notable heinleinations

• winchell (n.) and lippman (n.): Two words for 'journalist' coined by Heinlein. A "winchell" is a hateful, gossipy pundit. Named for this nasty little man. A "lippman" is a brave, muckracking investigator. Named for this good guy. We really really need two words for these two wildly different ideal types. (More recently Nick Davies tried out "churnalism", but it didn't stick.) It is stupid to attack 'journalism' when you are only dissing winchells, but that is the blunt instrument of language for you.


• niladic (computer adj.): Of a function, having zero arguments. The zeroth member of the n-adics.


• d'Alembertian (maths n.): the Laplace operator in Minkowski space; the divergence of the gradient of a function in a 4D manifold. What a beautiful word.


• bim (1950s US n.): woman. I think the register is the same as "chick" or "broad".


• offboarding process (HR adj.): The minutiae surrounding leaving a job: deleting accounts, generating P45s, updating databases. Sometimes a nasty metonym for being fired.


• to shark (Oxford Uni v.): to seduce (a fresher).



• tiger team (US corporate n.): Originally: "a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem". Now: "a team".
  See also COBRA Room.


• stringly typed (computer adj.): of an implementation that relies on strings for control flow and state despite being in a language with an actual type system. ColdFusion is like this.


• apportation (n.): In English, occult name for teleportation. In French, a contribution to something.


• lemmatise (linguistics v.): to group together all the inflections of a word to analyse them together


• stroogle (v.): to click around a place on Street View.


• greentext (channish n.): little terse stories, printed using the quotation ">" operator. Not usually vile.


• to be zucked (internet v.): to be mistreated by Mark Zuckerberg; to have your idea stolen; to be banned from Facebook.