notable no table

• New Aesthetic (art n.): Best defined visually. That slightly grating half-digitised gimmick that every other alt rock album of the last 7 years has used:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• surface learning (n.): superficial, merely verbal, resentful, and test-driven education. No engagement, no internalisation, no critique. Forgotten within months. Most of the 'learning' in the world is just this.


• chinny reckon (sarcastic English interjection): Liar! See also Itchy Chin, Chinny chinny... My peers used this to mean "I wonder" in response to an obvious question.


• damnit operator (computing n.): "!"; an error-suppressing manual override of some language feature. e.g. style inheritance priority (in CSS) or nullability (in C#).


• farm (computing n.): Set of servers all slaved as one.


• adult supervision (n.): Whereby a startup hires an older, outsider CEO. Started as a joke, but it is now reified.


• UQ (academic n.): uncertainty quantification; a multidisciplinary field covering uncertainty in a rigorous and deep way. Good shibboleth.


• dey (SE Scots n.): 1) milkmaid. 2) honorific for father or grandfather. There's a charming folk etymology for this: that it is an East African word meaning "wise man", brought back by veterans of the Yeomanry in Empire. (Actually it is just dad -> deyd -> dey.)


• Pensiero debole (Italian n.): 'weak thought'; a sort of edgy postmodernism. Coined by an intellectual cartoon, Gianni Vattimo.


• Salopian (poncey macaronic n.): A person from Shropshire.


• gasometer (n.). These lovely redundant things:
  
  We didn't have them where I'm from, so they took on a wonderful shining aura to young me.


• best-effort (computer adj.): Of a non-redundant, non-self-correcting network service.


• to bad-use (NE Scots v.): Solecism for "abuse".


• vanity metric (marketing n.). The end result of the spotlight fallacy.


• splittism (Zhonglish n.): selfish separatism; implies that you're being divisive merely out of spite for the Party.


• Speaking of which, some classic Communist heresies:
  • "adventurism" (for moving missiles into Cuba)
  • "capitulationism" (for moving them out)
  • "great-power chauvinism" (for interfering in non-Russian Communist parties)
  • "revisionism" (for not wanting nuclear war)
  • "splittism" (for not wanting to be invaded by the People's Liberation Army)