mean

mean – adj - Offensive, selfish, or unaccommodating; nasty; malicious; small-minded or ignoble; penurious, stingy, or miserly; inferior in grade, quality, or character; low in status, rank, or dignity; of little importance or consequence; unimposing or shabby; small, humiliated, or ashamed.

An adjective I would apply to much of culture and society in these waning days of Western civilization.

squamous

squamous - adj - Covered with or formed of scales; scaly.

Another word from H. P. Lovecraft. I've never much cared for his writing, yet from time to time I find myself drawn to it. I'd call it a guilty pleasure, but one story is usually enough to put me off his stories for another year or two. (But try his good story Pickman's Model.)

Meanwhile, my fascination with the non-exquisite Lindsay Lohan continues. I can't accept that a girl can be such severly damaged goods at age 21.

(Word of the Week indeed!)

terminus

terminus - noun - the finishing point; the end; a boundary, border or limit; the post or stone marking a boundary; the end of a railroad or other transportation line

cognoscenti

cognoscenti – n - Persons who have superior knowledge and understanding of a particular field, esp. in the fine arts, literature, and world of fashion.

Yes, I'm still here, but I've been busier than a one-armed paper hanger lately.

oblation

oblation - noun - the act of offering something, such as worship or thanks; the act of offering the bread and wine of Eucharist; something offered in a religious rite or as a charitable gift

trend

trend - noun - the general course or prevailing tendency; drift


It seem we have all become too busy to continue the 'Word of the Day'. Perhaps this is better titled 'Word of the Week'.

canard

canard – n - A false or baseless, usually derogatory story, report, or rumor.

How could we have missed this wonderful word for so long? I am now awaiting an opportunity to say, "That is a vile canard, Sir!" and challenge somebody to a duel. Do you have a flintlock pistol I can borrow?

A publicist recently said of Lindsey Lohan, "She can't sing, she can't act, and she's got the face of a weasel in heat." Well, here she is after 63 days of rehab.

maladroit

maladroit - adj - clumsy; awkward

One reference said "not adroit", to which I responded "no kidding!". Somehow adding part of the word to the definition seems wrong

arrogant

arrogant – adj - Making claims or pretensions to superior importance or rights; overbearingly assuming; insolently proud.

We all know I have a problem with the Deadly Sin of Lust. It's less well-known that Pride sometimes gets the best of me, which is why I have to be constantly on my guard lest I find people using today's word to describe me.

imprudent

imprudent - adj - lacking discretion; incautious; rash

Something in the same vein as misspeak.

misspeak

misspeak – v - To speak, utter, or pronounce incorrectly; to speak inaccurately, inappropriately, or too hastily.

When a politician or other public figure claims to have misspoken what he means is:
1) I inadvertently told the truth.
2) I forgot myself and said what I really believed.
Keep this in mind as you watch the carefully scripted, poll-driven, focus-group-tested mouthing of sound-bites laughingly called presidential debates.

roue

roue - noun - a man devoted to a life of sensual pleasure; a debauchee; a rake

Caligula comes to mind as a prominent example of this word. He is well known as the emperor who would invite his friends and their wives to dinner then, in the middle of the meal, take a friends wife and have sex with her. After having sex with her, Caligula would return to the table to finish his meal and extol or deride the woman's sexual behaviors to her husband.

bouleversement

bouleversement (bool-vair-suh-MAWN) - noun - complete overthrow; a reversal; a turning upside down

I have had to put my laptop in the shop to get the latch fixed so I could open the lid. This has left me bereft of my ability to keep track of what words have been entered temporarily. I do have a backup which I'll be using in the interim, and there is no date on when I'll be getting the computer back from the shop since it hasn't even been shipped off to get fixed yet (GAH!!!).

intelligentsia

intelligentsia – n - Intellectuals considered as a group or class, esp. as a cultural, social, or political elite.

Today's word came up in Richard Pipes's Concise History of the Russian Revolution. Pipes says - and I agree - that intelligentsia are needed to produce revolutions (as opposed to reforms) because they regard the mass of humanity as mere abstractions, imperfect life forms in need of the molding only the intellectual elite can provide. Historical examples would be France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and the United States today.

William F. Buckley once said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT. Agreed.

in totu

in toto - In all; completely; entirely; wholly.

I came across this term last night in Jacque Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, which I strongly recommend. (I take exception to some of his conclusions, but he's worth disagreeing with.)

By the way, I'm still recuperating from your beating me on the draw re reductio ad absurdum. ;^D

embonpoint

embonpoint - noun - (ahn-bohn-PWAN) plumpness of person; stoutness

I found this quote on wikipedia, "The Western ideal considers a slim and slender body mass as optimal while many historic cultures consider an embonpoint or plump body-mass as appealing". The article went on to talk about how US women failed to recognize what men find attractive, believing a slimmer than average appearance was more attractive. In reality, most men found women of average build to be more attractive.

isthmus

isthmus – n - A narrow strip of land, bordered on both sides by water, connecting two larger bodies of land.

I know most people consider the whole subject tiresome, just something to be gotten past in school, but my interest in history is life-long. I may have been the only five-year-old in the Western hemisphere who could have named all the US presidents and told you something about them (admittedly, nothing very penetrating - I was five!). Anyone interested in history is going to develop some knowledge of geography, and I thought I'd devote a few entries to the subject.

That's the isthmus of Corinth shown above, separating the Pelloponese (home of the Spartans) from what may still be called Attica (home of the Athenians).

cavil

cavil – v - To raise irritating and trivial objections; find fault with unnecessarily; to oppose by inconsequential, frivolous, or sham objections; a trivial and annoying objection; the raising of such objections.

petabyte

petabyte - noun - One quadrillion (10 to the 15th power) bytes

I found this word in this wonderful email signature:

"Peta" is Greek for fifth; a petabyte is 10 to the fifth power, as
well as fifth in line after kilo, mega, giga, and tera.

However notice the mistake: 10^5 is 100000 which is less than mega, quite a bit less than giga and a huge amount less than tera. The correct reference should have been 1000^5. Interestingly, since we deal in powers of 2 (binary) for digital computers, the actual number of a petabyte is 1024^5 (2^50) or 1,125,899,906,842,624. Given the discrepancy between 1000^5 and 2^50, it has been suggested that petabyte be equal to 1000^5 while pebibyte be equal to 2^50, but this isn't widely used. In reality, most people probably don't know what comes after terabyte anyway.

Here is some extra history about the prefix 'Peta' which is interesting:
Adopted in 1975, it comes from the Greek πέντε, meaning five, because it is equal to 1000^5. It is based on the model of tera- (from Greek τέρας = 'monster', but looking like tetra- from the Greek for "four" with a letter missing, and so peta-, coming from penta-, omits the third letter, n.

cavort

cavort – v - To prance or caper about; to behave in a high-spirited, festive manner; make merry.

I've been getting precious little of this done lately.