Double-Tongued Dictionary Recent Citations

Citation Queue These are recently added citations for catchwords that have not yet been researched or incorporated into a full dictionary entry. There is also a date-sorted archive which includes all citations, whether used in a full entry or not, as well as the full entries themselves.

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single n. I was never a standup. I never worked “a single,” as they call it. (Sep. 13, 2009) [full citation…]

velvet coup n. A senior official with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Yadollah Javani, was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying opposition leaders, including Mir Hussein Moussavi, who came second in the June 12 ballot, should also be placed on trial for trying to engineer a so-called “velvet coup” in Iran. (Sep. 13, 2009) [full citation…]

stripper n. More daily cartoonists, who call themselves “strippers” and many of whom consider themselves artists, really should consider hiring gag writers, although a few do. Just because you can draw doesn’t mean you’re funny. (Sep. 13, 2009) [full citation…]

weeper n. Six inches of rain between Friday night and Sunday afternoon proved too much for track crews. Crews fought a day-long battle with the wet track and pit road from the rain and what are called weepers. Weepers are caused by water bubbling up through cracks in the asphalt from the over-saturated ground under the paving. By 4:30 p.m., despite periods of sunshine, the plug was pulled on Sunday’s race. (Sep. 13, 2009) [full citation…]

steeplejacking n. Let me now explain “steeplejacking.” This is what happens when mainstream denominational churches lose their congregational members to a nearby evangelical church. In very simple terms this is where members are wooed away from their churches by members of evangelical extremists, and/or their churches are literally taken over in place. There is a great book available on Steeplejacking written by two ministers, Sheldon Culver and John C. Dorhauer of the United Church of Christ—Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right is Hijacking Mainstream Religion. (Sep. 13, 2009) [full citation…]

jamiton n. We’ve all been there—stuck in traffic, inching along, running late and getting angry when suddenly everyone starts moving. Just like that, the road clears. No flashing lights, no mangled cars, no clue to suggest what went wrong. They’re called phantom traffic jams. [...] The mathematics of such traffic jams are strikingly similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosions, said Aslan Kasimov, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Mathematics. Realizing this allowed the reseachers to solve traffic jam equations that were first theorized in the 1950s. The MIT researchers even came up with a name for this kind of gridlock—“jamiton.” It’s a riff on “soliton,” a term used in math and physics to desribe a self-sustaining wave that maintains its shape while moving. (Sep. 13, 2009) [full citation…]

phantom traffic jam n. We’ve all been there—stuck in traffic, inching along, running late and getting angry when suddenly everyone starts moving. Just like that, the road clears. No flashing lights, no mangled cars, no clue to suggest what went wrong. They’re called phantom traffic jams. (Sep. 13, 2009) [full citation…]

bando n. “That’s what you call convenient,” said James Bertan, 41, an ex-convict and self-described “bando,” or someone who lives in abandoned houses. (Sep. 13, 2009) [full citation…]

Churchillian Drift n. Long ago, I coined the term “Churchillian Drift” to describe the process whereby the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one side and replaced by someone more famous. So to Churchill or Napoleon would be ascribed what, actually, a lesser-known political figure had said. The process occurs in all fields. (Sep. 3, 2009) [full citation…]

neepery n. Oops. “Neepery” is techno-slang. It refers to the use of excessive jargon. (The jargon itself is “neep” or sometimes referred to as “neep-neep”. And yes, this means my first use of the word “neepery” was an example of neepery.) (Sep. 2, 2009) [full citation…]

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