Word of the Day!

[ksquared]

RCG_man writes:
Rimlesses. Is this a word? I suppose it depends if rimless is a noun or adjective. Didn't sound right when a colleague used it at work today.

RIMLESS (rim-less) adjective –
If you are an optician:
lacking a rim or frame “rimless glasses”

RIMLESS (rim-less) noun –
If you are a hunter:
A type of cartridge with an extraction groove cut into the base of the case, allowing the base to be the same diameter as the head.

RIMLESS (rim-less) objectative
If you are clueless and rude at times:
ksquared

RIMLESS' - "plural"

[ksquared]

elucidate \ih-LOO-suh-dayt\ verb
1 : to make lucid especially by explanation or analysis
*2 : to give a clarifying explanation

Example sentence:
Karen was asked to elucidate a bit for those in the audience who weren't up-to-date on the latest research.

To "elucidate" is to make something clear that was formerly murky or confusing -- and it is perfectly clear how the modern term got that meaning. "Elucidate" traces to the Latin term "lucidus," which means "lucid." "Lucidus" in turn descends from the verb "lucere," meaning "to shine." So "elucidating" can be thought of as the figurative equivalent of shining a light on something to make it easier to see. "Lucere" has also produced other shining offspring in English. Among its descendants are "lucid" itself (which can mean "shining," "clear-headed," or "easily understood"), "lucent" (meaning "giving off light" or "easily seen through"), and "translucent" (meaning "partly transparent" or "clear enough for light to pass through").

[ksquared]

TEMPORIZE (tem'pu-rīz"), —v.i., -rized, -riz•ing.

In response to Frank's job offer, Karen temporized—

a.) realizing a girl had to be breathtakingly practical about such things, she demanded a complete accounting of his store’s profits before she would answer.
b.) not sure whether she really wanted to spend any of her work days with Frank, Karen babbled on, delaying a final decision.
c.) this was the moment she had dreamed of her entire young life.

And the answer is “b”.
1. to be indecisive or evasive to gain time or delay acting.
2. to comply with the time or occasion; yield temporarily or ostensibly to prevailing opinion or circumstances.
3. to treat or parley so as to gain time (usually fol. by with).
4. to come to terms (usually fol. by with).
5. to effect a compromise (usually fol. by between).

[ksquared]

TETCHY(TETCH-ee)adjective: irritably or peevishly sensitive; ie:touchy

Example sentence:
After learning how tetchy some of the participants could be, she stifled her urge to post an epigram lest she further offend any additional delicate sensibilities.

"Tetchy" is a word that may have been coined by Shakespeare -- its first known use in English occurs in _Romeo and Juliet_ (1592). Etymologists are not certain how the word came about, but some have suggested that it derives from "tetch," an obsolete noun meaning "habit." The similarity both in meaning and pronunciation to "touchy" might lead you to conclude that "tetchy" is related to it, but there is no conclusive evidence to suggest such a connection. The adjectives "teched" and "tetched," meaning "mentally unbalanced," are variations of "touched," and are probably also unrelated to "tetchy."

[ksquared]

One of the regular contributors is a self-proclaimed philosopher. She produces reams of taradiddle. Her writing can be described as:

a.) Old-fashioned and out of date.

b.) Confessions of the self-absorbed.

c.) Pretentious nonsense.








And the answer is "c".

TARADIDLE (tar-a-did-dle) noun: pretentious nonsense.

[ksquared]

The students considered their teacher a martinet who

a.) inspired them with his exceptional passion for and knowledge of his subject matter.

b.) enjoyed punishing his students for the slightest infraction.

c.) parroted the teaching methods of others and was devoid of creativity.







And the answer is “b”

MARTINET (mar-ti-net) noun
Pronunciation: (mär"tn-et', mär'tn-et")

1. a strict disciplinarian, esp. a military one.
2. someone who stubbornly adheres to methods or rules.

[ksquared]

INSELBERG (in-sul-berg) noun: an isolated mountain

Karen tied her hiking boots, adjusted her pack, and looked out across the distance at an inselberg rising abruptly from the flat plain surrounding it. "Not to worry", said she "I've been training all year and have the utmost confidance in my abilities".

"Inselberg," which first appeared in English in 1913, comes from the German words "Insel," meaning "island," and "Berg," meaning "mountain," apparently because German explorers thought isolated mountains rising from the plains of southern Africa looked like islands in the midst of the ocean. Geologically speaking, an inselberg is a hill of hard volcanic rock, such as granite, that has resisted wind and weather and remained strong and tall as the land around it eroded away. Ayers Rock and Olga Rocks in central Australia are two spectacular examples of inselbergs. The word "monadnock," derived from the name of Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, is a synonym of "inselberg."

[rinselberg]

INSELBERG (in-sul-berg) noun: an isolated mountain ...

Thanks for clearing that up!

-- R. Inselberg

[hcjilson]

INSELBERG (in-sul-berg) noun: an isolated mountain

"

Count the day lost when you can't learn something new! That was good.....Very Good!
best to you both......hj

[ksquared]

JILSON (jill-son) n: American slang for a modern day Rip Van Winkle

Although this word never reached a high degree of popularity, you can still find it used in some parts of the United States. It’s one of those words whose origin is based on the name of a real person, Jilson Setters.

Jilson Setters, an obscure but talented optician, became a world famous fiddle player and songwriter in his later years. He apparently suffered from culture shock as a result of his exposure to modernity and it is thought that these brief but traumatic encounters were what drove him over the edge resulting in a dramatic career change. This spectacular event also provides credence to the adage that you can in fact “teach an old dog a new trick” and that “past experiences” can have some redeeming value.

The inspiration for the words of his most famous of all songs “Up On An Inselberg” was most likely based on his own peculiar past experiences. Sadly, not all of his tunes made it into the top 10, some of which never graced a single ear. “If I Only Had A Pal” faded into audio obscurity as one of the most dismal failures of all time.

UP ON AN INSELBERG
(to the tune of “Drunken Hiccups” which can be traced back
to even older variations of the same in the British Isles)

I tune up my fiddle, I rosin my bow
I make myself welcome wherever I go
I eat when I’m hungry, I drink when I’m dry
If hard times don’t kill me, I’ll earn ‘til I die

Hiccup, oh lordy, how safe here I feel
Hiccup, oh lordy, how safe here I feel

I bought my own poly, I made my own lens
If I didn’t get it right, I’d make em again
You myops, you presbops, you were all friends of mine
You killed my competitors, but you don’t trouble my mind

Hiccup, oh lordy, how clever I feel
Hiccup, oh lordy, how clever I feel

But all those picky myops refusing to budge

Insisting on perfection no matter my nudge

Those vain presbyopics, wanting tiny little glasses

Starting me thinking they all must be asses

Hiccup, oh lordy, how crazy I feel
Hiccup, oh lordy, how crazy I feel

So way up on an inselberg, I now wander alone
I’m drunk as the devil and a long ways from home

Let the evil empire have them for all that I care

My profits all gone, no more of them to share

Hiccup, oh lordy, how goodly I feel
Hiccup, oh lordy, how goodly I feel

[hcjilson]

That is definitely the first and only time I've been one up on "Inselberg". It won't happen again anytime soon! :bbg:

Outstanding job ksquared!

[slaboff]

LOL, wow that was funny

[rinselberg]

agitprop
n.
Political propaganda (especially, Communist propaganda) communicated in the form of literature, drama, cinema, visual art, music; etc.

Many of Rinselberg's posts, promoting a distinctly neocon foreign policy agenda in the Just Conversation forum, were dismissed as mere agitprop by those with a different point of view.

[hcjilson]

agitprop
n.
Political propaganda (especially, Communist propaganda) communicated in the form of literature, drama, cinema, visual art, music; etc.

Many of Rinselberg's posts, promoting a distinctly neocon foreign policy agenda in the Just Conversation forum, were dismissed as mere agitprop by those with a different point of view.

Among whom I used to be one, however gradually, .......very gradually, he's bringing me around! :bbg: :bbg:

[ksquared]

AWFULIZE (ah-full-ize) verb: to imagine or predict the worst circumstances or outcome.

I believe it’s quite common to awfulize when the topic is foreigh policy. Fortunately there are always those who can de-awfulize the world to the full extent of the initial awfulness. The liberal response may be “how come you’re so wrong, my little neo-con”, but this shouldn’t mean we couldn’t all be Pals.

[ksquared]

NICE (nice) adj:pleasing, agreeable, respectable, overdelicate, fastidious, polite

Baseball great Leo Durocher. Durocher played the infield for two decades, but he is better remembered as the manager who led the New York Giants to their 1954 World Series championship. He is also remembered for coining the phrase “nice guys finish last,” a tough-guy observation that he may or may not have spoken exactly that way and which he used as the title for his 1975 autobiography.

Although these days, the nice in nice guy is considered praise—this is the sense of nice synonymous with “pleasant,” “agreeable,” “congenial,” and “favorable”—these positive senses didn’t develop until the early 1700s, centuries after nice first appeared in print.

So what did nice mean for its first few hundred years of existence? Plenty of things. For starters, nice shares a linguistic ancestor with the word nescience, meaning “ignorance; lack of knowledge or awareness.” Earlier incarnations of (and influences on) nice meant “foolish,” “wanton,” “simpleminded,” and “stupid.” That helps explain some of the other-than-nice senses that once flourished: “lewd, wanton,” and “dissolute”; “coy, modest, diffident,” and “reticent”; “lacking vigor, strength, or endurance”; and “lacking significance; trivial.”

For when mine hours
Were nice and lucky, men did ransom lives
Of me for jests (Shakespeare).

Ere...
The nice Morn on th' Indian steep,
From her cabin'd loop-hole peep (John Milton).

[ksquared]

RIGHT (right) adj., n., adv., v.intr.: so many meaning for such a little word or to put it another way, a little word that carries a big stick.

n.:That which is just, morally good, legal, proper, or fitting. “right”
adv.:In the proper or desired manner:The frame doesn't fit right.
v. tr.:To put in or restore to an upright or proper position: They righted their boat.
v. intr.: To regain an upright or proper position.

And the list goes on and on. But the question I have for today is how did the political Right came to be known by that name?

Let's begin by noting that when they are applied to politics, the terms Right and Left are more arbitrary than absolute. Although right and left are envisioned at opposite ends of an axis, political theorists question what is being measured along that axis: prioritizing equality on the left and liberty on the right? Economic security at one end and economic liberty at the other? You get the idea.

But let’s get back to the origin of Right (and, of course, Left). Those senses originated in the legislative assemblies of the French Revolution, where royalists would sit on the right side of the chamber and the radical politicians would sit on the left.

Over the years and throughout the world, legislative seating and the political beliefs of the Right have moved a few times, but most lexicographers of American English agree on this definition: the Right refers to individuals who profess support of the established order and who favor traditional attitudes and practices and conservative governmental policies.

Of course, that leads to the question of just how to define “traditional attitudes” and “conservative governmental policies”. One could almost say "when you're right, you're right but when you're left you're also right", but luckily for you, I'm out of time.

[ksquared]

BELABOR (be·la·bor) tr.v.: To discuss repeatedly or at length; harp on: Don't belabor the point.

Now if you’re looking for a word to describe - one who spends an unnecessary amount of time explaining a commonly understood topic, I’m afraid belaborer (one who explains or insists on excessively) doesn’t quit work. Some people might use “a Karen”, but this term should only be used for those very special occasions (and this isn’t one of them).

No, the word I'm looking for describes someone who makes a point of explaining something very obvious, mistakenly thinking they are bringing exceptional clarity to an obvious situation. So why not use platitudinarian—one given to banal, trite, or stale remarks - one might ask? Well, I’m not quite sure this one is quite right either.

Other words that may come to mind are preacher, patronizer, and proselytizer, condescender, and harper – that is, “one who harps.” Your own children might use parent.

With so many choices it seemed a moot point consulting Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary and I suppose we would be guilty of belaboring the obvious to marvel over how very scathing this dictionary is. Plus it didn’t have an exact match for what we were looking for either. It did, however, contain this superb definition for a word we’ve most likely used if only in our thoughts. “A bore", which according to Bierce, is a “person who talks when you wish him to listen.”

[ksquared]

CHIP (chip) noun:

• A (cantankerous at times) master optician (see also rare or/and dying breed)
• A small piece of wood used to make pulp. Chips are made either from wood waste in a sawmill or pulpwood operation, or from pulpwood specifically cut for this purpose. Chips are larger and coarser than sawdust.
• A triangular wooden float attached to the end of a log line
• A thin crisp slice of potato fried in deep fat
• A piece of dried bovine dung
• A mark left after a small piece has been chopped or broken off of something
• A small crystal of a silicon semiconductor fabricated to carry out a number of electronic functions in an integrated circuit
• A small round discs used instead of money at the poker table.
• A tiny missing piece
• An image subset window, used in the correlation process.
• A lofted shot played from around the green. Usually played with a pitching wedge or a sand wedge where the hands do not pass hip height and the wrists hinge very little.
• Another name for a household. Big chip refers to the family of the eldest son, while little chip refers to the family households of the younger sons.
• The length of time it takes to transmit either a "0" or a "1" in a binary pulse code.
• A program, established by the Balanced Budget Act, designed to provide health assistance to uninsured, low-income children either through separate programs or through expanded eligibility under state Medicaid programs.
• A simple game language.
• A nickname

He asked his friends to call him “Chip” to avoid confusion.

He was so much like his Dad, everyone started calling him “Chip”.

He could take a chip off the old block and grind it into a pair of lens.

[RGC_man]

Nice. I'm sure it was Jane Austen who thanked someone for scolding her in a nice letter. And Chaucer used it to mean wanton.

[rinselberg]

accolade



"accolade" is a noun, meaning:

1.
a. An expression of approval; praise.
b. A special acknowledgment; an award.

2. A ceremonial embrace, as of greeting or salutation.
3. Ceremonial bestowal of knighthood.

alternatively:

a tangible symbol signifying approval or distinction; "an award for bravery" [syn: award, honor, honour, laurels]


"accolade" can also be a transitive verb:

To praise or honor: “His works are invariably accoladed as definitive even as they sparkle and spark” (Malcolm S. Forbes).


ETYMOLOGY

People usually have to stick their necks out to earn accolades, and this is as it should be. In tracing accolade back to its Latin origins, we find that it was formed from the prefix ad-, “to, on,” and the noun collum, “neck,” which may bring the word collar to mind. From these elements came the Vulgar Latin word accollre, which was the source of French accolade, “an embrace.” An embrace was originally given to a knight when dubbing him, a fact that accounts for accolade having the technical sense “ceremonial bestowal of knighthood,” the sense in which the word is first recorded in English in 1623.


USAGE

rinselberg's posts, all of which are accessible from the Home Page referenced in his User Profile, have won accolades from other OptiBoard members, including:

What is this? :hammer:

There's no box to check for I can do without rinselberg entirely.

and

Rinselberg,

What do you do for a living? You seem to spend endless hours on OptiBoard being disagreeable, eccentric and just plain (insert the word). I don't understand why you would waste a post with this? I mean "Just Conversation" is just that: CONVERSATION. There is nothing to converse about with this.

Buddy, contribute or move along. I understand there are other chat boards and I would be happy to send you links to them. But either join in and play accordingly, or move along. I, for one, am getting really tired of your rhetoric!

Dictionary reference: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Also: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

[chip anderson]

Actually, it was my old bald headed grandfather whom I resembled at birth and therefore actually was named Chip for "Chip off the Old Block."

[ksquared]

Pop-metaphysics (noun) – An underlying philosophical or theoretical principle that has no scientific evidence to support it.

Example:
Although he does concede the universe – all time, all matter, and all space – exploded out of nothing (1), Dr. Adkins, an atheist, struggles to explain how the universe came into existence, uncaused, out of nothing. He finds himself trapped in self-contradictions. In his book The Creation Revisited he has this to say:

“Now we go back in time beyond the moment of creation to when there was no time and there was no space.” He imagines “a swirling dust of mathematical points which recombine again and again and again and finally by trial and error to form our space universe.”

Dr. Adkins provides us with an excellent example of pop-metaphysics, a theoretical idea that has no scientific evidence to support it. It’s also self-contradictory because it assumes time and space before there was time and space.

(1) Einstein’s’ theory of General Relativity predicted that Universe is expanding from a single point in the distant past. Science has since confirmed Einstein’s prediction with observable facts. The universe exploded into existence from a single point in the distant past. A scientific "truth" that can't be denied no matter how you look at it or how imaginative you may be.

[slaboff]

Yes but what caused that explosion?

[ksquared]

Well....if you are an atheist you can have only one answer: "nothing created something out of nothing” which flies in the face of science.

If you are one of the others listed below you can answer with: "something created something out of nothing"

You might be interested to know that Einstein believed the universe was static and eternal and it’s creation was not dependant on any outside cause. He wasn’t all that thrilled with his own theory. In 1914 He introduced a cosmological constant into his equation so he could avoid an absolute beginning to the universe.

In 1919 British cosmologist Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein’s GR theory while he was studying a solar eclipse. He wasn’t happy either and said, “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant to me…. I would like to find a genuine loophole.”

Unfortunately, it all slid down hill from there. In 1922 Russian Mathematician Alexander Friedman found Einstein’s fudge factor. Einstein had divided by zero; something every school child knows is a “no-no”.

In 1927 astronomer Edwin Hubble found even more concrete evidence for an expanding universe. He observed a “red shift” in the light from every observable galaxy, which meant that all of the galaxies were moving away from a single point.

Einstein visited Mt. Wilson (where Hubble made his observations) so he could see for himself the observable evidence. Sure enough, it was just as his theory had predicted. Afterwards, Einstein redirected his efforts to solving the puzzle of life “to know how God created the world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”

So you see, as irritating as it may be, General Relativity supports one of the oldest “formal” arguments for the existence of a theistic God.

Agnostic - I do not know if God or gods exist.
Atheist - I do know, God or gods do not exist.
Theist - I do know, God or gods do exist.
Polytheist - Many gods exist.
Henotheist - The henotheist worships only one of the many gods who exist.
Monotheist - Only one God exists.
Pantheist - All things that exist are part of God. Therefore God is impersonal.
Deist - The one God who exists is personal, yet He is not involved with humanity.
Personal Theist - The one personal God is intimately involved with humanity.
Unitarian - God is only one person.
Trinitarian - The one God who exists, is, by nature, a Trinity - three distinct persons within the nature of the one God.