Monday, April 30, 2012

Pomace

Pomace (pronounced /ˈpʌməs/ PUM-əs) or marc (pronounced /ˈmɑrk/) is the solid remains of grapes, olives, or other fruit after pressing for juice or oil. It contains the skins, pulp, seeds, and stems of the fruit.

Grape pomace has traditionally been used to produce pomace brandy (such as grappa or zivania) and grape seed oil. Today, it is mostly used as fodder or fertilizer.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Guinguettes

Guinguettes were popular drinking establishments located in the suburbs of Paris and other cities in France. Ginguettes would also serve as restaurants and, often, as dance venues. The origin of the term comes from guinguet, indicating a sour white light local wine. A Goguette was a similar kind of establishment.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Friday, April 27, 2012

Fred

Fred is a derisive term used by "serious" road cyclists to describe other cyclists who do not conform to serious road cyclists' norms with regard to dress and equipment, and appear amateurish to them. The term is generally reserved for men, while the female Fred is sometimes called a "Doris."

The exact qualities that define one as a "Fred" vary widely among regions and cyclists.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Elision

Elision is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce. Sometimes, sounds may be elided for euphonic effect.

Elision is normally unintentional, but it may be deliberate. The result may be impressionistically described as "slurred" or "muted."

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Scrum

Scrum is an iterative, incremental methodology for project management often seen in agile software development, a type of software engineering.

During each “sprint”, typically a two to four week period (with the length being decided by the team), the team creates a potentially shippable product increment (for example, working and tested software). The set of features that go into a sprint come from the product “backlog”, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. Which backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he or she wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint, and records this in the sprint backlog.[6] During a sprint, no one is allowed to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for that sprint. Development is timeboxed such that the sprint must end on time; if requirements are not completed for any reason they are left out and returned to the product backlog. After a sprint is completed, the team demonstrates how to use the software.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

One percenter

One percenter

Outlaw motorcycle club members can be distinguished by a 1% patch worn on the colors. This is claimed to be a reference a comment by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) in which they stated that 99% of motorcyclists were law-abiding citizens, implying that the last one percent were outlaws. The comment, supposedly a response to the Hollister riot in 1947, is denied by the AMA - who claim to have no record of such a statement to the press, and that the story is a misquotation. As a result, outlaw motorcycle clubs and their members are commonly referred to as "one percenters". They are also known as Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs or OMGs according to the ATF.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Coprolalia

Coprolalia is involuntary swearing or the involuntary utterance of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks. Coprolalia comes from the Greek κόπρος (kopros) meaning "feces" and λαλιά (lalia) from lalein, "to talk". The term is often used as a clinomorphism, with 'compulsive profanity' inaccurately referred to as being Tourette syndrome.

Related terms are copropraxia, performing obscene or forbidden gestures, and coprographia, making obscene writings or drawings.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Mary Sue

A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as "Mary Sues" is that they are too ostentatious for the audience's taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the "Mary Sue" character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an "author's pet".

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

quasistar

A quasistar (also called black hole star) is a hypothetical type of extremely massive star that may have existed very early in the history of the Universe. Unlike modern stars, which are powered by nuclear fusion in their cores, a quasistar's energy would come from material falling into a central black hole.

A quasistar is predicted to form when the core of a large protostar collapses into a black hole during its formation and the outer layers of the star are massive enough to absorb the resulting burst of energy without being blown away (as they are with modern supernovas). Such a star would have to be at least one thousand times the mass of the Sun. Stars this large could only form early in the history of the Universe before the hydrogen and helium were contaminated by heavier elements; see Population III stars.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Islamism


Islamism (Islam+-ism; Arabic: الاسلاميةal-'islāmiyya) also Arabic: إسلام سياسيal-Islām al-Siyāsiyy, lit., "Political Islam" is a set of ideologies holding that Islam is not only a religion but also a political system; that modern Muslims must return to the roots of their religion, and unite politically. Another definition for إسلام سياسي which is translated as Islamism suggests a different concept. As accepted by a large group of Shia muslims (for example in Iran), إسلام سياسي is 'to know Islam as the right ethical system which must be the core of ethics in politics'. Therefore, if we assume Islamism is إسلام سياسي, then the suggested definition is not accepted by a large group of Muslims and if we want to give the Shia version another name (such as Political Islam), then the general term إسلام سياسي should not be used as the equivalent to Islamism.

Islamism is a controversial term and definitions of it sometimes vary. Leading Islamist thinkers emphasized the enforcement of sharia (Islamic law) on Muslims; of pan-Islamic political unity; and of the elimination of non-Muslim, particularly western military, economic, political, social, or cultural influences in the Muslim world, which they believe to be incompatible with Islam.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Kempeitai

The Kempeitai ("Corps of Law Soldiers") was the military police arm of the Imperial Japanese Army from 1881 to 1945. It was not an English-style military police, but a French-style gendarmerie. Therefore, while it was institutionally part of the Imperial Japanese Army, it also discharged the functions of the military police for the Imperial Japanese Navy under the direction of the Admiralty Minister (although the IJN had its own much smaller Tokkeitai), those of the executive police under the direction of the Interior Minister, and those of the judicial police under the direction of the Justice Minister. A member of the corps was called a kempei.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Roughcast

Roughcast or pebbledash is a coarse plaster surface used on outside walls that consists of lime and sometimes cement mixed with sand, small gravel, and often pebbles or shells. The materials are mixed into a slurry and are then thrown at the working surface with a trowel or scoop. The idea is to maintain an even spread, free from lumps, ridges or runs and without missing any background.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Brahmin

A Brahmin (also Brahman; Brāhmaṇa) is a member of the priestly class in the Indian subcontinent and belongs to the upper caste society. According to the Manusmṛti, there are four "varnas", or classes: the Brahmins (poets, priests, teachers, scholars), the Kshatriyas (kings, agriculturists and nobility), the Vaishyas (merchants), and Shudras (artisans, service providers and laborers). In Hinduism, Brahmins were charged with performing religious duties as priests and preaching Dharma (as "one who prays; a devout or religious man; a Brāhman who is well versed in Vedic texts; one versed in sacred knowledge"). The Brahmins held authority over interpretation of Vedic and Puranic spiritual texts like the Vedas, Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita, and were the teachers of the Vedic period.

Friday, April 13, 2012

peripatetic

peripatetic:
  1. tending to walk about
  2. constantly travelling; itinerant; nomadic.
  3. (usually capitalized) Having to do with Aristotle, his philosophy, or the school of thought which he founded.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Casus belli

Casus belli is a Latin expression meaning the justification for acts of war. Casus means "incident", "rupture" or indeed "case", while belli means bellic ("of war"). It is usually distinguished from casus foederis, with casus belli being used to refer to offenses or threats directly against a nation, and casus foederis to refer to offenses or threats to another, allied, nation with which the justifying nation is engaged in a mutual defense treaty, such as NATO.

The term came into wide usage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the writings of Hugo Grotius (1653), Cornelius van Bynkershoek (1707), and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1732), among others, and the rise of the political doctrine of jus ad bellum or "just war theory". Informal usage varies beyond its technical definition to refer to any "just cause" a nation may claim for entering into a conflict. As such, it has been used both retroactively to describe situations in history before the term came into wide usage and in the present day when describing situations when war has not been formally declared.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

diktats

diktats: An order or decree imposed by someone in power without popular consent.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

aftcastle


An aftcastle is the upper deck of a sailing ship positioned behind the Mizzenmast. It was used in medieval shipping such as galleys or galleasses to provide a heightened platform from which to fire upon other ships; it was also a place of defense in the event of boarding. More common, but much smaller, is the forecastle.

Monday, April 9, 2012

port-wine stain


A port-wine stain or naevus flammeus is a vascular birthmark consisting of superficial and deep dilated capillaries in the skin which produce a reddish to purplish discolouration of the skin. They are so called for their colour, resembling that of port wine. It is part of the family of disorders known as vascular malformations, specifically an arteriovenous malformation.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

bilgeboard

A bilgeboard is a lifting foil used in a sailboat, which resembles a cross between a centerboard and a leeboard. Bilgeboards are mounted between the centerline of the boat and the sides, and are almost always asymmetric foils mounted at an angle to maximize lateral lift while minimizing drag. They are most often found on racing scows.

When sailing, the windward side bilgeboard is retracted into the hull of the boat, so that it produces no drag. The leeward side foil provides the lift to counter the lateral force of the sail, and converts it into forward motion. The bilgeboards are angled so that as the boat heels, or leans under the force of the wind, the leeward bilgeboard becomes more upright, and provides the greatest possible force in the desired direction.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

capstan


A capstan is a vertical-axled rotating machine developed for use on sailing ships to apply force to ropes, cables, and hawsers. The principle is similar to that of the windlass, which has a horizontal axle.

Friday, April 6, 2012

collaborative consumption

The term collaborative consumption is used to describe the cultural and economic force away from 'hyper-consumption' to re-invented economic models of sharing, swapping, bartering, trading or renting that have been enabled by advances in social media and peer-to-peer online platforms.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

cathead


A cathead is a large wooden beam located on either bow of a sailing ship, and angled outward at roughly 45 degrees. The beam is used to support the ship's anchor when raising it (weighing anchor) or lowering it (letting go), and for carrying the anchor on its stock-end when suspended outside the ship's side. It is furnished with sheaves at the outer end, and the inner end (which is called the cat's-tail) fits down on the cat-beam. The cat stopper also fastens the anchor on. The purpose of the cathead is to provide both a heavy enough beam to support the massive weight of the anchor, and to hold the metal anchor away from the wooden side of the ship to prevent damage.

In common practice, the projecting end of the beam was carved to resemble the face of a lion or cat. Whether such carving was due to a play on the already existing name of the beam or whether the beam was so named because of the practice of such carving is unknown.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

batgirl

A batboy or batgirl is the person who carries the baseball bats around to a baseball team. A batboy may also lay out the equipment and mud the baseballs to be used in the game.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

gunwale

The gunwale (pronounced "gunnel" to rhyme with "tunnel") is a nautical term describing the top edge of the side of a boat.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Kumeyaay

The Kumeyaay, also known as Tipai-Ipai, Kamia, or formerly Diegueño, are Native American people of the extreme southwestern United States and northwest Mexico. They live in the states of California in the US and Baja California in Mexico. In Spanish, the name is commonly spelled Kumiai.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

orlop


The orlop is the lowest deck in a ship (except for very old ships). It is the deck or part of a deck where the cables are stowed, usually below the water line. It has been suggested the name originates from "overlooping" of the cables.

It has also been suggested that the name is a corruption of "overlap", referring to an overlapping, balcony-like half deck occupying a portion of the ship's lowest deck space. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word descends from Dutch overloop from the verb overlopen, "to run (over); extend").

lordosis

  Lordosis is historically defined as an abnormal inward curvature of the lumbar spine.