Wikipedia Articles

Art & Media

Analysis

  • Bechdel test - a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.
  • Gamine - a slim, elegant young woman who is, or is perceived to be, mischievous, teasing or sexually appealing.
  • Idiot plot - one which is “kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot, and where the story would quickly end, or possibly not even happen, if this were not the case.
  • Johanson analysis - a method to evaluate the representation of women and girls in fiction. The analysis evaluates media on criteria that include the basic representation of women, female agency, power and authority, the male gaze, and issues of gender and sexuality.
  • Manic Pixie Dream Girl - a stock character type in films. Film critic Nathan Rabin, who coined the term, said that the MPDG "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." MPDGs are said to help their men without pursuing their own happiness, and such characters never grow up; thus, their men never grow up.
  • Mary Sue - a type of fictional character, usually a young woman, who is portrayed as unrealistically free of weaknesses.
  • Redshirt is a stock character in fiction who dies soon after being introduced.
  • Smurfette principle - the practice in media, such as film and television, to include only one woman in an otherwise entirely male ensemble.
  • Stocker character - stereotypical fictional person or type of person in a work of art such as a novel, play, or a film whom audiences recognize from frequent recurrences in a particular literary tradition.
  • Sword and planet - a subgenre of fantasy that features rousing adventure stories set on other planets, and usually featuring humans as protagonists. The name derives from the heroes of the genre engaging their adversaries in hand-to-hand combat primarily with simple melée weapons such as swords, even in a setting that often has advanced technology.

Books & Literature

  • A True Story - a long novella or short novel written in the second century AD by the Greek author Lucian of Samosata. The novel is a satire of outlandish tales that had been reported in ancient sources, particularly those that presented fantastic or mythical events as if they were true. It is Lucian's best-known work. It is the earliest known work of fiction to include travel to outer space, alien lifeforms, and interplanetary warfare. It has been described as "the first known text that could be called science fiction".
  • Alien space bats - a neologism for plot devices used in alternate history to mean an implausible point of divergence.
  • Campus novel - also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s.
  • Hamlet and His Problems - an essay written by T.S. Eliot in 1919 that offers a critical reading of Hamlet.
  • Hard science fiction - a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.
  • How to Blow Up a Pipeline - a nonfiction book written by Andreas Malm and published in 2021 by Verso Books. In the book, Malm argues that sabotage is a logical form of climate activism, and criticizes both pacifism within the climate movement and "climate fatalism" outside it.
  • I, Libertine - a literary hoax novel that began as a practical joke by late-night radio raconteur Jean Shepherd. Shepherd was annoyed at the way bestseller lists were compiled in the mid-1950s. These lists were determined from sales figures and from the number of requests for new and upcoming books at bookstores. Shepherd urged his listeners to enter bookstores and ask for a non-existent book. He fabricated the author (Frederick R. Ewing) of this imaginary novel, concocted a title (I, Libertine), and outlined a basic plot for his listeners to use on bookstore clerks. Fans of the show took it further, planting references to the book and author so widely, demand for the book led to its inclusion on The New York Times Best Seller list
  • Incunable - a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. Incunabula were produced before the printing press became widespread on the continent and are distinct from manuscripts, which are documents written by hand.
  • Lab lit - a loosely defined genre of fiction, distinct from science fiction, that centers on realistic portrayals of scientists and on science as a profession
  • Lamb to the Slaughter - a 1953 short story by Roald Dahl. It was initially rejected, along with four other stories, by The New Yorker, but was published in Harper's Magazine in September 1953. "Lamb to the Slaughter" demonstrates Dahl's fascination with horror (with elements of black comedy), which is seen in both his adult fiction and his stories for children. The story was suggested to Dahl by his friend Ian Fleming: "Why don't you have someone murder their husband with a frozen leg of mutton which she then serves to the detectives who come to investigate the murder?"
  • Let's kill all the lawyers - a line from William Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2. The full quote is: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers". It is among Shakespeare's most famous lines.
  • Literary nonsense - a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not, with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning.
  • Mundane science fiction - a niche literary movement within science fiction that developed in the early 2000s, characterized by its setting on Earth or within the Solar System; a lack of interstellar travel, intergalactic travel or human contact with extraterrestrials; and a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written or a plausible extension of existing technology.

Comics

  • Gag-a-day - the style of writing comic cartoons such that every installment of a strip delivers a complete joke or some other kind of artistic statement. It is opposed to story or continuity strips, which rely on the development of a story line across a sequence of the installments. Most syndicated comics are of this type.
  • Glossary of comics terminology
  • The Lexicon of Comicana - a 1980 book by the American cartoonist Mort Walker. It was intended as a tongue-in-cheek look at the devices used by cartoonists. In it, Walker invented an international set of symbols called symbolia after researching cartoons around the world.
  • Women in refrigerators is the name for the superhero comic-book trope whereby female characters are injured, raped, killed, or depowered (an event colloquially known as fridging) as a plot device intended to move a male character's story arc forward.

Graphic Design

  • Greeking - a style of displaying or rendering text or symbols, not always from the Greek alphabet. Greeking obscures portions of a work for the purpose of either emphasizing form over details or displaying placeholders for unavailable content.

Images and Photography

  • Autostereogram - a single-image stereogram (SIS), designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional (3D) scene from a two-dimensional image.
  • - Hidden mother photography - a genre of photography common in the Victorian era in which young children were photographed with their mother present but hidden in the photograph. It arose from the need to keep children still while the photograph was taken due to the long exposure times of early cameras.

Magazines

Music

  • ABC Notation is a shorthand form of musical notation for computers. In basic form it uses the letter notation with a–g, A–G, and z, to represent the corresponding notes and rests, with other elements used to place added value on these – sharp, flat, raised or lowered octave, the note length, key, and ornamentation.
  • As Slow as Possible - a musical piece that is currently being played on an organ at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany. The performance began in 2001 and will end in 2640
  • Backmasking - a recording technique in which a sound or message is recorded backward onto a track that is meant to be played forward.
  • Boris Johnson is a Fucking Cunt - a British satirical punk rock single by The Kunts, a band created by the dark comedy singer Kunt and the Gang. The song is directed at British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and consists of the words "Boris Johnson is a fucking cunt" being repeated.
  • Chopped and screwed - a music genre and technique of remixing music that involves slowing down the tempo and deejaying. It developed in the Houston hip hop scene in the early 1990s by DJ Screw. The screwed technique involves slowing the tempo of a song down to 60 and 70 quarter-note beats per minute and applying techniques such as skipping beats, record scratching, stop-time and affecting portions of the original composition to create a "chopped-up" version of the song.
  • Crab canon - an arrangement of two musical lines that are complementary and backward, similar to a palindrome.
  • Earworm - a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person's mind after it is no longer playing.
  • Erhu - a Chinese two-stringed bowed musical instrument, more specifically a spike fiddle, which may also be called a Southern Fiddle, and is sometimes known in the Western world as the Chinese violin or a Chinese two-stringed fiddle.
  • Filk music - a musical culture, genre, and community tied to science fiction, fantasy, and horror fandom and a type of fan labor. The genre has existed since the early 1950s and been played primarily since the mid-1970s.
  • Hang - a type of musical instrument called a handpan, fitting into the idiophone class and based on the Caribbean steelpan instrument.
  • Intonarumori - experimental musical instruments invented and built by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo between roughly 1910 and 1930. There were 27 varieties of intonarumori built in total, with different names.
  • Manualism - the art of playing music by squeezing air through the hands. Because the sound produced has a distinctly flatulent tone, such music is usually presented as a form of musical comedy or parody. The musical performer is called a manualist, who may perform a cappella or with instrumental accompaniment.
  • Mirror canon - a type of canon which involves the leading voice being played alongside its own inversion (i.e. upside-down).
  • Musical cryptogram - a cryptogrammatic sequence of musical notes, a sequence which can be taken to refer to an extra-musical text by some 'logical' relationship, usually between note names and letters.
  • Musical saw - a hand saw used as a musical instrument.
  • Dual naming is the adoption of an official place name that combines two earlier names, or uses both names, often to resolve a disagreement over which of the two individual names is more appropriate. In some cases, the reasons are political.
  • Prisencolinensinainciusol is a song composed by the Italian singer Adriano Celentano, and performed by Celentano and his wife Claudia Mori, a singer/actress-turned-record producer. The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, designed to be "Bob Dylan-esque"; however, the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words “all right.
  • Real Book - a musicians' fake book – a compilation of lead sheets for jazz standards. Fake books had been around at least since the late 1920s, but their organization was haphazard, and their content did not always keep pace with contemporary musical styles.
  • Rednex - a Swedish musical group whose style is a mix of American country music and modern Techno, with their appearance and stage names taking inspiration from the American redneck stereotypes.
  • Shave and a Haircut - "Shave and a Haircut" and the associated response "two bits" is a 7-note musical call-and-response couplet, riff or fanfare popularly used at the end of a musical performance, usually for comic effect. It is used both melodically and rhythmically, for example as a door knock.
  • Shepard tone - is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower.
  • Suite for Piano (Schoenberg)
  • Voix céleste - an organ stop consisting of either one or two ranks of pipes slightly out of tune. The term celeste refers to a rank of pipes detuned slightly so as to produce a beating effect when combined with a normally tuned rank.
  • White Noise - an English experimental electronic music band formed in London in 1968, after American-born David Vorhaus, a classical bass player with a background in physics and electronic engineering, attended a lecture by Delia Derbyshire, a sound scientist at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, then both former members of electronic music project Unit Delta Plus, joined Vorhaus to form the band.
  • Yu-Mex - a style of popular music in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which incorporated the elements of traditional Mexican music. The style was mostly popular during the 1950s and 60s, when a string of Yugoslav singers began to perform traditional Mexican songs.

Performing Arts & Performance Art

  • Claque - an organized body of professional applauders in French theatres and opera houses. Members of a claque are called claqueurs.
  • Endurance art - a kind of performance art involving some form of hardship, such as pain, solitude or exhaustion. Performances that focus on the passage of long periods of time are also known as durational art or durational performances.
  • Flatulist - an entertainer often associated with flatulence-related humor, whose routine consists solely or primarily of passing gas in a creative, musical, or amusing manner.
  • Mise-en-scène - the stage design and arrangement of actors in scenes for a theatre or film production, both in visual arts through storyboarding, visual theme, and cinematography, and in narrative storytelling through direction.
  • Proscenium - the metaphorical vertical plane of space in a theatre, usually surrounded on the top and sides by a physical proscenium arch (whether or not truly "arched") and on the bottom by the stage floor itself, which serves as the frame into which the audience observes from a more or less unified angle the events taking place upon the stage during a theatrical performance.
  • Rhythm 0 - a six-hour work of performance art by Serbian artist Marina Abramović in Naples in 1974. The work involved Abramović standing still while the audience was invited to do to her whatever they wished, using one of 72 objects she had placed on a table. These included a rose, feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet.
  • Spike - a marking, usually made with a piece of tape (although some theatres use paint pens), put on or around the stage. This marking is used to show the correct position for set pieces, furniture, actors and other items which move during the course of a performance and are required to stop or be placed in a specific location.
  • Surtitles - translated or transcribed lyrics/dialogue projected above a stage or displayed on a screen, commonly used in opera, theatre or other musical performances.
  • Theater in the round - a space for theatre in which the audience surrounds the stage.
  • Thrust stage - one that extends into the audience on three sides and is connected to the backstage area by its upstage end.
  • WeiweiCam - a self-surveillance project by artist Ai Weiwei, in China, that went live on April 3, 2012, exactly one year after the artist's detention by Chinese officials at Beijing Airport. At least fifteen surveillance cameras monitor his house in Beijing which, according to Ai, makes it the most-watched spot of the city.

TV & Movies

  • Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo - a 1984 American dance musical film directed by Sam Firstenberg. It is a sequel to the 1984 breakdancing film Breakin'.
  • Bruceploitation - an exploitation film subgenre that emerged after the death of martial arts film star Bruce Lee in 1973, during which time filmmakers from Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea cast Bruce Lee look-alike actors ("Lee-alikes") to star in imitation martial arts films, in order to exploit Lee's sudden international popularity.
  • Dutch angle - a type of camera shot which involves setting the camera at an angle on its roll axis so that the shot is composed with vertical lines at an angle to the side of the frame, or so that the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the camera frame.
  • Heil Honey I'm Home! - a British sitcom, written by Geoff Atkinson and produced in 1990, which was cancelled after one episode. It centres on Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, who live next door to a Jewish couple, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein. The show spoofs elements of mid-20th century American sitcoms and is driven by Hitler's inability to get along with his neighbours. It caused controversy when broadcast and has been called "perhaps the world's most tasteless situation comedy".
  • Horse operas - a Western movie or television series that is clichéd or formulaic, in the manner of a soap opera
  • scream queen - an actress who is prominent and influential in horror films, either through a notable appearance or recurring roles. A scream king is the male equivalent.
  • Soap operas - called soap operas because they used to be sponsored by soap companies

Typography

  • River - are gaps in typesetting which appear to run through a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignment of spaces

Video Games

  • Fantasy video game console - an emulator for a fictional video game console. In short, it aims to create the experience of retrogaming without the need to emulate a real console, allowing the developer to freely decide what specifications their fictional hardware will have.
  • No Russian - a mission in the 2009 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and its remastered version, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered. In the level, the player participates in a mass shooting at a Russian airport, although the player is not forced or told by the game itself to shoot any civilians and may skip the level altogether without penalty. "No Russian" is noticeably more graphic than any other level in the game.

Visual Art

  • Animal-made art - art created by an animal. Animal-made works of art have been created by apes, elephants, cetacea, reptiles, and bowerbirds, among other species.
  • Cleopatra's Needles - a separated pair of ancient Egyptian obelisks now in London and New York City. The obelisks were originally made in Heliopolis (modern Cairo) during the New Kingdom period, inscribed by the 18th dynasty pharaoh Thutmose III and 19th dynasty pharaoh Ramesses II. They were later moved to the Caesareum of Alexandria, which had been conceived by Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra VII, for whom the obelisks are named. They stood in Alexandria for almost two millennia until they were re-erected in London and New York City in 1878 and 1881 respectively.
  • Crystal Palace Dinosaurs - a series of sculptures of dinosaurs and other extinct animals, incorrect by modern standards, in the London borough of Bromley's Crystal Palace Park.
  • Equestrian statue - a statue of a rider mounted on a horse, from the Latin eques, meaning 'knight', deriving from equus, meaning 'horse'. A statue of a riderless horse is strictly an equine statue. A full-sized equestrian statue is a difficult and expensive object for any culture to produce, and figures have typically been portraits of rulers or, in the Renaissance and more recently, military commanders.
  • Kitsch - a term applied to art and design that is perceived as naïve imitation, overly eccentric, gratuitous or of banal taste. The modern avant garde traditionally opposed kitsch for its melodramatic tendencies, its superficial relationship with the human condition and its naturalistic standards of beauty. In the first half of the 20th century, kitsch was used in reference to mass-produced, pop-cultural products that lacked the conceptual depth of fine art. However, since the emergence of Pop Art in the 1950s, kitsch has taken on newfound highbrow appeal, often wielded in knowingly ironic, humorous or earnest manners.
  • Kuleshov effect - the practice of cutting between two shots, which allows the viewers to derive more meaning from the interaction of the two shots than just one shot by itself.
  • Ligne claire - a style of drawing created and pioneered by Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist and creator of The Adventures of Tintin. It uses clear strong lines sometimes of varied width and no hatching, while contrast is downplayed as well.
  • London Noses - an artistic installation found on buildings in London. They are plaster of Paris reproductions of the artist's nose which protrude from walls in an incongruous and unexpected way. The noses are said to be located at Admiralty Arch, Great Windmill Street, Meard Street, Bateman Street, Dean Street, Endell Street and D'Arblay Street in Central London
  • Lost artworks - original pieces of art that credible sources indicate once existed but that cannot be accounted for in museums or private collections or are known to have been destroyed deliberately or accidentally, or neglected through ignorance and lack of connoisseurship.
  • Moon Museum - a small ceramic wafer three-quarters by one-half inch (19 by 13 mm) in size, containing artworks by six prominent artists from the late 1960s. The artists with works in the "museum" are Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Forrest Myers and Andy Warhol.
  • Mummy brown - a rich brown bituminous pigment with good transparency, sitting between burnt umber and raw umber in tint. The pigment was made from the flesh of mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh.
  • Outsider art - art by self-taught or naïve art makers.
  • Seedfeeder - the pseudonym of an illustrator known for contributing sexually explicit drawings to Wikipedia. Between 2008 and 2012, the artist created 48 depictions of various sex acts. Seedfeeder's illustrations garnered negative and positive reactions: some Wikipedia editors claimed they contained racist and sexist undertones, while Andy Cush of Gawker called him "Wikipedia's greatest artist of sex acts".
  • Shibboleth - the title of a temporary art installation placed by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo in the Tate Modern in 2007. The work took the form of a long crack in the floor.
  • tronie - a type of work common in Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression. These works were not intended as portraits but as studies of expression, type, physiognomy or an interesting character such as an old man or woman, a young woman, the soldier, the shepherdess, the Oriental, or a person of a particular race, etc.
  • Wall poems in Leiden - Wall Poems (Dutch: Muurgedichten, alternatively Gedichten op muren or Dicht op de Muur) is a project in which more than 110 poems in many different languages were painted on the exterior walls of buildings in the city of Leiden, The Netherlands.]]
  • Wind phone - an unconnected telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, where visitors can hold one-way conversations with deceased loved ones.
  • Z movie - a low-budget film that has qualities lower than a B movie.

Computer Science

  • Ethnocomputing - is the study of the interactions between computing and culture.

Attacks

  • Billion laughs attack - a type of denial-of-service (DoS) attack which is aimed at parsers of XML documents.
  • Email bomb - a form of net abuse consisting of sending huge volumes of email to an address in an attempt to overflow the mailbox or overwhelm the server where the email address is hosted in a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack).
  • Evil maid attack - an attack on an unattended device, in which an attacker with physical access alters it in some undetectable way so that they can later access the device, or the data on it.
  • Fork bomb - a denial-of-service attack wherein a process continually replicates itself to deplete available system resources, slowing down or crashing the system due to resource starvation.
  • Google hacking - a computer hacking technique that uses Google Search and other Google applications to find security holes in the configuration and computer code that websites use.
  • Pass the hash - a hacking technique that allows an attacker to authenticate to a remote server or service by using the underlying NTLM or LanMan hash of a user's password, instead of requiring the associated plaintext password as is normally the case.
  • ReDoS - an algorithmic complexity attack that produces a denial-of-service by providing a regular expression that takes a very long time to evaluate. The attack exploits the fact that most regular expression implementations have exponential time worst case complexity: the time taken can grow exponentially in relation to input size.
  • ROCA Vulnerability - a cryptographic weakness that allows the private key of a key pair to be recovered from the public key in keys generated by devices with the vulnerability. "ROCA" is an acronym for "Return of Coppersmith's attack".
  • R-U-Dead-Yet Attack - Low and slow DoS attack
  • Side-channel attack - any attack based on information gained from the implementation of a computer system, rather than weaknesses in the implemented algorithm itself (e.g. cryptanalysis and software bugs).
  • Slowloris - Another slow DoS attack
  • Watering hole attack - a computer attack strategy, in which the victim is a particular group (organization, industry, or region). In this attack, the attacker guesses or observes which websites the group often uses and infects one or more of them with malware. Eventually, some member of the targeted group becomes infected.
  • Zip bomb - a malicious archive file designed to crash or render useless the program or system reading it. It is often employed to disable antivirus software, in order to create an opening for more traditional viruses.

Bugs

  • ILOVEYOU - a computer worm that infected over ten million Windows personal computers on and after 5 May 2000 when it started spreading as an email message with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and the attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs".
  • MissingNo. - short for Missing Number, is an unofficial Pokémon species found in the video games Pokémon Red and Blue. Due to the programming of certain in-game events, players can encounter MissingNo. via a glitch.
  • Mojibake - the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding.
  • Scunthorpe Problem - The Scunthorpe problem is the blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string of letters that appear to have an obscene or unacceptable meaning.
  • Time-of-check to time-of-use - time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU, TOCTTOU or TOC/TOU) is a class of software bugs caused by a race condition involving the checking of the state of a part of a system (such as a security credential) and the use of the results of that check.
  • Year 2000 Problem - A class of computer bugs related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates beginning in the year 2000.

Cryptography

  • Acoustic cryptanalysis - a type of side channel attack that exploits sounds emitted by computers or other devices.
  • Add-Rotate-XOR - Many modern block ciphers and hashes are ARX algorithms—their round function involves only three operations: modular addition, rotation with fixed rotation amounts, and XOR (ARX).
  • Alberti cipher - one of the first polyalphabetic ciphers. In the opening pages of his treatise De componendis cifris] he explained how his conversation with the papal secretary Leonardo Dati about a recently developed movable type printing press led to the development of his cipher wheel.
  • Alice and Bob cast of characters - fictional characters commonly used as a placeholder name in cryptology, as well as science and engineering literature.
  • All or nothing transform - an encryption mode which allows the data to be understood only if all of it is known. AONTs are not encryption, but frequently make use of symmetric ciphers and may be applied before encryption.
  • Beale ciphers - a set of three ciphertexts, one of which allegedly states the location of a buried treasure of gold, silver and jewels estimated to be worth over US$43 million as of January 2018.
  • Blowfish (cipher) - a symmetric-key block cipher, designed in 1993 by Bruce Schneier and included in many cipher suites and encryption products.
  • ChaCha - aim to increase the diffusion per round while achieving the same or slightly better performance.
  • Chaffing and winnowing - a cryptographic technique to achieve confidentiality without using encryption when sending data over an insecure channel.
  • Chaocipher - a cipher method invented by John Francis Byrne in 1918 and described in his 1953 autobiographical Silent Years. He believed Chaocipher was simple, yet unbreakable. Byrne stated that the machine he used to encipher his messages could be fitted into a cigar box. He offered cash rewards for anyone who could solve it.
  • Commitment scheme - a cryptographic primitive that allows one to commit to a chosen value (or chosen statement) while keeping it hidden to others, with the ability to reveal the committed value later. Commitment schemes are designed so that a party cannot change the value or statement after they have committed to it: that is, commitment schemes are binding.
  • Coppersmith's attack - a class of cryptographic attacks on the public-key cryptosystem RSA based on the Coppersmith method.
  • Coppersmith method - a method to find small integer zeroes of univariate or bivariate polynomials modulo a given integer.
  • Cryptanalysis of the Enigma
  • Crypto Wars - an unofficial name for the attempts of the United States (US) and allied governments to limit the public's and foreign nations' access to cryptography strong enough to thwart decryption by national intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency (NSA).
  • Cryptographic attacks - a method for circumventing the security of a cryptographic system by finding a weakness in a code, cipher, cryptographic protocol or key management scheme. This process is also called "cryptanalysis".
  • Cryptovirology is a field that studies how to use cryptography to design powerful malicious software.
  • Differential Cryptanalysis - Differential cryptanalysis is a general form of cryptanalysis applicable primarily to block ciphers, but also to stream ciphers and cryptographic hash functions.
  • Diffie-Hellman key exchange - a method of securely exchanging cryptographic keys over a public channel.
  • ElGamal encryption - an asymmetric key encryption algorithm for public-key cryptography which is based on the Diffie–Hellman key exchange.
  • Entropy (information theory) - is the average rate at which information is produced by a stochastic source of data.
  • Feistel cipher - a symmetric structure used in the construction of block ciphers
  • Garbled circuit - a cryptographic protocol that enables two-party secure computation in which two mistrusting parties can jointly evaluate a function over their private inputs without the presence of a trusted third party. In the garbled circuit protocol, the function has to be described as a Boolean circuit.
  • Identicon - An Identicon is a visual representation of a hash value, usually of an IP address, that serves to identify a user of a computer system as a form of avatar while protecting the users' privacy.
  • Indistinguishability obfuscation - a cryptographic primitive that provides a formal notion of program obfuscation. Informally, obfuscation hides the implementation of a program while still allowing users to run it.
  • Key Schedule - In cryptography, the so-called product ciphers are a certain kind of cipher, where the (de-)ciphering of data is typically done as an iteration of rounds.
  • Key signing party - an event at which people present their public keys to others in person, who, if they are confident the key actually belongs to the person who claims it, digitally sign the certificate containing that public key and the person's name, etc.
  • Key Wrap - a class of symmetric encryption algorithms designed to encrypt cryptographic key material.
  • Knapsack cryptosystems
  • Lamport signature - a method for constructing a digital signature. Lamport signatures can be built from any cryptographically secure one-way function; usually a cryptographic hash function is used.
  • Learning with errors - the computational problem of inferring a linear n-ary function f over a finite ring from given samples yi = f (xi) some of which may be erroneous.
  • Linux Unified Key Setup - disk encryption specification created by Clemens Fruhwirth in 2004 and was originally intended for Linux.
  • Lunchtime attack - a variant of the chosen-ciphertext attack, in which an attacker may make adaptive chosen-ciphertext queries but only up until a certain point, after which the attacker must demonstrate some improved ability to attack the system. The term "lunchtime attack" refers to the idea that a user's computer, with the ability to decrypt, is available to an attacker while the user is out to lunch. This form of the attack was the first one commonly discussed: obviously, if the attacker has the ability to make adaptive chosen ciphertext queries, no encrypted message would be safe, at least until that ability is taken away.
  • Merkle Tree - a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every leaf node is labelled with the hash of a data block, and every non-leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes.
  • Multiple encryption - the process of encrypting an already encrypted message one or more times, either using the same or a different algorithm. It is also known as cascade encryption, cascade ciphering, multiple encryption, and superencipherment. Superencryption refers to the outer-level encryption of a multiple encryption.
  • Nihilist cipher - manually operated symmetric encryption cipher, originally used by Russian Nihilists in the 1880s to organize terrorism against the tsarist regime.
  • Nothing-up-my-sleeve number - any numbers which, by their construction, are above suspicion of hidden properties. They are used in creating cryptographic functions such as hashes and ciphers.
  • Pepper - a secret added to an input such as a password during hashing with a cryptographic hash function. This value differs from a salt in that it is not stored alongside a password hash, but rather the pepper is kept separate in some other medium, such as a Hardware Security Module
  • Post-quantum Cryptography - Cryptographic algorithms (usually public-key algorithms) that are thought to be secure against an attack by a quantum computer
  • Rail fence cipher - a form of transposition cipher. It derives its name from the way in which it is encoded.
  • Related-key Attack - In cryptography, a related-key attack is any form of cryptanalysis where the attacker can observe the operation of a cipher under several different keys whose values are initially unknown, but where some mathematical relationship connecting the keys is known to the attacker.
  • Rotational Cryptanalysis - a generic cryptanalytic attack against algorithms that rely on three operations: modular addition, rotation and XOR — ARX for short.
  • Slide Attack - The slide attack is a form of cryptanalysis designed to deal with the prevailing idea that even weak ciphers can become very strong by increasing the number of rounds, which can ward off a differential attack.
  • Solitaire - The Solitaire cryptographic algorithm was designed by Bruce Schneier at the request of Neal Stephenson for use in his novel Cryptonomicon, in which field agents use it to communicate securely without having to rely on electronics or having to carry incriminating tools. It was designed to be a manual cryptosystem calculated with an ordinary deck of playing cards.
  • Sponge function - any of a class of algorithms with finite internal state that take an input bit stream of any length and produce an output bit stream of any desired length.
  • Twofish - a symmetric key block cipher with a block size of 128 bits and key sizes up to 256 bits.
  • Voynich manuscript - an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown, possibly meaningless writing system. The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. The manuscript has never been demonstrably deciphered, and none of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years have been independently verified.

Data Structures

  • Rope - a data structure composed of smaller strings that is used to efficiently store and manipulate a very long string. For example, a text editing program may use a rope to represent the text being edited, so that operations such as insertion, deletion, and random access can be done efficiently.

Encodings, Standards

  • Absolute time in pregroove - a method of storing information on an optical medium, used on CD-R and CD-RW . ATIP information is only readable on CD-R and CD-RW drives, as read-only drives don't need the information stored on it. The information indicates if the disk is writable and information needed to correctly write to the disk.
  • Barcode
  • CTA-708 - the standard for closed captioning for ATSC digital television (DTV) streams in the United States and Canada. It was developed by the Consumer Electronics sector of the Electronic Industries Alliance, which is now a standalone organization Consumer Technology Association.
  • EIA-608 - also known as "line 21 captions" and "CEA-608", was once the standard for closed captioning for NTSC TV broadcasts in the United States, Canada and Mexico. It also specifies an "Extended Data Service", which is a means for including a VCR control service with an electronic program guide for NTSC transmissions that operates on the even line 21 field, similar to the TeleText based VPS that operates on line 16 which is used in PAL countries.
  • ISO 3166-2 - part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and defines codes for identifying the principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces or states) of all countries coded in ISO 3166-1.
  • Punycode - a representation of Unicode with the limited ASCII character subset used for Internet host names.

Files

  • GEDCOM - an open de facto specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. GEDCOM was developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) as an aid to genealogical research.
  • EICAR test file - a computer file that was developed by the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR) and Computer Antivirus Research Organization (CARO), to test the response of computer antivirus (AV) programs. Instead of using real malware, which could cause real damage, this test file allows people to test anti-virus software without having to use a real computer virus.
  • Run commands - In the context of Unix-like systems, the term rc stands for the phrase "run commands". It is used for any file that contains startup information for a command.
  • Request for Comments (RFC) - in information and communications technology, is a type of text document from the technology community. An RFC document may come from many bodies including from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), or from independent authors.
  • Well-known URIs - Uniform Resource Identifier for a URL path prefixes that start with .well-known. They are implemented in webservers so that requests to the servers for well-known services or information are available at URLs consistent well-known locations across servers.
  • Windows Metafile - an image file format originally designed for Microsoft Windows in the 1990s. The original Windows Metafile format was not device-independent (though could be made more so with placement headers) and may contain both vector graphics and bitmap components. It acts in a similar manner to SVG files.

Graphics

  • Box-drawing character - a form of semigraphics widely used in text user interfaces to draw various geometric frames and boxes. Box-drawing characters typically only work well with monospaced fonts.
  • Demoscene - an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills.
  • Greeble - or nurnie is a fine detailing added to the surface of a larger object that makes it appear more complex, and therefore more visually interesting.
  • Horizontal blanking interval - refers to a part of the process of displaying images on a computer monitor or television screen via raster scanning. CRT screens display images by moving beams of electrons very quickly across the screen. Once the beam of the monitor has reached the edge of the screen, the beam is switched off, and the deflection circuit voltages (or currents) are returned to the values they had for the other edge of the screen; this would have the effect of retracing the screen in the opposite direction, so the beam is turned off during this time. This part of the line display process is the Horizontal Blank.
  • Marching squares - a computer graphics algorithm that generates contours for a two-dimensional scalar field (rectangular array of individual numerical values).
  • Miller columns - a browsing/visualization technique that can be applied to tree structures. The columns allow multiple levels of the hierarchy to be open at once, and provide a visual representation of the current location. It is closely related to techniques used earlier in the Smalltalk browser, but was independently invented by Mark S. Miller in 1980 at Yale University. The technique was then used at Project Xanadu, Datapoint, and NeXT.
  • Stanford Bunny - Standard for scanning 3d objects
  • Utah Teapot - Standard 3D test model
  • Z-Fighting - When 2 planes are in the same position and 'mesh' together.

Hardware/Signals

  • 8-N-1 - a common shorthand notation for a serial port parameter setting or configuration in asynchronous mode, in which there is one start bit, eight (8) data bits, no (N) parity bit, and one (1) stop bit. As such, 8-N-1 is the most common configuration for PC serial communications today.
  • Bell character - a device control code originally sent to ring a small electromechanical bell on tickers and other teleprinters and teletypewriters to alert operators at the other end of the line, often of an incoming message.
  • Beowulf cluster - a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware.
  • Bucky bit - a bit in the binary representation of a character that it set by pressing a modifier key
  • Chip art - refers to microscopic artwork built into integrated circuits, also called chips or ICs. Since ICs are printed by photolithography, not constructed a component at a time, there is no additional cost to include features in otherwise unused space on the chip
  • Clipper chip - a chipset that was developed and promoted by the NSA with a built-in backdoor that was intended to "allow Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials the ability to decode intercepted voice and data transmissions." Introduced in 1993, it was entirely defunct by 1996.
  • Control character - a code point (a number) in a character set, that does not represent a written symbol. They are used as in-band signaling to cause effects other than the addition of a symbol to the text.
  • Core rope memory - a form of read-only memory (ROM) for computers, first used in the 1960s by early NASA Mars space probes and then in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and programmed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Instrumentation Lab and built by Raytheon.
  • Data erasure - a software-based method of overwriting the data that aims to completely destroy all electronic data residing on a hard disk drive or other digital media by using zeros and ones to overwrite data onto all sectors of the device.
  • Identification friend or foe is an identification system designed for command and control. It uses a transponder that listens for an interrogation signal and then sends a response that identifies the broadcaster. It enables military and civilian air traffic control interrogation systems to identify aircraft, vehicles or forces as friendly and to determine their bearing and range from the interrogator.
  • Lisp machine - general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support
  • Null - a direction in an antenna's radiation pattern where the antenna radiates almost no radio waves, so the far field signal strength is a local minimum.
  • Phase-shift keying - a digital modulation process which conveys data by changing (modulating) the phase of a constant frequency carrier wave. The modulation is accomplished by varying the sine and cosine inputs at a precise time. It is widely used for wireless LANs, RFID and Bluetooth communication.
  • Radiation hardening - the process of making electronic components and circuits resistant to damage or malfunction caused by high levels of ionizing radiation (particle radiation and high-energy electromagnetic radiation), especially for environments in outer space (especially beyond the low Earth orbit), around nuclear reactors and particle accelerators, or during nuclear accidents or nuclear warfare.
  • Reference designator - unambiguously identifies the location of an component within an electrical schematic or on a printed circuit board. The reference designator usually consists of one or two letters followed by a number, e.g. R13, C1002. The number is sometimes followed by a letter, indicating that components are grouped or matched with each other, e.g. R17A, R17B.
  • ringing - oscillation of a signal, particularly in the step response (the response to a sudden change in input).
  • Software protection dongle - an electronic copy protection and content protection device. When connected to a computer or other electronics, they unlock software functionality or decode content. The hardware key is programmed with a product key or other cryptographic protection mechanism and functions via an electrical connector to an external bus of the computer or appliance.
  • Stone Soupercomputer - a Beowulf-style computer cluster built at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the late 1990s.
  • White spaces - radio frequencies allocated to a broadcasting service but not used locally. In addition to white space assigned for technical reasons, there is also unused radio spectrum which has either never been used, or is becoming free as a result of technical changes. In particular, the switchover to digital television frees up large areas between about 50 MHz and 700 MHz. This is because digital transmissions can be packed into adjacent channels, while analog ones cannot. This means that the band can be compressed into fewer channels, while still allowing for more transmissions.

Image Processing/Videos

  • Eigenface - the name given to a set of eigenvectors when used in the computer vision problem of human face recognition.
  • Lenna - Standard test image for image processing
  • Letterboxing - Letterboxing is the practice of transferring film shot in a widescreen aspect ratio to standard-width video formats while preserving the film's original aspect ratio. The resulting videographic image has mattes (black bars) above and below it; these mattes are part of each frame of the video signal.
  • Pillarbox - The pillarbox effect occurs in widescreen video displays when black bars (mattes or masking) are placed on the sides of the image.

Logic

  • Abductive reasoning - a form of logical inference. It starts with an observation or set of observations and then seeks to find the simplest and most likely conclusion from the observations. This process, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not positively verify it.
  • Angelic non-determinism - the execution of a non-deterministic program where all choices that are made favor termination of the program.
  • Billiard-ball computer - an idealized model of a reversible mechanical computer based on Newtonian dynamics.
  • Currying - the technique of translating the evaluation of a function that takes multiple arguments into evaluating a sequence of functions, each with a single argument.
  • Demonic non-determinism - describes the execution of a non-deterministic program where all choices that are made favour non-termination.
  • Vacuous truth - a conditional or universal statement that is only true because the antecedent cannot be satisfied.

Machines

  • Busy beaver - The busy beaver game consists of designing a halting, binary-alphabet Turing machine which writes the most 1s on the tape, using only a limited set of states. The rules for the 2-state game are as follows: 1. the machine must have two states in addition to the halting state, and 2. the tape starts with 0s only. As the player, you should conceive each state aiming for the maximum output of 1s on the tape while making sure the machine will halt eventually.
  • Phreaking boxes - a device used by phone phreaks to perform various functions normally reserved for operators and other telephone company employees.
  • Stingray - an IMSI-catcher, a cellular phone surveillance device, manufactured by Harris Corporation. Initially developed for the military and intelligence community, the StingRay and similar Harris devices are in widespread use by local and state law enforcement agencies across Canada, the United States, and in the United Kingdom.
  • Turmite - a Turing machine which has an orientation as well as a current state and a "tape" that consists of an infinite two-dimensional grid of cells. The terms ant and vant are also used.

Miscellaneous

  • Assembly - a demoscene and gaming event in Finland. It is the biggest demoscene party.
  • Bit bucket - the bit bucket is where lost computerized data has gone, by any means; any data which does not end up where it is supposed to, being lost in transmission, a computer crash, or the like, is said to have gone to the bit bucket – that mysterious place on a computer where lost data goes.
  • Comparison of free software for audio
  • Crack intro - a small introduction sequence added to cracked software. It aims to inform the user which "cracking crew" or individual cracker removed the software's copy protection and distributed the crack.
  • Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol - a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots. It is specified in RFC 2324, published on 1 April 1998 as an April Fools' Day RFC, as part of an April Fools prank.
  • Kill file - a file used by some Usenet reading programs to discard articles matching some unwanted patterns of subject, author, or other header lines. Adding a person or subject to one's kill file means that person or topic will be ignored by one's newsreader in the future. By extension, the term may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in other media.
  • lp0 on fire - an outdated error message generated on some Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems in response to certain types of printer errors.
  • Magic debug values
  • The Mother of All Demos - a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968.The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.
  • Mung - computer jargon for a series of potentially destructive or irrevocable changes to a piece of data or a file. It is sometimes used for vague data transformation steps that are not yet clear to the speaker. Common munging operations include removing punctuation or HTML tags, data parsing, filtering, and transformation.
  • Party line - a local loop telephone circuit that is shared by multiple telephone service subscribers. It was called a party line because multiple callers could connect to the line and talk to each other
  • People's Computer Company - an organization, a newsletter (the People's Computer Company Newsletter) and, later, a quasiperiodical called the Dragonsmoke.
  • PICTIVE - a participatory design method used to develop graphical user interfaces.
  • Plan 9 from Bell Labs - a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s.
  • Pointer swizzling - the conversion of references based on name or position into direct pointer references (memory addresses). It is typically performed during deserialization or loading of a relocatable object from a disk file, such as an executable file or pointer-based data structure.
  • Roofnet - an experimental mesh network developed by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT
  • Tivoization - the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware.
  • UNIX-HATERS Handbook - a semi-humorous edited compilation of messages to the UNIX-HATERS mailing list. The book concerns the frustrations of users of the Unix operating system. Many users had come from systems that they felt were far more sophisticated in features and usability, and they were frustrated by the perceived "worse is better" design philosophy that they felt Unix and much of its software encapsulated.
  • Usenet Death Penalty - a final penalty that may be issued against Internet service providers or single users who produce too much spam or fail to adhere to Usenet standards. It is named after the death penalty (the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for a crime), as it causes the banned user or provider to be unable to use Usenet, essentially "killing" their service.
  • Van Eck phreaking - a form of eavesdropping in which special equipment is used to pick up side-band electromagnetic emissions from electronic devices that correlate to hidden signals or data to recreate these signals or data to spy on the electronic device. Side-band electromagnetic radiation emissions are present in (and with the proper equipment, can be captured from) keyboards, computer displays, printers, and other electronic devices.
  • Wardriving - the act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks, usually from a moving vehicle, using a laptop or smartphone. Software for wardriving is freely available on the internet.
  • Whole Earth Catalog - an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, "do it yourself" (DIY), and holism, and featured the slogan "access to tools".
  • Worse is better - a term conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in an essay of the same name to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability. Software that is limited, but simple to use, may be more appealing to the user and market than the reverse.
  • Write only memory - he opposite of read-only memory (ROM). By some definitions, a WOM is a memory device which can be written but never read. Initially there seemed to be no practical use for a memory circuit from which data could not be retrieved. However, it was soon recognized that write-only actually describes certain functionalities in microprocessor systems. The concept is still often used as a joke or a euphemism for a failed memory device.

Networking and Communications

  • Automatic Packet Reporting System - an amateur radio-based system for real time digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area. Data can include object Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, weather station telemetry, text messages, announcements, queries, and other telemetry. APRS data can be displayed on a map, which can show stations, objects, tracks of moving objects, weather stations, search and rescue data, and direction finding data.
  • Broadcast Domain - a logical division of a computer network, in which all nodes can reach each other by broadcast at the data link layer.
  • Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol - a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots.
  • Internet mail protocols
  • flit - a link-level atomic piece that forms a network packet or stream.
  • Friend-to-friend - a type of peer-to-peer network in which users only make direct connections with people they know. Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication.
  • Line 21 - once the standard for closed captioning for NTSC TV broadcasts in the United States, Canada and Mexico. It was developed by the Electronic Industries Alliance and required by law to be implemented in most television receivers made in the United States.
  • List of TCP/UDP Ports
  • Network Telescope - An Internet system that allows one to observe different large-scale events taking place on the Internet
  • PAN-PAN - the international standard urgency signal that someone aboard a boat, ship, aircraft, or other vehicle uses to declare that they need help and that the situation is urgent, but for the time being, does not pose an immediate danger to anyone's life or to the vessel itself. This is referred to as a state of "urgency". This is distinct from a mayday call (distress signal), which means that there is imminent danger to life or to the continued viability of the vessel itself. Radioing "pan-pan" informs potential rescuers (including emergency services and other craft in the area) that an urgent problem exists, whereas "mayday" calls on them to drop all other activities and immediately begin a rescue.
  • Pen register - a device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register, including programs monitoring Internet communications.
  • QUIC - an experimental general-purpose transport layer network protocol.
  • Router on a stick - is a router that has a single physical or logical connection to a network.
  • SPDY - deprecated open-specification networking protocol that was developed primarily at Google for transporting web content.
  • Slow-scan television - a picture transmission method used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color.
  • Sneakernet - an informal term for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such as magnetic tape, floppy disks, optical discs, USB flash drives or external hard drives between computers, rather than transmitting it over a computer network. The term, a tongue-in-cheek play on net(work) as in Internet or Ethernet, refers to walking in sneakers as the transport mechanism. Alternative terms may be floppy net, train net, or pigeon net.
  • Telephone exchange - a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It interconnects telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital systems to establish telephone calls between subscribers.
  • Telephone exchange names - were used in many countries, but were phased out in favor of numeric systems in the 1960s. In the United States, the demand for telephone service outpaced the scalability of the alphanumeric system and after introduction of area codes for direct-distance dialing, all-number calling became necessary. Similar developments followed around the world, such as the British all-figure dialling.
  • Virtual LAN - any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer (OSI layer 2).
  • Zzzzzzz - later just Z, was a dial-a-joke service active in the 1970s and early 1980s. Started by Bob Bilkiss of West Los Angeles in 1970, it operated from the 213 area code and was named so to appear last in the Los Angeles telephone directory. Emerging from a wave of dial-a-joke numbers in Los Angeles in the turn of the 1970s, Zzzzzz enjoyed a high level of popularity in its day. For several years, it was the busiest residential telephone number in the United States, if not the world.

Operating Systems

  • Embarrassingly parallel - an embarrassingly parallel workload or problem (also called embarrassingly parallelizable, perfectly parallel, delightfully parallel or pleasingly parallel) is one where little or no effort is needed to separate the problem into a number of parallel tasks.
  • Linux kernel oops - an oops is a deviation from correct behavior of the Linux kernel, one that produces a certain error log. The better-known kernel panic condition results from many kinds of oops, but other instances of an oops event may allow continued operation with compromised reliability.
  • TempleOS - Handwritten operating system written in Holy C.

Programming

  • Big ball of mud - a software system that lacks a perceivable architecture.
  • Browser war - ompetition for dominance in the usage share of web browsers. The "First Browser War" during the late 1990s pitted Microsoft's Internet Explorer against Netscape's Navigator.
  • Byzantine fault - a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed.
  • Code smell - any characteristic in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem.
  • Convention over configuration - a software design paradigm used by software frameworks that attempts to decrease the number of decisions that a developer using the framework is required to make without necessarily losing flexibility.
  • Creeping elegance - the tendency of programmers to disproportionately emphasize elegance in software at the expense of other requirements such as functionality, shipping schedule, and usability.
  • Data Clump - a name given to any group of variables which are passed around together (in a clump) throughout various parts of the program.
  • Declarative programming - a programming paradigm—a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs—that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow.[
  • Dependency hell - a colloquial term for the frustration of some software users who have installed software packages which have dependencies on specific versions of other software packages.
  • Design smell - "structures in the design that indicate violation of fundamental design principles and negatively impact design quality".
  • Dogfooding - when an organization uses its own product.
  • DLL Hell - a term for the complications which arise when one works with dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) used with Microsoft Windows operating systems, particularly legacy 16-bit editions, which all run in a single memory space.
  • Editor war - the common name for the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi (usually Vim) text editors.
  • Everything is a file - one of the defining features of Unix, and its derivatives—that a wide range of input/output resources such as documents, directories, hard-drives, modems, keyboards, printers and even some inter-process and network communications are simple streams of bytes exposed through the filesystem name space.[
  • Feature creep - the excessive ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, especially in computer software, videogames and consumer and business electronics.
  • God object - an object that knows too much or does too much. The God object is an example of an anti-pattern.
  • Greenspun's tenth rule - Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
  • Heisenbug - a heisenbug is a software bug that seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study it
  • Homoiconicity - a property of some programming languages. A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the language, and thus the program's internal representation can be inferred just by reading the program itself.
  • International Obfuscated C Code Contest - a computer programming contest for the most creatively obfuscated C code.
  • JAR hell - a term similar to DLL hell used to describe all the various ways in which the classloading process can end up not working.
  • Just another Perl hacker - a Perl program which prints "Just another Perl hacker," (the comma is canonical but is occasionally omitted). Short JAPH programs are often used as signatures in online forums, or as T-shirt designs.
  • Kolmogorov complexity - the length of the shortest computer program (in a predetermined programming language) that produces the object as output.
  • Lasagna code - code whose layers are so complicated and intertwined that making a change in one layer would necessitate changes in all other layers.
  • Literate programming - a programming paradigm introduced by Donald Knuth in which a computer program is given an explanation of its logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed (embedded) with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which compilable source code can be generated
  • Magic cookie - a token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs, where the data is typically not meaningful to the recipient program. The contents are opaque and not usually interpreted until the recipient passes the cookie data back to the sender or perhaps another program at a later time. The cookie is often used like a ticket – to identify a particular event or transaction.
  • Metasyntactic variable - a specific word or set of words identified as a placeholder in computer science and specifically computer programming. These words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted to be applicable to the specific usage before compilation (translation to an executable).
  • Polymorphic code - code that uses a polymorphic engine to mutate while keeping the original algorithm intact. That is, the code changes itself each time it runs, but the function of the code (its semantics) will not change at all.
  • Quine - A self replicating program.
  • Ravioli code - code that comprises well-structured classes that are easy to understand in isolation, but difficult to understand as a whole.
  • Rubber duck debugging - Talking out your program to find bugs.
  • Shotgun debugging - Making haphazard or diverse changes to software in the hope that a bug will be perturbed out of existence.
  • Shotgun surgery - an antipattern in software development and occurs where a developer adds features to an application codebase which span a multiplicity of implementors or implementations in a single change.
  • Software bloat - a process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version—whilst making only dubious user-perceptible improvements or suffering from feature creep.
  • Software brittleness - the increased difficulty in fixing older software that may appear reliable, but fails badly when presented with unusual data or altered in a seemingly minor way.
  • Software rot - a slow deterioration of software performance over time or its diminishing responsiveness that will eventually lead to software becoming faulty, unusable, or otherwise called "legacy" and in need of upgrade.
  • Spaghetti code - pejorative phrase for unstructured and difficult-to-maintain source code. Spaghetti code can be caused by several factors, such as volatile project requirements, lack of programming style rules, and insufficient ability or experience.
  • Stovepipe - a pejorative term for a system that has the potential to share data or functionality with other systems but which does not do so.
  • Thunk - a subroutine used to inject a calculation into another subroutine. Thunks are primarily used to delay a calculation until its result is needed, or to insert operations at the beginning or end of the other subroutine. They have many other applications in compiler code generation and modular programming.
  • Turing tarpit - any programming language or computer interface that allows for flexibility in function but is difficult to learn and use because it offers little or no support for common tasks.
  • Underhanded C Contest - a programming contest to turn out code that is malicious, but passes a rigorous inspection, and looks like an honest mistake even if discovered.
  • Wirth's law - an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
  • Write-only language - a pejorative term for a programming language alleged to have syntax or semantics sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size is too difficult to understand by other programmers and cannot be safely edited.
  • You aren't gonna need it - a principle which arose from extreme programming (XP) that states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. Other forms of the phrase include "You aren't going to need it" (YAGTNI) and "You ain't gonna need it".Ron Jeffries, a co-founder of XP, explained the philosophy: "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you [will] need them."

Security & Privacy

  • Dancing pigs - Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.
  • Differential privacy - a system for publicly sharing information about a dataset by describing the patterns of groups within the dataset while withholding information about individuals in the dataset.
  • Dining cryptographers problem - studies how to perform a secure multi-party computation of the boolean-OR function.
  • Google hacking - also named Google Dorking, is a computer hacking technique that uses Google Search and other Google applications to find security holes in the configuration and computer code that websites use.
  • Nothing to hide argument - The nothing to hide argument states that individuals have no reason to fear or oppose surveillance programs, unless they are afraid it will uncover their own illegal activities. An individual using this argument may say that an average person should not worry about government surveillance if they have "nothing to hide".

Design

  • Anti urination devices in Norwich - a form of hostile architecture installed in Norwich and the surrounding area in the late 19th century to discourage public urination.
  • Camden Bench - It is designed specifically to influence the behaviour of the public by restricting undesirable behaviour, a principle known as hostile architecture, and instead be usable only as a bench.
  • Defensive Design - the practice of planning for contingencies in the design stage of a project or undertaking.
  • Hostile architecture - an urban design trend in which public spaces are constructed or altered to discourage people from using them in a way not intended by the owner.
  • [Rotated letter]
  • Typeface anatomy - Typeface anatomy describes the graphic elements that make up Font in a typeface.
  • Voc-ATypI Classification - In typography, the Vox-ATypI classification makes it possible to classify typefaces into general classes.

Economics

  • Game theory - the study of mathematical models of strategic interaction between rational decision-makers
  • Local Currency - In economics, a local currency is a currency that can be spent in a particular geographical locality at participating organisations.
  • Monopsony - a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers.

History & Anthropology

  • Abuwtiyuw - The Egyptian dog Abuwtiyuw was one of the earliest documented domestic animals whose name is known.
  • Acoustic Kitty - Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology, which in the 1960s intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies.
  • Alleycat race - an unsanctioned bicycle race. Alley cats almost always take place in cities, and are often organized by bicycle messengers. The informality of the organization is matched by the emphasis on taking part, rather than simple competition. For instance, many alleycats present prizes for the last competitor to finish (sometimes known as Dead Fucking Last or DFL)
  • Animal welfare in Nazi Germany - There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany (German: Tierschutz im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland) among the country's leadership. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected.
  • Bamboo ceiling - a term used to describe the combination of individual, cultural, and organizational factors that impede Asian Americans' career progress inside organizations.
  • Bat bombs - an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20–40-mile radius (32–64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target.
  • Bicycle culture
  • British pet massacre - an event in 1939 in the United Kingdom where over 750,000 pets were killed in preparation for food shortages during World War II.
  • Cargo Cult - A belief system among members of a relatively undeveloped society in which adherents practice superstitious rituals hoping to bring modern goods supplied by a more technologically advanced society.
  • Chicken George (politics) - a campaign tactic in the 1992 U.S. presidential election, where one or more people in chicken costumes heckled President George H. W. Bush over his refusal to participate in a debate with Democratic candidate Bill Clinton.
  • Childhood secret club - an informal organization created by children.
  • Children's street culture - the cumulative culture created by young children. Collectively, this body of knowledge is passed down from one generation of urban children to the next, and can also be passed between different groups of children (e.g. in the form of crazes, but also in intergenerational mixing). It is most common in children between the ages of seven and twelve. It is strongest in urban working-class industrial districts where children are traditionally free to "play outside" in the streets for long periods without supervision.
  • Compulsory sterilization of disabled people in the U.S. prison system
  • Cypherpunk - any activist advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change.
  • Ekistics is the science of human settlements including regional, city, community planning and dwelling design.
  • Epicenity - the lack of gender distinction
  • Ethnic Mennonite - refers to Mennonites of Central European ancestry and culture who are considered to be members of a Mennonite ethnic or ethnoreligious group. The term is also used for aspects of their culture, such as language, dress, and Mennonite food.
  • Eugenics in the United States
  • Eye-rolling - passive-aggressive response to an undesirable situation or person. The gesture is used to disagree or dismiss the targeted person without physical contact.
  • Flitch of bacon custom - The awarding of a flitch of bacon to married couples who can swear to not having regretted their marriage for a year and a day is an old tradition, the remnants of which still survive in some pockets in England.
  • Flower child - originated as a synonym for hippie, especially among the idealistic young people who gathered in San Francisco and the surrounding area during the Summer of Love in 1967.
  • Free range parenting - the concept of raising children in the spirit of encouraging them to function independently and with limited parental supervision, in accordance of their age of development and with a reasonable acceptance of realistic personal risks.
  • Genocide Convention - an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It was the first legal instrument to codify genocide as a crime, and the first human rights treaty unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, on 9 December 1948, during the third session of the United Nations General Assembly. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951 and has 152 state parties as of 2022.
  • Hacker culture
  • History of breakfast
  • Human Interference Task Force - a team of engineers, anthropologists, nuclear physicists, behavioral scientists and others convened on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy and Bechtel Corp. to find a way to reduce the likelihood of future humans unintentionally intruding on radioactive waste isolation systems.
  • IBM during World War II - Both the United States government and Nazi German government used IBM punched card technology for some parts of their camps operation and record keeping.
  • Idiosyncrasy credit - a concept in social psychology that describes an individual's capacity to acceptably deviate from group expectations. Idiosyncrasy credits are increased (earned) each time an individual conforms to a group's expectations, and decreased (spent) each time an individual deviates from a group's expectations.
  • Immurement - is a form of imprisonment, usually until death, in which a person is placed within an enclosed space with no exits.
  • Julian day - the continuous count of days since the beginning of the Julian period, and is used primarily by astronomers, and in software for easily calculating elapsed days between two events (e.g. food production date and sell by date).
  • Kakistocracy - a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens.
  • Kremlinology - the study and analysis of the politics and policies of the Soviet Union while Sovietology is the study of politics and policies of both the Soviet Union and former communist states more generally. These two terms were synonymous until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  • Lions led by donkeys - a phrase popularly used to describe the British infantry of the First World War and to blame the generals who led them. The contention is that the brave soldiers (lions) were sent to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent leaders (donkeys).
  • Maple syrup event - the presence of a particular scent in New York City in the late 2000s, and the response to this smell by the residents, various media outlets, and government agencies
  • Memory of the World Programme - an international initiative launched to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climatic conditions, and willful and deliberate destruction. It calls for the preservation of valuable archival holdings, library collections, and private individual compendia all over the world for posterity, the reconstitution of dispersed or displaced documentary heritage, and increased accessibility to, and dissemination of, these items.
  • Murder Hole - a hole in the ceiling of a gateway or passageway in a fortification through which the defenders could fire, throw or pour harmful substances or objects, such as rocks, arrows, scalding water, hot sand, quicklime, tar, or boiling oil, down on attackers.
  • Naruto run - a running style based on the way the characters run leaning forward with their arms behind their backs.
  • Nils Olav - a king penguin who resides in Edinburgh Zoo, Scotland. He is the mascot and colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King's Guard.
  • Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money and related objects.
  • Obsolete Occupations
  • Orphan Train - a supervised welfare program that transported children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. The orphan trains operated between 1854 and 1929, relocating about 250,000 children. The co-founders of the Orphan Train movement claimed that these children were orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless, but this was not always true. They were mostly the children of new immigrants and the children of the poor and destitute families living in these cities. Criticisms include ineffective screening of caretakers, insufficient follow-ups on placements, and that many children were used as strictly slave farm labor.
  • Pink Capitalism - the incorporation of the LGBT movement and sexual diversity to capitalism and the market economy, viewed especially in a critical lens as this incorporation pertains to the LGBT, Western, white, and affluent, upper middle class communities and market.
  • Project MKUltra is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which were illegal. Experiments on humans were intended to develop procedures and identify drugs such as LSD to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.
  • Room 641A - a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.
  • Sick building syndrome - a condition in which people develop symptoms of illness or become infected with chronic disease from the building in which they work or reside.The main identifying observation is an increased incidence of complaints of symptoms such as headache, eye, nose, and throat irritation, fatigue, dizziness, and nausea.
  • Stone Soup - a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing.
  • Sword of Damocles - King who hung a sword from a string above his head to represent the constant threat involved in ruling
  • TEMPEST - a U.S. National Security Agency specification and a NATO certification referring to spying on information systems through leaking emanations, including unintentional radio or electrical signals, sounds, and vibrations. TEMPEST covers both methods to spy upon others and how to shield equipment against such spying.
  • The world wonders - a phrase which rose to notoriety following its use during World War II when it appeared as part of a decoded message sent by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, to Admiral William Halsey Jr. at the height of the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 25, 1944. The words, intended to be without meaning, were added as security padding in an encrypted message to hinder Japanese attempts at cryptanalysis, but were mistakenly included in the decoded text given to Halsey. Halsey interpreted the phrase as a harsh and sarcastic rebuke, and as a consequence dropped his futile pursuit of a decoy Japanese carrier task force, and, belatedly, reversed some of his ships in a fruitless effort to aid United States forces in the Battle off Samar.
  • Toilet-related injuries and deaths
  • Waffle House Index - an informal metric named after the Waffle House restaurant chain and is used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the effect of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery.

Architecture

  • Brickwork orientation
  • Kitchen work triangle - a concept used to determine efficient kitchen layouts that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional. The primary tasks in a home kitchen are carried out between the cook top, the sink and the refrigerator.
  • Panopticon - a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.
  • Parti - an organizing thought or decision behind an architect's design, presented in the form of a parti diagram, parti sketch, or a simple statement.
  • Shit flow diagram - a high level technical drawing used to display how excreta moves through a location, and functions as a tool to identify where improvements are needed.
  • Transom - a transverse horizontal structural beam or bar, or a crosspiece separating a door from a window above it. This contrasts with a mullion, a vertical structural member.
  • Wattle and daub - a composite building method used for making walls and buildings, in which a woven lattice of wooden strips called wattle is daubed with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung and straw.
  • Witch window - a window (usually a double-hung sash window, occasionally a single-sided casement window) placed in the gable-end wall of a house and rotated approximately 1/8 of a turn (45 degrees) from the vertical, leaving it diagonal, with its long edge parallel to the roof slope.

Events

  • 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots - also known as the 1984 Sikh Massacre, was a series of organised pogroms against Sikhs in India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Government estimates project that about 2,800 Sikhs were killed in Delhi and 3,350 nationwide, whilst independent sources estimate the number of deaths at about 8,000–17,000.
  • 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack - The deliberate contamination of salad bars at ten The Dalles, Oregon restaurants with Salmonella. A group of prominent followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections. The incident was the first and is the single largest bioterrorist attack in United States history.
  • 2008 Chinese milk scandal - a significant food safety incident in China. The scandal involved Sanlu Group's milk and infant formula along with other food materials and components being adulterated with the chemical melamine, which resulted in kidney stones and other kidney damage in infants. The chemical was used to increase the nitrogen content of diluted milk, giving it the appearance of higher protein content in order to pass quality control testing. 300,000 affected children were identified, among which 54,000 were hospitalized, according to the latest report in January 2009. The deaths of six babies were officially concluded to be related to the contaminated milk.
  • Baby Tooth Survey - The Baby Tooth Survey was initiated by the Greater St. Louis Citizens' Committee for Nuclear Information in conjunction with Saint Louis University and the Washington University School of Dental Medicine as a means of determining the effects of nuclear fallout in the human anatomy by examining the levels of radioactive material absorbed into the deciduous teeth of children.
  • Blanket protest - part of a five-year protest during the Troubles by Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners held in the Maze prison (also known as "Long Kesh") in Northern Ireland. The republican prisoners' status as political prisoners, known as Special Category Status, had begun to be phased out in 1976. Among other things, this meant that they would now be required to wear prison uniforms like ordinary convicts. The prisoners refused to accept that they had been administratively designated as ordinary criminals, and refused to wear the prison uniform.
  • Candy bar protest - a short-lived 1947 protest by Canadian children over the increase in price of chocolate bars from five to eight cents.
  • Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone - an occupation protest and self-declared autonomous zone in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.
  • Chicago Tylenol murders - a series of poisoning deaths resulting from drug tampering in the Chicago metropolitan area in 1982. The victims consumed Tylenol-branded acetaminophen capsules that had been laced with potassium cyanide. Seven people died in the original poisonings, and there were several more deaths in subsequent copycat crimes. No suspect has been charged or convicted of the poisonings, but New York City resident James William Lewis was convicted of extortion for sending a letter to Tylenol's manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, that took responsibility for the deaths and demanded $1 million to stop them.
  • Compton's Cafeteria riot - occurred in August 1966 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The riot was a response to the violent and constant police harassment of drag queens and trans people, particularly trans women. The incident was one of the first LGBT-related riots in United States history, preceding the more famous 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. It marked the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco.
  • Crash at Crush - a one-day publicity stunt in the U.S. state of Texas that took place on September 15, 1896, in which two uncrewed locomotives were crashed into each other head-on at high speed. Unexpectedly, the impact caused both engine boilers to explode, resulting in a shower of flying debris that killed two people and caused numerous injuries among the spectators.
  • Dirty protest - part of a five-year protest during the Troubles by Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners held in the Maze Prison (also known as "Long Kesh") and a protest at Armagh Women's Prison in Northern Ireland.
  • Erfurt latrine disaster - occurred on 26 July 1184, when Henry VI, King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor), held a Hoftag (informal assembly) in the Petersberg Citadel in Erfurt. On the morning of 26 July, the combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement.
  • Gay Nineties - an American nostalgic term and a periodization of the history of the United States referring to the decade of the 1890s.
  • Ganesha drinking milk miracle - a phenomenon which occurred on 21 September 1995, in which statues of the Hindu deity Ganesha were thought to be drinking milk offerings.The news spread very quickly in various Indian and American cities, as Indians everywhere tried to "feed" idols of Ganesha with milk and spread the news through telephones and word of mouth, attracting significant attention in the Indian media. Scientists have described the incident as occurring through capillary action.
  • Great Resignation - an ongoing economic trend in which employees have voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse, beginning in early 2021 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • nut rage incident - also referred to as nutgate (Korean: 땅콩 회항, Ttangkong hoehang), was an air rage incident that occurred on December 5, 2014, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City onboard Korean Air Flight 086. Korean Air vice president Heather Cho (Korean name: Cho Hyun-ah), dissatisfied with the way a flight attendant served nuts on the plane, ordered the aircraft to return to the gate before takeoff.
  • Nutellagate - a controversy at Columbia University surrounding allegations of widespread student theft of dining hall Nutella. Columbia first began serving Nutella in its dining halls in February 2013. Within a month, future Pulitzer Prize winner Cecilia Reyes reported in the Columbia Daily Spectator that high demand for the spread was costing the university $5,000 per week, a figure reportedly calculated by Executive Director of Dining Services Vicki Dunn, as students were consuming up to 100 pounds of Nutella per day. In a school-wide email, Dunn accused students of filling cups with Nutella and stealing full jars from John Jay Dining Hall. It was estimated that at that rate, Nutella consumption would cost the university $250,000 a year, enough to buy seven jars for every undergraduate student. The high volume of Nutella consumption raised questions around food waste, dining hall meal plan costs, exorbitant tuition rates, and consumerism.The story quickly garnered national attention, and was reported the next day in The New York Times. The student blog Bwog calculated based on the original figure from the Spectator—$5,000 per week for 100 pounds per day—that unless the Spectator had misreported the numbers, the university was being charged 70% more for its Nutella than prices offered by local distributors. Two days after the Spectator article, the university clarified in a statement titled "NUTELLA-GATE EXPOSED: It's a Smear!" that the weekly cost of Nutella was actually less than one-tenth the reported amount, and that while in the first week the university spent $2,500 on Nutella, the cost had actually fallen to around $450 in following weeks.
  • Paraquat murders - a series of indiscriminate poisonings carried out in Japan in 1985. Police were unable to gather any evidence about the murders other than they were caused by a poisoned beverage that was left inside or around vending machines.
  • Pepsi Fruit Juice Flood - a flood of 176,000 barrels (28 million litres; 7.4 million US gallons) of fruit and vegetable juices into the streets of Lebedyan, Russia and the Don River, caused by the collapse of a PepsiCo warehouse.
  • Storm Area 51 - an American Facebook event that took place on September 20, 2019, at Area 51, a United States Air Force (USAF) facility within the Nevada Test and Training Range, to raid the site in a search for extraterrestrial life.
  • ThinThread - an intelligence gathering project by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) conducted throughout the 1990s. The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data. The program was discontinued three weeks before the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority.

Laws, Fines and Cases

  • Ambulance chasing - a term which refers to a lawyer soliciting for clients at a disaster site. The term "ambulance chasing" comes from the stereotype of lawyers who follow ambulances to the emergency room to find clients.
  • Bernstein v. United States - Bernstein v. United States is a set of court cases brought by Daniel J. Bernstein challenging restrictions on the export of cryptography from the United States
  • Buck v Bell - a decision of the United States Supreme Court, in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Despite the changing attitudes in the coming decades regarding sterilization, the Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Buck v. Bell.
  • Buttock mail - the colloquial term for a Scottish Poor Law tax which was introduced in 1595. Enforced by the ecclesiastical courts, buttock mail was levied as a fine for sexual intercourse out of wedlock.
  • Chewbacca defense - a legal strategy in which a criminal defense lawyer tries to confuse the jury rather than refute the case of the prosecutor.
  • Conscientious objection to military taxation - a legal theory that attempts to extend into the realm of taxation the concessions to conscientious objectors that many governments allow in the case of conscription, thereby allowing conscientious objectors to insist that their tax payments not be spent for military purposes.
  • Crumbling skull rule - a well-established legal doctrine used in some tort law systems. It holds that where a plaintiff had a condition or injury that predates the tort and would have naturally deteriorated or worsened over time (e.g. a crumbling skull), the defendant is not responsible to the degree that the condition or injury would have naturally worsened over time.
  • Death by misadventure - the recorded manner of death for an accidental death caused by a risk taken voluntarily. Misadventure in English law, as recorded by coroners and on death certificates and associated documents, is a death that is primarily attributed to an accident that occurred due to a risk that was taken voluntarily.
  • Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 - an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, allowing a man to marry his dead wife's sister, which had previously been forbidden. This prohibition had derived from a doctrine of canon law whereby those who were connected by marriage were regarded as being related to each other in a way which made marriage between them improper.
  • Disparate impact - practices in employment, housing, and other areas that adversely affect one group of people of a protected characteristic more than another, even though rules applied by employers or landlords are formally neutral.
  • Eggshell skull - a well-established legal doctrine in common law, used in some tort law systems, with a similar doctrine applicable to criminal law. The rule states that, in a tort case, the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them.
  • Enumclaw horse sex case - a series of incidents in 2005 involving Kenneth Pinyan, an engineer who worked for Boeing and resided in Gig Harbor, Washington; James Michael Tait, a truck driver; and other unidentified men. Pinyan and Tait filmed and distributed zoophilic pornography of Pinyan receiving anal sex from a stallion under the alias "Mr. Hands". After engaging in this activity on multiple occasions over an unknown span of time, Pinyan received fatal internal injuries in one such incident.
  • Federal telephone excise tax - a statutory federal excise tax imposed under the Internal Revenue Code in the United States under 26 U.S.C. § 4251 on amounts paid for certain "communications services". The tax was to be imposed on the person paying for the communications services (such as a customer of a telephone company) but, under 26 U.S.C. § 4291, is collected from the customer by the "person receiving any payment for facilities or services" on which the tax is imposed (i.e., is collected by the telephone company, which files a quarterly Form 720 excise return and forwards the tax to the Internal Revenue Service).
  • Jelly bean rule - a rule that says that just because foods are low in fat, cholesterol, and sodium, they cannot claim to be "healthy" unless they contain at least 10 percent of the Daily Value of: vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, protein, fiber, or iron. The FDA also made a policy that companies could not fortify foods with the sole intent of making that claim.
  • [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law][Key disclosure laws] - also known as mandatory key disclosure, is legislation that requires individuals to surrender cryptographic keys to law enforcement. The purpose is to allow access to material for confiscation or digital forensics purposes and use it either as evidence in a court of law or to enforce national security interests.
  • hue and cry - a process by which bystanders are summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal who has been witnessed in the act of committing a crime.
  • Iceland v Iceland Foods Ltd - an ongoing legal dispute between the country of Iceland and the British supermarket chain Iceland Foods over the trademark, intellectual property rights and use of the name "Iceland".
  • Indiana Pi Bill - the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, although it does imply various incorrect values of the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by a physician who was an amateur mathematician, never became law due to the intervention of Professor C. A. Waldo of Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.
  • Letters rogatory - a formal request from a court to a foreign court for some type of judicial assistance. The most common remedies sought by letters rogatory are service of process and taking of evidence.
  • Memory law - a legal provision governing the interpretation of a historical event and showcases the legislator's or judicial preference for a certain narrative about the past. In the process, competing interpretations may be downplayed, sidelined, or even prohibited.
  • Mormon Extermination Order - a state executive order issued by Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs on October 27, 1838, in the aftermath of the Battle of Crooked River – a clash between members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a unit of the state militia in northern Ray County during the 1838 Mormon War. Claiming that church members had committed open and avowed defiance of the law and had made war upon the people of Missouri, Governor Boggs directed that "the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description".
  • Onion Futures Act is a United States law banning the trading of futures contracts on onions as well as "motion picture box office receipts".
  • Posse Comitatus Act - a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385, original at 20 Stat. 152) signed on June 18, 1878, by President Rutherford B. Hayes which limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States.
  • The Salmon Act 1986 - an act of Parliament which outlines the difference between legal and illegal salmon fishery, among other things. The Act also makes it illegal to "handle salmon in suspicious circumstances".
  • Stambovsky vs. Ackley commonly known as the Ghostbusters ruling, is a case in the New York Supreme Court held that held that a house, which the owner had previously advertised to the public as haunted by ghosts, legally was haunted for the purpose of an action for rescission brought by a subsequent purchaser of the house
  • Statue forbidding Bearing of Armour - was enacted in 1313 during the reign of Edward II of England. It decrees "that in all Parliaments, Treatises and other Assemblies, which should be made in the Realm of England for ever, that every Man shall come without all Force and Armour".
  • Sterilization law in the United States
  • Tarriff engineering - design and manufacturing decisions made primarily so that the manufactured good is classified at a lower rate than it would have been absent those decisions. It is a loophole whereby an importer pays a lower tariff by "adapting the item [being imported] so that [the importer doesn't] have to pay any levy".
  • United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton - a 2013 United States District Court for the Southern District of New York judgment regarding a requested order from the United States government to seize an imported Mongolian Tarbosaurus (referred to as a Tyrannosaurus bataar in the case title) skeleton related to smuggling law and the applicability of Mongolian law in the United States.The form of the styling of this case—the defendant being an object, rather than a legal person—is because this is a jurisdiction in rem (power over objects) case, rather than the more familiar in personam (over persons) case.
  • US v. Vampire Nation - has little to do with actual vampires; the defendant filed the appeal under that name as it was the name of his electronic music group (consisting of only himself).
  • Window tax - a property tax based on the number of windows in a house. It was a significant social, cultural, and architectural force in England, France, and Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries. To avoid the tax, some houses from the period can be seen to have bricked-up window-spaces (ready to be glazed or reglazed at a later date).
  • Wrongful birth - a legal cause of action in some common law countries in which the parents of a congenitally diseased child claim that their doctor failed to properly warn of their risk of conceiving or giving birth to a child with serious genetic or congenital abnormalities.
  • Wrongful life - the name given to a legal action in which someone is sued by a severely disabled child (through the child's legal guardian) for failing to prevent the child's birth. Typically, a child and the child's parents will sue a doctor or a hospital for failing to provide information about the disability during the pregnancy, or a genetic disposition before the pregnancy. Had the mother been aware of this information, it is argued, she would have had an abortion, or chosen not to conceive at all.

People

  • Adolf Hitler and vegetarianism
  • Agent 355 - the code name of a female spy during the American Revolution, part of the Culper Ring. Agent 355 was one of the first spies for the United States, but her real identity is unknown.
  • Albert D. J. Cashier - born Jennie Irene Hodgers, was an American soldier who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Cashier adopted the identity of a man before enlisting, and maintained it until death. Cashier became famous as one of a number of women soldiers who served as men during the Civil War, although the consistent and long-term (at least 53 years) commitment to a male identity has prompted some contemporary scholars to suggest that Cashier was a trans man.
  • Alicia Boole Stott - the daughter of George Boole and was best known for coining the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four (or more) dimensions, and having an impressive grasp of four-dimensional geometry from a very early age.
  • Amelio Robles Ávila - a colonel during the Mexican Revolution. Assigned female at birth with the name Amelia Robles Ávila, Robles fought in the Mexican Revolution, rose to the rank of colonel, and lived openly as a man from age 24 until his death at age 95.
  • Angelica Ross - an American actress, businesswoman, and transgender rights advocate. A self-taught computer programmer, she went on to become founder and CEO of TransTech Social Enterprises, a firm that helps employ transgender people in the tech industry.
  • Cajun Navy - an informal ad hoc volunteer groups comprising private boat owners who assist in search and rescue efforts in the United States as well as offer Disaster Relief assistance
  • Caleb Lawrence McGillvary - also referred to as Kai, is a Canadian man who first became known from the internet viral video "Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker", which featured him recounting a crime he witnessed while hitchhiking. McGillvary subsequently received national attention in the press. In 2019, McGillvary was convicted of first-degree murder in New Jersey. He cited the fallout from the video as part of his defense against the homicide charge.
  • Chicago Gaylords - The Almighty Gaylords Nation is a Chicago street gang that was most active during the mid and late 20th century. The original president of the Gaylords selected the name after reading about the Gaylords in the public library (the Gaillards, later anglicized to Gaylord, were people from Normandy who lived near the Château Gaillard, constructed by Richard I).
  • Christopher Johnson McCandless - pseudonym "Alexander Supertramp", was an American adventurer who sought an increasingly nomadic lifestyle as he grew up. After graduating from Emory University in Georgia in 1990, McCandless traveled across North America and eventually hitchhiked to Alaska in April 1992. There, he entered the Alaskan bush with minimal supplies, hoping to live simply off the land. On the eastern bank of the Sushana River, McCandless found an abandoned bus, Fairbanks Bus 142, which he used as a makeshift shelter until his death. In September, his decomposing body, weighing only 67 pounds (30 kg), was found inside the bus by a hunter.
  • Christine Collins was an American woman who made national headlines during the late 1920s and 1930s after her nine-year-old son, Walter Collins, went missing in 1928. Five months after Walter's disappearance, a boy claiming to be Walter was found in DeKalb, Illinois. At the reunion, Collins said that the boy was not Walter. Under pressure to resolve the case, the officer in charge, Captain J.J. Jones, convinced her to "try the boy out" by taking him home. She returned three weeks later, again saying that he was not her son. The police had Collins committed to the psychiatric ward at Los Angeles County Hospital under a "Code 12" internment – a term used to jail or commit someone who was deemed difficult or an inconvenience.
  • Committee to End Pay Toilets in America - a 1970s grass-roots political organization which was one of the main forces behind the elimination of pay toilets in many American cities and states.
  • David Phillips - an American civil engineer best known for accumulating frequent flyer miles by taking advantage of a promotion by Healthy Choice Foods in 1999. He is the Associate Vice President of Energy and Sustainability at University of California Office of the President, who calculated while grocery shopping that the value of a mail-in promotion for frequent flyer miles exceeded the cost of the pudding on which it was offered. In May 1999, Phillips received 1,253,000 frequent flyer miles.
  • Delia Derbyshire - an English musician and composer of electronic music. She carried out pioneering work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s, including her electronic arrangement of the theme music to the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who. She has been referred to as "the unsung heroine of British electronic music", having influenced musicians including Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital.
  • Digby Tatham-Warter - Digby got to him and said "Don't worry about the bullets, I've got an umbrella". He then escorted the chaplain across the street under his umbrella. When he returned to the front line, one of his fellow officers said about his umbrella that "that thing won't do you any good", to which Digby replied "Oh my goodness Pat, but what if it rains?"
  • Erasto Bartholomeo Mpemba - a Tanzanian game warden who, as a schoolboy, discovered the eponymously named Mpemba effect, a paradoxical phenomenon in which hot water freezes faster than cold water under certain conditions; this effect had been observed previously by Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes.
  • Fionn mac Cumhaill - often anglicized Finn McCool or MacCool, is a hero in Irish mythology, as well as in later Scottish and Manx folklore. He is the leader of the Fianna bands of young roving hunter-warriors, as well as being a seer and poet. He is said to have a magic thumb that bestows him with great wisdom. He is often depicted hunting with his hounds Bran and Sceólang, and fighting with his spear and sword.
  • Fixer - someone who carries out assignments for or is skillful at solving problems for others. The term has different meanings in different contexts.
  • Goodspaceguy - an American perennial candidate from Washington state.
  • Hannah Ocuish - a 12-year old Pequot Native American girl with an intellectual disability who was hanged on December 20, 1786, in New London, Connecticut. She is believed to be the youngest person executed in the United States.
  • Ivan Renko - Ivan Renko was a fictitious Yugoslav basketball player created by Bobby Knight when he was the head coach for the Indiana University Hoosiers.
  • Gerald Anderson Lawson - an American electronic engineer. He is known for his work in designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console as well as leading the team that pioneered the commercial video game cartridge. He was thus dubbed the "father of the videogame cartridge" according to Black Enterprise magazine in 1982. He eventually left Fairchild and founded the game company Video-Soft.
  • John F. Carrington - an English missionary and Bible translator who spent a large part of his life in the Belgian Congo. He became fluent in the Kele language and in the related talking drum form of communication, and wrote a book titled The Talking Drums of Africa.
  • Joseph Darby - a renowned jumper from the Black Country village of Netherton. He specialised in spring jumping (jumping starting from a stationary position) often using weights in his hands to help propel him.
  • Julia Robinson - an American mathematician noted for her contributions to the fields of computability theory and computational complexity theory—most notably in decision problems. Her work on Hilbert's tenth problem (now known as Matiyasevich's theorem or the MRDP theorem) played a crucial role in its ultimate resolution. Robinson was a 1983 MacArthur Fellow.
  • Larrikin - an Australian English term meaning "a mischievous young person, an uncultivated, rowdy but good hearted person", or "a person who acts with apparent disregard for social or political conventions".
  • Las Patronas - a group of volunteer women of La Patrona community, from the town of Guadalupe in the municipality of Amatlán de los Reyes, Veracruz. Since 1995 the group has provided food and assistance to migrants on their way north through Veracruz.
  • Marion Marguerite Stokes - a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, access television producer, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and prolific archivist, especially known for her compulsive hoarding and archiving of hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012, at which time she operated nine properties and three storage units. According to The Los Angeles Review of Books's review of the 2019 documentary film Recorder, Stokes's massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving."]]
  • Mary Kenneth Keller - an American Roman Catholic religious sister, educator and pioneer in computer science. She and Irving C. Tang were the first two people to earn a doctorate in computer science in the United States.
  • Mehran Karimi Nasseri - also known as Sir Alfred Mehran, is an Iranian refugee who lived in the departure lounge of Terminal One in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 26 August 1988 until July 2006, when he was hospitalized.
  • Neerja Bhanot - an Indian purser who died while saving passengers on Pan Am Flight 73 which had been hijacked by terrorists from a terrorist organization during a stopover in Karachi, Pakistan, on 5 September 1986, just two days before her 23rd birthday. Posthumously, she became the first female recipient and, until 2003, the youngest recipient of India's highest peacetime gallantry award, the Ashoka Chakra, as well as several other accolades from the governments of Pakistan and the United States.
  • Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym of a group of mathematicians, predominantly French alumni of the École normale supérieure (ENS). The series is known collectively as the Éléments de mathématique (Elements of Mathematics), the group's central work. Topics treated in the series include set theory, abstract algebra, topology, analysis, Lie groups and Lie algebras.
  • Nolan Bushnell - founder of Atari also made Chuck E Cheese
  • Onfim - a boy who lived in Novgorod (present-day Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod. Onfim, who was most likely six or seven at the time, wrote in the Old Novgorodian dialect of Old East Slavic. Besides letters and syllables, he drew "battle scenes and drawings of himself and his teacher".
  • Pauli Murray - an American civil rights activist who became a lawyer, a women's rights activist, Episcopal priest, and author. Drawn to the ministry, in 1977 Murray was the first African-American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest, in the first year that any women were ordained by that church.
  • Pretendian - a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity by claiming to be a citizen of a Native American or Indigenous Canadian tribal nation, or to be descended from Native ancestors.
  • Public Universal Friend - an American preacher born in Cumberland, Rhode Island, to Quaker parents. After suffering a severe illness in 1776, the Friend claimed to have died and been reanimated as a genderless evangelist named the Public Universal Friend, and afterward shunned both birth name and gendered pronouns.
  • Ralph Kerwineo - an American who became notable after a 1914 incident in which Mamie White, the woman who had lived as Kerwineo's wife for over ten years, revealed to the local police Kerwineo's "true sex" (female). It was supposedly in retaliation to a legal marriage of Kerwineo and twenty-one-year-old Dorothy Kleinowski, and resulted in a police arrest and trial for disorderly conduct.
  • Ronald Clark O'Bryan - nicknamed The Candy Man and The Man Who Killed Halloween, was an American man convicted of killing his eight-year-old son Timothy (April 5, 1966 – October 31, 1974) on Halloween 1974 with a potassium cyanide-laced Pixy Stix that was ostensibly collected during a trick or treat outing.
  • Sōkaiya - specialized racketeers unique to Japan, and often associated with the yakuza, who extort money from or blackmail companies by threatening to publicly humiliate companies and their management, usually in their annual meeting (総会, sōkai).
  • Steve Shirley - a British information technology pioneer, businesswoman and philanthropist.
  • Student Information Processing Board - a student group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that helps students access computing resources and use them effectively.
  • Techno Viking - an internet phenomenon or meme based on a video from the 2000 Fuckparade in Berlin, Germany.
  • The boy Jones - a British teenager who became notorious for breaking into Buckingham Palace multiple times between 1838 and 1841.
  • Thomas Midgely Jr. - called a "one-man environmental disaster", having contributed to the discovery of Freon and leaded gasoline.
  • Thursday October Christian I - the first child born on the Pitcairn Islands after the mutineers took refuge on the island. Born on a Thursday in October, he was given his unusual name because Fletcher Christian wanted his son to have "no name that will remind me of England."
  • Timothy Dexter was an American businessman noted for his writing and eccentricity.
  • Umarell - a term popular in Bologna referring specifically to men of retirement age who pass the time watching construction sites, especially roadworks – stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back and offering unwanted advice
  • Wendy Carlos - an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores. Studying and working with various electronic musicians and technicians at the city's Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, she helped in the development of the Moog synthesizer, the first commercially available keyboard instrument created by Robert Moog. In 1979, Carlos raised public awareness of transgender issues by disclosing she had been living as a woman since at least 1968, and in 1972 had undergone sex reassignment surgery.

Politics

  • Anti-king - a would-be king who, due to succession disputes or simple political opposition, declares himself king in opposition to a reigning monarch. The term is usually used in a European historical context where it relates to elective monarchies rather than hereditary ones. In hereditary monarchies such figures are more frequently referred to as pretenders or claimants.
  • Anti-PowerPoint Party is a Swiss political party dedicated to decreasing professional use of Microsoft PowerPoint, which the party claims "causes national-economic damage amounting to 2.1 billion CHF" and lowers the quality of a presentation in "95% of the cases"
  • Bald-hairy - a common joke in Russian political discourse, referring to the empirical rule of the state leaders' succession defined as a change of a bald or balding leader to a hairy one and vice versa.
  • Candy Desk - a tradition of the United States Senate since 1968, whereby a senator who sits at a particular desk near a busy entrance keeps a drawer full of candy for members of the body. The current occupant of the candy desk is Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey.
  • Evidence-based policy - a concept in public policy that advocates for policy decisions to be grounded on, or influenced by, rigorously established objective evidence.
  • George H W Bush broccoli comments - During his tenure as the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush frequently mentioned his distaste for broccoli, famously saying: "I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid. And my mother made me eat it. Now I'm president of the United States. And I'm not gonna eat any more broccoli!" Bush's views on broccoli were seen as out of touch with Americans, as broccoli was becoming more popular and was referred to as the "vegetable of the 80s".
  • Horseshoe theory - asserts that the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, closely resemble one another, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together
  • Parliamentary snuff box - a wooden snuff box at the door of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom where snuff is stored for use by Members of Parliament. It originated after 1694 when smoking was banned in the House of Commons. It is the responsibility of the Principal Doorkeeper to ensure it is kept stocked.
  • spin - a form of propaganda, achieved through knowingly providing a biased interpretation of an event or campaigning to influence public opinion about some organization or public figure.
  • Useful idiot - a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders

Religion

  • Abzu - the name for fresh water from underground aquifers which was given a religious fertilising quality in Sumerian and Akkadian mythology. Lakes, springs, rivers, wells, and other sources of fresh water were thought to draw their water from the abzu. In Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, it is referred to as the primeval sea below the void space of the underworld (Kur) and the earth (Ma) above.
  • Apatheism - the attitude of apathy towards the existence or non-existence of God(s). It is more of an attitude rather than a belief, claim, or belief system.
  • Cosmic ocean - a mythological motif found in the mythology of many cultures and civilizations, representing the world or cosmos as enveloped by primordial waters.
  • Crypto-Judaism - the secret adherence to Judaism while publicly professing to be of another faith; practitioners are referred to as "crypto-Jews"
  • Dudeism - a religion, philosophy, or lifestyle inspired by "The Dude", the protagonist of the Coen Brothers' 1998 film The Big Lebowski.
  • Flirty Fishing - a form of evangelism by sexual intimacy practised from around 1974 to 1987 by the cult Children of God, currently known as Family International (TFI). Female members of Children of God, or "fisherwomen" would apply their sex appeal on "fish", men from outside the cult (often but not always having sex), using the occasion to proselytize for Jesus and seek donations.
  • Gnosticism - a collection of religious ideas and systems that emphasised personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) over the orthodox teachings, traditions, and authority of the church. Viewing material existence as flawed or evil, Gnostic cosmogony generally presents a distinction between a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser divinity (sometimes associated with the Yahweh of the Old Testament) who is responsible for creating the material universe.
  • Hundun - both a "legendary faceless being" in Chinese mythology and the "primordial and central chaos" in Chinese cosmogony, comparable with the world egg.
  • Islam and cats - The domestic cat is a revered animal in Islam
  • Medjed - a minor deity mentioned in certain copies of the Book of the Dead. While not much is known about the deity, his ghost-like depiction in the Greenfield papyrus has earned him popularity in modern Japanese culture, and he has appeared as a character in video games and anime.
  • Michaelmas - a Christian festival observed in some Western liturgical calendars on 29 September. In some denominations a reference to a fourth angel, usually Uriel, is also added. Michaelmas has been one of the four quarter days of the financial, judicial, and academic year.
  • Mormonism and violence - Mormons have both used and been subjected to significant violence throughout much of the religion's history. In the early history of the United States, violence was used as a form of control. Mormons were violently persecuted and pushed from Ohio to Missouri, from Missouri to Illinois and from Illinois, they were pushed west to the Utah Territory. There were incidents of massacre, home burning and pillaging, followed by the death of their prophet, Joseph Smith. Smith died from multiple gunshot wounds from a lynch mob at a jail in Carthage, Illinois; Smith had defended himself with a small pistol smuggled to him by church leader Cyrus Wheelock and he was then shot while trying to flee from a window. There were also notable incidents in which Mormons perpetrated violence. Under the direction of Mormon prophets and apostles, the Mormon burned and looted Davies County, attacked and killed a member of the Missouri state militia, and carried out an extermination order on the Timpanogos. Other Mormon leaders led the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Battle Creek massacre, and Circleville Massacre. Mormons have also been a major part in several wars, including the 1838 Mormon War, Walker War and Black Hawk War. The memory of this violence has affected both the history and the doctrines of the Latter Day Saint movement.
  • Roman Catholic Diocese of Condom - a French bishopric based in Condom from 1317 to 1801. It comprised four archdeaconries : Condom itself, Bruilhois, Villefranche and Nérac. In 1763 these totaled circa 140 parishes.
  • Tehom - the mythological cosmic ocean of Biblical cosmology, covering the Earth until God created the firmament to divide it into upper and lower portions and reveal the dry land; the world has been protected from the cosmic ocean ever since by the solid dome of the firmament.
  • Tetragrammaton - the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ (transliterated as YHWH), the name of the national god of Israel.
  • Titivillus - a demon said to work on behalf of Belphegor, Lucifer or Satan to introduce errors into the work of scribes
  • Tohu va Vohu - a Biblical Hebrew phrase found in the Genesis creation narrative (Genesis 1:2) that describes the condition of the earth ('éretz) immediately before the creation of light in Genesis 1:3. Numerous interpretations of this phrase are made by various theological sources. The King James Version translation of the phrase is "without form, and void", corresponding to Septuagint ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, "unseen and unformed".

War, Conflicts, Military

  • 1838 Mormon War - also known as the Missouri Mormon War, was a conflict between Mormons and non-Mormons in Missouri from August to November 1838, the first of the three "Mormon Wars".
  • Anglo-Zanzibar War - a military conflict fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on 27 August 1896. The conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, marking it as the shortest recorded war in history.
  • Ecash - an anonymous cryptographic electronic money or electronic cash system in 1983.
  • Emu War - a nuisance wildlife management military operation undertaken in Australia over the later part of 1932 to address public concern over the number of emus said to be running amok in the Campion district of Western Australia. The unsuccessful attempts to curb the population of emus, a large flightless bird indigenous to Australia, employed soldiers armed with Lewis guns—leading the media to adopt the name "Emu War" when referring to the incident.
  • Fog of war - the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign. Military forces try to reduce the fog of war through military intelligence and friendly force tracking systems. The term has become commonly used to define uncertainty mechanics in wargames.
  • Hearts and Minds - the strategy and programs used by the governments of Vietnam and the United States during the Vietnam War to win the popular support of the Vietnamese people and to help defeat the Viet Cong insurgency. Pacification is the more formal term for winning hearts and minds. In this case, however, it was also defined as the process of countering the insurgency. Military, political, economic, and social means were used to attempt to establish or reestablish South Vietnamese government control over rural areas and people under the influence of the Viet Cong.
  • Kettle War - The Kettle War was a military confrontation between the troops of the Holy Roman Empire and the Republic of the Seven Netherlands on 8 October 1784. It was named the Kettle War because the only shot fired hit a soup kettle.
  • Military Reaction Force - Military Reconnaissance Force or Mobile Reconnaissance Force (MRF) was a covert intelligence-gathering and counterinsurgency unit of the British Army active in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Internet

  • Book of Mozilla - a computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of web browsers.
  • Cats That Look Like Hitler - a satirical website featuring photographs of cats resembling Adolf Hitler, the Ultranationalist dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945.
  • Chum Box - A chum box (or chumbucket) is a form of online advertising that uses a grid of thumbnails and captions to drive traffic to other sites and webpages.
  • Considered harmful - a part of a phrasal template "X considered harmful". As of 2009, its snowclones have been used in the titles of at least 65 critical essays in computer science and related disciplines. Its use in this context originated with a 1968 letter by Edsger Dijkstra published as "Go To Statement Considered Harmful".
  • Copy protection - measures to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media.
  • Distributed Denial of Secrets is a whistleblower site founded in 2018. Sometimes referred to as a successor to WikiLeaks, it is best known for its June 2020 publication of a large collection of internal police documents, known as BlueLeaks. The group has also published data on Russian oligarchs, fascist groups, shell companies, tax havens, and banking in the Caymans, and has hosted data scraped from Parler in January 2021 and from the February 2021 Gab leak.
  • dril - a pseudonymous Twitter user best known for his idiosyncratic style of absurdist humor and non sequiturs.
  • Email storm - a sudden spike of "reply all" messages on an email distribution list, usually caused by a controversial or misdirected message.
  • Embrace, extend, extinguish - a phrase that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
  • Emoji domain - a domain name with one or more emoji in it, for example 😉.tld.
  • Eternal September - is Usenet slang for a period beginning in September 1993, the month that Internet service provider America Online (AOL) began offering Usenet access to its many users, overwhelming the existing culture for online forums.
  • Flash of unstyled content - an instance where a web page appears briefly with the browser's default styles prior to loading an external CSS stylesheet, due to the web browser engine rendering the page before all information is retrieved. The page corrects itself as soon as the style rules are loaded and applied; however, the shift may be distracting. Related problems include flash of invisible text and flash of faux text.
  • Googlewhack - a contest to find a Google Search query that returns a single result.
  • Google's ideological echo chamber - commonly referred to as the Google memo, is an internal memo, dated July 2017, by United States-based Google engineer James Damore about Google's culture and diversity policies.
  • Holy grail - a web page layout which has multiple equal-height columns that are defined with style sheets. It is commonly desired and implemented, but for many years, the various ways in which it could be implemented with available technologies all had drawbacks. Because of this, finding an optimal implementation was likened to searching for the elusive Holy Grail.
  • Infodemic - a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information about something, such as a disease.
  • Internet Research Agency - also known as Glavset and known in Russian Internet slang as the Trolls from Olgino, is a Russian company engaged in online influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests.
  • ISO 3166 - a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, special areas of geographical interest, and their principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces or states).
  • Joe job - a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them (see also Email spoofing), but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.
  • Me at the zoo - first video that was uploaded to YouTube.
  • Microsoft acquisition hoax - a bogus 1994 press release suggesting that the information technology company Microsoft had acquired the Roman Catholic Church. It is considered to be the first Internet hoax to reach a mass audience.
  • Milkshake Duck - an Internet meme that describes people who gain viral popularity on social media for some positive or charming trait but are later revealed to have distasteful histories or offensive behavior.
  • Monkey selfie copyright dispute - a series of disputes about the copyright status of selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British nature photographer David Slater.
  • Mousetrapping - a technique used by some websites (often tech support scam sites) to keep visitors from leaving their website, either by launching an endless series of pop-up ads, redirects or by re-launching their website in a window that cannot be easily closed (sometimes this window runs like a stand-alone application, and the taskbar and the browser's menu become inaccessible). Many websites that do this also employ browser hijackers to reset the user's default homepage.
  • PETA Domain Name Disputes - In February 1995, a parody website calling itself "People Eating Tasty Animals" registered the domain name "peta.org". PETA sued, claiming trademark violation, and won the suit in 2001; the domain is currently owned by PETA. While still engaged in legal proceedings over "peta.org", PETA themselves registered the domains "ringlingbrothers.com" and "voguemagazine.com", using the sites to accuse Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and Vogue of animal cruelty.
  • plonk - a Usenet jargon term for adding a particular poster to one's kill file so that poster's future postings are completely ignored.
  • Rotation Curation - also #RotationCuration, is the concept of rotating the spokesperson on a broad scoped social media account. Such a scope can be a location, a country, an organization, a group, and so on.
  • Sealioning - a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity.
  • Series of tubes - a phrase used originally as an analogy by then-United States Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to describe the Internet in the context of opposing network neutrality.

Language

Alphabets and Writing Systems

  • Abjad - a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels.
  • Abugida - sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary.
  • Armenian alphabet
  • Armenian Braille
  • Armenian orthography reform - occurred between 1922 and 1924 in Soviet Armenia and was partially reviewed in 1940. Its main features were neutralization of classical etymological writing and the adjustment of phonetic realization and writing.
  • Boustrophedon - a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with reversed letters.
  • Braille pattern dots-6
  • Cyrillic script
  • Deseret Alphabet - a phonemic English-language spelling reform developed between 1847 and 1854 by the board of regents of the University of Deseret under the leadership of Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
  • Forfeda - the "additional" letters of the Ogham alphabet, beyond the basic inventory of twenty signs.
  • International uniformity of brailler alphabets - the goal of braille uniformity is to unify the braille alphabets of the world as much as possible, so that literacy in one braille alphabet readily transfers to another
  • Moon type - a writing system for the blind, using embossed symbols mostly derived from the Latin script (but simplified). It is claimed by its supporters to be easier to understand than braille, though it is mainly used by people who have lost their sight as adults, and thus already have knowledge of the shapes of letters.
  • New York Point - a braille-like system of tactile writing for the blind invented by William Bell Wait (1839–1916), a teacher in the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind. The system used one to four pairs of points set side by side, each containing one or two dots. (Letters of one through four pairs, each with two dots, would be ⟨:⟩ ⟨::⟩ ⟨:::⟩ ⟨::::⟩.) The most common letters are written with the fewest points, a strategy also employed by the competing American Braille.
  • Night writing - an encoding system that used symbols of twelve dots arranged as two columns of six dots embossed on a square of paperboard. The system was a forerunner of Braille and was designed in 1815 by Charles Barbier. It was one of twelve different alternative and shorthand writing methods created by Barbier.
  • Ogham - an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language
  • Syllabary - a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words.

Debate/Argument

  • Gish gallop - a technique in which a debater attempts to overwhelm an opponent by excessive number of arguments, without regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.
  • Name calling - a form of verbal abuse in which insulting or demeaning labels are directed at an individual or group.

Grammar

  • Adjective Order - In many languages, attributive adjectives usually occur in a specific order. In general, the adjective order in English can be summarised as: opinion, size, age or shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. This sequence (with age preceding shape) is sometimes referred to by the mnemonic OSASCOMP.
  • Anthimeria - using one part of speech as another, such as using a noun as a verb: "The little old lady turtled along the road." In linguistics, this is called conversion; when a noun becomes a verb, it is a denominal verb, when a verb becomes a noun, it is a deverbal noun.
  • Antimetabole - the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed order; for example, "I know what I like, and I like what I know".
  • Comparative illusions - certain comparative sentences which initially seem to be acceptable but upon closer reflection have no well-formed meaning. The typical example sentence used to typify this phenomenon is "More people have been to Russia than I have".
  • Denominal verb - verbs derived from nouns.
  • Deverbal noun - nouns that are derived from verbs or verb phrases, but that behave grammatically purely as nouns, not as verbs.
  • Donkey sentence - sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning (it is bound semantically) but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians.
  • Eye dialect - the use of deliberately nonstandard spelling to emphasize how a word is being pronounced.
  • Garden-path sentence - a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning.
  • Hypercorrection - non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated.
  • Reduced relative clause - a relative clause that is not marked by an explicit relative pronoun or complementizer such as who, which or that. An example is the clause I saw in the English sentence "This is the man I saw." Unreduced forms of this relative clause would be "This is the man that I saw." or "…whom I saw."
  • Singular they - the use in English of the pronoun they or its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (or themself), as an epicene (gender-neutral) singular pronoun.
  • Symploce - a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used successively at the beginning of two or more clauses or sentences and another word or phrase with a similar wording is used successively at the end of them. It is the combination of anaphora and epistrophe.
  • Verbification - is creation of a verb from a noun, adjective or other word.
  • Zeugma and syllepsis - In rhetoric, zeugma (from the Ancient Greek ζεῦγμα, zeûgma, lit. "a yoking together") and syllepsis (from the Ancient Greek σύλληψις, sullēpsis, lit. "a taking together") are figures of speech in which a single phrase or word joins different parts of a sentence.]]

Idioms

  • Bilingual tautological expressions - is a phrase that combines words that mean the same thing in two different languages
  • Egg of Columbus - refers to a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact. The expression refers to an apocryphal story, dating from at least the 16th century, in which it is said that Christopher Columbus, having been told that finding a new trade route was inevitable and no great accomplishment, challenges his critics to make an egg stand on its tip. After his challengers give up, Columbus does it himself by tapping the egg on the table to flatten its tip.
  • "He never married" was a phrase commonly used by obituary writers in the United Kingdom as a euphemism for the deceased having been homosexual.
  • Greek to me - Different languages have similar formulations. Many have picked the point of reference to be a foreign language with another alphabet or writing system.
  • Hobson's Choice - a free choice in which only one thing is offered. Because a person may refuse to accept what is offered, the two options are taking it or taking nothing. In other words, one may "take it or leave it".
  • Morton's Fork - a type of false dilemma in which contradictory observations lead to the same conclusion. It is said to have originated with the collecting of taxes by John Morton.
  • Salad days - a Shakespearean idiom referring to a period of carefree innocence, idealism, and pleasure associated with youth. The modern use, chiefly in the United States, describes a heyday, when a person is/was at the peak of their abilities, while not necessarily a youth.
  • Snowclone - a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants.
  • Trip the light fantastic - to dance nimbly or lightly to music.

Languages

  • Abjad - a type of writing system where each symbol or glyph stands for a consonant, in effect leaving it to readers to infer or otherwise supply an appropriate vowel.
  • Artistic language - a constructed language designed for aesthetic and phonetic pleasure. Language can be artistic to the extent that artists use it as a source of creativity in art, poetry, calligraphy or as a metaphor to address themes such as cultural diversity and the vulnerability of the individual in a globalizing world.
  • Avoidance speech - a group of sociolinguistic phenomena in which a special restricted speech style must be used in the presence of or in reference to certain relatives.
  • Cant - the jargon or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group.
  • Characteristica universalis - commonly interpreted as universal characteristic, or universal character in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator.
  • Constructed Languages - A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary are, instead of having developed naturally, consciously devised for communication between intelligent beings, most commonly for use by humanoids.
  • Creole language - a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language.
  • Daughter language - also known as descendant language, is a language descended from another language, its mother language, through a process of genetic descent. If more than one language has developed from the same proto-language, or 'mother language', those languages are said to be sister languages, members of the same language family.
  • Dené–Yeniseian languages - a proposed language family consisting of the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia and the Na-Dené languages of northwestern North America.
  • Dog Latin - the creation of a phrase or jargon in imitation of Latin, often by "translating" English words (or those of other languages) into Latin by conjugating or declining them as if they were Latin words.
  • Engineered language - constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical languages (or ideal languages), logical languages (sometimes abbreviated as loglangs), and experimental languages.
  • Europanto - a macaronic language concept with a fluid vocabulary from European languages of the user's choice or need. It was conceived in 1996 by Diego Marani (a journalist, author and translator for the European Council of Ministers in Brussels) based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many European languages.
  • False friends - words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning.
  • Gesticulation in Italian
  • Grimm's law - a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC.
  • Home sign - a gestural communication system, often invented spontaneously by a deaf child who lacks accessible linguistic input. Home sign systems often arise in families where a deaf child is raised by hearing parents and is isolated from the Deaf community. Because the deaf child does not receive signed or spoken language input, these children are referred to as linguistically isolated.
  • International auxiliary language - a language meant for communication between people from all different nations, who do not share a common first language.
  • Irish language in Newfoundland
  • Judeo-Spanish (also called Ladino) - a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. Originally spoken in Spain, it is today spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most of the surviving speakers residing in Israel.
  • Kakekotoba - a rhetorical device used in the Japanese poetic form waka. This trope uses the phonetic reading of a grouping of kanji (Chinese characters) to suggest several interpretations: first on the literal level (e.g. 松, matsu, meaning "pine tree"), then on subsidiary homophonic levels (e.g. 待つ, matsu, meaning "to wait").
  • Karenic languages - The Karen or Karenic languages are tonal languages spoken by some seven million Karen people. They are of unclear affiliation within the Sino-Tibetan languages. The Karen languages are written using the Burmese script.
  • Koiné language - a standard or common language or dialect that has arisen as a result of the contact, mixing, and often simplification of two or more mutually intelligible varieties of the same language.
  • La Spezia–Rimini Line - in the linguistics of the Romance languages, is a line that demarcates a number of important isoglosses that distinguish Romance languages south and east of the line from Romance languages north and west of it.
  • Language contact - occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact and influence each other. The common products include pidgins, creoles, code-switching, and mixed languages. In many other cases, contact between speakers occurs but the lasting effects on the language are less visible; they may, however, include loan words, calques or other types of borrowed material.
  • Language game - A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the "rule" of the "game" being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance "Water!" could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication.
  • Latin obscenity - the profane, indecent, or impolite vocabulary of Latin, and its uses. Words deemed obscene were described as obsc(a)ena (obscene, lewd, unfit for public use), or improba (improper, in poor taste, undignified).
  • Linguistic relativity - the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition.
  • Macaronic language - uses a mixture of languages, particularly bilingual puns or situations in which the languages are otherwise used in the same context (rather than simply discrete segments of a text being in different languages).
  • Nicaraguan sign language - a sign language that was developed, largely spontaneously, by deaf children in a number of schools in Nicaragua in the 1980s. It is of particular interest to the linguists who study it because it offers a unique opportunity to study what they believe to be the birth of a new language.
  • North-South differences in the Korean language - The Korean language has changed between North and South Korea due to the length of time that the two states have been separated.
  • Null-subject language - a language whose grammar permits an independent clause to lack an explicit subject; such a clause is then said to have a null subject.
  • Pandanus language - an elaborate avoidance language among several of the peoples of the eastern New Guinea Highlands, used when collecting Pandanus nuts.
  • Patois - speech or language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. As such, patois can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects or vernaculars, but not commonly to jargon or slang, which are vocabulary-based forms of cant.
  • Pidgin language - a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages.
  • Polari - a form of slang or cant used in Britain by some actors, circus and fairground showmen, professional wrestlers, merchant navy sailors, criminals, sex workers, and the gay subculture.
  • Signing Exact English - a system of manual communication that strives to be an exact representation of English language vocabulary and grammar. It is one of a number of such systems in use in English-speaking countries. It is related to Seeing Essential English (SEE-I), a manual sign system created in 1945, based on the morphemes of English words.
  • SignWriting - a system of writing sign languages. It is highly featural and visually iconic, both in the shapes of the characters, which are abstract pictures of the hands, face, and body, and in their spatial arrangement on the page, which does not follow a sequential order like the letters that make up written English words.
  • Sister language - cognate languages; that is, languages that descend from a common ancestral language, their so-called proto-language. Every language in a language family that descends from the same language as the others is a sister to them.
  • Simultaneous communication - a technique sometimes used by deaf, hard-of-hearing or hearing sign language users in which both a spoken language and a manual variant of that language (such as English and manually coded English) are used simultaneously.
  • Stylometry - the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language, but it has successfully been applied to music and to fine-art paintings as well.
  • Texas German - a group of German language dialects spoken in Texas by descendants of German immigrants who settled there in the mid-19th century.
  • Theives' cant - a secret language (a cant or cryptolect) which was formerly used by thieves, beggars and hustlers of various kinds in Great Britain and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries.
  • Toki Pona - a philosophical artistic constructed language (philosophical artlang) known for its small vocabulary, simplicity, and ease of acquisition. It was created by Sonja Lang, a Canadian linguist and translator, to simplify thoughts and communication.
  • Transpiranto - a parody language, a caricature of the international auxiliary language Esperanto. The name contains a play on the Swedish verb transpirera, to perspire.
  • Utamakura - is a rhetorical concept in Japanese poetry.

Letters, Characters and Glyphs

  • -30- - traditionally used by journalists in North America to indicate the end of a story or article that is submitted for editing and typesetting. It is commonly employed when writing on deadline and sending bits of the story at a time, via telegraphy, teletype, electronic transmission, or paper copy, as a necessary way to indicate the end of the article. It is also found at the end of press releases.
  • Asemic writing - a wordless open semantic form of writing.
  • Bourbaki dangerous bend symbol - The dangerous bend or caution symbol ☡ (U+2621 ☡ CAUTION SIGN) was created by the Nicolas Bourbaki group of mathematicians and appears in the margins of mathematics books written by the group. It resembles a road sign that indicates a "dangerous bend" in the road ahead, and is used to mark passages tricky on a first reading or with an especially difficult argument.
  • Cedilla a hook or tail ( ¸ ) added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation
  • Multiocular O - ꙮ
  • Quincunx - a geometric pattern consisting of five points arranged in a cross, with four of them forming a square or rectangle and a fifth at its center.
  • Rota - one of the symbols used by the Pope to authenticate documents such as papal bulls. It is a cross inscribed in two concentric circles. Pope Leo IX was the first pope to use it.
  • Signum manus - the medieval practice, current from the Merovingian period until the 14th century in the Frankish Empire and its successors, of signing a document or charter with a special type of monogram or royal cypher.
  • Up tack - ⊥

Linguistics

  • Clitic - a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase.
  • Clitic doubling - is a phenomenon by which clitic pronouns appear in verb phrases together with the full noun phrases that they refer to (as opposed to the cases where such pronouns and full noun phrases are in complementary distribution).
  • Dialect levelling - the process of an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features between two or more dialects.
  • Formulaic language - a linguistic term for verbal expressions that are fixed in form, often non-literal in meaning with attitudinal nuances, and closely related to communicative-pragmatic context. Along with idioms, expletives and proverbs, formulaic language includes pause fillers (e.g., "Like", "Er" or "Uhm") and conversational speech formulas (e.g., "You've got to be kidding," "Excuse me?" or "Hang on a minute").
  • Lexical similarity - a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words.
  • Mutual intelligibility - a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.

Poems

  • l(a - a poem by E. E. Cummings. It is the first poem in his 1958 collection 95 Poems.
  • Catullus 16 - a Latin poem that was considered so explicit that a full English translation was not published until the late twentieth century. The first line has been called "one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin—or in any other language, for that matter."

Punctuation

  • Interrobang - a punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark, or interrogative point, and the exclamation mark, or exclamation point, known in the jargon of printers and programmers as a "bang".
  • Irony punctuation - any proposed form of notation used to denote irony or sarcasm in text.
  • Pilcrow - ¶

Speech

  • High rising terminal - a feature of some variants of English where declarative sentence clauses end with a rising-pitch intonation, until the end of the sentence where a falling-pitch is applied.
  • Vocal fry register - the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure that permits air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency.

Weird words, phrases, and sentences

  • Alternatives to the Ten Commandments - Several alternatives to the Ten Commandments have been promulgated by different persons and groups, which intended to improve on the lists of laws known as the Ten Commandments that appear in the Bible.
  • Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - is a grammatically correct sentence in American English, often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity.
  • Coals to Newcastle - an idiom of British origin describing a pointless action.
  • Colorless green ideas sleep furiously - a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical.
  • Donald Duck talk - an alaryngeal form of vocalization which uses the inner cheek to produce sound rather than the larynx.
  • Dord - a dictionary error in lexicography. On July 31, 1931, Austin M. Patterson, the dictionary's chemistry editor, sent in a slip reading "D or d, cont./density." This was intended to add "density" to the existing list of words that the letter "D" can abbreviate. The phrase "D or d" was misinterpreted as a single, run-together word: Dord.
  • Double-barreled question - an informal fallacy. It is committed when someone asks a question that touches upon more than one issue, yet allows only for one answer.
  • Ghoti - a creative respelling of the word fish, used to illustrate irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation.
  • Going postal - Going postal is an American English slang phrase referring to becoming extremely and uncontrollably angry, often to the point of violence, and usually in a workplace environment. The expression derives from a series of incidents from 1986 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public in acts of mass murder.
  • Satiric misspelling - an intentional misspelling of a word, phrase or name for a rhetorical purpose. This is often done by replacing a letter with another letter (for example, k replacing c), or symbol (for example, $ replacing s, @ replacing a, or ¢ replacing c).

Words

  • 7 Dirty Words - are seven English-language words that American comedian George Carlin first listed in 1972 in his monologue "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television".
  • -graphy - The English suffix -graphy means either "writing" or a "field of study"
  • Amor fati - a Latin phrase that may be translated as "love of fate" or "love of one's fate". It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.
  • Anadiplosis - the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause. The word is used at the end of a sentence and then used again at the beginning of the next sentence.
  • Anaphora - a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending them emphasis.
  • Anatopism - An anatopism is something that is out of its proper place.
  • Antimetabole - the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed order; for example, "I know what I like, and I like what I know". It is related to, and sometimes considered a special case of, chiasmus.
  • Apherisis - the loss of one or more sounds from the beginning of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel, thus producing a new form called an aphetism.
  • Aptronym - a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner.
  • Auto-antonym - also called a contronym, contranym or Janus word, is a word with multiple meanings (senses) of which one is the reverse of another. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together".
  • Aureation - a device in arts of rhetoric that involves the "gilding" (or supposed heightening) of diction in one language by the introduction of terms from another, typically a classical language considered to be more prestigious. Aureation commonly involves other mannered rhetorical features in diction; for example circumlocution, which bears a relation to more native literary devices such as the kenning.
  • Autological Word - a word that expresses a property that it also possesses
  • Banq - coined words pronounced identically to the word "bank". Both terms have been adopted by financial services companies and others to satisfy legal restrictions on the usage of the word bank. The compound bancorp (banc/bank + corp[oration]) is often used in the names of bank holding companies.
  • Calque - a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language.
  • Capitonym - a word that changes its meaning (and sometimes pronunciation) when it is capitalized; the capitalization usually applies due to one form being a proper noun or eponym.
  • Chiasmus - or, less commonly, chiasm, is a "reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words": Despised, if ugly; if she's fair, betrayed.
  • Circumlocution - the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea. It is sometimes necessary in communication (for example, to work around lexical gaps that might otherwise lead to untranslatability), but it can also be undesirable (when an uncommon or easily misunderstood figure of speech is used)
  • Dasein is a German word that means "being there" or "presence" (German: da "there"; sein "to be"), and is often translated into English with the word "existence". It is a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings.
  • Dead metaphor is a figure of speech which has lost the original imagery of its meaning due to extensive, repetitive, and popular usage.
  • Demonym - is a word that identifies residents or natives of a particular place and is derived from the name of the place.
  • Deixis - words and phrases, such as "me" or "here", that cannot be fully understood without additional contextual information—in this case, the identity of the speaker ("me") and the speaker's location ("here").
  • Diegesis - the relaying of information in a fictional work (such as a film or novel) through a narrative. Diegetic elements are part of the fictional world ("part of the story"), as opposed to non-diegetic elements which are stylistic elements of how the narrator tells the story ("part of the storytelling").
  • Doublet - two or more words in the same language are called doublets or etymological twins or twinlings (or possibly triplets, and so forth) when they have different phonological forms but the same etymological root
  • Eggcorn - An idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms).
  • Epanalepsis - the repetition of the initial part of a clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence: "The king is dead; long live the king!"
  • Epistrophe - the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses or sentences.
  • Eponym - a person, place, or thing after whom or which someone or something is, or is believed to be, named
  • Etaoin shrdlu - a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print in the days of "hot type" publishing because of a custom of type-casting machine operators.
  • Etymology of Tea - The etymology of the word tea can be traced back to the various Chinese pronunciations of the Chinese word 茶. Nearly all of the words for tea worldwide fall into three broad groups: te, cha and chai, which reflected the history of transmission of tea drinking culture and trade from China to countries around the world.
  • Expurgation - also known as bowdlerization, is a form of censorship that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work, or other type of writing of media.
  • Fnord - a word coined in 1965 by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill in the Discordian religious text Principia Discordia. It entered into popular culture after appearing in The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) of novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Here, the interjection "fnord" is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened, and children in grade school are taught to be unable to see the word consciously. For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of unease and confusion which prevents rational consideration of the text in which it appears.
  • Fossil word - a word that is broadly obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom.
  • Fumblerules - A fumblerule is a rule of language or linguistic style, humorously written in such a way that it breaks this rule.
  • Garaigo - Japanese for "loan word", and indicates a transcription into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese (especially Literary Chinese), but in modern times, primarily from English, Portuguese, Dutch, and modern Chinese dialects, such as Standard Chinese and Cantonese
  • Ghost word - a word published in a dictionary or similarly authoritative reference work, having rarely, if ever, been used in practice, and hitherto having been meaningless.
  • Hapax legomenon - a word that only occurs once within a certain context.
  • Headlinese - an abbreviated form of news writing style used in newspaper headlines.
  • Heterogram - a word, phrase, or sentence in which no letter of the alphabet occurs more than once.
  • Inkhorn term - a loanword, or a word coined from existing roots, which is deemed to be unnecessary or overly pretentious
  • Irreversible binomial - a pair or group of words used together in fixed order as an idiomatic expression or collocation.
  • Irony - a rhetorical device, literary technique, or event in which what appears, on the surface, to be the case, differs radically from what is actually the case.
  • Isogram - a logological term for a word or phrase without a repeating letter.
  • LGBT slang
  • Lorem Ipsum - a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document without relying on meaningful content (also called greeking).
  • Mass noun - a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements.
  • Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept.
  • Minced oath - a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics.
  • Mondegreen - Mishearing of a phrase that results in near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.
  • Nonce word - any sequence of sounds or letters (phonemes or graphemes), created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word within a given language.
  • Palindrome - a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward, such as madam or racecar or the number 10801.
  • Panalphabetic window - a stretch of text that contains all the letters of the alphabet in order. It is a special type of pangram or pangrammatic window.
  • Pangram - a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once.
  • Pangrammatic lipogram - uses every letter of the alphabet except one.
  • Pangrammatic window - a stretch of naturally occurring text that contains all the letters in the alphabet.
  • Patronymic - a component of a personal name based on the given name of one's father, grandfather (avonymic), or an earlier male ancestor.
  • Phonetic reversal - the process of reversing the phonemes or phones of a word or phrase.
  • Placeholder name - words that can refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown in the context in which they are being discussed.
  • Plurale tantum - a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object.
  • Protologism - a newly used or coined word, a nonce word, that has been repeated but not gained acceptance beyond its original users or been published independently of the coiners.
  • RAS Syndrome - the use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym (or other initialism) in conjunction with the abbreviated form. This means, in effect, repeating one or more words from the acronym. Two common examples are "PIN number"/ "VIN number" (the "N" in PIN and VIN stands for "number") and "ATM machine" (the "M" in ATM stands for "machine").
  • Reborrowing - the process where a word travels from one language to another and then back to the originating language in a different form or with a different meaning. This path is indicated by A→B→A, where A is the originating language, and can take many forms. A reborrowed word is sometimes called a Rückwanderer (German, a 'returner')
  • Sensational spelling - the deliberate spelling of a word in a non-standard way for special effect.
  • Skunked term - a word that becomes difficult to use because it transitions from one meaning to another
  • Sniglet - an often humorous word made up to describe something for which no dictionary word exists.
  • Sui generis - a Latin phrase that means "of its/his/her/their own kind", "in a class by itself", therefore "unique"
  • Symploce - a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used successively at the beginning of two or more clauses or sentences and another word or phrase with a similar wording is used successively at the end of them. It is the combination of anaphora and epistrophe.
  • Tmesis - a linguistic phenomenon in which a word or phrase is separated into two parts, with other words between them.
  • Truce term - a word or short phrase accepted within a community of children as an effective way of calling for a temporary respite or truce during a game or activity, such as tag or its variants.
  • Wanderwort - a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another, usually in connection with trade.
  • Weasel word - an informal term for words and phrases such as "researchers believe" and "most people think" which make arguments appear specific or meaningful, even though these terms are at best ambiguous and vague.
  • Yak Shaving - any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.

Math

  • Ethnomathematics - is the study of the relationship between mathematics and culture

Algebra

  • 1 + 2 + 3 + 4…
  • Digital root - a non-negative integer is the (single digit) value obtained by an iterative process of summing digits, on each iteration using the result from the previous iteration to compute a digit sum.
  • Magma - In abstract algebra, a magma (or groupoid) is a basic kind of algebraic structure. Specifically, a magma consists of a set equipped with a single binary operation. The binary operation must be closed by definition but no other properties are imposed.
  • Modular arithmetic - a system of arithmetic for integers, where numbers "wrap around" upon reaching a certain value—the modulus (plural moduli).
  • Racks and quandles - In mathematics, racks and quandles are sets with binary operations satisfying axioms analogous to the Reidemeister moves used to manipulate knot diagrams.
  • Rng - an algebraic structure satisfying the same properties as a ring, but without assuming the existence of a multiplicative identity
  • Set-theoretic definition of natural numbers
  • Tetration - is an operation based on iterated, or repeated, exponentiation. It is the next hyperoperation after exponentiation, but before pentation

Functions

  • Arity - In logic, mathematics, and computer science, the arity of a function or operation is the number of arguments or operands that the function takes.
  • Binary Operation - In mathematics, a binary operation on a set is a calculation that combines two elements of the set (called operands) to produce another element of the set.
  • Linear congruential generator - an algorithm that yields a sequence of pseudo-randomized numbers calculated with a discontinuous piecewise linear equation
  • Taxicab geometry - a form of geometry in which the usual distance function or metric of Euclidean geometry is replaced by a new metric in which the distance between two points is the sum of the absolute differences of their Cartesian coordinates.
  • Weierstrass Function - The function has the property of being continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere.

Geometry

  • blowing up - a type of geometric transformation which replaces a subspace of a given space with all the directions pointing out of that subspace. For example, the blowup of a point in a plane replaces the point with the projectivized tangent space at that point.
  • Catenary - the curve that an idealized hanging chain or cable assumes under its own weight when supported only at its ends.
  • Constructive Solid Geometry - Constructive solid geometry allows a modeler to create a complex surface or object by using Boolean operators to combine simpler objects.
  • Cox-Zucker machine - n algorithm created by David A. Cox and Steven Zucker. This algorithm determines if a given set of sections provides a basis (up to torsion) for the Mordell–Weil group of an elliptic surface E → S where S is isomorphic to the projective line.
  • Dandelin spheres - one or two spheres that are tangent both to a plane and to a cone that intersects the plane.
  • Deltahedron - a polyhedron whose faces are all equilateral triangles.
  • Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers - an online list of thousands of points or "centers" associated with the geometry of a triangle.
  • Fractal - a subset of a Euclidean space for which the Hausdorff dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.
  • Gabriel's Horn - a geometric figure which has infinite surface area but finite volume.
  • Golden angle - the smaller of the two angles created by sectioning the circumference of a circle according to the golden ratio; that is, into two arcs such that the ratio of the length of the larger arc to the length of the smaller arc is the same as the ratio of the full circumference to the length of the larger arc.
  • Polyomino - a plane geometric figure formed by joining one or more equal squares edge to edge. It is a polyform whose cells are squares. It may be regarded as a finite subset of the regular square tiling with a connected interior.
  • Prince Rupert's Cube - is the largest cube that can pass through a hole cut through a unit cube, i.e. through a cube whose sides have length 1, without splitting the cube into two pieces.
  • Pseudosphere - a surface with constant negative Gaussian curvature.z
  • Spherical polyhedron - a tiling of the sphere in which the surface is divided or partitioned by great arcs into bounded regions called spherical polygons.
  • Sphericon - a solid that has a continuous developable surface with two congruent semi circular edges, and four vertices that define a square.
  • Tautochrone curve - A tautochrone or isochrone curve is the curve for which the time taken by an object sliding without friction in uniform gravity to its lowest point is independent of its starting point.
  • Toroid - a surface of revolution with a hole in the middle, like a doughnut, forming a solid body.

Graph Theory

  • Kirchhoff's theorem - a theorem about the number of spanning trees in a graph, showing that this number can be computed in polynomial time as the determinant of a matrix derived from the graph.
  • Snark - an undirected graph with exactly three edges per vertex whose edges cannot be colored with only three colors. In order to avoid trivial cases, snarks are often restricted to have additional requirements on their connectivity and on the length of their cycles.

Group Theory

  • Monster group - the largest sporadic simple group.
  • Setoid - a set (or type) X equipped with an equivalence relation ~
  • Sporadic group - a sporadic group is one of the 26 exceptional groups found in the classification of finite simple groups.

Logic

  • Constraint satisfaction problem - mathematical questions defined as a set of objects whose state must satisfy a number of constraints or limitations.
  • Decision problem - a decision problem is a problem that can be posed as a yes-no question of the input values.
  • First-order logic - a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science.
  • Non-interactive zero-knowledge proof - a variant of zero-knowledge proofs in which no interaction is necessary between prover and verifier.
  • Satisfiability modulo theories - a decision problem for logical formulas with respect to combinations of background theories expressed in classical first-order logic with equality.
  • Zero-knowledge proof - a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that they know a value x, without conveying any information apart from the fact that they know the value x.

Miscellaneous

  • Abstract nonsense - In mathematics, abstract nonsense, general abstract nonsense, generalized abstract nonsense, and general nonsense are terms used by mathematicians to describe abstract methods related to category theory and homological algebra. More generally, "abstract nonsense" may refer to a proof that relies on category-theoretic methods, or even to the study of category theory itself.
  • Abuse of notation - occurs when an author uses a mathematical notation in a way that is not formally correct but that seems likely to simplify the exposition or suggest the correct intuition (while being unlikely to introduce errors or cause confusion).
  • Cis - a mathematical notation defined by cis x = cos x + i sin x, where cos is the cosine function, i is the imaginary unit and sin is the sine function.
  • Coin problem - a mathematical problem that asks for the largest monetary amount that cannot be obtained using only coins of specified denominations. For example, the largest amount that cannot be obtained using only coins of 3 and 5 units is 7 units.
  • Currying - the technique of translating the evaluation of a function that takes multiple arguments into evaluating a sequence of functions, each with a single argument. For example, a function that takes two arguments, one from X and one from Y, and produces outputs in Z, by currying is translated into a function that takes a single argument from X and produces as outputs functions from Y to Z.
  • Duality - a duality translates concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion, often (but not always) by means of an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A.
  • Elo rating system - a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess.
  • Freshman's Dream - the erroneous equation (x + y)n = xn + yn, where n is a real number (usually a positive integer greater than 1).
  • Goat problem - How big must r be chosen in the diagram, in order for the red area to equal one half of the area of the circle? Illustration: A goat/bull/horse is tethered at point Q. How long needs the line to be, to allow the animal to graze on exactly one half of the circle area?
  • Ham sandwich theorem - states that given n measurable "objects" in n-dimensional Euclidean space, it is possible to divide all of them in half (with respect to their measure, i.e. volume) with a single (n − 1)-dimensional hyperplane.
  • List of Mathematical Jargon
  • List of Unusual Units of Measurement
  • Moving sofa problem - a two-dimensional idealisation of real-life furniture-moving problems and asks for the rigid two-dimensional shape of largest area A that can be maneuvered through an L-shaped planar region with legs of unit width.
  • Pancake Sorting - the colloquial term for the mathematical problem of sorting a disordered stack of pancakes in order of size when a spatula can be inserted at any point in the stack and used to flip all pancakes above it. A pancake number is the minimum number of flips required for a given number of pancakes.
  • Penrose graphical notation - a (usually handwritten) visual depiction of multilinear functions or tensors proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971.
  • Ramsey Theory - named after the British mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, is a branch of mathematics that studies the conditions under which order must appear. Problems in Ramsey theory typically ask a question of the form: "how many elements of some structure must there be to guarantee that a particular property will hold?" More specifically, Ron Graham describes Ramsey theory as a "branch of combinatorics".
  • Queueing theory - the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues.
  • Recreational mathematics (Category) - Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research and application-based professional activity.
  • Squaring the circle - a problem proposed by ancient geometers. It is the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge.
  • Topological game - an infinite game of perfect information played between two players on a topological space. Players choose objects with topological properties such as points, open sets, closed sets and open coverings. The conditions for a player to win can involve notions like topological closure and convergence.
  • Verbal arithmetic is a type of mathematical game consisting of a mathematical equation among unknown numbers, whose digits are represented by letters of the alphabet. The goal is to identify the value of each letter. The name can be extended to puzzles that use non-alphabetic symbols instead of letters.
  • Zenzizenzizenzic - an obsolete form of mathematical notation representing the eighth power of a number (that is, the zenzizenzizenzic of x is x8), dating from a time when powers were written out in words rather than as superscript numbers.
  • Zero-sum game - a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants.

Numbers

  • 0.999…. - denotes the repeating decimal consisting of infinitely many 9s after the decimal point (and one 0 before it), equal to 1.
  • 57 - Although 57 is not prime, it is jokingly known as the "Grothendieck prime" after a story in which mathematician Alexander Grothendieck supposedly gave it as an example of a particular prime number.
  • Abscissa and ordinate - In common usage, the abscissa refers to the (x) coordinate and the ordinate refers to the (y) coordinate of a standard two-dimensional graph.
  • Champernowne constant - C10 = 0.12345678910111213141516…
  • Dunbar's number - a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.
  • Golden ration - two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities.
  • Grandi's series - the infinite series 1 − 1 + 1 − 1 + ⋯
  • Happy number - starting with any positive integer, replace the number by the sum of the squares of its digits in base-ten, and repeat the process until the number either equals 1 (where it will stay), or it loops endlessly in a cycle that does not include 1. Those numbers for which this process ends in 1 are happy numbers, while those that do not end in 1 are unhappy numbers (or sad numbers).
  • Illegal Number - an illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdictions.
  • Illegal prime - a prime number that represents information whose possession or distribution is forbidden in some legal jurisdictions.
  • Interesting number paradox - a semi-humorous paradox which arises from the attempt to classify every natural number as either "interesting" or "uninteresting". The paradox states that every natural number is interesting. The "proof" is by contradiction: if there exists a non-empty set of uninteresting natural numbers, there would be a smallest uninteresting number – but the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting because it is the smallest uninteresting number, thus producing a contradiction.
  • Long and short scales - two of several naming systems for integer powers of ten which use some of the same terms for different magnitudes. For whole numbers smaller than 1,000,000,000 (109), such as one thousand or one million, the two scales are identical. For larger numbers, starting with 109, the two systems differ. For identical names, the long scale proceeds by powers of one million, whereas the short scale proceeds by powers of one thousand. For example, in the short scale, "one billion" means one thousand millions (1,000,000,000), whereas in the long scale, it means one million millions (1,000,000,000,000). For interleaved values, the long scale system employs additional terms, typically substituting the word ending -ion for -iard.
  • Kaprekar number - In mathematics, a non-negative integer is called a "Kaprekar number" for a given base if the representation of its square in that base can be split into two parts that add up to the original number, with the proviso that the part formed from the low-order digits of the square must be non-zero—although it is allowed to include leading zeroes. For instance, 45 is a Kaprekar number, because 452 = 2025 and 20 + 25 = 45. The number 1 is Kaprekar in every base, because 12 = 01 in any base, and 0 + 1 = 1.
  • McNugget numbers - A McNugget number is the total number of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets in any number of boxes. In the United Kingdom, the original boxes (prior to the introduction of the Happy Meal-sized nugget boxes) were of 6, 9, and 20 nuggets.
  • Mersenne prime - a prime number that is one less than a power of two.
  • Milü - also known as Zulü (Zu's ratio), is the name given to an approximation to π (pi) found by Chinese mathematician and astronomer Zu Chongzhi in the 5th century.
  • Munchausen Number - a natural number in a given number base b that is equal to the sum of its digits each raised to the power of itself.
  • Names of large numbers
  • Normal number - a real number is said to be simply normal in an integer base b if its infinite sequence of digits is distributed uniformly in the sense that each of the b digit values has the same natural density 1/b. A number is said to be normal in base b if, for every positive integer n, all possible strings n digits long have density b^−n.
  • Number theory - a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers.
  • Plastic number - is a mathematical constant which is the unique real solution of the cubic equation
  • Polite number - a positive integer that can be written as the sum of two or more consecutive positive integers.
  • Repdigit - a repdigit or sometimes monodigit is a natural number composed of repeated instances of the same digit in a positional number system (often implicitly decimal).
  • Repunit - a number like 11, 111, or 1111 that contains only the digit 1 — a more specific type of repdigit.
  • Roman Numerals - The numeric system represented by Roman numerals originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages.
  • Silver ratio - two quantities are in the silver ratio (also silver mean or silver constant) if the ratio of the sum of the smaller and twice the larger of those quantities, to the larger quantity, is the same as the ratio of the larger one to the smaller one.

Statistics/probability

  • Simpson's paradox - a phenomenon in probability and statistics, in which a trend appears in several different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined.
  • Wiener sausage - a neighborhood of the trace of a Brownian motion up to a time t, given by taking all points within a fixed distance of Brownian motion.

Topology

  • Handlebody - In the mathematical field of geometric topology, a handlebody is a decomposition of a manifold into standard pieces.

Odds and Ends

  • Aadhaar - a 12-digit unique identity number that can be obtained voluntarily by the citizens of India and resident foreign nationals who have spent over 182 days in twelve months immediately preceding the date of application for enrolment, based on their biometric and demographic data.
  • Abraham Lincoln's patent - an invention to buoy and lift boats over shoals and obstructions in a river. Abraham Lincoln conceived the invention when on two occasions the boat on which he traveled got hung up on obstructions. Lincoln's device was composed of large bellows attached to the sides of a boat that were expandable due to air chambers. Filed on March 10, 1849, Lincoln's patent was issued as Patent No. 6,469 later that year, on May 22. His successful patent application led to his drafting and delivering two lectures on the subject of patents while he was president.
  • Akhfash's goat is a Persian parable in which a philosopher trains his pet goat to nod its head when asked if it had understood a book that it was shown. The term "Akhfash's goat" refers to a person who nods along with a conversation that they do not understand.
  • Anti-Barney humor - a form of humor that targets the main character Barney the Dinosaur from the children's television series Barney & Friends and singles out the show for criticisms
  • "Assume a can opener" - a catchphrase used to mock economists and other theorists who base their conclusions on unjustified or oversimplified assumptions.
  • Baby Jesus theft - the theft of plastic or ceramic figurines of the infant Jesus from outdoor public and private nativity displays during the Christmas season. It is an "enduring (and illegal) practice" according to New York Times journalist Katie Rogers, "believed to be part of a yearly tradition, often carried out by bored teenagers looking for an easy prank." The prevalence of such thefts has caused the owners of outdoor manger scenes to protect their property with GPS devices, surveillance cameras, or by other mean.
  • Baby Train - an urban legend told in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. The legend first appeared in Christopher Morley's 1939 novel Kitty Foyle. According to the legend, a certain small town had an unusually high birth rate. This was allegedly caused by a freight train passing through the town and blowing its whistle, waking up all the residents. Since it was too late to go back to sleep and too early to get up, couples would have sex. This resulted in a mini-baby boom.
  • Baseball metaphors for sex - In American slang, baseball metaphors for sex are often used as euphemisms for the degree of physical intimacy achieved in sexual encounters or relationships.
  • BBC Redux - a BBC Research & Development system that digitally records television and radio output in the United Kingdom produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation. It has been operating since 2007 and contains several petabytes of recordings and subtitle data.
  • Bogus pipeline - a fake polygraph used to get participants to truthfully respond to emotional/affective questions in survey. It is a technique used by social psychologists to reduce false answers when attempting to collect self-report data. As an example, social desirability is a common reason for warped survey results.
  • Boston marriage - the cohabitation of two wealthy women, independent of financial support from a man. The term is said to have been in use in New England in the late 19th/early 20th century. Some of these relationships were romantic in nature and might now be considered a lesbian relationship; others were not.
  • Bump and run - a technique for passing mainly used in stock car and touring car racing, which eventually inspired the police PIT maneuver.
  • Bus bunching refers to a group of two or more transit vehicles (such as buses or trains), running along the same route, which were scheduled to be evenly spaced, but instead run in the same place at the same time.
  • Bus factor - a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from the phrase "in case they get hit by a bus". It is also known as the bus problem, lottery factor, truck factor, bus/truck number, or lorry factor.
  • Camera eats first - the act of taking a digital or smartphone photograph of a meal before eating, often followed by uploading the image to social media. The expression refers to the photographer metaphorically "feeding" their camera before feeding themselves. Such photos are generally for personal use, such as keeping photographic food diaries, rather than for commercial purposes.
  • Clock-face scheduling - a timetable system under which public transport services run at consistent intervals, as opposed to a timetable that is purely driven by demand and has irregular headways.
  • Clown alley - a circus is a backstage area, usually very near the animal pens, where clowns change into their costumes and apply makeup.
  • Cold Reading - a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, mediums, illusionists (readers), and scam artists to imply that the reader knows much more about the person than the reader actually does.
  • Communition - the reduction of solid materials from one average particle size to a smaller average particle size, by crushing, grinding, cutting, vibrating, or other processes.
  • Currah - a British computer peripheral manufacturer, famous mainly for the speech synthesis ROM cartridges it designed for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and other 8-bit home computers of the 1980s.
  • Curse of the Colonel - an urban legend regarding a reputed curse placed on the Japanese Kansai-based Hanshin Tigers baseball team by deceased KFC founder and mascot Colonel Harland Sanders.
  • Damnatio memoriae - a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts.
  • Death during consensual sex
  • Diapering - any of a wide range of decorative patterns used in a variety of works of art, such as stained glass, heraldic shields, architecture, and silverwork. Its chief use is in the enlivening of plain surfaces.
  • Disambiguation (disambiguation)
  • Dooring - a traffic collision in which a cyclist rides into a car door or is struck by a car door that was opened quickly without checking first for cyclists by using the side mirror and/or performing a proper shoulder check out and back.
  • East Asian age reckoning
  • Elevator surfing - an activity involving riding on top of elevators. Rarely, the activity may also involve jumping between moving elevators, although most elevator surfers consider this to be unwise and needlessly dangerous.
  • Erdős–Bacon number - the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring academic papers between that person and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the person is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon.
  • Exquisite corpse - a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun." as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.
  • Flyting - a contest consisting of the exchange of insults between two parties, often conducted in verse.
  • Five techniques - also known as deep interrogation, are a group of interrogation methods developed by the United Kingdom during the 20th century and are currently regarded as a form of torture.
  • Foreign accent syndrome - a medical condition in which patients develop speech patterns that are perceived as a foreign accent that is different from their native accent, without having acquired it in the perceived accent's place of origin.
  • Friedman Unit - One Friedman Unit is equal to six months, specifically the "next six months", a period repeatedly declared by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to be the most critical of the then-ongoing Iraq War even though such pronouncements extended back over two and a half years.
  • Giraffe (chess) - a fairy chess piece that moves like an elongated knight.
  • Gloss - a brief notation, especially a marginal one or an interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different.
  • Goatse Security - a loose-knit, nine-person grey hat hacker group that specialized in uncovering security flaws.
  • Hash House Harriers - an international group of non-competitive running social clubs. An event organized by a club is known as a Hash or Run, or a Hash Run.
  • Hobby tunneling - tunnel construction as a diversion.
  • House numbering
  • Human microphone - also known as the people's microphone, is a means for delivering a speech to a large group of people, wherein persons gathered around the speaker repeat what the speaker says, thus "amplifying" the voice of the speaker without the need for amplification equipment.
  • I learned it by watching you! - a large-scale United States anti-narcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America. The PSA features a father confronting his son (Reid MacLean) in his bedroom after finding a box containing an unspecified controlled substance and drug paraphernalia. After his father angrily asks him how he learned to use drugs, the son shouts, "You, alright?! I learned it by watching you!" As the father recoils from realizing the error of his own ways, a narrator then intones, "Parents who use drugs, have children who use drugs."
  • Inedia - the claimed ability for a person to live without consuming food, and in some cases water. It is a pseudoscientific practice and several adherents of these practices have died from starvation or dehydration as not having followed security guidelines (especially forcing change, change too fast).
  • Infamia - a loss of legal or social standing. As a technical term of Roman law, infamia was an official exclusion from the legal protections enjoyed by a Roman citizen, as imposed by a censor or praetor. More generally, especially during the Republic and Principate, infamia was informal damage to one's esteem or reputation. A person who suffered infamia was an infamis (plural infames).
  • Intracolonic explosion is an explosion inside the colon of a person due to ignition of explosive gases such as methane. This can happen during colonic exploration, as a result of the electrical nature of a colonoscope.
  • Italian Sounding - the marketing phenomenon consisting of words and images, colour combinations (the Italian tricolour) and geographical references for brands that are evocative of Italy to promote and market products – especially but not exclusively agri-food – that are not actually Made in Italy
  • Jeonse - also known as chŏnse, key money deposit or key money, is a type of lease or deposit common in the South Korean real estate market. Instead of paying monthly rent, a renter will make a lump-sum deposit on a rental space, at anywhere from 50% to 80% of the market value, which is then returned at the end of the lease term.
  • Jetliner position - also known as the captain's chair, is a form of physical torment used in cases where the tormentor is unable or unwilling to inflict corporal punishment on the subject. The recipient is made to put their back against a wall or pole and place their feet eighteen inches or so from the base of the object. The feet are usually kept close together. The subject must then slide down the wall or pole until their thighs are parallel to the ground, so that their profile is of someone sitting in a chair. They may also be required to slide their feet back until their shins and thighs are at right-angles to each other, which makes the stresses upon the knee joints and thigh muscles much greater.
  • Jobsworth - a person who uses the (typically minor) authority of their job in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights in acting in an obstructive or unhelpful manner. It characterizes one who upholds petty rules even at the expense of effectiveness or efficiency.
  • Julian day - the continuous count of days since the beginning of the Julian period, and is used primarily by astronomers, and in software for easily calculating elapsed days between two events (e.g. food production date and sell by date).
  • "I'm not a scientist" is a phrase that has been often used by American politicians, primarily Republicans, when asked about a scientific subject, such as global warming, or the age of the earth.
  • Le bruit et l'odeur - a speech given in 1991 by Jacques Chirac, the Mayor of Paris who later became French president; it translates as "noise and smell."
  • Leave the gate as you found it - a rule in countryside areas throughout the world. If a gate is found open, it should be left open, and if it is closed, it should be left closed. If a closed gate absolutely must be traversed, it should be closed again afterwards. Leaving a closed gate open can lead to animals escaping or unwanted mingling. Leaving an open gate closed can prevent livestock from accessing water or other resources.
  • Long-time nuclear waste warning messages - intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years.
  • Luddite fallacy - used to express the view that those concerned about long term technological unemployment are committing a fallacy, as they fail to account for compensation effects.
  • Man bites dog - a shortened version of an aphorism in journalism that describes how an unusual, infrequent event (such as a man biting a dog) is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence with similar consequences, such as a dog biting a man.
  • Maplewashing - the alleged tendency of Canadian governments, institutions, and media to perpetuate the notion that Canada is morally superior to other countries, thus sanitizing and concealing negative historical and contemporary actions.
  • Mellified man - also known as a human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey.
  • Mnemonic major system - a mnemonic technique used to aid in memorizing numbers. The system works by converting numbers into consonants, then into words by adding vowels. The system works on the principle that images can be remembered more easily than numbers.
  • Mornington Crescent - an improvisational comedy game featured in the BBC Radio 4 comedy panel show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (ISIHAC), a series that satirises panel games.The game consists of each panellist in turn announcing a landmark or street, most often a tube station on the London Underground system. The ostensible aim is to be the first to announce "Mornington Crescent", a station on the Northern line. Interspersed with the turns is humorous discussion amongst the panellists and host regarding the rules and legality of each move, as well as the strategy the panellists are using. The actual aim of the game is to entertain the other participants and listeners with amusing discussion of the fictional rules and strategies.
  • Morganatic marriage - sometimes called a left-handed marriage, is a marriage between people of unequal social rank, which in the context of royalty or other inherited title prevents the principal's position or privileges being passed to the spouse, or any children born of the marriage.
  • Mr. Big - a covert investigation procedure used by undercover police to elicit confessions from suspects in cold cases (usually murder). Police officers create a fictitious grey area or criminal organization and then seduce the suspect into joining it. They build a relationship with the suspect, gain their confidence, and then enlist their help in a succession of criminal acts (e.g., delivering goods, credit card scams, selling guns) for which they are paid. Once the suspect has become enmeshed in the criminal gang they are persuaded to divulge information about their criminal history, usually as a prerequisite for being accepted as a member of the organization.
  • Mundaneum - an institution which aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification. It was developed at the turn of the 20th century by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. The Mundaneum has been identified as a milestone in the history of data collection and management, and (somewhat more tenuously) as a precursor to the Internet.
  • Navies of landlocked countries - A landlocked navy is a naval force operated by a country that does not have a coastline. While these states are unable to develop a sea-going, blue-water navy, they may still deploy armed forces on major lakes or rivers.
  • Numerology - any belief in the divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events.
  • Open access
  • Open secret - a concept or idea that is "officially" (de jure) secret or restricted in knowledge, but in practice (de facto) may be widely known; or it refers to something that is widely known to be true but which none of the people most intimately concerned are willing to categorically acknowledge in public
  • Operation London Bridge - the plan for what will happen in the United Kingdom after the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
  • Order of the Smile - an international award given by children to adults distinguished in their love, care and aid for children.
  • McDonald's Monopoly - a sales promotion run by fast food restaurant chain McDonald's, with a theme based on the Hasbro board game Monopoly. The game first ran in the U.S. in 1987 and has since been used worldwide.
  • Paper chase - a racing game played outdoors (best played within a wood or even a shrubbery maze) with any number of players. At the start of the game, one person is designated the 'hare' and everyone else in the group are the 'hounds'. The 'hare' starts off ahead of everyone else leaving behind a trail of paper shreds (or chalk marks in an urban environment) which represents the scent of the hare. Just as scent is carried on the wind, so too are the bits of paper, sometimes making for a difficult game. After some designated time, the hounds must chase after the hare and attempt to catch them before they reach the ending point of the race.
  • paracosm - a detailed imaginary world thought generally to originate in childhood. The creator of a paracosm has a complex and deeply felt relationship with this subjective universe, which may incorporate real-world or imaginary characters and conventions.
  • Pastel QAnon - a collection of techniques and strategies of using feminine-coded aesthetics to indoctrinate predominantly women into the QAnon conspiracy theory
  • Paul is dead - an urban legend and conspiracy theory alleging that Paul McCartney, of the English rock band the Beatles, died in November 1966 and was secretly replaced by a look-alike.
  • Pepsi Stuff - a major loyalty program launched by PepsiCo, first in North America on March 28, 1996 and then around the world, featuring premiums — such as T-shirts, hats, denim and leather jackets, bags, and mountain bikes — that could be purchased with Pepsi Points through the Pepsi Stuff Catalog or online.
  • Pester power - the "tendency of children, who are bombarded with marketers' messages, to unrelentingly request advertised items".
  • Philately - the study of postage stamps and postal history
  • PIT maneuver - a pursuit tactic in which a pursuing vehicle forces a fleeing vehicle to turn sideways abruptly, causing the driver to lose control and stop.
  • political gaffe - an error in speech made by a politician.
  • Politician's syllogism - The politician's syllogism, also known as the politician's logic or the politician's fallacy, is a logical fallacy of the form: We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.
  • Postdiction - In skepticism, it is considered an effect of hindsight bias that explains claimed predictions of significant events such as plane crashes and natural disasters.
  • Quadruple play - a marketing term combining the triple play service of broadband Internet access, television and telephone with wireless service provisions. This service set is also sometimes referred to as "The Fantastic Four".
  • Prawo Jazdy - a supposed Polish national who was listed by the Garda Síochána in a police criminal database as having committed more than 50 traffic violations in Ireland. A 2007 memorandum stated that an investigation revealed prawo jazdy to be Polish for 'driving licence', with the error arising due to officers mistaking the phrase, printed on Polish driving licences, to be a personal name while issuing traffic tickets.
  • Reducto ad Hitlerum - also known as playing the Nazi card, is an attempt to invalidate someone else's position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.
  • Rough ride - a form of police brutality in which a handcuffed prisoner is placed in a police van or other patrol vehicle without a seatbelt, and is thrown violently about as the vehicle is driven erratically.
  • Royal sign-manual - the signature of the sovereign, by the affixing of which the monarch expresses his or her pleasure either by order, commission, or warrant. A sign-manual warrant may be either an executive act (for example, an appointment to an office), or an authority for affixing the Great Seal of the pertinent realm.
  • Russian political jokes - a part of Russian humour and can be grouped into the major time periods: Imperial Russia, Soviet Union and finally post-Soviet Russia.
  • Salami slicing tactics - a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition. With it, an aggressor can influence and eventually dominate a landscape, typically political, piece by piece. In this fashion, the opposition is eliminated "slice by slice" until it realizes, usually too late, that it is virtually gone in its entirety.
  • San Seriffe - a fictional island nation created for April Fools' Day 1977, by Britain's Guardian newspaper.
  • Scholia - grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments – original or copied from prior commentaries – which are inserted in the margin of the manuscript of ancient authors, as glosses.
  • Schmilblick - an imaginary object first described in a nonsense prose by the French humorist Pierre Dac during the 1950s. According to its creator, the Schmilblick can be used in almost any occasion, therefore being strictly indispensable.
  • Schroedinger's cat in popular culture
  • Serious game - a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The "serious" adjective is generally prepended to refer to video games used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, and politics.
  • Spherical cow - a humorous metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of complex real life phenomena.
  • Spoon theory - a metaphor describing the amount of physical and/or mental energy that a person has available for daily activities and tasks, and how it can become limited. It was coined by writer and blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003 as a way to express how it felt to have lupus; explaining the viewpoint in a diner, she gave her friend a handful of spoons and described them as units of energy to be spent performing everyday actions, representing how chronic illness forced her to plan out days and actions in advance so as to not run out of energy.
  • Sprouts - a paper-and-pencil game which can be analyzed for its mathematical properties. It was invented by mathematicians John Horton Conway and Michael S. Paterson at Cambridge University in the early 1960s. Setup is even simpler than the popular Dots and Boxes game, but game-play develops much more artistically and organically.
  • Suicide in Lithuania - Suicide in Lithuania has become a significant social issue in the country due to its high rate. Despite constantly decreasing since its peak in 1995, the suicide rate in Lithuania remains the highest in the EU and the OECD. The suicide rate as of 2017 is 26.4 suicides per 100,000 people.
  • Sprezzatura - an Italian word that first appears in Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it". It is the ability of the courtier to display "an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them". Sprezzatura has also been described "as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance".
  • Swabian salute - a partly humorous, partly euphemistic reference to the expression Leck mich am Arsch (akin to expression "kiss my arse", but literally "lick me on the arse") which is a common profanity.
  • Sweater curse - a term used by knitters to describe the belief that if a knitter gives a hand-knit sweater to a significant other, it will lead to the recipient breaking up with the knitter.
  • Taco Liberty Bell - an April Fool's Day joke played by fast food restaurant chain Taco Bell on April 1, 1996. Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in seven leading U.S. newspapers announcing that the company had purchased the Liberty Bell to "reduce the country's debt" and renamed it the "Taco Liberty Bell".
  • Tap, rack, bang is jargon for the response to a failure to fire in a firearm with a removable magazine. This is designated as an "Immediate Action" and involves no investigation of the cause (due to being under fire in a combat or defensive situation), but is effective for common failures, such as defective or improperly seated ammunition magazines.
  • Therblig - are 18 kinds of elemental motions used in the study of motion economy in the workplace. A workplace task is analyzed by recording each of the therblig units for a process, with the results used for optimization of manual labour by eliminating unneeded movements.
  • The Game - a mental game where the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which must be announced each time it occurs.
  • The Incredible, Edible Egg - a marketing slogan for the American Egg Board.
  • The People Walker is a service where people can hire someone to walk with them and provide motivation through conversation and companionship.
  • Third man factor - third man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence, such as a spirit, provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences.
  • Third place - the social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place"). Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, bookstores or parks.
  • This Is Your Brain on Drugs - a large-scale US anti-narcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) launched in 1987, that used three televised public service announcements (PSAs) and a related poster campaign.
  • Tibb's Eve refers to both a folk expression for a day which will never arrive, as well as a celebration held on 23 December originating in Newfoundland and Labrador known as Tipp's Eve.
  • Tyrolean traverse - a method of crossing through free space between two high points on a rope without a hanging cart or cart equivalent. This is used in a range of mountaineering activities: rock climbing, technical tree climbing, caving, water crossings and mountain rescue.
  • Undecimber or Undecember is a name for a 13th month in a calendar that normally has 12 months. Duodecimber or Duodecember is similarly a 14th month. Tridecember is the only name for a 15th month.
  • Vehicle registration plates of Europe
  • Verdana-gate - The "scandal" that ensued when IKEA changed their main typeface from Futura to Verdana.
  • Water jousting - a form of jousting where the adversaries, carrying a lance and protected only by a shield, stand on a platform on the stern of a boat.
  • Whamageddon - a game played during the 24 days before Christmas Eve in which players try to go from December 1 to the start of Christmas Eve as per European celebrations on the 24th December (midnight on the 24th December or 24:00 on the 24th of December) without hearing "Last Christmas" by Wham!
  • World famous in New Zealand - a commonly used phrase within New Zealand and the slogan of Lemon & Paeroa soft drink. It is used to describe items that though famous within New Zealand are unknown in the rest of the world, whereas similar items and people in larger countries would have a far higher media profile and would therefore be famous worldwide.

Galleries, Glossaries and Lists

Paradoxes

  • Abilene Paradox - a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group.
  • Berry paradox - a self-referential paradox arising from an expression like "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters" (a phrase with fifty-seven letters).
  • Boy or Girl paradox - surrounds a set of questions in probability theory, which are also known as The Two Child Problem, Mr. Smith's Children and the Mrs. Smith Problem. The initial formulation of the question dates back to at least 1959, when Martin Gardner featured it in his October 1959 "Mathematical Games column" in Scientific American. He titled it The Two Children Problem, and phrased the paradox as follows:
  • Coastline Paradox - counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length.
  • Curry's paradox - a paradox in which an arbitrary claim F is proved from the mere existence of a sentence C that says of itself "If C, then F", requiring only a few apparently innocuous logical deduction rules. Since F is arbitrary, any logic having these rules proves everything.
  • Paradox of tolerance - if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
  • Zeno's Paradox - Paradoxes about movement, one being the fact that to get halfway you first need to get halfway there, then halfway there, etc.

Phenomena, Effects and Laws

  • Apophenia - the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things.
  • Barnum effect - a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.
  • Bedtime procrastination - a psychological phenomenon in which people stay up later than they desire in an attempt to have control over the night because they perceive themselves (perhaps subconsciously) to lack influence over events during the day.
  • Benford's law - in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading digit is likely to be small.
  • Betteridge's law of headlines - "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
  • Bouba/kiki effect - is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects.
  • Brandolini's law - "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
  • Broken escalator phenomenon - the sensation of losing balance or dizziness reported by some people when stepping onto an escalator which is not working. It is said that there is a brief, odd sensation of imbalance, despite full awareness that the escalator is not going to move
  • Broken Windows Theory - Criminological theory that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.
  • Character amnesia - a phenomenon whereby experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well known to them.
  • Computer says no - Popular name given to an attitude seen in some public-facing organisations where the default response to a customer's request is to check with information stored on or generated by a computer, and then make decisions based on that, often in the face of common sense.
  • Crab mentality - is a way of thinking best described by the phrase "if I can't have it, neither can you".
  • Cunningham's Law - The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.
  • Curb cut effect - the phenomenon of disability-friendly features being used and appreciated by a larger group than the people they were designed for.
  • Daughter from California syndrome - Wikipedia - a phrase used in the medical profession to describe a situation in which a long-lost relative arrives at the hospital at which a dying elderly relative is being treated, and insists that the medical team pursue aggressive measures to prolong the patient's life, or otherwise challenges the care the patient is being given
  • Dear enemy effect - an ethological phenomenon in which two neighbouring territorial animals become less aggressive toward one another once territorial borders are well-established.
  • Droste Effect - Picture recursively appearing within itsel
  • Dutch disease - the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture).
  • Eroom's law - the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology (such as high-throughput screening, biotechnology, combinatorial chemistry, and computational drug design), a trend first observed in the 1980s
  • Founder's syndrome is the difficulty faced by organizations, and in particular young companies such as start-ups, where one or more founders maintain disproportionate power and influence following the effective initial establishment of the organization, leading to a wide range of problems.
  • Half-life of knowledge - the amount of time that has to elapse before half of the knowledge or facts in a particular area is superseded or shown to be untrue.
  • Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect - a perceptual phenomenon wherein the intense saturation of spectral hue is perceived as part of the color's luminance.
  • IKEA Effect - The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created.
  • Law of triviality - members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.
  • L'esprit de l'escalier - a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.
  • Littlewood's law - a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (defined by the law as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month
  • Mariko Aoki phenomenon - a Japanese expression referring to an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores. The phenomenon's name derives from the name of the woman who mentioned the phenomenon in a magazine article in 1985.
  • Matilda effect - a bias against acknowledging the achievements of those women scientists whose work is attributed to their male colleagues.
  • Matthew effect - "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer".
  • Missing white woman syndrome - Missing white woman syndrome is a term used by social scientists and media commentators to refer to extensive media coverage, especially in television, of missing person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls.
  • McCollough Effect - The McCollough effect is a phenomenon of human visual perception in which colorless gratings appear colored contingent on the orientation of the gratings.
  • Muphry's Law - An adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."
  • Nobel disease - the embracing of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life
  • Noble cause corruption - corruption caused by the adherence to a teleological ethical system, suggesting that people will use unethical or illegal means to attain desirable goals, a result which appears to benefit the greater good. Where traditional corruption is defined by personal gain, noble cause corruption forms when someone is convinced of their righteousness, and will do anything within their powers to achieve the desired result. An example of noble cause corruption is police misconduct "committed in the name of good ends" or neglect of due process through "a moral commitment to make the world a safer place to live.".
  • Nominative Determinism - the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names.
  • Not invented here - the tendency to avoid using or buying products, research, standards, or knowledge from external origins. It is usually adopted by social, corporate, or institutional cultures. Research illustrates a strong bias against ideas from the outside.
  • Pareidolia - the tendency to interpret a vague stimulus as something known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music.
  • Pareto Principle - The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
  • Parkinson's law - the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".
  • Path dependence - Path dependence is when the decisions presented to people are dependent on prior decisions or experiences made in the past.
  • Pinkwashing - also known as rainbow-washing, is the strategy of promoting LGBT rights protections as evidence of liberalism and democracy, especially to distract from or legitimize violence against other countries or communities.
  • Poe's Law - Parody so extreme that you can't tell if it's sincere or sarcastic.
  • Post hoc ergo propter hoc - an informal fallacy that states: "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." It is often shortened simply to post hoc fallacy.
  • Presentism - In literary and historical analysis, presentism is the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.
  • Rice's theorem - all non-trivial semantic properties of programs are undecidable. A semantic property is one about the program's behavior (for instance, does the program terminate for all inputs), unlike a syntactic property (for instance, does the program contain an if-then-else statement). A property is non-trivial if it is neither true for every partial computable function, nor false for every partial computable function.
  • Scully Effect - The character is believed to have initiated a phenomenon referred to as "The Scully Effect"; as the medical doctor and the FBI Special Agent inspired many young women to pursue careers in science, medicine and law enforcement, and as a result brought a perceptible increase in the number of women in those fields.
  • Submechanophobia - a fear of submerged man-made objects, either partially or entirely underwater.
  • The Wrong Type of Snow - A British Rail press release implied that management and its engineering staff were unaware of different types of snow. Henceforth in the United Kingdom, the phrase became a byword for euphemistic and pointless excuses.
  • Tsundoku - the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them. It is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf.
  • Twinkie Defense - "Twinkie defense" is a derisive label for an improbable legal defense.
  • Watching-eye effect - people behave more altruistically and exhibit less antisocial behavior in the presence of images that depict eyes, because these images insinuate that they are being watched.
  • Wisdom of the crowd - the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.
  • XY problem - a communication problem encountered in help desk and similar situations in which the real issue, X, of the person asking for help is obscured, because instead of asking directly about issue X, they ask how to solve a secondary issue, Y, which they believe will allow them to resolve issue X.
  • Yips - a sudden and unexplained loss of ability to execute certain skills in experienced athletes. Symptoms of the yips are losing fine motor skills and psychological issues that impact on the muscle memory and decision-making of athletes, leaving them unable to perform basic skills of their sport.

Philosophy

  • Absurdism - In philosophy, "the Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.
  • Dystheism - the belief that a god is not wholly good and is possibly evil.
  • Flipism - a pseudophilosophy under which decisions are made by flipping a coin.
  • Five-minute hypothesis - a skeptical hypothesis put forth by the philosopher Bertrand Russell that proposes that the universe sprang into existence five minutes ago from nothing, with human memory and all other signs of history included.
  • Hanlon's Razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
  • Homunculus Argument - The homunculus argument is a fallacy arising most commonly in the theory of vision. One may explain human vision by noting that light from the outside world forms an image on the retinas in the eyes and something (or someone) in the brain looks at these images as if they are images on a movie screen.
  • instrumental and intrinsic value - the distinction between what is a means to an end and what is as an end in itself. Things are deemed to have instrumental value if they help one achieve a particular end; intrinsic values, by contrast, are understood to be desirable in and of themselves.
  • Last Thursdayism - "the world might as well have been created last Thursday".
  • Obscurantism - the practice of deliberately presenting information in an imprecise, abstruse manner designed to limit further inquiry and understanding. There are two historical and intellectual denotations of obscurantism: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge—opposition to disseminating knowledge; and (2) deliberate obscurity—a recondite literary or artistic style, characterized by deliberate vagueness.
  • Omphalos Hypothesis - The omphalos hypothesis is one attempt to reconcile the scientific evidence that the universe is billions of years old with the Genesis creation narrative, which implies that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.
  • Misotheism - the "hatred of God" or "hatred of the gods"
  • Russell's Teapot - an analogy to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others. He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
  • Social Gadfly - a person who interferes with the status quo of a society or community by posing novel, potentially upsetting questions, usually directed at authorities.
  • sublime - the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic.
  • Syncretism - the practice of combining different beliefs and various schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merging or assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths.
  • Qualia - individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.
  • Wabi-sabi - a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" in nature.

Puzzles/Thought Experiments

  • Ant on a rubber rope - An ant starts to crawl along a taut rubber rope 1 km long at a speed of 1 cm per second (relative to the rubber it is crawling on). At the same time, the rope starts to stretch uniformly by 1 km per second, so that after 1 second it is 2 km long, after 2 seconds it is 3 km long, etc. Will the ant ever reach the end of the rope?
  • Chicken or the egg - The dilemma stems from the observation that all chickens hatch from eggs and all chicken eggs are laid by chickens. "Chicken-and-egg" is a metaphoric adjective describing situations where it is not clear which of two events should be considered the cause and which should be considered the effect, or to express a scenario of infinite regress, or to express the difficulty of sequencing actions where each seems to depend on others being done first.
  • Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel - a thought experiment which illustrates a counterintuitive property of infinite sets. It is demonstrated that a fully occupied hotel with infinitely many rooms may still accommodate additional guests, even infinitely many of them, and this process may be repeated infinitely often.
  • If a tree falls in a forest - a philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding observation and perception.
  • Infinite Monkey Theorem - states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.
  • Quantum suicide and immortality - a thought experiment in quantum mechanics and the philosophy of physics. Purportedly, it can falsify any interpretation of quantum mechanics other than the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, from the cat's point of view.
  • Roko's Basilisk - a thought experiment similar to Pascal's Wager to the site in which an otherwise benevolent future AI system tortures simulations of those who did not work to bring the system into existence
  • Maxwell's demon - a thought experiment that would hypothetically violate the second law of thermodynamics. It was proposed by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. In his first letter, Maxwell referred to the entity as a "finite being" or a "being who can play a game of skill with the molecules". Lord Kelvin would later call it a "demon".In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small massless door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules (or atoms) approach the door, the demon quickly opens and closes the door to allow only fast-moving molecules to pass through in one direction, and only slow-moving molecules to pass through in the other. Because the kinetic temperature of a gas depends on the velocities of its constituent molecules, the demon's actions cause one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down. This would decrease the total entropy of the system, without applying any work, thereby violating the second law of thermodynamics.
  • Ship of Theseus - A thought experiment that raises the question of whether a ship—standing for an object in general—that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.
  • The monkey and the coconuts - The monkey and the coconuts is a mathematical puzzle in the field of Diophantine analysis involving five sailors and a monkey on a desert island who divide up a pile of coconuts.
  • Thompson's Lamp - Thomson's lamp is a philosophical puzzle based on infinites. It was devised in 1954 by British philosopher James F. Thomson, who used it to analyze the possibility of a supertask, which is the completion of an infinite number of tasks.

Science

  • Bioswale - channels designed to concentrate and convey stormwater runoff while removing debris and pollution.
  • Gnathology - the study of the masticatory system, including its physiology, functional disturbances, and treatment. Dr Beverly McCollum established the Gnathologic Society in 1926.
  • Xeriscaping - the process of landscaping, or gardening, that reduces or eliminates the need for irrigation.

Academia

  • Gresham College is-an institution of higher learning located at Barnard's Inn Hall off Holborn in Central London, England. It does not enrol students or award degrees. It was founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, and hosts over 140 free public lectures every year. Since 2001, all lectures have also been made available online.
  • Least publishable unit - the smallest measurable quantum of publication, the minimum amount of information that can be used to generate a publication in a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or a conference.
  • University of Farmington - a fake university set up in 2015 in Michigan by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to expose student visa fraud in the United States. The sting operation, which was code-named "Paper Chase", was overseen by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Over 600 individuals were identified in the operation, many of whom face deportation from the United States for visa violations.
  • University of Northern New Jersey - a fake university created and maintained by the United States Department of Homeland Security from 2013 to 2016 to investigate student visa fraud.

Anatomy

  • Entoptic phenomenon - visual effects whose source is from within the eye itself.
  • Saccular acoustic sensitivity - a measurement of the ear's affectability to sound. Saccular acoustic sensitivity has a variety physiological as well as mental/emotional effects.

Animals

  • 52-hertz whale - an individual whale of unidentified species, which calls at the very unusual frequency of 52 Hz.
  • Alex - a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment. He was compared to Albert Einstein and at two years old was correctly answering questions made for six-year-olds.
  • Blast fishing - a destructive fishing practice using explosives to stun or kill schools of fish for easy collection. This often illegal practice is extremely destructive to the surrounding ecosystem, as the explosion often destroys the underlying habitat (such as coral reefs) that supports the fish.
  • Boji - a street dog in Istanbul, Turkey, known for regularly riding on the city's public transport. He is described as being an "Anatolian shepherd mix" and having "golden-brown fur, dark eyes and floppy ears". He makes use of buses, metro trains, trams, and ferries. He is one of several examples of animals taking public transportation.
  • Brood parasites - organisms that rely on others to raise their young.
  • Carcinisation - an example of convergent evolution in which a crustacean evolves into a crab-like form from a non-crab-like form.
  • Chick culling - the process of separating and killing unwanted (male and unhealthy female) chicks for which the intensive animal farming industry has no use. It occurs in all industrialised egg production, whether free range, organic, or battery cage. However, some certified pasture-raised egg farms are making steps to eliminate the practice in entirety.
  • Chrismatic megafauna - large animal species with symbolic value or widespread popular appeal, and are often used by environmental activists to achieve environmentalist goals.
  • Clitellum - a thickened glandular and non-segmented section of the body wall near the head in earthworms and leeches, that secretes a viscid sac in which eggs are stored.
  • Common raccoon dog - also called the Chinese or Asian raccoon dog to distinguish it from the Japanese raccoon dog, is a small, heavy-set, fox-like canid native to East Asia. Named for its raccoon-like face markings, it is most closely related to foxes.
  • Exploding Animals
  • F. D. C. Willard - the pen name of a Siamese cat named Chester, who internationally published under this name on physics in scientific journals, once as a co-author and another time as the sole author
  • Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum and Phooey - five mice who traveled to the Moon and circled it 75 times on the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. NASA gave them identification numbers A3305, A3326, A3352, A3356, and A3400, and their nicknames were given by the Apollo 17 crew, Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ronald Evans. The four male mice, one female mouse, and Evans orbited the Moon for a record-setting six days and four hours in the Apollo command module America as Cernan and Schmitt performed the Apollo program's last lunar excursions.
  • Fish intelligence - the resultant of the process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new contexts information and conceptual skills" as it applies to fish.
  • Gef - Gef, also referred to as the Talking Mongoose or the Dalby Spook, was the name given to an allegedly talking mongoose which was claimed to inhabit a farmhouse owned by the Irving family. The Irvings' farm was located at Cashen's Gap near the hamlet of Dalby on the Isle of Man.
  • Hollywood Freeway chickens - a colony of feral chickens that live under the Vineland Avenue off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway (U.S. Route 101) in Los Angeles, California. It is not definitively known how they came to be there, although news stories generally ascribe them to an overturned poultry truck.
  • Kaguya - a mouse that had two parents of the same sex (c.  April, 2004). She was named after a Japanese folk tale, in which the Moon-born princess Kaguya (Kaguya-hime) is found as a baby inside a bamboo stalk
  • Kangaroo meat - is produced in Australia from wild kangaroos and is exported to over 60 overseas markets. Kangaroo meat is sourced from the 4 main species of Kangaroos that are harvested in the wild. It is the current largest commercial land based wildlife trade on the planet.
  • Ken Allen - a Bornean orangutan at the San Diego Zoo. He became one of the most popular animals in the history of the zoo because of his many successful escapes from his enclosures. He was nicknamed "the Hairy Houdini". In 1985, he gained worldwide attention for a series of three escapes from his enclosure, which had been thought to be escape-proof. During some of his escapes, his female companions joined him. Ken Allen's ability to outwit his keepers, as well as his docile demeanor during his escapes, resulted in fame. He had his own fan club, and was the subject of T-shirts and bumper stickers (most reading "Free Ken Allen"). A song, "The Ballad of Ken Allen", was written about him. Zoo officials eventually hired experienced rock climbers to find every finger-, toe- and foothold within the enclosure, spending $40,000 to eliminate the identified holds.
  • Larry - a cat who has served as Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street since 2011.
  • Loveland frog - a legendary humanoid frog described as standing roughly 4 feet (1.2 m) tall, allegedly spotted in Loveland, Ohio. In 1972, the Loveland frog legend gained renewed attention when a Loveland police officer reported to a colleague that he had seen an animal consistent with descriptions of the frogman. After a reported sighting in 2016, the second officer called a news station to report that he had shot and killed the same creature some weeks after the 1972 incident and had identified it as a large iguana that was missing its tail.
  • Mike the Headless Chicken - a Wyandotte chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off.
  • Mud-puddling - a behaviour most conspicuous in butterflies, but occurs in other animals as well, mainly insects; they seek out nutrients in certain moist substances such as rotting plant matter, mud and carrion and they suck up the fluid. Where the conditions are suitable, conspicuous insects such as butterflies commonly form aggregations on wet soil, dung or carrion.From the fluids they obtain salts and amino acids that play various roles in their physiology, ethology and ecology.
  • Nim Chimpsky - a chimp who was taught sign language, and his longest quote was "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you"
  • Phantom cat - large felids such as leopards, jaguars and cougars which allegedly appear in regions outside their indigenous range.
  • Pickles - a black and white collie dog, known for his role in finding the stolen Jules Rimet Trophy in March 1966, four months before the 1966 FIFA World Cup was scheduled to kick off in England.
  • Pierre Brassau was a chimpanzee and the subject of a 1964 hoax perpetrated by Åke "Dacke" Axelsson, a journalist at the Swedish tabloid Göteborgs-Tidningen. Axelsson came up with the idea of exhibiting a series of paintings made by a non-human primate, under the pretense that they were the work of a previously unknown French artist named "Pierre Brassau", in order to test whether critics could tell the difference between true avant-garde modern art and the work of a chimpanzee.
  • Potoooooooo - an 18th-century Thoroughbred racehorse who won over 30 races and defeated some of the greatest racehorses of the time. He went on to be a sire. He is now best known for the unusual spelling of his name, pronounced Potatoes.
  • Puppy cat - a term used to refer to specific breeds of domestic cats that have unusual behavioral tendencies that are reminiscent of young domestic dogs.
  • Raining of animals - a rare meteorological phenomenon in which flightless animals fall from the sky.
  • Rat King - A collection of rats whose tails are intertwined and bound together by one of several possible mechanisms, such as entangling material like hair or sticky substances like sap or gum.
  • Salmon of Knowledge - a creature in the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology, sometimes identified with Fintan mac Bóchra, who was known as "The Wise" and was once transformed into a salmon.
  • Scaly boy - a species of goby native to the Pacific coast of Central America from Mexico to Panama.
  • Scute - a bony external plate or scale overlaid with horn, as on the shell of a turtle, the skin of crocodilians, and the feet of birds.
  • Sentinel Species - are organisms, often animals, used to detect risks to humans by providing advance warning of a danger.
  • Slug - a common name for any apparently shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusc. The word slug is also often used as part of the common name of any gastropod mollusc that has no shell, a very reduced shell, or only a small internal shell, particularly sea slugs and semislugs (this is in contrast to the common name snail, which applies to gastropods that have a coiled shell large enough that they can fully retract their soft parts into it).
  • Thagomizer - the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurine dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators. The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name. Cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name "thagomizer" in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip The Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term sometimes used within scientific circles, research, and education.
  • Whale fall - occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft), in the bathyal or abyssal zones. On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades.
  • Wild asses - a subgenus of single toed grazing ungulates.

Astronomy

  • 3753 Cruithne - a Q-type, Aten asteroid in orbit around the Sun in 1:1 orbital resonance with Earth, making it a co-orbital object.
  • Frame-dragging
  • Graveyard orbit - an orbit that lies away from common operational orbits. Some satellites are moved into such orbits at the end of their operational life to reduce the probability of colliding with operational spacecraft and generating space debris.

Biology

  • Conservation-induced extinction - happens when trying to preserve a different species. This mostly threatens the parasite and pathogen species that are highly host-specific to critically endangered hosts. When the last individuals of a host species are captured for the purpose of captive breeding and reintroduction programs, they typically undergo anti-parasitic treatments to increase survival and reproductive success. This practice may unintentionally result in the extinction of the species antagonistic to the target species, such as certain parasites.
  • Mirror life - a hypothetical form of life with mirror-reflected molecular building blocks
  • Primordial soup - the hypothetical set of conditions present on the Earth around 4.0 to 3.7 billion years ago.
  • RNA Tie Club - an informal scientific club, meant partly to be humorous, of select scientists who were interested in how proteins were synthesised from genes, specifically the genetic code. It was created by George Gamow upon the suggestion by James Watson in 1954, at the time the relationship between nucleic acids and amino acids in genetic information was unknown. The club consisted of 20 full members, each representing an amino acid, and four honorary members, representing the four nucleotides. The functions of the club members were to think up possible solutions and share in writing the other members.
  • Sonic hedgehog protein - encoded for by the SHH gene. The protein is named after the character Sonic the Hedgehog.
  • Viviparity - development of the embryo inside the body of the parent. This is opposed to oviparity which is a reproductive mode in which females lay developing eggs that complete their development and hatch externally from the mother.

Botany

  • Chitting - a method of preparing potatoes or other tubers for planting. The seed potatoes are placed in a tray (often in egg cartons) in a light and cool place but shielded from direct sunlight.
  • Crown shyness - a feature observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, instead forming a canopy with channel-like gaps.
  • epiphyte - a plant or plant-like organism that grows on the surface of another plant and derives its moisture and nutrients from the air, rain, water (in marine environments) or from debris accumulating around it.
  • Fairy ring - a naturally occuring ring of mushrooms
  • Fatwood - also known as "fat lighter", "lighter wood", "rich lighter", "pine knot", "lighter knot", "heart pine", "fat stick" or "lighter'd" [sic], is derived from the heartwood of pine trees.

Cartography, Geography and Places

  • Alcohol and Drug Abuse Lake - a reservoir in Richland County, South Carolina, United States. The lake was likely named after a place called Morris Village, a nearby residential treatment center for people with substance dependence.
  • Alternative names for Northern Ireland
  • Aoshima - an island in Ehime Prefecture, Japan, known for its large number of feline residents. Felines have been reported by news outlets to outnumber humans by ratios between 6:1 and 10:1, but as elderly inhabitants of the island have died, the ratio has greatly increased to almost 36:1.
  • Aral Sea - once the fourth largest lake in the world, has been shrinking since the 60s, when rivers that fed it were diverted for Soviet irrigation projects.
  • The Blue Banana is a discontinuous corridor of urbanization spreading over Western and Central Europe, with a population of around 111 million
  • Boojum tree - a tree in the ocotillo family, whose other members include the ocotillos. Some taxonomists place it in the separate genus Idria. It is nearly endemic to the Baja California Peninsula (both the northern and southern states), with only a small population in the Sierra Bacha of Sonora, Mexico. The plant's English name, Boojum, was given by Godfrey Sykes of the Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona and is taken from Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark".
  • Buffer state - a country lying between two rival or potentially hostile great powers. Its existence can sometimes be thought to prevent conflict between them. A buffer state is sometimes a mutually agreed upon area lying between two greater powers, which is demilitarized in the sense of not hosting the military of either power (though it will usually have its own military forces). The invasion of a buffer state by one of the powers surrounding it will often result in war between the powers.
  • Condom - also known as Condom-en-Armagnac, is a commune in southwestern France in the department of Gers, of which it is a subprefecture. It has gained international interest in the English speaking world for its unfortunate naming.
  • Continental drip is the observation that southward-pointing landforms are more numerous and prominent than northward-pointing landforms. When published, it has been geological satire.
  • Counties of Ireland
  • Doubly-landlocked countries - A country is "doubly landlocked" or "double-landlocked" when it is surrounded only by landlocked countries (requiring the crossing of at least two national borders to reach a coastline).
  • Dual naming - the adoption of an official place name that combines two earlier names, or uses both names, often to resolve a disagreement over which of the two individual names is more appropriate. In some cases, the reasons are political.
  • Embanking of the tidal Thames - the historical process by which the lower River Thames, at one time a broad, shallow waterway winding through malarious marshlands, has been transformed by human intervention into a deep, narrow tidal canal flowing between solid artificial walls, and restrained by these at high tide.
  • Fugging, Lower Austria
  • Fugging, Upper Austria
  • Gävle Goat - a traditional Christmas display erected annually at Slottstorget in central Gävle, Sweden. It is a giant version of a traditional Swedish Yule Goat figure made of straw. It is erected each year by local community groups at the beginning of Advent over a period of two days. It has been the subject of repeated arson attacks, and, despite security measures and a nearby fire station, the goat has been burned to the ground most years since its first appearance in 1966. As of December 2021, 38 out of 56 goats have been destroyed or damaged in some way. Burning or destroying the goat in some way is illegal, and the Svea Court of Appeal has stated that the offence should normally carry a 3-month prison sentence; in 2018, it sentenced a 27-year-old man to a suspended sentence and day fines for aggravated property damage for burning the goat.
  • Gropecunt Lane - a street found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages, believed to be a reference to the prostitution centred on those areas; it was normal practice for a medieval street name to reflect the street's function or the economic activity taking place within it.
  • International Cocoa Quarantine Centre - an organization aiming to reduce the amount of disease affecting cocoa plants. Cocoa plants are quarantined in a 1,000-square-metre (11,000 sq ft) greenhouse before being transported across the globe. Quarantining cocoa plants is considered important because over 70% of the global cocoa supply originates from West Africa, and therefore the cocoa market is susceptible to any catastrophic effects that should occur in that region.
  • Lake Vostok - the largest of Antarctica's almost 400 known subglacial lakes. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleoclimatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15 to 25 million years. It is hypothesized that unusual forms of life could be found in the lake's liquid layer, a fossil water reserve. Because Lake Vostok may contain an environment sealed off below the ice for millions of years, the conditions could resemble those of ice-covered oceans hypothesized to exist on Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moon Enceladus.
  • Laser Kiwi flag - created by Lucy Gray in 2015 as a proposed flag of New Zealand. During the 2015–2016 New Zealand flag referendums, the Laser Kiwi flag became a large social media phenomenon, and was used in comedy routines by comedians, such as John Oliver, discussing the flag referendum and New Zealand in general. The flag features a New Zealand fern and a kiwi shooting a green laser beam from its eyes. The description of the flag was that "the laser beam projects a powerful image of New Zealand. I believe my design is so powerful it does not need to be discussed."
  • Macedonia naming dispute - The use of the country name "Macedonia" was disputed between Greece and Macedonia (now North Macedonia) between 1991 and 2019. The dispute was a source of instability in the Western Balkans for 25 years. It was resolved through negotiations between Athens and Skopje, mediated by the United Nations, resulting in the Prespa agreement, which was signed on June 17, 2018.
  • Naukograd - meaning "science city", is a formal term for towns with high concentrations of research and development facilities in Russia and the Soviet Union, some specifically built by the Soviet Union for these purposes.
  • Northeast megalopolis is the most populous megalopolis located entirely in the United States, with over 50 million residents, as well as the most urbanized megalopolis in the United States and the megalopolis with the world's largest economic output.
  • Null Island - the name of an imaginary place located at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E), i.e., where the prime meridian and the equator intersect. The fictitious island, usually defined as 1 meter square, is often used in mapping software as a placeholder to help find and correct database entries that have erroneously been assigned the coordinates 0,0. Although Null Island started as a joke within the geospatial community, it has become a useful means of addressing a recurring issue in geographic information science.
  • Open Location Code - a geocode system for identifying an area anywhere on the Earth. Google states that plus codes are accepted as postal addresses in Cape Verde, parts of Kolkata, and the Navajo Nation.
  • Pele's hair - a volcanic glass formation produced from cooled lava stretched into thin strands, usually from lava fountains, lava cascades, or vigorous lava flows. It is named after Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes.
  • Phantom island - a purported island which was included on maps for a period of time, but was later found not to exist. They usually originate from the reports of early sailors exploring new regions, and are commonly the result of navigational errors, mistaken observations, unverified misinformation, or deliberate fabrication.
  • Place names considered unusual
  • Provinces of Ireland
  • Quad Cities - a region of cities in the U.S. states of Iowa and Illinois: Davenport and Bettendorf in southeastern Iowa, and Rock Island, Moline and East Moline in northwestern Illinois. These cities are the center of the Quad Cities metropolitan area, which as of 2013 had a population estimate of 383,781 and a Combined Statistical Area (CSA) population of 474,937, making it the 90th-largest CSA in the nation.
  • Röstigraben - also transcribed Röschtigraben in order to reflect the Swiss German pronunciation [ˈrøːʃtiˌɡrabə]) is a term used to refer to the cultural boundary between German-speaking and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, the latter known in French as the Suisse romande.
  • Satellite map images with missing or unclear data
  • Seasteading - the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, in international waters outside the territory claimed by any government. No one has yet created a structure on the high seas that has been recognized as a sovereign state. Proposed structures have included modified cruise ships, refitted oil platforms, and custom-built floating islands.
  • Survey marker - objects placed to mark key survey points on the Earth's surface. They are used in geodetic and land surveying. A benchmark is a type of survey marker that indicates elevation (vertical position). Horizontal position markers used for triangulation are also known as triangulation stations. Benchmarking is the hobby of "hunting" for these marks.
  • Tama-Re - compound in Putnam County, Georgia (a.k.a. "Kodesh", "Wahannee", "The Golden City", "Al Tamaha") was an Egyptian-themed set of buildings and monuments established in 1993 on 476 acres near Eatonton.
  • Thankful Villages - settlements in England and Wales from which all their members of the armed forces survived World War I.
  • The Bitches - a tidal race and set of rocks between Ramsey Island and the west Welsh coastline near St Davids. They are a popular tourist destination and a playspot for extreme waterboarding enthusiasts such as whitewater kayakers and surfers.
  • Trap street - a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent.
  • Union station - a railway station at which the tracks and facilities are shared by two or more separate railway companies, allowing passengers to connect conveniently between them. The term 'union station' is used in North America and 'joint station' is used in Europe.
  • Urk - a small Dutch town that was formerly an island, has its own dialect which differs significantly from standard Dutch and incorporates several Yiddish loanwords.
  • Use of Nordic countries vs. Scandinavia
  • Weißwurstäquator - a humorous term describing the supposed cultural boundary separating Southern Germany from the northern parts, especially Bavaria from Central Germany.
  • Woonerf - a living street, as originally implemented in the Netherlands and in Flanders (Belgium). Techniques include shared space, traffic calming, and low speed limits.
  • World Clock - a large turret-style world clock located in the public square of Alexanderplatz in Mitte, Berlin. By reading the markings on its metal rotunda, the current time in 148 major cities from around the world can be determined.
  • Zealand - the largest and most populous island in Denmark proper (thus excluding Greenland and Disko Island, which are larger in size
  • Zeeland - the westernmost and least populous province of the Netherlands. The country of New Zealand was named after Zeeland after it was sighted by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman.
  • Zone of Death - the name given to the 50 sq mi (129.50 km2) Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of a purported loophole in the Constitution of the United States, a criminal could theoretically get away with any crime, up to and including murder.

Chemistry

  • Mpemba effect - a catch-all term for possible cases in which hot water appears to freeze faster than cold water. The phenomenon is temperature-dependent. There is disagreement about the parameters required to produce the effect and about its theoretical basis.
  • Frit - a ceramic composition that has been fused, quenched, and granulated. Frits form an important part of the batches used in compounding enamels and ceramic glazes; the purpose of this pre-fusion is to render any soluble and/or toxic components insoluble by causing them to combine with silica and other added oxides

Fluid Dynamics

  • Vortex Shedding - In fluid dynamics, vortex shedding is an oscillating flow that takes place when a fluid such as air or water flows past a bluff (as opposed to streamlined) body at certain velocities, depending on the size and shape of the body.

Medical

  • Hyperthymesia - a condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. It is extraordinarily rare, with only about 60 people in the world having been diagnosed with the condition as of 2021.
  • Snatiation - a term coined to refer to the a medical condition originally termed "stomach sneeze reflex", which is characterized by uncontrollable bursts of sneezing brought on by fullness of the stomach, typically immediately after a large meal.

Physics

  • Atmospheric duct - a horizontal layer in the lower atmosphere in which the vertical refractive index gradients are such that radio signals (and light rays) are guided or ducted, tend to follow the curvature of the Earth, and experience less attenuation in the ducts than they would if the ducts were not present.
  • Cat state, named after Schrödinger's cat, is a quantum state that is composed of two diametrically opposed conditions at the same time, such as the possibilities that a cat be alive and dead at the same time.
  • Cold welding - a solid-state welding process in which joining takes place without fusion or heating at the interface of the two parts to be welded. Unlike in fusion welding, no liquid or molten phase is present in the joint.
  • Dashpot - also known as a damper, is a mechanical device that resists motion via viscous friction.
  • Eddy current - Loops of electrical current induced within conductors by a changing magnetic field in the conductor according to Faraday's law of induction.
  • Faraday Cage - An enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields.
  • Phased array - a computer-controlled array of antennas which creates a beam of radio waves that can be electronically steered to point in different directions without moving the antennas.
  • Shape of the universe - The shape of the universe, in physical cosmology, is the local and global geometry of the universe. The local features of the geometry of the universe are primarily described by its curvature, whereas the topology of the universe describes general global properties of its shape as of a continuous object.
  • Sputtering is a phenomenon in which microscopic particles of a solid material are ejected from its surface, after the material is itself bombarded by energetic particles of a plasma or gas.
  • Superdense coding - a quantum communication protocol to transmit two classical bits of information (i.e., either 00, 01, 10 or 11) from a sender (often called Alice) to a receiver (often called Bob), by sending only one qubit from Alice to Bob, under the assumption of Alice and Bob pre-sharing an entangled state.
  • The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wavefunction collapse. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realized in some "world" or universe.
  • Thin-film interference - a natural phenomenon in which light waves reflected by the upper and lower boundaries of a thin film interfere with one another, either enhancing or reducing the reflected light.
  • Quantum suicide - a thought experiment in quantum mechanics and the philosophy of physics. Purportedly, it can falsify any interpretation of quantum mechanics other than the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, from the cat's point of view. Quantum immortality refers to the subjective experience of surviving quantum suicide. This concept is sometimes conjectured to be applicable to real-world causes of death as well.
  • Quantum teleportation - a process in which quantum information (e.g. the exact state of an atom or photon) can be transmitted (exactly, in principle) from one location to another, with the help of classical communication and previously shared quantum entanglement between the sending and receiving location.
  • Quantum Zeno effect is a feature of quantum-mechanical systems allowing a particle's time evolution to be arrested by measuring it frequently enough with respect to some chosen measurement setting.

Psychology

  • Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.
  • Cotard delusion - a rare mental disorder in which the affected person holds the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs.
  • Greeble - artificial objects designed to be used as stimuli in psychological studies of object and face recognition.
  • Rosenhan Experiment - An experiment conducted to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The experimenters feigned hallucinations to enter psychiatric hospitals, and acted normally afterwards.
  • Selection Bias - the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.
  • Semantic satiation - a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
  • Sensory-specific Satiety - a sensory hedonic phenomenon that refers to the declining satisfaction generated by the consumption of a certain type of food, and the consequent renewal in appetite resulting from the exposure to a new flavor or food.
  • Snoezelen - a therapy for people with autism and other developmental disabilities, dementia or brain injury. It consists of placing the person in a soothing and stimulating environment, called the "Snoezelen room". These rooms are specially designed to deliver stimuli to various senses, using lighting effects, color, sounds, music, scents, etc. The combination of different materials on a wall may be explored using tactile senses, and the floor may be adjusted to stimulate the sense of balance.
  • Somatoparaphrenia - a type of monothematic delusion where one denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of one's body.

Technology

  • Electrical network frequency analysis - an audio forensics technique for validating audio recordings by comparing frequency changes in background mains hum in the recording with long-term high-precision historical records of mains frequency changes from a database.
  • Gray goo - a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass on Earth while building more of themselves, a scenario that has been called ecophagy ("eating the environment", more literally "eating the habitation").
  • Mains hum - a sound associated with alternating current which is twice the frequency of the mains electricity. The fundamental frequency of this sound is usually double that of fundamental 50/60 Hz, i.e. 100/120 Hz, depending on the local power-line frequency. The sound often has heavy harmonic content above 50/60 Hz.
  • Parasitic capacitance - an unavoidable and usually unwanted capacitance that exists between the parts of an electronic component or circuit simply because of their proximity to each other. When two electrical conductors at different voltages are close together, the electric field between them causes electric charge to be stored on them; this effect is capacitance.

Sports & Games

  • 2021 Balloon World Cup - a sporting event organized by Ibai Llanos and Gerard Piqué, based on a game of keep-up with a balloon that went viral on social media.
  • A drive into deep left field by Castellanos - a phrase spoken by Thom Brennaman, a play-by-play announcer for the Cincinnati Reds, during a baseball game against Kansas City on August 19, 2020. Brennaman was replaced in the middle of the broadcast for a microphone gaffe in which he described an unnamed location as "one of the fag capitals of the world". While he apologized to listeners on the air, Reds outfielder Nick Castellanos hit a home run, which caused Brennaman to interrupt himself to deliver a home run call, describing the hit as a "drive into deep left field", before continuing with his apology.
  • Academic fencing - Mensur is the traditional kind of fencing practiced by some student corporations (Studentenverbindungen) in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, and, to a minor extent, in Belgium, Lithuania, and Poland. It is a traditional, strictly regulated épée fight between two male members of different fraternities with sharp weapons. The German technical term Mensur (from Latin meaning 'dimension') in the 16th century referred to the specified distance between each of the fencers.
  • The Barkley Marathons - an ultramarathon trail race held each year in Frozen Head State Park in Morgan County, Tennessee. The course, which varies from year to year, consists of five loops of the 20+ mile, off-trail course for a total of 100 miles (160 km). The race is limited to a 60-hour period from the start of the first loop, and takes place in March or early April of each year. The race is known for its extreme difficulty and many peculiarities.
  • Candlepin bowling - a variation of bowling that is played primarily in the Canadian Maritime provinces and the New England region of the United States. It is played with a handheld-sized ball and tall, narrow pins that resemble candles, hence the name.
  • Duckpin bowling - a variation of the sport of bowling. Duckpin balls are 4+3⁄4 in (12 cm) to 5 in (12.7 cm) in diameter, weigh 3 lb 6 oz (1.5 kg) to 3 lb 12 oz (1.7 kg) each, and lack finger holes. Duckpins, though arranged in a triangle identical to that used in ten-pin bowling, are shorter, slightly thinner, and lighter than their ten-pin equivalents, which makes it more difficult for the smaller ball to achieve a strike.
  • Extreme ironing - an extreme sport in which people take ironing boards to remote locations and iron items of clothing. According to the Extreme Ironing Bureau, extreme ironing is "the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt."
  • Fowling - a hybrid game that combines the equipment of American football and bowling into one sport with a similar layout as horseshoes and cornhole.
  • Funnel ball - a playground game where a ball is thrown into a funnel with multiple exit holes.
  • Gateball - a mallet team sport inspired by croquet. It is a fast-paced, non-contact, highly strategic team game, which can be played by anyone regardless of age or gender.
  • Jorkyball - a format of two vs two football. It is played in a 10 m (33 ft) by 5 m (16 ft) cage on artificial turf with the possibility of using the walls to pass, dribble, and score. As in football it is played only with the feet and use of hands is forbidden. The objective is to score goals into a net. As in squash and paddle, the sport is played in a four-walled court and all of them can be used including the net above, i.e. there is no outside.
  • Mas-wrestling - the international name used for the Yakut ethnosport derived from the traditional stick pulling game mas tard'yhyy (мас тардыhыы, 'stick tugging'). Reminiscent of the Eskimo Stick Pull featured at the World Eskimo Indian Olympics, Norwegian kjevletrekk, Finnish kartunveto or väkikapulan veto, as well as the Highland test of strength The Swingle Tree (played with a shepherd's crook), participants taking part in mas-wrestling competitions sit in front of each other, prop their feet against the board that divides the competition area and tug on a wooden stick (mas), making sure to keep it parallel to the propping board. Mas-wrestling demands great muscular strength from the hands, legs, back, and abdominals.
  • New York Yankees appearance policy - the Yankees have maintained a strict appearance policy, specifying that players' hair must not touch their collars and that they may have mustaches but no other facial hair.
  • Paper chase - a racing game played outdoors (best played within a wood or even a shrubbery maze) with any number of players. At the start of the game, one person is designated the 'hare' and everyone else in the group are the 'hounds'. The 'hare' starts off ahead of everyone else leaving behind a trail of paper shreds (or chalk marks in an urban environment) which represents the scent of the hare. Just as scent is carried on the wind, so too are the bits of paper, sometimes making for a difficult game. After some designated time, the hounds must chase after the hare and attempt to catch them before they reach the ending point of the race.
  • Pedestrianism - a 19th-century form of competitive walking, often professional and funded by wagering, from which the modern sport of racewalking developed.
  • Poohsticks - a game first mentioned in The House at Pooh Corner, a Winnie-the-Pooh book by A. A. Milne. It is a simple game which may be played on any bridge over running water; each player drops a stick on the upstream side of a bridge and the one whose stick first appears on the downstream side is the winner.
  • Skitching - the act of hitching a ride by holding onto a motor vehicle while riding on a skateboard, roller skates, bicycle, or sneakers when there is snowfall.
  • Spitball - an illegal baseball pitch in which the ball has been altered by the application of a foreign substance such as saliva or petroleum jelly. This technique alters the wind resistance and weight on one side of the ball, causing it to move in an atypical manner.
  • Tejo - a Colombian sport in which metal discs are thown toards packets filled with gunpowder
  • Underwater hockey - a globally played limited-contact sport in which two teams compete to manoeuvre a puck across the bottom of a swimming pool into the opposing team's goal by propelling it with a hockey stick (or pusher).

Things

  • Adventure playground - a specific type of playground for children. Adventure playgrounds can take many forms, ranging from "natural playgrounds" to "junk playgrounds", and are typically defined by an ethos of unrestricted play, the presence of playworkers (or "wardens"), and the absence of adult-manufactured or rigid play-structures.
  • Ampelmaennchen - is the symbol shown on pedestrian signals in Germany.
  • Anti-satellite weapons are space weapons designed to incapacitate or destroy satellites for strategic or tactical purposes.
  • Antimony pill - a pill made from metallic antimony. It was a popular remedy in the nineteenth century, and it was used to purge and revitalise the bowels. In use, it is swallowed and allowed to pass through the body, after which it is customarily recovered for reuse, giving rise to the name everlasting pill.
  • Apollo insurance covers - autographed postal covers signed by the astronaut crews prior to their mission. The ability of astronauts to obtain much life insurance was limited, so they signed hundreds of postal covers before they left, on the presumption that they would become highly valuable in the event of their death.
  • Archimedes' Screw - is a machine used for transferring water from a low-lying body of water into irrigation ditches.
  • Autopen - a device used for the automatic signing of a signature or autograph. Many celebrities, politicians and public figures receive hundreds of letters a day, many of which request a personal reply; this leads to a situation in which either the individual must artificially reproduce their signature or heavily limit the number of recipients who receive a personal response.
  • Auxetics - structures or materials that have a negative Poisson's ratio. When stretched, they become thicker perpendicular to the applied force.
  • Bankruptcy barrel - a visual symbol, primarily of the 20th century, used in cartoons and other media as a token of destitution. Not intended to be realistic, it consists of a suit made of only a wooden barrel held on by suspenders, indicating that the subject is so poor that he is unable to afford even clothes
  • Battenburg markings - a pattern of high-visibility markings developed in the United Kingdom (UK) in the 1990s and now used on the sides of emergency service vehicles in the UK, Crown dependencies, British Overseas Territories and several other European countries such as Czech Republic, Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Belgium as well as in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, and Trinidad and Tobago.
  • Beetle bank - in agriculture and horticulture, is a form of biological pest control. It is a strip, preferably raised, planted with grasses (bunch grasses) and/or perennial plants, within a crop field or a garden, that fosters and provides habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and other fauna that prey on pests.
  • Berlin key - a key for a type of door lock. It was designed to force people to close and lock their doors, usually a main entrance door or gate leading into a common yard or tenement block.
  • Biometric passport - a traditional passport that has an embedded electronic microprocessor chip which contains biometric information that can be used to authenticate the identity of the passport holder. It uses contactless smart card technology, including a microprocessor chip (computer chip) and antenna (for both power to the chip and communication) embedded in the front or back cover, or centre page, of the passport.
  • Bog butter - an ancient waxy substance found buried in peat bogs, particularly in Ireland and Scotland. Likely an old method of making and preserving butter, some tested lumps of bog butter were made of dairy, while others were meat-based.
  • Bread dildo - a dildo prepared using bread, allegedly made in the Greco-Roman era around 2,000 years ago.
  • Camouflage passport - a document, designed to look like a real passport, issued in the name of a non-existent country or entity.
  • Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine - a Coke vending machine in Capitol Hill, Seattle, that was in operation since at least the early 1990s until its disappearance in 2018. n June 2018, the machine mysteriously disappeared and a message was posted to the machine's Facebook page stating "Going for a walk, need to find myself. Maybe take a shower even." A note was taped to the rail where the machine used to be: "Went for a walk".
  • Cat organ - a hypothetical musical instrument which consists of a line of cats fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard so that they cry out when a key is pressed. The cats would be arranged according to the natural tone of their voices.
  • Catafalque - a raised bier, box, or similar platform, often movable, that is used to support the casket, coffin, or body of a dead person during a Christian funeral or memorial service.
  • Christmas Bullet - an American single-seat cantilever wing biplane. It is considered by many to be among the worst aircraft ever constructed.
  • Clock of the Long Now - a mechanical clock under construction, that is designed to keep time for 10,000 years.
  • Cold War playground equipment - was intended to foster children's curiosity and excitement about the Space Race. It was installed during the Cold War in both communist and capitalist countries.
  • Color trade mark - a non-conventional trade mark where at least one colour is used to perform the trade mark function of uniquely identifying the commercial origin of products or services.
  • Commonplace books - a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: sententiae (often with the compiler's responses), notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.
  • Company scrip - scrip (a substitute for government-issued legal tender or currency) issued by a company to pay its employees. It can only be exchanged in company stores owned by the employers. In the United Kingdom, such truck systems have long been formally outlawed under the Truck Acts. In the United States, payment in scrip became illegal in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
  • Cork hat - a type of headgear with corks strung from the brim, to ward off insects. Pieces of cork, typically bottle corks, are hung on strings from the brim of the hat. The low density of cork means a number of pieces may hang from a hat without significantly increasing its weight. Movement of the head causes the corks to swing, discouraging insects, particularly bush flies, from swarming around the wearer's head, or entering the nose or mouth. The shape and material of cork hats varies but, typically, they are similar to a slouch hat.
  • Chicken gun - a large-diameter, compressed-air cannon used to fire dead chickens at aircraft components in order to simulate high-speed bird strikes during the aircraft's flight.
  • Chip log - also called common log, ship log, or just log, is a navigation tool mariners use to estimate the speed of a vessel through water. The word knot, to mean nautical mile per hour, derives from this measurement method.
  • Crinkle crankle wall - The crinkle crankle wall economizes on bricks, despite its sinuous configuration, because it can be made just one brick thin. If a wall this thin were to be made in a straight line, without buttresses, it would easily topple over. The alternate convex and concave curves in the wall provide stability and help it to resist lateral forces.
  • Cubs Win Flag - a victory flag that is flown at Wrigley Field after every Chicago Cubs home win.
  • Czech Hedgehog - The Czech hedgehog is a static anti-tank obstacle defense made of metal angle beams or I-beams (that is, lengths with an L- or I-shaped cross section).- Characteristica universalis - commonly interpreted as universal characteristic, or universal character in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator.
  • Dead key - a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) character by itself, but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after. Thus, a dedicated key is not needed for each possible combination of a diacritic and a letter, but rather only one dead key for each diacritic is needed, in addition to the normal base letter keys.
  • Democracy Wall - a long brick wall of Xidan Street, Xicheng District of Beijing, where thousands of people put up posters to protest about the political and social issues of China.
  • Denatured alcohol - ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage recreational consumption.
  • Donkey vote - a ballot cast in an election that uses a preference voting system, where a voter is permitted or required to rank candidates on the ballot paper, and ranks them based on the order they appear on the ballot paper.
  • Drunk Tank Pink is a tone of pink which has been observed to reduce hostile, violent or aggressive behavior.
  • Dual-tone multi-frequency signaling - a telecommunication signaling system using the voice-frequency band over telephone lines between telephone equipment and other communications devices and switching centers.
  • Engineer's ring - a ring worn by members of the United States Order of the Engineer, a fellowship of engineers who must be a certified Professional Engineer or graduated from an accredited engineering program (or be within one academic year of graduation to participate). The ring is usually a stainless steel band worn on the little finger of the dominant hand. This is so that it makes contact with all work done by the engineer. Rings used to be cast in iron in the most unattractive and simple form to show the nature of work. The ring is symbolic of the oath taken by the wearer, and symbolizes the unity of the profession in its goal of benefitting mankind. The stainless steel from which the ring is made depicts the strength of the profession.
  • Ersatz Good - Substitute good, normally inferior.
  • Etagere - a French set of hanging or standing open shelves for the display of collections of objects or ornaments
  • Exaggeration postcard - also known as tall tale postcards, were postcards popular throughout North America, especially in the Great Plains region, during the early 20th century. These postcards would feature impossibly large animals and crops, often shown being carried by train or wagon, and would usually have some sort of caption to go along with them.
  • Factory-kitchen - a large mechanized enterprise of food service in the Soviet Union, originated in the 1920–1930s. Its main purpose was centralized preparation of food (both prefabrication and full processing) supplied for communal dining rooms or for personal purchase.
  • Fata Morgana - a complex form of superior mirage that is seen in a narrow band right above the horizon.
  • Flushometer - a metal water-diverter that uses an inline handle to flush tankless toilets or urinals.
  • Folly - a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings.
  • Forgotten Winchester - a Winchester Model 1873 lever-action centerfire rifle that archaeologists discovered in 2014 leaning against a Juniper tree in Great Basin National Park in Nevada. The gun was manufactured in 1882, but nothing is known of its abandonment.
  • Free Speech Flag - a symbol of personal liberty used to promote freedom of speech. Designed by artist John Marcotte, the flag and its colors correspond to a cryptographic key which enabled users to copy HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. It was created on May 1, 2007, during the AACS encryption key controversy.
  • Gauge block - a system for producing precision lengths. The individual gauge block is a metal or ceramic block that has been precision ground and lapped to a specific thickness.
  • Garden hermit - hermits encouraged to live in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy land-owners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to dress like druids and remain permanently on-site, where they could be fed, cared-for and consulted for advice or viewed for entertainment.
  • Gay bomb - a non-lethal psychochemical weapon that a United States Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing. The theories involve discharging sex pheromones over enemy forces in order to make them sexually attracted to each other.
  • Gender of connectors and fasteners - In electrical and mechanical trades and manufacturing, each half of a pair of mating connectors or fasteners is conventionally assigned the designation male or female.
  • Goat tower - a multi-story decorative goat house, modeled on a European garden folly, an early example of which was built in Portugal in the 19th century.
  • Half-track - a civilian or military vehicle with regular wheels at the front for steering and continuous tracks at the back to propel the vehicle and carry most of the load. The purpose of this combination is to produce a vehicle with the cross-country capabilities of a tank and the handling of a wheeled vehicle.
  • Holdout - a piece of property that did not become part of a larger real estate development because the owner either refused to sell or wanted more than the developer would pay.
  • Hipster PDA - a paper-based personal organizer. Originally a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the increasing expense and complexity of personal digital assistants (PDA), the Hipster PDA (said to stand for "Parietal Disgorgement Aid" and often abbreviated to "hPDA") simply comprises a sheaf of index cards held together with a binder clip.
  • Immovable ladder - Some consider the so-called immovable ladder under the window of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to be a visible symbol of the alleged inactivity the Status Quo imposes.
  • Impeller - a driven rotor used to increase the pressure and flow of a fluid. It is the opposite of a turbine, which extracts energy from, and reduces the pressure of, a flowing fluid.
  • Inflatable rat - or union rats, are giant inflatables in the shape of cartoon rats, commonly used in the United States by protesting or striking trade unions. They serve as a sign of opposition against employers or nonunion contractors, and are intended to call public attention to companies employing nonunion labor.
  • Insect hotel - also known as a bug hotel or insect house, is a manmade structure created to provide shelter for insects. They can come in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on the specific purpose or specific insect it is catered to. Most consist of several different sections that provide insects with nesting facilities – particularly during winter, offering shelter or refuge for many types of insects. Their purposes include hosting pollinators.
  • Inverted Jenny - a 24 cent United States postage stamp first issued on May 10, 1918, in which the image of the Curtiss JN-4 airplane in the center of the design is printed upside-down; it is probably the most famous error in American philately. Only one pane of 100 of the invert stamps was ever found, making this error one of the most prized in philately.
  • Itinerarium - a travel guide in the form of a listing of cities, villages (vici) and other stops on the way, including the distances between each stop and the next
  • Jail tree - is any tree used to incarcerate a person, usually by chaining the prisoner up to the tree.
  • logbook - a record of important events in the management, operation, and navigation of a ship. It is essential to traditional navigation, and must be filled in at least daily.The term originally referred to a book for recording readings from the chip log that was used to estimate a ship's speed through the water.
  • London Bridge (Lake Havasu City) - a bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. It was originally built in the 1830s and formerly spanned the River Thames in London, England.
  • Lost work - a document, literary work, or piece of multimedia produced some time in the past, of which no surviving copies are known to exist.
  • Louver - a window blind or shutter with horizontal slats that are angled to admit light and air, but to keep out rain and direct sunshine. The angle of the slats may be adjustable, usually in blinds and windows, or fixed.
  • Matrix digital rain - the computer code featured in the Matrix series. The falling green code is a way of representing the activity of the virtual reality environment of the Matrix on screen.
  • Mead of Poetry - also known as Mead of Suttungr, is a mythical beverage that whoever "drinks becomes a skald or scholar" able to recite any information and solve any question.
  • Mezuzah - a piece of parchment, known as a klaf, contained in a decorative case and inscribed with specific Hebrew verses from the Torah. These verses consist of the Jewish prayer Shema Yisrael, beginning with the phrase: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord (is) our God, the Lord is One". In mainstream Rabbinic Judaism, a mezuzah is affixed to the doorpost of Jewish homes to fulfill the mitzvah (Biblical commandment) to "write the words of God on the gates and doorposts of your house" (Deuteronomy 6:9).
  • Milk cars are a specialized type of railroad car intended to transport raw milk from collection points near dairy farms to a processing creamery. Some milk cars were intended for loading with multiple cans of milk, while others were designed with a single tank for bulk loading. Milk cars were often equipped with high-speed passenger trucks, passenger-type buffer plates, and train signal and steam lines seldom found on conventional refrigerator cars.
  • Moquette - derived from the French word for carpet, is a type of woven pile fabric in which cut or uncut threads form a short dense cut or loop pile. As well as giving it a distinctive velvet-like feel, the pile construction is particularly durable, and ideally suited to applications such as public transport.
  • Mortsafe - a contraption designed to protect graves from disturbance. Resurrectionists had supplied the schools of anatomy in Scotland since the early 18th century. This was due to the necessity for medical students to learn anatomy by attending dissections of human subjects, which was frustrated by the very limited allowance of dead bodies – for example the corpses of executed criminals – granted by the government, which controlled the supply.
  • Mr. Ouch - a hazard symbol developed by the US’s National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) to represent electrical hazards. Unlike other high-voltage warning symbols, Mr. Ouch was specifically designed with young children in mind. Mr. Ouch is similar in name, purpose, and appearance to the UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh's "Mr. Yuk" design used to label poisonous substances, although the two symbols were developed independently.
  • Napier's bones - a manually-operated calculating device created by John Napier of Merchiston, Scotland for the calculation of products and quotients of numbers. The method was based on lattice multiplication, and also called 'rabdology', a word invented by Napier.
  • Nickelodeon - the first type of indoor exhibition space dedicated to showing projected motion pictures in the United States. Usually set up in converted storefronts, these small, simple theaters charged five cents for admission and flourished from about 1905 to 1915.
  • Nurdles - tiny plastic pellets (smaller than 5mm) that are universally used in the plastics industry for the manufacture of plastic products.
  • Numbers station - a radio station that just broadcasts a bunch of formatted numbers. They're believed to be use to communicate with intelligence officers, although they could also be used as a distraction to tie people up in trying to "decode" meaningless sequences.
  • Optical telegraph - a line of stations, typically towers, for the purpose of conveying textual information by means of visual signals. There are two main types of such systems; the semaphore telegraph which uses pivoted indicator arms and conveys information according to the direction the indicators point, and the shutter telegraph which uses panels that can be rotated to block or pass the light from the sky behind to convey information.
  • Osteria - Italy was originally a place serving wine and simple food. Lately, the emphasis has shifted to the food, but menus tend to be short, with the emphasis on local specialities such as pasta and grilled meat or fish, often served at shared tables.
  • Palimpsest - a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document.
  • Panty tree - a tree underneath a ski lift decorated with bras, panties, and Mardi Gras beads cast off by skiers riding the chair lift.
  • parklet - a sidewalk extension that provides more space and amenities for people using the street.
  • Pittsburgh toilet - a common fixture in pre-World War II houses built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States and the surrounding region. It consists of an ordinary flush toilet installed in the basement, with no surrounding walls. Most of these toilets are paired with a crude basement shower apparatus and large sink, which often doubles as a laundry basin.
  • Polar bear jail - a special building in Churchill, Manitoba where polar bears that are considered troublesome or dangerous are isolated before they can be relocated.
  • Port tongs - a special set of tongs designed to open wine bottles that are sealed with a cork. The tongs are heated over an open flame and held against the neck of the wine bottle for 20–30 seconds. The heated section of bottle is then cooled with a damp cloth or ice water, causing the glass to fracture due to thermal expansion. The result is generally a clean, predictable break.
  • Pressure-sensitive tape - an adhesive tape that will stick with application of pressure, without the need for a solvent (such as water) or heat for activation.
  • Pykrete - a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight).
  • Ransom strip - a parcel of land needed to access an adjacent property from a public highway, to which the owner is denied access until payment is received.
  • Revenge dress - a dress once worn by Diana, Princess of Wales. The dress has been interpreted as having been worn "in revenge" for the televised admission of adultery by her husband, Charles, Prince of Wales.
  • sensitive compartmented information facility - in United States military, national security/national defense and intelligence parlance, is an enclosed area within a building that is used to process sensitive compartmented information (SCI) types of classified information.
  • Scrip - any substitute for legal tender. It is often a form of credit. Scrips have been created for exploitative payment of employees under truck systems, and for use in local commerce at times when regular currency was unavailable, for example in remote coal towns, military bases, ships on long voyages, or occupied countries in wartime.
  • Shebeen - originally an illicit bar or club where accessible alcoholic beverages were sold without a license.
  • Sleeve garter - a garter worn on the sleeve of a shirt. It came into wide use, especially in the USA, in the latter half of the 19th century when men's ready-made shirts came in a single (extra long) sleeve length. Sleeve garters allow men to customize sleeve lengths and keep their cuffs from becoming soiled while working or at the correct length when worn under a jacket.
  • Smoot - a nonstandard, humorous unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot, a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 lay down repeatedly on the Harvard Bridge (between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts) so that his fraternity brothers could use his height to measure the length of the bridge.
  • Sneckdown - a curb extension caused by snowfall. A natural form of traffic calming, sneckdowns show where a street can potentially be narrowed to slow motor vehicle speeds and shorten pedestrian crossing distances.
  • Space-cadet keyboard - a keyboard designed by John L. Kulp in 1978 and used on Lisp machines at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which inspired several still-current jargon terms in the field of computer science and influenced the design of Emacs.
  • Spite house - a building constructed or substantially modified to irritate neighbors or any party with land stakes. Because long-term occupation is not the primary purpose of these houses, they frequently sport strange and impractical structures.
  • Spoke card - a card placed in the spokes of a bicycle wheel. They lie parallel to the entire wheel. One origin of the spoke card was laminated cards inserted in spokes with numbers used to identify competitors in competitive races held by bicycle messengers, in official competitions and in unofficial alleycat races. Tarot cards with the racers number written on them were used initially, but nowadays cards are often custom printed.
  • Sponson - projections extending from the sides of land vehicles, aircraft or watercraft to provide protection, stability, storage locations, mounting points for weapons or other devices, or equipment housing.
  • Squib load - a firearm malfunction in which a fired projectile does not have enough force behind it to exit the barrel, and thus becomes stuck. This type of malfunction can be extremely dangerous, as failing to notice that the projectile has become stuck in the barrel may result in another round being fired directly into the obstructed barrel, resulting in a catastrophic failure of the weapon's structural integrity.
  • Stamp hinge - a small, folded, transparent, rectangular pieces of paper coated with a mild gum. They are used by stamp collectors to affix postage stamps onto the pages of a stamp album.
  • Test Card F - a test card that was created by the BBC and used on television in the United Kingdom and in countries elsewhere in the world for more than four decades. It was the first to be transmitted in colour in the UK and the first to feature a person, and has become an iconic British image regularly subject to parody.
  • The Letters of Utrecht - form an endless poem in the stones of a street in the center of the Dutch city of Utrecht.
  • Three Wolf Moon - a T-shirt featuring three wolves howling at the Moon.
  • Torpedo juice - slang for an alcoholic beverage, first mixed in World War II, made from pineapple juice and the 180-proof grain alcohol fuel used in United States Navy torpedo motors. Various poisonous additives were mixed into the fuel alcohol by Navy authorities to render the alcohol undrinkable, and various methods were employed by the U.S. sailors to separate the alcohol from the poison.
  • Trattoria - an Italian-style eating establishment that is generally much less formal than a ristorante, but more formal than an osteria.
  • Trencher - a type of tableware, commonly used in medieval cuisine. A trencher was originally a flat round of (usually stale) bread used as a plate, upon which the food could be placed to eat.
  • United Nationa laissez-passer - The UNLP is a valid travel document, which can be used like a national passport (in connection with travel on official missions only).
  • Universal nut sheller - a simple hand-operated machine capable of shelling up to 57 kilograms (126 lb) of raw, sun-dried peanuts per hour. It requires less than $10 USD in materials to make, and is made of concrete poured into two simple fibreglass molds, some metal parts, one wrench, and any piece of rock or wood that can serve as a hammer.
  • Unobtainium - a term used in fiction, engineering, and common situations for a material ideal for a particular application but impractically hard to get.
  • Unsinkable aircraft carrier - a term sometimes used to refer to a geographical or political island that is used to extend the power projection of a military force.
  • US error coins - error coins produced by the US government. There are three categories of error coins as provided by the American Numismatic Association. Metal usage and striking errors referred to widely as planchet errors, die errors, and mint striking errors. This does not include the varieties that the US Mint has issued over the years.
  • Vehicle registration plates of the Northwest Territories - In 1970, to celebrate the centennial of the territory, a unique polar bear-shaped plate was introduced. The basic bear shape has been retained ever since, and the plate is now a registered trademark of the Government of the Northwest Territories.
  • Veterstrikdiploma - a diploma which children between 5 and 6 years can get in the Netherlands and Belgium after they manage to tie their shoelaces by themselves. Veterstrikdiploma is sometimes used as a derogatory term for a diploma or degree which is deemed worthless
  • Warp and woof - the two basic components used in weaving to turn thread or yarn into fabric. The lengthwise or longitudinal warp yarns are held stationary in tension on a frame or loom while the transverse woof is drawn through and inserted over and under the warp.
  • What-not - a piece of furniture derived from the French étagère, which was exceedingly popular in England in the first three-quarters of the 19th century. It usually consists of slender uprights or pillars, supporting a series of shelves for holding china, ornaments, trifles, or "what nots", hence the allusive name.
  • Xyloband - wristbands that contain light-emitting diodes and radio frequency receivers, they were launched by RB Concepts Ltd, a company set up by entrepreneur Clive Banks with inventor Jason Regler. The lights inside the wristband can be controlled by a software program, which sends signals to the wristband, instructing it to light up or blink, for example.

Food and Cooking

  • 99 Flake - A 99 Flake can refer to any of three possible items: an ice cream cone with a Cadbury Flake inserted in it; the Cadbury-produced Flake bar itself specially made for insertion into an ice cream cone; or a wrapped ice cream cone product marketed by Cadbury.
  • American Egg Board - a United States checkoff marketing organization, which focuses on marketing and promotion of eggs for human consumption. The AEB is best known for its long-running slogan, "The Incredible, Edible Egg", and the Just Mayo scandal.
  • Banana ketchup - a popular Philippine fruit ketchup condiment made from banana, sugar, vinegar and spices. Its natural color is brownish-yellow but it is often dyed red to resemble tomato ketchup.
  • Beef on weck - a sandwich found primarily in Western New York State, particularly in the city of Buffalo. It is made with roast beef on a kummelweck roll, a roll that is topped with kosher salt and caraway seeds.
  • Butter mountain - a supply surplus of butter produced in the European Economic Community because of government interventionism that began in the 1970s
  • Calentao - a Paisa and Antioquia, Colombian cuisine dish made from reheated leftovers including rice, egg, pasta, beans, potatoes and other foods such as arepa, chorizo, and ground beef. It is generally eaten for breakfast and is often accompanied by aguapanela, arepa, coffee, juice or hot chocolate.
  • Cookie Puss - an ice cream cake character created by Carvel in the 1970s as an expansion of its line of freshly made exclusive products, along with Hug Me the Bear and Fudgie the Whale.
  • Coronation chicken is a combination of cold cooked chicken meat, herbs and spices, and a creamy mayonnaise-based sauce. It was invented as part of a banquet for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, hence the name.
  • Dark cuisine - hei an liao li is a Chinese neologism referring to a culinary style built around foods or food combinations that sound bizarre or even disgusting but which often are tastier than anticipated.
  • Democracy sausage - the colloquial name for a sausage wrapped in a slice of bread, bought from a sausage sizzle operated as a fundraiser at Australian polling places on election day, often in aid of the institutions that house the polling place.
  • Dishwasher salmon - an American fish dish made with the heat from a dishwasher, particularly from its drying phase.
  • Doctor's sausage - a popular variety of boiled sausage in Russia and the former Soviet republics, corresponding to GOST standard 23670-79, a sort of low-fat bologna. In accordance with the legislation of the Eurasian Economic Union, no meat products may be released using names that are similar to the names of meat products established by interstate (regional) standards, with the exception of meat products manufactured according to these standards. In the technical regulations, as an example of such a name, "Doctor's sausage" (along with some others) is given.
  • Government cheese - processed cheese provided to welfare beneficiaries, Food Stamp recipients, and the elderly receiving Social Security in the United States, as well as to food banks.
  • Floating island - a dessert consisting of meringue floating on crème anglaise (a vanilla custard).
  • Frog cake - an Australian dessert in the shape of a frog's head, composed of sponge cake and cream covered with fondant.
  • Fudgie the Whale - a type of ice cream cake produced and sold by Carvel in its franchise stores. It was developed by Carvel in the 1970s as an expansion of its line of freshly made products, along with Hug Me the Bear and Cookie Puss.
  • Gas mark - a temperature scale used on gas ovens and cookers in the United Kingdom, Ireland and some Commonwealth of Nations countries.
  • Hershey's Kiss plume
  • Larder - a cool area for storing food prior to use. Originally, it was where raw meat was larded—covered in fat—to be preserved.
  • Lemon stick - a type of stick candy. They are similar to candy canes and peppermint sticks except lemon oil and acids are used for the flavoring.
  • McArabia - a pita bread sandwich available at all McDonald's outlets in Arab countries and Pakistan. It is known as the Grilled Chicken foldover in Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa, as McOriental in Spain, France and Holland, the McTurco in Turkey, Greek Mac in Greece and Cyprus, and as the McKebab in Israel.
  • Mennonite cuisine - food that is unique to and/or commonly associated with Mennonites, a Christian denomination that came out of sixteenth century Protestant Reformation in Switzerland and The Netherlands.
  • Milk toast - a breakfast dish consisting of toasted bread in warm milk, typically with sugar and butter.
  • Mother of vinegar - a biofilm composed of a form of cellulose, yeast, and bacteria that sometimes develops on fermenting alcoholic liquids during the process that turns alcohol into acetic acid with the help of oxygen from the air and acetic acid bacteria (AAB). It is similar to the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) mostly known from production of kombucha, but develops to a much lesser extent due to lesser availability of yeast, which is often no longer present in wine/cider at this stage, and a different population of bacteria. Mother of vinegar is often added to wine, cider, or other alcoholic liquids to produce vinegar at home, although only the bacteria is required, but historically has also been used in large scale production.
  • Mushroom ketchup - a style of ketchup that is prepared with mushrooms as its primary ingredient. Originally, ketchup in the United Kingdom was prepared with mushrooms as a primary ingredient, instead of tomato, the main ingredient in contemporary preparations of ketchup.
  • Nixtamalization - a process for the preparation of corn, or other grain, in which the grain is soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution, usually limewater (but sometimes aqueous alkali metal carbonates), washed, and then hulled.
  • Persipan - a material used in confectionery. It is similar to marzipan but, instead of almonds, is made with apricot or peach kernels. Persipan consists of 40% ground kernels and 60% sugar.
  • Placenta cake - a dish from ancient Greece and Rome consisting of many dough layers interspersed with a mixture of cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves, baked and then covered in honey. The dessert is mentioned in classical texts such as the Greek poems of Archestratos and Antiphanes, as well as the De agri cultura of Cato the Elder.
  • Popcorn - a variety of corn kernel which expands and puffs up when heated
  • Princess cake - a traditional Swedish layer cake or torte consisting of alternating layers of airy sponge cake, pastry cream, raspberry jam and a thick-domed layer of whipped cream. The cake is covered by a layer of marzipan, giving it a smooth rounded top. The marzipan overlay is usually green, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and often decorated with a pink marzipan rose. The original recipe first appeared in the 1948 Prinsessornas kokbok cookbook, which was published by Jenny Åkerström (1867-1957), teacher of the three daughters of Prince Carl, Duke of Västergötland.
  • Psychology of eating meat - a complex area of study illustrating the confluence of morality, emotions, cognition, and personality characteristics.
  • Scorched rice - a thin crust of slightly browned rice at the bottom of the cooking pot. It is produced during the cooking of rice over direct heat from a flame.
  • Skilly - a weak broth that was made with oatmeal mixed with water.
  • Soldiers (food) - a thin strip of toast; the strips that a slice is cut into are reminiscent of soldiers on parade.
  • Solo garlic - Solo garlic is a type of garlic where the bulb is 1 giant clove.
  • Soy curls - a soy based meat alternative, made from boiling and dehydrating soybeans, with a texture similar to chicken. Soy curls are prepared by boiling, baking or frying.
  • Squash - a non-alcoholic beverage concentrated syrup used in beverage making.
  • Starch mogul - a machine that makes shaped candies or candy centers from syrups or gels, such as gummi candy. These softer candies and centers are made by filling a tray with cornstarch, stamping the desired shape into the starch, and then pouring the filling or gel into the holes made by the stamp. When the candies have set, they are removed from the trays and the starch is recycled.
  • Stargazy pie - a Cornish dish made of baked pilchards (sardines), along with eggs and potatoes, covered with a pastry crust. Although there are a few variations using other types of fish, the unique feature of stargazy pie is fish heads (and sometimes tails) protruding through the crust, so that they appear to be gazing to the stars.
  • Toast sandwich - a sandwich made with two slices of bread in which the filling is a thin slice of toasted bread, which may be heavily buttered.
  • Wacky cake - a spongy, cocoa-based cake. It is unique in that unlike many pastries and desserts, no eggs, butter or milk are used to make the cake batter.
  • World's longest hot dog

Transit

  • Articulated bus - also referred to as a banana bus, bendy bus, tandem bus, vestibule bus, wiggle wagon, stretch bus, or an accordion bus, (either a motor bus or trolleybus) is an articulated vehicle used in public transportation.
  • Automated guideway transit - a type of fixed guideway transit infrastructure with a riding or suspension track that supports and physically guides one or more driverless vehicles along its length.
  • Bi-articulated bus - a type of high-capacity articulated bus with an extra axle and a second articulation joint, as well as extended length. Bi-articulated buses tend to be employed in high-frequency core routes or bus rapid transit schemes rather than in conventional bus routes.
  • Bicycle lift - are powered mechanical systems for moving bicycles uphill. They are used where the steepness of a slope or other situations like subway crowds make riding uphill difficult.
  • Bicycle stairway - a pedestrian stairway which also has a channel alongside it to facilitate walking a bicycle up or down the stairway.The channel itself is also often called a wheeling ramp, push ramp or runnel.
  • Bus rapid transit creep - a phenomenon commonly defined as a bus rapid transit (BRT) system that fails to meet the requirements to be considered "true BRT". These systems are often marketed as a fully realized bus rapid transit system, but end up being described as more of an improvement to regular bus service by proponents of the "BRT creep" term.
  • Cincinnati Subway - a partially completed rapid transit system beneath the streets of Cincinnati, Ohio. Although the system only grew to a little over 2 miles (3.2 km) in length, its derelict tunnels and stations make up the largest abandoned subway tunnel system in the United States.
  • Comparison of European road signs
  • Comparison of MUCTD-influenced traffic signs
  • Comparison of traffic signs in English-speaking territories
  • Dual mode bus is a hybrid bus that can run independently on power from two different sources, typically electricity from overhead lines (in the same way as trolleybuses) or batteries, alternated with conventional fossil fuel (generally diesel fuel).
  • TRAM-EM European Tramdriver Championship - the European championship for competitive tram driving.
  • Gadgetbahn - a neologism that refers to a public transport concept or implementation that is touted by its developers and supporters as futuristic or innovative, but in practice is less feasible, reliable, and more expensive than traditional modes such as buses, trams and trains.
  • Guided buses - buses capable of being steered by external means, usually on a dedicated track or roll way that excludes other traffic, permitting the maintenance of schedules even during rush hours. Unlike trolleybuses or rubber-tired trams, for part of their routes guided buses are able to share road space with general traffic along conventional roads, or with conventional buses on standard bus lanes.
  • Kassel kerb - a special kerb (curb in US English) designed for low-floor buses that serve an elevated bus stop platform.
  • The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (usually referred to as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, abbreviated MUTCD) is a document issued by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) to specify the standards by which traffic signs, road surface markings, and signals are designed, installed, and used.
  • Pico y placa - a driving restriction policy aimed to mitigate traffic congestion. The scheme was initially set in place in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1998, by then mayor Enrique Peñalosa to help regulate traffic during rush hours. The system restricts traffic access into a pre-established urban area for vehicles with license plate numbers ending in certain digits on pre-established days and during certain hours.
  • Platform screen doors - also known as platform edge doors (PEDs), are used at some train, rapid transit and people mover stations to separate the platform from train tracks, as well as on some bus rapid transit, tram and light rail systems.
  • Road rail vehicle - a dual-mode vehicle which can operate both on rail tracks and roads.
  • Rubber tyred metro - a form of rapid transit system that uses a mix of road and rail technology. The vehicles have wheels with rubber tires that run on rolling pads inside guide bars for traction, as well as traditional railway steel wheels with deep flanges on steel tracks for guidance through conventional switches as well as guidance in case a tyre fails.
  • Trackless train - a road-going articulated vehicle used for the transport of passengers, comprising a driving vehicle pulling one or more carriages connected by drawbar couplings, in the manner of a road-going railway train.
  • Transit Elevated Bus - a proposed new bus concept where a guided bus straddles above road traffic, giving it the alternative names such as straddling bus, straddle bus, land airbus, or tunnel bus by international media.
  • Transit village - a pedestrian-friendly mixed-use district or neighborhood oriented around the station of a high-quality transit system, such as rail or B.R.T.
  • Translohr - a rubber-tired tramway (or guided bus) system, originally developed by Lohr Industrie of France and now run by a consortium of Alstom Transport and Fonds stratégique d'investissement (FSI) as newTL, which took over from Lohr in 2012.
  • Trolleybus - an electric bus that draws power from dual overhead wires (generally suspended from roadside posts) using spring-loaded trolley poles.
  • Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals - a multilateral treaty designed to increase road safety and aid international road traffic by standardising the signing system for road traffic (road signs, traffic lights and road markings) in use internationally.