Neology

Two lesbian friends of mine alerted me tonight to a new word: "gayelle."

It's a fascinating attempt to coin a new word. The people over at gayelle.org (a.k.a. sapphicchic.com) are claiming, apparently seriously, that because the word "lesbian" is now old-fashioned and has negative connotations, it's time to replace that word with a new, hip, sophisticated, 21st-century word. And the one they came up with is "gayelle"--"the feminine form of gay meaning homosexual."

Also, the word "bisexual" contains the word "sex" and used to be sometimes used to mean "hermaphrodite," so the gayelles have decided (with the help of a little intersex-phobic phrasing like "freak of nature") that bisexual women should have a new term as well. They somehow came up with "sapphysapphia" (although their explanation fails to explain why they think that term should have anything to do with being interested in men too), which word they note is composed of only six different letters; if you put those letters in alphabetical order, you get "ahipsy," which they've altered to "hipshe." So, all you bi-dykes, better get used to calling yourselves hipshes from now on. (And presumably non-bi women aren't hip.)

On the one hand, I'm tempted to mock them. To me (and to the lesbian friends who mentioned "gayelle" to me), the terms sound silly and goofy and not even remotely hip. (One of my friends suggested that "Gay-El" sounded like a resident of Krypton; the other noted that "gayelle" is only one letter off from "gazelle.") Also, the gayelle folks say that "The word lesbian is antiquated" as evidence that we should stop using it, while they say (in a positive tone) that "Sappho" is "A well known name from antiquity" as a reason to use that; really, none of their arguments in favor of their new coinages make much sense to me.

On the other hand, language does change, and new coinages and new uses sometimes do catch on. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that people were still lamenting the loss of the perfectly good word "gay" to those awful homosexuals who'd appropriated it.

One thing that kinda bugs me politically about the "gayelle" thing is that it's kind of the opposite of reclaiming a word. The queer community has, to some degree and in some contexts, reclaimed a variety of words (including "queer") that used to be fairly universally derogatory; I'm a little sad to see people saying "that word is sometimes used derogatorily, so let's stop using it." (Interesting that the word "dyke" doesn't appear anywhere on their site.) Then again, this kind of language change happens all the time too, when once-polite words become derogatory. And for that matter, I myself have spent time agitating (mildly) for a new coinage; I invested a fair bit of energy into the gender-neutral pronoun "ta" in the '90s, before switching to gender-neutral "they."

I'm also mildly politically bothered by the gender politics I see in "gayelle." By creating a feminine form of "gay" (and why not "gayette," anyway?), they implicitly suggest that the word "gay" is exclusively male (which is, to be fair, how many people use it)--but they also suggest that the word for a homosexual woman should be a derivative of the word for a homosexual man. Wouldn't it be better to come up with a word that's not derived from an exclusively male label?

One more issue with "gayelle" is that the word's already in use. Googling for it, or looking in Urban Dictionary, reveals that the current most popular uses (at the time of my writing this entry) are:

• A community TV station in Trinidad & Tobago. (Which at first I thought was a queer station, given the slogan "At Last We Own Television" and the current top-of-page ads for "The Freedom Walk" and (in pink) "Gayelle The Channel presents ... Phagwa 2008.") (I'm thinkin' if women are going to start using "gayelle," then men should switch to "phagwa.") (Yes, I know that Phagwa is an ancient Hindu festival. I'm being culturally insensitive for the sake of a joke; sorry.)
• A Caribbean term for a cockfighting arena (I kid you not). Okay, cockfighting or stickfighting, but "cockfighting" is funnier in this context.

I'm left still uncertain whether this whole "gayelle" thing is in fact a joke, in which case my hat's off to the people who put it together. But the site is very straight-faced (as it were), and they're apparently even running radio ads on queer radio, which suggests to me that if it is a joke, it's a very elaborate one.

(Note: I'm pretty sure that some people who don't know me are going to encounter this entry, so I should note that (a) I'm a bi man, so I don't get to tell lesbians what they should call themselves, and (b) I use terms like "queer" and "dyke" casually and positively; no derogatory connotations should be inferred.)

Posted by Jed at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

According to a Detroit Free Press article, "Leap year babies hop through hoops of joy, pain of novelty birthday" (doesn't "Hoops of Joy" sound like it should be part of the same series as "Abs of Steel" and "Blades of Glory"?), a baby born on Leap Day is a "leapling," and an adult born on Leap Day (that is, a former leapling who's now grown up) is a "leaper."

Posted by Jed at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Arb" is apparently a short form of "arbitrage trader." The Wall Street Journal had a blog entry recently that, a couple paragraphs after referring to arbitrage traders, included the phrase "an unhappy arb is a litigious one."

(The Perils of a Google-Yahoo Blocking Move, 8 February 2008)

Posted by Jed at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation of Villon's "The Ballad of Dead Ladies" (the poem whence comes the phrase "But where are the snows of yesteryear") includes this line:

(From Love he won such dule and teen!)

Turns out that "teen" is an archaic or obsolete word meaning things like "grief" or "injury" or "irritation." And a Dule Tree was a tree used in Britain for public hangings; "dule" in Scots and Middle English (according to Wikipedia) had to do with sorrow or grief.

There are a few other web pages that include the phrase dule and teen; most are other copies of the Rossetti translation, but a few are other verses, mostly copies of an Andrew Lang poem. One page defines the phrase as meaning "grief and pain."

The connection to teenagers is left as an exercise to the reader.

Posted by Jed at 8:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to Wikipedia, "presidential glass" is another term for a particular kind of mostly-transparent teleprompter commonly used by US Presidents.

Posted by Jed at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Fossicking" is an Australian and Cornish (Cornwallish? Cornwallian?) term for prospecting. In Australia, it can apparently also mean "rummaging."

Encountered it in a cover letter for a story submitted to SH.

Posted by Jed at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wikipedia says that "palilalia" is "the repetition or echoing of one's own spoken words."

It can sometimes be a symptom of Tourette Syndrome. I already knew that coprolalia (involuntary swearing) was another such symptom, but I hadn't previously heard the name for yet another symptom: "copropraxia," "involuntarily performing obscene or forbidden gestures."

I normally don't list words here whose meaning is obvious from the roots (when I know the roots); I could've guessed what copropraxia is. But I like the word, so I figured I'd include it.

Posted by Jed at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to Urban Dictionary and other sources, one's "wheelhouse" is an "area of expertise." I gather it's used similarly to "forte" or "strong point" or "metier."

Posted by Jed at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"Griesel" is apparently another term for biodiesel, more specifically for vegetable oil used as diesel fuel.

I first encountered the term in a story submitted to SH; did a web search, and came up with a few instances of it online, such as a CNN transcript:

Ah, golden vegetable oil. It's not diesel, it's griesel.

Interestingly, apparently there's a guy whose birth name is Ernest Griesel who uses the stuff. Makes me wonder whether the term came from his name, or whether the pun was developed independently by someone else as well.

Posted by Jed at 9:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hurling is Ireland's second-most-popular sport (after Gaelic football). It involves hitting a ball with a stick to score goals; I get the impression it's vaguely related to field hockey.

According to Wikipedia, "The earliest known recorded game of hurling is from times before Christ," and "[h]urling is older than the recorded history of Ireland."

There are apparently a bunch of similar and related games. For example, there's an Irish women's variant called "camogie." There's also a related Scottish game called shinty, and a related British (?) game called bandy; both shinty and bandy are ancestors of ice hockey. And there's another related game that was once very popular on the Isle of Man called cammag.

(Encountered "hurler"--a hurling player--in a story submitted to SH.)

Posted by Jed at 7:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Hypsography" is the measurement and mapping of topographical elevation.

(I wrote this note in late 2006, but neglected to post it. So the word is no longer exactly new to me, but it was a year ago.)

Posted by Jed at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To "schvitz" is to sweat; more commonly, a schvitz is a steam bath, as one might take in a sauna.

Posted by Jed at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's possible I've heard this one before, but I like it too much to pass it up, and I don't think I ever knew what it meant before. A "cacoëthes" is a strong desire or urge. Derives from a Greek word meaning "wickedness." Apparently one of the most common modern uses is in the phrase "cacoëthes scribendi," usually referring to an insatiable and/or irresistible urge to write; often specifically in reference to an Oliver Wendell Holmes poem titled "Cacoëthes Scribendi."

Posted by Jed at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apparently, in British slang, to "have the hump" is to be "annoyed or upset with someone," according to The Free Dictionary. I wonder if the phrase derives ultimately from Kipling.

Encountered the phrase in late December in a transcript of a Veronica Mars episode, in which the (British) transcriber wrote: "The manager has the hump."

Oddly, as of late December, Urban Dictionary didn't mention this meaning of the word "hump." I suppose I could add it, but the general quality of the defs in Urban Dictionary doesn't really make me want to contribute to it.

Posted by Jed at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a comment thread for a YouTube video, someone named "DarthMauricius" wrote (on December 19, 2007):

"This is the lolest video ever"

The meaning is obvious; I'm just pleased and amused by the act of adding a superlative ending to "LOL."

Posted by Jed at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a comment on a journal entry a few years back, Sarah P introduced me to the term "mullygrubs," which turns out to be an alternate spelling for mulligrubs, which Quinion defines as "A state of depression or low spirits" and Dictionary of American Regional English defines as (among other things) "A condition of despondency or ill temper."

It can also refer to a stomach ache or a particular kind of ball in cricket. Apparently the word appeared (among other places) in Steinbeck's Travels with Charley.

Quinion also mentions the word "megrims"; a megrim was a migraine, but "megrims" could mean just general low spirits. I'd heard that before, but had forgotten it. Quinion and MW3 suggest that "mulligrubs" might even have originally been an alteration of "megrims."

Anyway, "mulligrubs" isn't quite a new-to-me word, but Sarah's mention of it was my only previous exposure to it, so it was new to me a few years ago; close enough for blogging.

Posted by Jed at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I read this word in Perdido Street Station, I assumed it was a misprint; but I looked it up, and sure enough, "skewwhiff" is an adjective or adverb from British dialect, meaning "askew" or "awry."

Interestingly, almost all of first few pages of Google search results for this term are definitions of it; it's not until the third or fourth page of results that actual uses of the term in text start to appear, such as a press release that refers to "this skewwhiff logic, where one set of rules would exist for one set of companies, while others were excluded[...]."

Posted by Jed at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to Wikipedia, a "bunny boiler" is "an obsessive and dangerous individual, most commonly referring to a jilted lover who is stalking the person who has spurned her or him. [...] The phrase derives from a famous scene in the 1987 film Fatal Attraction where a scorned woman [...] boils [her ex-lover's] daughter's pet rabbit in a pot."

Yikes.

See also Phrase Finder's entry, which suggests that the term came into popular and widespread use in 1994. Which makes me even more surprised that (I'm pretty sure) I've never encountered it before.

Posted by Jed at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I heard someone say on the phone recently that they were going to get a mani-pedi. At first I thought they'd said "Moneypenny," but then I parsed it correctly as a manicure plus a pedicure.

Posted by Jed at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had originally intended this blog to focus primarily on new coinages, to be a resource for early citations for dictionary makers and such. 'Cause, y'know, I figured I already knew most of the existing words that were worth knowing. But most of the really new coinages that I encounter aren't that interesting to me--they're often just variations on existing words, with meanings that are obvious at a glance--whereas it's turned out that a high percentage of the words I encounter that I wasn't previously familiar with have been around for quite some time.

Case in point: "vaticination."

I'm finally reading Tristram Shandy, and finding a variety of words I don't think I've ever seen before. Early on in the book, there's a parson named Yorick, and a friend of his tells him that by his plain-speaking he makes too many enemies, who will one day do him harm. The narrator continues:

Yorick scarce ever heard this sad vaticination of his destiny read over to him, but with a tear stealing from his eye[....]

--chapter XII, p. 32 of the Everyman's Library edition

A vaticination is a prediction, or the act of predicting. Comes straight from Latin.

Posted by Jed at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In a submission, I encountered the phrase "can of corn" as a baseball term; hadn't heard it before, so went and looked it up. Apparently it refers to a baseball hit in such a way that it's particularly easy to catch.

John Marshall, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's "Answer Guy," says that there are several possible origin stories for the phrase. The most accepted one, he says, is this: In olden times, "[...] a grocer would use a stick to tip a can of vegetables off a high shelf, then catch it in his hands or outstretched apron."

A British site, The Phrase Finder, gives a somewhat different explanation: it repeats a story to the effect that the phrase refers to a shopkeeper lightly tossing a can of food to a customer, and notes that it's a can of corn because the outfield is sometimes called "the cornfield."

But the P-I answer sounds better-researched.

Also, the Phrase Finder answer claims that the phrase was first used by announcer Red Barber, but the P-I answer says it was first used in 1896, which was twelve years before Barber was born.

Posted by Jed at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Apparently the term "UFO" is out; in its place, "UAP," for "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," is gaining popularity.

Jon Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune says:

The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the term that extraterrestrial-watchers nowadays prefer over Unidentified Flying Object) was first seen by a United ramp worker[....]

--"In the sky! A bird? A plane? A ... UFO?", by Jon Hilkevitch

But other sources suggest that the "UAP" term is actually an older term, and TSOR hasn't led me to anything definitive one way or t'other. Any thoughts?

Posted by Jed at 8:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Apparently "double-gaited" means "bisexual," according to Chapman's American Slang.

I encountered it in a 1981 Elmore Leonard novel:

"[...] Yeah, I think he's fucking her. I think he'd be out of his fucking mind if he wasn't. Robbie Daniels doesn't strike me as being double-gaited or having any abnormal ideas what his dick is for," the detective said. "I mean outside the popular abnormal ideas that're getting more normal all the time."

--Elmore Leonard, Split Images, p. 15

The quote's a little odd; I would've assumed from that line that "double-gaited" meant gay, rather than bi. But apparently not.

Various online sources corroborate Chapman: Sexual Identity and Gender Identity Dictionary; Probert Encyclopaedia; Sex-Lexis Dictionary of Sexual Terms (though the database on that last one seems to have, um, gone down).

It derives from the term's use in horse-racing, of course. It's not clear to me whether the Polish/English dictionary that provides the term "dziwny" is referring to horse racing or sexual orientation.

Posted by Jed at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A "junglist" is someone who listens to jungle, of course.

Turns out that "jungle" is "a style of electronic music that incorporates influences from genres including breakbeat hardcore, techno, rare groove and reggae/dub/dancehall." Also, "[t]here is significant debate as to whether Jungle is a separate genre from drum and bass as some use the terms interchangeably."

Posted by Jed at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent Doonesbury strip used the phrase "hit the hustings." Turns out that (says Wikipedia) a "husting" is "the platform from which a candidate speaks before a parliamentary or other election, or, by metonymy, the occasion of the debate or the entire campaign."

Posted by Jed at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm cheating a little, 'cause I may have heard the word "flâneur" before; but it came up twice in unrelated contexts on the same day, a month or so back, so I figured I'd mention it here.

To quote Wikipedia: "A flâneur is a detached pedestrian observer of a metropolis, a 'gentleman stroller of city streets', first identified by Charles Baudelaire."

The two occurrences I recently encountered:

Mr. Rose knew that something unusual was going on, he said, when the very first ad he received, after starting the column in 1998, began: "67-year-old disaffiliated flâneur picking my toothless way through the urban sprawl, self-destructive, sliding towards pathos, jacked up on Viagra and on the lookout for a contortionist who plays the trumpet."

--"Book Lovers Seek Lovers, Buttered or Plain," by Sarah Lyall, an article about the London Review of Books personals column.

And, from a Wikipedia article on a Degas painting called " Viscount Lepic and his Daughters Crossing the Place de la Concorde," this: "The Vicomte Lepic was an aristocrat, artist, and flâneur."

Posted by Jed at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A "flokati rug," also known as a "flokati," is a particular kind of Greek rug, according to MW11.

Posted by Jed at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I recently encountered the word "agida," though I'm no longer sure where. Turns out MW11 spells it "agita," and defines it as a feeling of anxiety. One might assume that it derives from "agitation," but MW11 says it's a "South Italian dialect pronunciation of Italian 'acido,'" meaning "acid" or "heartburn."

Word Detective noted, back in 2000, that "agita" is "more or less the Italian-American equivalent of the Yiddish 'tsuris,'" and that nobody's sure of its origin; he mentioned "acido" as a possible source, but also Italian "agitare."

(Later in that same column, btw, he discusses cock a snook, which we also discussed a few months back.)

Posted by Jed at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An "Uncle Mary" is, I gather, a gay man who works against the cause of gay rights, or who's seen as kowtowing to an anti-gay agenda. Wayne Besen's column/blog entry "Out This 'Uncle Mary'" (from June, 2005) defines an "Uncle Mary" as "the gay version of an Uncle Tom."

Posted by Jed at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Promession is a new approach to the old issue of what to do with a corpse: it involves freezing the body in liquid nitrogen, then "placing it on a vibrating mat so it disintegrates into powder," according to the Daily Mail's article "Cremation to be replaced by eco-friendly freeze-drying of corpses."

Posted by Jed at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I thought I knew what a nit was (it's one of those things I'm always picking, right?), but it turns out there's another meaning: it's a unit of brightness, equal to 1 candela per square meter. The nit page at sizes.com helpfully notes that the abbreviation is "nt," and that "A good LCD computer monitor has a brightness of about 250 nits." (That was last revised in mid-2002, so good LCD monitors may well be nittier than that by now.)

I first encountered the word in a CNET story, "Tripping the lights organic."

Btw, the search function at sizes.com doesn't seem to work very well, so if you're having a hard time finding a unit, try their index. Lots and lots of cool words there.

According to MW3, this use of "nit" derives from Latin "nitere," "to shine."

Meanwhile, it turns out there are other definitions of "nit" as well. In particular, in Australia, to "keep nit" is to keep watch.

Posted by Jed at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I mentioned this in a comment in my main journal, but I figure it's worth recording here as well.

The Clancy Brothers recorded an Ewan MacColl song, "Shoals of Herring," on their album The Boys Won't Leave the Girls Alone. There's a line in the song that I always heard as "with a hundred grand of the silver darlings" (meaning a hundred thousand). But the version of the lyrics posted at Cantaria has it as "a hundred cran."

At first I figured that must be a misprint; MW3 doesn't list the word "cran." But I checked OneLook Dictionary Search, and discovered that "cran" is the standard unit of measure for fresh-caught herring, about 45 gallons.

But how many herring is that? Luckily, itymbi foresaw that we might want to know, and gave an answer a couple years ago. It pointed to the cran page at the very useful (and previously unknown to me) sizes.com, which tells us that a cran can vary from 700 to 2500 herring, but averages around 1200.

So actually, a hundred cran is probably significantly more than a hundred grand of herring.

The sizes.com page also clarifies that it's 45 wine gallons, equal to 37.5 imperial gallons.

Side note: In some sense, this doesn't fit my usual criterion of being a word that I haven't heard before; I've been hearing it since I was a kid. Except I didn't know I'd been hearing it 'til last night, so I figure that's close enough.

Posted by Jed at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I usually post words here after I find out what they mean, but I just encountered three words that I can't find relevant definitions for, so I'm gonna post 'em here and see if any of y'all know what they mean.

First, "snook." A snook is a kind of fish, and there are various places named "Snook," and to snook is to make a particular gesture of contempt, or to show contempt for something. But in the Johnny Cash song "Straight A's in Love," the line "I began to be a snook at books" doesn't seem to fit any of those meanings. It's possible it's a typo or a Mondegreen, but all the sites I can find that have lyrics for that song include that line.

The other two are even more mysterious: on a page about Star Trek: Phase II at Memory Alpha, an episode summary mentions the crew "brouching and scraling at each other." Brouching? Scraling? The terms don't seem to appear anywhere else on the web, or in any dictionaries I have access to, including slang dictionaries. Typos? Made-up terms from the episode being described? I have no idea.

Any thoughts?

Posted by Jed at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Seen in a submission. "Scoria" (derived eventually from Greek "skōr," meaning "excrement") means "slag." Emphasis on first syllable.

Amusingly, MW11 defines "scoria" as "slag," and defines "slag" as "the dross or scoria of a metal." But the "scoria" definition has a little more detail, so it's not an entirely circular pair of definitions.

Posted by Jed at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As food travels through the digestive system, it spends some time in the stomach, where it's turned into a "semifluid mass" (says MW11) called "chyme." See The Digestive System for more.

Posted by Jed at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another one from a submission: "pyroclastic" refers to fragmenting due to volcanic action. In the story, I think it was being used as a synonym for "volcanic," but I'm not sure.

Posted by Jed at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A submission referred to "Ford dooleys," obviously (from context) a kind of vehicle. I spent a while poking around online trying to find out more; encountered the spellings "doolie," "duelly," and finally "dually." It seemed really unlikely that "dually" was a noun, but in fact the Wikipedia entry for pickup truck says that big pickups with doubled rear tires are known as "duallies."

While I'm here, I may as well mention that that Wikipedia article also says:

This type of vehicle is known in Australia and New Zealand as a ute or utility (from "utility vehicle"), in South Africa as a bakkie (pronounced "bucky"), and in Israel as a tender.

Not clear to me from that article whether "this type of vehicle" refers to pickup trucks in general, or specifically to the kind that have no sides or gate on the flatbed back.

Posted by Jed at 8:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Turns out "nabe" is short for "neighborhood" (in the sense, I think, of the community that lives near you); apparently originally used in the phrase "the nabes" to refer to the local theatre.

...the webcam that's trained on Mathew Street, a nabe in Liverpool that houses the famous Cavern Club...

--"Robbery averted via Beatles fan webcam in Liverpool," Engadget, 28 August 2006

Posted by Jed at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't want to turn this blog entirely into words I encountered in Privilege of the Sword, but I do want to note that a "fichu" is a particular kind of scarf.

Posted by Jed at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Hartshorn" is a (perhaps old-fashioned) term for a particular kind of smelling salts (using ammonia); MW11 says it's because harts' horns were once the main source for ammonia.

Another one from Privilege of the Sword.

The term seems rather evocative to me; it sounds like it should be the name of a lonely castle on a moor somewhere. (Especially because I keep wanting to mispronounce it as "heart-shorn.")

(I'm obliquely reminded that it took me a while, as a kid, to parse the title of the Peter Dickinson novel Heartsease; I think I kept wanting it to have something to do with seas instead of ease.)

Posted by Jed at 9:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Chypre" (from French, meaning "Cyprus") is a kind of perfume. I encountered it in Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword.

Posted by Jed at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A "Scouser" is a person from Liverpool; which is to say, a Liverpudlian. According to MW3, the name is due to "lobscouse" (a meat and vegetable stew) being popular in Liverpool.

Posted by Jed at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Wikipedia entry for railfan contains a small trove of unfamiliar-to-me words.

The term itself has the meaning you'd probably expect: someone who's interested in railroads. But the article also defines such terms as "FRN" (Fucking Rail Nut); "grizzers," "gricers," and "gunzels" (all terms for railfans); "bashers" (who like actually riding the trains); "stoats" and "veg," who spend their time mainly at one station; and more.

See also the articles on US railfan jargon and UK railfan jargon.

Posted by Jed at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've known the phrase "RTFM" for many years, and I've been using the phrase "TSOR" for about three years, but I had never previously encountered "STFW."

At first I thought it was a variant on "STFU" ("Shut The Fuck Up"), but from context that clearly wasn't right. (The context was ESR's How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, which I just saw for the first time even though it's apparently been around for years.) Then the document expanded the acronym: it stands for "Search The Fucking Web."

Sort of like TSOR, but blunter.

. . . I'm obliquely reminded to mention that a few years ago, a tech-writing group that I was in named a server "wtfm"--which, of course, stood for "Write The Fucking Manual."

Posted by Jed at 8:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had heard of fuller's earth before, but I had always thought it was named after someone named "Fuller." (Doesn't "Fuller's Earth" sound like the name of a science fiction novel?)

Anyway, so it turns out "fuller's earth" is called that because it was formerly used by fullers. What did they do with it? Why, they fulled, of course. And what's "fulling"? I'm glad you asked.

To "full" (MW10, entry 5, transitive verb entry) is "to shrink and thicken (woolen cloth) by moistening, heating, and pressing." You might guess it's called that because of something to do with filling the cloth in some way, but apparently not: this "full," which appears to be a homomorph of the more common word spelled the same way, derives from Latin "fullo" (by way of Anglo-French). (Whereas "full" in the sense of "having as much as will fit" comes ultimately from Greek plErEs. Sez MW10.)

I'm guessing that fuller is one of those now-obsolete professions (and presumably the surname "Fuller" comes from the profession), but I don't really know.

It turns out that fulling is also known as waulking in Scotland, where the songs waulkers sang while waulking are known as waulking songs. Not to be confused with walking songs, of course; such confusion would be fullish.

Posted by Jed at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A "tranche" is "a division or portion of a pool or whole," sez MW11; apparently "pool" in this context refers to finance. And "tranche" apparently has a very specific meaning in the context of bonds.

And "tranch de vie" is French for "slice of life."

Posted by Jed at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Psephology is an old-fashioned term for "the statistical study of elections," according to Wikipedia, which notes that the term was "coined (from the Greek psephos, 'pebble', which the Greeks used as ballots) in the United Kingdom in 1952 by historian R. B. McCallum."

Posted by Jed at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the roleplaying game Paranoia, a character could have a mutant power called "machine empathy," which caused machines (including computers) to like the character. Apparently in comic books these days, a similar superpower--the ability to psionically interact with computers--is called cyberpathy or (in the 2003 TV series Jake 2.0) technopathy.

Apparently "cyberkinesis" and "technokinesis" are other synonyms for the same thing.

Posted by Jed at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A submission recently used the phrase "pashing off"; from context, it was clearly Australian slang for something in the general vicinity of either kissing or making out. WordWeb Online says to pash is to "Kiss, embrace, or fondle with sexual passion"; Urban Dictionary says pashing is "heavy duty kissing between teenagers"; Free Dictionary says a pash is "a romantic infatuation" or "the object of such an infatuation," and that it's short for "passion." (That last pair of definitions sounds to me like it matches US use of "crush," which can be either the feeling you have or the person who you have that feeling about.)

Versatile word! I suppose you could say "I had such a pash for my pash that we started pashing."

Posted by Jed at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just learned that the process of going metric is called metrication.

Also, that there's a traditional Chinese unit of time, the ke, which was traditionally equal to 1/100 of a day, or approximately 15 minutes.

Also that there are only three remaining nations (according to Wikipedia, anyway) that don't widely use the metric system: the US, Liberia, and Myanmar.

And that in some stretches of Interstate 19 in Arizona, "distances are given in hundreds or thousands of meters, and not miles or even kilometres."

While I'm here, I may as well mention that the US Navy (again according to Wikipedia) measures distances in "kiloyards."

Posted by Jed at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was familiar with the katana (the long Japanese sword used by samurai) and the wakizashi (the sh