notable rolfing

• 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 produce the bokeh effect:
  


• executive assistant (Corporate n.): inflated secretary. Courtier to the CEO king.


• TCF (regulator adj.): treating customers fairly. First seen in the sentence "We have achieved significant optimisations by overcoming our TCF inhibitions."
• bastion host (networking n.): Hardened gateway computer, running just a proxy server. Compare DMZ, the logical counterpart.


• webshit (informal cybersecurity n.): Malware included in your download. Warez.


• lamer (hacker n.): a willfully ignorant person; a button-masher; a script kiddie. The opposite of a Hacker.


• alliaceous(botanical adj.): oniony; that nice sting.


• grobian (Renaissance n.): ass; buffoon; glutton. From the (fictional) Saint Grobian, patron saint of assholes. Cognate to grope.


• ad verecundiam (Latin n.): argument from authority. (We should say argument from inappropriate authority, lest we forget that knowledge does grant appropriate authority, and that shorthand testimony from appropriate authorities is the proximate source of most knowledge tokens. But that sounds fussy, and so we will lose the language fight.)


• flossy (AA adj.): showy. to floss (AA v.): to show off. Weird to me.


• cot–caught merger (linguistics n.): loss from a dialect of the distinction between /ɔː/ (au, aw: 'caught' or 'thought') and /ɒ/ (o: "cot" or "lot").


• upzone (US, transitive v.): To relax zoning laws in an area, allowing more intensive residence.


• whale (gaming n.): addicted player. The tiny fraction of players of free online games who spend enough to make the business model work.


• rolfing (quack n.): pseudoscientific mixture of chiropracty and massage. I was amused by how often this ad used the word without saying what it is: