WotD: "cow cuddling", which is just what it sounds like: "a form of animal-assisted therapy involving hugging cows for healing" (Wikipedia). Also a side hustle for dairy farmers to help with economic uncertainty. thehustle.co/news/save-a-...

Happy Caturday

WotD: "gazump". (Not new, just new to me) Of a seller, to accept a verbal offer to buy but then go with a higher bidder before the lower offer has closed. Found in a story on Semafor about the possible Netflix-Warner deal.

WotD: "polygloom" — " a heterogeneous complex, defying summation by a single causal logic, menacing, a whole that is worse than the sum of the parts." adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

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I'm hoping someone has done a study of naming trends for septic-tank cleaning businesses. Feels like an opportunity for the business owner to wax clever. @fritinancy.bsky.social

WotD: "LLeMing", someone who outsources their thinking to AI — "because they are always LLM-ing, but also because their near-constant AI use conjures images of cybernetic lemmings unable to act without guidance." Used by Lila Shroff in The Atlantic, attributed to "a colleague". archive.ph/JvX7Z

Happy Caturday

Happy Caturday

WotD: "second-screen show" — "content optimized for casual viewing, meaning intentionally scripted for distracted viewers." Not new (2022?) but new to me. Also called "ambient TV" (2020 or earlier). theconversation.com/too-distract...

WotY: "vibecession" -- when people feel like the economy is doing worse than the numbers suggest. From Kyla Scanlon www.mercatus.org/macro-musing...

Happy Caturday

Happy Caturday

WotD: "dummymander", based on "gerrymander" — "when a party stretches its base too thin in pursuit of extra seats." www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...

Happy Caturday

Happy Caturday

Happy Caturday

"It's a good start"

Happy Caturday

Happy Caturday

Words of wisdom today about language learning from @colingorrie.bsky.social "[grammatical] paradigms are like vitamins. They can be good for you, but don't confuse them with actual food."

A scary MS Word thing happened today: the Normal template disappeared. I tried to run a macro, but gah, no macros. 😶 BACK UP YOUR NORMAL.DOTM FILE REGULARLY I use a script+scheduled task to automatically back up (details below), so I was able to recover, yay. www.mikepope.com/blog/Display...

Happy Caturday

Happy Caturday, editing edition

Happy Caturday

Happy Caturday

A mention today in @bcdreyer.social's substack of "camel case" reminded me that the programming world is rich in the names of ways to case/combine words, including: UPPERCASE lowercase camelCase PascalCase snake_case kebab-case ... and more! [cont.]

WotD: Humpty Dumpty Laws Coined by Gabe Fleisher (with a nod to Alice in Wonderland) for cases where words mean what the president says they mean. open.substack.com/pub/wakeupto...

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WotD: soft secession "Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders." open.substack.com/pub/cmarmita...

WotD: pizza tracker. Genericization of the progress bar that Domino's Pizza uses to show an order's status. "Gong will use 'pizza tracker' as a stand-in for the entire status-bar-and-updates category, much like how people use Kleenex and Band-Aid." thehustle.co/originals/ho...

Happy Caturday

Happy Caturday

WotD: quishing — "an identity fraud scam utilizing QR codes". www.uspis.gov/news/scam-ar...

WotD: nutpicking — highlighting random people as supposed representatives of an opposing side.

Happy Caturday

Happy Caturday

Hello, I'm a programmer on TV. I type really, really fast and I have four monitors that are constantly scrolling code-y looking text. At least one of my monitors is green-on-black monochrome. I also can control traffic lights in major metropolitan areas.

Happy Caturday

WotW: Coldplay cam

Happy Caturday

More language-learning insight from @colingorrie.bsky.social: "The prepositional system of a language that you're studying is going to be different in weird and unpredictable ways from your first language." ... and hoo-boy, is this ever true.

Happy Caturday

WotD: Bessent’s Law Defined by Paul Krugman this way: "Even if the appointee looks qualified for the position, we can be sure that he or she will indulge and cheer on every Trump idea, no matter how bad." Source: paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-you-sh...

WotD: situationship www.vogue.co.uk/article/situ...

Words of wisdom in our Old English class today about trying to suss out "real" Old English usages: "Written Old English can never be disentangled from Latin because anyone who wrote in Old English also wrote in Latin." From our instructor, @colingorrie.bsky.social

Happy Caturday

WotD: to susancollins. Not defined, but something like "express concerns, but then do it anyway". In Jeff Tiedrich's newsletter today: www.jefftiedrich.com/p/none-of-th...

WotD: graceful degradation. This isn't being good-natured about the inevitable pains of aging (haha); it's designing a thing (flashlight, website, robot, &c) so that it still functions in a limited way even if parts are inoperative. developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/G...

Happy Caturday, today featuring this fren I met in Kansas City.