English Vocabulary: Nouns

Alas, many of the people who are highly visible and active can best be characterized as “toxic”. These are people who, because of the nature of their personalities and attitudes, have a consistently negative emotional effect on the people they interact with. Without necessarily intending to do so, they have created a constant miasma of disrespect, nitpicking, defensiveness, discouragement, and intolerance. This toxic atmosphere permeates the entire culture, gradually driving less toxic people into seclusion or to other languages, or souring their moods such that they become toxic as well. This leaves an even higher concentration of toxicity, affecting even more people, on and on.

Lee: seems Google Plus social network is winding down. Everybody got tired of it.
Craig: Yeah. I'm sucking on the dregs now, but they ain't tasty.

“Pagan Poetry” has been highly praised by critics, with many citing it as a highlight of the album. Allmusic said of “Pagan Poetry” that it “shares a spacious serenity with the album's quietest moments” and included this song as a track pick. Rolling Stone said: “In ‘Pagan Poetry’, she deploys the implied heaven of Zeena Parkins harp and a flotilla of music boxes with an Asian-teahouse touch.” Blender said “‘Pagan Poetry’ sounds like the prelude to a particularly exotic sexual interlude.” In March 2006, in the number 77 of the Spanish edition of Rolling Stone, “Pagan Poetry” was ranked number 38 by Spanish music professionals and experts on a list of the best songs of the 21st century. Slant Magazine said of the album: “Vespertine delicately traces the cycle of said relationship” and called the song “loss of personal identity and full possessive entrapment”. Pitchfork Media placed the song at number 227 on its list of “The Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s”.

Theodicy (play /θiːˈɒdɪsi/ from Greek theos - “god” + dike - “justice”) is a theological and philosophical study which attempts to prove God's intrinsic or foundational nature of omnibenevolence (all-loving), omniscience (all-knowing), and omnipotence (all-powerful). Theodicy is usually concerned with the God of the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, due to the relevant assertions of their respective holy texts. The fundamental dilemma of theodicy is the problem of evil: its continuing existence and God's apparent inability or unwillingness to eradicate it.

A tort, in common law jurisdictions, is a wrong that involves a breach of a civil duty (other than a contractual duty) owed to someone else. It is differentiated from a crime, which involves a breach of a duty owed to society in general. Though many acts are both torts and crimes, prosecutions for crime are mostly the responsibility of the state, private prosecutions being rarely used; whereas any party who has been injured may bring a lawsuit for tort. It is also differentiated from equity, in which a petitioner complains of a violation of some right. One who commits a tortious act is called a tortfeasor. The equivalent of tort in civil law jurisdictions is delict. Tort may be defined as a personal injury; or as “a civil action other than a breach of contract.”

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. — 1984, George Orwell

I. Exordium

What is a living creature? It responds to things, and it multiplies. From the perspective of computing, it's an entity that is capable of input and output, with a manner of self-propagation.

Ah, propagation… Therein lies the interesting element–the growth of a population. Consider a hypothetical case, where you start out on a desert island with a pair of male and female creatures; each female produces just one female offspring per generation, and stops reproducing after two generation. Assume the male is immortal, and massive incest occurs to create all subsequent generations, all females. The heritage diagram of sorts would look something like this: …

While not quite new, the concept is recent - largely confined to Twenty-First Century films such as “Saw” and its sequels, and Roth's earlier films “Cabin Fever” and “Hostel.” In addition, “Captivity,” which premiered last Friday, June 13, has attracted the “torture porn” label - with its billboards becoming especially controversial. How long will it be before the MPAA follows the lead of movie reviewers in labeling films “torture porn”? (Meanwhile, in the context of television, Senator Sam Brownback may well succeed in convincing the FCC to move aggressively against depictions of violence, especially explicit ones - a move that has led to significant blowback from the ACLU.)

Beginning April 29, 1957, visitors were able to walk through the castle and view several dioramas depicting the story of Sleeping Beauty. The original dioramas were designed in the style of Eyvind Earle, production designer for Disney's 1959 film Sleeping Beauty, and were then redone in 1977 to resemble the window displays on Main Street, U.S.A.. The walkthrough was closed for unspecified reasons in October 2001; popular belief claims the September 11th attacks and the potential danger that ensued played a major factor in the closing.

In the 1970s, she became well-known internationally for her humanitarian work and advocacy for the rights of the poor and helpless, which was documented by Malcolm Muggeridge in his documentary and subsequent book Something Beautiful for God. Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity continued to grow during her life-time, and at the time of her death, they had 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counselling programs, orphanages, and schools.

Miasma means an infectious or noxious vapor, especially from putrescent organic matter, which pollutes the atmosphere. The word “miasma” came from ancient Greek and meant “pollution.”. At first, people didn't have a complete notion of miasma, and they just had known an obscure picture of it. But after several decades, more and more medical researches on miasma had appeared and made the notion of miasma become popular among human society. The miasma theory, also called the miasmatic theory, was believed holding diseases in itself, and was considered to be a noxious form of “bad air”, which had the same meaning of malaria. Miasma was also suggested to be a poisonous vapor or mist filled with particles from decomposed matter (miasmata) that caused illnesses.

Venom in many snakes, such as pitvipers, affects virtually every organ system in the human body and can be a combination of many toxins, including cytotoxins [cell], hemotoxins [blood], neurotoxins [nerves], and myotoxins, allowing for an enormous variety of symptoms. Earlier, the venom of a particular snake was considered to be one kind only i.e. either hemotoxic or neurotoxic, and this erroneous belief may still persist wherever the updated literature is hard to access. Although there is much known about the protein compositions of venoms from Asian and American snakes, comparatively little is known of Australian snakes.

Most snakebites, whether by a venomous snake or not, will have some type of local effect. There is minor pain and redness in over 90% of cases, although this varies depending on the site. Bites by vipers and some cobras may be extremely painful, with the local tissue sometimes becoming tender and severely swollen within 5 minutes. This area may also bleed and blister and can eventually lead to tissue necrosis.

…

Application of a tourniquet to the bitten limb is generally not recommended.

Joke: Girl in Hotel with Amenities

a pretty girl is checking out in a hotel, the bill is $800. She complains it's too much. Manager says its standard fare, hotel features swimming pool, gym, and wifi. The girl said she didn't use any of it. Manager says: but it's provided. The girl proceeds to make a payment, but deduct $700 for bedding with manager, so pays only $100. Manager panicked and said: when did i? Girl said: but it's provided.

Even so, there are many titles we couldn't fit here that we're still anguishing over. Djuna Barnes' Nightwood dropped in and out. Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point hovered for a while at the edges. There were writers we had to admit we love more for their short stories than their novels — Donald Barthelme, Annie Proulx, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty. We could agree that some of Gore Vidal's novels are an essential pleasure, but it's his non-fiction that's essential period. Then there was the intellectual massif of Norman Mailer, indisputably one of the great writers of our time, but his supreme achievements are his headlong reconfigurations of the whole idea of non-fiction, books like Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song. Dawn Powell, Mordechai Richler, Thomas Wolfe, Peter Carey, J.F. Powers, Mary McCarthy, Edmund White, Larry McMurtry, Katherine Ann Porter, Amy Tan, John Dos Passos, Oscar Hijuelos — we looked over our bookcases and many more than 100 names laid down a claim. This means you, Stephen King.

As her losses mounted to more than $200, Budz fed the machine $5 tokens, pressing the Spin button almost rhythmically. No serious slot player touches the pull handle on a one-armed bandit.

Now the veneer of credibility, already bruised by allegations of tamper-prone data, secret food caches and smuggled supplies, has cracked. … The Biospherians will soldier on, but their two-year experiment in self- sufficiency is starting to look less like science and more like a $150 million stunt.

Rayment, 30, and his twin brother Adrian feature in the upcoming sequel Matrix Reloaded, as a pair of kung-fu fighting villains. The menacing twins play rogue virii, roaming the Matrix in all-white attire and silver dreadlocks.

Ever wonder why trains have this wedge-like shaped thing at the front? It is called the cowcatcher. In the early days of trains (giant, black, iron-clad, coal-burning steam-engined trains, humongous cylindrical shaped that are water-boilers), often it would run into cows. Of course it would kill the cows but may leave undesirable things on the track. Thus, they developed this wedge-shaped metal grille that swipes animals in-the-way out of the way. (Of course it would still kill the cows, but human amenity has priority) As times moved on, cows no-longer stands in the ways of trains, but the cowcatcher evolved into an aesthetic element, as if to say: “nothing will get in my way!”.

frontispiece is the front illustration facing the title page of a book

selling like hotcakes.

Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars …

there are lots of sultans in Arabian Nights. The leaders of different cultures throughout times have different names. There are: king, czar, emperor, sultan, chairman, president, chieftain …

Even without hard answers from the labs, boomers — and the people who market to them — have begun taking matters into their own hands. Bookstores bulge with memory-improvement guides. The Web is awash in memory sites, and numerous hospitals and private therapists teach memory courses. There are even over-the-counter memory nostrums available in health-food stores. To find out whether any of these work, I decided to spend a couple of weeks talking to the memory savants and sampling the memory cures. Total recall might be too much to ask, but total immersion was the only way to find out.

Take a group of passionate, obsessive, suspicious and Web-inclined individuals (both journalists and Mac lovers qualify). Tell them that there is a secret deal between two organizations about which they are passionate and obsessive. They will then stay up all night speculating about who sold his soul to whom, and will exhaust their vocabularies pillorying the apparent soul-sellers.

Lecter draws “Golgotha After the Deposition” and Starling's inquiry leads into a running religious discussion.

as in, the mandible of a longhorn beetle.

If you are a fan of Star Wars movie, you must have heard of Darth Maul. Darth Maul is a Sith lord apprentice, who wields an double-sided light saber — the bane of Jedi Knights. The name isn't picked randomly, of course. Darth imparts “dark” or “death”, and maul means heavy hammer or injury by such hammer.

warlords in uniform has lots of insignias, assholes of infinite order, Purple Hearts and all that shit.

Lemming, the rodent known for mass migration sometimes resulted mass drowning, misunderstood as mass suicide.

This word appeared in the dialogue in the movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape, where one sister is buying their mother a sundress, and her pesky sister retorted why she'd want one because she's got varicose veins all over.

Lackey is not a common word today, but i it appeared in children's story such as Cinderella. A lackey is a liveried male servant, while livery means a uniform. In Alice in Wonderland: Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper, there's also this passage about a footman wearing livery:

For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood — (she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish) — and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.

For the purpose of determining maximum length a river's “true source” is considered to be the source of whichever tributary is farthest from the mouth. This tributary may or may not have the same name as the main stem river. For example, the source of the Mississippi River is normally said to be Lake Itasca in the U.S. state of Minnesota, but the most distant source in the Mississippi system is that of the Jefferson River in the state of Montana, a tributary of the Missouri River which in turn is a tributary of the Mississippi. When the Mississippi is measured from mouth to this farthest source, it is called the Mississippi-Missouri-Jefferson. Furthermore, it is sometimes hard to state exactly where a river begins, especially rivers that are formed by ephemeral streams, swamps, or changing lakes. In this article, length means the length of the longest continuous river channel in a given river system, regardless of name.

Zebras have excellent hearing, and tend to have larger, rounder ears than horses. Like horses and other ungulates, zebra can turn their ears in almost any direction. In addition to eyesight and hearing, zebras have an acute sense of smell and taste.

At some point, the armada of devices we strap to our bodies like tools on Batman's belt will coalesce into a smaller number of multifunction devices. Equipped with radio links, a pda can serve as an appliance-control remote, a digital wallet, a cell phone, an identity badge, an e-mail station, a digital book, a pager and perhaps even a digital camera. There is sure to be a catchy name for this all-purpose Internet-enabled thingy, perhaps Wireless Internet Digital Gadget for Electronic Transactions, or WIDGET.

in typography, ligature is certain glyphs that are made up of combined letters. e.g.: fi=fi, ae=æ

rich folks have manors, estates, mansions. From Wikipedia: «The term is sometimes applied to country houses which belonged to gentry families, as well as to grand stately homes, particularly as a technical term for minor late medieval fortified country houses intended more for show than for defense.»