January 12, 2012
The term ‘winders‘ was originally coined in 2008 by the sociologist John W. Leigh, in his article ‘Moving towards new forms of social success.’
The term (a contraction of the expression ‘windy winners’) goes back to the original way of experiencing social success by individuals uninhibited with regards to their own success, not looking as much to reconcile rival existential expectations (such as the bobos – bohemian bourgeois, for example) but rather to juxtapose them in a way which is not seeking to constitute a system.
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January 11, 2012
Limousine liberal is a pejorative American political term used to illustrate perceived hypocrisy by a political liberal of upper class or upper middle class status; including calls for the use of mass transit while frequently using limousines or private jets, claiming environmental consciousness but driving low MPG sports cars or SUVs, or ostensibly supporting public education while actually sending their children to private schools.
Democratic New York City mayoral hopeful Mario Procaccino coined the term to describe incumbent Republican Mayor John Lindsay and his wealthy Manhattan backers during a heated 1969 campaign.
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January 11, 2012
‘Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There’ is a book by David Brooks, first published in 2000. The word ‘bobo,’ Brooks’s most famous coinage, is a portmanteau of the words bourgeois and bohemian.
The term is used by Brooks to describe the 1990s descendants of the yuppies. Often of the corporate upper class, they claim highly tolerant views of others, purchase expensive and exotic items, and believe American society to be meritocratic.
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January 11, 2012
A dye pack is a radio-controlled incendiary device used by some banks to preemptively foil a bank robbery by causing stolen cash to be permanently marked with red dye shortly after a robbery. In most cases, a dye pack is placed in a hollowed-out space within a stack of banknotes, usually $10 or $20 bills. This stack of bills looks and feels similar to a real one, with new technology allowing for the manufacturing of flexible dye packs which are difficult to detect by handling the stack.
When the marked stack of bills is not used, it is stored next to a magnetic plate near a bank cashier, in standby or safe mode, ready to be handed over to a potential robber by a bank employee. When it is removed from the magnetic plate, the pack is armed, and once it leaves the building and passes through the door frame, a radio transmitter located at the door will trigger a timer (typically 10 seconds), after which the dye pack will explode and release an aerosol (sometimes tear gas, but usually of Disperse Red 9, a dye used in smoke grenades) intended to permanently stain and destroy the stolen money and mark the robber’s body with a bright red color. The chemical reaction causing the explosion of the pack and the release of the dye creates high temperatures of about 400 degrees Fahrenheit which further discourages a criminal from touching the pack or removing it from the bag or getaway vehicle.
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January 10, 2012
Fertility tourism or reproductive tourism is the practice of traveling to another country for fertility treatments. It may be regarded as a form of medical tourism. The main reasons for fertility tourism are legal regulation of the sought procedure in the home country, or lower price. In-vitro fertilization and donor insemination are major procedures involved. It has been proposed to be termed ‘reproductive exile’ to emphasis the difficulties and constraints faced by infertile patients, who are ‘forced’ to travel globally for reproductive procedures.
There is generally a demand for sperm donors who have no genetic problems in their family, 20/20 eyesight, a college degree, and sometimes a value on a certain height, age, eye color, hair texture, blood type and ethnicity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the inventory of taller men who are blonde and blue eyed is most popular.
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January 10, 2012
Snowflake children is a term used by organizations that promote the adoption of embryos left over from in vitro fertilization to describe children that result, where the children’s parents were not the original cell donors. These embryos are transferred to infertile couples via embryo adoption, although the legal process of taking ownership of an embryo differs from that of traditional adoption. The term was coined by the first agency to provide the transfer service, Nightlight Christian Adoptions. Proponents also use the term for the frozen embryos themselves.
The term ‘Snowflake babies’ was first used to describe babies born in this manner, but the first snowflake children are no longer babies. The first snowflake baby, Hannah, was born in 1998 to Marlene and John Strege. Former president George W. Bush has made public appearances together with snowflake children while speaking about his support for adult stem cell research and his opposition to embryonic stem cell research.
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January 10, 2012
A donor offspring, or donor conceived person, is conceived via the donation of sperm (sperm donation) or ova (egg donation), or both, either from two separate donors or from a couple. In the case of embryo donation, the conceiving parents are a couple.
Donor conceived people may never learn of their true birth origins as information about their true biological parent(s) is not recorded on the birth certificate. This is compounded by the fact that only a small proportion (av. 10%) of donor conceived people will ever be informed of the nature of their conception by the recipient parent(s).
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January 10, 2012
Surrogacy [sur-uh-guh-see] is an arrangement in which a woman carries and delivers a child for another couple or person. This woman, the surrogate mother, may be the child’s genetic mother (called traditional surrogacy), or she may be biologically unrelated to the child (called gestational surrogacy).
If the surrogate receives compensation beyond the reimbursement of medical and other reasonable expenses, the arrangement is called commercial surrogacy, otherwise it is often referred to as altruistic surrogacy.
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January 5, 2012
The Landlord’s Game is a board game patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie. It is a realty and taxation game, which is considered to be a direct inspiration for the board game ‘Monopoly.’
Though many similar home-made games were played at the beginning of the 20th century, it is the first of its kind to have an attested patent. Magie designed the game to be a ‘practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.’
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January 5, 2012
Wardrobing [wawr-droh-bing] is the practice of purchasing an item, using it, and then returning it to the store for a refund. It is most often done with expensive clothing – hence the name – but the practice is also common with tools, electronics, and even computers.
Perhaps one of the most notorious examples of wardrobing comes from the film ‘My Date With Drew,’ which was filmed entirely on a wardrobed video camera. The filmmaker purchased the camera from Circuit City, used it for 30 days to film his movie, and then returned the camera for a full refund.
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January 4, 2012
Harold Williams (1876 – 1928) was a New Zealand journalist, foreign editor of ‘The Times’ and is considered one of the most accomplished polyglots in history, said to have known over 58 languages and other related dialects. Like most youngsters his age, Harold wasn’t possessed by a voracious appetite for learning, but he recalled that, when he was about seven, ‘an explosion in his brain’ occurred and from that time his capacity to learn, in particular languages, grew to an extraordinary degree. He began with the study of Latin, one of the great root languages, and hungrily acquired others.
As a schoolboy he constructed a grammar and vocabulary of the New Guinea language Dobuan from a copy of St. Mark’s Gospel written in that language. Next he compiled a vocabulary of the dialect of Niue Island, again from the Gospel written in that language, and was published in the ‘Polynesian Journal.’
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January 2, 2012
A squeegee [skwee-jee] man is a person who, washcloth and squeegee in hand, wipes windshields of cars stopped in traffic and then solicits money from drivers. While squeegee men are a feature of life in many cities around the world, the phenomenon first became prevalent in New York City in the 1980s.
Although some merely provided a service, in other cases the windshield-washing would be carried out without asking, often perfunctorily, and with subsequent demands for payment, sometimes with added threats of smashing the car’s windshield if their demands were not met. Upon his election, mayor Rudy Giuliani famously embarked on a crusade against squeegee men as part of his quality-of-life campaign, claiming that their near-ubiquitous presence created an environment of disorder that encouraged more serious crime to flourish.
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