A supremacy of dinosaurs
A dignity of dragons
A fondle of unicorns
A shroud of ghouls
A hustle of brownies
A lawn of gnomes
A clangor of robots
A harem of sexbots
A culture of viruses
If you love new words as much as I, you'll enjoy the Stoakes-Whibley Natural Index of Supernatural Collective Nouns over at the book of joe.
"Whatever' is voted the most irritating word in the English language.
Absolutely right.
It's not a new kind of cloud, just a rare one that just got its name: Asperatus. "Asperatus comes from the Latin verb aspero, meaning "to roughen up" or "agitate". The poet Vergil used it to describe the surface of a choppy sea."
The Royal Meteorological Society is now gathering detailed information for the days and locations where the asperatus clouds have been seen in an attempt to understand exactly what is causing them.
Officials will then apply to the UN's World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva to have the new cloud type considered for addition into the International Cloud Atlas, the system used by meteorologists across the globe.
A new mental illness that is so destructive that some psychiatrists are urging that bitterness be considered a mental illness - post traumatic embitterment disorder. I think we all know or have met people of this sort.
"They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, a German psychiatrist who named the behavior.
Embittered people are typically good people who have worked hard at something important, such as a job or a relationship or activity, Linden says. When something unexpectedly awful happens -- they don't get the promotion, the wife files for divorce or they fail to make the Olympic team -- a profound sense of injustice overtakes them. Instead of dealing with the loss with the help of family and friends, they cannot let go of the feeling of being victimized. Almost immediately after the traumatic event, they become angry, pessimistic, aggressive, hopeless haters.
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There are only a handful of studies on the behavior, but psychiatrists meeting Monday were in agreement that much more research is needed on identifying and helping these people. One estimate is that 1% to 2% of the population are embittered, says Linden, who has published several studies on the behavior.
"These people usually don't come to treatment because 'the world has to change, not me,' " Linden says. "They are almost treatment resistant.... Revenge is not a treatment."
Merriam-Webster has chosen "w00t" as the word of the year, blending as it does whimsey and new technology.
w00t, the hybrid of letters and numbers, if you don't know is an exclamation of happiness or triumph, first used by gamers.
Last year, the word of the year was truthiness.
Who hasn't used many of the words or phrases listed below?
forever and a day
all corners of the world
it's Greek to me
short shrift
household words
thin air
fixtures
tongue-tied.
seen better days,
good riddance,
charmed life,
for goodness sake,
didn't sleep a wink,
in a pickle
heart of gold.
laughable,
laughingstock,
zany,
gloomy,
excitement,
bedroom,
luggage
worthless.
All first came from the mind of William Shakespeare. A Way with Words.
Why career planning is a waste of time
Or why your best guess beats careful planning.
In reality, people frequently don't know what they want and psychology has proved it.
We are very poor at what will make us happy in the future, We "miswant."
The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it's such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information.
Maybe the Chaos Theory of Career Development makes more sense.
if you ask people about their career decisions, almost 70% report that they have been significantly influenced by chance events.
This seems to tie in with Purposive Drift: Making it Up as We Go Along by Richard Oliver at Change This
Your life is not a project plan. Nobody knows where they will be in five years time.
Life is more open, much messier, more ambiguous, more complex, more mysterious, more surprising and filled with more possibilities for good or for ill than we can possibly imagine.
He argues that we revert to "machine-like' thinking because it promises a world of predictability and certainty to mask the frightening thought of our own fragility.
He says we are all more ignorant than we know and smarter than we think and believes our real compass point is our sense of well-being.
Making it up as you go along, he calls Purposive Drift and that's a perfectly reasonable, responsible and realistic approach to life.
Seems to be the one I took.
My favorite battlefield slang from Iraq via Austin Bay
Battle rattle: Slang for combat gear. "Full battle rattle" means wearing and carrying everything (helmet, body armor, weapons).
Beltway clerk: A derisive term for a Washington political operative or civilian politician.
Blackwater: Specifically, a private security firm operating in Iraq. Used as slang, can mean any private security firm. "Gone to Blackwater" indicates that a soldier quit the armed services and went to work for a private security firm.
Blue canoe: Slang for a portable toilet.
Bohica: Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. Pronounced "bo-HEE-ka." Means "we're about to get screwed, as usual." This term was in use in the Army in the 1960s.
Embrace the suck: Phrase heard in OIF1 (the original Operation Iraqi Freedom force). Translation: The situation is bad, but deal with it.
Flash-blasted: Being screamed at or chewed out by the unit's senior noncommissioned officer.
Groundhog Day: Every day of your tour in Iraq.
O dark 30: Pronounced "oh dark thirty." A word play on military time. Means a very early hour during the night. ("We had to get up at oh-dark-thirty.")
PUC: Person Under Custody. ("We got two PUCs on that last raid.")
Turkey peek: To glance around or over an object or surface, such as a corner or wall.
Waxed: To get hit hard or get killed.
What is it like to be autistic? Take a look at In My Language on YouTube.
When you watch it, it's like being in someone else's skin. Odd, compelling and strange.
33 names of things you never knew had names.
via Jonah Goldberg who I think spends more time sniffing out timewasters and utterly useless bits of information that anyone I know.
minimus, ophryon, rasceta and columella nasis all describe parts of the body.
Lovely words to impress your friends and family with anytime.
American researchers have coined a new term. Middlescents are those workers between 35 and 54 who have burned themselves out.
Work Stressful? You may be a middlescent
The middlescent is frustrated, confused and exasperated, finding themselves leaving work feeling "burned out, bottlenecked and bored".
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"It is a critical time for people and they have to rethink their whole life. Should they be less ambitious? Should they spend more time with their family?
"The critical time for that used to be well into your 50s, now it's getting younger.
It's what used to be called a mid-life crisis, but it seems to be happening earlier now. I think highly educated people who live in this world of abundance we enjoy today have more opportunities for identity crises throughout their lives. That's a good thing because it's usually a crisis that forces you to assess your life and find new meaning and passion.
I came across this quote today from Peter Drucker and it's such a good question that it's worth asking repeatedly over time.
"What can you and only you do, that if done well, can make a real difference."
It seems like we're in the middle of an epidemic of ADT or attention deficit trait according to Dr. Edward Hallowell and it's making us dumber.
Why can't you pay attention anymore?
the constant and relentless chatter coming from our computers, phones and other high-tech devices is diluting our mental powers....you've become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving.
Multitasking doesn't work either though the attempt to do so can get your adrenaline going. Hallowell says no one really multitasks. You just spend less time on any one thing.
It's the great seduction of the information age. You can create the illusion of doing work and of being productive and creative when you're not. You're just treading water.
Remember frazzing? That's the frantic, ineffective multitasking, typically with the delusion that you're getting a lot done.
The brain doesn't multitask, it toggles among tasks rather than processing all tasks simultaneously.
Says Hallowell
We need to preserve time to stop and think.
If you don't allow yourself to stop and think, you're not getting the best of your brain. What your brain is best equipped to do is to think, to analyze, to dissect and create. And if you're simply responding to bits of stimulation, you won't ever go deep.
When you hit your funny bone, you say "Ouch" or swear because it somehow relieves the pain.
When someone else sneezes, you say "Gesundheit" or 'God bless you'.
What do you say when someone else hits their funny bone on knee or elbow?
"Uffda" (OOF-dah) is a Swedish onomatopoetic word, a sympathetic exclamation when somebody else is in pain.
According to Howard Reingold in "They Have a Word for It , it combines "Ouch for you" and "Oh, I'm sorry you hurt yourself."
We are always interested in "new" emotions. Though I doubt whether there really are any new emotions that are unrelated to our relationship with technology.
After all, we humans are pretty much the same as humans were a thousand, two thousand years ago except we know what's happened since and we build on what's gone before.
We begin to make finer descriptions of and distinctions between feelings. I was quite surprised to learn that "empathy" as a word didn't exist 100 years ago, though "pity" and "sympathy" did.
Elevation is a new word to describe that warm tingling feeling in the chest you feel when seeing, even reading about, acts of kindness or heroism that motivates you to be better.
Now there's idolspize, a word that succinctly describes the tricky emotion between idolizing and despising in the Washington Post.
The best book I know about "new" emotions is "They Have a Word for It : A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases by Howard Rheingold.
It's so good that I've decided to create a new category so I can talk about some of them.