notable psycho booms

• psycho-boom (心理热潮) (n.): recent rapid, enthusiastic import of psychiatric concepts and treatments in China. Excellent stuff. Except, unfortunately, psychoanalysis has stolen a march on the cognitive/biological approach, and is enjoying a lucrative afterlife, following its much-deserved death in the West.

  American psychoanalytic institutes often have trouble finding willing patients; Chinese programs have the opposite problem. When Beijing University held a series of lectures on Carl Jung a few years ago, it could admit only a quarter of the people who wanted to attend.

  


• scènes à faire (legal n.): something too simple or cliched to be copyrightable. e.g. rooftop showdown, the millenial whoop.


• to get winstoned (underground UK v.): to cut one's septum on one of the new plastic £10 notes, which have Churchill's face on them.


• bomb (underground UK n.): a paper case to deliver powder to the stomach.


• sac (chess v.): to sacrifice


• Quadrilateral (international n.): Potential anti-China bloc: the US, India, Australia and Japan


• the clenis (90s US proper n.): Bill Clinton's dick.


• Mendelian disorder (biology n.): a monogenic, heritable disease. Follows the three laws. Not the usual case.


• skort (n.): culottes; shorts with an extra bit of fabric mimicking a short skirt.


• hodler (internet n.): holder; a person who owns Bitcoin long-term.


• willybot (internet n.): program for fraudulent trading, especially of bitcoin, to inflate prices. Named after one operating in the late and ominous Mt Gox.


• toyetic (corporate n.): toyable; merchandise-friendly.


• snow job (50s US n.): a blizzard of bullshit, a wall of flattery.


• ancient solution (maths n.): solution of a differential which applies for all prior time, (−∞, T). Coined by Perelman.


• quad (engineering n.): a quadrillion BTU; 1.05 exajoules. Useful unit for measuring national energy grids.


• Merkelwürfel (German n.): Merkel's cubes. Impressively nasty unspeak for traffic-control blockades in public spaces.


• scalar < vector < matrix < tensor < matroid. Haven't verified that last generalisation but it could be true in a squinting way.