Ultracrepidarianism:

“The habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge.”

The term draws from a famous comment purportedly made by Apelles, a famous Greek artist, to a shoemaker who presumed to criticise his painting.

The Latin phrase, “Sutor, ne ultra crepidam”, literally translates into “Shoemaker, not above the sandal”, and is used to warn people to avoid passing judgment beyond their expertise.

- Source 1, Source 2

Drawings of ultracrepidarianism and other lovely terms like

• Recumbentibus—A knockout punch, either verbal or physical.
• Acersecomic—A person whose hair has never been cut.
• Harmartia—The character flaw or error of a tragic hero.
• Jettatura—The casting of an evil eye.
• Pogonotrophy—The act of cultivating, or growing and grooming, a mustache, beard, sideburns or other facial hair.
• Ostentiferious—Bring omens or unnatural or supernatural manisfestations.
• Scripturient—Possessing a violent desire to write.

can be found here.

IRONY (n.) – dropping your IPhone in Apple juice.

INTERNET (n.) – where grammar goes to die.

THERE (n.) – they same thing as “their” or “they’re”, especially if you’re an idiot.

LAUGHTER (n.) – when a smile has an orgasm.

Source: theberry.com

When I grow up, I want to become a psychoneuroimmunologist.

Term of the day: “Lagrangian multipliers”

(It’s another word for modification indices, used to search for sources of model misfits in the presence of nonnormality and hierarchical data)

“Since the universals of language are in the brain, they must also be in the genes; linguistics is theoretical biology.”
– G. Fauconnier

(via Luna)

One could dismantle the “something is in the brain therefor it has to be in the genes” argument rather quickly, but it’s still a memorable quote, especially when you try to understand what he really wanted to say.

Business, from busy-ness:
The etymology of “business” relates to the state of being busy either as an individual or society as a whole, doing commercially viable and profitable work.

See also: business time, flight of the conchords.

I have always wanted to know what the true background of non-capitalizing “ee cummings” is – the usual story is that “he preferred it like that”.
It turns out, the internet (all hail!) doesn’t help, for once.

Cummings’s publishers and others have sometimes echoed the unconventional orthography in his poetry by writing his name in lowercase and without periods, but usual orthography (uppercase and periods) is supported by scholarship, preferred by publishers today. Cummings himself used both the lowercase and capitalized versions, though he most often signed his name with capitals.

The use of lowercase for his initials was popularized in part by the title of some books, particularly in the 1960s, writing his name in lower case on the cover and spine. In the preface to E. E. Cummings: the growth of a writer critic Harry T. Moore notes ” He [Cummings] had his name put legally into lower case, and in his later books the titles and his name were always in lower case.” According to his widow, this is incorrect, She wrote of Friedman “you should not have allowed H. Moore to make such a stupid & childish statement about Cummings & his signature.” On 27 February 1951, Cummings wrote to his French translator D. Jon Grossman that he preferred the use of upper case for the particular edition they were working on. One Cummings scholar believes that on the rare occasions that Cummings signed his name in all lowercase, he may have intended it as a gesture of humility, not as an indication that it was the preferred orthography for others to use.

Critic Edmund Wilson commented “Mr. Cummings’s eccentric punctuation is, also, I believe, a symptom of his immaturity as an artist. It is not merely a question of an unconventional usage: unconventional punctuation may very well gain its effect… the really serious case against Mr. Cummings’s punctuation is that the results which it yields are ugly. His poems on the page are hideous.”

– Wikipedia

Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = “ten”) was a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning “removal of a tenth”.

A unit selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing. The remaining soldiers were given rations of barley instead of wheat and forced to sleep outside the Roman encampment.
Because the punishment fell by lot, all soldiers in the group were eligible for execution, regardless of the individual degree of fault, or rank and distinction.
The leadership was usually executed independently of the one in ten deaths of the rank and file.

– Source: Wikipedia via Sara and Matthew

(New tag: language)