notable notarikonim

• thicc or thique (hip-hop adj.): curvaceous; in particular, callipygian. I thought this might be satirical, but no, it is well-attested in the literature.


• parietal hours (from the Latin n.): "walled hours": times of the day that American college students were allowed members of the opposite sex in the dorm. About 25 hours a week, at 60s Radcliffe.


• aborning (US adv.): while being born. e.g. I NEARLY DIED ABORNING; I WASN'T TO GET OFF SO EASILY


• frass (US n.): Insect droppings. Compare Jamaican raas?


• shotgun parser (n.): an ad hoc input recognizer, split into many pieces, across all layers, with parsing interspersed with processing logic, often reading Turing-complete data formats. Very insecure, predictably and by default. Unfortunately, this antipattern is the standard way of reading input, used in 99% of programs, simply because it is very very easy to do. "Shotgun parser" is the enemy of the Langsec people, who demand regular and context-free protocols.


• sophont (sci-fi n.): Poul Anderson's term for "sentient", "being". Not ever used outwith scifi.


• headspace (n. or v.): distance between the back of a gun's chamber and the bit that stops the bullet falling out. Nasty pun in there.


• to fuzz (infosec v.): to feed a program many inputs in an attempt to cause errors and crash it. Besides giving the attacker power over service, crashes also mean vulnerabilities.


• falsing (telephony n.): the overinterpretation of random noise by an audio decoder: it produces syllables from nothing. I loved this: "sometimes occurs on a voice circuit when a human voice hits the exact pitch to which the tone decoder is tuned, a condition called talk-off".


• chyron (TV n.): the text ticker down the bottom of overproduced news channels. (A genericised trademark, booooo.) See also lower third ("a graphic overlay placed in the title-safe lower area of the screen, though not necessarily the entire lower third of it")


• safe area (TV n.): the centre of the screen, where text is safe from being clipped by weird small screens.


• OSEMI (acronym): Obtain, Scrub, Explore, Model, Interpret. Good summary of statistical workflow.


• post-traumatic growth (n.): Understudied and underemphasised phenomenon, compared to the depiction of the suffering of victims. I think most of my growing up has been "post-traumatic" (in a broad sense): e.g. my parents divorcing, heartbreak, being rejected from quantitative graduate programs before I was ready.


• X-Altruism (pejorative n.): extreme altruism. Nascent attempt to justify moral shiftlessness by pathologising giving a shit: "Scott Atran at the University of Michigan concludes excessive humanitarianism can cause a schism in society by sacrificing 'in-group solidarity in favour of concerns for out-groups'." It really would be awful if anyone ever did too much, or felt solidarity, for the outgroup.