January 25, 2011
A chav is a stereotype of certain people in the United Kingdom. Also known as a charver in Yorkshire and North East England, ‘chavs’ are said to be aggressive teenagers, of white working class background, who repeatedly engage in antisocial behaviour such as street drinking, drug abuse and rowdiness, or other forms of juvenile delinquency. The derivative Chavette has been used to refer to females.
Chav probably has its origins in the Romani word ‘chavi,’ meaning ‘child’ (or ‘chavo,’ meaning ‘boy,’ or ‘chavvy,’, meaning ‘youth’). This word may have entered the English language through the Geordie dialect word charva, meaning a rough child. This is similar to the colloquial Spanish word chaval, meaning ‘kid’ or ‘guy.’ In Italy, chavs are termed as coatto, which basically means ‘working class’ and vulgar.
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January 24, 2011
Helicopter parent is a colloquial, early 21st-century term for a parent who pays extremely close attention to his or her child’s or children’s experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions. The term was originally coined by Foster W. Cline, M.D. and Jim Fay in their 1990 book ‘Parenting with Love and Logic.’
Helicopter parents are so named because, like helicopters, they hover closely overhead, rarely out of reach, whether their children need them or not. They try to resolve their child’s problems, and try to stop them coming to harm by keeping them out of dangerous situations.
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January 18, 2011
Spaghetti Junction is a nickname sometimes given to a complicated or massively intertwined road traffic interchange that resembles a plate of spaghetti. The term is believed to have been coined by a journalist at the Birmingham Evening Mail in the 1970s to refer to the Gravelly Hill Interchange on the M6 motorway in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Since then many complex interchanges around the world have acquired the nickname.
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December 14, 2010
The term life hack refers to productivity tricks that programmers devise and employ to cut through information overload and organize their data. The original definition of the term referred to utilities that filtered and processed data streams like email and RSS feeds. Examples of these types of life hacks might include utilities to synchronize files, track tasks, remind yourself of events or filter email. As the meme spread, the definition of the term expanded. Today, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack. The term became popularized in the blogosphere and is primarily used by geeks who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow.
The terms hack, hacking, and hacker have a long history of ambiguity in the computing and geek communities, particularly within the free and open source software crowds. However, in the context used here a ‘hack’ is a clever trick or stratagem. British technology journalist Danny O’Brien coined the term after polling a group of productive geeks on the details of their work processes. O’Brien discovered a pattern among these super-productive programmers: that they devised and used ’embarrassing’ scripts and shortcuts to get their work done.
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December 13, 2010
Chartjunk refers to all visual elements in charts and graphs that are not necessary to comprehend the information represented on the graph, or that distract the viewer from this information. Examples of unnecessary elements which might be called chartjunk include heavy or dark grid lines, unnecessary text or inappropriately complex typefaces, ornamented chart axes and display frames, pictures or icons within data graphs, ornamental shading and unnecessary dimensions.
Another kind of chartjunk skews the depiction and makes it difficult to understand the real data being displayed. Examples of this type include items depicted out of scale to one another, noisy backgrounds making comparison between elements difficult in a chart or graph, and 3-D simulations in line and bar charts. The term was coined by American statistician Edward Tufte in his 1983.
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November 18, 2010
Cisgender [sis-jen-der] is a neologism that refers to individuals who are comfortable in the gender they were assigned at birth. It contrasts ‘transgender’ on the gender spectrum. A more popular term is ‘gender normative.’ The word has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis, meaning ‘on the same side’. In this case, ‘cis’ refers to the alignment of gender identity with assigned gender.
The word was coined in 1995 by Carl Buijs, a transsexual man from the Netherlands. Buijs said in a usenet posting, ‘As for the origin, I just made it up. I just kept running into the problem of what to call non-trans people in various discussions, and one day it just hit me: non-trans equals cis. Therefore, cisgendered.’
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November 16, 2010
Fnord is the typographic representation of disinformation or irrelevant information intending to misdirect, with the implication of a worldwide conspiracy. The word was coined as a nonsensical term with religious undertones in the Discordian religious text Principia Discordia (1965) by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill, but was popularized by The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) of satirical conspiracy fiction novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
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November 8, 2010
Agnotology is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The neologism was coined by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology. More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before. Proctor studied the tobacco industry’s conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.
Some of the root causes for culturally-induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness. Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not ‘come to be’,’ or are ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was delayed for at least a decade because key evidence was classified military information related to underseas warfare.
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November 8, 2010
A snowclone is a type of cliché and phrasal template originally defined as ‘a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants.’
An example of a snowclone is ‘grey is the new black,’ a version of the template ‘X is the new Y.’ Both the generic formula and the new phrases produced from it are called snowclones.
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October 28, 2010
Plunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay ‘Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative.’ It has since been applied to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition. Plunderphonic music is known for heavy sampling of educational films of the 1950s, news reports, radio shows, or anything with trained vocal announcers.
The process of sampling other sources is found in various genres (notably hip-hop), but in plunderphonic works the sampled material is often the only sound used. These samples are usually uncleared, and sometimes result in legal action being taken due to copyright infringement. Some plunderphonic artists use their work to protest what they consider to be overly-restrictive copyright laws. Many plunderphonic artists claim their use of other artists’ materials falls under the fair use doctrine.
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October 18, 2010
Freeganism is the practice of reclaiming and eating food that has been discarded. Freegans and Freeganism are often seen as part of a wider ‘anti-consumerist’ ideology, and freegans often employ a range of alternative living strategies based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans ’embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.’
The word ‘freegan’ is a portmanteau of ‘free’ and ‘vegan’; not all dumpster divers are vegan, but the ideology of veganism is inherent in freeganism. Freeganism started in the mid 1990s, out of the antiglobalization and environmentalist movements. The movement also has elements of Diggers, an anarchist street theater group based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960s, that gave away rescued food.
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October 13, 2010
A meme [meem] is a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures. The British scientist Richard Dawkins coined the word in ‘The Selfish Gene’ (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.
Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches. Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual meme’s reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate.
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