there  could  be  snakes  in  here

niceness (UNIX n.): inverse process priority. a job with a high niceness is very kind to the users of your system (i.e., it runs at low priority), while a job with little niceness utilises more of the CPU TPTB (internet n.): The Powers That Be. You can hear the conspiratorial hiss. skeuomorph (pej. design n.): an object which retains the look and metaphors of its predecessors even though it does not need to: cultural fluency (culture war n.): Mandatory ideological re-education on campus (see also sensitivity training ). Very useful, not as guide to actually ethical conduct, but as primer on what inadvertent words are likely to incite a mob. stemwinder (US n.): A rousing speech, especially by a politician. spavined (posh adj.): bony, particularly of horses; wasted. neuclidean (maths adj.): noneuclidean for impatient people. landsat (science n.): The oldest satellite mapping project: 45 years of continuous imagery. interocu...

sentinel organ (medical n.): a part of the body particularly sensitive to some medical insult (pathogen, toxin, mutation). Canary in the mine. Has been used of the brain, liver, thyroid, mammaries . toxicant (medical n.): toxic substance. Hypernym of toxin , which is supposed to be "naturally produced toxicant". Language being what it is, people actually use "toxin" as the hypernym and "toxicant" as "artificial, industrial toxin". the walking well (medical collective n.): Medical jargon for healthy people. But particularly malingerers: people going to the GP with nothing wrong. Term is a shibboleth for the speaker being an allied practitioner. apodization (signal processing n.): applying a function to a signal to change its shape, in particular tapering out the extreme values to zero, in particular improving the focus of an optical system by manipulating its input-intensity profile. Literally "de-footing". Used to p...

pokie (Oz n.): slot machine (metonym for poker machine). See also pokie palace , a cheap casino. The only evidence I have that this diminution is typical of Australia is this: Jahwist (philology proper n.): One of the hypothesised four authors of the Old Testament, the one who uses YHWE as the name of God. numale (manosphere n.): Slur for non-hegemonically masculine / non-sexist man. Said to be disrespected by all. the Cupertino idiot-tax operation : Apple Inc. banya (Russian n.): sauna room. to patch (Scots v.): to cancel; to bail; to ditch. Dundonian. stramineous (Latinate adj.): straw-like; worthless. to slot floppies (Rhodesian v.): to shoot insurgents. Presumably racist. source (stream computing n.): stream creator/pusher. Source and sink are from thermodynamics and/or ecology. sink (stream computing n.): stream consumer. A class or function (or file...) that receives events from another object or f...

to knout (v.): to lash with a barbed, multi-headed whip. Peculiar to English commentary about Tsarist Russia. to perlustrate (v.): to inspect thoroughly; to rifle through. morganatic (adj.): Of marriage: crossing class boundaries; partial; granting no titles to the wife and children. AKA left-handed marriage . accouchement (Fr n.): a birth; the moment of fetal expulsion. altricial (adj): incapable of moving around immediately after birth. test particle (n.): fictional entity used in high-energy physics simulations / dynamics problems at the limit. Model with only one property, the one you want to simulate. fustian (n.): 1) thick dark cloth; 2) pompous writing. Confusing because it looks like an adjective. to templatize (computing v.): genericise; to use metaprogramming templates on. Seen in a BS marketing spiel; yet another case of presenting some 40-year-old basic CS idea as revolutionary innovation. nesomane (n.): Island lover. ...