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notable signage, postage, and oral topiary

  • incel (n.): involuntary celibate. Tends to be used by terribly bitter people. Ozy Frantz is trying to reclaim the term, since the problem is a real one.

  • foofaraw (West US n.): pomp, fuss, ruckus.

  • sinter (metallurgy v.): to fuse things into a solid without heating them to liquefaction. Think making a vicious snowball out of powder. Useful for ultra-high-melting-point things like tungsten.

  • zero-rating (telecomms n.): Offering free mobile data, usually for very limited things like app stores or Facebook. A good form of price discrimination - but legislators often ban it in the name of net neutrality, creating equality by running among fields with a running chainsaw. Common in the developing world - best of all, for Wikipedia.

  • dead mileage (n.): non-profitable movement of commercial vehicles, for maintenance or live placement.

  • to deadhead (v.): to travel, as staff, using dead mileage.

  • data sleaze (n.): customer data obtained secretly by businesses, secretly sold on. Almost all 'free' services are data sleaze operations.

  • expert beginner (pej. tech n.): Closed-minded person, who plateaus before becoming actually competent, because of bad feedback or arrogance. Often hailed as an expert by other know-nothings in their small pond. Most very experienced people are probably this. ("10 years of experience... or the same year repeated 10x?")

  • ignotum per ignotius (Lat. n.): An explanation which is more obscure than the initial concept. e.g. In which an explicand, which is to say one or more explananda, is elucidated by a kaleidoscopic but wholly inefficacious explanans, the whole taking on a manner befitting only an ἐσωτερικ or γνωστικ, thereby violating the good maxims of relation and manner.

  • language server: 1) the part of an IDE that supplies autocomplete and refactor-all and all that sugary goodness; 2) a good name for a blog.



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