Term used by fairground folk to describe members of their community who’ve settled by the sea. Lots more fairground terminology here.

What the ancient Egyptians used to call brains. (In ancient Egyptian, of course.)

sumit commented on the word sand-dancer

sumit commented on the word sand-dancer

sumit commented on the word skull offal

sumit commented on the word skull offal

The term given to the meat of wild animals by refugees in East Africa, usually caught illegally and traded and cooked covertly.

sumit commented on the word night-time spinach

sumit commented on the word night-time spinach

sumit added the word gyron to the list Sumit’s Words.

“Few things agitate French winemakers more than other winemakers’ unspeakable irreverence towards the terroir, the mix of soil and climate found in the place where a vine is grown. The strength of feeling is so great that the country even has its own breed of, er, terroiristes. A group of masked, militant French winemakers has attacked foreign tankers of wine, bricked up a public building and caused small explosions at supermarkets.”

aka the dead dinosaur pose.

To win at Jenga. New Scientist, for the record, describes skintling as “angling all your blocks so that their diagonals are perpendicular to the edge of the table”.

The Mexican volcano rabbit, aka teporingo

The Mexican volcano rabbit, aka zacatuche

or one who lives in polar regions. Apparently

New Scientist has an article on CamelCase (oh, the irony that Wordie only permits lower-case listings) that notes its original usefulness in making programming terms readable and mentions two derivatives: UpperCamelCase and lowerCamelCase. It also discusses how it’s made the transition to web brandnames as a way of avoiding spaces … and ends on a sinister note by suggesting another programming convention that might be the next to break_free and irritate the_world_at_large.

Hey, I loved that drink! It was horrible, but it was the drink of the future.

@seanahan: an ugly word for an ugly occupation.

A “facilitator” who actually manipulates the participants in a conversation or meeting towards particular conclusions or outcomes. For example, critics of Gordon Brown’s citizen juries suggest that facipulators are employed to ensure that the juries don’t come up with suggestions far removed from government policy.

The “u” is long. Shoomit!

Ah, the confusion between summit and Sumit (which is my real name as well as my username) has plagued me all my life. Despite the number of words beginning “su” that are pronounced “shu” (sugar, sure etc.) the similarity with summit means people always pronounce my name incorrectly and it sometimes takes years to persuade them otherwise. Oh, and sumit.com is owned by Summit Research Labs of Princeton, New Jersey. Thanks, guys!

“Vegansexuals are people who do not eat any meat or animal products, and who choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals. One vegan respondent from Christchurch said: ‘I believe we are what we consume, so I really struggle with bodily fluids, especially sexually.'”

Among other things, “an extreme sport involving diving off a fixed point such as sea harbour walls, bridges, rocks and cliff faces into water. The sport’s origins can be traced to United Kingdom’s West Country.” Why this merits a particular name — and for that matter, how it can be described as a “sport” — is a bit of a mystery to me. It’s an appropriate name, though, since people keep killing themselves doing it.