Recently in the New-to-me words Category

I turned on the radio during Talk of the Nation's Science Friday yesterday, in the middle of a segment about natural gas in water.

At one point (starting at 13:52 in the segment), the guest (Josh Fox, director of a documentary on the topic) said, fairly emphatically:

Chemicals in the fracking process are not supposed to be found in wells. [...] I happen to trust the citizens on the ground, who are saying, “Look, our water wasn't flammable before; they came and did a frack job; all of a sudden our water is flammable.”

And I thought, Wow, I had no idea that the term “frak” from Battlestar Galactica had gained such widespread acceptance. I heard it on Gilmore Girls once, but I don't think I've heard anyone else outside of sf circles say it; but here's a guy on the radio using it completely casually as a swear word, sounding like he says it all the time.

So I started to write this entry about it, but I had to go find the recording to get the quote right. And that was how I found out that the episode title was “New Film Investigates ‘Fracking’ For Natural Gas.”

Which made clear that I was misinterpreting something.

One quick web search later, I learned that hydraulic fracturing is a method of acquiring oil and natural gas, and that it's also known as “fracking.”

Which means that Fox wasn't swearing at all.

So instead of this being an entry about the use of a science fiction swear word in mainstream society, it's an entry about a word I hadn't previously known, and about the misinterpretations that can occur when you know a homophone for the word someone is actually saying.

Just happened across the Greek phrase "Μολων λαβε" (not sure how to get the accent marks to appear in HTML), often transliterated "molon labe." Apparently it was King Leonidas's response when the Persians demanded the Spartans' weapons: "Come and take them!"

Wikipedia adds:

It corresponds roughly to the modern equivalent English phrase "over my dead body," "bring it on" or, most closely, "come and get it."

I would not have expected an ancient Greek phrase to appear on a T-shirt at a Tea Party rally, but that's just where I saw this (in a photo). It turns out that American gun-rights advocates have adopted the phrase as a challenge to those they see as trying to take their guns away.

That Wikipedia page has a bunch of other interesting stuff about the use of the phrase at various historical moments.

And on a side note, it introduced me to an acronym I'd never encountered before: RKBA. From context, at first I thought it must stand for "Royal [something] [something] Association," but no: it's "Right to Keep and Bear Arms."

Sometime around the beginning of March, I came across the word theophory, which Wikipedia says is "the practice of embedding the name of a god or a deity in, usually, a proper name."

For example, Wikipedia says that the name "Elijah" incorporates both "El" and "Jah," both of which refer to God; it says the name translates to (among other things) "My God is Jah."

All of which is interesting enough to me on its own—I had known that "El" in names sometimes referred to God, but had no idea there was a word for that—but is even more interesting to me because my very own name is an example of theophory.

My parents had various reasons for naming me "Jedediah": partly after Jedediah Smith, for example, and partly because it was, they always said, King Solomon's name before he changed it to Solomon.

Turns out in that context it's usually spelled "Jedidiah," with an i in place of the second e. But regardless, it was in fact a name given to Solomon when he was a baby, and it means "beloved of God"; I never thought of this before, but I now assume the "iah" part at the end refers to Yahweh.

According to the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, a manugrapher's job is to trace and paint advertising material, including lettering.

Which is pretty much what one might expect from the roots of the word: someone who writes by hand. But I'm pleased and amused that it's a job title.

MW10 says that inanition is (among other definitions) "the exhausted condition that results from lack of food and water."

Useful word!

Seems like the adjective form should be "inane" (as in: "I'm totally inane; I better have some dinner"), but although that comes from the same root (Latin "inanis," meaning "empty"), it doesn't mean the same thing.

According to Wikipedia, "terroir" is "the special characteristics that geography bestow[s] upon particular varieties" of wine, coffee, and tea, based on "the assumption that the land [where] the grapes [or whatever] are grown imparts a unique quality that is specific to that region."

In addition to the literal meaning, I like it as a metaphor for the characteristics (if any) bestowed by someone's homeland.

Turns out that quango, also spelled qango, is an acronym for "quasi non-governmental organization" or "quasi-autonomous NGO." Looks like the term is fairly common in the UK and elsewhere, but I don't think I had ever heard it before.

Pandiculation is "the act of stretching oneself."

The context in which I encountered it indicated that the term is specifically used to refer to the sort of stretching one does when tired, or when waking up after sleeping.

Apparently, "buckraking" refers to a journalist taking a lot of money for a speaking engagement, especially speaking to a group that has a particular agenda; such a payment may cast doubt on the journalist's objectivity.

Despite the etymology (a portmanteau of "buck" and "muckraking"), the term doesn't actually have anything to do with muckraking; the word "muckraking" is apparently a stand-in here for "journalism," plus of course the pun/joke that the journalist is raking in the bucks.

I'd never heard the term before, but apparently it goes back to at least 2002, when NBC banned it. (Though the phrasing of that piece is ambiguous; perhaps NBC banned the practice under a different name.)

Just happened across a remarkably poetic phrase that I've never heard used this way before.

I was reading an article about a woman who stabbed an attacker; the woman fled the scene, and near the end of the article it notes:

The woman was still in the wind Thursday night, police said.

At first I thought that must be a typo of some sort. But a quick search finds some other occurrences, such as this headline from an unrelated article: "Shooting victim shows up at hospital, perp still in the wind."

Urbandictionary suggests that the term can mean various things, including "unable to be found" and "on the run."

The derivation seems obvious, but I do wonder (a) where and when the phrase was first used this way, and (b) why I've never encountered it before.

The other day, I read a submission that included the phrase "Axis Mundi." There were a lot of other unfamiliar phrases in the story, so I figured it was just something the author had made up.

Tonight, I encountered the phrase again, in a different story by a different author.

I Googled it, and found the relevant Wikipedia entry, so now I know what it refers to. (Though that entry appears to contain a great deal of original research and a certain amount of wacky speculation and overinterpretation. Skyscrapers are designed to evoke the axis mundi? Really?)

But I'm nonetheless a little surprised, and intrigued.

Because the term didn't appear at all in any submission we received until early 2005, after four and a half years of submissions. It popped up again in late 2005, then in mid-2006, then in late 2007. Four instances in three years. Didn't appear at all in any submissions in 2008.

But so far in 2009, we've received five stories that use the phrase, by four different authors.

In other words: in the past nine months, this phrase has turned up in more stories than in the entire previous eight and a half years—the lifetime of the magazine.

So now I'm wondering about the term. Has it recently entered the mass public consciousness, perhaps via the design firm or the band that use the name? Or is this just a coincidence?

"Esculent" is apparently a synonym for "edible." It's been appearing in print since 1626, but I only just encountered it for the first time in Wikipedia.