Les Jones

Word of the Day: The Wilhelm Scream

So I've been trying to keep this blog an Iowa Caucus Free Zone, and this post is just tangentially related, so bear with me.

Colby Cosh compared the Dean Scream to the Wilhelm Scream. I had no idea what that was until I followed that second link:

A series of short painful screams performed by an actor were recorded in 1951 for the Warner Brother's film "Distant Drums." They were used for a scene where a man is bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator. The recording was archived into the studio's sound effects library -- and it was used in many of their films since.

"Star Wars" Sound Designer Ben Burtt tracked down the scream recording - which he named "Wilhelm" after a character who let out the same scream in the film "Charge at Feather River." Ben has adopted the scream as sort of a personal sound signature, and has included it in many of the films he has worked on. He and a small circle of sound effects people, including myself and Richard Anderson, continue the crusade to keep Wilhelm alive. The Wilhelm Scream continues to be heard in new films every year.

Some of the Wilhelm Scream credits include Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies (and the Christmas TV special!), Reservoir Dogs, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and lots more. There's a WAV file of the scream at the bottom of that Web page.

Word of the Day: Sausagefest

Sausagefest - A bunch of guys. Etymology: perverted.

I had heard Jay's college-age younger brother use the word (as in, "man that place was a total sausagefest, let's go somewhere else"). Then Jacqueline Passey used it the other day in Being a girl at a poker tournament is even better than being a girl at a science fiction convention:

Although I have somewhat above-average looks and try to dress sexy this is still WAY more attention than I'm warranted. So I can only conclude that it's because this tournament is a total sausage-fest. Now, I have a lot of experience with sausage-fests from my years of attending science fiction conventions and activism with the Libertarian Party, but the guys at this tournament are different than the sci-fi and libertarian geeks.

Poker players seem to be a LOT more confident (cocky?) about approaching women. I wonder if it's because you need above average confidence to enter one of these tournaments, or if it develops as a result of making a lot more money than most of your peers, on your own terms and schedule? Either way, they are not shy!

Previous WOTD - Informativity

Word of the Day: Muffintop

First I heard Michelle Malkin use the term, then Brittney. It's a trend.

What's a muffintop? Here's your visual definition:

UPDATE: Brittney points to these female muffintops.

Previous WOTD: Sausagefest

Word of the Day: Growler

From Malted Barley via Chris Wage, who's been enjoying growlers from a Nashville microbrewery.

Brander Matthews wrote about it in Harper’s Magazine in July 1893: “In New York a can brought in filled with beer at a bar-room is called a growler, and the act of sending this can from the private house to the public-house and back is called working the growler”.

It was also called rushing the growler, since perhaps these children were often in a hurry. Teenagers could make good money and get a free lunch if they would show up at the factories and pick up the workers’ beer pails to get them filled at the taverns. They would sometime use a long pole in order to carry a quantity of pails to refill on one trip. Another possible explanation for using the term ‘rushing’ the growler.

Previous WOTD: Muffintop

Word of the Day: Crunk

Crunk

Part of speech - noun, adjective, or verb.

Definition - I'm not exactly sure.

Seriously. The Urban Dictionary gives lots of definitions. Here are the first three:

It's a mixture of the word crazy and drunk
i wanna go to a party and get crunk

In 1995, Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter were scheming ways to get past the TV censors on Conan's late night talk show, and they settled on an all-purpose, suitable replacement for the infamous seven dirty swearwords that they couldn't say on TV: Crunk. The choice to use that word was definitely not random. Ice T just happened to be on the show that night, and he likely fed the word to them beforehand and certainly helped fuel its popularity during the telecast ("That was seriously crunked up, right there.").

Fucked up. Usually high and drunk.
I got crunk last night.

I'll leave it to the hip youngsters to define it. Paging Chris Wage! Paging Brittney! Paging Blake! Paging Mr. Roboto! (Who will hopefully illustrate the crunk ideal using photos of inebriated Nashville debutantes.) BTW, Roboto is back from the land of the unblogging, and I borrowed both of these photos from his site. BTW*2, the third and fourth girls from the left are giving the sign of the shocker.

Previous WOTD: Growler

Word of the Day: Editorial We

This starts off kinda dry. Keep reading and you will be rewarded with punny goodness.

From Wikipedia, after explaining the royal we:

The editorial we is a similar phenomenon, in which editorial columnists in newspapers and similar commentators in other media refer to themselves as we when giving their opinions. Here, the writer has once more cast himself or herself in the role of spokesman: either for the media institution who employs him, or more generally on behalf of the party or body of citizens who agree with the commentary.

Similar to the editorial we is the practice common in academics of referring to a generic third person by we (instead of the more common one or the informal you):

By adding three and five, we obtain eight.

This came up because of Brittney's post:

Know why the City Paper's blog sucks? Because no one uses "I" or "me." They are writing that thing in the dry style of newspaper journalism.

They're eschewing the use of I and me? That means they're writing in the "editorial we."

They should write their blog in French. Then they could write in the editorial oui.

Or they could type in all lowercase. Then they'd be writing in the editorial wee.

Of course if they were really having fun they'd be writing in the editorial wwwhhheeeeeee!!!!!

LATER: And if they wet themselves while they're writing? The editorial wee-wee.

Previous WOTD: Crunk

Word of the Day - Bush Tourette's Syndrome

On occasion of the SOTU address, Bush Tourette's Syndrome - A phenomenon in which George Bush sends partisans into unreasoned invective.

From The Bull Moose via Michael Silence.

The vexing problem that was on full display in the Alito nomination is that the Party of Howard Dean appears completely hostage to left wing special interest groups and hyperbolic bloggers. Have the Democrats learned absolutely nothing from defeat?

There is a great need for a serious alternative to the plutocratic policies of the elephant. Right now, the donkey isn't it. The Democratic Party is [in] severe need of an intervention by a crack team of Viennese psychiatrists to treat the outbreak of Bush Tourettes Syndrome (BTS).

Once again, we are reminded of the axiom that the only force that can save the Republican Party is the Democratic Party. The GOP's popularity is plummeting and the only solace that they can derive from the current political situation is the nature of their adversaries.

See also: Bush Derangement Syndrome

Previous WOTD: Editorial We

Word of the Day: Chindogu

From the Japanese word for weird or distorted tool. A fanciful invention of questionable utility. The Wikipedia entry for Chindogu makes a useful distinction between practical inventions and chindogu. "However, Chindōgu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions, would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever. Thus, Chindōgu are sometimes described as 'unuseless' - that is, they cannot be regarded as 'useless' in an absolute sense, since they do actually solve a problem; however, in practical terms, they cannot positively be called 'useful'."

Baby Mops, found at The Urban Grind.

More examples with pictures at The Art and Philosophy of Chindogu. You may also enjoy this interview with Chindogu master Kenji Kawakami.

Previous WOTD: Bush Tourette's Syndrome

Word of the Day - Spoony

This word is so good I'm lifting it straight from Dictionary.com's word of the day.

Word of the Day for Tuesday February 14, 2006

spoony \SPOO-nee\, adjective:
1. Foolish; silly; excessively sentimental.
2. Foolishly or sentimentally in love.

Nevertheless, because we're spoony old things at heart, we like to believe that some showbiz marriages are different.
-- Julie Burchill, "Cut!," The Guardian, February 7, 2001

So when your fervor cools, you think that this suddenly familiar and lusterless partner couldn't possibly be the one you're destined to be with; otherwise you'd still be all spoony, lovey-dovey and bewitched.
-- John Dufresne, "What's So Hot About Passion?," Washington Post, February 9, 2003

We know they aren't doing it for love, otherwise it wouldn't take $50 million to sucker them into getting spoony for a construction worker.
-- "Say it isn't so 'Joe'," USA Today, December 30, 2002

Spoony is from the slang term spoon, meaning "a simpleton or a silly person."

Previous WOTD: Chindogu

Word of the Day - La Quinta

La Quinta - Spanish for "next to Denny's."

UPDATE: Wait a minute. According to the La Quinta Inn in Pensacola La Quinta actually means something completely different:

Oops. My bad.

Previous WOTD - Spoony

Word of the Day - Ohrwurm

Bob Krumm writes:

For the last two days, my daughter has been singing "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" from the musical The Sound of Music. Apparently she has to sing this song at a school event.

So how do I solve the problem of having this annoying song stuck in my head as I'm about to go off to work?

Ohrwurm- A song or tune that repeats over and over inside a person's head. (Definition from Word Spy.)

The Germans use the word Ohrwurm (rhymes with "door worm," where the "w" is pronounced like a "v") to denote these cognitively infectious musical agents. Whenever somebody complains to you that he just can't keep the latest pop tune from running through his head, tell him he can dispel it by calling it by name and by thinking about the original German meaning, which captures some of the mnemonicalli parasitical connotations of the word, for Ohrwurm literally means "ear worm" and is also used to refer to a kind of worm that can crawl into the ear. —Howard Rheingold, "Untranslatable words," The Whole Earth Review, December 22, 1987

Previous WOTD: La Quinta

Word of the Day: Captcha

From captcha.net: A captcha is a program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass, but current computer programs can't pass. For example, humans can read distorted text like that below, but current optical character recognition (OCR) computer programs have problems interpreting it:

Wikipedia gives this (presumably reverse-engineered) acronym: "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart."

By using a captcha, the site owner ensures that a human being rather than a computer program is accessing the site. The system prevents bots from automatically interacting with the system and potentially abusing it. The example below is Blogger's captcha for preventing blog comment spam.

Previous WOTD: Ohrwurm

Word of the Day: Vaccination Time Travel

Tam writes of her recent bout with the flu:

Now imagine the clock being set back eighty-eight years to 1918. Would I have had the strength to pump a well? Saddle a horse? Chop firewood? Walk to market to get food? How bad would I have felt without the over-the-counter drugs I'd already taken? Little wonder that an influenza pandemic could have such a devastating effect; it made folks too weak to do the things they needed to do to go on living. Not only that, but there are all the infections that tag along with the flu; in those pre-antibiotics days, pneumonia was as good as a death sentence.

Every now and again I'm reminded that the past may be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to get sick there.

Vaccination time travel - The idea - introduced by Douglas Copeland in his book, Generation X - that it would be great to travel into the past, but only after you've had all of your vaccinations.

And maybe if I could take some good anaesthetics. Pre-20th century surgery would bite.

Previous WOTD - Captcha

Word of the Day: Yona

Yona - A contraction of "you want to."

At least, that's the explanation my brother gave for naming his dog Yona. "Yona eat? Yona ride in the truck?"

Bonus! - Yona howling at an ambulance (11.6 MB AVI movie)

Previous WOTD - Vaccination time travel

Word of the Day: Perkitas

Perkitas - The quality of conveying lightness and sunniness. Antonym: gravitas.

Coined as far as I know by S-townMike.

Previous WOTD - Yona

Word of the Day: Salmagundi

Pinched from Dictionary.com.

1. A salad plate usually consisting of chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, and onions, served with oil and vinegar.
2. Any mixture or assortment; a medley; a potpourri; a miscellany.

And if you're a novelist, "Sal Magundi" would make a good name for a character of multiple and uncertain ancestries.

Previous WOTD - Perkitas

Bonus! - Salmagundi recipe from the BBC.

Word of the Day - Humuhumunukunukuapuaa

Via Bartleby, which has a pronunciation sound file.

NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. humuhumunukunukuapuaa or hu·mu·hu·mu·nu·ku·nu·ku·a·pu·a·as Either of two triggerfishes, Rhinecanthus aculeatus or R. rectangulus, native to the outer reefs of Hawaii, the latter having a broad black band on the side and a black triangle at the beginning of the tail.

ETYMOLOGY: Hawaiian humuhumu-nukunuku--pua'a, trigger fish with a blunt snout like a pig's : humuhumu, small trigger fish (from reduplication of Proto-Polynesian *sumu, trigger fish) + nukunuku, small snout, reduplication of nuku, snout + , like + pua'a, pig.

The fish is in the news because Hawaiian legislators are trying to renew its status as the official state fish.

Previous WOTD - Salmagundi

PS Hawaiian children fish for the humuhumunukunukuapuaa with a wooden bat in shallow water.

PPS They tell each other when to strike at the fish by murmuring "humunu humunu SWING!"

PPPS Well, OK. That's not exactly true.

PPPPS The bat is actually made of aluminum. Old timers think the aluminum bats are ruining the sport. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Bonus! - My friend Karl gave me some good advice once. If there's ever a Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit question about Hawaii's rulers, the answer is always King Kamehameha. He's apparently the only Hawaiian ruler anyone is expected to know. I think I'll pass along Karl's advice to my children on their wedding night unless I think of something better.

Word of the Day - Eastroturf

Eastroturf - The artificial grass commonly found in Easter baskets.

Via Heath Ledger, who is hilarious.

Previous WOTD - Humuhumunukunukuapuaa

Word of the Day - Typosquatter

Typosquatter - a person who registers a mis-spelled version of a domain name.

Typed too fast? Google profits from your typo:

The practice has sparked a speculative scramble to register unused names and test their ad potential. Because purchasers can change their minds within five days and avoid paying the $6 registration fee for the name, many investors enter the names in Google's ad program for a quick test and quickly drop those that don't yield enough clicks to cover the domain registration fee.

Of the 30 million dot-com names registered worldwide last month, more than 90 percent were dropped, according to domain name registrar GoDaddy.com. As a whole, the Internet has 54 million active .com and .net addresses, according to VeriSign.

Jackson said he has bought 6,600 domains and uses several ad services to earn revenue on them. "I know quite a few guys making over a million dollars a year from advertising on their domains," he said. "It's like a 24-hour money-printing machine."

I know someone in Knoxville who typosquats. He started out guessing at mis-spelled domains. Then he got scientific about it and had someone with access to a well-used DNS lookup table to collect failed domain lookups. He buys popular mis-spellings, singular/plural orphans, and correctly-spelled domains that don't exist but that people are attempting to access.

Previous WOTD - Eastroturf

Word of the Day - Retcon

Stumbled upon at Dave's Long Box, definition via Wikipedia:

Retroactive continuity – commonly contracted to the blend retcon – is the adding of new information to "historical" material, or deliberately changing previously established facts in a work of serial fiction. The change itself is referred to as a "retcon", and the act of writing and publishing a retcon is called "retconning".

Retcons are common in comic books, especially those of large publishing houses such as Marvel Comics and DC Comics, due to the lengthy history of many series and the number of independent authors contributing to their development; this is the context in which the term was coined. Retconning also occurs in TV shows, movies sequels, video games, radio series, series of novels, and can be done in any other type of episodic fiction. It is also used in roleplaying, when the game master feels it is needed to maintain consistency in the story or to fix significant mistakes that were missed during play.

Read the whole thing, which has examples from comics, film, TV, and literature.

Previous WOTD: Typosquatter

Word of the Day - Neti Pot

Neti pot - a pot used to irrigate the sinuses. From Wikipedia:

Jala neti is a yoga technique, meaning literally "water cleansing", where the practitioner rinses out the nasal cavity with water (usually salted) using a neti pot. The technique is starting to be recognized by science under the term nasal irrigation.

Jala neti, though relatively unknown to western culture, is a common practice in parts of India and other areas in south east asia, performed as routinely as using a toothbrush. It is performed daily usually the first thing in the morning with other cleansing practices. Sometimes it is done more often such as at the end of the day if you work or live in a dusty or polluted environment. When dealing with problems of congestion it can be performed up to 4 times a day and has been shown to speed up the healing process for common colds.

And from The Chicago Tribune:

Blame it on the weather--or on increased knowledge of the pots--but this year, neti pot use is on the rise. "I must have sold 100" and need to order more, said Patricia Kuehfus, the owner of Pathways Body, Mind, Spirit Shop in suburban Colonie.

Well of course neti pot use is on the rise. Duh! I mean, who could possibly resist this kind of great marketing:

You know, I have sinus problems, so this could actually help me, but if I do try it I promise not to take or post pictures of myself with a neti pot in one nostril and snot streaming out of the other.

A few years ago I saw a doctor being interviewed on television about a similar device she had supposedly developed. (It may have been SinuCleanse.) I didn't realize the underlying idea had been around so long.

Previous WOTD: Retcon

Word of the Day - Hedonic Treadmill

From Wikipedia:

Humans rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. The more possessions and accomplishments we have, the more we need to boost our level of happiness. It supposes that the brain of a species that has dominated others would evolve to strive for continual betterment.

Brickman and Campbell (1971) coined the term "Hedonic Treadmill" in an chapter in which they described the consequences of adaptation to good and bad events (Brickman, P., &Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Apley (Ed.), Adaptation level theory: A symposium (pp. 287-302). New York: Adademic Press). The theory has consequences for understanding happiness as both an individual and a societal goal.

The concept was modified by Michael Eysenck, a British psychology researcher during the late nineties, to refer to the hedonic treadmill theory which compares the pursuit of happiness to a person on a treadmill, who has to keep working just to stay in the same place.

Previous WOTD - Neti Pot

Word of the Day - Fissiparous

Merriam-Webster definition: tending to break up into parts : DIVISIVE

Via Michael Barone:

But I think we have to admit that it's hard for an opposition party to come up with an agenda and that it's particularly difficult for the Democratic Party, which throughout its history has tended to be more heterogeneous and fissiparous than the Republican Party

Previous WOTD: Hedonic treadmill

Word of the Day - Hypothesis of Collective Imprudence

John Derbyshire:

Global warming is actually an instance of the Hypothesis of Collective Imprudence. The HCI says that no large collectivity of human beings (nation-state or larger) will ever act to avert an obvious calamity until that calamity begins to cause really major, dramatic, unignorable damage. Examples abound: WW2, 9/11, etc.

I suspect that illegal immigration is another illustration of the HCI. America's Newspaper of Record this morning has a story about how easy it is to buy a fake "green card" (i.e. certification of legal permanent resident status) on the streets of New York. I have been seeing the same story for decades — 60 Minutes did one back in the early 1990s. Nothing gets done. Nothing will get done until something awful happens. Then something will get done.

Individual human beings can, and often do, act with prudence. Insurance companies would be out of business otherwise. For nations, let alone for humanity at large, acting with prudence is so much the exception rather than the rule, I can't even think of a case. Can anyone else?

I think Derbyshire's too pessimistic, but I agree in general - it's hard to get a diffuse body of people to act on a diffuse problem until something dramatic happens.

Previous WOTD - Fissiparous

Word of the Day - Internet

The Internet - Senator Ted Stevens' all-purpose noun, adjective, verb and adverb to describe the global network of TCP/IP networks, its content, and usage.

Used in a sentence: "When I Internet back onto the Internety Internet I'll Internet you an Internet Internetly." Or as Stevens put it:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.

Image via Brittney.

Previous WOTD - Hypothesis of Collective Imprudence

Word of the Day - Egoboo

Definition via Word Spy:

egoboo (EE.goh.boo) n. Recognition and praise for a task well done, particularly a task that is performed for free. Also: ego-boo.

In science-fiction-fan-speak there's a phenomenon called 'egoboo.'...It means a boost in reputation. Hackers operate in a gift economy in which giant-size egos compete with one another for attention and reputation on the Net. If you do something cool, like reduce the length of a subroutine by 50 percent, you score major egoboo.
—Mark Frauenfelder, "Man Against the FUD," LA Weekly, May 21, 1999

The word apparently came about via sci-fi fan culture as early as the 1950s to describe the motivation for people who organized fanzines, sci-fi cons, and such, but it also applies to open source programming, blogging, answering questions on message boards, and other online activities for which there's no financial renumeration.

Previous WOTD - Internet

Word of the Day - Whale Tail

From the NSFW Whale-Tail.com via the SFW File It Under:

A whale tail is the effect that happens when a girls G-string or Thong becomes exposed as she walks, bends over or squats. Actually whenever you can see that wonderful exposed thong in the shape of a whale's tail.

Related: Muffintop

Previous WOTD - Egoboo

Word of the Day - A/S/L

Brittney's post on why she's not on MySpace has the ironic title "A/S/L? R U Ready For My MANHOOD?"

I'm up on most of the Internet acronymage, but that one flew right past me. Urban Dictionary to the rescue. Turns out it's a chat thing.

Age / Sex / Location. The mating call of the barely post-pubescant teenager. Typically the male initiates this signal, as an attempt to attract a female that can give an honest reply to his liking. More often, however, the male is fooled by another male, generally much older, who will impersonate his "dream girl" for his own sick, sadistic pleasure.

Horny teenager: "A/S/L?"
50yr old bald, obese guy sitting naked at computer, scratching double chin and eating cheetos: "16/F/hopefully in your bedroom soon ;) "
Horny Teenager: "Wanna cyber?!?!"
50yr old dude: "Thought you'd never ask!!!!!"

Previous WOTD - Whale Tail

Word of the Day - Jo and Angie

Jo and Angie - Someone's parents. "Jo momma angie daddy." Coined as far as I know by my brother.

Previous WOTD - A/S/L

And I Thought Sausagefest...

was just an expression. Via the frequently not safe for work Fantasygoat.

WOTD: Ames Room

Definition from Wikipedia:

An Ames room is a distorted room that is used to create an optical illusion. It was invented by American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames, Jr. in 1946 based on a concept by Hermann Helmholtz.

An Ames room is constructed so that from the front it appears to be an ordinary cubic-shaped room, with a back wall and two side walls perpendicular to each other and perpendicular to the horizontally level floor and ceiling. However, this is a trick of perspective and the true shape of the room is trapezoidal: the walls are slanted and the ceiling and floor are at an incline, and the right corner is much closer to the front-positioned observer than the left corner (or vice versa).

As a result of the optical illusion, a person standing in one corner appears to the observer to be a giant while a person standing in the other corner appears to be a dwarf. The illusion is convincing enough that a person walking back and forth from the left corner to the right corner actually appears to be growing or shrinking.

An Ames room is depicted in the 1971 film adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Also, production of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy used several Ames room sets in Shire sequences to make the heights of the hobbits correct when standing next to Gandalf.

Previous WOTD - Jo and Angie

Bonus! - Honi phenomenon - A type of selective perceptual distortion known as the Honi phenomenon causes some married persons to perceive less size distortion of the spouse than a stranger in an Ames room.

The effect was related to the strength of love, liking, and trust of the spouse being viewed. Women who were high positive in this area perceived strangers as being more distorted than their partners. Size judgements by men did not seem to be influenced by the strength of their feeling toward their spouse. (Dion &Dion, 1976)

WOTD: Femtroopers

Femtroopers - Feminine versions of Star Wars stormtroopers, the better to hookup at DragonCon with. (See The Onion: Woman At Farscape Convention Has Dangerously Inflated Self-Image.) From the San Francisco Chronicle via Insty.

Natural environment - the hotel and/or convention center

Favorite put-down - aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?

See also:
- Non-traditional Stormtroopers
- Leia's Metal Bikini - the Greatest Web Site on the Entire Internet

P.S. - It turns out Paddlestar Galactica isn't dirty at all. Stupid canoeists.

Previous WOTD - Ames room

Bonus femtrooper pic that is vaguely dirty but work-safe!

Word of the Day - Minced Oath

From Wikipedia

A minced oath is an expression based on a profanity which has been altered to reduce or remove the disagreeable or objectionable characteristics of the original expression; for example, "gosh" used instead of "God", "darn" instead of "damn" and "heck" instead of "hell". The profanities upon which minced oaths are based are usually religious in nature. The use of minced oaths originally began in the United Kingdom sometime before the Victorian Age, as part of the cultural impact of Puritanism after the Protestant Reformation.

Based on this list of minced oaths, they aren't kidding about most of them being religious.

By George --> By God
By golly --> By God's body
By gosh --> By God
By gum --> By God
By Jove --> By God
For crying out loud --> For Christ's sake
For Pete's sake --> For St. Peter's sake
For the love of Mike --> For St. Michael's sake
Jiminy Cricket --> Jesus Christ
Judas Priest --> Jesus Christ
Jumping Jehoshaphat --> Jumping Jesus
Odds-bodkins --> God's sweet body
Sacré bleu --> Sang de Dieu (God's blood)
Suffering succotash --> Suffering Saviour
Zounds --> God's wounds

When I watched Warner Brothers cartoons I had no idea "Suffering succotash" and "Jumping Jehoshaphat" had any religious connotations.

Previous WOTD - Femtroopers

Libra Monkey Boiled Peanuts

What's Your Southern Sign? via Kit. Like Kit, I'm Boiled Peanuts.

BOILED PEANUTS (Sept 24 - Oct 23) You have a passionate desire to help your fellow man. Unfortunately, those who know you best, your friends and loved ones, may find that your personality is much too salty, and their criticism will affect you deeply because you are really much softer than you appear. You should go right ahead and marry anybody you want to because in a certain way, yours is a charmed life. On the road of life, you can be sure that people will always pull over and stop for you.

Eh. It's just as close as my Western/Chinese sign of Libra Monkey.

Bonus! - So we've all eaten at Chinese restaurants with placemats showing the Year of the Monkey, Year of the Dog, and all that. I found out from my wife that the Chinese also track months and even hours. From Wikipedia:

It is a common misconception that there are only the singular animals assigned by year. These yearly cycles represent what others perceive you as being: while a person might appear to be a Dragon they might actually be a Snake internally and an Ox secretively. Combined with 5 elements, this makes for 8460 combinations (5 elements, 12 animals, 12 months, 12 times of day). The inner animal is assigned by the month of birth. This dictates your love life and inner persona and is critical to a proper understanding of your compatibility with other signs. It may be considered what the individual wishes to become, or believes to be their true self. The secret animal is determined by exact time of birth and is your own true sign which your personality is based on. It is important to compensate for daylight savings or any clock adjustment performed by your country, as it is mapped according to the sun's location and not the local time.

These are said to be critical for the proper use of Chinese astrology. Many Western displays of the Chinese zodiac omit these, as well as the elements, for easier consumption and understanding.

Word of the Day: Hasselhoffing

Stolen from Urban Dictionary:

December 09, 2006: Hasselhoffing

The act of changing a colleague's desktop wallpaper to display the manly physique of David Hasselhoff.

And if you need a Hasselhoff picture, it's hard to beat Flashfelhoff.

Previous WOTD - minced oath

Word of the Day: Robot Culinaire

VINCENT: You know what the funniest thing about Europe is?
JULES: What?
VINCENT: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it's just, it's just theirs is a little different
JULES: Example.
VINCENT: You know what they call a 7 cup food processor in Paris?
JULES: They don't call it a 7 cup food processor?
VINCENT: Nah man they got the metric system. And the French language. They wouldn't know what the fuck a 7 cup food processor is.
JULES: Then what do they call it?
VINCENT: They call it a 1.7 Liter Robot Culinaire.
JULES: A 1.7 Liter Robot Culinaire?
VINCENT: That's right.
JULES: (laughs) What do they call a Whopper?
VINCENT: I don't know. I didn't go into Burger King.

Previous WOTD - Hasselhoffing

Words of the Day - Zeitgeist and Eponymous

From the Dilbert Blog's Acting Smarter Than You Are:

It’s also good to know a few brainy words that only appear in high-end publications. The two words you need most are zeitgeist and eponymous. I try to drop one of those two intellectual turds into conversations as often as possible. If you use those words with confidence, people will naturally assume you know lots of other big words.

eponymous - The dictionary definitions I found didn't make any sense, so I won't link them. Eponymous means that the name is the same. The name of Led Zeppelin's first album is Led Zeppelin. REM had an album called "Eponymous" but since it wasn't called "REM" it wasn't really eponymous. That's Michael Stipe's idea of a joke, anyway.

zeitgeist - "the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time," says Dicionary.com, and that's a decent definition.Pronounced with two long i sounds. It's a German word, and typically when you see e and i together in German you pronounce whichever comes second. And there's Google Zeitgeist that keeps track of topical searches.

There you go. You are officially smart. You may now pick up your ThD (Doctorate of Thinkology).

Previous WOTD - Robot Culinaire

Word of the Day: Reuleaux Triangle

A mathematical definition here, and here's a more readable one:

A Reuleaux polygon is a polygon that is a curve of constant width - that is, a curve in which all diameters are the same length. The best-known version is the Reuleaux triangle. Both are named after Franz Reuleaux, a 19th-century German engineer who did pioneering work on ways that machines translate one type of motion into another, although it was known before his time.

The Reuleaux triangle is the simplest nontrivial example of a curve of constant width - a curve in which the distance between two opposite parallel tangent lines to its boundary is the same, regardless of the direction of those two parallel lines. (The trivial example would be a circle.)

This is how you can draw the triangle:

One reason it's interesting is that a drill bit constructed in the shape of an offset Reuleaux triangle can bore a square hole:

Other interesting properties (from Wikipedia):

• Because all of its diameters are the same length, the Reuleaux triangle - actually, all Reuleaux polygons - is the answer to the Mensa-like question "Other than as a circle, what shape can you make a manhole cover so that it cannot fall down through the hole?"
• The rotor of the Wankel engine is a Reuleaux triangle.

Hat tip to Grant Cunningham.

Previous WOTD - Zeitgeist and Eponymous

Word of the Day - Dysgeusia

Combing through my unfinished 2006 blog posts I found this excellent word from SayUncle:

Since I’m no longer smoking, I’m experiencing Dysgeusia, which means that my sense of taste is changing. Dysgeusia can be caused as a side effect of the medication Chantix (which I am taking and recommend for quitting smoking) and as a result of quitting smoking in general.

According to that second link it's pronounced "dis-GOOZ-ee-a."

Previous WOTD - Reuleaux Triangle

Word of the Day - Baumol’s Cost Disease

Here's a simple example from Wikipedia:

Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. The original study was conducted for the performing arts sector. Baumol and Bowen pointed out that the same number of musicians are needed to play a Beethoven string quartet today as were needed in the 1800's; that is, the productivity of Classical music performance has not increased.

In a range of businesses, such as the car manufacturing sector and the retail sector, workers are continually getting more productive due to technological innovations to their tools and equipment. In contrast, in some labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on human interaction or activities, such as nursing, education, or the performing arts there is little or no growth in productivity over time. As with the string quartet example, it takes nurses the same amount of time to change a bandage, or college professors the same amount of time to mark an essay, in 2006 as it did in 1966.

Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive and have a limited desirable provider-customer ratio, there is little growth in productivity over time. As a result, the costs of the bureaucracy will inflate quicker than the growth in the GDP.

From The New Yorker:

There are really two American economies: one that’s getting more productive and one that’s not. In the first—the economy of Dell, Toyota, and Wal-Mart—consumers have grown accustomed to paying less for more. In the second—the economy of Harvard, the Yankees, and Bob’s Body Shop—they pay more for the same. The first economy has policymakers worried about deflation. The second has consumers worried about paying their bills.

Cost disease isn’t anyone’s fault. (That’s why it’s called a disease.) It’s just endemic to businesses that are labor-intensive. Colleges, for example, could do many things more efficiently, but, since their biggest expense is labor, the only way to reduce costs is either to increase the number of students each professor teaches or to outsource the work to poorly paid adjuncts. The same goes for health care: you can control drug costs and limit expensive new procedures, but, when it comes to, say, hospital care and doctor visits, the only way to improve productivity is to shrink the size of the staff and have doctors spend less time with patients (or treat several patients at once). Thus the Hobson’s choice: to lower prices you have to lower quality.

Interesting. It seems that it's the very sectors of the economy - such as education and healthcare - where government is being asked to step in that are the very ones vulnerable to Baumol's cost disease. And once government steps in to subsidize it, the prices are going nowhere but up - as the cost decreases due to subsidy, the utilization and demand increases. (Demand doesn't really increase, because there's more or less unlimited demand for education and healthcare, but effective demand increases.)

It's well-known that healthcare costs and edcuation costs are rising faster than the rate of overall inflation. Is that simply a function of Baumol's cost disease, or is it caused by government subsidy, or some of both? I don't know the answer, but in either case it may suggest limits on government intervention. In the latter case, subsidy creates demand, and in the former case government is attempting to solve a problem that is to some degree insoluble. Or am I reading this wrong? Tell me in comments.

See also:
- Why Are U.S. Healthcare Costs So High?

Previous WOTD - Dysgeusia

Word of the Day: Plurale Tantum

From Wikipedia:

A plurale tantum (plural: pluralia tantum) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant, though it may still refer to one or many of the object it names. Many languages have pluralia tantum, such as the English words "scissors" and "pants".

The converse term, for a noun which appears only in the singular, is singulare tantum (plural: singularia tantum), for example the English word "dust".

Previous WOTD: Baumol's Cost Disease

Word of the Day: Pseudomamma

Pseudomamma - a false nipple.

On physical examination, the breasts were symmetrical having no nodes or retractions. In the plantar region of the patient's left foot, there was a well-formed nipple was surrounded by areola and hair on the surface, measuring 4.0 cm in diameter, with no palpable nodes. The remaining physical examination was normal, including the mammary line.

Hat tip to jwz.

Previous WOTD - Plurale Tantum

Word of the Day: Theomachy

I used "theomachy" in a post this morning, so it's a good time to have it as the WOTD.

One online source defines theomachy as "Strife or battle among gods, as in the Homeric poems." That definition is expanded on in the Wikipedia entry.

I've also seen theomachy used to describe unseen forces and struggles in general, and in particular forces that explain overarching behaviour - Darwin's natural selection, Dawkins' selfish gene, Marx's class warfare, or Smith's invisible hand of competition.

Previous WOTD - Pseudomamma