Word of the Day - Add to this thread

[hester_prynne]

FOPPISHLY

This word, tho all too often mistaken for a gesture inclined to clumsiness, or a type of hybrid rabbit, is actually a word taken from the leprechaunese language. It translates into something like "angle of the little hats".

Heh.
H

[stilltrucking]

You kill me hester

[eugeneherman]

In the Thai language, only roughly phonetically spelled in our letters, the word for 'pumpkin' is 'PHUK'. Most all Thai immigrants are counseled to avoid the 'funny' words that mean some 'funny' aka 'embarrassing thing in English. Hey! That's the word! Him BARE ASSED. In language or cross language alliterative entendres all always the funniest thing to me!

[Lightning Rod]

this one goes out to joel: you'll have to ask him how to pronounce it

concupiscence
strong desire; especially : sexual desire

[stilltrucking]

con·cu·pis·cence (kŏn-kyū'pĭ-səns)
http://www.answers.com/topic/concupiscence
I listened to it there when I first read the text a couple of months ago, I liked the sound of it.

"Lebenswelt"

"What an enemy we have in Greek!"

[Arcadia]

more

(nitroglicerine something) for more or less september. He looks so orphan that I couldn´t resist to acompañar him to the doctor today... I tried to be a silent companion until my father didn´t remembered the name of the medicine he was taking during 15 seconds.... well, the nitroglicerine doctor is so kind!!. I hope the fact that he almost died two years ago doing an ergometry is not a bad sign...

[stilltrucking]

re: more
still a lazy student of zen
no sitting practice going
except for waiting rooms
I do my best sitting there
><><<><><><><>><><>><>>>><

another German word:
Gewesensein

memory of having been ...

[stilltrucking]

Arachnophillia :

Contrary to popular belief, the female only rarely eats the male after mating, and L. mactans is the only black widow species for which this form of sexual cannibalism has been observed in the wild.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_wido ... production

[stilltrucking]

apophany

William Gibson dragged the word from psychological-circle obscurity with the publication of Pattern Recognition early in 2003. One of its central themes is the messy boundaries between careful observation, paranoia, and delusion. The theme of apophenia is primarily carried by the protagonist's mother, who works with a group dedicated to transcribing other-world voices heard amongst random electronic white noise. Gibson's inclusion of the term in his text spawned a blog-bound meme frenzy, and the Skeptics Dictionary's definition was copied and pasted and discussed ad nauseum for a few months around this time.


"There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, Cayce knew, took for granted was there."
-William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Apophany may be the proper description for an individual's obsessive, recurring visions of paranormal activity, extraterrestrial clues, or absolute belief in divination methods like numerology. Maybe even softlinking.

One danger in this word is its easy misuse. Apophany is the negatively valenced term for pareidolia or even creativity. We should be careful in its application and skeptical when we hear it. Was Picasso "suffering" from this disease when he saw a bull's head in a bicycle seat? Do we need Prozac to stop us seeing the fun connections between the Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon? Are we nuts when we see the naughty bits in the Rorschach blot? Was Jung deluded when he described acausal synchronicity as fact? (Well, yes, for this last one, but you see my point.)

So when is it appropriate to use? Three things distinguish the affliction from eureka.

The inability or unwillingness to attribute the connections to random chance. (Voices in the static.)
The incredulousness of the things being connected. (A pillow and Old Scratch.)
The frequency with which the connections are found.

What's really happening?
James Alcock, writing for the CSICOP, suggests that sufferers are meeting deep emotional needs by setting up an expectation which heavily influences perception. Small bits of evidence that should be rejected on a rational basis are instead accepted by default, and rationality changed to fit the perceived evidence. This is reinforced when believers listen to each others' stories. I posit that this is why cheerios tend to cluster, because it's easier to believe around other believers than around skeptics, and belief is comforting.

Brugger's research says there is definite brain chemistry at work here, as people with elevated dopamine levels seem to be more susceptible. Given that elevated dopamine is a common stress response, this underscores Alcock's assertion that the altered belief system is meeting some deeper emotional need.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
-Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi

[stilltrucking]

Cloy:

cause surfeit through excess though initially pleasing;

Surfeit:

9. to indulge to excess in anything.

[Origin: 1250–1300; (n.) ME sorfete, surfait < MF surfait, surfet (n. use of ptp. of surfaire to overdo), equiv. to sur- sur-1 + fait < L factus, ptp. of facere to do (see fact); (v.) sorfeten, deriv. of

[stilltrucking]

Transience:
· S: (n) transience, transiency, transitoriness (an impermanence that suggests the inevitability of ending or dying)
· S: (n) brevity, briefness, transience (the attribute of being brief or fleeting)

On Transience
By Sigmund Freud
Published in 1915
We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.

http://www.freuds-requiem.com/transience.html

[stilltrucking]

The walk is described - or rather, imagined - by Freud in a brief and little-known essay called "On Transience", which Von Unwerth reads as providing the perfect stuff of micro-history: "a portrait in miniature of the world of its writer". Freud's concern in this essay is with mourning and melancholia, and he frames his thoughts in the form of a recollection of a warm and lingering afternoon in the "smiling countryside" of the Dolomites during the summer of 1913. His companions are "a young but already famous poet", assumed to be Rainier Maria Rilke, and his "taciturn friend", assumed to be Rilke's former lover and muse, the writer Lou Andreas-Salome.

He did not live to see the irony of his prediction. He died in 1939, just as the skies over Europe were darkening once more.

Freud and Rilke met only twice, and the encounter which was recreated as the elegiac summer walk probably took place in a hotel lobby in Munich. Rilke, who thought psychoanalysis would destroy creativity by "correcting" the artistic instincts with bright red ink, kept his distance.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/stor ... 87,00.html

[stilltrucking]

Jouissance

[Lightning Rod]

perihelion is a great word

it means the closest point to the sun

Perihelion

[stilltrucking]

Warrior:
That seems a strange term for someone who sits in a secure location and pilots a drone that kills people. A strange term for someone who sits in an underground bunker and sends death down on hundreds of thousands, millions of non combatants with the push of a button.


Apeiron