Tag: English

Words & Phrases, 2022

~ cafebedouin
  • no fixed address, homeless
  • asphodel, Greek land of the dead
  • bioreactor meat
  • food’s comforting inner cuddle
  • pay-triots, money-grubbing grifters exploiting a nationalist cause
  • the death of nuance
  • axolotls, Mexican salamander
  • mononymous
  • moral holiday
  • the holiday from history
  • call of the void, wanting to jump from a high place, hit a guard rail
  • det stora oväsendet, “The Great Noise”, witch trials in Sweden
  • metaworse
  • defecation on doorsteps
  • digital context collapse
  • torment nexus, propose a new technology and people will go to great lengths to create it
  • X accelerationism, or the belief that mainstream industries can be pressured or provoked into adopting X as a way to protect their assets from being ripped off by people coopting their IP for X
  • full recluse and cottagecore
  • …a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses
  • COVID Casablanca
  • the election of the unfavorables
  • the dark throat of seeds
  • tourist investors
  • a little whalesong in the yoga studio
  • incipient knuckleheadism
  • dorveille, or wakesleep
  • HVEs, homegrown violent extremists.
  • DVEs, domestic violent extremists
  • songlines, divine pathways
  • Metamates
  • behavioral activation, the theory that your actions can influence your mood
  • bitter-enders, people who sit all the way through the credits of movies
  • crystallized in your chrysalis.
  • definitional collapse
  • anticipatory self-censorship
  • res ipsa loquitur, negligence can be determined from the nature of the injury in the absence of direct evidence
  • Debts to be paid: once for a simple trade, twice for free-given aid, and thrice for the insult made.
  • pluralistic ignorance, something no one believes, but everyone thinks that the vast majority believes
  • shitpost diplomacy
  • the fandomification of global conflict
  • geometric progression
  • riding-crop belief
  • the faces at the bottom of the well
  • a different slice off the same loaf
  • an endless chain of half-built houses
  • ambisextrous
  • a digital iron curtain
  • signs in the sewage
  • the stone that stirs the avalanche
  • cyberapocalypse
  • a personalist regime
  • the opportunity set, like the Overton window but for opportunity
  • convergent evolution
  • context collapse
  • revanchism, from the French, revenge
  • a dog’s breakfast of contradictions
  • a meaningless farrago of fragments
  • a hard school of danger
  • writing in a language that is at the corners of change
  • an arc of implication
  • cowboy economics: driven by the spirit of the limitless frontier, where we shoot (or drill) first and ask about consequences later
  • Risk cannot be destroyed, it can only be shifted through time and redistributed in form.—Christopher Cole
  • algospeak, changing the words you’re using the circumvent automated platform censorship
  • technowashing, the growing obsession with technological solutions to climate change
  • a dead link, a sign of ruin in an otherwise living space
  • Jammern auf hohem Niveau, high level whining
  • phlogiston, a hypothetical substance once believed to be present in all combustible materials and to be released during burning
  • prelude to the poop
  • the agency of the virtual, that which acts without physically existing
  • рашизм, “ruscism” or Russian fascism
  • jerk-light internet
  • left of launch, peripheral processes before things happen
  • right of launch, is addressing the present
  • hipshitical
  • blasts of complete batshittery
  • the wealthy, the pale and the male
  • endless struggle sessions
  • te voya decir la neta, let me give the truth to you straight
  • farkakte, Yiddish for covered in excrement
  • Mamahuhu, literally horse-horse, tiger-tiger in Chinese but means careless person or so-so.
  • a man of desires and grudges
  • buzzsaw of fandom
  • The devil wears Pravda
  • wicing, Old English for pirate
  • almost a Belter—antisocial, independent and intolerant
  • a kind of beautiful madness
  • bagualu, alchemist’s pot
  • Zeitenwende, end of an era
  • cyborg locust brains
  • Incertus, not sure of himself
  • ungatz, nothing
  • timeless turtle
  • grizzled geezers
  • The reality of the naive
  • metastasizing mind worms
  • ceteris paribus, all things being equal
  • pareidolia, assigning meaning to seemingly random patterns
  • siloviki, Russian literally people of force
  • No hoper
  • a Barbie that burped
  • [pills] a thousand tiny promises
  • Lashes to ashes. Bust to dust.
  • mingle-mangle
  • damned by dollars
  • epistemically foraging
  • umwelt, the perspective of the world and environment unique to a particular organism
  • mahraganat—meaning festivals, a style of music in Egypt
  • getihu, Chinese, individual businesses or sole proprietorships
  • eucatastrophe, Tolkien, the crash of good fortune.
  • subterranean secrets
  • lingxiu, Chinese, leader
  • deli bal, Turkish, mad honey
  • honey hunter
  • a black hole of charisma
  • dickle, dill pickle
  • forget-me-nazis
  • crypto-coven
  • KTLO, Keep The Lights On
  • plein, French, full
  • chicken of the underpass, rats
  • incel retirement community
  • asabiyyah, group consciousness or solidarity
  • counterelite, a heresiarch
  • Kalb al-Akrab, the heart of the scorpion
  • autoptic, based on one’s own observation
  • involution, reduction in size, increased complexity
  • eudaimonia, well-daemoned
  • ankang, Chinese, police-run psychiatric hospitals
  • proliferating varieties of absence
  • bezzle, when prices rise faster than real value.—paraphrasing John Kenneth Galbraith 
  • paralysed by choice
  • baizuo, woke educated liberal
  • legal cynicism, losing confidence in police leads people to resolve conflicts through their own means
  • abattoir, slaughterhoise
  • roué, debauched old man
  • wantrepreneurs
  • China’s final warning, when China warned Russia many times about the Taiwan Straight
  • graveyard of stars
  • Sokushinbutsu, living mummification
  • opportunity neglect, a tendency to reject opportunities with low probability of success even when they come with little or no objective cost (e.g., time, money, reputation)
  • dullahan, or gan ceann, Irish, a headless fairy carrying a swollen, greenish head with large eyes under one arm, and rides a black horse.
  • twindemic, flu and COVID-19
  • narrative creation overdrive
  • crosswalk cock
  • chumbox
  • kaiju eiga, monster-movie
  • inceligence
  • fertig lustig, ready/finalized and funny
  • ихтамнеты, in Russian, they are not there
  • fail whale
  • errorphants
  • randy reindeer
  • kurashi, hygge
  • vaca flaca, skinny cow, hunger times
  • shiterative
  • algospeak — vocabulary meant to skirt content moderation
  • Orang-Pedek, Indonesian, short person
  • wodewose, huge hairy wild men
  • Eyedropper of gravy
  • Less than mediocre
  • kalsarikännit, Finnish, pantsdrinking, drinking in underwear
  • feces thesis
  • JAG, Just A Guy, average
  • turd bird
  • Quintero, town in Chile that makes concrete and is so polluted it is called the sacrifice zone
  • peregrinations, wandering to different countries
  • Iblis, a Muslim name for the devil
  • VVVVVV, Vilket Var Vad Vi Ville Visa, roughly “Which was what we wanted to show” in Swedish
  • полный пиздец, Russian,completely fucked up
  • apanthropy: the desire to be away from other people.
  • sympathy grift
  • the daily death march of sorrow
  • ideology over evidence
  • melon felons
  • pyramid of skulls
  • anomaly cluster

Words & Phrases, 2021

~ cafebedouin
  • disaster voyeurism
  • Stakhanovites, model workers who produced higher than expectations
  • university, a synthesis of two words: “unity” and “diversity.”
  • collimination, adjusting the line of sight of a telescope
  • muhaha, evil laugh
  • Isekai, an anime genre of going to another world and having adventures
  • Zugzwang, worse position than if opponent’s turn to play
  • (R)azi Party, portmanteau of (R) Republican and Nazi Party
  • mad-eyed, staring at the undreamt thing
  • cronyism and connections
  • heart heat, emotional turmoil
  • grief’s lonely algorithm
  • manslipping — about the tendency of men to let their masks fall below their noses 
  • invincible ignorance
  • A far-right propaganda machine built atop a gaslight factory
  • enormous faff
  • the American nightmare of overpromise and underdelivery
  • slaved and saved for nothing
  • transmedia information war propping up a popularity contest for strongmen
  • Pandejos
  • Tempus Fugit, time flies.—Virgil
  • hover to discover
  • a self-motivated lickspittle
  • head-canon, the canon in your head that isn’t canon
  • Hungerstein, hunger stone
  • Gangster capitalism, unnecessary adjective?
  • gazing into the void of self-creation
  • runch, running lunch
  • future dreamscape
  • byzantine shitshow
  • mazuma, money
  • reflexivity, the feedback loop by which expectations or desires can shape reality
  • friya, free and beloved
  • niksen, the art of doing nothing
  • ground truth, might have origins in maps
  • gray bar motel, jail
  • subs or dubs, subtitles or …
  • economical with the actualité
  • data void
  • herd of independent minds
  • inscape plan, turning inward to find salvation
  • global weirdness
  • endless melting-snowflake background
  • agnotology, the academic study of ignorance
  • The Slenderman of cocktails
  • vetocracies, when too many actors have veto rights
  • Jimoto, japanese for “local area”
  • pernicious convergence, all roads lead to Rome
  • paroxysms of junkie violence
  • crumb de la crumb
  • symbiosis, from the Greek for “together” and “living.”
  • screechy and preachy
  • content cop providing free moderation labor
  • , αἰσθητής (aisthētḗs), one who perceives
  • reality testing
  • Transformation through Education program
  • howling cognitive vacuum
  • Dīwān, “record,” “compendium,” “collected works
  • America’s spiritual sewers
  • mise en abyme, a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence
  • hegemonic anxiety, the fear of losing global dominance.
  • pain lost in translation
  • petro-masculinity
  • wishful worries
  • ossan, rude Japanese word for middle-aged dudes
  • O.H. Krill, original hostage, alien’s name, part of UFO conspiracy lore
  • nooshijoon, Farsi, may it nourish your soul
  • full of LinkedIn hustle-goblins
  • quantum foam
  • sewer stories, where truth and false doesn’t apply
  • wokescolds
  • hysteresis effect, an event that happens whose effects continue after the event
  • a never-ending assembly line of death
  • psephologist, pollster?
  • shtum, British slang for silent
  • decorative statistics
  • Sisyphus spinning the wheels of a perpetual-motion Peloton
  • neijuan, Chinese, involution is the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless
  • Genizah — Hebrew meaning “to hide or put away” — refers to a storage place in a synagogue or a cemetery where old Jewish books go to die
  • occhiolino or little eye, Galileo’s word for microscope
  • hidden curriculum refers to the set of social norms and skills that autistic people have to learn explicitly, but that neurotypical people learn automatically
  • Degenerate gambler and chance king
  • Russlandversteher, a derogatory term for people who take a soft stance on Vladimir Putin’s Russia
  • chyron, a caption superimposed over usually the lower part of a video image (as during a news broadcast)
  • a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline
  • Omne Ignotum Pro Mirifico; Wonderful, Because Mysterious.
  • Cirque du Subway
  • Smokey, sweet nuts
  • Scariants, scary variant portmanteau
  • low return world
  • paperback shaman
  • a counter-syllabus
  • fantasy cults
  • assabiya, group cohesion or solidarity
  • panopticoin
  • the human built world
  • death lottery
  • vetocracy, a system defined by how easy it is, and how many ways there are, to block action.
  • tangping (躺平) = Internet buzzword that refers to the choice of young people choosing to stop working overtime and rebel against overly competitive society.
  • silverback MD
  • mayhem man
  • a creeping charla­tanism
  • bucolic dystopia, impoverished and rundown
  • No pole fisherman; if you don’t fish ’em, you don’t eat ’em.
  • homo mimeticus
  • performative assholery
  • loosely connected, incoherent mishmash of militants, grifters, and attention merchants
  • thugs dam, in Tibetan, is an honorific meaning one engaged in meditation, applied to the dead
  • entropocene, an era of larger, quicker, less predictable, non-linear change
  • freaking in, freaking out on the inside
  • a dim, electrified jejunum
  • a cipher of misinformation and malaise
  • poop on the porch
  • Sideshadowing: unsettles simple causal explanations of human events, reminding us that what actually takes place is always one of numerous possibilities that could have occurred.
  • pace hurtling gravewards
  • tedious memoryhole preamble
  • Proustian signifier
  • Wu-wei (無為), literally translated as ‘no trying’ or ‘no doing’, but best translated as ‘effortless action’ or ‘spontaneous action’.
  • lifequakes
  • fatally tangled
  • ukeireru, acceptance (of who you are, what you do and what society does to you)
  • necessary surgery long put off
  • malinformation — facts taken out of context to support a false narrative
  • supermediated psychoscapes
  • ten percent world, what remains after people are done with it
  • Utopian dreams commingled with nightmares of terrible ruin.
  • quantum extremal surface
  • asymmetry (or convexity) of payoffs
  • an assortment of cranks and kooks
  • sheng nu, leftover women in Chinese
  • sphincter factor
  • our poisonous effluent
  • papier-mâché Mephistopheles
  • mukbang, eating broadcast
  • poop splash
  • chutney and cheese
  • buyout barons
  • globaloney
  • muddled median
  • crepuscular corners
  • a moral panic in search of an audience
  • agent of refusal
  • escalator to extinction
  • dark bargain
  • liangmianren, or two-faced people
  • kintsugi, treating breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
  • punctuated equilibrium
  • the marrow of the medium
  • wakanyeja, Lakota for the child is also holy
  • generated incapacities
  • Compersion is our wholehearted participation in the happiness of others.
  • expensive, interlocking failure
  • a liability bomb
  • the NPR set
  • ride new waves of ruin
  • Bentoism, BEyond Near Term Orientation
  • technosignatures
  • semi-irl Gen X boomerpost
  • future fascist fashion
  • a break in continuity
  • pushed up to the very edge of apocalypse
  • avoid the pyramiding catastrophe
  • horrorshows of humanity
  • micro-consumerist bollocks
  • limitarianism
  • fatal hatchouts
  • postprandial
  • a dorm room pass-the-bong puzzler
  • captivity of childhood
  • tatterdemalion
  • surface gravity
  • anger outlaw
  • the freedom of a shimmering anonymity
  • ludic element
  • isomer, mirror image, like hands
  • niugui sheshen, 牛鬼蛇神, evil monsters, bad political actors
  • desirable difficulties
  • Big Meat
  • Rush hour Rambo
  • heladeros, ice cream maker

Words & Phrases, 2020

~ cafebedouin
  • diktats, a harsh punishment unilaterally imposed
  • griot, West African storyteller
  • amanuensis, transcriptionist
  • Anholt cultu
  • violent entertainment of context collapse
  • fissiparous, an organism is one that produces new individuals by fission/splitting
  • wegan diet, a vegan diet modified to include only wild-harvested meats
  • axis of assholes
  • slow-rolled
  • TTP, techniques, tactics and procedures
  • Moonlight Maze, Russian cyberattack on DoD in 1990s
  • semiotarchy, tyranny of signs
  • kenopsia, eerie feeling when you are the only one in a building
  • reality resetters
  • Weltschmerz, world pain
  • sprooks, spies and crooks
  • keening, public lamentation for the dead
  • LARPing, live action role playing
  • hustlers masquerading as philosophers
  • an alien in a trench coat of normalcy
  • Cultural defense warrior
  • Uncle Sid, the Buddha
  • Groypers, Gen Z Christian fundamentalist white nationalists
  • Stultus est sicut stultus facit, stupid is as stupid does
  • wu de, martial virtue
  • bathos, an anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial
  • the freaky rich and their courtiers
  • shipaggedon
  • new cangaço, bandit in Brazil
  • micromort, one-in-a-million chance of death
  • Bric-à-brac
  • the straw that stirred the drink
  • learn to man the fry cooker
  • Herrenvolk, “master race” 
  • the firehose of falsehood
  • bourse, stock exchange
  • hyperfuturist
  • beinhaus, bone house, bird house of a human skull
  • nocebo, something making you ill because you expectmit to
  • oikeiôsis, something belonging to oneself
  • phantom urban topology
  • antimetabole vs. chiasmus
  • Coup Clutz Clan
  • tsujigiri, crossroads killing
  • fakokta, fucked up in Yiddish
  • criminally ignorant
  • surplus to requirements
  • symbrachydactyly, limb difference
  • reshook, past tense of reshake
  • Jantelagen, energy to ignore the fame of a famous person
  • recreational fear
  • solfeggio frequencies
  • Münchhausen Trilemma, more proof: circular, regressive, or dogmatic
  • boojahideen or booj
  • tribalism trap
  • poisonous creature comforts
  • the intimacy of scrutiny
  • gemba, closest to the decision makes the decision, Toyota
  • mouneh, Lebanese pickle
  • deficit of wonder
  • 臭いものに蓋 (kusai-mono-ni-futa). Its literal meaning is “to cover what stinks”. Its figurative meaning is to look the other way or hush up a problem
  • semantic satiation, using a word to the point it loses its meaning
  • 尻拭い (shiri-nugui). The literal meaning is “ass-wiping”, but the figurative meaning is to clean up somebody’s else mess
  • 自業自得 (jigou-jitoku): Reap what you sow
  • post-truth freak flags
  • dazibaos, a wall mounted newspaper, a form of protest
  • quacksalvery
  • the dark abyss of stochasticity
  • Kaupapa, (Māori, or te reo), kaupapa means principles and ideas which act as a base or foundation for action. A kaupapa is a set of values, principles and plans which people have agreed on as a foundation for their actions
  • xenoarchaeologist, someone who studies alien civilizations
  • homoiconic, same structures for data and code
  • Technologiefolgekostenabschätzung, literally technology follow-up cost assessment
  • misophonics, extreme aversion to certain noises
  • Callipygian, having shapely or beautiful buttocks
  • yauh peng, yauh leng, both inexpensive and beautiful
  • isegoria, it’s all just opinions, all speech is equal
  • parrhesia, candid speech that may require an apology
  • 報復性熬夜, revenge bedtime procrastination or not going to bed to reclaim free time
  • nerdquarium
  • dalits, broken people
  • acedia, no longer caring about caring
  • adult pacifer
  • weenie wagger
  • crèche question
  • kulturkampf
  • kalos kai agathos
  • sluggish, sclerotic and stupid
  • topoi, commonplace book of classical rhetoric
  • productive uncertainty
  • rusted chrome of yestermorrow
  • rock of righteousness
  • Shitness protection program
  • apophatic, God is known be what She is not
  • ceteris paribus, other things being equal
  • eco-Taliban
  • jouhatsu, people who disappear and continue to conceal their whereabouts for years, means evaporation
  • emblematic high priests of critical uncertainty
  • Die Entzauberung der Welt, “the unmagicking of the world.”
  • revanchism, the political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement
  • reply guys
  • mwenkanonkan, indigenous feminism of Uganda that predates Western feminism
  • akrasia, weakness of will
  • cobots, collaborative robots
  • Globaloney
  • woketopians
  • necrophoric, an animal that carries the dead of its own kind
  • chinthe, a mythological lion-like creature that frequently guards Buddhist temples
  • a series of linked interiors
  • fictive kin
  • irony poisoning
  • shoaling, rising water tables
  • adjustor of destinies
  • intermittently connected suburbs of the self
  • laminar agent
  • vampiric complexion
  • Cronenberg character
  • humeur noire
  • prettier and tittier
  • chronic malcontent
  • exponentialize the terrible
  • derecho, a line of severe thunderstorms that produce high winds, from Spanish “straight”
  • double dissidents
  • coprolites, fossilized crap
  • hibakusha, nuclear bomb survivors
  • coronagrifting
  • wakaresaseya, relationship ender, Japan
  • naught but a lunatic line
  • cri de coeur
  • pathocracies
  • annus terribilis
  • petri d
  • corporate claptrap
  • apophenia, connecting unrelated phenomenon
  • legend tripping
  • Aloha Wanderwell
  • clown fiend
  • slow your tarred heart
  • untact, “un” and “contact”
  • nuguna, meaning “anyone”
  • honjok, individualist loners, literally alone tribe
  • deathfluencers
  • sanitary Spartacans
  • three ring shit show of your life
  • cyberverse
  • motte-and-bailey fallacy
  • pareidolia
  • pigeonhole principle
  • Books are willing accomplices in the crime of thinking.
  • Please scream inside your heart.
  • man mafia, patriarchy
  • yahrzeit, anniversary of someone’s death
  • contain the contagion
  • McJunkins
  • barycenter, gravitational center
  • stereoscopic vision
  • jungle plums, false mastic
  • cargo cult public health
  • mlecchita vikalpa, cryptography
  • gamblesphere
  • persecuting society, caused by scarcity
  • choremania
  • þetta reddast, everything will work out
  • rype, wild bird
  • blatherskite
  • quiescent mode
  • orthopedic fracture machines, trampolines
  • hamsterkauf, hoarding
  • uitwaaien, outblowing, spending time in the wind
  • Zuihitsu, at will and pen
  • memory artist
  • sapere aude, dare to know
  • kakorrhaphiophobia, fear of failure
  • ungeklärt, undefined
  • mortichnia, or “death march”, the footprints of a dying animal
  • digging graves with artistic precision
  • aleatory, determined by chance
  • minstrel show of hate
  • morituri te salutant, those that are about to die salute you
  • clear the froth
  • coterminous, bordering
  • invidious, tending to rouse ill-will
  • stichomythia, alternating character in poem
  • hysteresis, negative effects into the future in economics
  • ave atque vale, hail and goodbye
  • bohemian downsides
  • unchecked dread
  • Kodak fiend, taking pictures of unsuspecting people
  • paracrine effect
  • combed hair before battle
  • pitiless crowbar of events
  • gulag government
  • fluxion
  • socnets
  • nosocomial, hospital-acquired
  • saeculum, expected lifetime or replacement cycle for a generation
  • vitaparcours
  • publicity requirement
  • praying atheist
  • mutualism
  • bezoars
  • dipterocarp
  • folivores, leaf eaters
  • wild monkey rumpus
  • standing reserve, Heidegger
  • Gestell, framework
  • hand-washing for the infodemic
  • sologamy, single women who essentially marry themselves
  • bizarre digital fever dream
  • covidiots
  • dodecahedron
  • simulacra, the copy without an original
  • chingar, to fuck
  • puppet people
  • our messianic libido.
  • ipsissima vox,the very voice
  • Virilio’s Information Bomb
  • is not even wrong, so bad it really can’t even be discussed coherently
  • romanticizing pathology
  • iconics of the hegemon
  • the massive ocean inside of me makes the fish swim
  • petrichor, the smell after it rains
  • past light cone, a clean figure in spacetime that encloses all the places and times where something happened whose consequences we might see
  • sucking on lozenges
  • Aphantasia is a condition where one does not possess a functioning mind’s eye and cannot voluntarily visualize imagery
  • thinkmeat
  • taste adjacent
  • gnawing on the remnants of dreams
  • imaginary vortex
  • consumer metaphysics
  • thin newness
  • gomi, Japanese for garbage
  • new tech angel hair
  • waterflesh
  • bum guns
  • a matter of personal microculture
  • coronapocalypse
  • suppuration
  • the pitiless crowbar of events
  • skeuomorph, derivative that keeps non-functional design cues from original
  • la puta vida, this bitch of a life
  • baboso, drooling idiot
  • Drano enema
  • a supernova of stupidity
  • overcooked and underdone
  • zaftig, plump
  • aspeta, wait
  • mise-en-place
  • a man of esoteric skills and appetites
  • a clean, three ingredient high
  • cryptids, an animal that has been claimed to exist but is not proven to exist
  • tant pis, so much worse
  • liminal space, the time between what was and what will be.
  • necrocapitalism
  • pseudo‑event
  • lagniappe
  • virtual trophy
  • sick room architectures
  • garbage guru
  • Dowager Duchess
  • ever-softening society
  • the interfering aunt
  • parlor general
  • tongue rot
  • trash trove
  • link cowboys
  • TEOTWAWKI, or The End of the World as We Know It
  • exogenous shock 
  • laggardiste
  • panem et circenses
  • slaves of praise
  • akrasia, a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one’s better judgment
  • ikigai, “reason for being,” or it’s the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what you can get paid for, and what the world needs
  • neltiliztli, rootedness
  • huehuetlatolli, elder’s discourse
  • YORP effect
  • black chemistries awaiting catalysis
  • unwitting recipients of dead news from above
  • 40 million fascists and a mule
  • Io me ne frego, I don’t care
  • mass-infantilism
  • barroom windbags
  • città di merda, city of shit
  • ragazzo delle borgate, guy from the suburbs
  • romafaschifo, Rome sucks
  • maglia nera, black Jersey or last place
  • ghost lineage
  • Something in the milk ain’t clean…
  • paranoia into policy
  • cupiditas oculorum, lust of the eyes
  • fecal dust
  • psychoentirety rejection
  • cumulative causation
  • censorship through noise
  • gongoozler
  • Lithopanspermia, the transfer of organisms in rocks from one planet to another either through interplanetary or interstellar space
  • memory-wired
  • propaganda DJ
  • a loser’s catalog
  • interoceptive
  • ora et labora, prayer and work
  • Un travail de bénédictin—literally, a Benedictine labor—is a French expression for the sort of project someone can only accomplish over a long time through patient, modest, steady effort.
  • extispicy, entrail reading
  • proletarii – that is, people whose duty to the state was to ‘bear children’ as they did not have enough property to be classified as assidui, ‘the settled’ or ‘the landowning’
  • Kinkshaming
  • Purity Police, grudgewankers
  • hemicrania, a pain affecting half the head
  • Great Weirding,
  • Permaweird
  • Atira asteroids, within Earth’s orbit
  • papier-mâché Mephistopheles
  • Holdout creditor problem
  • Everything becomes vintage
  • Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
  • a trash fire that will inherit the earth
  • Beruria, clarity, woman in Talmud
  • the rocks of psychosis
  • technical debt
  • Coase theorem
  • residual benefactor, the person who gets what’s left after bankruptcy
  • anxiegenic paradoxes, anxiety creating
  • designed by clowns
  • peeling for the pentimento
  • confederacy of catastrophe
  • bumper cars of mismatched words
  • coloratura, florid ornamental singing passages
  • living in the doom
  • the narcissism of small differences
  • wild is the way
  • warring information tribes
  • haruspex, ancient Roman official who reads the entrails of animals for omens
  • nalgas, buttocks
  • Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres, “Tell me who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are.”
  • smooth-skinned erection machine
  • intellectual panoply
  • gender-criticals
  • Heslington brain
  • Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt
  • homophily
  • mystics of the stream

English Split Composition

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment

“English is a language built mostly out of two others. Much of it was created out of the language of invaders who came to Britain around 450 ad from Anglia and Saxony (in what we’d now call northern Germany). About 600 years later the French invaded and brought their language with them, too; it was derived from Latin. The new French competed with Old English, and the outcome was a language—modern English—built out of both.

Often words with similar meanings from the two languages were both turned into English words, such as make (Saxon) and create (from French), or need (Saxon) and require (from French). So in English you can say almost anything with two kinds of words: short, simple ones with Saxon origins, or fancier ones that come from Latin.”

-Ward Farnsworth, “What Did Lincoln Know About Language That We Don’t?” Reason.com. June 22, 2020.

Top 104 Books Published in English on Russia in 2019

~ cafebedouin

“Hundreds of books about the Russian-speaking world are scheduled to be published in English in 2019. This list narrows that group down to 104 that show exceptional promise — and gives you the tools to find the ones you’ll love in seconds…

…the previews below are largely laudatory, but their optimism can make them a light read in and of themselves: this collection will take you from literary greats to romping counterfactual histories and from dark Soviet humor to gorgeous children’s books.”

—Hilah Kohen, “2019’s top Russia-related books: ‘Meduza’ has your reading list for the next 10,000 years.” Meduza. January 30, 2019.

Meduza in English

~ cafebedouin

“Every day, we bring you the most important news and feature stories from hundreds of sources in Russia and across the former Soviet Union. Our team includes some of Russia’s top professionals in news and reporting. We value our independence and strive to be a reliable, trusted outlet for verified, unbiased information about Russia and the former Soviet Union, as well as a source for sharp insights about one of the world’s most enigmatic regions.”

—Meduza in English, and RSS

h/t Electric Eel

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) on StarDict on Ubuntu/Debian

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment

So, after reading “You’re probably using the wrong dictionary,” I thought I would give installing Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) on a Debian-flavor of Linux a try and write it up the process and some observations of its use.

Installation on a Debian-flavor of Linux is straight-forward:

$ sudo apt-get install stardict
$ cd Downloads
$ wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/jsomers/dictionary.zip
$ unzip dictionary.zip
$ cd dictionary
$ tar -xvjf stardict-dictd-web1913-2.4.2.tar.bz2
$ cd stardict-dictd-web1913-2.4.2/
$ sudo mv *.* /usr/share/stardict/dic/
$ stardict

This launches the main application. There is also a mini-window that can be moved to where you like and then you can use it with other applications by highlighting text. Here’s a screenshot of this article:

When you highlight a word, it will automatically be searched for and displayed in the mini-window.

Entries include pronunciation, etymological origin, related words, definition and an example of usage, often from literature. I can imagine this being a very useful tool. It might be worth checking if my writing from this date changes in an appreciable way and whether it is an improvement or not.

One Can Not Feel Like An Old Fogey

~ cafebedouin
  1. “A good Christian can not attend church and still be saved.”
  2. “A good Christian cannot attend church and still be saved.”

“Example 1 speaks uncontroversially of the possibility that good Christians may be forgiven for lax church attendance. Example 2, by contrast, states a radically anticlerical claim: that church attendance will wreck your chances of salvation.”

—Geoffry Pullum,”A Moment of Sympathy for the Old Fogeys and Snoots.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 28, 2018

Even if general usage would make these interchangable, I cannot abide using can not and cannot as if they were the same.