Words & Phrases, 2017

Every time I come across an interesting word or phrase, I add it to a yearly list.

• tsundoku, leaving a book you bought unread
• cotisuelto, man who insists on leaving his shirt untucked
• iktsuarpok, repeatingly going outside to check if anyone is coming
• trepverter, perfect retort that comes to you later
• longueurs, dull and tedious, usually plural 
• Rahula, hindrance
• ikigai, Japanese technique for finding your purpose in life via four questions: 1. What do you love? What are you good at?What does the world need from you? What can you get paid for?
• ptomaine, nitrous substance from putrid protein
• heterotopias —  the production of shared spaces of ‘otherness’ through the disruption of the usual conventions
• Lebensreform — life reform
• technicians of midcult — creativity in the service of dominate ideologies, e.g., journalists, graphic designers, etc.
• paralipsis – a way to make an accusation or spread a rumor while skirting the consequences
• bergerie: shepherd’s cottages
• mishegoss: crazy, silliness
• two-dimensional ersatz dashboard Jesus
• 4Ds: dismiss, distort, distract, dismay
• Nijinsky of dreams, famous dancer
• gjakmarrja, Albanian revenge killing
• maskirovka, camouflage 
• taranoa, watch me carefully
• hxaro partnerships, gift giving relationships
• acephalous, no formal heirarchy / governance 
• witvoets, white foots
• sonzai-kan, the human presence 
• non-places, Marc Augé
• a little hiccup in the psychospace of reality
• A hedged freedom
• The freedom of desolation
• Useless people on useless land
• Praise also the light and creation unfinished
• egoizing
• subvising, supervising from below
• interverify
• maquiladoras, Mexican factories
• runcible, fit for multiple purposes
• exploration of the possible
• refuseniks
• dostadning, death cleaning
• dim, desperate, or drunk
• London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial
• taphophobia, the overwhelming fear of being buried alive.
• Es tut mir sehr leid, it brings me great pain in German, also very sorry
• monks and drunks
• Ad Aster Per Alia Porci, To the stars on the wings of a pig
• animal laborans, a laboring beast
• zoi se mas, life to us
• arrière-boutique, room behind the shop
• parrēsía — to be outspoken
• silphium, lost classical herb
• okaeri nasai, welcome home
• Lover of the Strange
• Sympathizer of the Rude
• Barbarianologist of the Farthest Peripheries
• cryptids, mythical creatures
• homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man
• peripatetic, walking, Aristotelianism
• homo mimeticus
• Magen veLo Yera’e –  Unseen Defender
• prosaism 
• sannyasins / sannyasa: 4th stage of life
• Polanyi’s Paradox, we know more than we can say, which in modern times has morphed into the question of whether humans can maintain advantages over machines
• dysphemistic, substituting a disagreeable term for an agreeable term — fired rather than “let go”
• Malveillance, bad surveillance — a term with already bad connotations
• Dyson sphere, solar tech encapsulating a sun to power advanced civilizations
• Matrioshka brain, an artificial intelligence or computational framework powered by a Dyson sphere
• Yuppies Afuera (Spanish for “outside”)
• moishe kapoyr, oppositional 
• Zos Kia Cultus, chaos magician pre-cursor 
• nocebo effect, where negative expectations can start a chain of harmful events which ultimately fulfill those expectations
• colpo d’aria, a hit of air 
• apophenia, meaning in randomness
• budgerigar, parakeet 
• Guelo, my dad’s dad
• kodokushi, lonely death
• death doula
• etiolated, to make white and sickly, esp. plants without sun
• Todos somos hijos de la tierra: we are all children of the earth.
• cabrón: “bastard” or “dumbass”
• pinche / chingada: “fuck”
• To’on Na’atik means “We understand each other” in Mayan
• τόκος, ancient Greek, usury/offspring
• Gadji beri bimba, Dada poem of Hugo Ball with sound patterns rather than meaning. He lived to ” “to remind the world that there are people of independent minds – beyond war and nationalism – who live for different ideals.”
• maenads, female Greek followers of Dionysus 
• Verfremdungseffekt, “alienation effect”
• stamukha, grounded accumulation of sea ice
• Lyapunov function, differential equation used to evaluate stability
• residual runoff of human desire 
• Unblessed with beauty
• No hay que confundir la velocidad con el tocino, do not confuse speed with bacon
• virus in the system
• Okhrana, secret agents of the czar
• shtetl, a small town with a large Jewish population that used to be in Europe prior to the Holocaust.
• kyriarchy, social system based on domination, oppression, and submission
• nepreryvka, continuous work week
• presentational self
• chemolithoautotrophic, organisms that obtain necessary carbon for metabolism from bedrock
• aperçu, glimpse, clever insight, outline,  general idea
• lumpen digitariat, common users, digital underclass
• Ithaa means “mother of pearl”
• kanko oto—”call and response”
• shisa kanko, point and call
• déjà vecu, feeling you’ve been in a situation you haven’t
• Déjà visité, feeling you have been somewhere you have not been
• kaze no denwa, or “phone of the wind”
• Demographic of the dumb
• There’s no way to freedom but through freedom.
• Eudaimonia – well-daemoned 
• It takes a village to produce a village idiot.
• anam cara: soul friend, Celtic
• Non Sanz Droit, not without right, Shakespeare motto on heraldic crest
• lumpenproletariat: criminal underclass
• Closed Cell Restricted: solitary in Angola prison
• “W.W.T.P.D.”—What would the Panthers do? 
• stigmergically, consensus social mechanism
• Prince Rupert’s drop, toughened glass beads
• Arecibo message, 1974 interstellar radio message with basicinformation about Earth
• groupuscules, a small political group, particularly of radicals
• chode, penis wider than it is long
• Weltanschauung, worldview
• ponyatiya, unwritten rule, things that are understood. 
• Travail, opium unique
• Anodyne, drug to lessen pain
• inchoate, early stages 
• Elmer Gantry, character in Sinclair Lewis novel parodying evangelical Christianity 
• John Frum, figure associated with cargo cults
• Turducken, deboned chicken stuffed into deboned duck stuffed into deboned turkey
• Bratsky Krug, circle of brothers
• Bespredel, chaos
• Farb, historically inaccurate 
• capillary electrophoresis: detecting extra terrestrial life
• apocalypticist
• a debate without data
• hipoisie, hipsterdom
• zoi se mas, life to us
• ni bheidh a leitheid ann aris: His likes will not be here again. 
• Fionn Mac Cumhaill, a.k.a., Finn McCool
• Benandonner, giant
• high place phenomenon
• Stomata ga nai, “it cannot be helped”
• Pero mi existir es resistir. My existence is resistence.
• Per aspera ad astra, “through hardships to the stars.”
• Managed democracy
• …anyone who’s gone out of sane consciousness knows that a door once opened is never satisfactorily shut.