snell and frore
I'm not particularly enjoying The Worm Ouroboros, and I switched from reading to skimming about a hundred pages in. But one thing that keeps pleasing me about it is the...
Archive for New-to-me Words
nurdle
The word nurdle has a variety of definitions; in particular, it's most commonly used to refer to a little squirt of toothpaste, or to refer to small plastic pellets. Edited...
sectional (and yak-shaving)
Ah, yak-shaving. I was curious about the use of the word “sectional” in Civil War-era documents; that's not a usage I had encountered before. So here's how looking up a...
sismance?
Jackie pointed out (I'm paraphrasing) that we're now seeing bromance storylines with female characters. I did a quick Google for [female bromance], and found the following suggested terms: womance (pronounced...
homophene
Everyone knows about homophones. But I only just learned about homophenes: different words that look the same to a lip-reader. See also A Lip Reader Deciphers The Umpire-Manager Arguments Of...
Semi-finished casting products
In addition to being amused by the phrase “semi-finished casting products,“ I like (and hadn't encountered before) a couple of the specific names of such products: billet “a length of...
assortative
A couple weeks ago, I came across the phrase assortative mating in an article about autism: Judith Warner explores a provocative theory about why rates of autism, particularly the mild...
LPT
LPT, I recently learned, stands for Life Pro Tip: a tip about how to do something in real life (as opposed to on a computer). My understanding is that, as...
craic
In May, I saw the following line in an article about bicycling, socializing, and social networks in Dublin: “We just want to show how cycling is a social thing to...
desenrascanço
Desenrascanço is a Portuguese word more or less meaning “disentanglement,” used to refer to improvising solutions, or, as one web page puts it, “an ability to solve a problem without...