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notable incompossibilities

  • grey literature (librarian n.): a subtractive genre: neither academic nor commercial nor amateur writing. NGO reports, government whitepapers, think tank bilge, treaties. Perfectly named. Whatever you think of the average quality of academia, I guarantee you this is worse. It is not clear how much of the world's decisions depend on it.

  • hoʻoponopono (Hawaiian n.): "making RIGHT"; a particular conflict resolution ritual. Recently rehashed into a Standard New Age form of narcissistic self-forgiveness. Behold: we can now complain about the cultural appropriation of intangibles: “When things are taken out of our cultures and applied in ways in which those outside the culture want to apply them, especially for profit, there is almost always a problem.

  • frummer (Yiddish n.): a highly observant Jew. From פֿרום‎; pious.

  • shadow welfare system (sociology n.): things that poor people do to get by outside of government benefits, e.g. food banks, not paying for the subway, getting hospitalised or sectioned. Also used sardonically of safety nets for the rich only, e.g. company bailouts, upper bracket tax breaks, .

  • partwork (UK n.): a book artificially split up into a series of (expensive) magazines, usually with a toy attached.

  • SerDe (computer n.): a Serializer plus its Deserializer.

  • sleep efficiency (biology n.): the ratio of the total time spent asleep (total sleep time)t compared to the total amount of time spent in bed. What you want but can't have.

  • lifestyle businesses (new economy n.): intentionally low-key job, low hours in exchange for low or variable pay; e.g. a passive income stream.

  • lifestyle town (bs n.): Somewhere you move cos it's nice. e.g. Welwyn, Portland.

  • written in tablets of jade (US adj.): permanent, incontrovertible. Curious.

  • incompossible (logic adj.): incompatible; not mutually possible.

  • nohello (internet n.): Etiquette at Google, that you should begin IM conversations without preamble, but with the actual question. Should save many thousands of hours.

  • Kapton tape (trademarked n.): duct tape in spaaaaace

  • polymonogamous (internet n.): a closed polyamorous relationship; a settled polycule with a fixed number of people >2.

  • to aumann (internet v.): to sincerely attempt to uncover the truth after finding a disagreement.

  • cosmesis (medical n.): prettiness, or at least non-horrifyingness.

  • fixup (literary n.): retroactively novelised series of short stories, usually given some themes in common.

  • Krukenberg procedure (medical ): surgical technique to convert an arm stump into a pincer using the ulna.

  • let go (euphemistic n.): Standard businessese evasion, but note the ambiguity even in the evasion: is it being set free or dropped?

  • JAMstack (web dev n.): client JavaScript, APIs, and prebuilt Markup.

  • concept doubling (philosophy n.): process by which politically polarised homonyms are made; the idea that liberals and conservatives (increasingly) express different concepts by uttering the same word.

  • fatidic (arch. adj.): fateful; prophetic

  • atopy (medicine n.): genetic tendency to develop allergic diseases (rhinitis, asthma, eczema).

  • banner blindness (internet n.): being conditioned to ignore any large brightly-coloured boxes on a webpage by years of ignoring ads.

  • since eighteen-oatcake (Scots phrase): time out of mind; the year dot

  • Naukri (India n.): a job search site with, supposedly, 50m registered applicants.

  • trug (UK n.): shallow, gardening basket made with wide strips of wood.

  • participatory action research (sociology n.): paper in which the academic actively took part in the thing they were studying. If politics is to again take over science, this is one name it will wear. See also complete participant.

  • to arb (internet v.): to take advantage of the variation in odds offered by different bookmakers, in order to make a profit regardless of the outcome of an event. Matched Betting

  • arber (internet n.): arbitrageur

  • red tide (marine biology n.): algal bloom involving dinoflagellates. Turns the entire coastal region orangey-red. Can output massive doses of saxitoxin.

  • bi-ace (internet adj.): romantically interested in men and women, but sexually interested in neither.

  • XAI (tech n.): Explainable Artificial Intelligence. Not black-box like deep learning.

  • Stormies (internet n.): Can't find this anywhere else, but in context I think it was "fascists; Stormfronters".

  • backtesting (finance n.): retrodiction

  • fitch-style (logic adj.): cool notation which indents one level for every new assumption, so you can see immediately what depends on what.

  • hydrocycling, hydrospinning (exercise n.): riding a static bike underwater. Actually really good.

  • area boys (Nigerian proper n.): a particular Lagos gang. See also yahoos

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