Words & Stuff

Their faces had the warm glow of lampads in an ancient church[....] --We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney in 1960; p. 52 of the 1977 Penguin...

Karen M. recently referred to something as "emo," and suddenly I'm seeing the term everywhere. Turns out it's more or less derived from "emotional hardcore" as a genre of music,...

The sky of beatific blue, the suns, tiny as children's toys, reflected in all the badges, faces unclouded by the insanity of thoughts [...]: all this was formed of...

"Israel and US on back foot over Hamas" --headline in Financial Times, 10 February 2006 UsingEnglish.com says back foot is a British idiom; to be on one's back foot...

A trig point is a small tower that's part of a network that forms a conceptual grid of triangles over a geographical region. A very useful tool for building computer...

...the number of [...] fake pings--"spings"--has also increased... --Blog firm working with Google to cut 'spings', vnunet.com, 10 February 2006 The wikipedia entry on sping says the word is...

"Mokita" means "the truth everyone knows but no one talks about," according to Wendalyn at Mavens' Word of the Day. Wendalyn adds that the word apparently "comes from the Kilivila...

Turns out a "compere" is a master of ceremonies (MW11 sez "chiefly British"). And to compere is to emcee. I had seen "compeer" before (mostly in Pogo, I think), for...

According to MW3, "rimu" is "a tall New Zealand timber tree." It's a Maori word. I probably won't post too many plant names in this blog; as when playing Fictionary,...

To "saponify," sez MW11, is "to convert (as fat) into soap." Not exactly a word that one is likely to need in everyday use....