Lexical Adventures

• mews - Mews is a primarily British term formerly describing a row of stables, usually with carriage houses below and living quarters above
• puce - a color that is defined as ranging from light grayish red-violet to medium to dark purplish-brown. Puce is the French word for flea. The color is said to be the color of the bloodstains remaining on linen or bedsheets, even after being laundered, from a flea's droppings or after a flea has been killed.
• armoire - a type of cupboard, cabinet, or wardrobe, originally used for storing weapons
• aspic - aspic is a dish in which ingredients are set into a jelly/gelatin made from a meat stock or consommé. veggie versions exist. but meat versions were made first...
• poly bounce - thing for bouncing light back onto a subject on the fill or non key light side (passive fill), called beadboard in the US and poly for polystyrene in Europe. it was originally rigid insulation made for the construction trade, but was adopted in the film trade because of its "true-white" color and "soft" bounce.
• potstickers - north american slang word for chinese dumplings / jiaozi/ gyoza - they stick to the bottom of the frypan in the last stage of cooking, and it browns them.
• crepuscular rays - rays of sunlight coming from a point in the sky. Also known as “God's rays
• bifurcated - divided into two parts or branches
• ballcock - ballcock is that floating ball mechanism or machine for filling water tanks, such as those found in flush toilets, while avoiding overflow and (in the event of low water pressure) backflow
• accretions - the process of growth or increase, typically by the gradual accumulation of additional layers or matter.
• breeze block - a light concrete building block made with cinder aggregate, usually for low load bearing walls. Concrete masonry units, as they are more formally known, can be made in a variety of densities and weights, depending on the fillers used. breezeblocks are those blocks with hollow centres, to reduce weight or improve insulation. The term “breeze block” is most commonly used in Great Britain and nations where British English is spoken, as “breeze” is used to mean “ash” or “cinders.” People outside of these regions may refer to breeze blocks as cinder blocks.
• langoustine - SCAMPI, norway lobster, a true lobster, :the most important commercial crustacean in Europe" - a light building brick made from the ashes of coal, coke, etc., bonded together by cement and used esp for walls that bear relatively small loads Usual US names cinder block clinker block
• anodyne - Not likely to provoke dissent or offense; uncontentious or inoffensive, often deliberately so: "anodyne New Age music".
• amortise - To write off gradually and systematically a given amount of money within a specific number of time periods.
• Truculent - disposed to fight, pugnacious, bitterly opposing
• Solfège - a pedagogical solmization technique for the teaching of sight-singing in which each note of the score is sung to a special syllable, called a solfège syllable - do re me fa so la ti do
• USP - Unique selling proposition: Today the term is used in other fields or just casually to refer to any aspect of an object that differentiates it from similar objects.
• antebellum - before the war
• Benelux - The Benelux is an economic union in Western Europe that comprises three neighbouring countries, the Kingdom of Belgium, the Kingdom of Netherlands, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and lies in the north western European region between France and Germany.
• lithotomy - mostly recognised as as the "childbirth position"
• Fascinator - term for the flouncy protuberant headwear which is slightly to very frivolous
• Lusophone - portugese, eg lusophone world versus anglophone world. spain is also sometimes included cos of similarity in language (galician)
• Cetaceans - whales
• parturient - about to bring forth with child (IE: PREGNANT)
• jubilee clip - A Jubilee Clip is a circular metal band or strip combined with a worm gear fixed to one end. It is designed to hold a soft, pliable hose onto a rigid circular pipe (or sometimes a solid spigot) of smaller diameter.
• hoplophobe - Hoplophobia from the Greek hoplon, or weapon, is defined as the "fear of firearms"
• Oulipo - Oulipo, short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature") is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members include novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poet Oskar Pastior and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud. IS THIS RELATED TO THE WORD LIPOGRAM??? A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, "missing letter") is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is omitted — usually a common vowel, the most common in English being "E".
• Caveat lector - Caveat lector is a Latin phrase meaning "Let the reader beware."
• Tachycardia - Tachycardia comes from the Greek words tachys (rapid or accelerated) and kardia (of the heart). Tachycardia typically refers to a heart rate that exceeds the normal range for a resting heartrate (heartrate in an inactive or sleeping individual). In humans, the upper threshold of a normal heart rate is usually based upon age, sometimes it can be very dangerous depending on how hard the heart is working and the activity
• The People's Prada - Primark (cited in the mirror)
• Timbale - a layered dish cooked in a large thimble-shaped mould and then turned out onto a serving plate. Often made of rice layered with vegetables or perhaps slices of aubergine layered with other vegetables and tomato sauce.
• Eau de vie - a clear, colorless fruit brandy that is produced by means of fermentation and double distillation. The fruit flavor is typically very light.
• hurple - a scottish word. still used in scotland. means to hobble or walk with a limp.
• curple - a strap under the girth of a horses saddle to stop the saddle kicking forward
• Parterre - a formal garden construction on a level surface consisting of planting beds, edged in stone or tightly clipped hedging, and gravel paths arranged to form a pleasing, usually symmetrical pattern. Parterres need not have any flowers at all. French parterres were elaborated out of 16th-century knot gardens, and reached a climax at the Chateau of Versailles and its many European imitators, such as Kensington Palace
• Maquette - usually small model of an intended work, such as a sculpture or piece of architecture. French, from Italian macchietta, sketch, diminutive of macchia, spot, from Latin macula.
• Hochregal - german for VNA Racking aka Very Narrow Aisle
• Grauniad - The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. This played on The Guardian's reputation for frequent typographical errors, such as misspelling its own name as The Gaurdian. The domain grauniad.co.uk is registered to the paper, and redirects to its website at guardian.co.uk.
• Garrote - The garrote particularly refers to the execution device used by the Spaniards until as recently as 1974. In Spain, it was abolished, as well as the death penalty, in 1978 with the new constitution. Originally, it was an execution where the convict was killed by hitting him with a club (garrote in Spanish). Later, it was refined and consisted of a seat to restrain the condemned person, while the executioner tightened a metal band around his neck with a crank or a wheel until suffocation of the condemned person was accomplished.
• Escalator, Escalate - the word escalator was originally trademarked by Charles Seeberger in 1900, to coincide with his device’s debut at the Exposition Universelle. The verb "escalate" originated in 1922, and has two uses, the primary: "to climb or reach by means of an escalator" or "to travel on an escalator", and the secondary: "to increase or develop by successive stages; spec. to develop from 'conventional' warfare into nuclear warfare." The latter definition was first printed in the Manchester Guardian in 1959, but grew to prominent use during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But in 1950 the term had entered a state of being so genericised that Otis Elevator Co lost a landmark legal battle to keep the trademark. All trademark protections were removed from the word "escalator", the term was officially genericized, and it fell into the public domain.
• Blunderbuss - The blunderbuss is a muzzle-loading firearm with a short, large caliber barrel, which is flared at the muzzle, and used with shot. The blunderbuss is an early form of shotgun adapted to military and defensive use. The term dragon was used to describe a blunderbuss in handgun form, and it is from this that the term dragoon evolved. The term blunderbuss is of Dutch origin, from the Dutch word donderbus, which is a combination of donder, meaning "thunder", and bus, meaning "Pipe" (Middle Dutch: busse, box, tube, from Late Latin, buxis, box). The transition from donder to blunder is thought by some to be deliberate; the term blunder was originally used in a transitive sense, synonymous with to confuse, and this is thought to describe the stunningly loud report of the large bore, short barreled blunderbuss. The term dragon is taken from the fact that early versions were decorated with a carving in the form of a mythical dragon's head around the muzzle; the muzzle blast would then give the impression of a fire breathing dragon....
• Oblast - о́бласть Oblast is a type of administrative division in Slavic countries, including some countries of the former Soviet Union. The word "oblast" is a loanword in English, but it is nevertheless often translated as "area", "zone", "province", or "region". The last translation may lead to confusion, because the subdivision of "oblast" is called "raion" which is translated as "region" or "district", depending on the context.
• Gravitropism - Gravitropism (or geotropism) is a turning or growth movement by a plant or fungus in response to gravity. Charles Darwin was one of the first Europeans to document that roots show positive gravitropism and stems show negative gravitropism. That is, roots grow in the direction of gravitational pull (i.e., downward) and stems grow in the opposite direction (i.e., upwards).
• Chin-wag - chin-wag, causerie is a light informal conversation for social occasions
• Aposematism - warning colouration, describes a family of antipredator adaptations where a warning signal is associated with the unprofitability of a prey item to potential predators. some insects are bright in colour to indicate that they are poisonous or untasty or bitey.
• Ununquadium - ununquadium or uuq is the temporary name of a radioactive chemical element in the periodic table that has the temporary symbol Uuq and has the atomic number 114.
• CamelCase - practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces - UpperCamelCase and lowerCamelCase.
• Synecdoche - Synecdoche is greek for "simultaneous understanding". it is the substitution of a part for whole, species for genus, etc. similar to but not the same as metonymy: substitution of cause for effect, proper name for one of its qualities, etc. eg: i got a new set of wheels or put it on plastic
• Praecisio - (also known as aposiopesis) from Gk. aposiopao “to be silent after speaking, observe a deliberate silence” praecisio, reticentia, obticentia, interruptio figure of silence
• Shill - A shill is an associate of a person selling goods or services or a political group, who pretends no association to the seller/group and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer. The intention of the shill is, using crowd psychology, to encourage others unaware of the set-up to purchase said goods or services or support the political group's ideological claims. Shills are often employed by confidence artists -- origin of the term shill is uncertain; it may be an abbreviation of the Yiddish shillaber. The word originally denoted a carnival worker who pretends to be a member of the audience in an attempt to elicit interest in an attraction.
• Ex Libris - A bookplate is also known as "ex libris" which is Latin for "from books"
• Subungual Hematoma - nail injury
• Infinite Broom - In topology, the infinite broom is a subset of the Euclidean plane that is used as an example distinguishing various notions of connectedness. The closed infinite broom is the closure of the infinite broom, and is also referred to as the broom space... Both the infinite broom and its closure are connected, as every open set in the plane which contains the segment on the x-axis must intersect slanted segments. Neither are locally connected. Despite the closed infinite broom being arc connected, the standard infinite broom is not path connected
• Gazump - The verb "gazump" means to refuse to formalise a property sale agreement at the last minute to accept a higher offer. "With buoyant property prices in the British residential property market of the late 1980s and early 1990s, gazumping became commonplace in England and Wales because a buyer's offer is not legally binding even after acceptance of the offer by the vendor. When property prices are in decline the practice of gazumping becomes rare. The term gazundering has been coined for the opposite practice whereby the buyer waits until everybody is poised to exchange contracts before lowering the offer on the property, threatening the collapse of a whole chain of house sales waiting for the deal to go through."
• Glee Club - A glee club is a musical group, historically of male voices but also of women's or mixed voices, which traditionally specializes in the singing of short songs—glees—by trios or quartets. The first named Glee Club was founded in London, England, in 1787.
• Percolator - a popular dance that no party is complete without. in order to percolate, you must rapidly gyrate your legs in time with the music, as well as pop your booty. kamel mcmillan of NCCU is considered to be the foremost authority on percolation
• Ideologue - an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology
• Tithonus - According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, when Eos asked Zeus for Tithonus to be immortal, she forgot to ask for eternal youth.... so he was immortal yet growing old.
• Haraam - the antonym to halal
• Hoki - Hoki is a type of fish in the hake family, found off the coasts of New Zealand and Australia. The fish are known by a number of other names, including blue grenadiers, blue hake, whiptails, whiptail hake, and New Zealand whiting. It is used to make McDonald's Fillet o Fish.
• Negligible Senescence - The word senescence is derived from the Latin word senex, meaning "old man" or "old age" or "advanced in age". Negligible Senescence refers to animals like certain fish and turtles which do not seem to age or age very very slowly.
• Pyrolysis - Pyrolysis is the chemical decomposition of a condensed substance by heating. The word is coined from the Greek-derived elements pyro "fire" and lysys "decomposition". Pyrolysis is usually the first chemical reaction that occurs in the burning of many solid organic fuels, like wood, cloth, and paper, and also of some kinds of plastic. In a wood fire, the visible flames are not due to combustion of the wood itself, but rather of the gases released by its pyrolysis; whereas the flame-less burning of embers is the combustion of the solid residue (charcoal) left behind by it.
• Reverse Dutch Auction - This sales term describes an auction with one buyer and multiple sellers whereby the auctioneer raises the price from a low starting point until a bidder agrees to sell at that price.
• obviate - to anticipate and prevent or eliminate (difficulties, disadvantages, etc.) by effective measures; render unnecessary: to obviate the risk of serious injury [from L. obvius "that is in the way, that moves against" (related to the word "obvious")]
• Apiary - is a bee hive or place where beehives of honey bees are kept
• Dolly Dinkle - amateur, mediocre dancing school, usually run by someone who runs it like a business or does not have formal training
• Circle of Confusion - In optics, a circle of confusion is an optical spot caused by a cone of light rays from a lens not coming to a perfect focus when imaging a point source. It is also known as disk of confusion, circle of indistinctness, blur circle, or blur spot.
• Bokeh- describes the rendition of out-of-focus points of light, referring to the æsthetic quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image produced by a camera lens using a shallow depth of field
• Hapax legomenon is a word which occurs only once in either the written record of a language, the works of an author, or in a single text. While technically incorrect, the term is also sometimes used of a word that occurs in only one of an author's works, even though it occurs more than once in that work. Hapax legomenon is from the Greek ἅπαξ λεγόμενον "[something] said only once."
• Cittaslow (literally Slow City) is a movement founded in Italy in October of 1999. The inspiration of Cittaslow was the Slow Food organization. Cittaslow's goals include improving the quality of life in towns while resisting "the fast-lane, homogenized world so often seen in other cities throughout the world"
• Daguerreotype - an early type of photograph, developed by Louis Daguerre, in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor.
• Goiânia accident - brazil radiation accident
• Tyvek is a brand of flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers, a synthetic material; the name is a registered trademark of DuPont. The material is very strong; it is difficult to tear but can easily be cut with scissors or any other sharp object. Water vapor can pass through Tyvek (highly breathable), but not liquid water, so the material lends itself to a variety of applications: medical packaging, envelopes, car covers, air and water intrusion barriers (housewrap) under house siding, labels, wristbands, mycology, and graphics. Tyvek is sometimes erroneously called "Tyvex".
• eschar is a slough or piece of dead tissue that is cast off from the surface of the skin, particularly after a burn injury, but also seen in gangrene, ulcer, fungal infections, necrotizing spider bite wounds, and exposure to cutaneous anthrax.
• Carambola - Starfruit. Like the grapefruit, carambola contains oxalic acid which can be harmful to individuals suffering from kidney failure or under kidney dialysis treatment. Consumption by those with kidney failure can produce hiccups, vomiting, nausea, and mental confusion, and fatal outcomes have been documented in some patients. also significantly increases the effectiveness of drugs like benzodiazepines.
• Mexican Wave - what i used to call a kallang wave is more popularly known as a mexican wave
• Hypoxic hypoxia - Hypoxic hypoxia is a generalized hypoxia, an inadequate supply of oxygen to the body as a whole. Things like high altitude can cause hypoxia.
• Requiescat in Pace - RIP comes from "Requiescat in Pace" or sort of "rest in piece" because christians used to believe there was a short time of soul sleep after death but before judgement
• Panspermia - Panspermia is the hypothesis that "seeds" of life exist already all over the Universe, that life on Earth may have originated through these "seeds", and that they may deliver or have delivered life to other habitable bodies.
• False friends - False Friends (or faux amis) are pairs of words in two languages or dialects (or letters in two alphabets) that look and/or sound similar, but differ in meaning. This may cause difficulty for the beginner who may experience linguistic interference
• Diacritic - A special mark added to a letter to indicate a different pronunciation, stress, tone, or meaning. eg: the Kreska in polish and the carca in czech
• Chianti - Chianti (keey an teh) is a red Italian wine produced in Tuscany. It was historically associated with a squat bottle enclosed in a straw basket, called a fiasco
• Ossuary - An ossuary is a chest, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains. They are frequently used where burial space is scarce. A body is first buried in a temporary grave, then after some years the skeletal remains are removed and placed in an ossuary.
• Mulesing - Mulesing is a surgical task that involves the removal of strips of wool-bearing skin from around the breech (buttocks) of a sheep. Mulesing is common practice in Australia as a way to reduce the incidence of flystrike (myiasis) on Merino sheep in regions where flystrike is common.
• Jawohl - Affirmative, Yes. German word.

Uffz Schmidt: "Müller! Tun Sie dies und das! Bewegung!" (Sgt. Schmidt: "Müller! Do this and that! Move your ass!")
G Müller: "Jawohl, Herr Unteroffizier! (Pvt. Müller: "Yes, Sergeant!")"

• Garden Path sentence - See Garden Path sentence
• Iconoclasm - Iconoclasm, Greek for "image-breaking", is the deliberate destruction within a culture of the culture's own religious icons and other symbols or monuments
• Pease - was originally the singular for "pea" but due to its spelling it was historically misread as plural and then it was used in phrases like "pease pudding".
• Schwa - The Latin letter ə (upside-down e)
• Just Deserts - Deserts, in the sense of 'things deserved' has been used in English since at least the 13th century. A citation in which it is linked with 'just' comes from 1599, in Warning Faire Women: "Upon a pillory - that al the world may see, A just desert for such impiety." The spelling "Just Desserts" is a corruption on the phrase, likely from the Australians.
• Madrigal - A madrigal is a type of secular vocal music composition, written during the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Throughout most of its history it was polyphonic and unaccompanied by instruments, with the number of voices varying from two to eight, but most frequently three to six.
• Clusterfuck - also known in the polite form as compound fiasco, of military origin. A combination of things going extremely wrong in a short period of time within the same general activity - caused by stupidity and/or ineptitude. example of use: clusterfuck trifecta par excellence (simultaneous failure of all three levels of government: local, state, and federal)
• Custodial sentence - a custodial sentence is the kind of sentence that leads to something like prison (incarceration) or in some other closed therapeutic and/or (re)educational institution, such as a reformatory, (maximum security) psychiatry or drug detoxication. serious crimes are likely to receive a custodial sentence. non-custodial are things such as fines, judicial beatings, various mandatory but 'open' therapy and courses, restriction orders, loss or suspension of civil rights, or even suspended sentences.
• efficacious - having the power to produce a desired effect
• Gone Bolshevik - slang
• Trebuchet - A trebuchet is a siege engine that was employed in the Middle Ages either to smash masonry walls or to throw projectiles over them. Like a sling really.
• Aerogel - low-density solid-state material derived from gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with gas.The result is an extremely low density solid with several remarkable properties, most notably its effectiveness as an insulator, its rigidness. (aka "solid smoke")
• Lame Duck - politician who has lost power (eg: Sarah Palin)
• Pessary - small removable plastic or silicone medical device which is inserted into the vagina or rectum and held in place by the pelvic floor to treat uterine prolapse or something other
• Chemoprophylaxis - administration of a medication for the purpose of preventing disease or infection. eg: a drug given to people in quarantine to prevent them from catching H1N1
• Piggy Bank - In Middle English, "pygg" referred to a type of orange clay used for making various household objects such as jars. People often saved mo