Definition of WAESUCKS
Scottish —used to express pity
Origin of WAESUCKS
Scots wae woe (from Middle English wa) + sucks, alteration of English sakes — more at woe
First Known Use: circa 1774
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Mar 092011
Dec 292010
The English language can be an odd place, and obscure. Some of these words go back to the 18th Century or earlier. Please feel free to tell us your favorite “odd” word in the comments!
A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years. ~Wendell L. Willkie
- Abligurition - Spending just an inconceivably large amount of money on food.
- Badot – Means silly.
- Baithe – To agree or consent.
- Callipygian – Adjective meaning having shapely buttocks.
- Dactylonomy – Counting on your fingers.
- Emacity – A fondness for buying things.
- Faineant – A person who is a do-nothing, loafer; or, something that is idle.
- Gallinipper – A large mosquito.
- Halch – To hug or embrace.
Dactylonomy |
Gallinipper |
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Dec 112010
The English language can be an odd place, and obscure. Some of these words go back to the 18th Century or earlier. Please feel free to tell us your favorite “odd” word in the comments!
A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years. ~Wendell L. Willkie
- Abatude – Means money that’s been clipped. In the old days, the edges of gold or silver coins would be clipped off to make change. So the entire image would not be showing. Think on today’s term with a quarter having a nip out the corner to represent 12 cents because you don’t have a dime and two pennies.
- Bablatrice – A female babbler. Chaterestre is another name for talkative woman. And, leighster is a female liar.
- Camorra – A secret society (usually one that’s breaking the law somehow).
- Dendrochronology – The art of tree ring dating.
- Echopraxia – When you mimic the moves of others whether consciously or unconsciously (i.e. yawning).
- Fagin – A person who trains others in crime, esp. children.
- Gadzookery – Use of archaic words or expressions. Example is ye, thee, dost, etc.
- Ha-Ha – A sunken fence or ditch that’s between two land boundaries that divides the land without obstructing the view of the landscape of the land.
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Dec 082010
This literally translates to ”brown hair”.
Chapatsu (チャパツ) is the once-rebellious, once-trendy style of bleaching and occasionally dyeing hair, found among Japanese teens.
While the style itself began to show up in Tokyo streets during the early to mid-1990s, the word did not appear in Kōjien (one of Japans authoritative dictionaries) until 1998.
The style first gained popularity among adolescent girls, seeking to accentuate their tanned skin rebelling against more traditional definitions of beauty, but quickly grew into the mainstream.
Lately, it appears that the “chapatsu” style is on its way out.
From Chapatsu – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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May 102010
..and what can word-learning in dogs teach us about the evolution of language in humans?
Time Out…. This is just amazing! Really, just amazing… Give it a read or two… And pet your animal(s) today…. Okay, go back to reading the article… Time In!
What is involved in the learning of a single new word? Consider the word “tiger”, being learned by a child with already a modest vocabulary, at least for animal words. First the child must make a new entry in the mental lexicon – that “tiger” is a word in the first place. He has to categorize it as a noun. It has to be categorized under “animal” (a supernym) and related to its hyponyms, like “Sumatran tiger.” Then, of course, the child has to learn what actual *thing* the word “tiger” refers to. Now, various conceptual categories likely have to be restructured. Before, the child might have referred to tigers as “cats,” but now the child has must conceptually distinguish cats from tigers. Sometimes, the child has to accomplish all of this without explicit instruction; he or she may be exposed to a word casually, or in the course of conversation. Early research showed that children indeed were able to learn new words after just a single casual exposure. As you can see, learning only one new word involves learning a considerable amount of new information.
The process by which a child learns a new word after only one exposure is called “fast mapping.” And kids “fast map”, well, fast. And often. From 2 years of age, typical English-speaking children add about ten new words a day to their vocabulary until they reach an average vocabulary size of 60,000 words by high school graduation.
Is the ability to fast map unique to language learning, or does it reflect more general cognitive learning skills that may be shared with other animals? Meet Rico.
via Monday Pets: How Do Dogs Learn New Words? : The Thoughtful Animal.
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Feb 122010
I never knew this, but “Jiffy” is not just slang…
Jiffy is used in different applications for various short, very short, or extremely short periods of time. In informal speech a “jiffy” means any unspecified short period of time, as in “I’ll be back in a jiffy”, but in other contexts it has more precise definitions. The word is thought to originally be thieves’ cant for lightning, though this cannot be confirmed.
The earliest technical usage for jiffy was defined by Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875–1946). He proposed a unit of time called the “jiffy” which was equal to the time it takes light to travel one centimeter. It has since been redefined for different measurements depending on the field of study.
Use in electronics
In electronics, a jiffy is the time between alternating current power cycles, 1/60 or 1/50 of a second in most countries — see alternating current.
Use in computing
In computing, a jiffy is the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt. It is not an absolute time interval unit, since its duration depends on the clock interrupt frequency of the particular hardware platform.
Early microcomputer systems such as the Commodore 64 and many game consoles (which use televisions as a display device) commonly synchronize the system clock with the vertical frequency of the local television standard, either 59.94 Hz with NTSC systems, or 50.0 Hz with most PAL systems. Within the Linux 2.6 operating system kernel, since release 2.6.13, on the Intel i386 platform a jiffy is by default 4 ms, or 1/250 of a second. The jiffy values for other Linux versions and platforms have typically varied between about 1 ms and 10 ms.
Use in physics
The speed of light in a vacuum provides a convenient universal relationship between distance and time, so in physics (particularly in quantum physics) and often in chemistry, a jiffy is defined as the time taken for light to travel some specified distance. In astrophysics and quantum physics a jiffy is, as defined by Edward R. Harrison, the time it takes for light to travel one fermi, which is the size of a nucleon. One fermi is 10−15 m, so a jiffy is about 3 × 10−24 seconds.
Sometimes a jiffy is used as a synonym for the Planck interval, about 5.4 × 10−44 seconds, which is the time it takes light to traverse the smallest meaningful length, the Planck length. In this quantum mechanical definition, a jiffy is the shortest theoretically possible time period that can be measured within one standard deviation of accuracy. In practice, current technology can come nowhere near making this brief a time measurement.
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