Nonce Word
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Nonce Word
A nonce word (also called an occasionalism) is a lexeme created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication.''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language''. Ed. David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Some nonce words may acquire a fixed meaning inferred from context and use, possibly even becoming an established part of the language, at which point they stop being nonce words. Some nonce words may be essentially meaningless and disposable, but they are useful for exactly that reason—the words " wug" and "blicket" for instance were invented by researchers to be used in exercises in child language testing. Lexicology The term is used because such a word is created " for the nonce" (i.e., for the time being, or this once). All nonce words are also neologisms, that is, recent or relatively new words that have not been fully accepted into mainstream or common use. The term ''nonce word'' in this sense is due to James Murray ...
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Lexeme
A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single root word. For example, in English, ''run'', ''runs'', ''ran'' and ''running'' are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as . One form, the lemma (or citation form), is chosen by convention as the canonical form of a lexeme. The lemma is the form used in dictionaries as an entry's headword. Other forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they are uncommon or irregularly inflected. Description The notion of the lexeme is central to morphology, the basis for defining other concepts in that field. For example, the difference between inflection and derivation can be stated in terms of lexemes: * Inflectional rules relate a lexeme to its forms. * Derivational rules relate a lexeme to another lexeme. ...
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Robert Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein (; July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific accuracy in his fiction, and was thus a pioneer of the subgenre of hard science fiction. His published works, both fiction and non-fiction, express admiration for competence and emphasize the value of critical thinking. His plots often posed provocative situations which challenged conventional social mores. His work continues to have an influence on the science-fiction genre, and on modern culture more generally. Heinlein became one of the first American science-fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as ''The Saturday Evening Post'' in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science-fiction novelists for many decades, and he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are often considered the "Big Three" of English-language sci ...
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Metasyntactic Variable
A metasyntactic variable is a specific word or set of words identified as a placeholder in computer science and specifically computer programming. These words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted before real-world usage. The words foo and bar are good examples as they are used in over 330 Internet Engineering Task Force Requests for Comments, the documents which define foundational internet technologies like HTTP (web), TCP/IP, and email protocols. By mathematical analogy, a metasyntactic variable is a word that is a variable for other words, just as in algebra letters are used as variables for numbers. Metasyntactic variables are used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept, which is useful for teaching programming. Common metasyntactic variables Due to English being the foundation-language, or lingua franca, of most computer programming la ...
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Hapax Legomenon
In corpus linguistics, a ''hapax legomenon'' ( also or ; ''hapax legomena''; sometimes abbreviated to ''hapax'', plural ''hapaxes'') is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. The term is sometimes incorrectly used to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works but more than once in that particular work. ''Hapax legomenon'' is a transliteration of Greek , meaning "being said once". The related terms ''dis legomenon'', ''tris legomenon'', and ''tetrakis legomenon'' respectively (, , ) refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used. ''Hapax legomena'' are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of any word in a corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words are ''hapax legomena'', and another 10% to ...
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Glokaya Kuzdra
''Glokaya kuzdra'' (russian: Глокая куздра) is a reference to a Russian language phrase constructed from non-existent words in a grammatically proper way, similar to the English language phrases using the pseudoword "gostak". It was suggested by Russian linguist Lev Shcherba. The full phrase is: "" ('). In the phrase, all word stems (-, -, -, -, -, ) are meaningless, but all affixes are real, used in a grammatically correct way and — which is the point — provide enough semantics for the phrase to be a perceived description of some dramatic action with a specified plot but with unknown actors. A very rough English translation (considering no semantic information is available) could be: "The glocky kuzdra shteckly budled the bocker and is kurdyaking the bockerling." Shcherba used it in his lectures in linguistics to emphasise the importance of grammar in acquiring foreign languages. The phrase was popularized by Lev Uspensky in his popular science book ''A Word about W ...
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Foobar
The terms foobar (), foo, bar, baz, and others are used as metasyntactic variables and placeholder names in computer programming or computer-related documentation. - Etymology of "Foo" They have been used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept. History and etymology It is possible that ''foobar'' is a playful allusion to the World War II-era military slang FUBAR (''Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition)''. According to an Internet Engineering Task Force RFC, the word FOO originated as a nonsense word with its earliest documented use in the 1930s comic ''Smokey Stover'' by Bill Holman. Holman states that he used the word due to having seen it on the bottom of a jade Chinese figurine in San Francisco Chinatown, purportedly signifying "good luck". If true, this is presumably related to the Chinese word '' fu'' ("", sometimes transliterated ''foo'', as in '' foo dog''), which can m ...
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Henry Holt And Co
Henry Holt and Company is an American book-publishing company based in New York City. One of the oldest publishers in the United States, it was founded in 1866 by Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt. Currently, the company publishes in the fields of American and international fiction, biography, history and politics, science, psychology, and health, as well as books for children's literature. In the US, it operates under Macmillan Publishers. History The company publishes under several imprints, including Metropolitan Books, Times Books, Owl Books, and Picador. It also publishes under the name of Holt Paperbacks. The company has published works by renowned authors Erich Fromm, Paul Auster, Hilary Mantel, Robert Frost, Hermann Hesse, Norman Mailer, Herta Müller, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ivan Turgenev, and Noam Chomsky. From 1951 to 1985, Holt published the magazine ''Field & Stream''. Holt merged with Rinehart & Company of New York and the John C. Winston C ...
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Quark
A quark () is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks and electrons. Owing to a phenomenon known as ''color confinement'', quarks are never found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons, or in quark–gluon plasmas. There is also the theoretical possibility of more exotic phases of quark matter. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of hadrons. Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as ''fundamental forces'' (electro ...
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Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann (; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a distinguished fellow and one of the co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor of physics at the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California. Gell-Mann spent several periods at CERN, a nuclear research facility in Switzerland, among others as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow in 1972. Early life and education Gell-Mann was born in Lower Manhattan to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, specifically from Czernowitz in present-day Ukraine. His parents were Pauline (née Reichstein) and Arthur Isidore Gell-Mann, who taught English as a second language ...
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Finnegans Wake
''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish literature, Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. It has been called "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables ... with the work of analysis and deconstruction". Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, ''Finnegans Wake'' was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idioglossia, idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English words with Neologism, neologistic portmanteau words, Irish language, Irish mannerisms and puns in multiple languages to unique effect. Many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams, reproducing the way concepts, people and places become amalgamated in dreaming. It is an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the ...
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Galumph
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel ''Through the Looking-Glass'', the sequel to ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865). The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of Looking-glass world. In an early scene in which she first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen, Alice finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language. Realising that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognises that the verses on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems and reads the reflected verse of "Jabberwocky". She finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has passed into, later revealed as a dreamscape. "Jabberwocky" is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English. Its playful, whimsical language has given English nonsense words and neo ...
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Chortle
Chortle is a British comedy website launched in 2000 by Steve Bennett. The site is a major source of comedy news in the UK. It also reviews comedy shows nationwide, including extensively at the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and presents the Chortle Awards to honour the best stand-up comics working in the UK. In recent years, the site has also branched out into events promotion. History Prior to starting Chortle, Bennett, who graduated from Oxford University, had been working as a local newspaper editor for the Informer group of free newspapers in Surrey and West London. He started the site after the newspaper group expressed a lack of interest in running a website. After considering his areas of interest, he decided to start a comedy site, since IMDb and ''Empire'' already covered the market for film, and there were numerous music websites available. The site received some early support from investors during the dot com boom which led to Bennett working from offices in Bri ...
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