ankh noun An object or design resembling a cross but having a loop instead of the top arm, used in ancient Egypt as the symbol of life.
Back in the early 90's, in the latter days of the satanic panic, a parents' group here in town distributed a list of satanic symbols for parents to watch for. My mom (not a crazy person) showed it to me and explained most of them. There were several things that didn't make sense on there, but I remember it included the ankh, which my mom had on a necklace, and was a plain stupid thing to put on the list, and the star of David, which was a wildly ignorant and hateful inclusion. I guess that's a reminder that people have circulated insane misinformation since well before social media.
Bromidic Adj. Dull and tiresome but with pretensions of significance or originality, corny, platitudinous I've heard the word a hundred times in the song "A Wonderful Guy" by Tex Beneke with Mary Mayo and finally looked it up. If you're a gamer, you might recognize the song from the Fallout 3 soundtrack. "I'm as trite and as gay as a daisy in May A cliché coming true I'm bromidic and bright As a moon-happy night Pouring light on the dew"
A form of Ayn Rand's favorite word Bromide: A commonplace remark or notion; a platitude. synonym: cliché.
Also closley related to nostrum A medicine whose effectiveness is unproved and whose ingredients are usually secret; a quack remedy. A favorite but usually ineffective remedy for problems or evils. A medicine the ingredients of which, and the method of compounding them, are kept secret, for the purpose of restricting the profits of sale to the inventor or proprietor; especially, a quack medicine.
I forgot, but here's how Bromide came into general use and came to mean what it does. It was a seltzer-water drink supposed to be good for an upset stomach—precursor to Alka-Seltzer, but you had to go into a drug store and order one (and lay down your nickel), and the chemist would make it right in front of you on the counter. This was very common in the 30's, in fact you can see people getting one in some movies, or saying "Hold on, I'm gonna go in and get a bromide real quick." I guess when they came out with Alka-Seltzer the term and the practice dropped out of popularity.
Oh hold on: Bromide compounds, especially potassium bromide, were frequently used as sedatives in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their use in over-the-counter sedatives and headache remedies (such as Bromo-Seltzer) in the United States extended to 1975 when bromides were withdrawn as ingredients due to chronic toxicity.[14] This use gave the word "bromide" its colloquial connotation of a comforting (but useless and ultimately dangerous) cliché.[15] From Wikipedia.
You'll find vials of rocuronium in hospital crash trays today, for preparing the patient for intubation and such. I had no idea its complement was the bromide ion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocuronium_bromide Some folks have to take bromide salts for severe epilepsy, too. I don't think it's that common though. https://www.gosh.nhs.uk/conditions-and-treatments/medicines-information/bromide-epilepsy/
Pleonasm noun the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning (e.g. see with one's eyes edit: when you could have just said ‘see’), either as a fault of style or for emphasis.
stochastic - (adj.) - randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely. Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite lone wolves to carry out unpredictable violent acts. The stochastic terrorist uses inflammatory rhetoric to stir up violence. He just doesn't know exactly what will happen or who will do it, or where and when.
Ladygarden I was writing (honest) when I heard the word used on a TV chat show. I looked it up ...I think the word could be used as a clean and wholesome alternative for 'fanny'
Ngram An n-gram is a collection of n successive items in a text document that may include words, numbers, symbols, and punctuation. N-gram models are useful in many text analytics applications where sequences of words are relevant, such as in sentiment analysis, text classification, and text generation. Here's an article from Etymology online telling how they can be wrong. https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/who-lusts-for-certainty-lusts-for-lies
Probably comes from n, used as a symbol used in mathematics. another one Mycologist Someone who works with fungi, living organisms such as mold, yeast and mushrooms.
