Pilcrows, Lavalieres & Olecranons

I'm quite fond of

PERICHORESIS: the technical term for the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity in orthodox Christian theology. Which, to laymanise things further, is to say that the relationship between, say, Jesus and the Father is so close that it's like they're in each other's pockets. Except, being the Trinity, it's three sets of pockets.

The best part of the term, aside from its total obscurity and impossibility to understand what it defines, is that it derives from some complex ancient Greek dance form that involved the dancers whirling around crazily in amongst each other.

Enlightened opening, Anthony. As I should emphasise that unfamiliar tags for familiar notions, concepts and philosophies are also welcome. Like earworm, for a catchy song that 'infects' your mind.

JOKES: an intra-sentence self-interjection by Gen-Next members indicating that what they have just said should be taken with a grain of salt and that what is coming up is therefore of immense importance. (Generally not used as an opportunity to take a breath.)

ps I didn't know JOKES. Until yesterday.

Bond: no, not James – but the name given to various brickwork patterns (for example Flemish bond, English bond). Also related, the short side of the brick is a ‘header’, the long side a ‘stretcher’, and a cut brick which is a ¼ of a header is a ‘Queens closer.’

harl: to drag with friction or scraping of the ground, as reluctantly

learned this from a non-native speaker of english which was a bit humbling for a londoner becoz we invented the language innit

Giclée print – often wondered what this process was, only to learn it was a new word for an ink-jet print… sounds so much better with a French accent!

This doesn't really fit, but I just have to relay something I overheard at the office, mere minutes ago:

"I use so many exclamation marks in my writing, but you can't exclamate someone at work. That's just rude."

I love it.

excellent kibbitzing DC
reminds me of WoW a while back on "?!". the victor borge one

Love a bit of verbing...

Keeping with bricks, to lay them at decorative angles is to skintle, says our prize publication.

What about'larboard'? It is the original term for 'port', but changed (gradually between the 17th to 19th century) because it's hard to differentiate larboard and starboard in a gale, under pirate attack and other adverse conditions.

Is there a term for a set of words that are phonetically distinct, so as not to be confused? I looked up the NATO Phonetic Alphabet and ended up with acrophony which is not the same.

On a different subject, my favourite word from advanced physics is 'brane'. Short for membrane but used extensively to give us Black Branes, D-Branes and, yes, p-Branes.

But what is it?

In theoretical physics, a membrane, brane, or p-brane is a spatially extended mathematical concept that appears in string theory and related theories (e.g. M-theory and brane cosmology). The membrane exists in a static number of dimensions.

The central idea is that the visible, four-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane inside a higher-dimensional space, called the "bulk".

Um, right.

CALLIPYGIAN
I was delighted to discover this word some years ago.
I am too coy to say why.
An unnamed dictionary on my computer defines it thus:
"adjective. Having well-shaped buttocks.
Also, cal·li·py·gous  /ˌkæləˈpaɪgəs/
Origin:
1640–50; < Greek kallipýg ( os ) with beautiful buttocks; referring to a statue of Aphrodite ( kalli- calli- + pyg ( ḗ ) rump + -os adj. suffix) + -ian

I appear to have failed to explain why 'brane' fits this week's Storm -- our universe (aka space-time) is a brane, at least in theory.

There are other examples of technical terms for familiar concepts that allow them to be expanded. For example, in maths aleph-0 refers to infinity (eg, the number of integers) but there are different types of infinity, so different aleph numbers too.

Here's one I encountered just now:

SEA-PUSS (plus other variations): the seaward undercurrent created after waves have broken on the shore.

always love the irony of hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: a fear of long words

kakistocracy: a useful word for descibing the level of political debate at the moment - government of a country by its most unprincipled citizens

Periplus: a sort of pilot guide of the classical world; the Lonely Planet of its day?

I like:

GROYNE: is a low wall or sturdy timber barrier built out into the sea from a beach to check erosion and drifting.

(from Old French groign, from late Latin grunium 'pig's snout')

I was reading a sub-editing blog the other day that featured a list of hip, new-fangled jargon for reporting on future trends (typical!). Annoyingly, there are no definitions. If you feel like pondering terms like blingamalism, brand personality register, Webtailing 3.0 or dreamtelligence, they can be found here:
http://rantingsubs.com/2011/09/28/blogtailing-betapreneurs/

BRUXISM: Habitual unconscious grinding of the teeth.

CISMONTANE: On this side of the mountains.

I'm in Sydney, so Penrith is cismontane, whereas Bathurst is not.

OK, I seem to be blog-hogging but just one more... My favourite so far.

ONOMATOMANIA: A medical term describing an irresistible preoccupation with specific words or names. An abnormal concentration on certain words and their supposed significance or on the effort to recall a particular word.

This, I imagine, could lead to a fair bit of bruxism for us cruciverbalists.

Pica: what most of us type in, that is 12-point sized fonts (not to be confused with a “vitiated appetite which makes the patient crave what is unfit for food”).

And one of my favourite sounding words (though thankfully never had to try it):

Ipecacuanha: an emetic or purgative drug derived from the plant of the same name.

Ipecac always makes me laugh, because it reminds of THAT Family Guy scene (eight crates of ipecac, four people, last one to vomit wins the pie in the fridge).

Aglets - the ends of your shoelaces
Glabella - the part of your forehead between the eyebrows

GRIKE: A weathered crack in limestone, several of which my wife and I have been walking over for years on our walks on the beach, but we only recently learned there was a word for it. The grikes separate CLINTS.

IDEMPOTENT: Only working once. Used in software to describe a piece of code that the act of loading changes the state so subsequent attempts to load it have no effect. Very useful back in the days of C and C++ header files, not so important now I live in .Net land.

String rim: the flattened piece of glass around the top of the neck of a wine bottle (well, a pre-screw cap wine bottle), sometimes called a champagne finish. Was used to secure the cork or stopper, but became obsolete with moulded or machine-made wine bottles with more regular necks – but still carries over on the modern bottles.

I've long dined out on the knowledge that a bottle base's hollw is a punt (versus the frog of a brick hollow), while the business end of a corkscrew - I've just read - is known as the worm.

I have long known that Snots & Dags are the highly bulbous/dented parts of a house brick purposely added for character.
But for the life of me I can't remember which is which.

When I was young and bread loaves were unsliced, the kind with two high tops joined, we used to 'bags' the 'frog' - the soft bit when you broke it in the middle. My favourite part was the convex bit on the other side. No doubt the name came from the brick hollow. Thanks DA for clearing up a childhood mystery.

re punt - I was wondering if glass blowers put the toe of their boot in to make the hollow of the bottle, but the etymology appears to be that punts, the boats, were hollowed out of a tree.

Tocsin: an alarm bell .. for its homophone?
from touch + signal. And a 19C Melbourne anti-federation newspaper.

And, relating to bottles - the air gap between the contents and the cork or cap is known as the 'ullage'

Hachure: those parallel lines drawn on a map to indicate the gradient of a slope – short and close together, the steeper the slope; and a ‘meander line’ – marking the indistinct boundary between the water and the shore.

Speaking of punts, the two-pronged metal fork at the end of the punt pole that makes it possible to get it out of the mud if you twist it right is a QUANT.

Ullage is also wasted beer, either from the drip trays beneath the tap or when emptying or reconnecting the lines.

The chef at the hotel where I used to work as a barman used to make a "mad cow, ullage and fungus pie". Three pints of ullage and one pint of Guiness were involved.

Late teens, working in a bottle shop, I loved telling people that minimal ullage was optimal.

Hard to pick an on-course leader so far - quite a few pearls. Gryke, bruxism, hachure, sea-puss, groyne, giclée point, idempotent: where is the winner hiding?

Thanks for that link KM - always keen to share that kind of lingo blog. Here's a visual vocab quiz over at Merriam-Webster. Managed 8/10, or 3080 points if you feel like vying:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/namethatthing/index.htm

10 out of 10, but only 2860 points. I think I got an easy one, hence the lower points.

8/10 for 2640 points. I think I ran out of puff, buggering up the two final questions.

Maybe we got the same Qs, with the variable being speed. I skimmed the words and second-guessed the image the moment it flashed up - getting lamb CHOP wrong!

2820 high score, using same technique. Lucky fluke - flummoxed in some games when the image didn't come up until it timed out! Corinthian, Ionic, Doric - all Greek to me.

lamb chop slayed me too.

Fun quiz, although performance is obviously highly variable depending on what is shown. Fortunately it does seem to try and keep the mix of difficulty constant. First try was 8/10 for 2900, second went 10/10 for 3540 on a few lucky guesses.

I would nominate CRYPTOMNESIA but think we've dragged that joke as far as it can go.

I nominate HAPLOLOGY. The term is probably not unknown to this group of logophiles, but happens to be my favourite word from uni days. The process whereby a syllable which is identical (or very similar) to its neighbouring syllable is dropped from a word in order to make it easier to say. To use it in a sentence: If the word HAPLOLOGY were to undergo the process of HAPLOLOGY, it would become HAPLOGY.

Just re-read the intro and want to add some examples of HAPLOLOGY to bring it into the real world. There are lots of spoken examples in Modern English: 'libry' for 'library'; 'probly' for 'probably'. The written example usually cited is that of Old English 'Anglaland' becoming 'England'.

When I was in catering college, it seemed very important for us to distinguish between our 'lardons' (thing strips of pork fat threaded through a cut of meat) and our 'bardons' (thin slices of pork fat or bacon spread over the top of a cut of meat)

They were thin strips.

Got 10/10 and 3500 points, thanks to a lucky guess on PLACKET and a recent gift of some persimmons.

The left pedal on a piano, often called the soft or quiet pedal, is known as the UNA CORDA PEDAL. It softens the sound by either shifting the keyboard so that it hits one less string or moving the hammer closer to the strings so it hits with less force.

The 'wippen' is part of the piano mechanism which tranmits the motion of the key to the hamnmer.

Nice, JD. And the hammer roller is also known as the KNUCKLE.

And while we're in musical territory, there is an interval called a TRITONE. I remember my music teacher asking me why I thought it was named a tritone. My response: because it has three names - augmented fourth, diminished fifth, and... um, tritone! Disregarding my brilliance, she informed me that it is in fact so named because it is an interval of three tones.

Catafalque: what the coffin rests on during the funeral.

And this is probably familiar, but I only recently came across ‘etaoin shrdlu’ for a linotype printing error, perhaps not an everyday sort of thing, but a lovely nonsense phrase nonetheless.

etaoin shrdlu gets my vote, not lores ipsum, qwerty or dvorak. That's good, Sam.

Thanks Criseyde – and thanks for ‘lores ipsum’ which I hadn’t heard of before.

And speaking of Latin, one last entry:

Operculum: either the caps to seedpods (like gum nuts) or the trap-doors to gastropod shells.

Some words I came across today when looking up 'goal' in the dictionary to see if we Aussies have verbed it yet (we have):

HAGIOSCOPE: a small opening in a church wall, giving worshippers a view of the high altar
GOBO: any shape, pattern or effect put directly in front of a camera so that the camera must shoot through it to the scene
GOBSHITE: a loudmouth person whose utterances are considered worthless

Em: GOBSHITE is priceless.

Thanks RobT - if you read that far, I can assume that I am not one!

My long standing favourite is:

ZUGZWANG: A no win situation

However, seeing that I came across it via DA many years ago, it´s probably not eligible.

One of the words I was asked for on the picture test was philtrum - the depression in the upper lip below the nose. I remember learning that when John Major was Prime Minister.