vocabulary seen online

Some of the word usage is common. I don't know why I didn't know them. Maybe I'm experiencing mental decline.

It could happen.

Others are foreign words or phrases that people like to toss around to show us how much broader they are than we are. And maybe they saw them in a thesaurus and thought oh man that looks really cool.

Others are words that people just made made up.

Several are from J.J. Sefton for Ace's Morning Report, a rather sweeping collection of political links. Sefton writes like an old man who likes tossing in a lot of bizarrre Yiddish and German, along with mangled names of political opponents.

A few are industry words or brand names.

In most cases I included the sentence the word was seen in.

All of them are words that you can just skip over while reading and not miss anything vital. That's how I used to read. Usually you can figure out what was meant with no problem. But then along comes a pop quiz with that ridiculous word as crucial to comprehension, because your teacher is a fiend who likes to play little games, and that blows your A for a grade.

And other times I do know the word, or think I do, but I want to make sure that I have it exactly.

Fifty-three items. Here goes.

* Armistice: A temporary stopping of open acts of warfare by agreement between the opponents: truce.

Should know this from "armistice day." But did I ever really understand armistice day? It could have been a day to celebrate our 2nd amendment. It could have been a day to celebrate arming our allies to the teeth. It could have been a pro-gun day, not a day that sets aside armaments. It could mean dig a hole and throw all your guns in it. But it's definitely something about guns.

Trump may have secured re-election today: President’s decision to call armistice in trade war with China could be milestone on his way to second term.

He could have said truce. He could have said ceasefire. He could have said victory.

* auctoritas: Authority. The general level of prestige a person had in Roman society, and, as a consequence, their clout, influence, and ability to rally support around one's will. The ability to make people do what you want just by being who you are.

Goes with gravitas.

The writer is showing off that if you think you're so smart going around using "gravitas" in sentences then you might be impressed with another word that goes with it. Since you're being all Latin-y with gravitas. See? He's broader than you. He knows more dead language words.

We have been lacking this kind of Presidential gravitas and auctoritas for decades.

* bills of attainder: Also known as an act of attainder, or writ of attainder or bill of pains and penalties is an act of a legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them, often without a trial.

The writer is showing us how smart he is by being a lawyer. Just as my doctor does by speaking Latin instead of English knowing I don't know what the f he's talking about. So why is he even talking?

(appeals judge on the D.C. Circuit, Neomi Rao) She reckons that the way the House is going after Mr. Trump violates the constitutional prohibition against bills of attainder.

* binder pilot: A lot of pilots use various electronic logbook software to store their flights. These software usually give you the option to generate and export flight records into PDF files that comply with the standards and layouts from JAA, EASA, FAA and many other civil aviation authorities. These files are suitable for printing in order to be used when applying for new license ratings or to attend a job interview.

Looked up because usage doesn't make sense, nor does the response to it.

Comment: Wonder how sparkle toes and squish would fair after a pass thru some binder-pilot’s finest farm implement?… wrap ’em tightly I say… eh?

Response: Excellent point. Thunder Jacket for them.

Thunder Jacket: A jacket for a pet dog to relax them during storms.

See? It still doesn't make sense.

* blatherskites: A babbling foolish person. One who talks nonsense in a blustering way; a blusterer.

But that’s because they’re lying, scheming, ultra-deceptive blatherskites who have also dangerously convinced millennials who’ve been pumped full of SSRI drugs since they were five years old - who already have little to live for - that the world is ending in twelve years unless drinking straws are outlawed and everyone but them must be denied access to air-travel.

I suppose we're also expected to know that SSRI drugs means "selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. Sure. Everybody knows that, Showoff.

* blivet: Something annoying, ridiculous, or useless. Something for which one cannot find a word, something difficult to name. An unpleasant or unsolvable situation or problem.

The writer is merely employing alliteration. Useful because it begins with "bl" that's all.

... black anti-abortion activists rip into blonde blivet blowhard Gillibrand for her stupid remarks ...

* buskin: 1. A foot and leg covering reaching halfway to the knee, resembling a laced half boot. 2. a. A thick-soled laced half boot worn by actors of Greek and Roman tragedies. b. Tragedy, especially that which resembles a Greek tragedy.

When William Barr arrived in February as the new attorney general, replacing the recused Jeff Sessions and the buskin Rod Rosenstein, the Mueller dream team charade finally dissipated.

* cabotage: transportation of people and goods between ports in the same country. Navigation along a coast: coastal trade.

Boris Johnson used this word to show off his vocabulary discussing possible trade deals with Trump. It's important Americans know English language comes from Britain and they know more words than we do. Piss off, British person, you still sound retarded no matter your superior vocabulary by your ridiculous gross rhotic displacement and crucial-consonant elisions and glottal stop substitutions what ain't even in the Queen's English you big goofball.

* champ: To bite upon or grind, especially impatiently: The horses champed the oats.To crush with the teeth and chew vigorously or noisily; munch. To mash; crush.

Progressives are no doubt champing at the bit to get involved with the HK protests to turn them into a progressive hate orgy.

(This whole time I thought it was “chomping at the bit.”)

* chef’s kiss: A gesture associated with chefs when they feel that a dish has been executed flawlessly.

The gesture, called al bacio (“as good as a kiss”), is one with sincere roots in traditional Italian culture. In American popular culture, however, the image of a chef giving the kiss of the fingers, as it is found on pizza boxes and cans of tomato paste, is a concoction of post-World War II advertising, and the use of the al bacio gesture perpetuated the stereotype.

Oh? duckduckgo images [tomato paste brands] No al bacio.

Everything about this back and forth between Swalwell and Lewandowski is amazing but Lewandowski repeatedly calling him "President Swalwell" is *chef's kiss*





* congeners: 1. A member of the same kind, class, or group.
2. An organism belonging to the same taxonomic genus as another organism.
3. Chemistry A compound produced in the same process that produces another, often structurally similar compound.

In the alcoholic beverages industry, congeners are substances, other than the desired type of alcohol, ethanol, produced during fermentation. These substances include small amounts of chemicals such as methanol and other alcohols (known as fusel alcohols), acetone, acetaldehyde, esters, tannins, and aldehydes (e.g. furfural). Congeners are responsible for most of the taste and aroma of distilled alcoholic beverages, and contribute to the taste of non-distilled drinks. It has been suggested that these substances contribute to the symptoms of a hangover. Congeners are also used by forensic toxicologists to determine what a person drank in a sub-discipline called alcohol congener analysis.

What makes rum or any brown liquor taste the way it does is, in large part, due to congeners—impurities from fermentation which are more easily filtered out with a column still. You can only get pot-still liquor to a certain level of purity. (Column stills can make things ultra-pure; virtually all vodka is distilled using a column still.)

* deracinate: To pull out by the roots; uproot. To displace from one's native or accustomed environment.

(Knew this already. This word was on a list in one of the GMAT preparation books that Toni and I used as puzzle books. This proves my brain is dying. Goodbye, Sweet World. Please be nice as I fade. I've always relied on the kindness of strangers.)

* didacticism: A philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art.

The most obvious error they make is to remove the context and read The New Colossus with the painfully literal-minded didacticism of the idiot.

(Knew this already. Didactic means intended to instruct, usually about morals.)

* dishpigging: A person who works in the kitchen of any industry, but does anything but cooking. i.e. cleaning dishes, cooking equipment, floors etc. 

Usually student chefs. Student chef cleaning up after full time chefs.

 I did dishpigging a few times, and every cook I worked with was a fucked-up drunk barely holding it together.

* Doula: A trained non-medical companion who supports another individual through a significant health-related experience such as childbirth, miscarriage, induced abortion or stillbirth or non-reproductive experience such as dying.

I sipped from the Hope Hicks/Beverly Crusher glass, and we watched Maddow’s show over veggie enchiladas. “I think of her as a news doula: You know the news is going to be painful no matter what, so we might as well have someone who helps us survive it,” Kee told me.

(Knew this already. Only weirdos use this word.)

* E-Pleb-Neesta: Star Trek "The Omega Glory" a tribe holds a slurred version of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution as holy words.

Anyway, true to form, once Cummings-dumpster was ripped for his pathetic record, the race card was shown and the words of the Democrat E-Pleb-Neesta invoked: Thou shalt not criticize any Black Democrats as that is racist. 

(Clever. Knew this already. Saw the episode. Twice. The tribe mispronounces vocabulary in basic US founder's principles. Kurt recognizes their formal legal language as mispronounced early American and suddenly modern American viewers become sympathetic to the bellicose tribe trying to uphold their miscomprehended basic principles. It's touching. In a maudlin overplayed way with ridiculous costumes.)

* Ephebophilia: The primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19. The term was originally used in the late 19th to mid 20th century. It is one of a number of sexual preferences across age groups subsumed under the technical term chronophilia.

LGBT Activists Vilify Pastor Arrested For Enacting Plot Of Celebrated Gay Movie Ephebophilia for me but not for thee.

* epigenetic: The study of heritable phenotype changes that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence. The Greek prefix epi- "over, outside of, around" in epigenetics implies features that are "on top of" or "in addition to" the traditional genetic basis for inheritance. Epigenetics most often denotes changes that affect gene activity and expression, but can also be used to describe any heritable phenotypic change. Such effects on cellular and physiological phenotypic traits may result from external or environmental factors, or be part of normal development. The standard definition of epigenetics requires these alterations to be heritable in the progeny of either cells or organisms.

I think gayness, and a lot of things, are epigenetic in nature. It's not true that we are what our DNA codes say we are. That's incomplete. We are what the expressed codes in our DNA say, but not everything in our DNA is actually expressed, or switched on.

[The gay gene apparently doesn't exist. But partial-potential-gay genes here and there do. This will be the new thing so get with the program already.]

* equivocal: Open to two or more interpretations and often intended to conceal the truth. synonym: ambiguous.

Characterized by a mixture of opposing elements and therefore questionable or uncertain.

Being of doubtful signification; capable of being understood in different senses; ambiguous; doubtful: as, an equivocal word, term, or sense; an equivocal answer.

Looked up because of this usage: It’s the same narrative positioning used by Trudeau/Freeland every time they clutch their parasitic pearls and demand equivocal status - in all things - from the U.S.

[Parasitic pearls, how weird]

* Fairchild 8: The F8 was Fairchild’s 1st processor. It was targeted as an inexpensive processor for service and control applications (gas pumps, vending machines, cash registers. It included 64 bytes of “scratchpad” RAM to enable two chip implementations (2nd chip being a ROM such as the 3851).

* gavone: pig

Note that it's assholes like George Will who out of one side of their cake-holes claim politics ain't beanbag while out the other proclaim fighting back in any manner, let alone the way the orange-comb-over gavone from Queens does, is beneath the dignity of elected office.

* geschrei: German: screaming, shouting, fuss, song and dance, hue and cry.

... Julie Kelly glumly asks if all of this Democrat impeachment geschrei will actually numb the public if and when criminals ever are revealed let alone punished and lastly ...

* gin blossom: slang for the capillaries in your nose and face that burst because of excessive drinking. 

Yes, the half-human-half-gin-blossom Bill Weld has some very interesting connections indeed.

* Gletkin: Character in Darkness at Noon, a novel by Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, published 1940. In which Rubashov, an old Bolshevik is arrested, imprisoned and and tried for treason against the government he helped to create. Gletkin a young man characterized by starching his uniform so that it cracks and groans whenever he moves. A junior examiner, LGletkin urges using harsh, physical methods to demoralize Rubashov. 

And for some outrageous amount of tuition that will send many of you into perpetual debt, the modern-day Gletkins of academia will purge you of these impure thoughts.

* goomar: Mafia mistress. Gun moll. 

[Kamala Harris] Good riddance to the world's most vicious, arrogant, and stupid goomar.

* gravamen: The main claim or most important aspect of a complaint against a defendant. The burden or chief weight; that part of an accusation which weighs most heavily against the accused; the substantial cause of an action at law; ground or burden of complaint in general. In the Ch. of Eng., a representation by the lower house of Convocation to the upper of an existing grievance, disorder, or inconvenience affecting the church.

Aside from the author's annoying insistence on using the pronouns "her" and "she" for who knows what purpose, the gravamen of his discourse (yes, it's written by a guy) is spot on, and the entire thing is worth a read.

* haruspex: A priest in ancient Rome who practiced divination by the inspection of the entrails of animals.

So says b3ta's resident haruspex. What have you read in the entrails today, Benny?

[B3ta. Must have got this from Harry Potter.]

* hoplophobe: political neologism coined by retired American military officer Jeff Cooper as a pejorative to describe an "irrational aversion to weapons." It is also used to describe the "fear of firearms" or the "fear of armed citizens."

Piers Morgan isn't any kind of voice of sanity. He's friends with Trump and doesn't like seeing unfair attacks on his friend. He's still a loony hoplophobe, for example.

* Horst Wessel: Berlin leader of Nazi Party's stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung, or SA, best known for being made a martyr for the Nazis after his murder by the Communist Party of Germany. His murderer was sentenced to prison but forcibly removed and killed by the SA after Nazis came to power. 

His funeral was attended by many Nazi elite. After his death he became a major propaganda symbol in Nazi Germany. Previously he had written the lyrics to a march that was renamed the Horst-Wessel-Lied. (Horst Wessel Song) and became the official anthem of Nazi Party and then later became the co-national anthem of Germany and also the first verse of the Deutschlandied, also known as Deutschland über alles. 

--  David Hogg wants activists to decorate the steps of the NRA with his body if he is ever assassinated.

-- He wants to be the Horst Wessel of the antigunner movement.

* indelible: Impossible to remove, erase, or wash away: permanent. 

(Christine Blasey Ford) The duo note the very weak and vague statement the father made on behalf of his daughter with the indelible hippocampus -- a strange and salient fact in and of itself.

I still don't get it. An important portion of the brain that cannot be erased. Eh. 

(Already knew indelible. But don't get the usage.) 

* lebensraum: Living space. A critical component in the Nazi worldview that drove both its military conquests and racial policy.

Despite Beijing's innate bellicosity and imperialist dreams, aided and abetted by American stupidity in the form of granting them most favored nation trading status (Carter), handing over extremely sensitive defense technology that boosted their military capabilities by decades (Clinton) and lebensraum to illegally claim all of the South China Sea as territorial waters and a free hand in Africa and elsewhere (Obama), China today has serious internal problems that could present a mortal threat to 70 years of total Communist control.

* limine: A motion in limine is a motion filed by a party to a lawsuit which asks the court for an order or ruling limiting or preventing certain evidence from being presented by the other side at the trial of the case. Generally, this motion is filed in advance of the trial, but a motion may be entertained by the court during a trial, before the evidence in question is offered. The purpose of this motion is to prevent the interjection of matters which are irrelevant, inadmissible or prejudicial.

* Mephistopheles: demon of temptation that appears in Goethe's masterpiece, "Faust". Waging a bet with God on whatever Dr. Faust would fall into depravity or not, Mephisto attempts to pull him into the path of evil. 

He [Epstein] enjoyed being, or playing, Mephistopheles, quite apart from any sexual gratification he may have had on the way.

* Mittelschmerz: A one-sided, lower abdominal pain associated with ovulation. German for "middle pain," mittelschmerz occurs midway through a menstrual cycle — about 14 days before your next menstrual period.

Continuing from my last sentiment, the other dirty bastards that are a part of this are right there in the GOP. In particular the now decomposing McCain and Mittelschmerz Romney.

* Motte and Bailey play: (MAB) is a combination of bait-and-switch and equivocation in which someone switches between a "motte" (an easy-to-defend and often common-sense statement, such as "culture shapes our experiences") and a "bailey" (a hard-to-defend and more controversial statement, such as "cultural knowledge is just as valid as scientific knowledge") in order to defend a viewpoint. Someone will argue the easy-to-defend position (motte) temporarily, to ward off critics, while the less-defensible position (bailey) remains the desired belief, yet is never actually defended.

(Greta the climatescold) Oh yeah, and it’s the ultimate Motte and Bailey play, because they can put an uneducated teenager with no scientific creds at all in front of one of the biggest government bodies in the world to demand socialism now or else, and when you go LOL WUT they switch to We Just Want A Clean Environment Why Do You Hate Children. It’s total bullshit.

* Pnyx: A hill in central Athens. Beginning as early as 507 BC, the Athenians gathered on the Pnyx to host their popular assemblies, thus making the hill one of the earliest and most important sites in the creation of democracy.

* Robert Norton Noyce: (December 12, 1927 – June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley," was an American physicist who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the realization of the first integrated circuit or microchip that fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name.

Hippies in the '60's thought that they were changing the world. They weren't. It was Robert Noyce and the Fairchild 8 that actually changed the world.

* Sauve qui peut: Save himself who can. Every man for himself.

* sigmoid: Shaped like the letter C or S. The sigmoid colon, the distal part of the colon from the level of the iliac crest to the rectum. 

 She (Elizabeth Warren) needs to have her vocal cords yanked out through her sigmoid.

* spruik: To make or give a speech, especially extensively or elaborately; spiel; orate.

The ad spruiks the brand's SkinGuard range, highlighting the issue of sensitive skin for men who shave every day -- including firefighters, who are required to be clean-shaven as it enables a proper seal for their breathing mask.

* steatopygia: the state of having substantial levels of tissue on the buttocks and thighs.

I heard they’d start on those with steatopygia flanks.

* styrene: Primarily a synthetic chemical that is used extensively in the manufacture of plastics, rubber, and resins. It is also known as vinylbenzene, ethenylbenzene, cinnamene, or phenylethylene.

An organic compound with the chemical formula C 6 H 5 CH=CH 2.This derivative of benzene is a colorless oily liquid that evaporates easily and has a sweet smell, although high concentrations have a less pleasant odor.

... Styrene Steyer lies about Wisconsin vote fraud ...

* supranational: Transcending national boundaries, authority, or interests. 

In mid-July, Robin Harris, a longtime adviser to ColdWar Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, wrote an article in the Telegraph urging Boris Johnson to carry out "a peaceful but revolutionary seizure of power by the British people from a supranational authority and a home-grown but deracinated, collaborationist elite."

* Swerve: Swerve is a natural sweetener made from ingredients in select fruits & starchy root vegetables. 

The author also does not discuss anything about the Keto Diet, and offers NO tips about substitutions or any additional information. For example, what is swerve?

* tensegrity: An elision of ‘tension + integrity’. Buckminster Fuller, building on the highly original sculptures of Kenneth Snelson, coined the term, to indicate that the integrity of the structure derived from the balance of tension members, not the compression struts.

Most of our houses and other man-made structures are ‘compressionegrities’ – their integrity lies with the continuity of compression from the highest brick in the Empire State Building to the lowest block of granite – the compression runs in an unbroken line from element to element all the way to the ground.

The skeleton is a stack of bones, like a stack of checkers – a continuous compression structure – with the individual muscles hanging off each bone to move it. But every classroom skeleton you have ever seen is wired together. Similarly, in the actual skeleton the bones float in a sea of soft-tissue.

They live in "The Bubble of Correct Thinking," and don't dare venture to test the limits of the tensegrity of the bubble's surface even though they realize how fragile it is, or perhaps because they realize how fragile it is.

* termagant: A woman regarded as quarrelsome or scolding; a shrew.

An imaginary deity, supposedly to hae been worshiped by the Mohammedans, and introduced into the moralities and other shows, in which hegigured as a most violent and turbulent personage.

Meanwhile, POTUS gets to face Crone Hillary 2.0 in the form of the similarly-miserable, mendacious, self-serving, imperially arrogant, hectoring scold/shrew/termagant, the odious wrinkled crone and permanent nag, Fauxcahontas.

* Titleist: Golf equipment manufacturer, balls and clubs and such.

Is anyone else made really uncomfortable these days by anyone wearing any ind of red baseball cap Like, I see one and my heart does weird shit and then I finally realize it only says Titleist or whatever. Maybe don't wear red caps anymore, normal people?

* togs: a set of clothes and accessories for a specified use.

I answered a host of questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet, on a slew of subjects from Brexit and Comey to where a Bond villain gets his togs. 

* tomato passata: Tomato passata is one of the most useful basic recipe in Italian cuisine. It is uncooked tomato, without seeds or skins, which is bottled and preserved to be used in sauce dishes throughout the year. It can not be eaten directly from the bottle as it requires cooking.

* tovarich: a comrade (especially in Russian communism) tovarich used as a noun is very rare.

... two contradictory essays on the fortunes of tovarich Sanders ...

* und so weiter: And so on, and so forth. 

Fight the power, don't let the man keep you down, et cetera, et cetera, und so weiter.

* vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Vampire squid.

Goldman Sachs is of the species vampyroteuthis Infernalis, lit.