notable intermittent explosions

• Intermittent Explosive Disorder (medical n.): behavioral disorder involving sudden irrational rage. Children under 6 are never considered to display IED: their explosive disorder is instead due to being under 6. Very possibly the reason for that unbelievably petty outburst you saw in Morrison's the other day.


• sport one's oak (Oxbridge v.): to signal a desire for solitude by closing one's (outer) door.


• fatberg (n.): a congealed mass of cooking fat, nappies and condoms, blocking a sewer. This one is 130 tonnes.


• Vouched Mozillian: A trusted volunteer for the Mozilla Foundation. Sounds like a clan from Dune.


• monocoque (engineering adj.): of frames which use the external chassis to support weight, lacking an internal load-bearing frame; 'structural skin'.




• Underwater basket weaving (US n.): snarky metonym for any useless university course. Decried as racist, as all things must be.


• survivors movement (internet n.): People who hate the psychiatric treatment they've had. Pretty much the same as "Mad Pride".


• futch (internet n.): femme butch; a woman who looks feminine but dresses masculine.


• to be blackpilled (channish v.): 1) to realise that Men's Rights Activism and Pick-up Artistry are in fact feminist delusions; to possess a misogyny so deep that you swear off sex entirely. In this strange corner of social activism, there are "blue pill" people (who don't take advantage of women) and "red pill" people (who disrespect and take advantage of women). These new people seem to have taken both pills and ended up hating women while not taking advantage of them. 2) part of Swansea.


• SMMUL: statistical and methodological myths and urban legends. Great book, but I'm not sure we needed this acronym.


• forcing function (n.): 1) a behavior-shaping constraint; a 'nudge'. 2) a univariate function of time in a system of differential equations; 3) a nonhomogeneous source function.


• Robotic process automation (n.): Fresh buzzword for that 'software' thing - but particularly the kind that nontechies can drag and drop to make slightly different software.


• hard tab (n.): a \t character, as opposed to "soft tabs", i.e. several spaces. I like them - they make it easier to key through several lines - but most of the software world thinks this makes me an idiot.


• big data (n.): A negative shibboleth: using it indicates that you are not a serious software or data person (or, charitably, that you work for people who are not).