Palaeos.com: 'Rows of cilia on Ciliophora. A more interesting question is whether this word is singular or plural. If plural, what the hell is the singular? Almost all sources scrupulously avoid using the singular by various circumlocutions and studied grammatical artifice. One source uses "kinety," an Anglo-Saxon truncation that seems implausible on a Greek root. The truth is probably that the correct singular has been long forgotten or was never mentioned in the original paper, whatever that might have been. Wonderful are the ways of science.'
Brad Skow, On the Meaning of the Question, 'How Fast Does Time Pass?' (PDF): 'There are philosophers who think that some views about the nature of time can be refuted just by asking this question (in the right tone of voice). Others think the question has an obvious and boring answer. I think we need to be clearer on what the question means before we can say either way.
'In this paper I will examine several different questions, all of which have some claim to be precisifications of the question, “How fast does time pass?�?'
Hobo-tech.com: 'As a musical style, hobotech is wide open. Sampling hobo songs, songs or storys about hobos, or songs that invoke the open spaces of a forgotten America are encouraged. A loping, rough hewn feel with spoons and guitar is a good thing.'
Oddee: 'These amazing ice spikes, generally known as penitentes due to their resemblance to processions of white-hooded monks, can be found on mountain glaciers and vary in size dramatically: from a few centimetres to 5 metres in height.'
Oddee: 'Also known as mammatocumulus, meaning "bumpy clouds", they are a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud. Composed primarily of ice, Mammatus Clouds can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction, while individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time.'
Apparently this has been used as a verb meaning 'kill (animals) painlessly': the O.E.D. quotes newspapers from the Twenties talking about e.g. 'proper lethalling establishments where cats can be put to sleep free of charge'. It seems odd to me to use a word like that and then employ a euphemism a moment later.
Metro: 'In an embarrassing mistake, officials in Massachusetts have been forced to admit that some road signs pointing to Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg have spelling mistakes in them.
'The typos, which are completely baffling considering how easy it is to spell Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, were revealed by a local newspaper, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, which has been covering the misspelling scandal since 2003.
'Resolving the issue involved large amounts of research into the roughly two dozen spelling variants for the lake, in Webster, Massachusetts, which is widely credited as having the longest place name in the USA.'
Discussion on longest word ever suggests that Wordie does have a finite capacity: if seanahan's guess is correct, it's that of all possible UTF-8 character combinations up to 2^7 characters long.
T.H.E.: 'A collaboration, after all, is a temporary liaison entered into for reasons of expediency - two political parties, for instance, might enter a collaborative relationship in a situation where neither can secure an overall mandate. This is very different from the longer-term fusions and crossovers of disciplines that occur all the time in the humanities without prodding or grant bribery.'
T.H.E.: 'The third danger is incipient support of an audit culture that leads to a Gradgrinding of university departments. In Charles Dickens' Hard Times, a horse is famously defined as:
'"'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) ... 'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.'"'
T.H.E.: 'Is this a true trahison des clercs, a selling of the pass by an academic establishment too alienated from politics to care or too worried about their careers to take a risk? Or is it the death by a hundred cuts that has crept up on us when we weren't looking? It hardly matters, for the result is the same - power in the hands of those whose interests are driven not by the pursuit of knowledge but by the pursuit of wealth.'
T.H.E.: '...the representative of the professoriate on the board lost a subsequent election after managers decided that nominees should be elected by the deans and the professors rather than the professors alone.'
T.H.E.: 'Like Acton, Clapham believed in finding empty spaces in the past and dutifully filling them, so he was probably a connoisseur of tedium, and he is said to have died of boredom on a late train back from London as he shared the compartment with the wife of a college master famous for the sedative properties of her conversation. "Not a mark on his body," the medical report is rumoured to have said, "but with a terrible staring look in his eyes." The story is a tribute to the lady, for Clapham must have been a hard man to bore.'
Not the founder of DNA itself: 'The inventor of the genetic technology behind the national DNA database says it risks losing support because it holds the records of innocent people.'
'The code of conduct spells out the job description. They are employed as temporary civil servants but do not have to be politically impartial like their civil service colleagues.
'They link together the minister, the party and the department. They are also the bridge between the neutral civil service and the politicians.
'One former "spad" - as they are known around Westminster - from the Blair years told me that they bring a political antenna to proceedings that essentially protects the civil servants by maintaining their independence.'
Culture24: 'A rare fusion of the Germanic and Celtic art styles of early medieval Britain known as Insular art, the mount takes the form of an animal with splayed legs and a projecting head.'
Douglas Yeo: 'Ever since I was a young boy I have been fascinated by the buccin, the late 18th and early 19th century French form of trombone that had a bell ending in a zoomorphic head.'
B.B.C. News: 'Dharug was one of the dominant Aboriginal dialects in the Sydney region when British settlers arrived in 1788, but became extinct under the weight of colonisation.
'Details of its demise are sketchy but linguists believe the last of the traditional Dharug speakers died in the late 19th Century, and their unique tongue only survives because of written records.
'In a remarkable comeback, Dharug now breathes again - its revitalisation helped by the efforts of staff at Chifley College's Dunheved campus in Sydney...
'At Chifley College, where around a fifth of the students are Aboriginal, Dharug is taught twice a week with great energy through repetition and song.
Joshua's Blog: '...And the long-term archivability of the hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party. The shortener may decide a link is a Terms Of Service violation and delete it. If the shortener accidentally erases a database, forgets to renew its domain, or just disappears, the link will break. If a top-level domain changes its policy on commercial use, the link will break... The most likely outcome, of course, is that we don't do anything and that the great linkrot apocalypse causes all of modern culture to dissapear in a puff of smoke. Hopefully.'
Times Online: 'Philosophical arguments are characteristically enthymematic – that is to say, the premisses that would be necessary to make them conclusive are not spelled out.'
Usually, when '1 Wordie lists' a word and it appears on no lists, it'll be on a profile—but this one was 'first listed by greenapple', on whose profile it isn't. So who's got this one, then?
As an acronym, a Rigid Inflatable Boat. I wonder how many other people ribsforsale.com tricked into clicking on their advert, hoping to buy succulent meat online.
A chocolate-coated lollipop... Okay, according to this it actually means: 'to bear a burden on your shoulders, such as a sack of potatoes. The load would press against the back of your neck.'
Don't worry about it. I thought you might be taking phony umbrage, but I couldn't tell how serious you were being, and my response ended up somewhat brusque. No hard feelings.
Wired: 'Monopoly also fails with many adults because it requires almost no strategy. The only meaningful question in the game is: To buy or not to buy? Most of its interminable three- to four-hour average playing time (length being another maddening trait) is spent waiting for other players to roll the dice, move their pieces, build hotels, and collect rent. Board game enthusiasts disparagingly call this a "roll your dice, move your mice" format.'
Rock, Paper, Shotgun: '“Grand strategy�? is a sub-genre title that always amuses me. I can’t help but picture someone playing Command & Conquer whilst wearing a ceremonial robe and crown, or Dawn of War on a 300″ monitor. Slightly disappointingly, it’s a different kind of grandiose it refers to - playing as an entire nation, seeing only the big picture and rarely the individual soldiers.'
On a similar note, here's some inconsistent handling of whitespace characters: this tag contains %0A characters (new line, I think). Linked from the list of recent tags on the front page, its URL contains the %0A characters and the page displays correctly; linked from the tags page, however, it has the %0As stripped out so that it leads to the nonexistent /tags/cannibalismanthropos - humanbeingphagous - feedingon.
(By the way, I see trying to visit tags that don't exist no longer produces a common-or-garden 404, which is nice. Thanks, John.)
Asahi Shimbun: ' Urban dwellers, looking for something missing from the day-to-day grind of their working lives, are literally heading to the mountains to reconnect with nature and find spiritual fulfillment.
'They are devotees of Shugendo, a religion based on ancient Japanese mountain worship that incorporates aspects of Buddhism, Shinto and other faiths.'
Mysterious Britain & Ireland: 'The Baobhan Sith is a particularly evil and dangerous female vampire from the highlands of Scotland. They were supposed to prey on unwary travellers in the glens and mountains. The name suggests a form of Banshee.'
Mysterious Britain & Ireland: 'The Bean Nighe is an example of the ominous 'Washerwoman at the Ford' rendered in the Highland tradition. The tradition of 'The Washerwomen at the Ford' seems to have its roots in Celtic legend and myth. She appears in the Irish stories and can be identified as the crone aspect of the triple goddess.'
Peter Turchin: 'Cliodynamics (from Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of temporally varying processes) is the new transdisciplinary area of research at the intersection of historical macrosociology, economic history/cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Mathematical approaches - modeling historical processes with differential equations or agent-based simulations; sophisticated statistical approaches to data analysis - are a key ingredient in the cliodynamic research program (see "Why do we need mathematical history?" in the side bar). But ultimately the aim is to discover general principles that explain the functioning and dynamics of actual historical societies.'
Design Crisis: 'The normally oh so civilized quiltosphere is abuzz with conflict regarding the latest issue of Quilter’s Home. According to this article in The Washington Post, Jo Ann’s Fabric Store refused to carry the scandalous March/April issue because it features pages of controversial quilts. Even though editor/owner Mark Lipinski ponied up extra cash to have the issues shrink wrapped in plastic sleeves a la Hustler magazine, the issue was deemed too shocking for Jo Ann’s customers, out of fear that they might accidentally look at the magazine.'
B.B.C. News: 'Achondritic meteorites were formed when the Solar System's planets were coming into being. The substances in such meteorites and the processes they have undergone can give clues about how the larger bodies were formed.
'By contrast, chondritic meteorites were formed during the the Solar System's early days before material had accreted into planets. They have not been altered by the melting and re-crystalisation that has utterly transformed the nature of, say, Earth rocks.'
B.B.C. News: 'Detailed analysis has shown that the sample, known as MM40, has a chemical composition unlike any other fragment of fallen space rock.
'This, say experts, raises questions about where it originated in the Solar System and how it was created.
'It also means that astrochemists must expand their list of the combinations of materials in planetary crusts.
'The detailed analysis of MM04 was led by Matthieu Gounelle from the Laboratory of Mineralogy and Cosmochemistry at the French Natural History Museum.'
WeirdNet's definition isn't that bad today, but I'd have thought the bird was a more obvious choice for first place.
According to the O.E.D. this can also be a verb: 'to make conceited or vain; to puff up with vanity; to dress up in finery', or to act ostentatiously. Also 'trans. Austral. To obtain the best portions of (a tract of land), esp. so as to make the remainder of little value to other people. See PEACOCKING n. 2. Now hist.'
Comments on tags attached to 0 words aren't displayed: there are comments on say what? but you can't see them now that the tag has been retired in favour of say what.
Larry Maddry: 'It seems the phrase originated with Joseph Flanders, then an employee for The Charlotte News. He had typed: “It was as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard.�?
'In the fall of 1965, Flanders’ friends at The Charlotte News, especially writer R. C. Smith, were so taken with Flanders’ phrase they formed a society—the Order of the Occult Hand—and vowed to get the words “it was as if an occult hand ... �? into print as soon as possible.'
This seems (judging by Google's cache) to have been born on a list called i scream for ice cream, by tagyoureit; both the person and the list appear to have ceased to be. Did someone with 400 words and 133 comments manage to do something to get nuked, or might this be a technical glitch...?
Independent: 'Phil Booth of the civil rights campaign group, NOID, said: "Inch by inch, the Government's plans to map and monitor everyone's communications are creeping into place. Today it's retention of data, soon it'll be a giant database to suck it all up. And unless we speak out and stop this, what used to be private – details of your relationships and personal interests – will end up in the ever-widening control of the stalker state."'
According to Wikipedia, 'some analysts distinguish among sub-types of Tom Swifties. Some call those in which the pun is carried by the verb "Croakers" (after the above listed example in which "Tom croaked"), or insist that only those examples in which the pun is carried by an adverb ending in -ly are "true" Tom Swifties (or Swiftlies), or make other distinctions.'
Where does one apply to become a Tom Swiftie analyst?
Sorry this isn't a nice message, but: johntgraham is trolling. I'm guessing you'll want either to nuke the posts or to add them to the 'mentions' page.
In fairness, I just had to check myself to confirm that the plural is goes rather than gos. dictionary.reference.com/browse/dos gives both dos and do's as plurals of do (n.), so maybe it was an attempted formation by analogy.
Is dingy an American spelling of dinghy, is it a typo, or has a pun flown over my head? (The O.E.D. does list it as a known spelling of dinghy, along with dingee, dinghee and dingey.)
Exactly two words, and including the whole of Kingdom Animalia? That's actually pretty restrictive (which is presumably why this list has already broken the two-word rule).
The Urban Elitist: 'But the time required for a full-length novexcel would be more than I’d care to invest in an experiment. Instead, I thought, how about a short storyspreadsheet?'
Boing Boing: 'Writing in the Atlantic, Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, takes a hard look at the econopocalypse and decides that the root of America's (and Europe's) economic woes is the cozy relationship between super-powerful bankers and government -- oligarchy.'
Contrasted with speaking technically/dispassionately: 'Or what was it Abraham did for the universal? Let me speak humanly about it, really humanly!' (Kierkegaard, Fear & Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay).
May I gently point out that tagging ten words with a URL makes you liable to be suspected of spamming and therefore vulnerable to the Wordie Treatment?
The dictionary.reference.com version is longer, nd indicates that WordNet is referring to the printing sense: 'a quad with a square body; "since 'em quad' is hard to distinguish from 'en quad', printers sometimes called it a 'mutton quad'",' i.e. quad as in quadrat.
Maybe gender should be added to the parts of speech feature. (Then again, arguably the same holds for number, and we've made do so far with plural and occasionally singular tags.)
What it's actually about: 'Home improvements retailer Kingfisher has said profits dropped 75% as it lost money in China and closed Trade Depot in the UK.'
Boston Globe: 'It's knowledge of crosswordese that separates the hard-core puzzlers from the dilettantes. You may never, ever find an opportunity to bring Enyo (a Greek war goddess) into conversation, and, like those contestants, you may have never seen an etui before, but if it helps you fill in that last blank square of a puzzle, it will be burned into your brain forever.'
Crosswordese sounds little different from Wordiean.
New Scientist: 'Kelemen has documented the same kind of erroneous thinking - called promiscuous teleology - in young children. Seven and eight-year olds agree with teleological statements such as "Rocks are jagged so animals can scratch themselves" and "Birds exist to make nice music". These mistakes diminish as kids take more science classes and learn causal explanations for natural events.'
Der Spiegel: 'The Romans did have levels, a six-meter long design called a chorobate copied from the Persians. They also filled goat intestines with water to find a level around corners. But that alone does not explain the precision of this amazing aqueduct.'
Der Spiegel: 'The soldiers chiseled over 600,000 cubic meters of stone from the ground -- or the equivalent of one-quarter of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. This colossal waterworks project supplied the great cities of the "Decapolis" -- a league originally consisting of 10 ancient communities -- with spring water. The aqueduct ended in Gadara, a city with a population of approximately 50,000. According to the Bible, this is where Jesus exorcized demons and chased them into a herd of pigs.'
A.P.O.D.: 'The Great Comet of 1965, Ikeya-Seki, was also a member of the Sungrazer family, coming within about 650,000 kilometers of the Sun's surface. Passing so close to the Sun, Sungrazers are subjected to destructive tidal forces along with intense solar heat.'
Grey as in greylisting. That Grumpy BSD Guy: 'Regular readers will remember that I have a collection of known bad addresses in my domains that I use for my greytrapping, all generated elsewhere, that has come in handy at times. Run of the mill spam operators tend to just suck in anything that looks like email addresses, and keeping the list available on the web has served us extremely well here.'
A sock, apparently; citation on ganzey. This sense isn't in the O.E.D., but it does mention ammunition-boots, footwear supplied as part of soldiers' kit, so maybe there's a connection.
B.B.C.: 'The islanders were kindly, polite, shy. The older ones spoke in a curiously old-fashioned way. Lots of "thees" and "thous", unfamiliar words like "ganzeys" for sweaters and "ammunitions" for socks. I liked it and was happy there.
'So, evidently, was a young naval officer who was based in Tristan during the war...'
According to the O.E.D., ganzey is a dialect variant of Guernsey, as in 'a jersey'.
I know reporting a bug in WeirdNet is a little redundant and that on the whole we don't want it fixed, but this one may be keeping 'interesting' definitions from our sight: we've known for some time that a few words fail to have definitions displayed even though they can be found at http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn, and I've noticed that this seems especially to affect words ending in -oof (goof, hoof, proof, aloof, roof...). Is there an -oof bug on Wordie's side, or is it 'just' a further dimension of WeirdNettery?
Edit: may I add -(o)ft to this? Loft and left I knew about, but I've also just found no definition on soft... (Raft and daft are normal, though. So is deft, so -eft isn't a guaranteed problem ending. Hmm.)
Another -oof word that's actually in the WordNet database but which WeirdNet fails to display here. As is proof. I think we have a pattern... and an odd-sounding bug report in the making.
For that matter, hoof, hooves and hoove (not as common, but actually a word: 'a disease of cattle', says the O.E.D.) are all missing WordNet definitions. Since I can find hoof on http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn this may be a glitch in Wordie's implementation. Or some gremlin with a grudge against -oof words.
The carpet is not a prophet; it is associated with Muhammad. It's actually called the Pearl Carpet of Baroda, so presumably the quotation marks here are in recognition of the awkward phrasing.
Mark Edwards, 'A Brief History of Holons': 'The idea of hierarchy and of their constituent part-wholes, or holons, has, as Arthur Koestler points out in the opening quote, a long and distinguished history... While all these various threads of ideas included the consideration of hierarchical networks and levels and orders of development it was not until the work of writer-philosopher Arthur Koestler that a fully theory of holarchy and holons was proposed.'
Apparently the person who added the tags couldn't find out how to remove them. John knows about them, but he's eternally busy, so they haven't been nuked yet.
T.H.E.: '"In concrete terms, one might see the contemporary plethora of educational quangos as the means by which the state's educational orthodoxies are ... policed," Mr Lea said.
'Quangos establish such orthodoxies by consulting academics then ignoring their comments, he added... "At the end of a consultation, you often do not feel your view has been taken seriously, but you are told: 'We consulted with you.'"'
B.B.C. News: 'He described the filaments seen on the body of the new dinosaur, which the team has named Tianyulong confuciusi, as "protofeathers" - the precursors of modern feathers.'
I added simip to the Wordie Paradox list, and the list page says it 'has been listed 3 times with 55 comments', so it seems still to be associated with multiple lists as well as (ghost) comments; it's just the actual page that's been nuked.
W.S.J.: 'The environment also brings out what security experts call the "mama-bear instinct." A Chuck E. Cheese's can take on some of the dynamics of the animal kingdom, where beasts rush to protect their young when they sense a threat.'
Some of these seem more objectionable than others; I find taxonomy useful enough, admittedly in an academic setting, and measuring is a more general concept than benchmarking.
Hi. If you wanted those comments to be associated with the specific words, rather than appearing at the bottom of your list, you'll have to add them to the word pages: giclairune, ukku.
Regarding WeirdNet's agricultural interests: 'seeds sometimes considered poisonous'? Hasn't anyone got around to checking? (Or are they perhaps poisonous in the sense that potatoes are technically poisonous, i.e. that you'd have to eat an awful lot to get a fatal dose?)
Strange Maps: 'The aforementioned Atlas is a publication of Le Monde diplomatique, the French monthly magazine for world affairs. It might not be incidental to note that the editorial line of “Le Diplo�? (as it is often called) is altermondialiste.
'Altermondialism (or alter-globalisation) seeks to counteract the negative effects of an economic globalisation seen as too Anglo-Saxon and neo-liberal.'
B.B.C. News: 'The debaptism certificate started out as a kind of satirical comment on the idea that you could be enrolled in a church before you could talk, but it seems to have taken off from there.'
What it means: 'The number of new claims of sexual abuse made against US Roman Catholic priests rose by 16% to more than 800 last year, a Church report says.'
Spotted on Slashdot: 'Tom was able to stretch this worthless article to 26 pages by putting microscopic pictures on each page along with about a paragraph of text.
'Tom is the new king of AdSense manipulation. I guess we can call it AdSenseless now.'
B.B.C. News: 'Ministers are being urged to restrict the sale of "electronic" cigarettes amid fears they could be harmful... The 'e-cigarettes' look real, but are battery-powered and typically made of stainless steel.
'Inside is a cartridge of liquid nicotine. When it is heated, the user inhales vaporised droplets of the drug and breathes out a mist rather than smoke.'
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?
Comments by vanishedone
Show previous 200 comments...
vanishedone commented on the word parasitophorous vacuole
I must remember this one the next time I want to insult someone...
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word kinety
See kineties.
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word kineties
Palaeos.com: 'Rows of cilia on Ciliophora. A more interesting question is whether this word is singular or plural. If plural, what the hell is the singular? Almost all sources scrupulously avoid using the singular by various circumlocutions and studied grammatical artifice. One source uses "kinety," an Anglo-Saxon truncation that seems implausible on a Greek root. The truth is probably that the correct singular has been long forgotten or was never mentioned in the original paper, whatever that might have been. Wonderful are the ways of science.'
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word gamogony
Palaeos.com: 'the process by which a gamont gives rise to many... gametes'.
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word integrative
Not integrated into any lists...
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word curly-haired
Covered, WeirdNet? So if I call a person curly-haired, I'm claiming that this person's whole body is hirsute?
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word precisification
Brad Skow, On the Meaning of the Question, 'How Fast Does Time Pass?' (PDF): 'There are philosophers who think that some views about the nature of time can be refuted just by asking this question (in the right tone of voice). Others think the question has an obvious and boring answer. I think we need to be clearer on what the question means before we can say either way.
'In this paper I will examine several different questions, all of which have some claim to be precisifications of the question, “How fast does time pass?�?'
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word last page
I'd forgotten that in fact Wordie may be gradually contracting; see the discussion on ghost comments.
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list meta-squared
Shouldn't this list include itself?
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word keech
Only until someone starts do—
BRACKETS!
—ing it randomly.
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word findguru
Teacup, not teapot or tea-pot or even peatot? He'll be turning into a saucer next...
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word deadbeef
Computerworld.com: 'Expert programmers learned the debugging technique of filling memory with DEADBEEF (a "readable" hexadecimal value) to help them find a core-walker (the mainframe equivalent of a memory leak).'
May 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hobotech
Hobo-tech.com: 'As a musical style, hobotech is wide open. Sampling hobo songs, songs or storys about hobos, or songs that invoke the open spaces of a forgotten America are encouraged. A loping, rough hewn feel with spoons and guitar is a good thing.'
May 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bird convicted over glass attack
Tough justice for avians who recklessly fly into windows—or not...
May 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word supercell
Oddee: 'Supercell is the name given to a continuously rotating updraft deep within a severe thunderstorm (a mesocyclone) and looks downright scary.'
April 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word penitente
Oddee: 'These amazing ice spikes, generally known as penitentes due to their resemblance to processions of white-hooded monks, can be found on mountain glaciers and vary in size dramatically: from a few centimetres to 5 metres in height.'
April 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mammatocumulus
Oddee: 'Also known as mammatocumulus, meaning "bumpy clouds", they are a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud. Composed primarily of ice, Mammatus Clouds can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction, while individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time.'
April 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word brazil
Contrary not only to WeirdNet #2 but also to WordNet #1, Brazil, if it exists at all, is to be found in the north Atlantic.
April 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lethalling
Citation on lethal.
April 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lethal
Apparently this has been used as a verb meaning 'kill (animals) painlessly': the O.E.D. quotes newspapers from the Twenties talking about e.g. 'proper lethalling establishments where cats can be put to sleep free of charge'. It seems odd to me to use a word like that and then employ a euphemism a moment later.
April 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
Or maybe double-brackets, like LibraryThing uses for authors' names.
April 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word elastic loaf
The official Iranian term for a pizza, according to a mid-2006 news story.
Edit: to clarify, the actual term is Persian; elastic loaf is a translation.
April 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
I imagine the some people would find such a feature more usable than others: recall she, for example.
April 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word my first dictionary
Suitable for children. Or not...?
April 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Metro: 'In an embarrassing mistake, officials in Massachusetts have been forced to admit that some road signs pointing to Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg have spelling mistakes in them.
'The typos, which are completely baffling considering how easy it is to spell Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, were revealed by a local newspaper, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, which has been covering the misspelling scandal since 2003.
'Resolving the issue involved large amounts of research into the roughly two dozen spelling variants for the lake, in Webster, Massachusetts, which is widely credited as having the longest place name in the USA.'
April 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word last page
Discussion on longest word ever suggests that Wordie does have a finite capacity: if seanahan's guess is correct, it's that of all possible UTF-8 character combinations up to 2^7 characters long.
April 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word collaboration
T.H.E.: 'A collaboration, after all, is a temporary liaison entered into for reasons of expediency - two political parties, for instance, might enter a collaborative relationship in a situation where neither can secure an overall mandate. This is very different from the longer-term fusions and crossovers of disciplines that occur all the time in the humanities without prodding or grant bribery.'
April 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word gradgrind
T.H.E.: 'The third danger is incipient support of an audit culture that leads to a Gradgrinding of university departments. In Charles Dickens' Hard Times, a horse is famously defined as:
'"'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) ... 'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.'"'
April 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word trahison des clercs
T.H.E.: 'Is this a true trahison des clercs, a selling of the pass by an academic establishment too alienated from politics to care or too worried about their careers to take a risk? Or is it the death by a hundred cuts that has crept up on us when we weren't looking? It hardly matters, for the result is the same - power in the hands of those whose interests are driven not by the pursuit of knowledge but by the pursuit of wealth.'
April 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word professoriate
T.H.E.: '...the representative of the professoriate on the board lost a subsequent election after managers decided that nominees should be elected by the deans and the professors rather than the professors alone.'
April 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sedative
T.H.E.: 'Like Acton, Clapham believed in finding empty spaces in the past and dutifully filling them, so he was probably a connoisseur of tedium, and he is said to have died of boredom on a late train back from London as he shared the compartment with the wife of a college master famous for the sedative properties of her conversation. "Not a mark on his body," the medical report is rumoured to have said, "but with a terrible staring look in his eyes." The story is a tribute to the lady, for Clapham must have been a hard man to bore.'
April 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word drower
It seems to be a surname.
April 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word drower
I don't think that's the sense of paradox Asativum had in mind; but that's for the listmaster to decide upon.
April 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ⌦
By the logic of ⌂, this means 'A house has been knocked over and destroyed'.
April 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ⌂
This is supposed to be a house, although I've yet to see a font in which it looks like anything more than an irregular pentagon.
April 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dna founder attacks database
Not the founder of DNA itself: 'The inventor of the genetic technology behind the national DNA database says it risks losing support because it holds the records of innocent people.'
April 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cardapult
'The business card catapult.'
April 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ☃
Different installed fonts, presumably. I'm on WinXP and can see both snowman and hat.
April 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spad
B.B.C. News: 'So what do special advisers do and is the characterisation fair?
'The code of conduct spells out the job description. They are employed as temporary civil servants but do not have to be politically impartial like their civil service colleagues.
'They link together the minister, the party and the department. They are also the bridge between the neutral civil service and the politicians.
'One former "spad" - as they are known around Westminster - from the Blair years told me that they bring a political antenna to proceedings that essentially protects the civil servants by maintaining their independence.'
April 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word insular art
Culture24: 'A rare fusion of the Germanic and Celtic art styles of early medieval Britain known as Insular art, the mount takes the form of an animal with splayed legs and a projecting head.'
April 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word buccin
Douglas Yeo: 'Ever since I was a young boy I have been fascinated by the buccin, the late 18th and early 19th century French form of trombone that had a bell ending in a zoomorphic head.'
April 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word buntot ng pagi
According to this jolly glossary (may be NSFW): '(lit. ray's tail. Pagi or Pagi-pagui is the name of the animal) Also buntot pagi. A Philippine whip made with a dried ray's tail.'
April 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word understan
South of Pakistan.
April 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dharug
B.B.C. News: 'Dharug was one of the dominant Aboriginal dialects in the Sydney region when British settlers arrived in 1788, but became extinct under the weight of colonisation.
'Details of its demise are sketchy but linguists believe the last of the traditional Dharug speakers died in the late 19th Century, and their unique tongue only survives because of written records.
'In a remarkable comeback, Dharug now breathes again - its revitalisation helped by the efforts of staff at Chifley College's Dunheved campus in Sydney...
'At Chifley College, where around a fifth of the students are Aboriginal, Dharug is taught twice a week with great energy through repetition and song.
'"Badagarang!" shouts the class when asked the word for kangaroo. Dingo, wallaby and koala are derived from Dharug.'
April 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mikiphone
A kind of miniature gramophone.
April 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word linkrot
Joshua's Blog: '...And the long-term archivability of the hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party. The shortener may decide a link is a Terms Of Service violation and delete it. If the shortener accidentally erases a database, forgets to renew its domain, or just disappears, the link will break. If a top-level domain changes its policy on commercial use, the link will break... The most likely outcome, of course, is that we don't do anything and that the great linkrot apocalypse causes all of modern culture to dissapear in a puff of smoke. Hopefully.'
April 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word enthymematic
Times Online: 'Philosophical arguments are characteristically enthymematic – that is to say, the premisses that would be necessary to make them conclusive are not spelled out.'
April 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word nailed down by his own ribs
Usually, when '1 Wordie lists' a word and it appears on no lists, it'll be on a profile—but this one was 'first listed by greenapple', on whose profile it isn't. So who's got this one, then?
April 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word rib
As an acronym, a Rigid Inflatable Boat. I wonder how many other people ribsforsale.com tricked into clicking on their advert, hoping to buy succulent meat online.
April 13, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word orlorn
BerFt.
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word imprimantur
Plural of imprimatur based on its Latin meaning; Wiktionary has some citations.
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word imprimateur
One who gives his imprimatur for the love of it.
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ÿØÿà
'My attempt to attach a graphic didn't work.'
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lillipop
A very small lollipop.
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word succolate
A chocolate-coated lollipop... Okay, according to this it actually means: 'to bear a burden on your shoulders, such as a sack of potatoes. The load would press against the back of your neck.'
Edit: link now unbroken.
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dumpy
WeirdNet #1 is new to me (and the O.E.D.), although the American Heritage Dictionary lists it at #2.
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word recontextualize
v. What will happen to this ghosted word if anyone ever lists it.
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word awesuuume
Unununium was an awesome name.
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cynacism
A disparaging attitude towards Natashquan Airport.
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word rollo may
May what?
(Okay, it's his surname.)
April 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user sionnach
Don't worry about it. I thought you might be taking phony umbrage, but I couldn't tell how serious you were being, and my response ended up somewhat brusque. No hard feelings.
April 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list obsessive-compulsive-slightly-judgmental-tagging-syndrome
Why not put the note on OCSJTS itself, to which the list summary refers people? Of course, that in turn refers them to tree- anyway.
I've added a credit to the list summary for the edification of people who can't be bothered to click through. And you can keep the umbrage.
April 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word roll your dice, move your mice
Wired: 'Monopoly also fails with many adults because it requires almost no strategy. The only meaningful question in the game is: To buy or not to buy? Most of its interminable three- to four-hour average playing time (length being another maddening trait) is spent waiting for other players to roll the dice, move their pieces, build hotels, and collect rent. Board game enthusiasts disparagingly call this a "roll your dice, move your mice" format.'
April 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ploth
@ploth: if you have a relevant page you'd do better to link directly to it, otherwise you may just get suspected of spamming.
April 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list british-broadcasting-concision
I get the feeling you'd like this to be an open list, so now it is.
April 11, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word grand strategy
Rock, Paper, Shotgun: '“Grand strategy�? is a sub-genre title that always amuses me. I can’t help but picture someone playing Command & Conquer whilst wearing a ceremonial robe and crown, or Dawn of War on a 300″ monitor. Slightly disappointingly, it’s a different kind of grandiose it refers to - playing as an entire nation, seeing only the big picture and rarely the individual soldiers.'
April 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word retrospective falsification
Just click on the 'Some HTML is allowed' link above the comment box.
April 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word retrospective falsification
That link won't work; if you use square brackets, Wordie tries to link to a corresponding word page. You have to use HTML for external links, <a href="http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/retrospective+falsification">like this</a>.
April 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bookaneer
T.H.E.: 'Publishers see every download of a pirate copy of a textbook as a sale lost. Now they are fighting back against the bookaneers...'
April 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
On a similar note, here's some inconsistent handling of whitespace characters: this tag contains %0A characters (new line, I think). Linked from the list of recent tags on the front page, its URL contains the %0A characters and the page displays correctly; linked from the tags page, however, it has the %0As stripped out so that it leads to the nonexistent /tags/cannibalismanthropos - humanbeingphagous - feedingon.
(By the way, I see trying to visit tags that don't exist no longer produces a common-or-garden 404, which is nice. Thanks, John.)
April 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word shugendo
Asahi Shimbun: ' Urban dwellers, looking for something missing from the day-to-day grind of their working lives, are literally heading to the mountains to reconnect with nature and find spiritual fulfillment.
'They are devotees of Shugendo, a religion based on ancient Japanese mountain worship that incorporates aspects of Buddhism, Shinto and other faiths.'
April 9, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word peritus
T.L.S.: 'He served as a peritus, or theological expert, at Vatican II...'
April 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word the 2009-2014 world outlook for 60-milligram containers of fromage frais
And now the winner.
April 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word boabhan sith
Mysterious Britain & Ireland: 'The Baobhan Sith is a particularly evil and dangerous female vampire from the highlands of Scotland. They were supposed to prey on unwary travellers in the glens and mountains. The name suggests a form of Banshee.'
April 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bean nighe
Mysterious Britain & Ireland: 'The Bean Nighe is an example of the ominous 'Washerwoman at the Ford' rendered in the Highland tradition. The tradition of 'The Washerwomen at the Ford' seems to have its roots in Celtic legend and myth. She appears in the Irish stories and can be identified as the crone aspect of the triple goddess.'
April 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pisos justice
Piso's justice, right?
April 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cliodynamics
Peter Turchin: 'Cliodynamics (from Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of temporally varying processes) is the new transdisciplinary area of research at the intersection of historical macrosociology, economic history/cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Mathematical approaches - modeling historical processes with differential equations or agent-based simulations; sophisticated statistical approaches to data analysis - are a key ingredient in the cliodynamic research program (see "Why do we need mathematical history?" in the side bar). But ultimately the aim is to discover general principles that explain the functioning and dynamics of actual historical societies.'
April 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word koncept steel pvt ltd, balustrade, fabrication, handrail bracket, stone cladding,ball hollow
My shopping lists never looked like this.
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word quiltosphere
Design Crisis: 'The normally oh so civilized quiltosphere is abuzz with conflict regarding the latest issue of Quilter’s Home. According to this article in The Washington Post, Jo Ann’s Fabric Store refused to carry the scandalous March/April issue because it features pages of controversial quilts. Even though editor/owner Mark Lipinski ponied up extra cash to have the issues shrink wrapped in plastic sleeves a la Hustler magazine, the issue was deemed too shocking for Jo Ann’s customers, out of fear that they might accidentally look at the magazine.'
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word chondritic
Citation on achondritic.
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word achondritic
B.B.C. News: 'Achondritic meteorites were formed when the Solar System's planets were coming into being. The substances in such meteorites and the processes they have undergone can give clues about how the larger bodies were formed.
'By contrast, chondritic meteorites were formed during the the Solar System's early days before material had accreted into planets. They have not been altered by the melting and re-crystalisation that has utterly transformed the nature of, say, Earth rocks.'
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word astrochemist
B.B.C. News: 'Detailed analysis has shown that the sample, known as MM40, has a chemical composition unlike any other fragment of fallen space rock.
'This, say experts, raises questions about where it originated in the Solar System and how it was created.
'It also means that astrochemists must expand their list of the combinations of materials in planetary crusts.
'The detailed analysis of MM04 was led by Matthieu Gounelle from the Laboratory of Mineralogy and Cosmochemistry at the French Natural History Museum.'
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word fly-fornication
From a list of Puritan names. This one confused me until I realised it was fly as in flee. Fly-debate is there too.
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word peacock
WeirdNet's definition isn't that bad today, but I'd have thought the bird was a more obvious choice for first place.
According to the O.E.D. this can also be a verb: 'to make conceited or vain; to puff up with vanity; to dress up in finery', or to act ostentatiously. Also 'trans. Austral. To obtain the best portions of (a tract of land), esp. so as to make the remainder of little value to other people. See PEACOCKING n. 2. Now hist.'
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list imagical-words-you-should-be-falling-over-yourself-to-use-image-search-on
I'm trying to decide whether wonneproppen and törpök belong on this list or that other one.
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list morbid-curiosity-words-you-should-be-very-hesitant-to-use-image-search-on
And for when you really need a warning about something, there's the hork alert tag.
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
Comments on tags attached to 0 words aren't displayed: there are comments on say what? but you can't see them now that the tag has been retired in favour of say what.
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list morbid-curiosity-words-you-should-be-very-hesitant-to-use-image-search-on
Blood is even worse than when I commented on it, although the porn/horror film still has slipped to third place...
This list is going to be useful largely for morbid curiosity, isn't it?
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wage
WeirdNet is accurate enough, I suppose, but what an opaque way of putting it.
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word order of the occult hand
Larry Maddry: 'It seems the phrase originated with Joseph Flanders, then an employee for The Charlotte News. He had typed: “It was as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard.�?
'In the fall of 1965, Flanders’ friends at The Charlotte News, especially writer R. C. Smith, were so taken with Flanders’ phrase they formed a society—the Order of the Occult Hand—and vowed to get the words “it was as if an occult hand ... �? into print as soon as possible.'
April 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word security cameras clue to fireball
What it means: 'Security cameras in Northern Ireland may shed some light on the cause of a massive fireball in the sky on Sunday.'
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word survivor guilt
As demonstrated here.
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word deep space
Apparently coined in 1934 by E.E. 'Doc' Smith, according to OUPblog's 'Nine Words You Might Think Came from Science but Which Are Really from Science Fiction '.
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word constructivism
Besides the art movement, and indeed other philosophical constructivisms, there's also metaethical constructivism.
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word fwoosh! i don't know if that best describes me, but it was the first thing that came to mind.
Very Zen.
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word umm...
Is there an OCSJTS tag for this, or is it just triple-punkt?
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word boom choco-laka
This seems (judging by Google's cache) to have been born on a list called i scream for ice cream, by tagyoureit; both the person and the list appear to have ceased to be. Did someone with 400 words and 133 comments manage to do something to get nuked, or might this be a technical glitch...?
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dorking
What if the residents flee into the Dorking Caves beneath?
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list spam--2
Some more examples are here.
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dorking
I'm sure the good people of Dorking, Surrey will be delighted to hear that.
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
Am I right in thinking the spinner image used when adding words on a list page is also new?
April 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word recto v verso
A word-off? Mostly I see these two sticking close together.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word grandoise
A Galápagos giant tortoise, perhaps?
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word victualz
Now, does this kind of monstrosity warrant a special OCSJTS tag, or is misspelling good enough for its kind?
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list efl-university-s-list
Don't worry; we just get occasional spammers trying to post adverts, so occasionally we check on people to make sure they're above board.
There is a FAQ page, although it's a bit ad hoc; there's also a list called Wordie for Dummies.
(Incidentally: I expect you meant karaoke.)
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word deepleap
Another time sink involving words.
Try to make words with the letters you're given (like Scrabble), against the clock; words gain points, unused letters lose them.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
Oooh! A 'recent tags' section has appeared on the home page!
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word trolls
There's a previous discussion on troll.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
For some reason, when I got asked to log in just now, I subsequently got sent to Wordie Mobile.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word aglet
Fortunately practice in tying laces makes one do it dextrously.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word arachnomancy
This sounds scary enough without being ghosted too.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word stalker state
Independent: 'Phil Booth of the civil rights campaign group, NOID, said: "Inch by inch, the Government's plans to map and monitor everyone's communications are creeping into place. Today it's retention of data, soon it'll be a giant database to suck it all up. And unless we speak out and stop this, what used to be private – details of your relationships and personal interests – will end up in the ever-widening control of the stalker state."'
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word austentatious
Not a plain Jane.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word irascrible
To write angry letters.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sike
So did we ever get that list of 'words that sound like frogs croaking'?
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word boy-girl party
Is this some kind of euphemism?
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word genicide
What happens when you break the wrong lamp.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tom swifty
Also Tom Swiftie, but this is the spelling used by tomswifty.com.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word croaker
According to Wikipedia, 'some analysts distinguish among sub-types of Tom Swifties. Some call those in which the pun is carried by the verb "Croakers" (after the above listed example in which "Tom croaked"), or insist that only those examples in which the pun is carried by an adverb ending in -ly are "true" Tom Swifties (or Swiftlies), or make other distinctions.'
Where does one apply to become a Tom Swiftie analyst?
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word compassionate ocean
Judging by a Web search, this is a Buddhist centre in Minnesota.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user john
Sorry this isn't a nice message, but: johntgraham is trolling. I'm guessing you'll want either to nuke the posts or to add them to the 'mentions' page.
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word flâ·neur
/tags/polka-dots
April 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pillow fight
It's International Pillow Fight Day today.
April 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word watershed
WordNet omits a specific broadcasting sense: the time in the evening after which material not considered suitable for children gets shown.
April 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pitty
I expected this to mean something akin to pitted, but the O.E.D. says pretty, 'nursery and colloq.'
April 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list guano
In fairness, I just had to check myself to confirm that the plural is goes rather than gos. dictionary.reference.com/browse/dos gives both dos and do's as plurals of do (n.), so maybe it was an attempted formation by analogy.
*Ducks*
April 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
I see /lists/ has been fixed at some point: it no longer has my Cryptolects list at the top every time I visit.
April 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word guano
Is dingy an American spelling of dinghy, is it a typo, or has a pun flown over my head? (The O.E.D. does list it as a known spelling of dinghy, along with dingee, dinghee and dingey.)
Edit: oh, now I see the list about misspellings...
April 4, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word enantiosis
Now I'm wondering whether you really mean that...
(O.E.D. definition for this word: 'a figure of speech in which the opposite is meant to what is said; irony.')
April 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word crogglement
Croggle gets some discussion here based on the guess that it's a portmanteau, but nothing conclusive: maybe cringe with goggle or boggle.
April 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word crogglement
Spotted here; according to this rather diverting page, it's 'a word invented by Dean Grennell to denote extreme astonishment'.
April 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word 'loyalists closer to guns move'
Not actually said by Yoda. 'Loyalist paramilitaries could be moving towards decommissioning their weapons, according to Shaun Woodward.'
April 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ark for ark's sake
Unfortunately, this one relies on people's recognising Ars Gratia Artis from the M.G.M. logo.
April 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list wanted-comic-strip-name
Exactly two words, and including the whole of Kingdom Animalia? That's actually pretty restrictive (which is presumably why this list has already broken the two-word rule).
April 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word novexcel
The Urban Elitist: 'But the time required for a full-length novexcel would be more than I’d care to invest in an experiment. Instead, I thought, how about a short storyspreadsheet?'
Worse than wovel...?
April 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word distain
A stain or tint, when not a typo for disdain.
March 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word econopocalypse
Boing Boing: 'Writing in the Atlantic, Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, takes a hard look at the econopocalypse and decides that the root of America's (and Europe's) economic woes is the cozy relationship between super-powerful bankers and government -- oligarchy.'
March 31, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word humanly
Contrasted with speaking technically/dispassionately: 'Or what was it Abraham did for the universal? Let me speak humanly about it, really humanly!' (Kierkegaard, Fear & Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay).
March 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
May I propose an amendment to 'as well as' instead of 'instead of'? I like looking for new open lists to investigate.
March 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user katharina
May I gently point out that tagging ten words with a URL makes you liable to be suspected of spamming and therefore vulnerable to the Wordie Treatment?
March 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list lost-for-word
That would be the Power of Wordie.
March 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word em
The dictionary.reference.com version is longer, nd indicates that WordNet is referring to the printing sense: 'a quad with a square body; "since 'em quad' is hard to distinguish from 'en quad', printers sometimes called it a 'mutton quad'",' i.e. quad as in quadrat.
March 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sprackly
So how's progress?
March 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word protozoa
I can't find dictionary support for the singular tag...
March 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word el quingombó
Maybe gender should be added to the parts of speech feature. (Then again, arguably the same holds for number, and we've made do so far with plural and occasionally singular tags.)
March 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word aptronym
More examples in this article.
March 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word trap street
Angloe was a trap town until it became actual.
March 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word vote set for 'disqualified' seat
It's actually the incumbent who's disqualified.
March 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word kingfisher hit by china weakness
What it's actually about: 'Home improvements retailer Kingfisher has said profits dropped 75% as it lost money in China and closed Trade Depot in the UK.'
March 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word phantom of heilbronn
The dangerous criminal mastermind who may in fact be an illusion created by contaminated cotton swabs.
March 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word aspire
A vampire snake.
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word umpire
Hang on: why is WeirdNet #1 specifically about baseball, when #2 quite adequately covers sports in general?
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spire
This vampire keeps things short and to the point.
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word vegetables
I can cope with WeirdNet #1 and #3's love of disjunction, but 'numerous herbaceous plant'? Who else uses plant as a mass noun?
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word umpire
This variety of vampire is rumoured to exist, but nothing about it is known for certain.
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word empire
A vampire that's always dashing.
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word transpire
Okay, a list there shall be.
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word transpire
n. 'A male vampire who dresses like a female vampire.' (Spotted here)
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
That's the . character breaking tags.
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word crosswordese
Boston Globe: 'It's knowledge of crosswordese that separates the hard-core puzzlers from the dilettantes. You may never, ever find an opportunity to bring Enyo (a Greek war goddess) into conversation, and, like those contestants, you may have never seen an etui before, but if it helps you fill in that last blank square of a puzzle, it will be burned into your brain forever.'
Crosswordese sounds little different from Wordiean.
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word epee
WordNet has a definition for this form but not for épée...
March 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word promiscuous teleology
New Scientist: 'Kelemen has documented the same kind of erroneous thinking - called promiscuous teleology - in young children. Seven and eight-year olds agree with teleological statements such as "Rocks are jagged so animals can scratch themselves" and "Birds exist to make nice music". These mistakes diminish as kids take more science classes and learn causal explanations for natural events.'
March 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word chorobate
Der Spiegel: 'The Romans did have levels, a six-meter long design called a chorobate copied from the Persians. They also filled goat intestines with water to find a level around corners. But that alone does not explain the precision of this amazing aqueduct.'
March 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word gadara
Citation on Decapolis.
March 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word decapolis
Der Spiegel: 'The soldiers chiseled over 600,000 cubic meters of stone from the ground -- or the equivalent of one-quarter of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. This colossal waterworks project supplied the great cities of the "Decapolis" -- a league originally consisting of 10 ancient communities -- with spring water. The aqueduct ended in Gadara, a city with a population of approximately 50,000. According to the Bible, this is where Jesus exorcized demons and chased them into a herd of pigs.'
March 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sungrazer
A.P.O.D.: 'The Great Comet of 1965, Ikeya-Seki, was also a member of the Sungrazer family, coming within about 650,000 kilometers of the Sun's surface. Passing so close to the Sun, Sungrazers are subjected to destructive tidal forces along with intense solar heat.'
March 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word features
We had an Oddocomplete once, but it was put out to pasture.
March 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word rihanna's i.q. is what, exactly
Maybe it cycles through the results of different kinds of I.Q. test.
March 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word greytrapping
Grey as in greylisting. That Grumpy BSD Guy: 'Regular readers will remember that I have a collection of known bad addresses in my domains that I use for my greytrapping, all generated elsewhere, that has come in handy at times. Run of the mill spam operators tend to just suck in anything that looks like email addresses, and keeping the list available on the web has served us extremely well here.'
March 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ammunition
A sock, apparently; citation on ganzey. This sense isn't in the O.E.D., but it does mention ammunition-boots, footwear supplied as part of soldiers' kit, so maybe there's a connection.
March 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ganzey
B.B.C.: 'The islanders were kindly, polite, shy. The older ones spoke in a curiously old-fashioned way. Lots of "thees" and "thous", unfamiliar words like "ganzeys" for sweaters and "ammunitions" for socks. I liked it and was happy there.
'So, evidently, was a young naval officer who was based in Tristan during the war...'
According to the O.E.D., ganzey is a dialect variant of Guernsey, as in 'a jersey'.
March 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
I know reporting a bug in WeirdNet is a little redundant and that on the whole we don't want it fixed, but this one may be keeping 'interesting' definitions from our sight: we've known for some time that a few words fail to have definitions displayed even though they can be found at http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn, and I've noticed that this seems especially to affect words ending in -oof (goof, hoof, proof, aloof, roof...). Is there an -oof bug on Wordie's side, or is it 'just' a further dimension of WeirdNettery?
Edit: may I add -(o)ft to this? Loft and left I knew about, but I've also just found no definition on soft... (Raft and daft are normal, though. So is deft, so -eft isn't a guaranteed problem ending. Hmm.)
March 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word goof
Another -oof word that's actually in the WordNet database but which WeirdNet fails to display here. As is proof. I think we have a pattern... and an odd-sounding bug report in the making.
March 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word weirdnet
See also, not only WeirdNet's very own tag, but also The WeirdNet Paradox and WeirdNot.
March 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word poof
For that matter, hoof, hooves and hoove (not as common, but actually a word: 'a disease of cattle', says the O.E.D.) are all missing WordNet definitions. Since I can find hoof on http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn this may be a glitch in Wordie's implementation. Or some gremlin with a grudge against -oof words.
March 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word 'prophet carpet' goes for $5.5m
The carpet is not a prophet; it is associated with Muhammad. It's actually called the Pearl Carpet of Baroda, so presumably the quotation marks here are in recognition of the awkward phrasing.
March 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word holon
Mark Edwards, 'A Brief History of Holons': 'The idea of hierarchy and of their constituent part-wholes, or holons, has, as Arthur Koestler points out in the opening quote, a long and distinguished history... While all these various threads of ideas included the consideration of hierarchical networks and levels and orders of development it was not until the work of writer-philosopher Arthur Koestler that a fully theory of holarchy and holons was proposed.'
March 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word adobeair
Apparently the person who added the tags couldn't find out how to remove them. John knows about them, but he's eternally busy, so they haven't been nuked yet.
March 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word consultation
T.H.E.: '"In concrete terms, one might see the contemporary plethora of educational quangos as the means by which the state's educational orthodoxies are ... policed," Mr Lea said.
'Quangos establish such orthodoxies by consulting academics then ignoring their comments, he added... "At the end of a consultation, you often do not feel your view has been taken seriously, but you are told: 'We consulted with you.'"'
March 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word douchetard
Wordlustitude doesn't even bother giving it a page of its own, simply associating it with some other words. Whether that's an endorsement I've no idea.
Edit: or were you asking whether the entire quotation is in English? It's a fair question...
March 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word protofeather
B.B.C. News: 'He described the filaments seen on the body of the new dinosaur, which the team has named Tianyulong confuciusi, as "protofeathers" - the precursors of modern feathers.'
March 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
For the mysteries of simip see ghost comments.
March 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ghost comments
I added simip to the Wordie Paradox list, and the list page says it 'has been listed 3 times with 55 comments', so it seems still to be associated with multiple lists as well as (ghost) comments; it's just the actual page that's been nuked.
March 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mama-bear instinct
W.S.J.: 'The environment also brings out what security experts call the "mama-bear instinct." A Chuck E. Cheese's can take on some of the dynamics of the animal kingdom, where beasts rush to protect their young when they sense a threat.'
March 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word constantinople
For italics, etc. you need to use HTML, not BBCode: <i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> → A Confederacy of Dunces.
March 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ghost comments
Actually, doesn't it qualify as a bug that simip is 404'd? A word not in the database ought to produce a 'Nobody is listing...' page.
March 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word predictors of beaconicity
B.B.C. News: 'Council leaders have compiled a banned list of the 200 worst uses of jargon, with "predictors of beaconicity" and "taxonomy" among the worst horrors... Cliches such as "level playing field" and inscrutable terms like "re-baselining" have been prohibited... The LGA's list includes suggested translations of some terms, such as "measuring" for the civil servant's favourite "benchmarking", "idea" for "seedbed", "delay" for "slippage" and "buy" for "procure"... Town hall workers are urged not to use the words "mainstreaming", "holistic", "contestability" and "synergies"... Ms Eaton said: "Why do we have to have 'coterminous, stakeholder engagement' when we could just 'talk to people' instead?'
Some of these seem more objectionable than others; I find taxonomy useful enough, admittedly in an academic setting, and measuring is a more general concept than benchmarking.
March 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ministers back blind benefit rise
It's about disability allowances for blind people.
March 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ᴕ
A cloaking device? Do I just not have the right fonts installed or do you see a blank space too?
March 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word duneverse
In which the Dune novels are set. The SF Site: 'Heretics of Dune presents yet another perspective of the "Duneverse"...'
March 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list leev2s-list
Hi. If you wanted those comments to be associated with the specific words, rather than appearing at the bottom of your list, you'll have to add them to the word pages: giclairune, ukku.
March 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cheat
Regarding WeirdNet's agricultural interests: 'seeds sometimes considered poisonous'? Hasn't anyone got around to checking? (Or are they perhaps poisonous in the sense that potatoes are technically poisonous, i.e. that you'd have to eat an awful lot to get a fatal dose?)
March 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word health gap drive 'wasted money'
What it means: 'Ministers have wasted public money in their attempts to tackle health inequalities, MPs say.'
March 15, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word altermondialism
Strange Maps: 'The aforementioned Atlas is a publication of Le Monde diplomatique, the French monthly magazine for world affairs. It might not be incidental to note that the editorial line of “Le Diplo�? (as it is often called) is altermondialiste.
'Altermondialism (or alter-globalisation) seeks to counteract the negative effects of an economic globalisation seen as too Anglo-Saxon and neo-liberal.'
March 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word debaptism
B.B.C. News: 'The debaptism certificate started out as a kind of satirical comment on the idea that you could be enrolled in a church before you could talk, but it seems to have taken off from there.'
March 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word australia spill '10 times worse'
Meaning, 'worse than originally thought'.
March 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word more taxi sex victims 'to emerge'
Meaning they'll come forward as accusers, not that they'll emerge from the taxi.
March 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word sex claims against us church rise
What it means: 'The number of new claims of sexual abuse made against US Roman Catholic priests rose by 16% to more than 800 last year, a Church report says.'
March 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word adsenseless
Spotted on Slashdot: 'Tom was able to stretch this worthless article to 26 pages by putting microscopic pictures on each page along with about a paragraph of text.
'Tom is the new king of AdSense manipulation. I guess we can call it AdSenseless now.'
March 14, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word e-cigarette
B.B.C. News: 'Ministers are being urged to restrict the sale of "electronic" cigarettes amid fears they could be harmful... The 'e-cigarettes' look real, but are battery-powered and typically made of stainless steel.
'Inside is a cartridge of liquid nicotine. When it is heated, the user inhales vaporised droplets of the drug and breathes out a mist rather than smoke.'
March 13, 2009
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
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