Words & Phrases, 2016

Every time I come across an interesting word or phrase, I add it to a yearly list. I tried making a poem using this one last year.

• Pointless cacophony 
• Buddha of subterranean impulses 
• Métro, boulot, dodo — commute, work, sleep 
• rossignol, French cryptographers whose name became French slang for a device that picks locks. 
• cynegetic tendencies
• Viktor Tausk’s Influence Machine 
• ghetto for grinds
• panjandrum, someone claiming clout
• werewolves wearing shoulder straps 
• Rhetorica ad Herennium 
• bête noir 
• sanctum sanctorum 
• stochastic,  random
• omotenashi, humble customer service
• Scrotum-faced carnival barker 
• akoisexual identity, feelings of love disappear when reciprocated.
• facies hermeticae, hidden faces
• factual Laocoön – priest that warned of Trojan horse and was killed
• fourfold vision
• chupacabra – fictional goat sucker
• mind-forged manacles
• Rube Goldberg machine – unnecessarily complicated 
• An American without an opinion
• Temples of tears 
• Overton window 
• gems from the matrix 
• Raspberry jam delta v 
• Cattywampus, not centered 
• Gish Gallop – spewing bullshit faster than it can be refuted 
• aware karada, learning through physically doing
• Albert Luke’s magical bracelet 
• Kraken Mare, sea of hydrocarbons
• 52 hertz whale
• Lojban – unambiguous logical language 
• inconsistently applied crypto-Saxonist jargon
• sciolism – superficial show of learning
• bube meyseh, old wives’ tale
• shtarker, muscleman
• seykhl, sense
• meshuge, crazy
• money based caste system
• Disdyakis tricontahedron – 120 sided dice
• between 40 and Ω
• Aleatory uncertainty, unknowable 
• bafflegab
• illusion of hindsight
• Auftragstaktik, goal but no how
• WYSIATI— What You See Is All There Is
• stumblebum
• “kto, kogo?” That literally means “who, whom” and it was Lenin’s shorthand for “Who does what to whom?”
• Forgotten arm, boxing term, “It’s the hit you didn’t see coming.”
• Rucksack revolution, Kerouac 
• Flâneur – loafer 
• Carne por la machina, meat for the machine
• Buona morte, good death
• glossolalia, speaking unknown language 
• half-humps
• overwatch
• smells like hobo feet
• Candango – a man without qualities, vagabond 
• Dark monarchy 
• Load of chancers in my lobby
• Kodokushi, lonely death
• solastalgia, comfort/pain, place loved is changing for worse 
• Fuzziness – protocol of throwing a process at a program to check for error 
• selfies, not selves
• the hardest man on the cobbles
• queasy quadroonerie of essentialism
• mollycoddled
• Generation Snowflake 
• hornean, voodoo priest
• shared paranoias
• closed ideology echo chamber
• Hare brained, the rule here is, we do whatever the fuck we want
• Charvaka, rejected any idea of God and the existence of any soul or afterlife.
• Semden – Tibetan for sentient being
• Kunga Dhondup – nickname for money
• Weltschmerz – physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind
• lojong – mind training 
• carceral state
• Antikythera Mechanism
• desiderata
• boojum
• Kemmerich gradient 
• Gruen Transfer
• Pomgolians 
• Kugelblitz, ball lightening 
• Orbers’ Paradox: if there are infinite stars, why isn’t the night sky as bright as the sun? 
• Ophiuchus: 13th sign of the zodiac 
• Radio Rental, insane
• Pratfall Effect, competent people more likable after failure 
• schadenfreude: pleasure from misfortune of others. 
• Hortus Delicarium, first encyclopedia by a woman
• neltiliztli: Aztec for rootedness, truth and goodness
• Sicario: Jewish killers who hunted the Romans who invaded their homeland. In Mexico, it means hitman. 
• cucuy: Mexician boogeyman
• aphakia: missing lens of the eye
• kakistocracy: government by the worst people
• Jára da Cimrman: underdog hero of Czechs.
• Mean World Syndrome
• El zorrilo no huele a si mismo. The skunk does not smell himself.
• I may be cheap, but I ain’t easy.
• Thomassons: architectural relics maintain despite being useless
• rathskeller
• kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material
• Hottel memo: The FBI’s most viewed file details the account of an Air Force officer recovering three flying saucers in New Mexico in 1950.
• reinigungskrise, cleaning crisis
• quantitative illusion
• authoritarian deliberation
• hektemorage, serfdom
• pachinko
• hygge, coziness of the soul
• Alban Arthuan, old name for winter solstices