Notable words, Q3 2016

• Saffronisation (Hinglish n.): official idealisation of ancient Hindu society: nationalist indoctrination masked as anti-Orientalism. At the limit, includes claims that Vedic India had TV, cars, and stem cell therapy. See also bhagwakaran.



• Dark pool (n.): a secret asset market (private as in not governmental and private as in confidential). No transparency, no public "market depth" reporting or identities. Reduces market impact of your trading and hides your strategies from others. Legal, mostly.



• Brownout (US n.): Reduction in the available electricity supply which knocks out high-voltage devices for a number of hours. Sometimes intentional, to stop e.g. thunderstorms from overloading the grid and causing fires. A mediocre blackout.



• salty (adj.): touchy; of a person who is acting irritable because of their failure. A taunt in PvP culture. Britain is very salty at the moment.



• Convex hull (n.): The smallest symmetrical shape that contains all of a given set of points. Awesome word for "tightest perimeter". Used heavily in GIS like Google Maps.



• yak shaving (v.): two useful meanings: 1) procrastination that creeps up on you in the pursuit of actual goals:

  "I want to wax the car today. Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I'll need to buy a new one at Home Depot. But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls. But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor's EZPass... Bob won't lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though. And we haven't returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it." And the next thing you know, you're at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.

  2) apparently useless activity that ends up serendipitously solving another real problem you were having. You never know which it is.



• to golf away (v.): to solve through cleverness; to rewrite code in fewer lines through "code golf", virtuoso algorithmics.



• FUD (n.): 'Fear, uncertainty, and doubt'. Used by grass-roots politicians to explain why they don't succeed: for the status quo sowed voters with FUD.



• ramuno (Italian n.): the imaginary unit i. A C19th contraction of "radice di meno uno".



• kayfabe (n.): The code of silence of stage wrestlers (about the sport's fakeness). An omerta. Possibly a Pig-Latin-like mush of "fake" ('ake-fay') with "be fake".



• exit (n.): a corporate buy-out of your startup. Named after what the founder then does regardless of personal fallout?



• khap (Hindi n.): An unofficial local council of northern India. Like a race-based Neighbourhood Watch. Often deeply regressive.



• empty product (n.): The result of multiplying no numbers together. By convention, this is 1! (Ex nihilo unum fit!) Required in number theory to explain why 1 isn't prime, etc.