Yankee
I am the living death
the memorial day on wheels
I am your Yankee doodle dandy
your John Wayne come home
your Fourth of July firecracker
exploding in the grave
Poem by Ron Kovic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Kovic and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee
tenebrous
I like long and unusual words, and anybody who does not share my tastes is not compelled to read me. Policemen and politicians are under some obligation to make themselves comprehensible to the intellectually stunted, but not I. Let my prose be tenebrous and rebarbative; let my pennyworth of thought be muffled in gorgeous habilements; lovers of Basic English will look to me in vain. — Robertson Davies , Marchbanks' Garland
See also:
restive
to her credit in that thread we have “rested” and “restive”, which are near antonyms that looks like synonyms. We had fun in that thread with near synonyms that looked antonyms. Can we compile the reverse or in that vein here? [Xah Lee, 2004, online forum on English]
See also: Antonymous Synonyms
blackhead
blackhead is technically called comedo. Also comes as whitehead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/comedo
slob
Pity the poor slob who just wants to get something done. Set adrift in a sea of functionality he can neither comprehend nor control — buried in toolbars, insulted by assistants — he can only look at the state of the average application's user interface and think that things can't possibly get any worse.
Inevitably, he's wrong. Long relegated to the back seat of the software development process in favor of ever-more useless features, usability has recently been chloroformed, hog-tied and stuffed in the trunk. Exhibit A: the newly prereleased Netscape 6. The tyranny of the skins has begun.
A satire on software “skins” phenomenon, by Greg Knauss. 2000-04. From: http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/04/10/daily.html.
brazen
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land:
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Sonnet “The New Colossus” by American poet Emma Lazarus, etched on the Freedom Goddess statue at New York. See also Las Vegas Travelog: New York New York.
yellow-bellied
There are a number of conceptual, logical, and methodological flaws in his doctrines. As part of his efforts to gain a mainstream following, he publishes the Journal of Yellow-bellied Absenteeism.
~2004, rubbish generated by a computer.
infelicities
After a year or two, many typographical errors and infelicities had been spotted. I took on the role of gathering and acting on these corrections, with the following goals.
2002, from a computer language manual. http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/preface-jfp.html
sartorially
Vampire. In Myth: Lithe, seductive, hypnotic creatures of the night who revel in bacchanalian pleasure seeking and live wild and erotic unlives. In Reality: Clumsy, fat, socially inept, sartorially blinded fuck-upsthat are so pathetic even the goths won't hang out with themanymore.
from a satirical website http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Main_Page
turn-key
Because there is no widely accepted standard for implementing a VPN, many companies have developed turn-key solutions on their own. In the next few sections, we'll discuss some of the solutions offered by Cisco, one of the most prevalent networking technology companies.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/vpn.htm/printable
poster child
The phrase poster child originally referred to a child afflicted by some disease or deformity whose picture is used on posters to raise money for charitable purposes; “she was the poster child for muscular dystrophy”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poster_child
profligacy
If my character is flawed by a few minor faults, but is otherwise decent and moral, if you can point out only a few scattered blemishes on an otherwise immaculate surface, if no one can accuse me of greed, or of pruriance, or of profligacy, if I live a virtuous life, free of defilement (pardon, for a moment, my self-praise), and if I am to my friends a good friend, my father deserves all the credit... As it is now, he deserves from me unstinting gratitude and praise. I could never be ashamed of such a father, nor do I feel any need, as many people do, to apologize for being a freedman's son.
From the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (BCE 65-68), translated and quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace
lanyard
It's rather a cultural curiosity that most cellphones sold in US don't have lanyard hole, while in Far East, almost everyone attaches a decorative lanyard to their cellphone, especially girls. The lanyard sold are extremely diverse, from plain strap to shiny beads to Chinese knots↗to bells & whistles (literally) to little cartoon effigies ranging just about all anime characters (e.g.Hello Kitty↗, Doraemon cat↗...).Walk into any street shop you can see arrays of these decorative lanyards. They are rather not used to hang the phone, but to hang from the phone as a littel personality trinket.
Xah Lee
lull
The sensation of talking to the two men, however, is surprisingly similar. Normal conversation is like a game of tennis: you talk and I listen, you listen and I talk, and we feel scrutinized by our conversational partner only when the ball is in our court. But Yarbrough and Harms never stop watching, even when they're doing the talking. Yarbrough would comment on my conversational style, noting where I held my hands as I talked, or how long I would wait out a lull in the conversation.
Among those who do very well at face-reading, tellingly, are some aphasics, such as stroke victims who have lost the ability to understand language.
Annals Of Psychology, The Naked Face, Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them?, By Malcolm Gladwell, August 5, 2002. http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm
halberd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halberd
cataract
My fall was stopped by a terrible squash, that sounded louder to my ears than the cataract of Niagara;...
Gulliver's Travels, Part 2 Chapter 8.
over-the-hill
“...That was back in the eighties, you over-the-hill fuckfaces...” [Satire, http://www.suck.com/daily/2001/06/08/]
ditty
Meet Prussian Blue. The girls, Lynx and Lamb Gaede — who look barely old enough to play Mario Kart, let alone “awaken their race” — have their own Web site and are releasing their second CD. They perform mainly covers of existing white supremacist music, though they are adding some ditties of their own.
Michael Seringhaus, 2005-10-27, The bittersweet melody of racist tunes, http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=30523
See also: lyrics of Victory Day (by Prussian Blue)
dirndl
Their site features a photo gallery, primarily offering snaps of the duo sporting dirndls and relaxing on grassy hillocks, or playing with their infant sister, Dresden.
Michael Seringhaus, 2005-10-27, The bittersweet melody of racist tunes, http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=30523
copasetic
“All right, this is the way it's gonna work. We drop everybody off at their houses. Everybody's gonna sit tight until I go make sure everything's copathetic with Kile and Jasper.” “The word is copasetic, Marty.”
dialogue from movie Mean Creek, 2004.
© 2004-2007 by Xah Lee.