phantom ring" (or experiencing a phantom vibration) and constantly checking e-mail are signs of BlackBerry addiction.'
Oddee: 'Tanorexia is an unhealthy dependence on tanning; the name comes because of its similarities to both substance addictions and body image disorders, such as anorexia.'
Yup, that's why it wasn't immediately obvious whether ebaysalvageyard was a spammer or not: the commercial site URL was a tag. And yes, the tag page is 404'd.
They're well established British usage, actually; we just have the -ise alternative in common usage too. Now if he'd said analyze, that would suggest a non-Brit.
I was going to suggest having a more prominent link to promotion somewhere, maybe on a landing page for new Wordie accounts, but since Basil clearly didn't look around much I wonder whether that would really have helped.
Oh well. Maybe I'll use the 'Weird Al/eBay junk' list theme myself.
Edit: ah, so it's the tag added by this user that leads to the sale. I was wondering where the overtly commerical bit would be. It's a 404'd tag, though...
I'm trying to decide whether this is an unusually subtle form of spam advertising or whether you're following in Weird Al's footsteps. If it's the latter, nice list idea.
Stephen Fry: 'I was taught by classical scholars and grew up on poets, dramatists and novelists who knew the classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me.'
According to dictionary.com it's 'an ornamented cadence esp. in early Renaissance music'.
Stephen Fry via Futurismic: 'CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch.
'If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials.
'For if CCTV was called... I don’t know... something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow "One nation under scunt" to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than "One nation under CCTV". "Damn, I was scunted as I walked home," "they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside," "Britain is the most scunted country in the world"... etc. etc. Or maybe, just maybe, we should stick to the idea of initials and borrow a set that have already taken on the darkest possible connotations of evil and tyranny. Surveillance System. SS.'
Concurring Opinions: 'The NY Times reports today that "three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students." Apparently the American Enterprise Institute's fear of the "liberal thugocracy" of academia is overblown; parents and family are a much better predictor of an individual's political predilections.'
Strange Maps: 'Irredentism, i.e. the desire to annex territory based on historical and/or ethnic grounds, gets its name from Italia irredenta, a term to describe territories held by the Austro-Hungarian empire between the unification of Italy and the end of the First World War, and claimed by Italy.'
NASA: 'Imagine a pipe as wide as a state and as long as half the Earth. Now imagine that this pipe is filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour. Further imagine that this pipe is not made of metal but a transparent magnetic field. You are envisioning just one of thousands of young spicules on the active Sun.'
They both modify a natural language to make it hard for uninitiated listeners to interpret it, so for the purposes of the Cryptolects list the similarity is relevant enough. Are you thinking of prepending?
I'm surrounded by ontologists who are concerned about the possibility of gunk. Apparently in mereology it's a term for stuff that isn't ultimately composed of fundamental particles: the parts all have further parts.
John Hodgman: 'HALLOWE’EN (apostrophe not generally pronounced). Originally called Samhain, this is the traditional Pagan-American holiday in which we ask our children to ponder the fragility of life by dressing them in darkly colored costumes and vision-impairing masks and encouraging them to walk around in the road.'
National Geographic: 'One of the most aggrieved victims of looting may be the Mijikenda people of the Kenya coast, who have had their ornate funerary objects, known as vigango, robbed for years. The chip-carved, wood vigango depict human faces and are erected for members of a secret society, the gohu. Most are four to six feet... high, though some can be taller, depending on the status of the gohu member. '
'Bentham's life-long opposition to the language of natural law and natural rights followed from the distinction between real and ficitious entities, and led to the famous remark in "Anarchical Fallacies" that the doctrine of natural rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1791 was "simple nonsense" and that of natural and imprescriptible rights, "nonsense upon stilts".'
(F. Rosen, intoduction to Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, O.U.P., p. xxxv)
Business Terms: 'A method of advertising research in which a study is conducted on the relationship between a viewer's pupil dilation and the interest factor of visual stimuli.'
'Many of the Turkish republic's early elite sought a Pan-Turkic identity in alliance with the Turkic cultures of Central Asia. But the ancient homeland of the Turkish people - Turkestan - was in the possession of Russia and China...'
Nice list... Depending on how far outside psychology you feel like straying, existential inauthenticity might be applicable: Heidegger talks about inauthentically doing 'what one does'. (His translators rendered das man as the they, as in 'they say...' at the start of a rumour, because 'the one' gives the wrong effect in English.)
Something's gone weird with the Meta list: when I added a word from the list page, the listed words vanished, and instead of seeing the words listed with the new addition included, I got my list of lists.
I tried adding another word to Meta, and got the same effect: image. I couldn't replicate the effect when testing on another of my lists, so it seems to be list-specific.
'He laid out three options for a Turkish national identity in the final years of the Ottoman Empire: Ottomanism, or a common Ottoman citizenship irrespective of religion of or?'>possible typo of or? origin; Pan-Islamism, based of course on religion; and Turkism, or a nationalism based on the Turkish "race".'
'European scholars were advancing the study of Turcology, or the study of the ancient history and civilization of the Turkish peoples. This was due in part to the rise of pan-Slavism in Russia and the eastern lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and took the form of Turanism, whose chief aim was the rapprochement and ultimate union - cultural, political, or both - among all peoples whose origins were said to go back to Turan, an ancient Iranian name for the country to the north-east of Persia, a kind of Shangri-La on the steppes of Central Asia.'
National Geographic: 'A previously unknown population of vampire moths has been found in Siberia. And in a twist worthy of a Halloween horror movie, entomologists say the bloodsuckers may have evolved from a purely fruit-eating species.'
Used by Tolkien to refer to the Drúedain, but according to the Encyclopedia of Arda originally 'a name from British folklore, referring to a hairy, troll-like being supposed to inhabit woods and forests'.
In Tolkien, a Hobbit-hole. Tucknorough.net: 'The word smial is derived from the Old English smygel meaning "retreat, burrow." The actual Hobbit word was trân.'
Am I correct in thinking the non-numerical style of list URL is new too? This is the first time I've noticed links like wordie.org/lists/vanishedone-s-words turning up.
'In the locality of Kyoshk he recorded samples of the Zargarī language, which, according to the natives, contain many Greek words, those same natives allegedly being the descendants of Alexander the Great. According to Sadeqe Kīy�?, "Zargarī is the most widely known and most universal of the secret languages in Iran". The popularity and widespread applcation of this cryptic language was the reason why nearly all secret languages in Iran are called Zargarī. The Tajiks do not currently use this term, although zaboni zargarī has been recorded to denote a provisional language of the goldsmiths.' (Gurgen Melikian, 'On the Problem of Secret Languages and Slangs in Iran', in Iran & the Caucasus, Vol. 6, No. 1/2 (2002), pp. 181-188)
Does anyone know what this is? This sounds intriguing: 'Artificial languages, signs, pass words, codes, symbols, euphemisms, implications, metaphors in Turkic culture (such as karga dili, special forms of greeting, communication by whistling, coded messages in posters, names given to military operations, road signs in history, etc.) come under the interest of this symposium.' But Googling suggests there's nothing else on it on the Anglophone Web.
The 'vernacular of the masons': Irish with some archaic and otherwise unusual vocabulary included (according to a review of the book Secret Languages of Ireland).
Nature: 'Shelta, or more correctly Sheldrii, a secret language found among a certain class of tramps in England and current among Irish tinkers, was discovered in 1876 by Charles Godfrey Leland...'
Looting Matters: 'Apparently the coin hoard had been "deposited on the same spot as a Roman rubbish pit or midden". The report continues: "due to the fact that the find had already been removed prior to investigation a stratigraphical relationship could not be established". In other words the precise archaeological context for the hoard had been lost during its removal in the dark of a December evening.'
Times Online: 'Cinemagoers tired of films where brand-name drinks creep artfully into shot or actors ostentatiously check their expensive watches will be relieved to hear that product placement has its limits.
'Danny Boyle - the director of Slumdog Millionaire, which was shown last night at the closing gala of The Times BFI London Film Festival – told The Times that there was such a thing as product displacement.
'Mercedes-Benz and another multinational insisted that their logos be removed from scenes in the film because they did not want to be associated with a Bombay slum, he said.'
Or chatbots, even? It's the Turing Test Plus, isn't it?
Unless John can see anything suggestive in the IP logs for Wordie, we're probably left guessing. I think the explanation that these really are children is most economical.
Private Eye #1222: 'According to Professor Richard Bradford in his recent survey The Novel Now, she is something called a "domesticated postmodernist". This apparently means a writer who doesn't quite let his or her weakness for highbrow trickery get in the way of a desire to sell large numbers of copies.'
We've had people saying previously - on features I think - that it can be hard to keep track of all the ongoing conversations when wordie.org/comments is flowing fast. To an extent it's a side-effect of site growth, but the site isn't ideally structured to support extended private conversations (private in the sense that their content concerns only a few participants): everything's publicly viewable except notes, and keeping track of the action involves watching the all-inclusive stream of recent comments, so when a lot of those comments are not only half-literate but also non-public chatroom stuff...
(Edit: this was written to respond to John and reesetee.)
Unusually, we're nowhere on the first Google page, although this tosser's site is. Vodila seems to be a surname, currently being besmirched by car salesmen.
And now all the spam comments have been removed from simip's list, although there's still one here. And simip seems positively to have embraced sea ice models. Is it an Israeli brand of comedy? Is simip hoping we'll leave the list up and forget about it, only to find the description has been changed back later? Or is something yet more sinister afoot...?
Gizmodo: 'Unlike a traditional Rubik's cube, the object here is not to solve it, but to match colors that might look good in a bedroom or living space. The problem is that Rubitone is only a concept, so my walls will just have to stay plain and white for now.'
Quoted from Atlanta Nights: 'Yvonne poured herself a drink and melted into the chair across from Callie. She brushed a strand of moltenly hair from her eyes and proceeded to carve the ham. Callie watched intently. Juice streamed from the ham in rivulets like saliva drooling from the fierce jaws of a wild dingo poised over the dead carcass of its prey in the dingo-eat-dingo world.'
BBC: 'When I was at school, the whispered warning Charlie's dead alerted a girl to the fact that her petticoat was showing under her lovat-green school skirt. Horror of horrors!
...
'There are various theories as to where that curious phrase came from. It seems to date from World War II, and my own favourite explanation is that in the 1940s, the window-blinds were lowered whenever there was a death in the house.
'The dipping half-slip was like a lowered window-shade. More fanciful versions involving Bonny Prince Charlie or Charles II, are, I am afraid, historically implausible, though no doubt a number of listeners will write or e-mail me to say that they prefer them.'
Also countermajoritarian (see title of linked page). Legal Theory Lexicon: 'The counter-majoritarian difficulty states a problem with the legitimacy of the institution of judicial review: when unelected judges use the power of judicial review to nullify the actions of elected executives or legislators, they act contrary to “majority will�? as expressed by representative institutions. If one believes that democratic majoritarianism is a very great political value, then this feature of judicial review is problematic.'
Philadelphia Inquirer: 'Too bad you're not a fruit fly. When winter arrives, many of them have a mysterious ability to simply chill out - entering a mild state of quasi-hibernation known as diapause.'
Science Blogs: 'This funny looking squid is about the size of a small avocado and can be found most commonly in the deepwater (greater than 100 m or 320 ft) of virtually all oceans. Its habit of filling up with water and the funny location of its siphonemisspelling? with a wild-looking 'tuft' of eight arms and two tentacles had prompted scientists to name it the piglet squid.'
Superlative of either manholy or manholey; I'm unsure which.
Neatorama: 'A Japanese city planner must have really, really, really liked manholes. Behold a quiet, unassuming street in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward with the unique world record of being the manholiest street in the world...'
Wordmall: 'what is the opposite of an epiphany? Frankly, I’ve had difficulty finding a word endorsed by widespread usage... So, let me approach the question from an etymological perspective. An epiphany leads a person to a burst of internal light. We need a term to metaphorically express leading a person to a dark cave. Let’s save the epi-, meaning to, and let’s add the combining form -calyptry, from the Greek kalyptra, covered and hidden as by a veil.
'Thus, we have epicalyptryep´-ee-cal-ip´-tree, deliberate concealment from self or resistance to insight. Spread the word, folks. Let’s get it into dictionaries.'
Slate: 'What's with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be epic?
'It's nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game's obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: "You beat it! Your skill is great!" If you lose, you are mocked: "You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!"'
There's an International Oleander Society whose folklore page notes some ideas/stories about the origin of the word. The OED rather more staidly assocites it with 'post-classical Latin oleandrum, oliandrum, accusative (14th cent.) or Middle French, French oléandre (1314 in Old French), of uncertain origin.'
Edge: 'Of all the words that could possibly encapsulate what a doctored-screenshot is, Penny Arcade’s sharp portmanteau of the terms screenshot and bullshit has always felt the most appropriate.'
A reluctance to learn or use formal Japanese even when otherwise a fluent and enthusiastic student of the language. Néojaponisme: 'Keigo is the new Japanese: many people seem almost proud of not understanding it, dismissing it out of hand as impossible and unnecessary. But if you can speak fluent Japanese but haven’t bothered to learn how to show formal respect, well, folks will draw conclusions. Future generations will look back on keigophobia the same way we do the ridiculous “Oh, no foreigner could ever learn Japanese — it’s far too illogical and mystical for the Western mind�? attitudes of yesteryear.'
According to Wikipedia it's a species of banyan. dictionary.die.net says it 'differs from the banyan (Ficus Indica) by sending down no roots from its branches'.
SciencePunk: 'Another example of pathological science, but this time over a electromagnetic wave rather than a physical substance, is the “discovery�? of N-rays... Hidden in the requisite darkness of the experiment, Wood secretly removed an essential prism from the apparatus, and switched a large file for a piece of wood. Nevertheless, Blondlot and his team were able to ’see’ the spark. Wood reported his findings in the journal Nature, stating that N rays were a purely subjective phenomenon.'
SciencePunk: 'Some time around the early 1960s, Soviet physicist Nikolai Fedyakin was carrying out experiments on tiny amounts of water that had been repeatedly forced through narrow quartz capillary tubes. His measurements showed this water had a higher boiling point, lower freezing point, and much higher viscosity than ordinary water... However, when Denis Rousseau of Bell Labs measured the properties of his own sweat after a rigorous game of handball, he found it to be identical to those of polywater... When researchers attempted to create polywater under even tighter controls to eliminate contamination, they found nothing but water.'
SciencePunk: 'Orgonite is an offshoot of the pseudoscience of Orgone, an all-encompassing life-force energy “discovered�? in the 1930s by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich... In reality, it’s just a piece of quartz embedded in some plastic, and the only thing it will accumulate is strange looks when you tell everyone how their sexual libido energy is coursing through you.'
Cracked: 'The sport began in 2000 and was developed from the similar, non-bike-related Bog Snorkelling Championships. Both were the brainchild of a local pub landlord, who dreamt it up after drinking a lot of booze. Interesting fact:
As well as hosting the Annual Bog Snorkelling Championships and the Mountain Bike Bog Snorkelling Championships, there is also a Triathlon Bog Snorkelling Championships, the latest in the town's attempt to milk the bog snorkelling thing for all it's worth.'
Cracked: 'camel wrestling is a Turkish sport in which two male camels slug it out. The Tulu Camels are specially bred for the competition, and decked out with bells and colourful ornamentation. They're then sent into the ring with another camel to do battle over a hot camel-babe in heat.'
'Some claim it's a cross between baseball and golf, but in reality it only has a passing similarity to either... The name derives from the German word for hornet, because of the buzzing noise the hornuss makes as it flies through the air.'
Cracked: 'It's referred to as "keepin' 'em down" and Ferret Leggers have to keep the two thrashing, angry ferrets down their trousers for as long as possible. When the Ferret Legger can't take any more, they whip their trousers down, freeing the Ferrets, and spend the next few weeks trying to piece together their shredded pride. And genitals.'
: 'Freestyle Walking and Free Running seem to be sports for people who bought the clothes to dress like Bam Margera, but didn't have any money left to buy a skateboard. So they go jumping off rails and fences using only their feet... Freestyle Walking was developed by Illinois residents Brian White, Brandon Kennedy, Tom Mottier and Mike Rempert in 1995 as a means of self-expression and creative interaction with one's environment.'
bossaball.com: 'Bossaball mixes soccer, volleyball and gymnastics
on trampolines and inflatables.'
Cracked: 'The name comes from Bossa nova, which is a style of Brazilian Music, and Bossaball officials are known as samba referees. They officiate the game, but also provide the soundtrack with drums, turntables and microphones, an innovation we think would improve many sports (golf most of all).'
olimpickgames.co.uk: 'Shin-kicking has once again become a regular feature of Robert Dover's Olimpick Games, much to the delight of the spectators. Contestants hold each other by the shoulder and try to kick shins and bring opponents to the ground. A Stickler, the ancient name for our judge, makes sure that shins are hit before a fall can count. Our kickers wear the traditional white smocks associated with shepherds. They are allowed to protect their shins with straw.'
Neil Gaiman: 'Guacamole-headed thoughts... I remain utterly mush-headed, but should have completely recovered in time for the UK tour and to do it all over again.'
Yahoo: 'The surprise guest was a molecule with 60 carbon atoms shaped like a soccer ball. To Kroto, it also looked like the geodesic domes promoted by Buckminster Fuller, an architect, inventor and futurist. That inspired Kroto to name the new molecule buckminsterfullerene, or buckyballs for short.
...
'Researchers at Smalley's laboratory then inadvertently found that the tubes would stick together when disbursed in a liquid suspension and filtered through a fine mesh, producing a thin film — buckypaper.'
The fat of the roe-deer, according to the OED. Although of the two citations it gives, both from the 1600s, one renders it as 'Bevy Greace', the other as 'Beuiegreace'.
BBC: 'I don't want them to see us as a nation of bevviers and swalliers. Where the image that first comes to mind of Scotland is of drunkenness and violence. I don't want our people and land constantly portrayed and seen almost as synonymous with drink and aggression.'
Possibly a Scots slang or dialect word? Of the very few Google results, the first suggests it's a surname.
I should say to prakashanand that despite our being rather ready to react to business method queries with spoof answers, we wouldn't actually prefer a spambot. Not for very long, anyway.
After Googling, I think this is the most helpful result: 'The skip-level meeting is about building relationships with your skips.'
Most of us treat skips merely as receptacles for large volumes of rubbish, making us understand encounters with them barely as meetings at all; thus distanced from a Buber-esque I-Thou encounter with the skip, we persist in looking down upon it instead of relating to it at its own level of being. By engaging in more meaningful and diverse relationships with skips we become able to experience a human-skip meeting in, if not a fully Levinasian sense, at least a more open, accepting and mutually satisfying one.
Nader Elhefnawy: 'My review of Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Peter Watts’s Blindsight for Strange Horizons quickly had people speculating about “neuropunk,” Watts himself “calling dibs” on the term in his comment about the review on his blog. The idea seems to be catching on, with cyberpunk great Rudy Rucker recently blogging about it too.'
Vanderbilt.edu: 'Worm grunting involves going into the forest, driving a wooden stake into the ground and then rubbing the top of the stake with a long piece of steel called a rooping iron. This makes a peculiar grunting sound that drives nearby earthworms to the surface where they can be easily collected for fish bait.
'Despite a lot of speculation, worm grunters don't really know why the technique works.'
Henry Jenkins: 'The kinds of communities I discussed in the book are what Cory Doctorow calls "ad-hoc-cracies." They emerge quickly in response to shared interests and concerns. They last as long as people need the community to work through a common problems or query. They vanish when they are no longer useful to their members. They are radically interdisciplinary or I'd prefer, "undisciplined," in that they draw together people with many different expertises and they deploy social networks which observe few of the barriers to interaction we experience in the physical world to bring people together who should be working together. They develop informal yet very powerful systems for vetting information and for carrying out deliberation.'
I've added some of Kierkegaard's and Fernando Pessoa's pseudo-attributions for their works, on the grounds that these were more fleshed-out smokescreen characters than mere noms de plume. They're possibly borderline cases, but at least they're distinctive ones.
BLDGBLOG: 'In their 2007 book, Boomburbs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities, Lang and LeFurgy explain that many of the largest cities in the United States today are simply hypertrophied suburbs—they are boomburbs. The mayors of established cities have had a hard time adjusting to this fact. Mesa, Arizona, for instance, an otherwise anonymous tumescence on the air-conditioned desert edge of Phoenix, is a "stealth city": Its population, incredibly, is larger than both Minneapolis–St. Paul and Miami. The authors also describe how the mayor of Salt Lake City once "dismissed the idea" that his city might have anything in common with suburban North Las Vegas, "despite the fact that North Las Vegas is both bigger and more ethnically diverse than Salt Lake City." What these boomburbs have, in lieu of historic centrality and international name-recognition, is a flexible legal and financial infrastructure. They have water rights boards and waste disposal networks, even local schools and sales tax—and though they don’t necessarily have mayors (though some do), they have "landscape management" committees and homeowners associations. These are cities made up less by buildings than by tax codes and the law.'
Presumably the " in 'never wants to receive a letter signed "fromunda cheese' gets parsed as the end of the hyperlink: <a href="first part of URL then a " which gets read as this closing character:">text</a>
It works if you enter it into the browser's address box.
Edit: hmm, it seems the automatic link creation with square brackets dislikes it too.
Of all possible results to place at number two (down from number one last night), image search comes up with a still from a pornographic/horror film called Blood Lake. I think WeirdNet must have got it into its clutches.
Adding a tag to a word seems to break the 'all tags' cloud for that word until a page reload: the cloud disappears but the toggle link is still 'hide', and no amount of clicking makes the tag cloud reappear.
I just noticed the 'add to list' dropdown appears under the tags... I didn't notice it under the tag cloud at first, and thought the profusion of tags had triggered a bug.
Philosophy's Other: 'After having operated as a separate science for decades, economics is now opening up its boundaries to other disciplines. One such discipline is cognitive neuroscience. The nascent field of neuroeconomics is a booming business. Worldwide, more than a dozen of new Centers for Neuroeconomics Studies equipped with high tech brain scanners have been founded within the past few years. Several papers on neuroeconomics already found their way into prestigious academic journals such as Science and Nature. At the same time neuroeconomics meets resistance among economists... Many economists and methodologists are skeptical about the contribution neuroeconomics can make to economics.'
New York Times Magazine: 'Proponents of neurolaw say that neuroscientific evidence will have a large impact not only on questions of guilt and punishment but also on the detection of lies and hidden bias, and on the prediction of future criminal behavior. At the same time, skeptics fear that the use of brain-scanning technology as a kind of super mind-reading device will threaten our privacy and mental freedom, leading some to call for the legal system to respond with a new concept of “cognitive liberty.�?'
There's a similar story told by Bertrand Russell: 'There is a story of a man who got the experience from laughing gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout." '
Dictionary battle: Wiktionary says it's between seven and twelve.
According to Wikipedia the term moron was used in psychology to refer to someone with a mental age of 8 - 12 on the Binet scale, so we may have to let WordNet off this time.
DRB: 'Yes, this is just what it says - "clockwork fetus in brass chamber", A Mechanical Womb. Could anything be more steampunk-ish than this? Described as "Anachrotechnofetishism", more works of such top-notch quality can be viewed in this gallery by Molly Friedrich.'
CBS: 'To hear the White House tell it, one factor in the House vote yesterday against the administration’s bailout plan – was the word "bailout." ... "It’s an effort to fix this problem of a frozen asset class that has implications over our entire economy," said Fratto at the daily White House press briefing.'
Removing the full stop prevents the 500, but usually full stops on words are well behaved nowadays, so maybe it's the combination of stop and semi-colon...
Comments by vanishedone
Show previous 200 comments...
vanishedone commented on the word jargon
Boing Boing: 'Perhaps print journalism foreshadowed its fledgling future long ago with its morbid jargon. Morgue. Gutter. Beat. Deadline. Dummy. Kill. Widow. Orphan.'
March 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Perhaps it means, 'The "random" misappropriation of it's still aggrieves me somewhat.'
March 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word stuccoyer
Also stuccoer, q.v.
March 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word oneyer
The O.E.D. says the origin is uncertain, the meaning is perhaps 'a sheriff', and it's now used only in allusion to Shakespeare's 'great Oneyres'. However, it does seem to be sure that the -yer is the same as in lawyer; great oneyer is given as an example under the entry for the suffix.
March 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word stuccoer
Also spelt stuccoyer: 'a modeller in stucco', says the O.E.D..
March 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Nobody is listing "random" it's misappropriation still aggrieves me somewhat. perhaps unoriginally but genuinely. djsalinger nevertheless managed to make it the 'least favourite' on his/her profile, where it links to http://wordie.org/words/ — probably an upshot of the " characters. Since we know adding word pages containing " is possible even though links to them break, this one 'should' be in the database as a word page somewhere, but it seems not to have been added. (At least, until I add it and tag it accidental profundity.)
March 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word island of excellence
Citation on pocket of excellence.
March 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pocket of excellence
T.H.E.: 'When a large number of departments in teaching-led universities were discovered by the 2008 research assessment exercise to be producing world-class work, a new phrase quickly entered the higher education lexicon.
'"Pockets of excellence" became a rallying cry for post-1992 universities keen to show that they could compete with the research elite. But a subtle rebranding of the "pockets" by the Higher Education Funding Council for England has raised eyebrows - and shown how politically sensitive the pockets have become.
'Last week, David Eastwood, chief executive of Hefce, confirmed that the funding body's preferred metaphor for the departments was now "islands of excellence", because it imbued them with a greater sense of isolation.'
March 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word slopping out
B.B.C. News: 'Slopping out was the practice of using buckets as toilets in prison cells.'
March 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word favour
WordNet lacks the sense 'resemble' (which the O.E.D. marks 'now colloq.'), as e.g. here: 'This girl kind of favored Kanako but it definitely wasn’t her'.
March 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word misery memoir
Citation on mum-oir.
March 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mum-oir
Spiked: 'Bored to death of the misery memoir, those endless books by adults claiming that their lives have been scarred by childhood abuse and neglect, normally at the hands of their parents? Well, now there’s a new, overgrown kid on the block. Welcome to the misery mum-oir, a book by a successful middle-class mother claiming that her life has been ruined by her abusive and unappreciative child.'
March 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word broadcasters urge saberi access
What it means: 'A number of UK and US media outlets, including the BBC, have called on Iran to allow independent access to detained American journalist Roxana Saberi.'
March 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
I wonder how it should be interpreted when people put definitions in the tag box (e.g. on tjuze). If it's because they want their definitions floating above the comments, that's a sign that some sort of dedicated definition-adding facility (with additions displayed under WordNet's?) might be useful; but if it's because they're new here and haven't worked out how it all works, having yet another way of adding data to word pages might confuse them further.
March 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word temptress in a teapot
It sounds nicer than a storm/tempest in a teacup/teapot/other. 'There were a couple of scenes where there were these cross-like structures, and the whole thing was the most incredible temptress in a teapot, in that we were accused of censoring it. We even ran the screenshots side by side. But some random fan got hold of it and it turned into a firestorm. That to me served as a reminder of how sensitive the hardcore market is.'
March 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word antidisestablishmentarianism
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism (although the OUP Blog rather unkindly calls it a mere 'stunt word').
March 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word puntland
B.B.C. News: 'Even these figures overstate the number of pirates that actually face trial because they include those handed over to the authorities in Puntland, the semi-autonomous region in the north-east of Somalia from which most pirates come.'
March 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word amphicar
Telstar Logistics: 'Special Agent Oddwick recently enjoyed an Amphicar sighting in Florida, although he didn't fully realize it at the time. Instead, he reported seeing a "boat/car thingy" and noted that he didn't believe the propellers were functional.'
March 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ?
prolixpolymath managed to add this to the database as 'onomatopoeia that best describes prolixpolymath', but in spite of that the link from his/her profile breaks; you have to use %3f. I've added this to Wordie Paradox using that method, and the result is another entry that doesn't know it's on the list: 'appears in these lists' is empty. (Edit: ah, I realised this has already been done with blah ... does that count%3f. However, the profile links of the people who added them break differently: this one produces a 500 Application Error, whereas the other produces a 'nobody is listing' page.)
March 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word eu workers 'no impact' on uk jobs
The missing bit is 'have had'.
March 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word fogbank
Sunday Herald: 'The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) "lost knowledge" of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million... Neither the NNSA nor the UK Ministry of Defence would say anything about the nature or function of Fogbank. But it is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear bomb. US officials have said that manufacturing the material requires a solvent cleaning agent which is "extremely flammable" and "explosive". The process also involves dealing with "toxic materials" hazardous to workers.'
March 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word brandjacking
B.B.C. News: 'Another problem facing legitimate firms is the practice of false association. This is when a domain name - with similar, but not identical wording to a popular website - is registered (and often made to look like) the legitimate site in order to direct unsuspecting users to bogus or offensive pages... The report says that the majority of illegal sites involved in so-called "brandjacking" are hosted in the United States, Germany and the UK.'
See also phishing, then.
March 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word brand abuse
A rather peculiar way of putting it: this seems to be a rather general term, so maybe 'trademark infringement' just didn't capture everything.
March 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hydrobot
Galileo Project: 'If the Europa Orbiter finds a submerged ocean, we could look for landing sites where instruments could descend to the surface, melt through the ice, and deploy "hydrobots" --- submarine robotic explorers.'
March 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bradigabo
Languagehat: 'Among the delightful trivia Sauer mentions are the "rare Latin lemma... bradigabo (badrigabo) in Épinal-Erfurt 131, the meaning of which is unknown; it was glossed as felduuop (Ép) / felduus (Erf), the meaning of which is also unknown"...'
March 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word what are you jumping about
Actually you can have question marks, but hexadecimal trickery is required: see %3f.
March 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
As regards viewing words by initial letter, see my comment from about a month ago regarding wildcarding, which would be still more versatile.
Maybe if alphabetical searches are implemented there should be additional filters for searches, e.g. 'beginning with a AND listed by $username'. (And while we're on the subject of search and search filters, I wonder whether a search function for tags might be useful.)
March 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
They're working for me.
March 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word new target for police confidence
Public confidence in the police, that is.
March 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list a-dummary-of-words
You might enjoy this list.
March 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word 'substantial doubt' for gm future
General Motors, not genetic modification.
March 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word boche baby
B.B.C. News: 'One of the last World War II taboos is being lifted in France.
'So-called "Boche babies" - the illegitimate offspring of occupying enemy troops - are speaking openly for the first time about their family secret and hunting for long-lost German fathers.'
March 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word regional sheep 'more vulnerable'
What it means: 'A new survey claims regional breeds of sheep face a heightened risk of disease because of their tendency to remain together in one location' (emphasis added).
March 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pene-enclave
Strange Maps: 'A pene-enclave is almost an enclave in the same way that a peninsula almost is an island. But only on a strictly lexical level. If we descend from the abstraction of definition to particular examples, things get messy — in an almost clintonesque way: all depends on what your definition of almost is.'
March 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
A problem with Niteowl's 'steampunk steam punk' tag (I mentioned it here a month ago) has turned up again with a tag on doodacky: the tag 'thingamebob whatsit doodah whatsitname' is linking to http://wordie.org/tags/thingamebobwhatsitdoodahwhatsitname, which produces a 500 Application Error.
March 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mole clinic
For moles of the kind you get on skin. I had visions of highly specialised vets.
March 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word data plans 'medical records risk'
A lost Star Trek plot, no doubt.
March 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word diasporization
Citation on mediatization.
March 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word deterritorialization
Citation on mediatization.
March 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mediatization
'Our analysts speak polysyllabically and in turn of five new processes: "deterritorialization" (culture as torn out of its geography and made homeless); "hybridity" (cultures as mixed up together); "liminality" (poor cultures shoved off the edge by rish ones); "diasporization" (cultures scattered worldwide but persisting in a mutant form); above all, analysts speak of "mediatization" (the stories of culture detached from their local habitations and carried largely abroad by the electronic media).'
~ Fred Inglis, Culture (Key Concepts series), p. 146
March 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word broken link
Probably not.
March 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user john
If you're now saying you're back on the bike, dare I ask what happened to the horse...? Please tell me it's living out its retirement in a pasture somewhere, or something--
March 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Regarding list URLs based on the wrong titles: is it my imagination, or did http://wordie.org/lists/meta use to be a working URL? You can see me using it on this page, about four months ago. It's now got to be http://wordie.org/lists/metaphysics-buzz-words-2, so it seems this bug can actually cause previously existing links to break.
March 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word errata
Now the 'it lives' tag is already taken...
March 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word brainjacking
Times: 'It sounds like science fiction, but politicians, lawyers and advertisers are falling over themselves to buy into the latest scientific discovery: brainjacking. Soon our secret desires and not so innocent thoughts could become public knowledge.'
March 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word group disorder
Apparently there's now a policing term for 'any form of violence committed by people acting together, be that in an organised or spontaneous manner'.
March 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word firefox
It's been one of our requested features for about a year.
February 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word marketecture
The Dilbert usage is apparently: 'preventing customers from realising what they're buying'.
February 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word academicise
Spiked: 'Fish calls this process of intellectual interrogation “academicising�?, which he describes thus: "To academicise a topic is to detach it from the context of its real world urgency, where there is a vote to be taken or an agenda to be embraced, and insert it into a context of academic urgency, where there is an account to be offered or an analysis to be performed."'
February 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word international sword swallower's awareness day
Scientific American: 'February 28th is International Sword Swallower’s Awareness Day, according to practitioner Dan Meyer, who recently demonstrated the technique at the AAAS meeting in Chicago.'
February 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word anti-carol
The Escapist: 'In reverence of the wonderfully dark stories, the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society created its anti-Christmas album A Very Scary Solstice... Three years on, and George Taylor helps to add a little "Fred Astaire" charm, and a lot of CGI, to this anti-carol based on the book "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".'
February 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word marionberry
B.B.C. News: 'A proposal to name the marionberry as the official berry of the US west coast state of Oregon has been scuppered by a grower of a rival berry type.
'The Oregonian newspaper said the resolution was removed from the state legislature's agenda at the request of a blackberry farmer, Larry Duyck.
'Raspberry, blueberry and strawberry growers had all supported the proposal.
'But Mr Duyck was worried that the marionberry would be given an unfair edge over his type of blackberries.
'Oregon's Marion County accounts for 90% of the world's marionberry crop, the Oregonian reported.'
The article also notes that a marionberry is a 'hybrid blackberry', and quotes someone discussing 'internal disputes in the berry community'.
February 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word comp
Checking WordNet's contribution to dictionary.reference.com/browse/comp, I see bilby has it right.
February 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word comp
The O.E.D. does give comp as an abbreviation of competition, as well as company, compositor and accompaniment.
February 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hospital drink cases hit new high
Cases of alcohol-related hospitalisation, not tall drinks cabinets.
February 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mima mounds
D.R.B.: 'The "natural" theory of nature being responsible for the Majorly Mysterious Mima Mounds starts to crumble upon further investigation. Sure there’s plenty of things we don’t yet understand about how our native world behaves scientists do know enough to be able to say what it can’t do – and it’s looking pretty certain it can’t be as precise, orderly, or meticulous as the mounds.'
February 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word twittercrat
The Escapist: 'The UK government is advertising for a 'Director of Digital Engagement'. The job description? To create strategies for communicating over social networking sites... The job advertisement has understandably come under fire from the government's rivals. Susie Squire, the TaxPayers' Alliance campaign manager, said: "The Government should not be spending money on a Twittercrat during a recession..."'
February 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word slug-moat
Scarthin Books: 'In the absence of slug-pellets, old wives masquerading as gurus crowd in -beer traps, milk traps (for those who don't like wasting beer) or barriers of soot, sand, lime, crushed egg-shells or double-whammy combinations of the above are advocated but are tedious to install, can vanish in a night's heavy rain and are at best only partially effective. My preferred solution requires capital expenditure but is then almost maintenance-free and has a working lifetime of years, perhaps decades. It is the SCARTHIN SLUG-MOAT (or for Google's Sake SLUGMOAT).'
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word golden raspberries
B.B.C. News: 'Mike Myers' comedy flop The Love Guru has dominated the Golden Raspberries, the spoof prizes awarded to the worst Hollywood movies of the year.
'The film won Razzies for worst picture, worst actor - for Myers in the title role - and worst screenplay, in the annual eve-of-Oscars mock-ceremony.'
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word parson bird
If you're saying she just now posted there, you must be misreading '6 months'. she hasn't been around for four months now.
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dark fire
Fireworks Glossary: 'A composition giving off hardly any light when it burns. It is used in stars to give a winking effect, or to separate colour changes.'
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word palinize
Good.is: 'verb. To be treated (and marginalized) in a way reminiscent of Sarah Palin.'
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pluto
Usage as a verb ('to be plutoed') here.
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lohaned
Good.is: 'adj. To be Lohaned—or Ms. Lindsay Lohaned, for the formal among us—is to get blitzed, bombed, shellacked, marinated, insert your own drunken euphemism here.'
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word kinnear
Good.is: 'verb. Named for the actor Greg Kinnear, this describes the sneaky method of taking a picture of someone who isn’t aware of it.'
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word belichick
Good.is: 'verb. To commit the NFL no-no of illegal videotaping, like New England Patriots head coach and sweatshirt enthusiast Bill Belichick.'
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word phelpsian
Good.is: 'adj. Extraordinarily successful, even beyond Michael Jordanesque and Tiger Woodsy—or just a hell of a swimmer.'
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list oddest-book-title-of-the-year
This year's shortlist is out.
Edit: there's also some further commentary here.
February 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word altermodernism
World Wide Words: 'This has appeared, like a dusty fly speck dotted across the review pages of the more upmarket British newspapers this month, because Altermodern is the name given to Tate Britain’s Triennial 2009 exhibition. The term was coined by the exhibition’s curator, the French cultural theorist Nicolas Bourriaud.'
February 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word theis
See discussion on oofay.
February 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word oofay
Theis is already in the O.E.D. with the meaning thus (19th C.). It's apparently a nautical term, so I can't guarantee it's what the spammer had in mind.
February 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word acquirement
The O.E.D. says an acquirement in the sense of 'that which is acquired' is 'usually a personal attainment of body or mind, as distinct from an acquisition or material and external gain, and opposed to a natural gift or talent'. So maybe something like accomplishment would be a better alternative, depending on the context.
February 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list meta
Duly listed.
February 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word marfan syndrome
He's one of the standard famous maybes, along with Tutankhamun and Rachmaninoff. Happily, life expectancy is now improved.
February 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word prawo jazdy
B.B.C.: 'It was discovered that the man every member of the Irish police's rank and file had been looking for - a Mr Prawo Jazdy - wasn't exactly the sort of prized villain whose apprehension leads to an officer winning an award.
'In fact he wasn't even human.
'"Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence," read a letter from June 2007 from an officer working within the Garda's traffic division.'
February 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word oracy
From some new educational proposals: 'The domains would be: arts and creativity; citizenship and ethics; faith and belief; language, oracy and literacy; mathematics; physical and emotional health; place and time (geography and history); science and technology.'
February 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word gabba
Néojaponisme: 'The power-drill pulse of gabba music, for example, would surely overshadow the wildest ambitions of Russolo’s intonarumori.'
February 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word nighthawking
Culture24: 'The organisation that oversees the reporting of archaeological finds by members of the public in England and Wales, the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), has moved to allay fears following media reports highlighting the rise of illegal metal detecting or ‘nighthawking’.'
February 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word individuate
Er... you do know WordNet is the source for the definition next to the word above, right?
February 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word passegiatta
Citation on paseo.
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word korso
Citation on paseo.
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word paseo
Times: 'Summer is coming and the strolling season beckons. Or rather it does to those Italians, Bulgarians and Spanish who enjoy, respectively, the pleasures of the passegiatta g; see bilby's comment on it'>edit: missing a g; see bilby's comment on it, the korso, and the paseo — which have been a part of European life for centuries.
'Summer? The paseo? Well, think of a favoured spot — square, garden, avenue — where people meet after work or at weekends to walk up and down. Men and women walk up and down, young and old walk up and down, rich and poor walk up and down. The activity is instinctive and inclusive. It has always had significance.'
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word leper
Good stuff so far; I haven't got further than the introduction yet.
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
You can get that feature easily enough by using a flat text file. After all, a Wordie list is just an ordered set of links to Wordie pages; if you don't want to share it or let people comment on it, all you need to do is write down some URLs in order.
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word corpse
As a verb: 'The conceit of death by laughter is a curious one and not restricted to the ancient world. Anthony Trollope, for example, is reputed to have “corpsed�? during a reading of F. Anstey’s comic novel Vice Versa.'
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word gelastics
T.L.S.: 'It was, in fact, a firm rule of ancient “gelastics�? – to borrow a term (from the Greek gelan, to laugh) from Stephen Halliwell’s weighty new study of Greek laughter – that the joker was never far from being the butt of his own jokes.'
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word miracle
The Onion mocking the WordNet #1 sense: 'The holy and sacrosanct miracle of birth, long revered by human civilization as the most mysterious and magical of all phenomena, took place for what experts are estimating "must be at least the 83 billionth time" Tuesday with the successful delivery of eight-pound, four-ounce baby boy Darryl Brandon Severson at Holy Mary Mother Of God Hospital.'
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user vanish
I feel I ought to offer my salutations on grounds of nomenclature...
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word chaulmoogra
Am I misreading it, or is this WeirdNet definition not even grammatical?
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word leper
'So why did Moses say things like, "And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean..." and, "Command the children of Israel, that they shall put out of the camp every leper..."? On top of everything else, it seems leprosy sufferers are the victims of mistranslation. The Hebrew word tsara'ath, translated as lepra in Latin and Greek, conveys the notion of one who is stricken or defiled, insofar as the concept is at all translatable into a modern idiom; it certainly does not mean leprosy, as we understand it. It is generally taken to be a generic term covering a range of dermatological diseases: leukoderma, vitiligo and psoriasis are among the most frequently cited.'
Tony Gould, Don't Fence Me In: From Curse to Cure: Leprosy In Modern Times, p. 3
February 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word deified
Thanks to deified, this is a palindrome containing palindromes.
February 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list bigbrothers-list
Wordie image? Just to check: you're not mixing us up with Wordle, by any chance...?
February 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pedago-demago
B.B.C. News: '"They use abominable jargon - pupils have to be called apprenants or learners - and they promote this pedago-demago philosophy in which the teacher is supposed to be best mates with his class," she says.'
February 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word convincible
Corrected; thanks.
February 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word convincible
Discussion on convinceable; WeirdNet #2 seems to be mixing this up with susceptible.
February 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word carnival
This being Wordie, naturally the etymological discussion of carnival is on shrovetide.
February 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
It would be nice to have some easy way of tracking which bugs are still open. Maybe I should extend the length of the features page with that suggestion.
February 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Is this what it looks like? I mentioned that bug here three months ago: it seems to affect only some lists, for some reason...
February 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spectrial
Slashdot: 'The Harvard Law students defending accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum are doing their best to turn his upcoming trial into a media event. But when it comes to pure spectacle, they have nothing on The Pirate Bay. TPB is referring to the event as a 'spectrial,' a cross between a spectacle and a trial.'
February 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word caption time
Maybe: "Just because I'm a baby, it doesn't mean I'll fall for the look behind you trick..."
Or: 'You could hide Damien's number of the beast with a hat, but his deathly stare and habit of calling up demonic fiends were harder to conceal.'
February 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list the-incredible-shrinking-list
I'd guess so, but nuked accounts usually appear as 404s. Perhaps John used conventional weaponry against Helga.
February 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word filther
A nickname for profanity filtering software.
February 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word siftable
A kind of 'building block' as the basis for a human-computer interface.
February 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word equasy
Spiked: 'Hysteria over reclassification reached a fever pitch earlier this week, when the government’s chief drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, claimed that taking Ecstasy is about as dangerous as ‘Equasy’ – a condition he has made up to describe horse-riding. The number of deaths caused by the drug annually, Nutt asserts, is roughly equivalent to the number of those killed or injured riding.'
February 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word world war wild
World War One: why not just use square brackets to link to another Wordie page?
February 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word china milk scandal firm bankrupt
One of the easier ones: a Chinese firm involved in a scandal over its milk has gone bankrupt.
February 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tankist
T.H.E.: 'While we were marching with lit torches across the croquet lawn to occupy the administrative building, we were led by a 'Tankist' (someone who joined the Communist Party when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968). The rest of us were all fooling around, having a laugh, half-pissed and asking who had the spliff, and suddenly he turned round and shouted "To the Winter Palace!" It was to the credit of most of the students that they fell about laughing.'
February 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word the stained finger
In fairness, this isn't a bad title once you already know about the Society of Inkwell Collectors.
February 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list peri-odd-icals
Happily, I've found an online list of Have I Got News for You? guest publications; less happily, it only goes as far as 2006.
February 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wrist-slitters' monthly
Let it be.
February 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word callipigeon
Having beautifully proportioned pigeons.
February 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word drower
Why is this word on the Wordie Paradox list? It seems free of glitches and bizarre behaviour.
February 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
It's the " character messing things up. If you enter http://wordie.org/words/i thought you'd lost it when you added "haar".... *gg into your browser location bar you can enter through the back door and join in the fun.
February 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wrist-slitters' monthly
Ian Creasey: 'Because I thought the story had a very British tone, I didn't bother sending it to any American magazines... First, I tried Interzone, who rejected it for being too funny. (In the David Pringle era, Interzone's steady diet of grey, depressing fiction earned it the affectionate nickname of Wrist-Slitters' Monthly.)'
Now there must be a list somewhere on which a name like this belongs...
February 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word i thought you'd lost it when you added "haar".... *gg
Six people including bilby have added haar; perhaps one of the other five knows what this is all about.
February 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word extreme etymology
Presumably a game suitable for fans of extreme ironing. Bradshaw of the Future: 'I really hope today's extreme etymology is true, because it's awesome.'
February 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hell manual
For the demons, or for the damned? I wonder what sort of list this was on...
February 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word co-rumination
The Escapist: 'The problem, according to Stony Brook University Professor Dr. Joanne Davila, is that easy access to email, social networks and other forms of always-on communications leads to excessive and repetitive discussions of the same problem, also known as "co-rumination," which can worsen the mood of teenage girls and create negative emotions.'
February 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word debate call for source protection
Not a command: 'The Northern Island Assembly is set to debate a DUP motion calling for public representatives to be protected against having to name sources.'
February 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word teapot
New update: his profile now says he's a tea-pot, but it still links to this unhyphenated page.
February 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list englishfolkfans-list
It's they who are the ominous ones. They use arcane, scary tags like stabby (sounds violent) and even hate hate hate.
We are just your friendly neighbourhood taggers, and everyone is invited to become one of Us. (One of us... One of us... One of us... One of us...)
February 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word winter deaths 'may double' worry
I think this means there's a worry that deaths in Winter may double, not that the level of worry may be doubled by them.
February 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word chaddi
B.B.C. News: 'A spokeswoman for the group, Nisha Susan, told the BBC it was giving chaddis (Hindi colloquial for underwear) as they alluded to a prominent Hindu right-wing group whose khaki-shorts-wearing cadres were often derisively called "chaddi wallahs" (chaddi wearers).'
February 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word haikoid
Néojaponisme: 'By “haiku�? throughout this post I mean “haikoid works from both before and after the word haiku was invented�? in accordance with standard English usage.'
February 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list englishfolkfans-list
Right. Misspelt words float around in the Wordie aether for eternity, and get tagged misspelling or typo when we come across them.
February 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list englishfolkfans-list
Not mellifluous?
Welcome to Wordie, nevertheless.
February 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word city 'has no-go areas for women'
As in 'the City', not city as in 'urban area'.
February 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word guggaflop
'Rose is famous for its unusual fauna. The balleron has a wooden spine. The dignipomp looks incredibly solemn. The musterach is very sensitive and sullen. The guggaflop is very, very, indeed very lazy.'
A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, entry on Rose (from Mervyn Peake's Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor)
February 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word flummywister
'Among the bird species, the best-known are the gladdy-whingers, which lay their spotted eggs in basket nests in the booblow tree, and the flummywisters, a type of songbird usually seen in elm trees. In winter the young flummywisters wear warm underwear; to hear them singing as their mothers loosen their buttons in spring is a very good omen.'
A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, entry on Rootabaga County (from Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories).
February 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word counter-narrative
Spiked: 'Insofar as there is any hint of a strategy in relation to tackling radicalisation, it always has a fantasy-like character. Often, the official discourse on radicalisation has much in common with attitudes that underpin the child protection industry. It warns that ‘vulnerable’ and ‘impressionable’ young people may be targeted on websites, campuses and at social venues, and ‘groomed’ by cynical operators. In November 2007, it was reported that the UK government’s Research, Information and Communication Unit would draw up ‘counter-narratives’ to the anti-Western messages on websites ‘designed to influence vulnerable and impressionable audiences here in the UK’.'
February 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list reversible-words
How about upset/setup?
February 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word fishing
Why does WeirdNet have distinct definitions for fishing as recreation and as a job, but no general definition along the lines of 'catching fish'...?
February 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cathode
Where on Earth is WeirdNet #4 coming from? Taking terminal as a synonym, maybe?
February 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word approbrium
One's own opprobrium?
February 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word advertising
Just idly wondering: does anyone remember exactly what the banner text was for advertising on Tuesdays, before every day became Tuesday? It was something like: It's Tuesday, and we all know what that means: advertisements! Huzzah! Google's giant mechanical brain has decided that you, the consumer, might be interested in these fine products:
February 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word synizesis
WordNet overlooks a linguistic sense.
The O.E.D. also notes: 'Path. Closure of the pupil of the eye.'
February 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word windowspotting
Improbable Research: 'In the June 28, 2008 issue of BMJ (the publication formerly known as the British Medical Journal) Barrie Smith, a retired physician from Birmingham, describes—though he does not name—a new form of the grand British tradition of otting. The proper name for it is obvious to anyone who reads Dr. Smith’s description: windowspotting.
'The best known of otting traditions is trainspotting. Some British citizens also practice planespotting, busspotting (a practice that now draws disapproval from the British Government, which views bus spotters as being possible terrorist spies) and other varieties of otting. These may all be descended from the ancient practice of bird spotting, also known as bird watching.'
February 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word coordinated interpersonal labial spasm
Frank Cottrell Boyce: 'Schools are not only not buying books, they’re chucking them out to make room for computers to convert libraries into learning resource centres (LRCs).
'The LRC is an educational disaster. Here, where books are merely “learning resources�?, reading is about functional literacy instead of pleasure. A paperclip is a learning resource. Google Earth is a learning resource. But a book is “the distilled essence of a human soul�?. A book is something you take to bed with you. It is not a learning resource any more than a kiss is a coordinated interpersonal labial spasm.'
February 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word agrimensorial
Having to do with land surveying. It seems fairly obscure, but the O.E.D. has it.
February 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
I tried to follow the links to /people/randy-meier?wl=19357 which (thanks to sionnach's spam-related pictures) are currently adorning the comment feed, but I got a 404. However, /lists/randy-meiers-list works fine, and /lists/19357 correctly redirects to it...
February 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word stone toad
Some quotations via Improbable Research:
“That really grinds my goat.�?
“I wouldn’t open that can of worms even with ten feet.�?
“Tiptoeing around like a well-oiled balloon.�?
“The students are all acting like stone toads.�?
I'm not sure whether the last one is meant to be a Metroid reference. (Any link to Toadstone?)
February 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word stoled
The O.E.D. defines stoled as 'wearing a stole'; stole as a verb in its own right, meanwhile, is listed with two senses, 'to provide (an altar, a church) with altar-stoles' and 'of a plant: to develop stolons'.
February 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word yo-yo
As a verb: 'All went well at first, with inflation, and therefore rent rises, staying low. Over the past year, however, the RPI has yo-yoed. In 2008 it rose steadily, hitting 5 percent in September before falling back to 0.9 percent by the end of the year.' (Private Eye #1229, p.6)
February 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word broadcasters' kangaroo tied down
Now they've just given up and started making Rolf Harris references.
'A plan by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to launch an on-demand video service has been blocked because it posed "too much of a threat to competition".
'The Competition Commission said Project Kangaroo "has to be stopped" and that viewers would benefit if the three were "close competitors" rather than allies.'
February 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word what what is this
What? What what might that what be but that what which 'what' in 'Which what?' was?
February 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tabloid
404 Not Found, a mere eleven hours later.
February 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word what what is this
Which what?
February 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word guantanamo inmate control warning
This is actually a story about the possible use of legal restrictions called control orders on people removed from Guantanamo Bay and brought to Britain.
February 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word transdifferentiation
Telegraph: 'Turritopsis Nutricula is technically known as a hydrozoan and is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self.
'It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation.
'Scientists believe the cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it potentially immortal.'
February 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word italy woman sent to clinic to die
Perhaps there's an attempt to offer ambiguous interplay through avoiding grammatical cues. 'Italy sent a woman...'? 'A woman sent Italy...'? 'In Italy, a woman sent...'? 'Italy is a woman sent...'? Or maybe the intention is to imply a subtext about the role of Woman in modern society, contrasting feminine-as-lifegiver-and-nurturer with the bluntness of clinical death.
Italy
Woman sent
To clinic
To die.
At a guess, though, someone used to writing things like 'Manchester man wins lottery' just took the form too far.
February 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user jmjarmstrong
Given that Facebook status updates can be made externally accessible via an RSS feed, wouldn't it be easier to use something like a Google Reader shared tag, so as to automate the process?
February 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list how-to-write-seo-friendly-articles
It is indeed.
February 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word italy woman sent to clinic to die
The actual story: 'A woman at the centre of the right-to-die debate in Italy has been moved to a clinic where she will be allowed to die after 17 years in a vegetative state.'
February 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word askance
I don't know whether to add it to the 'Wordie Paradox' list, or tag it 'misspelling', or dream up some new OCSJTS tag for it...
February 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word zazz
HG101: 'The word zazz has being going around for a while on this site now, and that's probably exactly the "quality" the game lacks. No character ever spills out their entire angsty life story. There are no funky hairdos and over-the-top character designs. Nobody ever turns into an angel in a post-cataclysmic final battle in space while flying around in a wormhole (with a choir singing orgasmically in the background, no less). Just a boy and his dog going on an adventure. This is as close as it gets to zazz level 0. The zazz basement, if you will.'
February 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word unbrick
Jargon File on brick: 'This term usually implies irreversibility, but equipment can sometimes be unbricked by performing a hard reset or some other drastic operation.'
February 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word egregarious
Egregious and gregarious, or just a typo...?
February 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list samme-s-words
No answer...
Is the 'no double listing' rule still supposed to be in force? I've never noticed any automatic checks and balances restricting my listing...
February 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hyperpackaging
Concurring Opinions: 'What strange confluence of laws and economic incentives produce all of this hyperpackaging of inexpensive goods? Do appliances break unless transported in a foot of protection? Do consumers injure themselves if they get the box home and the flatware is right at the surface and unsecured? Do labels deter theft of open-stock items (“We know that this isn’t your cereal bowl you have under your sweater because it has our label on it.�?)? Or ensure that things don’t get misplaced on store shelves?'
February 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word elver
WeirdNet is eager to give culinary advice.
February 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lesbian sadomasochism safety manual
Why is this considered an odd book title? It strikes me as pretty prosaic.
February 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word naked came the manatee
Named in 'honour' of Naked Came the Stranger, apparently.
February 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word evitative
There's got to be a 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' joke in here somewhere...
February 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word solipsistically
Solipsistically, it appears on no lists.
February 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word beyelp
'To talk loudly of, boast of, glory in' (O.E.D.). Marked obs., attested in the 1300s and too little beyelped since then.
February 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word garbologist
Cory Doctorow: 'Last December, Forbes published my latest article on Darren Atkinson, hands down the most exciting, thoughtful and skilled garbologist and dumpster diver I’ve ever heard of... Darren’s got the perfect zero-capital, socially conscious enterprise — drive around the industrial suburbs, collecting the scat of the wily corporation as it progresses through the twists and turns of its life-cycle, and panning out major cash in those fewmets.'
February 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
Don't forget the people who try to leave definitions in the tag box.
February 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word musu
Quoted from David Stanley: '…Another unique Samoan characteristic is musu, to be sullen. A previously communicative individual will suddenly become silent and moody. This often bears no relation to what’s happening at the time, and when a Samoan becomes musu, the best approach is just to sit back and wait until they get a grip…'
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word blunderscore
See tag.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word jan_ceulemans
Fair enough.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word jan_ceulemans
Nominations are now open, then. Undersprawl? Underspawn? Blunderscore?
Incidentally, Wordie seems to have stripped the underscore out of the page <title>: at the top of my browser window it's JanCeulemans.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lurking
Monarch of the Lurs?
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
I expect this is a form of the problem with the . character in URLs: ordinary.madness is apparently a legitimate user name, but /people/lists/ordinary.madness redirects to /lists/.
Speaking of /lists/, why does it seem never to change, if it has the last 500 lists on the site? Every time I end up there I see my Cryptolects list at the top.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word penghulu
In early drafts of At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft planned...
Okay, it's actually a word for chief from Malaysia and Indonesia.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word penguin
The great auk, now extinct.
Also, says the O.E.D., a rare verb meaning 'to publish as a Penguin book'.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word water-burial"
Not as broken as the kind with a " before the end, but when I clicked on this one I got taken to water-burial.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word 55folcum gefræge
Googling suggests this is from Beowulf, but the line number has got caught up in it. Ennumbered, or just a one-off curiosity?
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word jan_ceulemans
Do underscores fall into the domain of OCSJTS...?
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word nightmare clown
The nightmare clown would be ghosted, of course...
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word gue
A Shetland stringed instrument, but also an obsolete word meaning rogue.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word "befuddlement and swearing" questionmark
I'd forgotten about this beauty: it seems no longer to break my favourites list, which is nice, and of course we now have tags appropriate to its stature...
Edit: I see it still doesn't work properly on the comment feed...
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word funky gibbon
By The Goodies; see link and appreciative comments on New Caledonian bumpy gecko.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word schützengrabenvernichtungsautomobil
Dwight Rodgers: 'Although German is not one of the languages I can speak, and I'm probably repeating urban legend, I once heard that the German word for "Tank" early in the 1900s was something like "Schützengrabenvernichtungsautomobil", perhaps meaning "automobile that shoots and moves in trenches". The time required to yell this phrase upon seeing a tank, was, of course, presented as the primary reason for Germany losing the war.'
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word batak
Omniglot: 'The Batak are a negrito people, with kinky (curly) hair and dark skin. Their mother-tongue is called Binatak and is related to other regional languages of Malayic origin. While the Palawan and the Tagbanua tribes developed a unique alphabet, the Batak have never had a writing system. Anthropologists believe the Batak to be related to the Aeta people, found in other parts of the Philippines.'
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word government abuse chicken
Another of those Chinese delicacies.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word konkani
Derick Pinto: 'The other day, a Maharashtrain friend of mine remarked, "Konkani is a dialect of Marathi. That is why Konkani does not have its own script." This set me thinking. I am a linguist and I am interested in language and linguistics. So I found me asking myself as to whether Konkani is a dialect of Marathi or an independent language by itself.'
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
As in AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity.
February 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user vanishedone
I think I'm going to join in, this being my profile and all. (Who wants to be listmaster for 'What Wordies Like'?)
VanishedOne likes philosophy and conlangs he'll never find time to learn. Oh, and as chained_bear said, tags.
January 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word new caledonian bumpy gecko
'A faddish new dance'? Maybe the Bumpy Gecko is a follow-up to the Funky Gibbon...
January 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word murse
Somewhere in here there's scope for a pun on immersion therapy, but... well, I agree: ugh.
January 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word acanthocladous
'Having spiny branches' (O.E.D.). Suitable for those seeking an obscure yet... barbed insult.
January 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word new caledonian bumpy gecko
Otherwise known as the gargoyle gecko, and clearly at the front of the queue when striking gecko names were being handed out.
January 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dumdum
Why is this tagged 'WeirdNet'; was someone thinking of DumDums?
January 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word disloyal
I thought WeirdNet #1 was oddly specific until I saw WeirdNet #2...
January 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word neuromythology
Raymond Tallis: 'New technologies permitting imaging of the waking brain in humans have prompted increasingly extravagant claims about the extent to which advances in neurocience are casting light on human nature. The proliferation of new disciplines, such as neuro-aesthetics, neuro-ethics, neuro-law and neuro-economics, is a symptom of the widespread belief that the activity of the stand-alone brain explains our subjective experiences and our objectively observed behaviour.
'The talk will critically examine this central notion of neuromythology, demonstrate the inadequacy of neural accounts of human nature, discuss the reasons they command such wide support, and spell out the dire consequences they might have if they were truly believed.'
January 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word geissler tube
Seen here, along with a mercury arc rectifier.
January 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Niteowl has a tag that seems to be broken in an exciting new way: it appears on /people/tags/Niteowl as 'steampunk steam punk', but the link is to /tags/steampunksteam punk, which produces a 500 Application Error. (/tags/steampunk steam punk doesn't work either.)
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word £12,000 proposal to be debated
What it means: 'Assembly members sc. in Northern Ireland are to debate a controversial proposal to give the families of all those killed during the Troubles £12,000.'
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pazzaz
Passes with a strong accent?
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word somancer
That's some answer...
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user jenso
Not a problem; if you want to add a comment to a word, just go to the word's own page, e.g. bargainous. Comments on a list page apply to a list, comments on a tag page apply to a tag, etc.
Welcome to Wordie.
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word faq
You're looking at regular hyperlinks in each case: ?Plethora (I think you meant Prolagus) linked to two tag pages, and chained_bear linked to a list page. Tags appear on word pages (e.g. 'meta' on this page), but they also have their own dedicated pages.
...If that's what you were asking.
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list jensos-list
Did you by any chance want the definition to appear on the word page for bargainous?
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word 'green' light bulb fears rejected
What it means: 'The government has rejected claims that partially-sighted people will suffer when new low energy light bulbs are introduced across the UK.'
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word baubo
'Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is - to speak Greek - Baubo?'
Nietzsche, preface to The Gay Science (2nd. Ed.). Translator's (Kaufmann's) footnote: 'A primitive and obscene female demon; according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, originally a personification of the female genitals.'
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word grimald
Googling shows that it is a surname, so it probably is just a ghost.
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user vanishedone
I'll lay out some more chairs, shall I...? (Male, by the way.)
Lists can be sorted alphabetically as viewers wish; tags are public meta-data, though, so protocols tend to emerge around them (see OCSJTS). Trying to use a general-purpose tag like an initial letter indicator as an alternative means of organising one's own lists won't work, because nothing's stopping other people using the same tags (edit: okay, a per-user filter exists, but since tags display without attribution on word pages, their function is necessarily to provide information about the word); it only makes sense if you're going to embark on tagging the entire site in that way, and frankly it takes enough obsession just to tag all the plural nouns one comes across...
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word corkscrew
Corkscrews look like this. If you're a very lucky owner.
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word foodscape
moillusions.com: 'Pictures were photographed by Carl Warner, a photographer who works in London, and who made specialty of these food landscapes or how I like to call them - 'foodscapes'.'
January 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word geoglyphy
Strange Maps: 'Those badges and the fast fading map of Oz constitute some of the more recent examples of a mysterious British tradition of geoglyphy (i.e. producing figures by exposing chalk substratum on hillsides). This tradition might date back to the Iron Age, although some, similarly undocumented examples probably are no older than the 17th century. Famous examples include the Cerne Abbas Man (a.k.a. the Rude Giant), the Uffington Horse and the Long Man of Wilmington.'
January 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word burnsiana
T.H.E.: 'When Catherine Carswell published her biography The Life of Robert Burns in 1930, it proved so controversial that one reader sent her a bullet in the post, asking her to make the world "a cleaner place" by using it on herself.
'And in the week of the bard's 250th anniversary, two scholars have ensured their place in the colourful history of Burnsiana by reigniting a longstanding scholarly feud.'
January 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
I know wildcarding is already on the 'someday' list; following my comment on tags/v, I just wanted to add it to the record that some current tagging practices on Wordie (e.g. -fold, phono- and so on) would be more effectively served by a wildcard search feature.
January 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user mechanolatry
While we're giving you the introductory lecture treatment: you've set us wondering whether such a tag as v could ever be used comprehensively.
January 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word balisong
Not actually a song from Bali: it's a kind of knife, also called a butterfly knife. It has some fans and collectors.
January 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word (b)icicle
Or in other words, it's parenthesick. Hypothermia, maybe.
January 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word vim
You know, 'an imaginative lively style (especially style of writing)' is also the third WordNet definition (click on 'more...'). With WeirdNet and the row of dictionary icons here, you'll be wasting your time if you add standard definitions for common words.
January 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word meritage
The Lexicographer's Rules: 'A decade or two ago, the Meritage Association of Napa valley created the “Meritage�?name so that they could label what are blended table wines as something other than, well, “table wine.�?
'The conventional wisdom about wines says that blended wines — those made from more than one kind of grape, like table wines — tend to be inferior, or at the very least too variable to be counted on from bottle to bottle, from case to case, or from year to year.
...
'To be a meritage wine, there are specifications as to the types of grapes that must be included (at least two of the grapes used in red wine from Bordeaux), and a vintner must be admitted officially as a member to use the name, which is jealously guarded.'
January 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word saddlebacking
Maybe they took this seriously...
January 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word guitar nipple
B.B.C.: 'A BMJ spokesman said the inclusion and subsequent debunking of "cello scrotum" had "added to the gaiety of life".
'The spoof was inspired by a similar report of a phenomenon called "guitar nipple", which happened when the edge of the guitar was pressed against the breast, causing irritation.'
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sechin
As in Séchin in France?
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list silverthread-s-words-2
That's odd: you'd expect the URL for this list to end in /lists/silver (which isn't taken), but in fact it's /lists/silverthread-s-words-2, as though it had been named the same as this list.
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user sraz
Okay, we get the idea: you'd like us to visit savethewords.org. Nice-looking site apart from all the Flash slowing my browser down.
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word edivivus
Does this word exist, or is it a misspelling of redivivus?
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word na fedran
Maybe a relative of na fyddech?
A little Googling suggests Welsh. Did someone nuke a Welsh list?
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spaceout
Ah, yes. I think I've seen a few of this type around.
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sigma Σ σ
ς is missing (although it is present in the list description).
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
That troll wouldn't have been reborn, by any chance...?
Edit: dead within moments; thanks John.
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word past report 'irreparably damaged'
What it means: 'A report on the legacy of the Troubles is "irreparably damaged" by a proposal to compensate the families of all those killed, the NI first minister has said.'
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word caribbean stud poker
A stud poking, or a poker of studs?
January 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word waffle
How about the noun corresponding to the 'blather inconsequentially' sense? Writing advice for undergrads. in my Dept. (Durham, U.K.) tells them to avoid 'waffle: a waste of your time and the reader's'; I'd naturally read that as waffling in the sense of going on and on pointlessly.
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list happy-therapy
It strikes me that you could replace therapeutic in the list description with, say, management training and it would still be applicable to the list. Hmm.
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mystery shopping
Mysteries for sale here: bargain enigmata; finest arcana you'll ever see; buy one riddle, get one half price...
(Sadly, it's actually a market research term for researchers' pretending to be regular customers.)
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word waffle
The 1989 O.E.D. says the dither meaning is 'orig. Sc. and north. dial. Now colloq. or non-Standard.' Judging by Rolig's comment, maybe it's made a comeback since, though the only new addition from 1993 is a new sense: 'Of an aircraft or motor vehicle: to cruise along in a leisurely manner, usu. at low speed. colloq. (orig. R.A.F.).'
The 'talk verbosely and inconsequentially' sense is attested from 1701 and treated as current; it's the sense I'm familiar with too.
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ransomed
WeirdNet is feeling pious today.
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feuerlibelle
(The 'citation' box whichbe mentioned is the comment box under a word, not the tags/pos box. This would have made perfect sense as a comment, but as a tag it's rather lost because it can only ever be applied to one word. Compare, say, /tags/plural.)
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word prejoice
What is the anticipated sth?
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle
'No direct translation.'
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word orcish
As the name of a fantasy language, this turns up in the Warcraft universe.
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word skylla
Conventionally, yes; but isn't this a legitimate alternative romanisation of Σκ�?λλα?
January 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cop film arrests vampire assault
What this pun is actually about: 'Comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop has fended off the vampires and werewolves of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans to stay top of the North American film chart.'
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lactivism
Spiked: 'The intolerance of formula-feeding on Facebook has its counterpart in real-world ‘lactivism’, which not only advocates for breastfeeding but also against bottlefeeding. Indeed, the free bottles of infant formula that used to be given out to new mothers are are now banned from public hospitals in many parts of the US, much to the delight of militant lactivists.'
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word injur
v. Chop the final letter off.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ungovernable
Considering WeirdNet's definition for governable is quite reasonable, I'm not sure what's gone wrong here. Other than that it's WeirdNet.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word geofiction
Geofiction/geo-fiction seems mainly to be used to refer to fiction set in conworlds (elaborately imagined fantasy locations), but apparently there's another sense: Sarah Hall's 'agent and editor have coined this phrase for her writing -- "geo-fiction" -- because landscapes feature so strongly in the novels, be it Morecambe Bay, New York, or Cumbria'.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word orchardist
Courier-Mail: 'The Johnsons are angry, arguing that the State Government is bending over backwards to appease environmentalists whose supporters last year successfully lobbied to stop orchardists from shooting bats.'
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word plankalkül
epemag.com: 'The term Kalkül (calculus) is well known in mathematics, so he put "Plan" and "Kalkül" together to form Plankakül, meaning "calculus for a computing plan".'
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bluddian
Vocabulary list here.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ayleid
Found here.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word simlish
Apparently this might have been a Navajo derivative, but ended up being made a form of gibberish.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cirquish
A kind of Grammelot used by Cirque du Soleil.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ewokese
That's what this site calls the Ewok language, anyway.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word gelfling
WIkipedia's conlang list includes a Gelfling language, but none is mentioned here. Hmm. (Annoyingly, I have a DVD of this film, but I haven't got around to watching it and will probably have trouble finding it...)
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word divine language
A.k.a. Divinian; resources here.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word kryptonian
A.k.a. kryptonese: resources here.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word syldavian
For the language of the fictional country, see citation on Marols.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ilythiiri
The language of the Drow.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word galactic standard
Variations on this name being found in Star Wars; but apparently this also turns up in Asimov as a language name.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word galach
It apparently has some known vocabulary, which I reckon is enough to put it on the Conlangs list. Other Dune communication methods, like Atreides battle language, I'm still unsure about.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wilkins' philosophical language
As far as I know it has no snappier name. This is the one Borges wrote about.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hunt
Judging by the top six definitions, WeirdNet has ambitions to be a biographer.
January 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word prix de la carpette anglaise
B.B.C.: 'They were giving out the annual Prix de la Carpette Anglaise the other day. Literally it means the English Rug Prize, but doormat would be the better translation.
'As the citation explains, the award goes to the French person or institution who has given the best display of "fawning servility" to further the insinuation into France of the accursed English language.'
Is there a list anywhere for the names of prizes and awards? I couldn't find any with a quick search.
January 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word globish
B.B.C.: 'In a meeting with colleagues from around the world, including an Englishman, a Korean and a Brazilian, he noticed that he and the other non-native English speakers were communicating in a form of English that was completely comprehensible to them, but which left the Englishman nonplussed.
'He, Jean-Paul Nerriere, could talk to the Korean and the Brazilian in this neo-language, and they could understand each other perfectly.
'But the Englishman was left out because his language was too subtle, too full of meaning that could not be grasped by the others.
'In other words, Monsieur Nerriere concluded, a new form of English is developing around the world, used by people for whom it is their second language.
'It may not be the most beautiful of tongues, but in this day and age he says it is indispensible. He calls the language Globish and urges everyone - above all the French - to learn it tout de suite.'
January 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word teleiophile
According to Wikipedia, 'full-grown'.
January 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word gunpowder
It seems they've been removed now.
January 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word egrex
A royal egress?
January 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list helixs-list
Do you by any chance want these definitions to appear on the actual word pages briale and monego? Adding them to list pages will probably create confusion.
Welcome to Wordie.
January 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word educationese
T.H.E.: '"I'm bilingual. I speak English and educationese," said Shirley Hufstedler, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State for Education. In the academic world, it seems like a good combination.'
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sodality
T.H.E.: 'New barriers are far more effective than class consciousness in keeping people apart and frustrating generous ambitions: the ghettoes of race and religion, websites of the like-minded, cliques of the merely rich, sodalities of the stupid.
'To climb out of the furrows and gutters of life, moreover, you need realistic targets and supportive structures. Chinese families used to club together to get bright youngsters the kind of education that would admit them to the mandarinate.'
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word rs
These happen to be my initials. Why am I tagged stiffness?
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mistagging
But this only works on tags you added yourself, so you can't undo the work of whatever comedian transplanted all this lot from undertagged, etc.
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word beatbearing
ScienceDaily: 'A video of a new musical instrument created by a Queen’s University Belfast student has attracted over one million hits on the internet. PhD student Peter Bennett (26) from Stevenage, England, made the video to demonstrate the BeatBearing - his electronic musical instrument that uses ball bearings to create different drum patterns.'
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
With the site growing and John busy, I'm not surprised to see the suggestion made; but maybe we should explore the FAQ/tutorial options further before biting that bullet. At the moment, the FAQ page isn't a straightforward document, and you have to know where it is; it may still help to have a dedicated and fairly simple help or welcome page that isn't a regular word/conversation page, and make it a landing page to welcome new Wordies when they create their accounts, or even link it from the page headers/footers. (Maybe it could then link to Wordie for Dummies as a source of further information, since that list can be easily kept updated.)
Edit: okay, I just checked the footer: it already does lead to a page which links to help, FAQ and Wordie for Dummies (among others), but as it says, it isn't a formal help page itself. Also, help isn't really helpful unless you want to know about keyboards.
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bleak
Read backwards, they could also be the statement 'fish despair'.
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word grahamites
*Looks them up* Oh, crackers as in food. I had visions of a Grahamite Christmas party.
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word abjad-hawwaz
T.L.S.: 'A reference to the “Abjad-Hawwaz alphabet�? may suggest a secret or cryptic script; a note could have explained that it is the ordinary Arabic alphabet in the old “Semitic�? order, as still used in Hebrew.'
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word monorhyme
T.L.S.: 'The Arabic monorhyme (only one rhyme, maintained throughout a poem) is difficult to imitate in English for obvious reasons, and even an easier rhyme scheme will often compel the translator to resort to padding or distortion.'
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cadette
Citation on shroff.
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word futter
Citation on shroff.
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word shroff
T.L.S.: 'Burton’s language, too, is eccentric and pretty unreadable, such that a not unlikely title might be “The Shroff who Futtered his Cadette with the Two Coyntes�? (I am making this up, but the words are Burton’s). Such words may be useful for players of Scrabble; modern readers deserve something better.'
O.E.D. to the rescue: a shroff is 'a banker or money-changer in the East; in the Far East, a native expert employed to detect bad coin'. No luck with futter as a verb, though; it's given only (under futtah) as an early spelling of whata (Maori), 'a food-store raised on posts'. Wiktionary says, however, that it's Burton's own coinage, from foutre. A cadette is a younger daughter or sister... Coynte has been discussed before. And that, clearly, is how you get biologically improbable filth into the pages of a respectable newspaper.
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bleak
WeirdNet has let me down: it doesn't know about the fish called a bleak at all.
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word caviar left
T.L.S.: 'Michel Houellebecq’s opening shot in Ennemis publics, an exchange of letters between the two men over the first half of 2008, ranks up there with the very best anti-Lévy prose: “A master of the damp squib and the farcical media hype, you bring dishonour even to the white shirts you wear. Intimate with the powerful, you have bathed in obscene wealth since childhood and typify what slightly low-brow magazines such as Marianne continue to call the ‘caviar left’ . . . . A philosopher without thought but not without connections, you are also the author of the most ridiculous film in the history of cinema�?.'
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hysteria
T.L.S.: 'Hysteria is a rum sort of subject these days. It has officially disappeared as a disease, wiped out of existence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the bible of contemporary psychiatry, and hysterics themselves seem to have vanished from psychiatrists’ and neurologists’ waiting rooms. Lay people still use the term with abandon, generally with reference to women who make a spectacle of their extreme emotional lability. But an illness that has a history dating all the way back to the time of Hippocrates is no longer respectable or recognized in medical circles. In the words of one of its best-known modern historians, Etienne Trillat, “L’hystérie est morte, c’est entendu�?. '
January 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bottom
Let me guess: someone entered 'To serve as the receptive partner in a sexual coupling, especially homosexual.' into the tag box. Since the comma is the tag delimiter, we got two dubious tags for the price of one.
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bio-conservative
Metapsychology Online: 'The idea, then, is that the book provides a balanced account of its topic, sensitive to the worries of the bio-conservative who, in contemplating our proposed genetic future, sees only potential disaster in the shape of eugenic programs, damaged family relations, harmed children, and mass social injustice. It envisions itself, then, as no unequivocally enthusiastic bio-liberal polemic, of the sort produced by, for instance, John Harris or Julian Savulescu.'
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bio-liberalism
Metapsychology Online: 'Green's overall position on the issues he addresses is, at least officially, one of cautious bio-liberalism. That is, he thinks on balance that we ought to embrace the use of genetic science both to prevent disorder in, and to enhance, our offspring. At the same time, he is aware that possible risks--to individuals, families, and society at large--lurk in the shadows. He does not shy away from these risks, though he is optimistic that they can universally be overcome.'
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word faith-birth
Citation on in-valid.
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word in-valid
Post-Gazette.com: 'Perhaps one day genetic enhancement will be considered routine, even expected -- a scenario suggested in the 1997 science-fiction movie "GATTACA," in which children conceived without genetic improvements were called "in-valids" or "faith-births."'
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word genobility
Post-Gazette.com: 'Last month's announcement that scientists have largely determined the spelling of the entire human genetic code carries the promise that they might someday understand its meaning. And that has only increased talk about making people who would be uniformly smart, caring, tall, strong, handsome, beautiful and charismatic.
'Maxwell Mehlman has even coined a word for them: the genobility, for "genetically enhanced nobility."'
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tossel
The Online Etymology Dictionary notes regarding tassel that the O.E.D. 'calls attention to the variant form tossel and suggests association with toss (v.)'.
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pink land clouds
Spiked in response to the sea kittens: 'Many commentators have noted that PETA’s proposal is preposterous and sets a potentially dangerous precedent. If the idea catches on, we might soon be referring to pigs as ‘pink land clouds’, trees might become ‘land coral’, and so on. It could get awfully confusing – imagine arriving in the rainforest wearing scuba gear. And masses of textbooks on species and fauna will have to be reissued.'
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sex smell lures 'vampire' to doom
It's about pheromones and lampreys.
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word vampire fish
B.B.C. News: 'The sea lamprey, sometimes dubbed the "vampire fish", has parasitised native species of the Great Lakes since its accidental introduction in the 1800s.'
'The sea lamprey's mouth has garnered it the nickname "vampire fish"' (and the picture on the linked page shows why).
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mendatious
Bending the truth to get dates.
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word thresherman
threshermensreunion.org: 'Step back in time at the Central States Thresherman's Reunion, held anually over Labor Day weekend. Come see and experience traditional events including rock crushing, threshing, sheep shearing, tractor pulls, and a variety of country music shows.'
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word oilpull
Dark Roasted Blend: 'The internal combustion engine put an end to the reign of the steam tractors. This is a Rumely Oilpull, which ran on kerosene. Kerosene was cheaper and more plentiful than gasoline in those days. The tractor was called the "Oilpull" because oil was used in the cooling system instead of water. The "smokestack" on the front is actually part of the cooling system.'
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word scraperboard
Some Googling suggests that scraperboard, scraper board and scraper-board are all in use.
January 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word uraniborg
Spiegal Online: 'In 1576, the king of Denmark gave Tycho Brahe an island in the Öresund Strait, where Brahe built "Uraniborg" (Castle of the Heavens), complete with observatories. Massive pieces of astronomical equipment were kept in an underground station where the roof could be pulled aside with pulleys.
'For 21 years Brahe studied the heavens from Uraniborg. It's considered the world's first large research institute. Using data Brahe gathered, Kepler was later able to formulate his "Laws of Planetary Motion."
'But in 1596, dark clouds began to gather. Christian IV assumed the throne of Denmark and Norway... One of his first official acts was to humiliate his famous subject and to illegally deprive him of his estate... Within months the situation grew so tense that Brahe was at risk of imprisonment. He fled to Germany and took refuge with Emperor Rudolf II, an eccentric misanthrope who lived in the castle of Hradjin in Prague. Meanwhile, the young Danish king had Uraniborg torn down. Not a single stone of Brahe's observatory remains in place today.'
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word morphing oxymoron and an Erisian
So there can be ghosts which were never listed...
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word men jailed for caustic soda rape
What it means: that they raped someone and threw caustic soda on her. (Not a pleasant addition for a light-hearted list theme, but it is an example of British Broadcasting Concision.)
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word yoshimoto cube
Forgetomori: 'It’s a Yoshimoto cube, invented by Japanese Naoki Yoshimoto in 1971. Made up of eight interconnected cubes, it’s capable of unfolding itself in a cyclic fashion. That means you could keep folding, or unfolding it, indefinitely.'
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word politicisation
Spiked: 'Many countries in the European Union have instituted laws against Holocaust denial. Sanctifying the Holocaust in this way has allowed European officialdom to claim moral authority on matters of good and evil, right and wrong, in relation to the present and the past.
'Regrettably, the elevation of the Holocaust in this way does little to help people make sense of that terrible event. Instead, many Europeans experience the politicisation of the Holocaust as a bureaucratic project, something that is distant from their lives.'
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word disavowal
Spiked: 'At a time when Western powers cynically describe their military ventures as a disavowal of their own self-interest – apparently they fight for the humanitarian betterment of beleaguered peoples around the world – the Zionists’ use of force to express their right to exist, and to firm up their borders, is frowned upon.'
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word assimilationist
Spiked: 'Leon points out that when bourgeois national movements were flourishing, Jews tended to subscribe to an assimilationist outlook; because capitalism was relatively stable then, and thus anti-Semitism tended to be quite rare, they saw their place as being within already-existing societies rather than being nationally separate from them.'
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word victimhood
Spiked: 'Those who argue today that Zionism is ‘an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology’ also distort the facts. It is true that, both before and more significantly after the Second World War, Zionism was reliant on the imperialist powers to make its dream of a Jewish homeland a reality. That is because the rise of Zionism was implicitly bound up with the imperialist era, and there were powerful forces in the West – most notably Britain and the United States – that were keen to exploit Zionism for political ends. In the current period, however, we have what we might refer to as ‘Defensive Zionism’ – a form of Zionism that is less interested in expanding than withdrawing behind security walls, and which justifies itself less by reference to future-oriented dreams of a Land of Zion than by appeals to a ‘Jewish identity’ of victimhood... Contemporary Zionism is defensive. It is underpinned not by visions of the future but by ideas of Jewish victimhood, by the necessity of halting ‘future Holocausts’ against the Jews from their various mortal enemies.'
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word europe's lost mist 'boosts heat'
It means that 'the number of foggy, misty and hazy days is diminishing across the continent', and this amplifies warming. Once you know that the headline makes a fair amount of sense, except that it's the loss of the mist that boosts heat, the mist itself having the opposite effect.
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word theocrat
Citation on twelver.
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word twelver
B.B.C.: 'Smiles are exchanged, tea sipped, and the contracts are signed to allow the Shah Abbass story to be told in London.
'It's a good story. The Shah is credited with unifying a culturally and politically splintered country by creating a new sense of nationhood.
'He decreed that the Twelver denomination of Shia Islam - which reveres the twelve imams who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad - would be the state faith...
'Shah Abbas was not simply a successful theocrat. In establishing his capital in the centre of Iran, he set about claiming Isfahan as the crossroads of the world by inviting trade from the Far East and the distant west.'
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word near-earth object
An NEO for short; Futurismic suggests the alternative reading Nasty Existential Obliteration.
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word waxwork
WeirdNet brings a new meaning to this figurative usage: 'The jovial, cigar-chomping, bird-watching, jazz-loving, beer-drinking Ken Clarke isn't a slick political waxwork. He's his own bloke.'
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user john
erich13 added a deluge of irrelevant tags to admire, addon, adobeair and about, apparently while still unsure how to use the site; I asked him/her about 3 days ago to remove them, but it hasn't happened. Since s/he appears not actually to want them there, and the clouds are so huge and unrelated to the words, could you possibly use your admin. powers to prune them away? (Failing that, could large tag clouds be made to default to a smaller base font size, or to displaying as hidden, or something?)
January 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word japanese output plunges further
Industrial output, that is.
January 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tutorial
There have been suggestions along these lines before (see tagging tutorial), but thus far FAQ is the most we've come up with. A tutorial would be good provided it's easy for newcomers to find: maybe a landing page for new accounts.
Edit: see also the Wordie for Dummies list.
January 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mojo
Not in Wikipedia's case, but the point applies to other copyrighted sources.
January 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sir george in depression warning
Obviously, this is about Sir George Mathewson, former Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, talking about the risk of an economic depression.
January 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word kitchen dodgeball at the bridge
According to Room42: 'A slightly dangerous, incredibly stupid and highly amusing version of normal dodgeball, where bouncy balls are replaced with limes, steak knifes and occasionally a half-full black bin.' (Whether it's ever actually been played I've no idea, but that seemed no reason not to list it.)
January 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word shack
Good point; but it's a phrasal verb, so the up has to be included.
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word rhytidectomy
Otherwise known as a facelift.
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word shack
Is use as a verb common? I don't think I've ever heard it, so I've applied the WeirdNet tag.
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word shackling
n. A small shack. Perhaps.
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word custard
Google haven't entirely thought through the ramifications of advertising relevance. 'Cook scrambled eggs, now', on a page about custard? Yuck.
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word meshugana
Maybe the private note feature would be of use here...
I don't want to get embroiled in an argument, but I would like to point out that if the dictionary being quoted is still under copyright, copious quoting might prove legally awkward too.
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word faq
Another quotation for the mentions page, then...
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word subtribe
B.B.C. News: '"It certainly suggests there was a significant settlement nearby. As far as we understand, it was occupied by wealthy tribes or subtribes," she said.'
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word infect us with unendurable ease
Apparently the original has infects; I'm cheated out of third person indicative singular this time, but at least there's or else.
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ah. a lid off a daffodil.aha
I like to imagine that this is from a tragic love story in which some unrequited romancer is driven into madness which leads him to decapitate his spurner while muttering deranged yet strangely poetic observations. At any rate it's the best explanation I've got.
January 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word deep ecology
Citation on ecosophy.
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ecosophy
New York Times: 'Deep ecology, which called for population reduction, soft technology and non-interference in the natural world, was eagerly taken up by environmentalists impatient with shallow ecology — another of Arne Naess’s coinages — which did not confront technology and economic growth.
'It formed part of a broader personal philosophy that Mr. Naess called ecosophy T, “a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium�? that human beings can comprehend by expanding their narrow concept of self to embrace the entire planetary ecosystem. The term fused “ecological�? and “philosophy.�? The T stood for Tvergastein, his name for the mountain cabin he built in 1937 in southern Norway, where he often wrote.'
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lamb bacon
TastingTable: 'Bacon lovers take note: There's a new meat in town. Cured lamb belly is showing up on menus all over, cozying up to eggs at breakfast and standing in for its porcine counterpart in wintry dinners. Because it has a lower fat, lamb bacon doesn't crisp up as well as pork. But chefs like its meaty texture and the rich, gamey flavor it adds to hearty winter dishes.'
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word arthuriana
Citation on psychoceramics.
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word psychoceramics
Got Medieval: 'I will also be attending the PCA/ACA's (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's) conference in New Orleans over Easter weekend. (Pop culturalists are an ungodly sort.) There, my topic will be "The Sword in the Stone in Outsider Arthuriana". The original title used the vulgar word for "psychoceramics" for the Arthuriana I mean--things like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and the Alano-Sarmatian hypothesis--but the session organizers rightly suggested I try not to piss off famous people who do actually come to the PCA/ACA conference from time to time.'
See also: Josiah Stinkney Carberry.
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word censorware
io9: 'The researchers also found that web filtering programs - often dubbed "censorware" - seemed to be an ineffective way of preventing children from seeing upsetting content online.'
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tags
The world is not yet ready.
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wodehousian
The Ecomomist: 'European snobbery about money permeates the books. Villains are frequently showy arrivistes. Old money is good. A gift (as opposed to gainful employment) allows his best friend, Captain Haddock, to buy back his family’s ancestral mansion. The captain takes to castle life with relish. Enriched by a treasure find, he swaps his seaman’s uniform for an increasingly Wodehousian wardrobe involving cravats, tweeds and at one point a monocle.'
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word striation
The Economist: 'Tintin has never been a big hit in the Anglo-Saxon world. In Britain, he is reasonably well known, but as a minority taste, bound within narrow striations of class: his albums are bought to be tucked into boarding school trunks or read after Saturday morning violin lessons.'
Apparently I'm a minority within a minority, since I can't say I find this image familiar.
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word economistesque
As in the periodical. Crooked Timber: 'The Economist somehow manages to take an exquisitely Economistesque line, getting digs in at the French while backhandedly praising Americans for their peculiar issues, while allowing that the Brits are probably somewhere in the middle.'
January 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spangle
I don't really recommend trying to reduce image size; squashed images can look awful without anti-aliasing to remove jagged lines, and Firefox seems to have trouble scrolling pages that contain them.
January 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tags
I've asked erich13 to remove the tagibunda, which he hopefully will do when he reads the explanation of how to do it. So then they won't be overtagged anymore...
January 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word infection setback in prem babies
What it means: 'A treatment thought to improve a premature baby's chance of fighting infection does not actually provide any benefit, a UK study suggests.'
January 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list what-time-is-it-2
I'm afraid this is another list that rather resembles an existing Wordie list (though broader by the look of it). That one isn't open, though.
January 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user erich13
Thanks for the reply.
Like mollusque said on my profile: to remove tags, go back to the word page (adobeair, admire, addon, about), click the 'add tags/pos' link and remove the tags from the box. (You seem to have deleted the words from your list, which won't de-tag them.) Cheers.
January 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user erich13
Warning from a fellow user: tagging a word (for example, about) with so many irrelevant tags is liable to get you accused of spamming and subjected to the Wordie treatment.
January 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tags
Okay, who's suddenly making overtagged look mild (see e.g. about)? Edit: erich13, by the look of it: spambot or just overenthusiastic?
January 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word troolean
Relisoft: 'The GetMessage API is an interesting example of the bizarre Microsoft Troolean (as opposed to traditional, Boolean) logic. GetMessage is defined to return a BOOL, but the documentation specifies three types of returns, non-zero, zero and -1. I am not making it up!'
January 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spangle
The file https://www.tannershaven.com/images/Purse099 gives me declares itself as an application/octet-stream, which an image file shouldn't; I'm guessing the messed-up MIME type is that site's problem.
Would it bother people if I pointed out that Wordie declares itself to be XHTML, and therefore images are technically supposed to have a closing / as in <img="image location" alt="alt text (also technically required by the spec)" />, even if they work without? (Don't bother changing it; the page wouldn't validate anyway.)
January 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cussedness
1UP: 'Yet the same elements that make SaGa games so horrifying to those whose baptism into RPG fandom was Final Fantasy are the same qualities that make the series stand out in an increasingly stagnant genre. SaGa draws equally from three diverse inspirations: other Japanese RPGs, Western role-playing concepts -- computer and otherwise -- and creator Akitoshi Kawazu's sheer cussedness. The SaGa games tend to be fairly open and flexible, and they also have a habit of not holding players by the hand: they're full of unique systems and rules that are best learned through experimentation.'
January 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word homeware
'a a'
(See advertising.)
January 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word advertising
Google seems to be going back to first principles in its efforts to entice Wordies: just now I saw an advert on a couple of pages which turned out to be for Make International Ltd.'s designer homeware, but which apart from the company's domain name just has a link reading 'a' and the descriptive text 'a a'.
January 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word only
No, it's usual enough (WordNet #5; edit: and with O.E.D. citations from c1384 to 2001); but in my examples there's no preceding sentence or clause to give context like that.
It does add further complexity, doesn't it?
January 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word only
Commonplace usage is fairly loose, and by and large context helps out; arguably each of these means something different:
Only he died yesterday. (Everyone else survived.)
He only died yesterday. (He did nothing else besides.)
He died only yesterday. (So recently.)
He died yesterday only. (Not twice.)
I think in practice the second would usually be taken to mean the same thing as the third, though.
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word siege-mine
Science Daily: '“The Persians will have heard the Romans tunnelling,�? says James, “and prepared a nasty surprise for them. I think the Sasanians placed braziers and bellows in their gallery, and when the Romans broke through, added the chemicals and pumped choking clouds into the Roman tunnel. The Roman assault party were unconscious in seconds, dead in minutes. Use of such smoke generators in siege-mines is actually mentioned in classical texts...�?'
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word more reliable than the british weather
British weather is reliable. Forecasters may be fallible.
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sasanian
Science Daily: 'Dura-Europos on the Euphrates was conquered by the Romans who installed a large garrison. Around AD 256, the city was subjected to a ferocious siege by an army from the powerful new Sasanian Persian empire... The Sasanians used the full range of ancient siege techniques to break into the city, including mining operations to breach the walls.'
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word moonstruck
I can find dictionary references for both moonstruck and moon-stricken, but moonstrike seems not to have come into being except as the name of a B.B.C. television series. Presumably because only the moon can render people moonstruck, which it just does by striking them.
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word freewheeling
The Lexicographer's Rules: 'Our gathering is a more freewheeling affair (meaning, largely unstructured and without rules), and is meant to be fun. It’s whimsical.'
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word no waterproof lining though
Some ghosts really make me wonder about their original context...
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ecophagy
I was hoping it would mean house-eating.
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word a neverthriving of jugglers
According to the O.E.D., 'a never-thriving of jugglers' is 'one of many alleged group terms found in late Middle English glossarial sources, but not otherwise substantiated'.
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word strangelovecraftian
Charles Stross: '...it occurs to me that the Lovecraftian apocalyptic singularity is underexplored... What's the role of humour in this universe? Well, one might ask what Stanley Kubrick intended when he turned "Dr. Strangelove" into a theatre of the absurd... What happens in a survivable apocalypse? Lovecraftian apocalyptic fiction never actually explores the consequences of the Old Ones returning, let alone the human wreckage left behind in the aftermath... This isn't a manifesto. It's just an explanation of what I've been writing, and what I plan to write more of. It's probably best described by a portmanteau word: Strangelovecraftian (or, if you're in a hurry, Strangecraftian) fiction. Its goal is to use the eschatalogical horror of the Mythos much as recent SF has used the Singularity, to shed light on the human condition under circumstances that warp the soul.'
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bo
For usage as a verb (now obs.) see comment on boingboingboing.
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word boingboingboing
Surely 'boingboingbone'?
(Bo actually is an obsolete verb meaning 'cry bo' or generally 'shout', according to the O.E.D., which gives a citation from ?c1505. I doubt it had a bone form, admittedly.)
January 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cryonaut
The Retro Blog, 'It's a Big Day for Cryonicists': 'Happy Bedford Day, everybody. On January 12th, 1967, University of California psychology professor James Bedford became the first man to have his body cryogenically frozen. As the first man to be preserved, the bill was paid by the Life Extension Society. He also earned the awesome title of “cryonaut,�? the term given to cryogenically preserved individuals. I like it. It sounds far more adventurous than what it actually describes.'
January 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word jelly
See citation on spoon-based.
January 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spoon-based
Improbable Research, quoting a U.C.L. press release: 'The sound of a jelly Jello" in some parts of the world'>known as "Jello" in some parts of the world wobbling has been recorded for the first time ever in a soundproof chamber at UCL.
'The recording is being turned into a soundtrack for an architectural jelly banquet to be hosted at UCL at 8pm on 4 July 2008. The event, run by Bompas and Parr as part of the London Festival of Architecture, will see a troupe of dancers deliver a spoon-based performance to the soundtrack sampled from wobbling jellies and a delicious aroma of strawberries, and will feature jelly wrestling and other festive frolics.'
July 2008? Dash, we missed it...
January 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sex imagery probe may be extended
This is actually about an enquiry into 'the use of sexual imagery in goods aimed at children'.
January 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word carp diem
If; but this is a misspelling of carpe diem, so you want carpe jugulum (available from all good booksellers).
January 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word aftermath
I like the etymology of this: after-mowing, regrowth of grass after a harvest in early Summer.
January 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word 调侃
I think it's pronunciation, with the numbers representing the tonality; but I don't speak Chinese, so I may stand in need of correction.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list brer-rebus
Now, to tag or not to tag belt'>belt and yourself'>yourself as misbraced...? It's probably simplest just to tag everything vaguely taggable.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word en masse
Why is this tagged Latin?
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word quarm
Playground slang for a homosexual, apparently. Also an archaic spelling of qualm.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word misbraced
See tag. (Mulled over on grovester'>grovester.)
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word {grovester}
Let's go for misbraced, then.
(What is a grovester, anyway?)
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word undertagged
It's tricky in borderline cases, though.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word apod
Or the Astronomy Picture of the Day.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word root out
From a philosopher's dream: 'I was standing in a hall full of people who were listening to a speaker inveighing against synthetic a priori propositions. The atmosphere owed a lot to speeches by Hitler on the Jews and Joseph McCarthy on Communists: the speaker was standing behind one of those old-style microphones, shouting: We must root out synthetic a priori propositions! We must eliminate them! The crowd was getting increasingly worked up. I was standing by the wall, watching, feeling deeply uneasy.'
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
If so, the wording is confusing: shouldn't it say bugs 'has been tagged some number greater than 1 times, has 5 total tags...' and not, as it does, 'has been tagged 1 time, has 7 total tags...'?
Edit: ah, meta does say bugs has been tagged 3 times, so you must be right. I stand by my comment about the confusing wording, though; I'd have expected the total number of tags to count types, not tokens.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word skiermish
Battle on the piste.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word {grovester}
Debrace? Disbrace? Or are they too harsh?
Misbraced?
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ...and then the resplendent cartoonist tenderly applied the warm salve to the gorilla's painfully inflamed nipples. the end.
Is this a sort of reverse cliffhanger, in which we frustratingly don't get to find out how it all began?
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word 0h-n0
See tag.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word polka-dots
See tag.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word extra space
See tag.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pronking
There are three or four such lists, actually. Which no doubt says something profound about human psychology...
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word robin hood
'Robin Hood seems to hav been sometimes confused in kitchen tales with Robin Goodfellow, and so to hav been regarded in the light of a fairy—or in the dark of a goblin.'
Charles P.G. Scott, 'The Devil and His Imps: An Etymological Inquisition'
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hobthurse
Scott marks this as unattested; his conjecture about the origin of hobthrush is *Hob Thurse → *Hob-Thurse → *hobthurse → hobthurst, hobthrush.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word guytrash
Alternative form of gytrash.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word friar rush
A.k.a. Friar Rush with a lantern (apparently courtesy of Milton), i.e. a will-o'-the-wisp.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hob-goblin
Now hobgoblin as standard, but I decided to keep this form to go with Scott's hob-thursts, hob-thrusts and hob-thrushes.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word doolies
I tried to find out whether dooly or doolie is the usual singular, and failed to find anything about this imp at all. (It doesn't help that both have other meanings, and that Google is convinced I can't spell and the folklore I'm really interested in is of corn dollies.) What are doolies, and should we be afraid...?
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word boody
Citation on boodie, which is a completely separate word.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word boodie
A supernatural creature not to be confused with the boodie-rat, nor with the verb boody, meaning mope.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bolly
A kind of bogie or hobgoblin, but it also has the rather charming meaning 'covered with bubbles'. Or at any rate it had in 1582 (O.E.D.).
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word boggard
An alternative form of boggart, as you'd expect, but according to the O.E.D. also an old (c. 16th & 17th Century) term for a privy.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word black man
Yes, it's an old name for an evil spirit or devil (possibly attested from 1591 according to the O.E.D.). One of the less fortunate parts of folklore.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dablet
A kind of imp, according to the citation on Deviling.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word deviling
'I began to write up the Devil and his Imps, placing at first no limit on their number. I had no sooner thrown open the doors than the air was darkend by a grisly flight of black-wingd demons, and the grounds was coverd by a trooping host of uncanny creatures of vague unseemly forms and unassorted sizes. Devils, Devilets, Devilings, Dablets, and other Imps...'
Charles P.G. Scott, 'The Devil and His Imps: An Etymological Inquisition'
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
According to its listing on /tags/bunny, bugs has seven tags (although listening device seems to have been removed at some point), but I see only five. This can't be down to an enforced limit, given how many tags are on overtagged, so I wonder whether one of the tags on this word is itself glitched...
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word argentine
Is this a WeirdNet strike, or does the word 'Argentine' suggest fish to you?
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list obsessive-compulsive-slightly-judgmental-tagging-syndrome
I decided not to open this fully, in order to preserve an appearance of orderly, reliable meta-ness, but feel free to ask to be added as a contributor.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user mollusque
Just to let you know, I've decided OCSJTS had better have a list of its own, to which you've been added as a contributor.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word parenthesick
See tag.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list meta
Someone has tagged it parenthesick; thanks for the heads-up.
Edit: OCSJTS now has a list of its own.
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word carnalize
New York Times: 'The effect is grotesque, of a feline Tony Soprano brutalizing and carnalizing Carroll’s delicate surrealism. I imagine it would give children nightmares.'
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sooner
New York Times: 'I didn’t read the stories because no child could — they are stomach-churningly, almost incomprehensibly saccharine. Here, for example, is how Sandburg describes the cost of an episode of militarism: “And the thousand golden ice tongs the sooners gave the boomers, and the thousand silver wheelbarrows the boomers gave the sooners, both with hearts and hands carved on the handles, they were long ago broken up in one of the early wars deciding pigs must be painted both pink and green with both checks and stripes.�?'
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wuxtry
New York Times: 'Since this is a children’s story, the workers manage to defy Mr. His despite the false consciousness foisted on them by his mass media, whereupon he temporizes by trying to foment race hatred: “Wuxtry!�? he exclaims, hawking issues of his newspaper in person. “Blondes — your real enemy is brunettes!�? Unable to resist a villain who shouts “Wuxtry!�? I wandered off to the Internet to try to buy a copy of “Mr. His�? for my niece. None were for sale. By their reprinting, Mickenberg and Nel have rescued Mr. His from near-complete oblivion.'
January 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word reply-all storm
Slashdot: 'It seems that a recent "reply-all storm" at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users "reply-all" to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic.'
The linked article actually has 'reply-all e-mail storm'.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lightform
As in 'The Earth's Anomalous Lightforms'.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word silverblu
A mink with especially silvery fur.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word silver-marriage
According to the O.E.D., a wedding at which each guest contributed some money. It doesn't say how they were persuaded to do so.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word silver lady
'An epithet applied to Miss Elizabeth Baxter (d. 1972), philanthropist, from her custom of giving silver coins to the down-and-outs of the Embankment in London, used attrib. to describe a charitable organization (and its appurtenances) which distributes food and hot drinks to vagrants' (O.E.D.).
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word week-silver
Another charge the O.E.D. is uncertain about: 'some kind of feudal dues'.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wattle-silver
Another obscure levy: 'some kind of feudal impost' (O.E.D.).
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word turnsilver
Another mystery: 'A local payment of uncertain nature.' (O.E.D.)
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sheep's silver
Mica; whereas sheep-silver is yet another payment ending in -silver.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ruby silver
Proustite, not red silver.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word red silver
Silver ore, as it turns out.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word muck-silver
'Obs. rare (perh.) a fee paid to the lord of a manor in place of dung owed.' (O.E.D.)
I must find out whether the reverse applies and I can pay taxes in dung.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dick-a-tuesday
A will-o'-the-wisp.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word periwinkle
Another rhyme for silver: the periwinkle goes by the name of Dick-a-dilver or dicky dilver. Presumably not by choice.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word aver-silver
See comment on aver.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word aver
This turns up in some old compound forms: aver-silver, averpenny, aver-corn, averland. The O.E.D. quotes sources that associate it with average in this context, but frowns at their 'very doubtful value'.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ladysilver
The O.E.D. goes in for bracketeering with this one, since it's 'prob. a scribal error for laydsilver, an unattested variant of Middle English ladesilver, northern variant of loadsilver payment made in lieu of the manorial service of carrying loads'.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lessilver
A bit of a mysery: 'Etym., sense, and form doubtful', sayd the O.E.D., which just marks it obs. without providing a positive definition, only a 1706 quotation which calls lef-silver 'a Duty paid by the Tenants to the Lord, for leave to plough and sow in the time of Pannage, or Mast-feeding'.
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word milver
Another rhyme (chilver was pointed out a while ago) for silver, and it just happens to mean 'a person with whom one shares a strong interest in a particular topic, esp. that of words and wordplay' (O.E.D.). Shall we tag it meta?
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word month
'Of all our many English rhymes,
There's none, they say, for month.
I've tried and failed a hundred times,
Then made it the hundred-and-oneth.'
(Quoted from memory, and I can't remember the source. And yes, hundred-and-first would be the expected construction, so it is cheating, a bit.)
January 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word turn undead
Ghosted, of course.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word grimm
I suppose if WeirdNet is determined to define the brothers separately, one of them has to be first; but why is the generic definition for author inserted after each one, pushing the elder brother down to the third definition?
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word poubelle
A surname which, thanks to M. Eugène-René Poubelle, now has the general meaning 'dustbin'. Of course, when I learnt the word back in school French class, I learnt only the general meaning, and now my mind will forever parse 'M. Poubelle' as 'Mr. Dustbin'.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lame duckery
Pop Omnivore: 'What an uncanny parallel to American history! Our president used to be inaugurated in March, too—until the 20th Amendment, ratified in 1933, changed the date. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to take office on January 20. The reason for the change? To cut back on the long period of lame duckery.'
It might have been better hyphenated; I'm tempted to think a lame duckery ought to be a really unkempt duckpond.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ಠ
Or a snail on a vertical surface, I suppose.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word fraktur
FrakturWeb: 'Fraktur is a folk art form practiced by Pennsylvania Germans principally from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The name derives from that of a distinctive German script marked by "fractured" pen strokes and the form has clear roots in European folk culture.'
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ಠ
When not doing ocular duty in emoticons, this is clearly a unicycle.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word colony collapse disorder
This bee-ing Wordie, maybe we're just more interested in B-keeping.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word special, surrender, change, forever, waterproof, waste of time
It's Sigi's least favourite words.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word xiphioid
I wonder whether there exist any xiphoid xiphioids.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word swingebuckler
Mildly disappointingly, this is apparently just an alternative to swashbuckler.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word special, surrender, change, forever, waterproof, waste of time
Almost but not quite a candidate for this list.
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word {grovester}
A-brace-on, maybe?
January 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word try
The 'try and' construction always struck me as odd anyway, since normally two verbs combined with and retain separate meanings (so to speak): stand and deliver, and so on. Even 'I shall go and see him' means something like 'I shall go to him and (accordingly) I shall see him'. (It's true that 'Whatever did you have to go and do that for?' isn't so neat, but I think that's because it's generally tricky to say exactly what job the go is doing in that example.)
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sortiary
A practitioner of sortilege; obs. and rare according to the O.E.D.
Edit: judging by the quotation the dictionary uses that's apparently sortilege as in divination, whereas sortiary is given as a synonym for sortilege as in ballot selection.
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ascension
n. Religious movement.
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word verbiviniculture
As in 'The Wine of Words: Inquisitioning the Verbiviniculture of Clark Ashton Smith'.
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word coadjutancy
Clark Ashton Smith: 'Azathoth, the primal nuclear chaos, reproduced of course only by fission; but its progeny, entering various outer planets, often took on attributes of androgynism or bisexuality. The androgynes, curiously, required no coadjutancy in the production of offspring; but their children were commonly unisexual, male or female. Hzioulquoigmnzhah, uncle of Tsathoggua, and Ghizghuth, Tsathoggua's father, were the male progeny of Cxaxukluth, the androgynous spawn of Azathoth. Thus you will note a trend toward biological complexity. It is worthy of record, however, that Knygathin Zhaum, the half-breed Voormi, reverted to the most primitive Azathothian characteristics following the stress of his numerous decapitations. I have yet to translate the terrible and abominable legend telling how a certain doughty citizen of Comnioriom (not Athammaus) returned to the city after its public evacuation, and found that it was peopled most execrably and numerously by the fissional spawn of Knygathin Zhaum, which possessed no vestige of anything human or even earthly.'
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word breed
WeirdNet's parents didn't explain the facts of life very thoroughly.
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word anti-pent-agonist
O.E.D.: 'Examples of the purposes to which anti- has been put are seen in the following: anti-contagious-diseasist, anti-gigman-ic, anti-money-an, anti-pent-agonist, anti-philippizing, anti-street-musical, anti-tintinnabularian (an enemy of bells), anti-tobacconal.'
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tetragonism
Squaring the circle; marked by the O.E.D. as '? Obs.', so its future may hinge on how many of us manage to drop it into conversation.
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word antiquarium
Free the fish.
(Actually, it's a repository for antiquities—not, as you might expect, a home for antiquaries, though the two are probably similar in practice.)
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word whales
Save the whales from WeirdNet.
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ט
Save the whales.
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word drupa
One world, one Drupa.
(Yes, it's deservedly notorious.)
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tk
How often does it appear in English? In an O.E.D. Online check, the only search results that weren't multiple words (e.g. ALT key) were Atkins and (from Russian) astatki. (Edit: okay, I missed the fact the results were returned on multiple pages...)
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hard drive destruction 'crucial'
What it means: in order to destroy data on the drive, the drive has to be destroyed.
January 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list longest-words-on-wordie-2
This tag may be useful to you.
This has actually been done before, but that list isn't open and the listmaster hasn't been seen recently. Edit: oh, it actually is open. My mistake. This one isn't, though.
Edit: oh, and see the comments on longest word ever about the character limits Wordie sadly imposes.
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word slubbed
Just roll that WeirdNet definition 'round your mouth: 'nubby, nubbly, slubbed, tweedy'.
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word durien
Apparently a fictional planet in the Amber Nebula campaign setting, although I imagine it may have entered Wordie as a misspelling of durian or Darien.
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word guttural
That's evocative, WeirdNet, but I'm not sure it's entirely helpful.
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ather
Apparently an archaic form of both adder and either, although I doubt either was on the mind of whoever added it to Wordie's host of ghosts.
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spookfish
Science Daily: 'Although the spookfish was first discovered 120 years ago, no one had discovered its reflective eyes until now because a live animal had never been caught.'
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word overchicked
Slate: 'Urban Dictionary tells me, for example, that overchicked is an adjective used to describe a man who is significantly less attractive than his female companion.'
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word theothanatology
Slate: 'Take a very obscure academic term like theothanatology—the study of the death of God—which returns all of 829 results as of this writing.'
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word "pluralistic society"
Misquote, then; see "popinjay, if you can.
Edit: hmm. When I first submitted this comment the link not actually to "popinjay was missing (the word was absent), but after editing it's apparently there.
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word misquote
See tag.
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list diseases-that-make-lovely-baby-girls-names
Apparently, Colic is a surname.
January 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hydrometer
I don't want to reinflame the overtagged question, but: breweries, brewery and brewing...?
January 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
It strikes me that we can view the thousand most recent tags, but as far as I know we have no way of viewing the most commonly used tags; it would be interesting, and possibly useful, to have a clear picture of which ones have made it into general use.
January 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sorry trousers!
The mind boggles wondering what this was for before it ended up in the Adoption Agency.
January 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word relexology
Returning to Wordie.
January 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word miriad
Epic poem in which Miriam the Miri mirificously cooks mirid in mirish mirin.
January 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word chorea
Thanks, WeirdNet.
January 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lovehaft
No, it's when you hafta worship Great Cthulhu.
January 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word the man from uncle
Ghosted: T.H.R.U.S.H. must finally have done them in.
January 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lamasu
B.B.C. News: 'There were statuettes, just five or six inches high, representing Babylonian kings and Sumerian warriors and princesses. And there was a lamasu - the winged ox that was the symbol of Assyrian strength, and silverware and jewellery.'
Is this the same as lamassu/lammasu?
January 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sea angel
Citation on clione.
January 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word clione
Pink Tentacle: 'The clione, a.k.a. sea angel, is a cute, translucent swimming sea slug that glides gracefully through icy ocean waters by flapping a pair of appendages that resemble tiny angel wings. Don’t let the innocent, angelic look fool you, though — the clione is a vicious demon come feeding time.'
January 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word fence hope for tasmanian devils
Specifically, a fence to separate healthy and sick ones.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word oldware
In .org and .com versions.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word jokeware
As seen here.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word slideware
Word Spy: 'A much-hyped software product that currently exists only as a series of slides in a sales or marketing presentation.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word missionware
Word Spy: 'Products such as pens, coffee mugs, and T-shirts that are handed out to employees and that include the company's logo, motto, or mission statement.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word herdware
Word Spy: 'Computer software that tracks cattle herds.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word coasterware
Word Spy: 'Software so bad or useless that it never gets installed.' You can at least use the CD-ROM as a coaster.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word retroware
Word Spy: 'A software program that's two or three versions earlier than the current version.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word netware
Actually a specific piece of software, not a generic term for network software or things made of netting.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cyberware
As explained by Taryn East.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sliverware
M.P.C.: 'Sliverware abstracts software into three distinct layers: the network communication layer, the group coordination layer, and the services layer.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word demotorization
sltrib.com: 'Like many Japanese of his generation, the 28-year-old musician and part-time maintenance worker says owning a car is more trouble than it's worth... That kind of thinking -- which automakers here have dubbed "kuruma banare," or "demotorization" -- is a U-turn from earlier generations of Japanese who viewed car ownership as a status symbol.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word badgeware
Citation on badgerware.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word badgerware
Channel Register: 'CPAL should drive some measure of consistency among the badgeware license crowd. Companies such as SugarCRM and Centric CRM - and many others - have crafted various versions of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) that include so-called attribution clauses unique to their wares. As a result, scores of attribution - or badgeware - licenses have been thrust at customers - none of them OSI approved... It's expected that companies such as SugarCRM will modify their old attribution licenses to fit CPAL. We've taken the liberty of dubbing CPAL a badgerware license in honor of Socialtext's fluffy nature.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word firstbornware
Extreme payware.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tupperware
Splendidly, there is some software known as T.U.P.P.E.R.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word earthenware
Google Earth?
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word fritterware
Jargon File: 'An excess of capability that serves no productive end.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word guiltware
Snarkily defined here.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sadware
Since this list has ended up expanding beyond software, it ought to have this rather curious term for 'plates, dishes and chargers'.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word giftware
Giftware and gift-ware can be seen in the same document.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word grovelware
AnalogX: 'Unlike most of the other people out there that have useful utilities on their sites, I am giving away all of the programs on here, for free; not shareware or grovelware or whatever you want to call it.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word prayerware
Use conditional on prayers.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pairware
Market Opportunity: 'Define a new class of software known as "pairware". If "groupware" was the term given to software intended for group empowerment within structured organizations, "pairware" will be the term given to software intended for personal empowerment in the context of ad hoc relationships or tasks...'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word elephantware
Really slow bloatware. Download Squad: 'Elephantware. That is what we are talking about. Bloated programs that make brand new PCs boot like Pentium 2s with 64 MBs of RAM.'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bundleware
Wikipedia reckons 'usage of the word bundleware in this context OEM pre-installation'>sc. OEM pre-installation was at its peak in the late 1990s', but offers no evidence.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word meta-utopia
Cory Doctorow on metadata: 'In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas...'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spiteware
OCRemix: 'But here's the nice thing. Someone wrote "Media Player Classic" (spiteware?). It looks identical to version 6 of Windows Media Player (keep it simple), and it includes codecs for RealAudio and RealVideo formats. But why stop there? There's also a QuickTime codec (!). Away, begone, buggy Apple QuickTime Player (hopefully for good).'
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word careware
According to Wikipedia charityware, helpware and goodware are synonyms for careware, but there's no supporting citation.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word crimeware
The Wikipedia entry says this 'term was coined by Peter Cassidy, Secretary General of the Anti-Phishing Working Group to distinguish it from other kinds of malevolent programs', but adds a citation needed.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word moralityware
Koran-Spouting Trojan Is First Example of Moralityware (2005)
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word riskware
Apparently this is 'the generic term used by Kaspersky Lab to describe programs that are legitimate in themselves, but that have the potential for misuse by cyber criminals'.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word greyware
Or grayware in American English: according to Wikipedia this encompasses adware and spyware, though personally I'd consider spyware to be fully fledged malware.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word whatnottoware
Pretends to perform a system audit, but actually just installs Bonzi Buddy. Twice.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word beware
Just keep aware of it.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word knowware
This seems to be the name of a couple of companies.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word forceware
Just forswear this.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word footware
I hadn't heard of this one before; my silly definition was going to be 'software involved in the boot sequence'.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word underware
Software best not stored on a Flash drive.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wolfware
Software with one of those 'smart' interfaces that keeps changing, allegedly to suit the user's working habits but possibly according to the phases of the moon.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word neverware
Software which Neil Gaiman will never write.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word donateware
Alternative form of donationware.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word emailware
Alternative form of e-mailware.
January 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word freezebubble
A frozen bubble.
January 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
I see one thing Գ (%EF%BB%BF%D4%B3) and Գ (%D4%B3) have in common is that they both allegedly have 0 comments.
January 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Գ
Well, what happened is that this page now thinks it's ghosted, but on a list page it still shows up as twice-listed.
January 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Գ
Right: that's what I intended to mean by saying 'it doesn't know it's on that list' (i.e. the paradox list—which is Asativum's open list, incidentally).
Hmm... It shows up on list pages as having been listed twice, but in fact it's on three lists, while the right-hand column here still names only one. I wonder what would happen if I removed it from 'VanishedOne's words'...
January 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ӳ
Mucking about trying to hex this onto the Wordie Paradox list, I managed to get a version of Գ that works normally except that it doesn't know it's on that list: %EF%BB%BF%D4%B3. The weirder Գ is %D4%B3.
January 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word rogueliker
@PLAY: 'One of the most frustrating things about it is that the interface has been changed just enough from roguelike standards to bring the learning curve back to old-hand roguelikers. It may first seem a positive thing that the game doesn't rely on a bunch of shifted, ctrl-ed, even alt-ed key combinations to access commands, but the solution arrived upon takes a bit of getting used to.'
January 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cave pelican
@PLAY: 'The result is that the player must typically defeat a monster to gain loot instead of just happen upon it, a change that could be called slightly more realistic, if trapising your enchanted elf around throwing fireballs at cave pelicans isn't realistic enough for you. (Yes, cave pelicans, their feathers black as night, their floppy bills filled and dripping with the blood of the innocent.)'
January 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word vancian
killershrike.com: 'This site provides a comprehensive meta system of Magic referred to collectively as "Vancian Magic". It is patterned after the "fire & forget" style of casting described in some of the works of author Jack Vance, which became an integral part of how many people think of magic use in Fantasy RPGs as the basic idea was adapted to become the core of the D&D style of magic use. The Vancian Magic Systems presented on this site are all Charges based, organize Spells into Spell Levels, are able to use the concept of "Metamagic Feat" Talents, and by and large should be very usable by those who like the D&D X/Day/Spell Level style of Magic Use.'
January 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word noonshine
See the poem linked on Nephelidia.
January 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word nephelidia
'Cloudlets': a self-parodying poem by Swinburne.
January 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pigwiggenry
Lingwë: 'Shades of Draytonesque “pigwiggenry�? again here... Fairies and goblins were indeed a much greater part of Tolkien’s early imagination than his later...'
January 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word saundry
I thought this might be a misspelling of sundry, but it turns out to be a surname.
December 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word advisor
@qroqqa: the O.E.D. entry for advisory actually says: 'f. ADVISE + -ORY, as if ad. late L. *advimacsomacrius, f. late L. advimacsor.', which makes it unclear (depending on the scope of the 'as if') whether late Latin advisor actually existed, or whether advisory is just formed as though it did. Is Latin advisor attested anywhere?
December 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word advisor
According to the O.E.D., supervise derives from supervidere (super + videre), advise from advisare (not advidere/ad + videre).
December 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word advisor
If I remember correctly, advisor is the product of false etymology by mistaken analogy with visor; it's just become commonplace enough to appear in the dictionaries anyway.
December 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word vivisephulchre
My best guess about this is that someone was trying to coin vivisepulchre as a play on vivisepulture.
December 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word canadian search for snow missing
Which actually means: 'Rescuers are searching for eight men buried under two avalanches as they rode snowmobiles in western Canada's Rocky Mountains.'
December 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word juxtalingual
Lingwë: 'The meaning of “juxtalingual�? is obvious enough — but as much as I like it, I don’t think it’s a real word! I can’t find it in any dictionary (online of off; I don’t have access to the O.E.D. — anyone?), and a Google search yields absolutely no results — rare indeed! Searching Google books returned a couple of hits, but both of them were snippets of this very marketing blurb, from a series of high school and college book catalogs published in the 1960’s and ’70’s. So who exactly coined this interesting word? Was it an editor at Barron’s Educational Series, in Woodbury, New York? Or perhaps Vincent F. Hopper, who wrote the introduction for the reissue?
'And with all this fuss, what does a “juxtalingual�? translation look like? Basically, the lines of the original are split at the caesurae, producing a narrow column, facing which (on the same page) is a corresponding column in translation.'
December 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word earthrise
B.B.C.: 'Forty years ago, the largest TV audience in history tuned in to watch the Apollo 8 crew reach lunar orbit.It was during this mission that the famous "Earthrise" image was captured, changing forever our perception of the planet and its place in space.'
December 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bortle
BLDGBLOG: 'The forest, which covers 300 square miles and includes the foothills of the Awful Hand Range, rates as a 3 on the Bortle scale. The scale, created by John Bortle in 2001, measures night sky darkness based on the observability of astronomical objects...
'The IDA website itself contains everything that "locations with exceptional nightscapes" need to know to submit their application to be certified as "International Dark Sky Communities (IDSC), International Dark Sky Parks (IDSP), and International Dark Sky Reserves (IDSR)"... The Geauga Park District submitted their 34-page Lighting Management Plan... detailing various proposals for the reduction of local skyglow (as opposed to natural airglow), light trespass, and glare.'
December 29, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Back again: the random word feature has suddenly started producing a 500 Application Error when I try to use it.
Edit: and three hours later it's working again.
December 29, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word jobelins
'François Villon really was a delinquent and a killer, a crook and a convict, who even wrote ballads in the secret language, jobelins, of the gangs.' - The Book of Lost Books, p. 130
However, it's the singular form jobelin which dictionary.sensagent.com/JOBELINS/fr-fr/ gives as an 'ensemble oral de mots d'un groupe social'.
December 29, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word features
Besides Oddocomplete being a resource drain, the sorting algorithm pulled some unexpected things out of the database, and it had a nasty habit of forcing its own suggestions into the search box without asking nicely, so I don't think anyone grieved much when John removed it.
There was some talk of wildcarding 'someday' eight months ago on this page.
December 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
Annoyingly, the version of blah ... does that count? I managed to add here is operational, owing to the hexadecimal trickery used. However (as noted on bugs), when the random word feature took me to blah ... does that count? it proved unviewable. Try clicking on the links in this comment.
December 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
r3v's onomatopoeia is set to blah ... does that count? I just got sent there by the random word feature, which lopped off the terminal question mark and told me nobody was listing blah ... does that count, why didn't I?
I got blocked from adding the version with the question mark to the Wordie Paradox list (though changing ? to %3F worked), but either the block on adding words containing ? doesn't apply to profile onomatopoeia, or it didn't when the page was added.
Edit: I forgot to mention that on /people/recent/r3v the link to blah ... does that count? goes to /words/140718.
December 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
The tag page for /tags/scratch'n'sniff claims that 'nobody has used this tag', but in fact it can be seen on gunpowder: a problem with the ' character, maybe? (I wondered whether a deleted account might have put it there, but it turns out to be bilby's tag.)
December 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word equidus
Is there a tag for words tagged with broken tags? (Trivia: from the tags on this one we get both a 500 Application Error and a 404.)
December 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ecicebtric
Google informs me this is part of the name of a lawn and gardens company; as for whether it actually means anything...
December 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word traumatic fertilization
Scientific American: 'For female squids, sex is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience—and an apparently horrible one at that. The female releases millions of tiny eggs into the water along with the sperm contributed by the one male who got his hooks into her, and usually never goes back for seconds, the researchers found. Afterward, they never let a male get close—a behavior that even has led to the technical term “traumatic fertilization.�?'
December 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word cartocacoethes
Strange Maps: 'I learned a new word today, but the condition it describes has been with me for quite some time: cartocacoethes - the compulsion to see maps everywhere. More on that here...'
December 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tagbusters
*Adds a plural tag in passing*
December 27, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word wendish
The tag, however, cannot resist breaking.
December 27, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word overtagged
As far as I know nobody is holding Tag of the Year 08 awards. Which may be just as well.
Edit: so much for that.
December 27, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ,,,,
Commarginal, I think.
December 27, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word semi
I've never heard that one before; hopefully it's still safe to use semi for semi-final and semi-detached.
December 25, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word features
Please, no. I'm sick of sites that take it upon themselves to make that decision for me, presumably believing I couldn't possibly want to close their pages when going somewhere else.
December 25, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word firefox add-ons
Backgroundimage Saver
BlockSite
ChatZilla
DOM Inspector
DownThemAll
Exch
Extension Manager Extended
File Title
Firebug
Flashblock
Formfox
Greasemonkey
JavaScript Options
Longdesc
Menu Editor
Show Picture
Stylish
Tab History
User Agent Switcher
Web Developer
Zotero
December 24, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word stakeholder
T.H.E.: 'Academics never had to worry about shareholders, but that mythical being, the stakeholder, now dominates their lives. Despite their diversity, there is no shortage of people who not only claim to know what stakeholders want, but are also determined to ensure that academics provide it.'
December 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fulgid
Fitting...
December 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word extreme poodle grooming
That's what Boing Boing calls it, anyway.
December 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word x2 + y2
Maybe these algebraic pages are meant to be emoticons of some sort. This one is either crying or wearing a monocle.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word spitoon
Acually, the O.E.D. and dictionary.com accept this as an alternative spelling of spittoon.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word sauntering
Done that, haven't yet bought the T-shirt.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word authentic
A festive usage example (not suitable for small children).
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word scamperin'
Int'restin'. Rules governin' the use of f***in' asterisks in words must exist somewhere, though possibly inside various censors' heads.
Edit: here's a usage example.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word envy me
Presumably the twin village of Pity Me.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word jezebell
Dead ringer for a Biblical figure.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tuning machines
I wonder whether there's such a thing as a universal tuning machine.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word enarch
Seen in John's citation on achievatron: the only sense I could find in dictionaries was as a verb, 'to arch, to build in the shape of an arch'; but someone else found a definition for the noun sense.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word features
For some reason, if 'nobody has listed' a tag, there's no comment facility on its page (though as I noted over on tags, those tags were in use once): kath 'n' kim, for example. I don't know whether this should be on bugs or whether commenting on ghost tags should be a feature request.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tags
It strikes me that the 'nobody has used this tag' line, which appears on tags people have added and then all removed (e.g. kath 'n' kim), is always technically false, since those tags were in use at some point; genuinely never-used tags produce 500 Application Errors. It would be more accurate to say 'nobody is using this tag'.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list of-pouts
In the event that she returns: poutine (a culinary dish) and poutassou (a fish) fit visually, but they're pronounced differently.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fulgid
Are there any other WeirdNet definitions that look quite so much like thesaurus entries? Edit: oddly enough, the definition for fulgent is nothing of the sort.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word safety
WeirdNet is being very precise today.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word sagacity
I never fully understood my relations.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word mage
Oddly enough, WordNet defines magus but not mage.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word mistletoe
Not a total WeirdNet paradox, but close enough.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word christmas
I see WeirdNet is in the holiday spirit.
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word i+n-i=e
Therefore n = e?
December 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word faggot
Google is now advertising a site called 'Gay-parship'. Tasteful.
December 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pour
I can see what WeirdNet is getting at, but...
December 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word peg boy
Also peg-boy, pegboy. The Straight Dope: 'First, terminology. I’ve seen peg = “copulate�? in a 1902 slang dictionary, and it’s easy to believe the expression was common long before that. But the earliest usage of peg boy cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words by Robert Anton Wilson (1972), perhaps not the most reliable source. Wilson writes: “A ‘peg-boy’ is a young male who prostitutes himself to homosexuals; ‘peg-house’, a homosexual brothel. There is an unsubstantiated story that boys in East Indian peg-houses were required to sit on pegs between customers, giving them permanently dilated anuses.�? Whatever you say, Bob.'
December 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word scamperin'
Ah, but then we end up with one rule for capostrophe and another for asterical (see the discussion there).
December 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word scamperin'
Now, is this a capostrophe, or merely rustic?
December 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bucket shop
Slate: 'Lots of schemes are stock-market specific. There's the pump and dump, in which the perpetrator boosts the price of a stock through false or exaggerated statements, then sells his position at an artificially inflated level. And front-running, in which a broker buys himself shares of a stock right before his brokerage buys a much larger block of shares (or recommends the stock as a good prospect). In the jitney game, brokers trade a stock back and forth to give the impression that it's a hot commodity. Bucket shop is a common term for a brokerage that defrauds its customers, usually by selling worthless or highly speculative stocks that it wants to offload.'
December 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word difficutl
Perhaps this is one of the minor Aztec deities.
December 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word meta-charity
Philosophy, et cetera: 'Singer promotes giving to Oxfam in public speeches because it's easier for most people to understand the direct benefits of their work, but in private conversation he agrees that it is far better to donate to meta-charities. For instance, you can donate directly to the Poverty Action Lab, which conducts rigorous controlled, randomized studies to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, often finding that billions of dollars are being wasted at low cost...'
December 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word meroitic
B.B.C. News: 'The ram statues symbolise the god Amun, and include the first discovery of a complete royal dedication in Meroitic script, only found before in fragments. It is the oldest written sub-Saharan language and dates from the Meroe period of 300BC to AD450.'
December 17, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word thural
It gives you a standard to beat.
December 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word structural pessimism
Néojaponisme: 'This Time article places part of the blame on the Japanese people’s "structural pessimism" — a catchy phrase from Shirakawa Hiromichi, chief economist at Credit Suisse Japan. As the term suggests, the Japanese suffer from a general lack of confidence about the Japanese economy and the nation’s future, and as a result, are weary of big spending...
'It’s easy to blame this mass psychological disposition towards pessimism on some innate and unbending cultural characteristic. All those enka songs are in minor keys, right? And Kabuki is not one for happy endings. Must be something in the water. And listen to the phrase “structural pessimism�?: that doesn’t sound like it’s going away anytime soon. Japan would be much better off suffering from something like “faddish pessimism.'
December 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pluffy
According to the O.E.D., puffy or swollen is a current sense (in some dialects), fluffy or downy an obsolete one.
December 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word phyx
Well, Googling for φυξ produces results; but I don't speak Greek, so I can't tell you what they mean.
December 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word thural
According to the O.E.D. it means 'Of, pertaining to, or of the nature of incense' (obs., rare).
December 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word thaksinomics
B.B.C. News: 'While not entirely ditching the liberal reforms of "Thaksinomics" - a term used to refer to the economic set of policies of exiled former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra - he has argued for a more statist approach.'
December 15, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fruit dove
...and discovered the hard way that fruit can't swim.
December 15, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word nanopunk
'Nanopunk is an emerging subset of the speculative fiction genre of writing, movies and the performing arts' (Azonano); also nano-punk.
December 15, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word "this is your life and it's ending one minute at a time."
Another of those paradoxical unclickables.
December 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
I + Not-I = Everything seems to be acting normally nowadays.
December 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word demoticon
See tag.
December 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word flipper! :)
As in demote, or as in demotic? I quite like the latter possibility, so why not...?
December 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word flipper! :)
Do emoticons warrant an OCSJTS tag, and if so, what might it be?
December 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word cave spider
The world was a scary enough place before ghost(ed) spiders.
December 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word maieutic
If 'this website' doesn't exist, doesn't it follow that the words 'this website' don't refer to anything, and hence that the belief renders itself meaningless?
December 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word é
That was probably my addition of © to the Wordie Paradox list, by entering the hexadecimal.
December 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bride to nowhere
I wonder how 'the international Asian dating site' feels about having an advert on this page.
December 13, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ciao
Why is WeirdNet bringing Hawaiian into this?
T.L.S.: 'English words borrowed from Venetian include artichoke, arsenal, ballot, casino, contraband, gazette, ghetto, imbroglio, gondola, lagoon, lido, lotto, marzipan, pantaloon, pistachio, quarantine, regatta, scampi, sequin and zany. “Ciao�? – a long-standing contraction of the courteous Venetian salutation “vostro schiavo�? (your humble servant) – has now become a global greeting.'
December 12, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word open-list
I'm hoping John will add the promised automatic marker soon and this method will never become popular enough for me to have to worry about it. (Besides, the right-hand column would become enormous if we all used this...)
December 12, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word !
!
December 12, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bootho
Private Eye #1225: 'Richard Booth, the self-proclaimed King of Hay-on-Wye, is on the verge of being dethroned... Whereas he once drew a lot of welcome attention to Hay with his antics, such as declaring the town a independent republic with its own currency called the "Bootho", he now spends most of his time and effort denigrating the Welsh assembly as a force for evil.'
December 12, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word spaceguard
T.H.E.: 'A "spaceguard" system to scan the skies for asteroids heading for Earth has been mooted by leading scientists. The group, including Royal Society president Lord Rees, says the United Nations needs a system to destroy or divert dangerous asteroids, The Observer said on 7 December.'
December 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list the-wordie-armada
I just noticed that /lists/bon-voyage seems to have the same function.
December 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word thali
bradshaw of the future: 'A thali is a dish served on a flat plate. It's from Hindi थाली th�?lī "flat metal plate", which is related to Sanskrit sth�?l�? "a vessel, plate" from Proto-Indo-European *steh₂- "to stand". '
December 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word scanda
Possibly an alternative or incorrect spelling of skandha, a Buddhist metaphysical concept.
December 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list the-oup-junior-dictionary-neophytes
I'd find the claim that words are being removed and others added to reflect 'multiculturalism' more believable if the added words reflected backgrounds other than Western Christianity, but words like interdependent suggest more of a commitment to the idea of multiculturalism.
December 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word educationist
Times Online: 'There will be many teachers who insist this does not matter; that children are picking up the concepts or themes, or developing understanding, or some such. But it does matter. So hard are educationists trying to keep the attention of every child with “varied and matched learning�?, to use some more jargon, that education has become frighteningly dumbed down.'
December 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word nibiru
Bad Archaeology: 'Sitchin’s first book, The Twelfth Planet, was published in 1976, and according to his followers, it has transformed the field of ancient history. The inhabitants of Nibiru, the Anunnaki, form a link between Stonehenge, Tiahuanacu and the Sumerians; they were also responsible for creating modern humans by genetic engineering. Disagreement among the Anunnaki made them abandon Earth, but they are due to return shortly and will presumably pay a visit on the creations they abandoned (in other words, us).'
December 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fitter
For use as a verb see fittering.
December 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fittering
Apparently fitter as a verb means 'break into small fragments' (obs., rare) (O.E.D.).
December 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fainter
Fittingly, it's ghosted.
December 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word standup (note: adjective!)
You can mark a word as an adjective with the 'add tags/pos' link.
December 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word loft
No WordNet definition on this either... Lift has one, so it's not some weird 'l*ft' glitch.
December 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word left
Especially since there is a definition for right. Searching for left on wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn does return results, so maybe the problem is with Wordie's implementation.
December 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word dute
'Shortened form of dedute, DEDUIT, enjoyment, pleasure.' (Obs.) (O.E.D.)
December 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word hyloism
See hylotheism.
December 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word doodad
N.A.S.A.: 'When observing the great globular cluster NGC 4372, observers frequently take note of a strange dark streak nearly three degrees in length running near it. Unnamed, the streak, actually a long molecular cloud, has become known as the Dark Doodad Nebula. (Doodad is slang for a thingy or a whatchamacallit.)'
December 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word clameur de haro
B.B.C. News: 'One ancient right all Sarkees can invoke if they believe their property is being threatened, is the Clameur de Haro.
'By falling to their knees in front of witnesses, they can recite the Lord's Prayer in French then cry out for justice; "Haro, Haro, Haro! A mon aide mon Prince, on me fait tort!" (Help me, my prince, I have been wronged).
'If the Clameur is registered with the Greffe (court) the alleged wrong must stop until it is dealt with by the court.
'The seneschal said he had dealt with only one Clameur in 1999, but they almost always involve a boundary dispute.'
December 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list peacocks-plumage
I left out regulators, since it's the sense of vigilantes that's the unusual aspect.
December 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word grr
Currently grr, grrr, grrrrr and grrrrrrr are listed on Wordie, but for some reason not grrrr or grrrrrr. (A previous version of this comment suggested it was an aversion to even numbers of Rs, which was a silly thing to say on grr.)
December 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word mememancy
That link seems to lead to a broken redirect now; I think this one is current.
December 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word grest
Most gr.
Okay: 'a footboard' (obs., rare) (OED).
December 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word schadenfreunde
With friends like these...
December 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word septon
Kotaku: 'The manufacturer says it uses a material called "septon," which is used in medical devices.'
December 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word arborsculpture
Web Ephemera: 'Do you have a green thumb? Then perhaps arborsculpture is for you. It may not be a word that is familiar to you – it does not yet appear in any dictionaries, but it is a combination of art and gardening which is quickly growing in popularity.
'Arborsculpture is the art of growing and shaping the branches of tress (and other woody plants) in to shapes never intended in the wild or even in the garden.'
December 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word apartyheid
Not invited?
December 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
The random word feature just took me to http://wordie.org/words/http://wordie.org/words/coquettish: I'm guessing maybe it's been entered in the database somewhere, but whereas that page was a 404, entering http://wordie.org/words/coquettish in the search box took me to word. So maybe it's a glitch in the random word function instead.
December 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bombastic
I'm guessing the first WeirdNet definition, 'ostentatiously lofty in style', isn't the one it has in mind in its definition of a rant. Either that or I should be refining my ranting style.
December 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word rant
How like WeirdNet to define a commonplace monosyllable as a bombastic declamation.
December 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word cloak-fish
Another broken and spammy-looking tag...
December 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word immagically
Sadly I can't tag this imagical, since image search returns nothing.
December 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ajdukiewics
I think it relies on prior familiarity with the work of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. I don't find it amusing, and I've spent enough time in philosophy classes to find the proofs that p funny; but I'm not even remotely familiar with this person.
December 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word howwwwwwwwwwllll
A banshee?
December 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word gleetous
Alternatively, glittous: obs. and rare according to the OED, which is a shame. 'a. Of a hawk: Affected with phlegm. b. Of persons: Filthy (in conduct). c. fig. ? Sticky, ensnaring.'
December 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word umudrovat se
And that's why they call me...
December 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word xerolac
A lake of photocopier ink.
Seriously: maybe dry-something? Edit: Urban Dictionary thinks so.
December 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word barbarism
To complement WeirdNet's fine collection of adjectives...
Eric Hobsbawm: 'I have called my lecture ‘Barbarism, A User’s Guide’, not because I wish to give you instructions in how to be barbarians. None of us, unfortunately, need it. Barbarism is not something like ice-dancing, a technique that has to be learned—at least not unless you wish to become a torturer or some other specialist in inhuman activities... The argument of this lecture is that, after about a hundred and fifty years of secular decline, barbarism has been on the increase for most of the twentieth century, and there is no sign that this increase is at an end. In this context I understand ‘barbarism’ to mean two things. First, the disruption and breakdown of the systems of rules and moral behaviour by which all societies regulate the relations among their members and, to a lesser extent, between their members and those of other societies. Second, I mean, more specifically, the reversal of what we may call the project of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, namely the establishment of a universal system of such rules and standards of moral behaviour, embodied in the institutions of states dedicated to the rational progress of humanity: to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, to Equality, Liberty and Fraternity or whatever.'
December 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word umudrovat se
*Unsure whether to add this to the Philosophical Jargon list*
December 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word mouthful
Got a troll in here, have we?
December 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word japanning
Japan Times: 'Just as "China" became the common-use word for both porcelain and the country that produced it, so "Japan" entered the English language not only as the name of the country. Originally the word also referred to the lacquerware with which the country was associated, and the verb "japanning" meant "to varnish."'
December 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word disrelish
*Groans* That is truly awful. Sincere congratulations.
December 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word metriculate
Is this a misspelling of matriculate, or did someone need an erudite-sounding way of saying 'convert to metric'? There is an obsolete word metrificate, 'write in verse or metre' (OED).
December 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word enquerouresse
Oe of those nonce-words according to the OED, which makes it a feminine form of Old french enquereour, a judicial inquisitor. (Presumably in modern English we'd say inquisitress or inquisitrix, both of which are attested in the OED.) One citation, from about 1430: 'Art thou meyresse? or a newe enquerouresse? Shewe thi commission.'
December 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word villosity
Jeremy Bentham: 'The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate.'
December 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word manufacture
From an OED online wildcard search:
There's Rufai, which is in the OED ('A howling dervish, one of an order of Muslim friars pledged to poverty and self-mortification.'), but taken from Turkish.
Tufa, a geological term for a kind of pebble. Also tufaceous.
Chufa, a kind of plant.
Estufa, a kind of chamber.
Gufa, a kind of boat.
Stufa, an alternative form of stufe (obs.), a hot-air bath.
Stufata (obs.), a stew.
Wufan: 'Used attrib. to designate an official campaign launched in China in 1952 against bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, skimping on work and cheating on materials, and theft of state economic information.'
December 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
There are only alphabetical characters in the words on /lists/diamond-cuts.
December 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word kelp
I expect the tag refers to the kelp gull, but I'm nevertheless getting some strange mental images.
December 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word oedden
It probably walked out through the wall.
December 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tricks
Alternatively, go to the list page and look through the page source for links to URLs like /lists/edit/10258 or /lists/10258?s=a&d=d.
December 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word oedden
Who has the power to remove the 'ghosted' tag, then?
December 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list philosophical-jargon
Thanks, but noumenon (the singular) is already there.
December 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word harem
WeirdNet #2 gives the impression there are harems on the market, just waiting for tenants...
December 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word uxory
Harem won't do? (Okay, I know it doesn't cover wives in general, and concubinage doesn't imply marriage.)
December 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
List deletion attempts can produce a 500 Application Error instead of a 404; that's only happened to me once, though. Either way, the list doesn't get deleted.
December 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word sightholder
Neatorama: 'If you want to buy diamonds from De Beers, you've got to play by their rules: diamond are sold in events known as "sights." There are 10 sights held each year, and to buy, you have to be a sightholder (these are usually diamond dealers whose business is to have the stones cut and polished and then resold at diamond clearing centers of Antwerp, New York, and Tel Aviv).
'The diamonds are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. A sightholder is given a small box of uncut diamonds priced between $1 and $25 million. De Beers set the price - there is no haggling and no re-selling of diamonds in uncut form. It is rare for sightholders to refuse a diamond package offered to them, for fear of not being invited back. And those who dare to purchase diamonds from other sources than De Beers will have their sightholder privilege revoked.'
December 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word hyperdiamond
Neatorama: 'In 2005, physicists Natalia Dubrovinskaia and colleagues compressed carbon fullerene molecules and heating them at the same time to create a series of interconnected rods called Aggregated Diamond Nanorods (ADNRs or "hyperdiamond"). It's about 11% harder than a diamond.'
December 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word features
Or an option to search only open lists, maybe?
December 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word poppelganger
It's usually the Latin ones that have traps built in: stamina, prospectus, etc. List, anyone...?
December 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word aum
WeirdNet has in mind Aum Shinrikyo; on its own Aum/Om is �?, a term of art in Indian religious traditions.
December 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word uxory
This ghost doesn't haunt the dictionaries I've tried, but I found one case of usage in which, as you'd expect, it's apparently a back-formation from uxorious: 'Would I have recognized, during that moment at the lake, what was happening if it had been spelled out to me? U-X-O-R-I-O-U-S. Would I have wanted to know, stripping the moment of its mystery? What I know now is that the apples on the trees were hard, heavy knots, and cat tails were blowing their starry filaments over the water. The towel around me was sienna-colored. You take your uxory where you can find it.'
December 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word hoffwn
Apparently this ghost is Welsh.
December 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ratiocination
For any word under eight letters long, pretty slim.
December 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word public relations disasters
I love the way this displays next to a Google ad.
November 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word business juice
Is this by any chance corporate slang for money?
November 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word who-cooks-for-you; who-cooks-for-you-all
Although at first glance it looks as though some resentful Wordie has ghosted this and flounced off, it turns out that this represents the hoot of the Barred Owl.
November 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word cook
WeirdNet #2 and #4 are identical, for some reason.
November 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word jumping frenchmen of maine
This seems, based on a little Googling, to turn up in both singular and plural forms (Frenchman and Frenchmen), followed by both disease and disorder; I don't know whether the medical literature is more consistent. D.I.: 'As part of the survival instinct, most animals (including humans) react to sudden, unexpected stimuli with a startle reaction... In a normal individual, the muscular reaction subsides within a couple seconds if no real threat is detected, but for a sufferer of the Jumping Frenchman of Maine Disorder, an unexpected stimulus results in a somewhat different experience.
'An individual with this disorder has a genetic mutation that prevents "exciting" signals in the nervous system from being regulated, which causes a number of bizarre irregularities in their startle response. Most notably, an event which might startle a normal person will result in an extended, grossly exaggerated response from a jumper, including crying out, flailing limbs, twitching, and sometimes convulsions. Because a jumper is almost immediately susceptible to another jump soon after an episode ends, there have been reports that sufferers are sometimes teased mercilessly by people who find the reaction amusing, and trigger it repeatedly.'
Edit: Null Hypothesis denies the genetic aspect: 'Originally described by G. M. Beard in 1878, Jumping Frenchman of Maine Disease is an exaggerated "startle" reflex. It was first noted among related French-Canadian lumberjacks in the Moosehead Lake area of Maine. Initially thought to be a neurological and even an inherited disorder, later researches now suspect the disorder to be psychological and brought on by the stressful conditions in the lumber camps.' (That article uses both the singular and the plural forms, incidentally.)
November 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word muggle quidditch
Apparently it's really played. 'While the wizards in the Potter series play Quidditch on flying broomsticks, Muggles (author J. K. Rowling’s word for nonmagical people) run holding a broom between their legs. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and just as awkward...'
November 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list meta
Not that I know of; now listed, thanks. I wonder whether I should move these to another (open?) list...
November 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ennumbered
See tag.
November 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word dunlendish
A.k.a. Dunlending; this form is used on Ardalambion.
November 29, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word candlepower
htmltimes.com: 'And so it was defined in 1860 that a unit of candlepower was the light produced by "a pure spermaceti candle weighing one-sixth of a pound, burning at a rate of 120 grains per hour." Spermaceti candles weren't just an excellent source of oil, but were now a scientific instrument as well. When Michelson and Morley lit their spermaceti oil-filled lamps, they understood that it burned at a scientifically calibrated rate of eight candlepower units per hour.'
November 29, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word spermaceti
htmltimes.com: 'The head of a Sperm Whale is one fourth the length of it's entire body, and it is filled with a waxy white substance known as spermaceti. It is used by the whales as ballasts. When the fluid was first discovered in the 1700s, it reminded whalers of sperm, hence the name Sperm Whales. To collect this liquid, the whale's head would be cut off and lashed to the side of the ship. A whaler would then bore a man-sized hole in the whale's head and climb inside, chest deep in spermaceti, and hand out buckets— often up to three tons— of the of the waxy liquid. This messy job was done because spermaceti proved to have one exceedingly valuable property. It burned brightly, and it burned evenly.'
November 29, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ghubar
Arabic Calligraphy: 'Ghubar (or ‘dust’ in Arabic) is the name of a special kind of calligraphic script. As its name implies, ghubar can be as delicate as particles of dust on a piece of paper. Words written in this script can be as fine as a single hair.'
November 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the user prabin
Hint: you'd be better off putting definition comments on the word pages rather than the list pages.
Welcome to Wordie.
November 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fidayeen
B.B.C.: 'But frontal assaults, usually carried out by two-man teams firing semi-automatic rifles and lobbing grenades, were the favoured tactic of the insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir between 1999 and 2003. Scores of such attacks were carried out by "fidayeen" (literally "death-defying") squads in Indian-administered Kashmir during that period.'
November 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word eery
An alternative spelling of eerie, apparently.
November 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word turgooduccochiqua
Neatorama: 'Forget the turducken, here’s the turgooduccochiqua by Wil Shipley of Call Me Fishmeal blog. It’s a quail inside a cornish game hen inside a duck inside a chicken inside a turkey inside a goose. Oh, and with bacon between the layers.'
November 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word business-facing
T.H.E.: 'Correctly used, the term "business-facing" indicates an institution that is focused on educating young people to become employable graduates, offering both vocational degrees and opportunities to get into industry for those studying for academic qualifications. These opportunities can include work placements, partnerships with major local employers and mentoring programmes... However, the Government's focus on skills and employability among graduates has led to almost all universities labelling themselves "business-facing" in an attempt to show they are hitting Whitehall targets.'
November 27, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word basingstoke
Ruddigore: 'Well, then, when I am lying awake at night, and the pale moonlight streams through the latticed casement, strange fancies crowd upon my poor mad brain, and I sometimes think that if we could hit upon some word for you to use whenever I am about to relapse—some word that teems with hidden meaning—like "Basingstoke"—it might recall me to my saner self.'
November 27, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word elfconner
Lisa Star: 'What's an Elfcon you may ask? It's a Con(vention) of E(lvish) L(inguistic) F(ellows) who were at one time invited to participate in a group project to analyse and publish grammars, dictionaries, paleographical studies and the like of Tolkien's invented languages and alphabets. Participants were invited to provide their research in exchange for copies of the researches of others (and pay for the privilege). However, most of the people who participated never received copies of the publications, and the "cabal" that ran it became very secretive and accusatory. Current Elfcon members are Chris Gilson, Carl Hostetter, Arden Smith, Bill Welden and Pat Wynne (which is why they are referred to as Elfconners, a name coined by Pat Wynne).'
November 26, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word babywearing
Spiked: 'International Babywearing Week (12-18 November) was marred for some by the launch of a new campaign for Motrin, a brand of the painkiller ibuprofen marketed in the United States. For the uninitiated, ‘babywearing’, as defined by Babywearing International, the folks who sponsor International Babywearing Week, is simply ‘holding or carrying a baby or young child using a baby carrier’. And how did the ad for Motrin impact on Babywearing Week? By suggesting that babywearing is painful, and therefore those who do it might like to stock up on an effective painkiller.'
November 24, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ossilegium
Nina Burliegh: 'Ossuaries are quite common in Jerusalem. For about ninety years, Jews practiced ossilegium. This method of disposing of the dead involved first closing up body in a cave for a year. After the flesh had fallen away, the bones were removed from the cave and closed up in a small box — an ossuary — which was sometimes inscribed with a design or a name.'
November 24, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word siddle
According to the OED, it's a Northern English dialect word meaning 'downward slope; dip (of a coal-seam)' as a noun, and 'to slope downward, to dip' as a verb.
November 22, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word features
Anagram generator: wordsmith.org/anagram
Robot-themed acronym thing: cyborg.namedecoder.com
November 22, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word features
I wonder whether Meghan44 is confusing us with wordle.net.
November 22, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list bird-wirds-adjectives
It seems the wirdie.com registration has been allowed to lapse.
November 22, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word philomath
TLS: 'Then we need to inspect the term “philomath�?. The OED suggests that the primary meaning was “a student, esp. of mathematics, natural philosophy, and the like�?. The entry continues, “formerly popularly applied to an astrologer or prognosticator�?. This is putting the cart before the horse. The once respectable word underwent a precipitous decline around the early eighteenth century, from which it never fully recovered. Commonly it was applied to quacks, often by way of self-description. Writing on fortune-tellers in the Spectator in 1712, Joseph Addison referred scornfully to “some prophetic Philomath�?. A year later, the Tory periodical the Examiner spoke of the craze for French prophets in London in the previous decade, and remarked that “not a Philomath or Orthodox Astrologer�? could be heard in the din: even the famous almanac-maker John Partridge gave up and resolved to die a second time. (This of course refers to Jonathan Swift’s Bickerstaff pamphlets, which had predicted the death of Partridge so convincingly that most people were taken in. The Tatler had described Partridge himself as a “Philomath�?.) Leading almanacs like that of John Wing continued to use the label in an unselfconscious way. One or two land-surveyors clung on to it, and people entering puzzle competitions in magazines used it as a pseudonym. But by 1714 mathematicians and inventors pushing a serious idea found it risky to own up to this profession. The word was left to dodgy projectors and snake-oil salesmen.
'We could multiply examples from many sources. It was, however, Swift and his immediate circle who had done most to bring about this linguistic swerve. In 1709 a mock-prophecy appeared under the title of A Famous Prediction of Merlin, attributed to “T. N., Philomath�?, but really from the pen of Swift. In the following years the group of Scriblerian satirists, who also included Alexander Pope, John Gay and John Arbuthnot, wrote a series of pamphlets ridiculing vain and semi-literate projectors who promised the earth and delivered nothing. In 1717 “E. Parker, Philomath�? produced A Complete Key to the new Farce, call’d Three Hours after Marriage, a solemn pseudo-explication of the Scriblerians’ own farce.'
November 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word dead child porn
Spiked: 'During the Second Lebanon War of 2006, an American journalist coined the controversial phrase dead child porn to describe the media’s lust for photographing dead or brutalised children.'
Unfortunately it doesn't name the journalist, and I don't feel like Googling for the phrase.
November 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word blipcore
It's clearly a contagious malady.
November 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list meta
Is it an alternative version of giclée, then?
November 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word blipcore
Gauniad: 'UK group Lost Levels are hugely influenced by videogame music, and indeed, videogames in general, ploughing an intriguing furrow between indie pop and the US blipcore scene.'
November 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word arrowneous
See tag.
November 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word accentuache
See tag. I wonder whether these should have their own list.
Edit: and now they do...
November 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list meta
Cheers.
November 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word smartification
That only Smarties have the answer?
November 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word elf exploitation
I'm afraid they seem to be redirecting links from off-site referrers.
November 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word capostrophe
See tag.
November 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list meta
Capostrophe it is, then.
November 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word faction
'"Faction" is a hybrid genre, aiming at the factual accuracy of journalism on the one hand and the literary form of the novel on the other. There is a fundamental tension however between those two aims, given the constraints which factual accuracy places on characterization, plot, and thematic exploration characteristic of the novel. Further, faction cannot be defended on the grounds that factual accuracy is a literary value in faction. Finally, some aspects of faction, such as its inability to refer to sources or provide an analytic framework for a narrative, hinder rather than facilitate the communication of facts.'
~ abstract of 'The Case Against Faction' in Philosophy and Literature 32, pp. 347-358
November 17, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word omniphobic
ABC News: 'The MIT researchers found that the surfaces are both superoleophobic and also superhydrophobic, or water repelling. Because they repel everything, they're called omniphobic.'
November 17, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word superhydrophobic
Citation on superoleophobic.
November 17, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word superoleophobic
Neatorama: 'MIT researchers led by chemical engineer Robert Cohen and mechanical engineer Gareth McKinley have created the world's first superoleophobic and superhydrophobic surface (let me translate for you: the "super surface" repels both water and oil)...'
November 17, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word anticrepuscular
APOD: 'Pictured above are anticrepuscular rays. To understand them, start by picturing common crepuscular rays that are seen any time that sunlight pours though scattered clouds. Now although sunlight indeed travels along straight lines, the projections of these lines onto the spherical sky are great circles. Therefore, the crepuscular rays from a setting (or rising) sun will appear to re-converge on the other side of the sky.'
November 17, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pseudo-irony
Salon: 'A second major factor in the poignancy of the sad lolcat, I would argue, is the use of animals. The comic form is generally a prophylaxis against sentimentality. By articulating profound feelings through cats and marine mammals speaking garbled English, we're able to shroud genuine emotions in pseudo-irony -- which means those animals can evoke deeper emotions without fear of mockery or cheapness.'
November 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word standard feline english
Salon: 'There's lolcats magnetic poetry, lolcats translators, even a lolcats Bible Translation Project that renders familiar verses into Standard Feline English.'
November 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word skittishness
Salon: 'What makes lolcats different from the cat porn of the past -- the motivational posters of the '70s and '80s featuring furry kittens hanging from tree limbs, covered in toilet paper or in some other kind of adorable predicament -- is that lolcats aren't trying to be cute. In the cat-based imagery of ages past, cats retain their iconic traits: curiosity, skittishness, the tendency to curl up in a ball and just lie there.'
November 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word avant-garde a clue
Grauniad: 'McCartney revealed that George Harrison disparaged sonic experimentation as "avant-garde a clue".'
November 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
The bug that messes up list pages after additions is afflicting John's own brand new Meat list, so whatever it is, it isn't just affecting older lists.
November 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list meta
Not that I know of. Suggestions welcome, then: capostrophe, maybe?
I think there's also a vacancy for a tag to mark unruly double quotation marks (as mentioned on "pluralistic society", but you have to enter that manually into the address bar to reach the page).
November 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word plunderbunny
A term of affection (from the piratical Monkey Island series), I think.
November 14, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list jhepoys-list
---------------------------------
November 12, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word painfulness
Metapsychology: 'Grahek offers a prima facie dismissal of what many philosophers take to be a conceptual truth, i.e. that pain sensation and painfulness are inseparable. Actually, says Grahek, it doesn't require any a priori, philosophical, argument to tear apart such conceptual identification. All we have to do is to look at the clinical evidence concerning pain, specifically to two dissociation syndromes which seem to show that pain without painfulness and painfulness without pain, are possible. The book is mainly concerned with the syndrome called pain asymbolia, in which subjects report to feel pain deprived of its painful quality...'
November 12, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word accidie
Metapsychology: 'The eleven papers in this collection are concerned with practical reasoning, or reasoning about what to do. In particular, they address issues connected with a number of ways in which practical reasoning can go wrong. These include various aspects of akrasia (acting in a way you judge not to be best), failing to act in accordance with your resolutions (what Richard Holton calls weakness of will and distinguishes from the traditional understanding of akrasia), accidie (failing to be motivated by your value judgments), the role of emotions in practical reasoning, and prudence (whether we should take account of our future desires).'
November 12, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ebru
The Turkish term for paper marbling.
November 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pasigraphy
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the aim of this 'is to be intelligible to persons of all languages', so it isn't really at home on the Cryptolects list. I'm going to make some other lists involving conlangs and writing systems, though, so I'm still glad to have had it brought to my attention.
November 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tree-
Too many of those and the shortcuts become clutter in their own right.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tree-
But then you have to type just to run the app! (Unless you have it already entered from the last time; but I use Start -> Run -> msconfig and others quite often.)
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word desolace
Rock, Paper, Shotgun: 'Remarkably, for all this shift to the adrenal, the game does manage to realise, to a certain extent, what the film did best: that overwhelming sense of paranoia and loneliness. The latter is conveyed by the setting: Antarctica. Hardly a social hot-spot. Wander outside a building and into the snowy desolace and you’ll freeze to death within a couple of minutes.'
It's not in the dictionaries I've checked, but the intended meaning is plain enough.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
I've just seen an external link that lacked the usual arrow image after it: might that be because it was an https:// link?
Testing
Testing
Testing
Edit: yes, it looks as though the code that checks for external links only works for http://.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tree-
Fn + Alt + numpad 0 brings up http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan#rcxdict in a new window under my Firefox install. I don't know why, but I'm not going to disable the browser extension that's causing it.
If I badly enough want a dash I open a new tab with Web Developer Toolbar and use Edit HTML with the appropriate character code (or, on Wordie, just stick the code into the comment box). In practice, however, I'm unlikely to want to open another tab, or to hold down two keys with one hand while entering a four-digit code with the other. So yes, I use the odd double-hyphen here and there; and yes, I also use / where �?� is strictly required. But if you know of any Firefox extensions that offer easy duplication of the Windows Character Map (annoyingly buried three submenus down from Start), I'll try them.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
"pluralistic society" is producing bad links on the comments and front pages: they lead to http://wordie.org/words/ instead of http://wordie.org/words/%22pluralistic%20society%22
Edit: it's the same in this comment, so presumably it'll happen everywhere on the site.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word "pluralistic society"
So much better they can break the comments page with impunity. Right: what's the OCSJTS tag for this type?
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tree-
Fair enough. I've put a link here in the tag comments for passersby who have the same reaction as frindley.
Edit: by the way, I'm using a laptop, so even assuming I can remember 150 and 151 I can't use them.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word dashingly
See tag. And tree-.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word naui
Néojaponisme: 'Naui 「ナウ�?��?was a mayfly of a word, declared dead almost as soon as it was born, reviled as a desperate attempt to squeeze a few more youth dollars out of an already-uncool borrowed English lexeme (�?now�?). As a word in its own right, nau had already demonstrated a tenacity rivaling Madeline Usher’s, but naui was fated to surpass its progenitor in every respect. It became a lexicographic Cartophilus ― cursed to wander the sentences of Japanese forever, scorned and reviled but never granted the peace of oblivion. Its unforgivable sin? To once have both been and meant “fashionable.�?'
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Presumably something to do with what the list description says: 'Ignore that doppelganger version (coding goof)--here's the *working* one!'
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word anklet
The OED associates this with the -let suffix (as opposed to -et), although it's clearly formed through combination with ankle, so some letters have been cut off somewhere to avoid repetition.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list our-hopes-and-expectations
I hope you add some words to this list, otherwise I expect it will depress us with its hopelessness.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word monégasque,
Someone has got here before me and tagged it: commarginal.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word eat ceasar's ghost
Ironically, this is ghosted.
November 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word para-copyright
Cory Doctorow: 'Indeed, copyists are busily building an elaborate ethos of what can and can't be shared, and with whom, and under what circumstances. They join private sharing circles, argue norms among themselves, and in word and deed create a plethora of "para-copyrights" that reflect a cultural understanding of what they're meant to be doing.
'The tragedy is that these para-copyrights have almost nothing in common with actual copyright law... It's not surprising that para-copyright and copyright don't have much to say to one another. After all, copyright regulates what giant companies do with each other. Para-copyright regulates what individuals do with each other in a cultural settings.'
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ocsjts
See tree-.
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tree-
Fair enough; I just read a terminal hyphen as a dash by habit, given the way a hyphen is frequently used as an ersatz dash owing to keyboard limitations. U+002D is in fact officially known as a hyphen-minus, so maybe hyphen-plus or plus-hyphen? Edit: or hyphen miners?
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word asterical
See tag.
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word punkt
See tag.
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tree-
Slashing prices does the same job as 'slanticular'. Others I know of are pipelines, commarginal and colon cancer.
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word exclamateriel
See tag.
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word slanticular
See tag; slashing prices does used to do the same job.
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word die
I love the way this is tagged 'coin collecting'. You can't take it with you, you know...
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list cide-2
See also /lists/cide. This one is open, though, so it's not altogether redundant (since jubea hasn't been active here for a couple of months).
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word yins
Is WeirdNet correct in thinking there can be more than one yin?
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tree-
Thus further dashing the hopes of the others.
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tree-
I like dashtardly. Or how about balderdash?
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tree-
Okay: what is, or what should be, the standard tag for intrusive dashes? Dashing? Dashwood? A dashed shame?
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word rectify
This is why WeirdNet's creators never rectified its errors.
November 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word house-pride
What house-proud people have; WordNet doesn't define it, although it does define house-proud, but it's in the OED.
November 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word marols
zompist.com: 'Though Syldavia is in the Balkans, Syldavian forms are usually closer to Dutch than to German (cf. güdd, nietz, wertzragh above). Extratextually the reason is simple: when he needed foreign words, Hergé regularly used Marols, the Brussels Flemish dialect his grandmother spoke. (Another example is the Arabian city of Wadesdah— "What is that" in Marols; and see the Arumbaya in L'oreille cassée.)
'Some readers conclude that Syldavian "is" Marols, but this is an exaggeration...'
November 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word different
I just want to add a note about other, before someone asks: on the face of it 'X is other than Y' does look equivalent to 'Y is other than X', maybe because it looks like a statement of non-identity, and identity is symmetrical. However, whereas XY (X and Y together) is clearly non-identical to X, it doesn't seem other than X, since it incorporates X; whereas X does seem to me to be other than XY, or at least sometimes so, on the assumption that e.g. my liver is other than me, since it could be a functioning transplanted organ in someone else after 'I' have ceased to be. However, I appreciate that needs further tightening up (am I maybe just conflating senses of other?); am I boring anyone yet? Maybe we should stop trying to save pterodactyl and try something completely different...
November 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word different
I agree that difference is about emphasising a metaphorical distance--hence my place in the from camp. But I further contended that usage of than in all suggested cases other than for different is not merely about difference but reflects a logical distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships: than appears in cases where the difference is expressed asymmetrically ('X is different from Y' is logically equivalent to 'Y is different from X'; 'X is greater than Y' isn't equivalent to 'Y is greater than X'). Once you extend than to symmetrical cases, it seems no less arbitrary to me to resist extending it to logically equivalent symmetrical cases ('X is different than Y and not similar than Y').
There's no Académie anglaise to prevent your making arbitrary choices to suit your sense of euphony, just as there's no authority to persuade me that 'the rules are different for men from those for women' is an unworkably clumsy construction (I already speak a language that uses the in order + inf. construction; am I right in thinking Chaucer's for to seeke is equivalent to French pour + inf., and we've somehow lost it?); but treating different and rather as expressing the same kind of difference seems to me logically mistaken, not just syntactically/semantically. Of course, as a philosophy postgrad. I have a particular interest in preserving any logical distinctions expressed in syntax.
November 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word different
Off the top of my head: the rather/other cases, like those with scales of comparison, seem to involve evaluating one thing against the standard set by another, relative to a given difference: e.g. X is cheaper than Y, so we'll buy X rather than Y (where Y is the standard). Whereas an assertion of difference doesn't involve comparing X with Y in respect of some difference, but rather asserting the respect in which they differ itself: difference is a symmetrical relationship (if X differs from Y, then Y differs from X to the same extent), whereas than is maybe suited to asymmetrical cases: if X is greater than Y, Y is lesser than X.
My diabolical advocacy in turn: if 'different than', also 'similar than'? Difference and similarity are both symmetrical relationships; they express degrees of resemblance...
November 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word miltonist
T.H.E.: 'His rare fame as a Miltonist and his straight-talking style made Fish the natural choice as opening speaker at the Milton symposium, organised by the University of London's Institute of English Studies this July to mark the 400th anniversary of the poet's birth. He duly delivered a highly entertaining broadside against the "guerrilla Miltonists" and a younger generation of critics.'
November 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word environmental psychology
T.H.E.: 'Dr Edgerton is a researcher in environmental psychology at the University of the West of Scotland with a key interest in the design of educational institutions. There is a dearth of research on the topic, but enough exists to indicate that it can have a huge influence on student performance.'
November 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word credit
T.H.E.: 'And what about degree of difficulty? Should a first-year module designed to force students to locate the library be worth as much credit as a challenging final-year module on "Patagonian pre-history and its implications"?'
November 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word deflect
T.H.E. on modular academic courses: 'I kept encountering a story about a molecular biologist who opted to spend a year at a university in California and had been deflected from his true calling into drug-driven self-destruction by taking an optional ceramics module.'
November 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word different
From for me; I tend to associate than with degrees of comparison, hence a narrower sense than difference generally construed.
November 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the user riotup
Um... you should probably have a look at the Sound Lantern page on this site. And the abuse page. (Digest version: Basil put the same message on about a hundred people's profiles, and promptly got banned for spamming. But he did apologise, so you shouldn't necessarily be put off his site.)
November 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ^^
I've always taken ^^ to be an abbreviation of ^_^ (although they always remind me of nekomimi), which I would tend to set apart from the main text as I would other emoticons.
November 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list history
In U.K. politics the eye of history is less notorious than the hand. Possibly Fukuyama's 'end of history' would also fit this list?
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pagophagia
Oddee: 'Pagophagia is an obsessive need to chew on ice. Scientific research shows Pagophagia can be a sign of low iron in the blood.'
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word body dysmorphic disorder
Oddee: 'Patients who do not have an addiction to plastic surgery are satisfied when they leave; addicts think just one more procedure—and then another, and another, and another—will make them look perfect. This addiction can be the result of Body Dysmorphic Disorder, which is an unhealthy preoccupation with physical appearance or a specific body part.'
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word crackberry
Oddee: 'CrackBerry: addiction to BlackBerry. Hearing a "phantom ring" (or experiencing a phantom vibration) and constantly checking e-mail are signs of BlackBerry addiction.'
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word tanorexia
Oddee: 'Tanorexia is an unhealthy dependence on tanning; the name comes because of its similarities to both substance addictions and body image disorders, such as anorexia.'
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ebay
Yup, that's why it wasn't immediately obvious whether ebaysalvageyard was a spammer or not: the commercial site URL was a tag. And yes, the tag page is 404'd.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word medic
Maybe, but according to definition #2, 'some are pests'.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word abuse
Are we keeping ebaysalvageyard, then? There's probably a spare pedestal next to Mi-Vox and Friday.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word home
The front page is working for me, so either John's fixed it or it's only affecting some Wordies.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word sound lantern
They're well established British usage, actually; we just have the -ise alternative in common usage too. Now if he'd said analyze, that would suggest a non-Brit.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word abuse
I was going to suggest having a more prominent link to promotion somewhere, maybe on a landing page for new Wordie accounts, but since Basil clearly didn't look around much I wonder whether that would really have helped.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word medic
I cry out for a medic, and WeirdNet brings me a flowering plant.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word sound lantern
His profile now says 'sorry guys didn't realise this was spam', so it seems to have worked.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word sound lantern
Ouch, it's a fellow Brit:
Administrative Contact , Technical Contact :
The Word Wizard Inc.
rufusmiles AT hotmail DOT com
1 Albert House
London, SW12EG
UK
Phone: 442075467780
Westminster (London SW1)? No wonder: scummy lot down there...
Edit: I kindly obfuscated the e-mail address, because after all I wouldn't want to be responsible for Basil's being spammed.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word semicoli
See tag.
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list ebaysalvageyard
Oh well. Maybe I'll use the 'Weird Al/eBay junk' list theme myself.
Edit: ah, so it's the tag added by this user that leads to the sale. I was wondering where the overtly commerical bit would be. It's a 404'd tag, though...
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the user bonnie
Which may be a relief: imagine a Bonnie turned 1337-speaker...
November 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list ebaysalvageyard
I'm trying to decide whether this is an unusually subtle form of spam advertising or whether you're following in Weird Al's footsteps. If it's the latter, nice list idea.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word wordied
Yet another word you have to capitalise to reach.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word english reasearch paper
Better than losing your mens.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word head-smashed -in buffalo jump
Whose head, I wonder?
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word slashing prices
See tag.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word shhhh!...
Because I sugested shhhh!... was different from shhhh? The database certainly thinks it is.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word clausula
Stephen Fry: 'I was taught by classical scholars and grew up on poets, dramatists and novelists who knew the classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me.'
According to dictionary.com it's 'an ornamented cadence esp. in early Renaissance music'.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word linguify
Stephen Fry: 'I am in some sort a language professional I suppose, in as much as I write and broadcast, I linguify for a living you might say.'
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word scunt
Stephen Fry via Futurismic: 'CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch.
'If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials.
'For if CCTV was called... I don’t know... something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow "One nation under scunt" to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than "One nation under CCTV". "Damn, I was scunted as I walked home," "they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside," "Britain is the most scunted country in the world"... etc. etc. Or maybe, just maybe, we should stick to the idea of initials and borrow a set that have already taken on the darkest possible connotations of evil and tyranny. Surveillance System. SS.'
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word shhhh!...
Not to be confused with shhhh, shhh, shh, shhhhh or shhhhhh, all of which have been added to Wordie by various people.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pupilometrics
Hmm, it seems the spelling pupillometrics is in use too; I chanced upon it using the random word feature.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word thugocracy
Concurring Opinions: 'The NY Times reports today that "three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students." Apparently the American Enterprise Institute's fear of the "liberal thugocracy" of academia is overblown; parents and family are a much better predictor of an individual's political predilections.'
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word english reasearch paper
I was merely in the shower... but at least I see I was kindly left the great satisfaction of tagging this misspelling.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word mold
And mould.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word english reasearch paper
sionnach--I imagine this is the road rash that was meant, although I know it better as the name of a video game series.
Edit: oh, I see the question was answered on road rash itself.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word wink
WeirdNet's definitions of the verb senses seem to confuse winking with blinking.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word eliminative
As in eliminative materialism.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word highest
Strangely enough, WordNet defines lowest and higher but not highest.
November 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word the weirdnet paradox
See tag.
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fadelity
This is either a typo or a paradoxical pun.
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word irredentism
Strange Maps: 'Irredentism, i.e. the desire to annex territory based on historical and/or ethnic grounds, gets its name from Italia irredenta, a term to describe territories held by the Austro-Hungarian empire between the unification of Italy and the end of the First World War, and claimed by Italy.'
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word spicule
NASA: 'Imagine a pipe as wide as a state and as long as half the Earth. Now imagine that this pipe is filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour. Further imagine that this pipe is not made of metal but a transparent magnetic field. You are envisioning just one of thousands of young spicules on the active Sun.'
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word hcceren
They both modify a natural language to make it hard for uninitiated listeners to interpret it, so for the purposes of the Cryptolects list the similarity is relevant enough. Are you thinking of prepending?
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word communist
The tag usually a reference to a secret communist it is more generally usable for anyone of an informal political affiliation. is 404'd by the full stop. Does anyone know what word it's on?
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word u v v v w v uu v vv
At a guess: U vs. V vs. W vs. UU vs. VV
Presumably because v and u were originally the same letter.
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fakeaway
Well at home in the English language then, I should have thought.
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word gunk
I'm surrounded by ontologists who are concerned about the possibility of gunk. Apparently in mereology it's a term for stuff that isn't ultimately composed of fundamental particles: the parts all have further parts.
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word nü shu
Is it a language as such? One article is rather critical of reference to it as a language rather than a writing system.
Still interesting to hear about, though.
Edit: admittedly, a lot of cryptolects are actually more like dialects or slang than 'languages'.
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word weirdness
A dull error by WeirdNet standards, but surely it ought to be 'The state of being...'
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pellenor
You're thinking of the Pelennor Fields.
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word minas morghul
Morgul, isn't it? (See Sindarin dictionary.)
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word peregrine took
I don't have the book in front of me, but isn't it Peregrin?
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word friscalating
Apparently that's quoted from Wes Anderson.
November 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word hallowe'en
John Hodgman: 'HALLOWE’EN (apostrophe not generally pronounced). Originally called Samhain, this is the traditional Pagan-American holiday in which we ask our children to ponder the fragility of life by dressing them in darkly colored costumes and vision-impairing masks and encouraging them to walk around in the road.'
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word gohu
Citation on vigango.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word vigango
National Geographic: 'One of the most aggrieved victims of looting may be the Mijikenda people of the Kenya coast, who have had their ornate funerary objects, known as vigango, robbed for years. The chip-carved, wood vigango depict human faces and are erected for members of a secret society, the gohu. Most are four to six feet... high, though some can be taller, depending on the status of the gohu member. '
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word shuadit
According to Wikipedia: 'Shuadit, also spelled Chouhadite, Chouhadit, Chouadite, Chouadit, and Shuhadit is the extinct Jewish language of southern France, also known as Judaeo-Provençal, Judéo-Comtadin, Hébraïco-Comtadin.' That's a list in its own right...
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word imprescriptible
'Bentham's life-long opposition to the language of natural law and natural rights followed from the distinction between real and ficitious entities, and led to the famous remark in "Anarchical Fallacies" that the doctrine of natural rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1791 was "simple nonsense" and that of natural and imprescriptible rights, "nonsense upon stilts".'
(F. Rosen, intoduction to Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, O.U.P., p. xxxv)
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word dork out
Belated answer: yes. Sadly, though, /lists/star-trek-words isn't open, and the listmistress hasn't been on Wordie for months; however, there is a combined Star Trek and Star Wars list which is open.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word noh drama
*Applause*
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word s v c v k
Possibly the way a soft c sounds like s, a hard one like k?
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pupilometrics
Business Terms: 'A method of advertising research in which a study is conducted on the relationship between a viewer's pupil dilation and the interest factor of visual stimuli.'
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word dunmanifestin
Where the Discworld gods live.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list wide-open-spaces
Very Zen.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word brekekekex
In full, from Aristophanes: brekekekex koax koax.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I can see them now that I know where to look.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pan-turkic
Citation on Turkestan.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word turkestan
'Many of the Turkish republic's early elite sought a Pan-Turkic identity in alliance with the Turkic cultures of Central Asia. But the ancient homeland of the Turkish people - Turkestan - was in the possession of Russia and China...'
(James Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity?, p.75.)
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list groupthink
Nice list... Depending on how far outside psychology you feel like straying, existential inauthenticity might be applicable: Heidegger talks about inauthentically doing 'what one does'. (His translators rendered das man as the they, as in 'they say...' at the start of a rumour, because 'the one' gives the wrong effect in English.)
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word peer pressure
The doctor will see you now.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Something's gone weird with the Meta list: when I added a word from the list page, the listed words vanished, and instead of seeing the words listed with the new addition included, I got my list of lists.
I tried adding another word to Meta, and got the same effect: image. I couldn't replicate the effect when testing on another of my lists, so it seems to be list-specific.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word turkism
Citation on Ottomanism.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pan-islamism
Citation on Ottomanism.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ottomanism
'He laid out three options for a Turkish national identity in the final years of the Ottoman Empire: Ottomanism, or a common Ottoman citizenship irrespective of religion of or?'>possible typo of or? origin; Pan-Islamism, based of course on religion; and Turkism, or a nationalism based on the Turkish "race".'
(James Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity?, p.74.)
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word pipelines
See tag.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word commarginal
See tag.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word turan
Citation on Turcology.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word turanism
Citation on Turcology.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word turcology
'European scholars were advancing the study of Turcology, or the study of the ancient history and civilization of the Turkish peoples. This was due in part to the rise of pan-Slavism in Russia and the eastern lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and took the form of Turanism, whose chief aim was the rapprochement and ultimate union - cultural, political, or both - among all peoples whose origins were said to go back to Turan, an ancient Iranian name for the country to the north-east of Persia, a kind of Shangri-La on the steppes of Central Asia.'
(James Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity?, pp. 73-4)
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
I don't see any problems on the front page, actually--maybe my browser settings are more lenient?
In other W.P. news, I see whichbe found cloud, and now we have lists too. John will be delighted...
Edit: the hex trick worked on è too; again, it still leads to the wrong, i.e. paradoxical place.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
å is unlistable because it turns into ¥, as sarra discovered on Å.
Edit: I managed to add it by casting a hex, but it still leads to the same place.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word Å
The Wordie Paradox has struck again...
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word vampire moth
National Geographic: 'A previously unknown population of vampire moths has been found in Siberia. And in a twist worthy of a Halloween horror movie, entomologists say the bloodsuckers may have evolved from a purely fruit-eating species.'
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word dunlending
Ha! Well, Tolkien decided the people of Dunland would be known as Dunlendings, so in the absence of another word for their language (we know they had a language of their own), Dunlending is what we're stuck with.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word wose
Used by Tolkien to refer to the Drúedain, but according to the Encyclopedia of Arda originally 'a name from British folklore, referring to a hairy, troll-like being supposed to inhabit woods and forests'.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word smial
In Tolkien, a Hobbit-hole. Tucknorough.net: 'The word smial is derived from the Old English smygel meaning "retreat, burrow." The actual Hobbit word was trân.'
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word features
Am I correct in thinking the non-numerical style of list URL is new too? This is the first time I've noticed links like wordie.org/lists/vanishedone-s-words turning up.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the user loydstrom3000
Or just rely on people to sort the list 'order added -> ascending'.
November 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ath
See Omniglot. Used to write the fictional language Baronh.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ancients alphabet
Sic, according to Omniglot.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list cryptolects
Source (PDF) for more of those x... Moroccan families of obfuscated speech.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word katan
Slang used by Armenian wool-beaters in Moks.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word cti lezu
'Bird's language': yet another Armenian cryptolect.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word mnǰeren
'Mute language': another Armenian equivalent of Pig Latin.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word hcceren
Pig Latin for Armenians: add z to the beginnings of words.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word t'arseren
A secret version of the Armenian language, with words pronounced backwards.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word �?yzǰyty aevzag
See Čyzǰyty aevzag.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word Čyzǰyty aevzag
'Girls' language': an old Ossetian cryptolect, not really a 'language' but formed Pig Latin-style through implanting extra syllables.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word features
I see comment sorting is back. Cheers.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word zargarī
Citation on Zargari.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word zargari
'In the locality of Kyoshk he recorded samples of the Zargarī language, which, according to the natives, contain many Greek words, those same natives allegedly being the descendants of Alexander the Great. According to Sadeqe Kīy�?, "Zargarī is the most widely known and most universal of the secret languages in Iran". The popularity and widespread applcation of this cryptic language was the reason why nearly all secret languages in Iran are called Zargarī. The Tajiks do not currently use this term, although zaboni zargarī has been recorded to denote a provisional language of the goldsmiths.' (Gurgen Melikian, 'On the Problem of Secret Languages and Slangs in Iran', in Iran & the Caucasus, Vol. 6, No. 1/2 (2002), pp. 181-188)
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word funistrada
One for the Mountweazels list; but I don't think drosselmeier has visited Wordie recently :(
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word karga dili
Does anyone know what this is? This sounds intriguing: 'Artificial languages, signs, pass words, codes, symbols, euphemisms, implications, metaphors in Turkic culture (such as karga dili, special forms of greeting, communication by whistling, coded messages in posters, names given to military operations, road signs in history, etc.) come under the interest of this symposium.' But Googling suggests there's nothing else on it on the Anglophone Web.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word jenisch
See Yeniche.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word yeniche
A mixed language also called Jenisch.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bearlagair na saer
The 'vernacular of the masons': Irish with some archaic and otherwise unusual vocabulary included (according to a review of the book Secret Languages of Ireland).
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word sheldrii
Nature: 'Shelta, or more correctly Sheldrii, a secret language found among a certain class of tramps in England and current among Irish tinkers, was discovered in 1876 by Charles Godfrey Leland...'
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word x…xəyyuc
Actually a language family - see the book preview, found via the virtual linguist - but going on the Cryptolects list anyway.
Presumably one has to buy the book to find out how to pronounce it. It's one sales technique...
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word stratigraphical
Looting Matters: 'Apparently the coin hoard had been "deposited on the same spot as a Roman rubbish pit or midden". The report continues: "due to the fact that the find had already been removed prior to investigation a stratigraphical relationship could not be established". In other words the precise archaeological context for the hoard had been lost during its removal in the dark of a December evening.'
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word product displacement
Times Online: 'Cinemagoers tired of films where brand-name drinks creep artfully into shot or actors ostentatiously check their expensive watches will be relieved to hear that product placement has its limits.
'Danny Boyle - the director of Slumdog Millionaire, which was shown last night at the closing gala of The Times BFI London Film Festival – told The Times that there was such a thing as product displacement.
'Mercedes-Benz and another multinational insisted that their logos be removed from scenes in the film because they did not want to be associated with a Bombay slum, he said.'
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word oblomovism
I think I've met cats who practised this.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word colon cancer
See tag. I'm just listing this so it can be on the Meta list.
November 1, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word english research
Then again, it might just be britt, any dawn: a fisherman willing to catch herring any morning of the week.
Seriously: let's wait for people to open their mouths before making dark speculations about them.
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word peer pressure
Or chatbots, even? It's the Turing Test Plus, isn't it?
Unless John can see anything suggestive in the IP logs for Wordie, we're probably left guessing. I think the explanation that these really are children is most economical.
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word rigmutton
This sounds as though it comes from a very precise taxonomy of wanton wenches.
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word domesticated postmodernist
Private Eye #1222: 'According to Professor Richard Bradford in his recent survey The Novel Now, she is something called a "domesticated postmodernist". This apparently means a writer who doesn't quite let his or her weakness for highbrow trickery get in the way of a desire to sell large numbers of copies.'
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word yeth-hounds
Wailing with their... exposed windpipes, maybe? Yeth?
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word simip
It's conceptually, logically, metaphysically and even physically possible... but don't get your hopes up.
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word simip
How open are Wikipedia to having their bandwidth used like that? (Serious comment; I don't know about their sandbox.)
I imagine a site with no images can hold their attention for as long as each holds the other's.
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word english research
We've had people saying previously - on features I think - that it can be hard to keep track of all the ongoing conversations when wordie.org/comments is flowing fast. To an extent it's a side-effect of site growth, but the site isn't ideally structured to support extended private conversations (private in the sense that their content concerns only a few participants): everything's publicly viewable except notes, and keeping track of the action involves watching the all-inclusive stream of recent comments, so when a lot of those comments are not only half-literate but also non-public chatroom stuff...
(Edit: this was written to respond to John and reesetee.)
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word vodila
Complete with a 404-producing tag...
Unusually, we're nowhere on the first Google page, although this tosser's site is. Vodila seems to be a surname, currently being besmirched by car salesmen.
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list chinese-olympic-cuisine
It's neither Chinese nor Olympic, but I thought this deserved a mention here.
October 31, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word simip
Also:
SimIP
Simip
Apparently there are two places in the world whose names start with
Simip: Simipe and Simipang.
October 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word simip
And now all the spam comments have been removed from simip's list, although there's still one here. And simip seems positively to have embraced sea ice models. Is it an Israeli brand of comedy? Is simip hoping we'll leave the list up and forget about it, only to find the description has been changed back later? Or is something yet more sinister afoot...?
October 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word simip
As I said on the other page--on the positive side, it's pushing the spammer's own site down. At least here we can offer a balanced impression.
October 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word simity
Being flat-nosed.
October 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
I also got a 500 from wordie.org/words/add when adding a new word: I don't know whether that's connected to the commenting problem.
October 29, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word rubitone
Gizmodo: 'Unlike a traditional Rubik's cube, the object here is not to solve it, but to match colors that might look good in a bedroom or living space. The problem is that Rubitone is only a concept, so my walls will just have to stay plain and white for now.'
October 29, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word molossus
I'm mildly disappointed to find this isn't a colossus made of molasses.
October 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word whoremonger
I'm pretty sure this is the pimp rather than the customer (given the -monger), whatever WeirdNet #1 claims.
October 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word molrower
'A wencher, esp. a whoremonger', as The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang puts it.
October 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word moltenly
Not ordinarily an adjective, whatever the citation on dingo-eat-dingo might suggest. (The source is riddled with deliberate typos.)
October 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word <3
HTML link test
%3C3 with brackets
Edit: those are working for me.
October 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word dingo-eat-dingo
Quoted from Atlanta Nights: 'Yvonne poured herself a drink and melted into the chair across from Callie. She brushed a strand of moltenly hair from her eyes and proceeded to carve the ham. Callie watched intently. Juice streamed from the ham in rivulets like saliva drooling from the fierce jaws of a wild dingo poised over the dead carcass of its prey in the dingo-eat-dingo world.'
October 28, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bumblebee
Why is this tagged bird?
October 27, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word quaternion
So is WeirdNet just plain wrong, or can quaternion also mean four?
October 27, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word charlie's dead
BBC: 'When I was at school, the whispered warning Charlie's dead alerted a girl to the fact that her petticoat was showing under her lovat-green school skirt. Horror of horrors!
...
'There are various theories as to where that curious phrase came from. It seems to date from World War II, and my own favourite explanation is that in the 1940s, the window-blinds were lowered whenever there was a death in the house.
'The dipping half-slip was like a lowered window-shade. More fanciful versions involving Bonny Prince Charlie or Charles II, are, I am afraid, historically implausible, though no doubt a number of listeners will write or e-mail me to say that they prefer them.'
October 27, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word �??�?
Oh, I get it...
Not local, though: jisho.org/words?jap=kuro&eng=&dict=edict
October 26, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word counter-majoritarian
Also countermajoritarian (see title of linked page). Legal Theory Lexicon: 'The counter-majoritarian difficulty states a problem with the legitimacy of the institution of judicial review: when unelected judges use the power of judicial review to nullify the actions of elected executives or legislators, they act contrary to “majority will�? as expressed by representative institutions. If one believes that democratic majoritarianism is a very great political value, then this feature of judicial review is problematic.'
October 26, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word diapause
Philadelphia Inquirer: 'Too bad you're not a fruit fly. When winter arrives, many of them have a mysterious ability to simply chill out - entering a mild state of quasi-hibernation known as diapause.'
October 26, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word deepwater
Citation on piglet squid. Really.
October 25, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word piglet squid
Science Blogs: 'This funny looking squid is about the size of a small avocado and can be found most commonly in the deepwater (greater than 100 m or 320 ft) of virtually all oceans. Its habit of filling up with water and the funny location of its siphone misspelling? with a wild-looking 'tuft' of eight arms and two tentacles had prompted scientists to name it the piglet squid.'
October 25, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fakeaway
The last tag (which produces a 404 when clicked) looks like possible spam, at that.
October 25, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word proust
If the closest we have to a Proust film is Monty Python's All-England Summarise Proust Competition, the equivalent for Wordie would be... um...
October 24, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word sindonology
As discussed previously on sindonologist.
October 24, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word manholiest
Superlative of either manholy or manholey; I'm unsure which.
Neatorama: 'A Japanese city planner must have really, really, really liked manholes. Behold a quiet, unassuming street in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward with the unique world record of being the manholiest street in the world...'
October 24, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word amober
Also amobr and amobyr. A maiden-fee in old Welsh law.
October 24, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word for sale baby shoes used once
It's grim either way.
On the same topic: 'For sale parachute, never opened. Used once, small stain.'
October 24, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word balloon dog
Don't try this at home; I suspect exquisite harmony would not result.
October 24, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word kora
BBC: 'Toumani Diabate plays the kora, or West African harp'.
October 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word epicalyptry
Wordmall: 'what is the opposite of an epiphany? Frankly, I’ve had difficulty finding a word endorsed by widespread usage... So, let me approach the question from an etymological perspective. An epiphany leads a person to a burst of internal light. We need a term to metaphorically express leading a person to a dark cave. Let’s save the epi-, meaning to, and let’s add the combining form -calyptry, from the Greek kalyptra, covered and hidden as by a veil.
'Thus, we have epicalyptry ep´-ee-cal-ip´-tree, deliberate concealment from self or resistance to insight. Spread the word, folks. Let’s get it into dictionaries.'
October 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word enantiodromia
A Jungian concept, apparently. (I had a nice citation, but it turned out to misspell the word in question.)
October 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word enantidromia
Oops, misspelling in the source I was using.
October 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word wampum
Where can I exchange my wampum for a wompom?
October 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word kowaii
I thought it was kowai, and a dictionary check seems to back this up; searching for kowaii in http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi and http://www.df.lth.se/cgi-bin/j-e/dict only gives the name of a kind of food.
October 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word threven
So the Rich have thriven through knowledge of threven?
October 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word atenism
As in Tutankhamen: Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian Monotheism.
October 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word amenism
As in Tutankhamen: Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian Monotheism.
October 23, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word slate
Is formerly perhaps a WeirdNet way of saying obsolete or archaic? Surely a writing slate still is a slate; it's just that nobody uses one anymore.
October 22, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word fail
Slate: 'What's with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be epic?
'It's nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game's obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: "You beat it! Your skill is great!" If you lose, you are mocked: "You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!"'
October 22, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word oleander
There's an International Oleander Society whose folklore page notes some ideas/stories about the origin of the word. The OED rather more staidly assocites it with 'post-classical Latin oleandrum, oliandrum, accusative (14th cent.) or Middle French, French oléandre (1314 in Old French), of uncertain origin.'
October 22, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
In http://wordie.org/people/comments/username?o=some_number, some values of o (which are lower than the member's total comment count) produce 500 Application Errors: see discussion on punctilio. This affects multiple members and I've only got it to happen with values of o above four digits. E.g.
http://wordie.org/people/comments/chained_bear?o=14000
http://wordie.org/people/comments/reesetee?o=14000
October 22, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word punctilio
But why does it do that? http://wordie.org/people/comments/chained_bear?o=10865, for example, currently works for me, so why are certain values of o breaking?
October 22, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word toleration
No Wordies are tolerating toleration on their lists :(
October 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bullshot
It's quite fitting, given the alcohol content of the WordNet definitions.
October 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bullshot
Edge: 'Of all the words that could possibly encapsulate what a doctored-screenshot is, Penny Arcade’s sharp portmanteau of the terms screenshot and bullshit has always felt the most appropriate.'
October 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word keigophobia
A reluctance to learn or use formal Japanese even when otherwise a fluent and enthusiastic student of the language. Néojaponisme: 'Keigo is the new Japanese: many people seem almost proud of not understanding it, dismissing it out of hand as impossible and unnecessary. But if you can speak fluent Japanese but haven’t bothered to learn how to show formal respect, well, folks will draw conclusions. Future generations will look back on keigophobia the same way we do the ridiculous “Oh, no foreigner could ever learn Japanese — it’s far too illogical and mystical for the Western mind�? attitudes of yesteryear.'
October 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word voorwerp
Dutch for object/thing, apparently. Hanny's Voorwerp is an astronomical phenomenon.
October 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ficus religiosa
According to Wikipedia it's a species of banyan. dictionary.die.net says it 'differs from the banyan (Ficus Indica) by sending down no roots from its branches'.
October 21, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word egg coddler
I don't suppose there's a specific word for the study of egg coddlers, on the model of sucrology... yet?
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bug boy
And a little teapot.
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word n-ray
See N ray.
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word n ray
SciencePunk: 'Another example of pathological science, but this time over a electromagnetic wave rather than a physical substance, is the “discovery�? of N-rays... Hidden in the requisite darkness of the experiment, Wood secretly removed an essential prism from the apparatus, and switched a large file for a piece of wood. Nevertheless, Blondlot and his team were able to ’see’ the spark. Wood reported his findings in the journal Nature, stating that N rays were a purely subjective phenomenon.'
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word polywater
SciencePunk: 'Some time around the early 1960s, Soviet physicist Nikolai Fedyakin was carrying out experiments on tiny amounts of water that had been repeatedly forced through narrow quartz capillary tubes. His measurements showed this water had a higher boiling point, lower freezing point, and much higher viscosity than ordinary water... However, when Denis Rousseau of Bell Labs measured the properties of his own sweat after a rigorous game of handball, he found it to be identical to those of polywater... When researchers attempted to create polywater under even tighter controls to eliminate contamination, they found nothing but water.'
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word orgonite
SciencePunk: 'Orgonite is an offshoot of the pseudoscience of Orgone, an all-encompassing life-force energy “discovered�? in the 1930s by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich... In reality, it’s just a piece of quartz embedded in some plastic, and the only thing it will accumulate is strange looks when you tell everyone how their sexual libido energy is coursing through you.'
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word mountain bike bog snorkelling
Cracked: 'The sport began in 2000 and was developed from the similar, non-bike-related Bog Snorkelling Championships. Both were the brainchild of a local pub landlord, who dreamt it up after drinking a lot of booze. Interesting fact:
As well as hosting the Annual Bog Snorkelling Championships and the Mountain Bike Bog Snorkelling Championships, there is also a Triathlon Bog Snorkelling Championships, the latest in the town's attempt to milk the bog snorkelling thing for all it's worth.'
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word eukonkanto
See wife carrying.
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word morton's fork
As philosophers' forks go, Hume's Fork is probably the better known.
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word camel wrestling
Cracked: 'camel wrestling is a Turkish sport in which two male camels slug it out. The Tulu Camels are specially bred for the competition, and decked out with bells and colourful ornamentation. They're then sent into the ring with another camel to do battle over a hot camel-babe in heat.'
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word skibobbing
Another one from Cracked's list of baffling sports that's not so much strange (as sports go) as dangerous-sounding. More on SkiBikes at SkiBike World.
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word hornussen
Although it's #3 on Cracked's list of baffling sports, it didn't strike me as strange enough for the Oddympics list.
'Some claim it's a cross between baseball and golf, but in reality it only has a passing similarity to either... The name derives from the German word for hornet, because of the buzzing noise the hornuss makes as it flies through the air.'
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ferret legging
Cracked: 'It's referred to as "keepin' 'em down" and Ferret Leggers have to keep the two thrashing, angry ferrets down their trousers for as long as possible. When the Ferret Legger can't take any more, they whip their trousers down, freeing the Ferrets, and spend the next few weeks trying to piece together their shredded pride. And genitals.'
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word freestyle walking
: 'Freestyle Walking and Free Running seem to be sports for people who bought the clothes to dress like Bam Margera, but didn't have any money left to buy a skateboard. So they go jumping off rails and fences using only their feet... Freestyle Walking was developed by Illinois residents Brian White, Brandon Kennedy, Tom Mottier and Mike Rempert in 1995 as a means of self-expression and creative interaction with one's environment.'
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bossaball
bossaball.com: 'Bossaball mixes soccer, volleyball and gymnastics
on trampolines and inflatables.'
Cracked: 'The name comes from Bossa nova, which is a style of Brazilian Music, and Bossaball officials are known as samba referees. They officiate the game, but also provide the soundtrack with drums, turntables and microphones, an innovation we think would improve many sports (golf most of all).'
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word shin kicking
olimpickgames.co.uk: 'Shin-kicking has once again become a regular feature of Robert Dover's Olimpick Games, much to the delight of the spectators. Contestants hold each other by the shoulder and try to kick shins and bring opponents to the ground. A Stickler, the ancient name for our judge, makes sure that shins are hit before a fall can count. Our kickers wear the traditional white smocks associated with shepherds. They are allowed to protect their shins with straw.'
See the Cracked article for a video.
October 20, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word cockenthrice
Or possibly one of these:
http://wordie.org/lists/743
http://wordie.org/lists/250
http://wordie.org/lists/10190
http://wordie.org/lists/16782
It certainly does belong on Pseudo-seduction: nicely obscure and therefore fit to confuse potential victims.
October 19, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word red herring
World Wide Words has a fairly lengthy article on the origin of the term.
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word guacamole-headed
Neil Gaiman: 'Guacamole-headed thoughts... I remain utterly mush-headed, but should have completely recovered in time for the UK tour and to do it all over again.'
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word norwegians
As a tribe these may be 'forgotten', but as a nationality I think they're still around.
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word buckypaper
Yahoo: 'The surprise guest was a molecule with 60 carbon atoms shaped like a soccer ball. To Kroto, it also looked like the geodesic domes promoted by Buckminster Fuller, an architect, inventor and futurist. That inspired Kroto to name the new molecule buckminsterfullerene, or buckyballs for short.
...
'Researchers at Smalley's laboratory then inadvertently found that the tubes would stick together when disbursed in a liquid suspension and filtered through a fine mesh, producing a thin film — buckypaper.'
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bevy-grease
The fat of the roe-deer, according to the OED. Although of the two citations it gives, both from the 1600s, one renders it as 'Bevy Greace', the other as 'Beuiegreace'.
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bevvy
A drink, esp. beer; or, to drink - OED. Not to be confused with bevy.
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bevvier
See swallier; this one gets a few more Google results, but I haven't found it in dictionaries either. Possibly derivative of bevvy?
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word swallier
BBC: 'I don't want them to see us as a nation of bevviers and swalliers. Where the image that first comes to mind of Scotland is of drunkenness and violence. I don't want our people and land constantly portrayed and seen almost as synonymous with drink and aggression.'
Possibly a Scots slang or dialect word? Of the very few Google results, the first suggests it's a surname.
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word skip level meeting
Just a bad choice of forum for the query.
I should say to prakashanand that despite our being rather ready to react to business method queries with spoof answers, we wouldn't actually prefer a spambot. Not for very long, anyway.
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word skip level meeting
After Googling, I think this is the most helpful result: 'The skip-level meeting is about building relationships with your skips.'
Most of us treat skips merely as receptacles for large volumes of rubbish, making us understand encounters with them barely as meetings at all; thus distanced from a Buber-esque I-Thou encounter with the skip, we persist in looking down upon it instead of relating to it at its own level of being. By engaging in more meaningful and diverse relationships with skips we become able to experience a human-skip meeting in, if not a fully Levinasian sense, at least a more open, accepting and mutually satisfying one.
October 18, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word if
Warning in turn: "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful.
October 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word donatism
Walk this way.
Actually, that's just the first of quite a lot of Google results for donutism.
October 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word neuropunk
Nader Elhefnawy: 'My review of Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Peter Watts’s Blindsight for Strange Horizons quickly had people speculating about “neuropunk,” Watts himself “calling dibs” on the term in his comment about the review on his blog. The idea seems to be catching on, with cyberpunk great Rudy Rucker recently blogging about it too.'
October 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word mumfordish
Language Log via Languagehat: 'a synonym for "taboo" or "obscene" as applied to lexical items'. Used by A.S.C. Ross for uncertain reasons.
October 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word rooping iron
See roop and worm grunting.
October 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word roop
A hoarse sound, or, to make a hoarse sound, according to the OED. Presumably this is the basis of rooping iron—see worm grunting.
October 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word worm grunting
Vanderbilt.edu: 'Worm grunting involves going into the forest, driving a wooden stake into the ground and then rubbing the top of the stake with a long piece of steel called a rooping iron. This makes a peculiar grunting sound that drives nearby earthworms to the surface where they can be easily collected for fish bait.
'Despite a lot of speculation, worm grunters don't really know why the technique works.'
Edit: there's a festival, too.
October 16, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word platypup
DRB: 'Platypus babies are not called puggle, but they gotta have a cute name, so some suggest a name platypup.'
October 15, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word ad-hoc-cracy
Henry Jenkins: 'The kinds of communities I discussed in the book are what Cory Doctorow calls "ad-hoc-cracies." They emerge quickly in response to shared interests and concerns. They last as long as people need the community to work through a common problems or query. They vanish when they are no longer useful to their members. They are radically interdisciplinary or I'd prefer, "undisciplined," in that they draw together people with many different expertises and they deploy social networks which observe few of the barriers to interaction we experience in the physical world to bring people together who should be working together. They develop informal yet very powerful systems for vetting information and for carrying out deliberation.'
October 13, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list jakob-maria-mierscheid-alan-smithee-and-lieutenant-kija
I've added some of Kierkegaard's and Fernando Pessoa's pseudo-attributions for their works, on the grounds that these were more fleshed-out smokescreen characters than mere noms de plume. They're possibly borderline cases, but at least they're distinctive ones.
October 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word widows' men
Interesting. It reminds me of Jakob Maria Meirscheid, but there's only one of him. Well, none of him really... but you get the idea.
October 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word astrology
It's also forgotten about the constellations of the Zodiac, despite the etymology of astrology.
October 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word adolescent
Actually, in this case I think it's just defining the adjectival use in terms of the noun use.
October 11, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word boomburb
BLDGBLOG: 'In their 2007 book, Boomburbs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities, Lang and LeFurgy explain that many of the largest cities in the United States today are simply hypertrophied suburbs—they are boomburbs. The mayors of established cities have had a hard time adjusting to this fact. Mesa, Arizona, for instance, an otherwise anonymous tumescence on the air-conditioned desert edge of Phoenix, is a "stealth city": Its population, incredibly, is larger than both Minneapolis–St. Paul and Miami. The authors also describe how the mayor of Salt Lake City once "dismissed the idea" that his city might have anything in common with suburban North Las Vegas, "despite the fact that North Las Vegas is both bigger and more ethnically diverse than Salt Lake City." What these boomburbs have, in lieu of historic centrality and international name-recognition, is a flexible legal and financial infrastructure. They have water rights boards and waste disposal networks, even local schools and sales tax—and though they don’t necessarily have mayors (though some do), they have "landscape management" committees and homeowners associations. These are cities made up less by buildings than by tax codes and the law.'
October 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word never wants to receive a letter signed fromunda cheese
Presumably the " in 'never wants to receive a letter signed "fromunda cheese' gets parsed as the end of the hyperlink: <a href="first part of URL then a " which gets read as this closing character:">text</a>
It works if you enter it into the browser's address box.
Edit: hmm, it seems the automatic link creation with square brackets dislikes it too.
October 10, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word blood
Of all possible results to place at number two (down from number one last night), image search comes up with a still from a pornographic/horror film called Blood Lake. I think WeirdNet must have got it into its clutches.
October 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bracketeering
And now a tag with a different sense (which I'm noting here so there's something to mark meta).
October 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word squirrel
Hmm... the link to http://wordie.org/words/[squirrel] gives a 404, not the bracketeering word. Off to bugs, then...?
Edit: oh wait: it's a misuse of HTML entities that's doing that.
October 9, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Adding a tag to a word seems to break the 'all tags' cloud for that word until a page reload: the cloud disappears but the toggle link is still 'hide', and no amount of clicking makes the tag cloud reappear.
October 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word overtagged
I just noticed the 'add to list' dropdown appears under the tags... I didn't notice it under the tag cloud at first, and thought the profusion of tags had triggered a bug.
October 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word undisonant
BBC, 'The man who reads dictionaries': 'knowing that undisonant is the adjective to describe the sound of crashing waves and that apricity is the warmth of the winter sun brings these things more often to mind.'
October 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word neuroeconomics
Philosophy's Other: 'After having operated as a separate science for decades, economics is now opening up its boundaries to other disciplines. One such discipline is cognitive neuroscience. The nascent field of neuroeconomics is a booming business. Worldwide, more than a dozen of new Centers for Neuroeconomics Studies equipped with high tech brain scanners have been founded within the past few years. Several papers on neuroeconomics already found their way into prestigious academic journals such as Science and Nature. At the same time neuroeconomics meets resistance among economists... Many economists and methodologists are skeptical about the contribution neuroeconomics can make to economics.'
October 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word neurolaw
New York Times Magazine: 'Proponents of neurolaw say that neuroscientific evidence will have a large impact not only on questions of guilt and punishment but also on the detection of lies and hidden bias, and on the prediction of future criminal behavior. At the same time, skeptics fear that the use of brain-scanning technology as a kind of super mind-reading device will threaten our privacy and mental freedom, leading some to call for the legal system to respond with a new concept of “cognitive liberty.�?'
October 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word wordie
Wordie is where words used on those other sites get to come if they've been good, pious, righteous words.
October 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
/words/%CE%92%CE%91%CE%9D%CE%91%CE%9D%CE%91
It's less paradoxical than Synonym, actually.
October 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word corona
Image search for this word is highly disappointing, and possibly trying to sell me something.
October 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word somniloquism
There's a similar story told by Bertrand Russell: 'There is a story of a man who got the experience from laughing gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout." '
October 7, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word moronic
And duly added to the 'But technically it means...' list.
October 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word moronic
Dictionary battle: Wiktionary says it's between seven and twelve.
According to Wikipedia the term moron was used in psychology to refer to someone with a mental age of 8 - 12 on the Binet scale, so we may have to let WordNet off this time.
October 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word anachrotechnofetishism
DRB: 'Yes, this is just what it says - "clockwork fetus in brass chamber", A Mechanical Womb. Could anything be more steampunk-ish than this? Described as "Anachrotechnofetishism", more works of such top-notch quality can be viewed in this gallery by Molly Friedrich.'
October 6, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word faq
Similar principles apply to e.g. Blogger profile links (and make sure you link to your profile, e.g. for Blogger it'll be a user-number like 0123456789 as in http://www.blogger.com/profile/0123456789, not example as in http://example.blogspot.com).
October 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word gnidge
OED: 'To rub, squeeze, press'.
October 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word gnoff
OED: 'A churl, boor, lout.' Sadly obsolete, though it certainly looks the part.
October 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word gnip
Like nip, but fallen out of use.
October 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word hariolize
Same as hariolate.
October 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word hariolate
According to the OED, in the 17th Century this could also mean 'to practise ventriloquism'.
October 5, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word enter your list in reverse alphabetical order.
Probably so that it displays in alphabetical order without having to be sorted.
October 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Image search on enter your list in reverse alphabetical order. gives a 404 error; I'm guessing the full stop is guilty.
October 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word nebula
Apart from the nebulae WeirdNet has in mind, of course.
October 4, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word wonneproppen
Do we have a standard tag for striking image search results? If not, I propose imagical.
October 3, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word financiapocalypse
As seen on Lifehacker.
October 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word effort to fix the problem of a frozen asset class
Synonym of bailout.
CBS: 'To hear the White House tell it, one factor in the House vote yesterday against the administration’s bailout plan – was the word "bailout." ... "It’s an effort to fix this problem of a frozen asset class that has implications over our entire economy," said Fratto at the daily White House press briefing.'
October 2, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word 500 application error
Removing the full stop prevents the 500, but usually full stops on words are well behaved nowadays, so maybe it's the combination of stop and semi-colon...
September 30, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word uhbljknjlkljniuhnhuijk
DRB: 'The webbing in the Spiderman movies is made of a substance called "uhbljknjlkljniuhnhuijk" - According to Wiki answers.'
September 29, 2008
Show 200 more comments...