C.I.

Cédula de Identi{ficación|dad}. Spanish, `Identi{fication|ty} document.' (The `document' may be a card or passport-like booklet.) All Spanish-speaking countries have national C.I.'s, and many of them use C.I. as the abbreviation for such a document. Some people, in at least some of these countries, use ``C.I.'' metonymically for the identification number. There's another number called C.I. in Spanish. For a story that begins on the subject of Argentine C.I.'s see the ID entry.

CI

Chemical Ionization. `Chemical' refers to the mechanism, not the object.

C.I.

Clarence Irving. As in C.I. Lewis. What is it about the C. ?. Lewis clan anyway?

C.I. Lewis (born April 12, 1883 in Stoneham, Mass.; died February 3, 1964, in Cambridge, Mass.). A Harvard philosopher.

C.I.

Coeficiente Intelectual. Spanish, `Intelligence Coefficient.'

CI

Competitive Intelligence. I think this is a generalized version of what used to be called industrial espionage. Learn more from the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP).

CI

Compression Ignition. Ignition of the fuel-air mix in a combustion chamber resulting from compression. What happens in a Diesel engine, or in any engine that is Dieseling. More at the SI entry.

CI

Computational Intelligence. A journal. Other than that, you're on your own. Figure it out.

CI

Configuration Interaction.

CI

Configuration Item.

CI

Congestion Indicator. The channel, Bozo, not your nose. Maybe the road, too.

CI

Consentimiento informado. Spanish, `informed consent.' (Uninformed is desinformado.) Medical terminology, as in English.

C+I

Consumption Plus Investment. ``Private-sector output.''

.ci

Côte D'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) domain name code. The country has an official .com site on the web. See the Ivory Coast entry in the CIA Factbook. World's leading producer of cocoa, at the time of the Christmas Eve coup of 1999. Commercial web presence at <http://www.africaonline.co.ci/>.

CIA

Canadian Institute of Actuaries.

CIA

(US) Central Intelligence Agency. Their homepage can be reached through a trap door in the Office of the Director of Central Intelligence World Wide Web Site.

The CIA are very good at what they do, whatever it is. We know because they tell us so.

They say that doctors bury their mistakes.

CIA

Cloud Interstitial Aerosol. Cloud aerosol found between cloud elements.

CIA

Commission Internationale d'Aerostation. The FAI ballooning commission.

Aerostat, for a body having neutral bouyancy in air, and aerostation, are obsolete words in English, so we have gone back to an 1813 encyclopedia to work up entries for these terms. (Follow the links!) In French, of course, no word is ever officially obsolete that might conceivably displace a borrowed English term.

CIA

Connect Infobahn Australia. An ISP

CIA

Culinary Institute of America. One of the premier American schools for professional cooks; in New York City.

The CIA are very good at what they do, whatever it is. We know because the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

CIAC

Community Involvement Advisory Committee.

CIAC

Computer Incident Advisory Capability. An agency of the Department of Energy that creates public information documents related to computer security.

CIAO

Columbia International Affairs Online. A ``comprehensive source for theory and research in international affairs. It publishes a wide range of scholarship from 1991 on that includes working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, and proceedings from conferences.''

CIAP

(Australian) Clinical Information Access Project.

CIB

Combat Infantry Badge.

CIB

Conseil International du Bâtiment. Founded in 1953. The need to translate the expansion from French into an international lingua franca such as English provides an opportunity to adjust the public face of the organization, progressively aggrandizing it and unwieldy-sizing the name. I've seen these so far, as of June 2004:

1. CIB: International Council for Building Research.
2. CIB: International Council for Building, Research Studies and Documentation.
3. International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction. (Where did the ``Documentation'' go!? Aghh, this always happens!)

CIB

Credit Information Bureau.

CIBC

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

CIBC

Council on Interracial Books for Children. And you probably didn't even know that books had races. Heck, libraries have creeds.

CIBI

Credit Information Bureau, Incorporated.

CIC

Carrier Identification Code.

CIC

CEBus Industry Council.

CIC

Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

CIC

Corpus Iuris Civilis. Latin: `body of Civil Law.' Also Corpus Iuris Canonici (`standard' law).

E. Metzger, of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, maintains as complete as possible a page of Roman legal texts, including CIC, on the web at <http://www.iuscivile.com/materials/sources.shtml> (part of Roman Law Reseources.

The canonical codification was done under the Eastern Emperor Justinian, so see it as the Codex at Imperatoris Ivstiniani Opera (`the works of Emperor Justinian').

CIC

US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps.

CICA

Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants.

CICA

Center for Innovative Computer Applications. At the University of Indiana (IU).

cicatrice

Scar. In Spanish, which has generally longer words than English, cicatriz is the ordinary word for `scar,' not a sesquipedalianism. The verb is cicatrizar (`to scar' in both intransitive and transitive senses). There's another Spanish word, trizar, which means `to smash to pieces' or `to shred,' according to various dictionaries, although my father (a Chilean) used it in the sense of `to crack,' and not necessarily into pieces. Trizar is not etymologically related to cicatrizar, but since you weren't planning to look up trizar, I figured I'd define it here for your convenience.

CICC

Cairo International Convention and Exhibition Center. (In the Cairo in Egypt.)

CICC

Center of the International Cooperation for Computerization. In Japan.

CICC

Custom Integrated Circuits Conference sponsored by IEEE.

Cicero

Cognomen of the famous Roman whose full name was Marcus Tullius Cicero. Traditionally, in English he was called ``Tully'' -- an Anglicized version of his gentilicium -- the same way that Gaius Plinius Secundus was and is known as ``Pliny.'' (More specifically, he was known as Pliny the Elder, to distinguish him from the sister's son he adopted; the nephew took his uncle's name, as was standard in such cases. Of course, there is no reason to be specific, since the nephew, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, was also known as Pliny... the Younger.)

Cicero was regarded as the greatest of the Roman orators. If you want some idea of what this could mean, just square Tony Blair and divide by George W. Bush. (Vide etiam Wordsworth.) But enough about Cicero. We only add entries now so we can go off on irrelevant tangents, and to give you the information you neeeeeed and couldn't find in the other hits your search engine dredged up. For this entry, that special information has to do with my home town, Westfield, New Jersey. (Well, I should probably mention that there's a Tully County or something in upstate New York. Some other time, I guess. No need to mention the well-known town of Cicero, Illinois.) Westfield was for many years a powerhouse in New Jersey high school football, and the legendary Gary Kehler, coach from 1961 to 1982, was probably the principal reason.

To take a ferinstance, his 1977 team was rated by the Newark Star-Ledger as the second-best New Jersey high-school team of the century (apparently the century from about 1910 to 2003 or so), and the best among public schools. And they did it all without steroids. (At least, they were generally small teams, by today's standards. Draw your own conclusions.) Westfield played its home games at Memorial Stadium, built by the WPA on Rahway Avenue, and at some point the name was changed to Gary Kehler Stadium. On April 20, 2006, with due ceremony and the honoree in attendance, the town put up a sign there describing Gary Kehler's coaching achievements at Westfield High. The sign, which was placed on the press box at the stadium, lists Kehler's 171-26-7 record and his eight football teams that won the state championship. (Boy, I really need a transition play here.) There's an inscribed bust of Cicero in the Wellington Museum, at Apsley House in London. [There's a picture of the bust in F.R. Cowell's Cicero and the Roman Republic (Penguin/Pelican, 1948, 5/e 1973), facing p. 174.] It's a pretty good likeness of Gary Kehler around 1973.

Did I ever mention Garibaldi? Yes, I did! And you already forgot. It's at this ALM entry. I should probably add that Dennis played football on the Westfield school teams.

I should probably also add that the cognomen Cicero is a third-declension noun, with genitive singular Ciceronis. So most of the forms are constructed with an n. That's why the adjective form (in English) is Ciceronian. A similar-sounding word in Latin is cicer, `chickpea.'

CICO

Converging Input, Converging Output. A kind of stability in an input-output mapping: the system must be BIBO, and in addition any pair of inputs that converge must be mapped into outputs that converge. For the special case of instantaneous response, this is equivalent to the requirement of continuity.

CICS

Customer Information Control System. An IBM-licensed program that enables transactions entered at remote terminals to be processed concurrently by user-written application programs. It includes facilities for building, using, and maintaining databases.

CID

Charge Injection Device.

CID

Compositional InterDiffusion.

When you think about it, that's what always happens in diffusion.

CID

Configuration Interaction (CI) including Double excitations only. Cf. CIS, CISD.

CID

Connection Information Distribution (network, mechanism).

CID

Craft Interface Device.

CID

Criminal Investigation Detachment. Part of Allied Army of Occupation.

cid, CID

Cubic-Inch Displacement. Measure of engine size.

CIDA

Canadian International Development Agency.

CIDCM

Center for International Development and Conflict Management.

CIDE

Cambridge International Dictionary of English. Available on CD.

Product endorsement: ``You could do worse.''

CIDE

Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas. Despite the name, it's basically a university dedicated to the social sciences generally, with academic divisions for economics, public administration, political studies, international studies, history, and law (this division does function as a law school in the usual sense). CIDE was founded in November of 1974, and is located in Mexico City.

-cide

Latin suffix meaning `kill,' as in suicide, fratricide, parricide, homicide, etc. A near homonym of suicide occurs in Scottish tort law, but I can't remember what it is and I can't find it in CIDE.

CIDF

Control Interval Description Field of VSAM.

CIDX

Chemical Industry Data eXchange, Inc. Chemical Industry trade association for EDI.

CIE

Complete Island Etch. The truth they don't want you to know about Atlantis.

CIE

Commission Internationale de L'Éclairage or International Commission on Illumination oder Internationale Beleuchtungskommission. Also a Vienna site.

CIE

Computer Integrated Enterprise.

CIE

Conseil International des Infirmières (in French) and Consejo Internacional de Enfermeras (Spanish). Name means `International Council of female nurses.' Sounds like that other infamous sexist organization, the League of Women Voters. Official English name: International Council of Nurses (ICN).

CIE

Coras Iompair Éireann. So maybe that should be CIÉ. The Irish national public transportation company.

CIEC

Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition. Organized to oppose the CDA, preserved to record the defeat of the CDA.

CIEE

Council on International Educational Exchange.

CIES

Council for International Exchange of Scholars.

CIESPAL

Centro Internacional de Estudios Superiores de Comunicación para América Latina. `International Center for Higher Studies of Communication for Latin America.' It has some educational functions, and a historical connection with the Universidad Central del Ecuador, but it's not on the UCE campus.

CIE(USA)

United States National Committee of the CIE.

CIF

Código de Identificación Fiscal. `Fiscal identification code.' A Spanish tax identification code for businesses. The corresponding number for individuals is NIF. A little more at CIF/NIF.

CIF

Common Intermediate Format (for video). Defined by CCITT; a rather coarse 352 pixels across per each of 288 lines down.

CIF, C.I.F., cif

Cost, Insurance, and Freight. Cf. CNF.

CIF

Course Instructor Feedback. It's not a nasty ol' ``evaluation,'' see?

CIFA

CounterIntelligence Field Activity. Created by the US Defense Department in 2003 to track threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. Usually described as a Top Secret operation, but how secret can it be if I've heard of it?

CIF/NIF

Various order forms for Spanish businesses request this information. Individuals making a personal purchase or request fill in an NIF Número de Identificación Fiscal, businesses fill in a CIF (Código de Identificación Fiscal). The Mexican RFC is the common equivalent of both CIF and NIF.

cig

CIGarette. A popular disposable nicotine delivery instrument and fashion statement.

CIG

Canadian Institute in Greece. A/k/a l'Institut canadien en Grèce (ICG) and also to Kanadikó Institoúto stên Elláda (KIE). I'm glad to see that they're branching out beyond the vanilla languages, but this is probably not what the Inuit had in mind. CIG is the former CAIA (I mean the Canadian Archaeological Institute at Athens, I think), which changed its name in 2005 or 2006. As of 2007, some pages at the CIG still bear the title ``CAIA Home.''

CIG

Corpus Inscriptionum Graecorum. For other epigraphic resources see this links page maintained by Ulrich Schmitzer.

Cigarette Lighter

I have tried at various times in my life to grasp the rudiments of such inventions as the telephone, the camera, wireless telegraphy and even the ordinary motorcar, but without success. Television, of course, and radar and atomic energy are so far beyond my comprehension that my brain shudders at the thought of them and scurries for cover like a primitive tribesman confronted for the first time with a Dunhill cigarette lighter.

--- Noël Coward

CIGOS

Canadian Interest Group on Open Systems.

CIGS

CeIlinGS. Height above the ground of the base of the lowest layer of clouds when over half of the sky is obscured. The reason for the plural is that pilots tend to use ``ceiling'' as a countable noun synonymous with ``bottom of a cloud.'' When less than half the sky is obscured, cloud cover is probably not a big problem, and it's usually so patchy that defining a ceiling is difficult.

CIGS

Copper Indium Gallium [di]Selenide. A I-III-VI alloy semiconductor regarded as promising for polycrystalline thin-film photovoltaics. You can think of it as an alloy of copper indium diselenide and copper gallium diselenide: Cu(In_1-xGa_x)Se₂.

CIGSS

Copper Indium Gallium Sulfur [di]Selenide. A I-III-VI alloy semiconductor (q.v.).

CIH

Christmas International House. Provides an opportunity for international students to gather for fellowship and reunion during the Christmas holidays. All international students (18 years of age or older) are invited to apply. They are guests (room and board free) of local communities around the US for two weeks around Christmas and New Year's. Students pay a registration fee [in 1996: $35 before or $50 after November 11] and round trip transportation.

    CIH Registration Office
    P.O. Box 764
    Tucker, Georgia 30085-0764
    Phone: (770) 938-4291

I used to have the expansion with Interational -- interesting thought.

CII

Confederation of Indian Industry. ``Building Business Leadership.'' Founded in the last years of the nineteenth century, it is non-governmental, nonprofit, industry-led and industry-managed. French news sources describe the CII (Confédération indienne de l'Industrie) as analogous to France's Medef.

CII

French: chaîne française d'information internationale, `French Network for International Information' or something.

The project stems from a campaign promise President Jacques Chirac made during his successful 2002 campaign to remain in office (and thereby avoid prosecution on corruption charges stemming from his years as Paris mayor, though he had other motives for seeking reelection). He promised a ``CNN à la française.'' In other words he meant to create something like CNN, but government-run and government-subsidized. Its annual budget is initially about $87 million, operated as a 50-50 joint venture between TF1 and France Télévisions. CII plans (as of March 2006) call for broadcasts to begin at the end of 2006, initially to Africa and Asia.

Notice that although Chirac said it would be the ``voix de la France dans le monde,'' he did not promise that this voice would speak French -- he didn't call it a ``CNN en française'' or a ``CNN francophone.'' In fact, it came out around mid-March 2006 that most of the programming would be in English. A week or two later, Chirac was attending an EU meeting where a French businessman announced that he would make his presentation in English, since that is the international language of business; Chirac and the rest of the French delegation at the meeting walked out in protest.

CIISS

China Institute for International Strategic Studies. ``Attached to'' the Chinese Defense Ministry.

CIJA

Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy.

CIJR

Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.

CIKM

Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. An annual international conference inaugurated in 1992, sponsored by the ACM and its SIGIR and SIGMIS. I swear, these guys spend so much time on conference junkets, you wonder when they find the time to discard the spam from their mailboxes.

CIL

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Latin for `body [collection] of Latin inscriptions.' For other epigraphic resources see this links page maintained by Ulrich Schmitzer.

CILF

Cetedoc Index of Latin Forms. There may be some information on it at this Belgian site. Also known as Thesaurus formarum totius Latinitatis a Plauto usque ad saeculum XXum (TFTL).

CIM

Computer Integrated Manufacturing.

CIM

Corporate Information Management. A Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to modernize computer systems across the armed services. This went down in flames in January 1996 after six years of futility.

CIMA

Cellulose Insulation Manufacturers Association.

CIMPA

The Connected International Meeting[-]Professionals['] Association. ``The first and only online association of meeting professionals.''

``MISSION: Connect all meeting professionals to the internet and build a global community of tech-savvy buyers and sellers of meeting products/services.''

CIMPA traditionally holds a breakfast for members and guests who are attending the US Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC.

Alternate URL: <http://www.MEETINGPROFESSIONALS.ORG/>.

CIMS

Component Information Management System. Part of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) environment.

CIMT

China International Machine Tool (show). I just received an unsolicited email with the exciting information that this year, the biennial event will be held in China. At least they're not offering to refinance my X-rated wealth.

CIN

Community Information Network.

cin

Console INput. Just as bad as cout, but in the other direction. Hey -- why not take a break from the C++ grind and visit the Neuphilologische Mitteilungen entry, huh? I promise it's not entirely irrelevant.

CinC, CINC, C-in-C

Commander-IN-Chief. The US constitution identifies the president as the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces. In the US military, CinC's have traditionally been the commanders of major combatant, uh, commands, such as CINCLANTFLT and others listed following this entry. In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered subordinates to instead use ``combatant commanders'' when referring to generals and admirals to those large commands, on the reasoning that the only CinC is the POTUS.

The usage dies hard, however. A memorandum of September 15, 2003, includes the following:

Let's make sure that no service, CINC, or others make announcements on troop rotations, stop loss or mobilizations, without the proposal having been worked through the Joint Staff, David Chu [undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness] and me personally.

The memo was written by Donald Rumsfeld.

cinchona

A genus of evergreen trees and shrubs that originally grew in the tropical valleys of the Andes (from Bolivia to Columbia, and also some mountainous parts of Panama and Costa Rica). Eventually, it came to be extensively cultivated in India, Java, and the Scrabble forest. The English and Dutch transplanted species of cinchona (to India and Java, respectively) for the production of the antimalaria drug quinine, an alkaloid extracted from the bark (``Peruvian bark'').

The name cinchona is based on definitely bad information about possibly bad information: in 1742 Linnaeus named the genus in honor of the Countess of Chinchón. That's a small town about 45 km from Madrid, along the way to Toledo, and if Linnaeus could have googled this he wouldn't have misspelled it. It's too late now, because the one-aitch spelling has been widely incorporated in botanical and chemical nomenclature. I wish that IUPAC would adopt a sensible, similarly conservative attitude to terminology. Leave well enough alone! Look: I'm willing to compromise in the interest of letting sleeping dogs lie. You never heard me complain that the word, misspelled as it is, is mispronounced in some sort of church-Latin way (``sink-oh-na,'' or some such).

There's a new hotel in that town, named Hotel Condesa de Chinchón, only twenty minutes from the Warner Brothers Theme Park (Parque Temático de la Warner Bros.; ``Warner Bros.'' gets a female definite article because it is implicitly la empreza or la compañía Warner Bros., now where was I?). Oh yeah, the hotel is on Calle de los Huertos (previously called Avenida del Generalísimo). Calle de los huertos means `street of the orchards,' so it's rather appropriate and you're glad I mentioned it. According to legend, La condesa de Chinchón was cured of malaria by the use of Peruvian bark in 1638 while she was serving as vice-queen (no, no! -- ``vice'' as in ``deputy'') of Peru, and she brought some of the bark back to Spain in 1640. Well, it's not certain that she didn't.

Other names for the bark are Jesuits' bark (based on a separate legend) and quinquina, from the local (Chechua) word kina, meaning `bark.' (The reduplication is original in Chechua; the letter q is just the preference of Spanish orthography.)

CINCLANTFLT

Commander-IN-Chief, AtLANTic FLeeT.

CINCPACFLT

Commander-IN-Chief, PACific FLeeT.

CINCSAC

Commander-IN-Chief, Strategic Air Command.

CINCUSNAVEUR

Commander-IN-Chief, US NAVal Forces EURope.

cinnabar

Mercuric Sulfide. A bright red mineral highly prized as a dye. According to Lyde S. Pratt, The Chemistry and Physics of Organic Pigments (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1947), p. 4, there is archaeological evidence of the use of cinnabar as a pigment in China as early as the third millennium BCE. In Europe, cinnabar continued to be used until better artificial red dyes replaced it in the twentieth century. It is still the most common mercury ore. Today half of the mercury ore mined in the world comes from Spain and Italy. The color of cinnabar is called vermilion. More information on this mineral is at the entry for the historically related mineral minium.

CIO

Chief Information Officer. (Eldridge Cleaver, when he held this office in the Black Panthers, had the title ``Minister of Information.'' However, this was before he became a fugitive, before he bopped around Africa and was granted asylum in France, before he struck a plea bargain to return and do some time, and before he was born again. It was also before the information revolution.)

CIO

Chief Investment Officer.

CIO

Congress of Industrial Organizations.

In 1935, the CIO was formed behind the leadership of UMW head John L. Lewis, who stormed out of the AFL after beating up Carpenters-Union president William L. Hutcheson on the floor of the AFL convention floor.

The UMW was the only large industrial union in an AFL dominated by craft unions, and Lewis wanted the conservative AFL to engage in more aggressive organizing based on industrial unions. He put this idea into practice with the CIO, which created automobile and steel industrial unions and grew rapidly.

Semantically, Lewis's work was characterized by late nomenclature revision. For example, CIO originally stood for Committee of Industrial Organizations, and the United Steelworkers of America originally did business as the CIO's ``Steelworkers' Organizing Committee.'' Other important things can be and have been said about his leadership, but let this be here recorded: he showed that the American labor movement knew how to deploy apostrophe marks as well as sit-down strikes.

In 1940, Lewis returned from CIO leadership to UMW leadership, and after WWII the AFL experienced faster growth than the CIO. The AFL and CIO were merged as the AFL-CIO in December 1955.

Cf. DGB.

CIO

Counter/timer Input/Output.

CIOSL

Confederación Internacional de Organizaciones Sindicales Libres. Spanish, `International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.'

CIP

(Data- or other Communication-) Carrier Identification Parameter.

CIP

Catalog[u]ing In Publication. More (heck, something) at the ECIP entry.

CIP

Computer-Integrated Polarization Microscopy.

CIPB

Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting.

CIPE

Center for International Private Enterprise. Eets zee demmid Englo-Sexons at eet ageen! See IRI.

CIPHER

Center for Insight into Philosophic Health, Education, and Renewal. ``[A]n organization originally developed in response to issues raised at the Third International Conference for Philosophical Practice, held in New York in July of 1997, and devoted to the promotion of philosophy as a mode of practice.'' Philosophical practice, or philosophical counseling, is to the mind what chiropractic is to the body: voodoo, but what the hell, try it -- it might work.

CIPL

Permanent International Committee of Linguists. Like other organizations-of-organizations that are known by French acronym and English expansion, the CIPL has been slow to get its web-act together. Still no website as of late June 2001.

CIPM

Comité International des Poids et Mésures. `International Committee of Weights and Measures,' but you knew that.

CIPS

Canadian Information Processing Society.

CIPS

Centers Information Processing System. The ``Centers'' are those of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

CIPS

The Chartered Institute for Purchasing and Supply. ``CIPS is an international organisation, based in the UK, serving the purchasing and supply profession.''

CIPSH

Conseil International de la Philosophie et des Sciences Humaines. Normally referred to by its French initialism and its English name: International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. It is an NGO within UNESCO, but I am aware of no other reason to suppose that CIPSH should be entirely corrupt.

CIPW

Central Indiana Professional Writers.

They apparently stopped keeping up a website, but they're reported still to exist, meeting in donated space. According to this webpage, they ``meet the third Sunday of each month from 2-5:30pm in the lower banquet room of the Pizza Hut on Hwy. 31 North in Kokomo, IN.'' Makes you want to join just to learn what the ``lower banquet room'' of a Pizza Hut might entail.

CIR

Center for Individual Rights. A DC-based organization whose lawsuit forced the end of racial discrimination in admissions at the University of Texas (``race-based preferences'').

CIR

Center for Insurance Research.

Cir

Circinus. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

CIR

Committed Information Rate. Guaranteed minimum data rate of a Private Virtual Circuit.

CIR

Community Information and Referral. (In Central and Northern Arizona.)

CIR

Cylindrical Internal Reflect{ ance | ion } (spectroscopy).

circa

Latin, around. Now mostly used in the sense of `approximately [in time].' Abbreviated ca. (which see) or c.

Circ desk, circ

CIRCulation DESK at the library.

CIRCE

Collimated Ion Resonance Cannon, Ephermal. I suppose it might be more interesting if it were something real, instead of just a Star Wars weapon. (Star Wars the work of fiction.)

Circle of Willis

A ring-like arterial structure that distributes the blood supplied by four arteries to the various parts of the brain.

Circle of Willys

Jeeps in a protective configuration.

circs

The vital dates of a person who lived in premodern times. Metonym from the fact that, due to factors including calendrical ambiguities and lost records, birth and death dates are usually uncertain and stated as circa some year.

CIRES

Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences. It's located at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

CIRLA

The [!] Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Liberal Arts.

CIRM

Certified in Integrated Resource Management. A cert program launched by APICS in 1991.

CIRMS

Council on Ionizing Radiation Measurements and Standards.

CIROBE

Chicago International Remainder and Overstock Book Exposition. ``[S]trictly a trade show open only to attendees and exhibitors within the bargain book trade. This annual trade show takes place in Chicago every [F]all.''

Cf. BEA.

CIRP

Conference on InfraRed Physics.

CIRP

Cooperative Institutional Research Program. A survey of incoming college freshmen, administered by cooperative post-secondary institutions across the US for the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI, q.v.). The survey instrument is sometimes also called CIRP, and sometimes the ``CIRP Freshman Survey.'' HERI has a corresponding exit survey for graduating seniors (CSS).

Cirrus Logic

``Multimedia. Communications. Data Storage. And more.''

CIRS

Composite InfraRed Spectrometer. An instrument on NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan.

Look, I'm just a down-to-earth guy. Explain it to me in layman's terms. Make it relevant. Is it pronounced like ``Sears''?

CIS

(Stanford University) Center for Integrated Systems.

CIS

Cluster-Ion Spectroscopy.

CIS

Common Information System. Coördinated by (CISAC)

CIS

Commonwealth of Independent States. An extremely loose confederation of former soviets of the old USSR. Originally established, if that is the word, on (western) Christmas day, 1991, comprising eleven of the twelve non-Baltic states (Georgia stayed out).

CIS

Conductor-Insulator-Semiconductor. CIS cells are similar to MIS cells, but the conductor might be, say, ITO.

CIS

Configuration Interaction (CI) including Single excitations only. Cf. CID, CISD.

CIS

Continuous (fuel-) Injection System.

CIS

Corporate Information System[s].

CIS

CuInSe₂. Copper indium diselenide. Also called copper indium selenide. The band gap is 1.04 eV at room temperature, and it is one of the ``other'' popular semiconductors for PV's (besides silicon). It has a high absorption coefficient for solar radiation, and laboratory efficiencies have been measured approaching 20% -- rivaling silicon solar cells. Part of its attraction is that polycrystalline films of CIS make decent solar cells, whereas polycrystalline silicon is problematical. (The principal problem is that dangling bonds and other traps reduce the minority carrier lifetime.) Variants of CIS are the alloy semiconductors CIGS and CIGSS. All are part of the class of semiconductors classed I-III-VI (q.v.).

CIS

Customer Information System. Good-bye privacy.

CISA

Information Service Industry Association of R.O.C. I don't know what political or linguistic considerations are behind the acronym-expansion mismatch. [It's rare (and often ambiguous) to construct a Latin-character acronym as an initialism of logogram romanizations.]

CISAC

Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d'Auteurs et Compositeurs. (`International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers.')

CISC

Complex Instruction Set Comput{er[s] | ing}. The typical CISC microcontroller has on the order of 100 instructions, many quite specialized and rarely called. The speed advantage of being able to use such specialized instructions is traded off against the slower over-all performance for the average instruction, which may be quite common. The instructions in a CISC tend not to be very systematic in syntax or action. In contrast with the complementary approach, RISC, CISC uses fewer commands per task, uses a greater variety of commands, and the individual commands run more slowly.

CISD

Configuration Interaction (CI) including only Single and Double excitations. Cf. CID, CIS.

CISE

Centro Informazioni, Studi ed Esperienze.

CISE

Computer and Information Science and Engineering. NSF category.

CISG

(UN Convention on) Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

CISS

Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies. ``... provides a source of information and research for issues affecting Canada. Includes press releases and summaries of publications.''

CISS

Comite International des Sports Sourds. French, `International Committee of Southpaw [Lefty] Sports.' Yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's it. I said, THAT'S IT! What's the matter, can't you hear me?

Cf. WGD.

CISS

Community-Integrated Service Systems.

CISSE

Computer, Information, and Systems Sciences, and Engineering. An interesting list: you wonder about the hasa/isa relations of "Computer". I suppose it must be a default method of the Sciences class, at least. Either way, the paper submission deadline for CISSE 2006 has passed or is past. (CISSE is ``The Second International Joint Conferences on Computer, etc.'' but CISSE is overloaded, and the ``Conferences'' wrapper appears to take a scalar context.)

CISTI

Canadian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information.

CIT

Circumstellar Imaging Telescope.

CITA

Court Interpreters and Translators Association, founded 1978. Now called NAJIT.

CITES

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of wild fauna and flora. Tropical timber trade is a hot issue. A mahogany dresser?! You envirocriminal! (Here's the text of the convention.)

CITI

Confederation of Indian Textile Industry. (Sic: no definite article.)

citrine

A quartz mineral. Quartz is transparent and takes its color from impurities. Citrine is a orangish brown to yellow color from Fe³⁺ (details and relation to amethyst explained at amethyst entry. Since citrine can look like topaz (a different mineral), and since topaz is a precious gem, citrine has been sold under a dozen creative names (like ``yellow topaz'') that try to finesse the difference. Citrine is also sometimes considered a semiprecious gem. I think somebody should take over the musical terminology and call it a semidemiprecious gem. Small pieces of quartz are also sold as ``Cape May Diamonds'' and such. Where are the guardians of trade truth when you need them? (Hint: see the CW entry.)

CIU

Communication[s] Interface Unit.

CIUS

Crime in the United States. ``An annual publication in which the FBI compiles volume and rate of crime offenses for the nation, the states, and individual agencies. This report also includes arrest, clearance, and law enforcement employee data.'' The main report that people think of when you mention the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR).

In the detailed city-by-city (``agency'') tables, you can see that if one year there were no murders and the next year there was one, it was counted as a 100% increase in the murder rate. You can't blame them for using a nonzero baseline, I guess.

CivE

Civil Engineering. You're very welcome I'm sure.

Georgia Tech hosts the WWW Virtual Library section. LookSmart has a small page of CivE links that does not include the SBF glossary. We're not offended, heck no!

civil law

A system of over-the-counter legal remedies that protect large helpless corporations and the rich from outrageous attacks by the presumptious poor.

Civil War Battle Reenactment

The reenactment of a Civil War battle in which the confederacy prevailed. A wonderful demonstration of the power of denial.

CIX

Commercial Internet eXchange.

CJ

Celebrity Justice. A regular program on the WB channel. Their website is laid out a bit like a news site, but it's more attractive and interesting because all the stories have graphics, and the text isn't cluttered with prissy little qualifications just because they don't happen to know something for absolutely certain. Also, they help to right the gender imbalance in the news, Whereas men seem to dominate the so-called ``hard news,'' when I last visited the CJ website (April 24, 2004), I saw no pictures of men (just the Olsen twins, Courtney Love, Michael Jackson, and Anna Kournikova).

CJ

Chief Justice.

CJ

City Journal.

CJ

The Classical Journal, published triannually by CAMWS. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.

CJC

Canadian Jewish Congress.

CJC

Corpus Juris Civile. Alternate spelling of CIC (q.v.), using the modern letter J that was developed in medieval times to represent the consonantal phonemic value of I.

CJCS

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under the terms of the Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization Act of 1986, the JCS is an advisory organization only, not an executive. The act identifies the CJCS as the senior ranking member of the Armed Forces and also gives to the Chairman some of the functions and responsibilities previously assigned to the corporate body of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In effect, the JCS is a consultative body that is the main source of advice to the CJCS; the CJCS synthesizes and transmits this advice (as well as any other he has deemed appropriate to seek out within the military) as principal military advisor to the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council.

CJD

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. A rare but ``invariably fatal'' and rapidly progressive disease: death usually follows within half a year of initial clinical symptoms. Characterized by premature dementia in middle age and gradual loss of muscular coördination. Named after the psychiatrists Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt and Alfons Maria Jakob, who were the first to describe it (in the 1920's). For a long time it was believed to be caused by some unidentified virus, but efforts to isolate such a virus were unavailing. Now it is believed to be caused by prions, but that opinion is not universal. The mechanism of transmission is also unknown (setting aside some cases of tissue transplantation from infected individuals). There is little or no direct evidence that the meat of diseased animals is a vector. In particular, rates of the disease appear to be the same among vegetarians and nonvegetarians. There is, on the other hand, a variant of this disease, called variant CJD or new variant CJD, that is believed to be contracted by eating meat of diseased animals. The original CJD may now be referred to as ``classic CJD'' to distinguish it from this.

There's a Jakob-Creutzfeldt virus (JC, q.v.), but it does not cause CJD.

CJE

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Erkrankung. German for CJD.

CJF

Council of Jewish Federations. (I'm not sure about the link.)

CJH

Center for Jewish History.

CJK

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Languages with very non-European character sets.

CJKV

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

CJN

Canadian Jewish News.

CJR

Columbia Journalism Review. Their homepage points to Pulitzer stuff and gives their masthead and current contents.

CJS

College of Judea & Samaria. Graduation ceremonies are held just before Rosh HaShana (the New Year of the Jewish calendar).

cK

Calvin Klein. Calvin and Calvin Klein are trademarks of Calvin Klein Trademark Trust (CKTT).

.ck

Cook Islands domain name code.

CK

Creatine Kinase.

CKC

Canadian Kennel Club.

CKM

Cabibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (matrix). Kobayashi and Maskawa generalized the Cabibo-angle idea to mixing that involves more than two quark flavors.

CKTT

Calvin Klein Trademark Trust.

CL

CathodoLuminescence. Send an electron beam into the material and look at the light emitted. Photoelectric effect in reverse.

.cl

(Domain name code for) Chile.

Chilean saltpeter is sodium nitrate (NaNO₃); ordinary saltpeter is potassium nitrate (KNO₃). Ordinary saltpeter has a diuretic effect and at least a reputation for reducing libido in male humans. Before you go off thinking up lascivious etymologies, recognize that peter comes from the root for `stone.' [More on ordinary saltpeter at the P (phosphorus) entry.]

In March 2003, an editor for the New York Times op-ed page, Mr. Tobin, invited Boris Johnson, a Tory backbencher in the UK House of Commons, to write about the Iraq war. Johnson wrote the op-ed for the New York Times, and then he wrote an editorial about writing the op-ed for the New York Times for The Spectator. (Johnson is editor of that magazine.)

Tobin was very enthusiastic about the piece, but a few changes were necessary. ``Labour'' became the ``Labor party,'' and ``Rummie'' for Rumsfeld was considered a bit too undignified for New York Times readers. Oh, and a few other things. Johnson had written about US lobbying efforts for UN resolutions, including something to the effect that one doesn't make international law by giving new squash courts to the President of Guinea. (You don't?) This was changed to ``the President of Chile.'' Explanation: ``Uh, Booris,'' said Tobin, ``it's just easier in principle if we don't say anything deprecatory about a black African country, and since Guinea and Chile are both members of the UN Security Council, and since it doesn't affect your point, we would like to say Chile.'' (To be perfectly fair, the President of Guinea was dying of kidney disease -- for all I know he may be dead by now -- and from credible reports was being very statesmanlike. OTOH, Guinea held the rotating leadership of the Security Council at that time, for whatever little that's worth, and Chile was merely a member. In fact, Chile's opposition was firm, and for this Chile was widely expected to pay a price in future American disfavor -- to get the stick rather than the carrot, or squash racket.)

Johnson's op-ed mentioned Tony Blair. Jayson Blair (also having something to do with accuracy in the NYT) is mentioned at our CSPI entry.

For something on Chile's politics, start at the Concertación entry.

Cl

Chlorine. Atomic number 17. Lightest non-weird halogen.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

A chlorine.net site is under construction, but I don't know what/who it'll be about.

CL

Collaborative Learning or Cooperative Learning.

CL

Computational Linguistics. This here is a good site. Or maybe that should be ``that there.'' Oh well, as Leibniz would have said: ``calculemus.''

CL

ConnectionLess.

CL

Current-Limiting.

CLA

California Library Association.

CLA

Canadian Library Association. Cf. ALA.

CLA

Catholic Library Association.

CLA

College of Liberal Arts. Grrr. Commune of Leftie (pinko) Artists.

CLA

Collegiate Learning Assessment. A three-hour tour, er, test.

It is reputed to measure critical thinking and analytical reasoning, which presumably demonstrates that ``critical thinking'' is not a fraud. The instrument is administered -- it's like a therapy, see? -- to freshmen and seniors, and colleges can take credit for the measured improvement. About 120 schools use it, but for some reason nearly all of them keep the results a secret.

CLACSO

Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales. Spanish, `Latin American council on social sciences.'

CLAIM

Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Archivos de Imágenes en Movimiento. Spanish: `Latin American Coordinator [coordinating group] of Motion Picture Archives.' (Note: imágenes en movimiento is not the usual way to describe motion pictures, but not as strange as the literal translation `images in movement.' One might prefer the `archives of the moving image.') The acronym is more felicitous in English. Claim means nothing in Spanish, and is pronounced like climb in English.

CLAM

CLassical And Medieval Studies. Or maybe it stands for CLAssical and Medieval Studies. Whatever. ``The Classical and Medieval Studies program at CSU [Cleveland State University], known throughout the University as CLAM, is an interdisciplinary major program leading to a Bachelor of Arts degree.'' Its focus is on societies where Latin was the dominant language. (No, I'm sure they don't mind if you study Greek also.)

As of January 2003, Cleveland State seems to be the only university that has adopted this tasty nomenclature. However:

C.L.a.M., CLaM, CLAM

Corso di Laurea in Culture e Tecniche del Costume e della Moda. Italian, `BA [program] in Cultures and Techniques of Costume and Fashion.' Offered at the University of Bologna -- Rimini Branch, by -- get this: the faculty of literature and philosophy. (See the end of the Ph.D. entry for some ruminations on this.)

CLAMS

Chesapeake Lighthouse and Aircraft Measurements for Satellites.

ClAnt

CLassical ANTiquity. Journal catalogued by TOCS-IN.

CLAP

Campus Labor Action Project. A student group at the University of Notre Dame that is agitating (as of 2006) to improve compensation for unskilled workers employed by the university.

Claris

Wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple. Sells software for their machines.

CLAS

CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer.

CLAS

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

CLASP

Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme. ``An unincorporated association of Public Sector Authorities.'' (Sounds enough like a corpus or legal person to me, but one of the most important of legal fictions is that various entities are not bodies before the law. This is important because it limits the liabilities of the entities' members, or rather of those who would be their members.)

``CLASP is a [knowledge-based] organisation committed to improving the efficiency of the whole building process for the benefit of owners and users.'' They are ``Britain's number one public sector designer of permanent building systems and refurbishment solutions.''

A building system is what idiots like you and I tend to think of as one or more buildings. (Idiots like I would never have thought of writing ``like I,'' but ``you and me'' always invites reflection.)

Class E baseball

In 1943, many minor-league baseball teams and whole leagues were shut down for the duration, but war production brought a large influx of workers to two port cities on Lake Superior. A four-team league called the Twin Ports League was created there, comprising the Bays of Superior, Wisconsin, and the Dukes, the Heralds, and Marine Iron of Duluth, Minnesota. The league was unsuccessful and disbanded in mid-July after 34 games.

The Duluth Dukes were the one team that had existed before 1943. They played their first games in 1934, and except for 1943, they were part of a Northern League that was founded in 1932 and foundered in 1971. There is and there had been other minor leagues with the same name. Until 1962, when the classification scheme was changed, each Northern League has been a Class D league. That was the lowest classification used by the minor league association (the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues -- NAPBL), with the single exception of the Twin Ports League of 1943, which was designated Class E.

In 1946, the Northern League resumed operations after its wartime hiatus of 1943-1945, and the Duluth Dukes came back, playing their home games at Wade Municipal Stadium (``the Wade''). The Dukes had a 45-80 season in 1955 and disbanded. (The 50's killed a lot of minor league teams; the third Northern League was unusual both in being founded during the Depression and in surviving the 50's only to go down in 1971.)

Wade stadium has had better longevity than the teams that played in it. For the next year (1956) the Northern League created another team to play there. It was called the Duluth-Superior White Sox and was affiliated with the Chicago White Sox major-league team. This was replaced in 1960 by the Duluth-Superior Dukes, which was affiliated exclusively with the Detroit Tigers from 1960 to 1964, in a co-op arrangement with the Chicago Cubs in 1965, and then exclusively with the Cubs from 1966 to 1970, their last year.

A visit to Wade Stadium is reported to have been one of the things that convinced Miles Wolff to create the modern Northern League, an independent minor league. The Duluth-Superior Dukes were resurrected in 1993 as a founding member of that league, and played in the Wade until their final season in 2002.

classic

According to Italo Calvino:

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

According to Mark Twain:

A classic is a book everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read.

According to actual usage:

A classic is yesterday's cool, in need of a facelift of some sort, like Classic Coke, perhaps. The New York Times had an article by Brooks Barnes on June 11, 2008, reporting from Los Angeles below the title ``Beloved Characters as Reimagined for the 21st Century.'' Among the prospective fictional victims is Mickey Mouse, who is still generating $5 billion annually in merchandise sales, despite his reportedly increasing irrelevance:

``I love classic Mickey, but he needs to evolve to be relevant to new generations of kids,'' Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, said in an interview.

Classica et Mediaevalia

Don't ask me what it's about; I can't even guess. It's a Danish journal.

classicist

Someone who studies (in) the field called Classics. Note that while many things may be classics in the general sense (supra), the academic discipline of Classics (infra) construed singular, is concerned principally with the ancient Greek and Roman world, also known as ``Classical Antiquity.''

Beau David Case, a professor at Ohio State (OSU), used to keep a list of classicists with homepages, back when that was a manageable task.

Classics

Here is a quite comprehensive list of electronic resources compiled by Maria C. Pantelia.

You don't have to subscribe to the Classics mailing list in order to enjoy or otherwise experience the contributions of its members, you can visit its recent (since July 1998) hypertext archives. Frequent posters are often referred to by their initials, but those abbreviations aren't listed in this glossary.

One person I know, who got the usual ineffective English-language instruction as a student in Japan, watched children's television when he first came to the US as a way to improve his English. You could visit a page listing Greek and Roman Classics for Children.

Classics and Commercials

Classics & Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties, by Edmund Wilson, © 1950. First published by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Inc., reprinted by Vintage, 1962. The latter paperback edition is the one I quote from in a few entries of the glossary. So far, it's mentioned in entries for

1. obscure allusions
2. vitamin

Edmund Wilson was widely regarded as the greatest literary critic of his day. Yeah, whatever.

Classics-LGB

An electronic mailing list for those interested in Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual issues in the classics. Maybe that should be or Bisexual. I haven't seen the charter. You can read recent posts at hypertext archives and no one need know. Oops, I hadn't been keeping up: it was ``the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered classics list,'' and it was retired. ``Its managers had managed it for many years and needed a rest. It has been superseded by a new list, lambdacc.''

Clausius-Mosotti-Lorentz-Lorenz Equation

A formula, developed independently by the first two and the second two named individuals, which gives the average dielectric constant of a composite of two materials. Can be derived if a number of approximations are made, particularly that the composite consists of identical ellipsoidal inclusions of one material in a matrix of the other.

CLAW

Cleveland Leather Awareness Weekend. It's so nice to see that people are still into handicrafts and natural materials. It gives me the same warm feeling I got when I noticed how many personals ads seemed to mention Black and Decker.

CLAWS

Constitutent-Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System. ``Part-of-speech (POS) tagging, also called grammatical tagging, is the commonest form of corpus annotation, and was the first form of annotation to be developed by UCREL at Lancaster. Our POS tagging software for English text, CLAWS (the Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System), has been continuously developed since the early 1980s. The latest version of the tagger, CLAWS4, was used to POS tag c.100 million words of the British National Corpus (BNC).''

CLB

Configurable Logic Block. See brief explanation in context at FPGA.

CLBO

CsLiB₆O₁₀.

CLBHS

Cass Lake Bena High School. You're from the class of '78? You want this CLHS entry.

CLBS

Cass Lake Bena Schools. ``The Cass Lake Bena School District [ISD#115] is located in the city of Cass Lake, Minnesota, which is on the Leech Lake Reservation, home of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, members of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.''

CLC

Cambridge Latin Course. A set of introductory texts and supporting materials created by the Cambridge School Classics Program (CSCP). Teachers at every level seem to find the focus on reading and translating to be a bit of a grind eventually, and the material explaining grammar too late or too little, so there's a large after-market trade in suggestions and materials. There's an active <yahoo.com> mailing list for teachers who use the CLC: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CambridgeLatin/>. Here's an independent list of relevant bookmarks.

Teachers tend to feel that the order of presentation of grammatical topics in CLC is mixed up. The vocabulary introduced in CLC is far larger than is required for the GCSE's that UK students take at age 16. Some teachers consider this a problem.

The use of CLC in North America is supported by the NAACP. Surprising, isn't it? Oh no wait -- I think that should be the NACCP.

CLC and the Ecce Romani program are similar in approach and level of difficulty, and seem to be the two most popular Latin text sets in the US. Distinguishing features: the stories in Ecce are more domestic, whereas CLC focuses on political, military, and religious or cultic topics.

For the basic blue-state/red-meat distinction among Latin texts, see the OLC entry. Many texts besides CLC, Ecce, and OLC are in wide use. A more comprehensive list of texts can be found at the Latin school texts entry. (Go ahead: see if you can find it! Hint: click on the link.)

CLC

Campus Life Council. The Observer, a campus newspaper (see the ACP entry) published a news item about the Notre Dame CLC on Tuesday, January 31, 2006. It began thus:

    With half the academic year behind them, members of the Campus Life Council (CLC) examined the purpose and scope of their existence at Monday's meeting -- the first since Christmas break.

The accompanying photograph shows a couple of participants in the meeting looking a little bit down, but certainly not as downcast as this suggests.

CLC

Canadian Labour Congress. Bilingual acronym is CLC-CTC.

CLC

Capillary Liquid Chromatography.

CLC

Cholesteric Liquid Crystal.

CLCC

Ceramic Leadless Chip Carrier (q. v. for further information). Some confusion is occasioned by the occurrence of a similar-sounding PLCC (q.v.) in which ``L'' stands for leaded. Cf. CLDCC.

CLC-CTC

Canadian Labour Congress -- Congrès du travail du Canada. Ca. 2,300,000 members in a country (.ca) of ca. 31,000,000.

If you want to see the awkward consequences of explicitly gendered language, compare the English and French on their bilingual start page. In most European languages with sexual gender, the male form has traditionally been ``unmarked'' and the plural male form has implicitly been inclusive. Thus, for example, Spanish amigos usually means `friends' and not `male friends.' Amigas is used for `friends' only when all of them are female. Similarly the first-person plural pronoun (English we, us) is nosotras when we are all female, nosotros otherwise.

The politically correct view is that this gender asymmetry is unfair, and explicit gender balance is necessary. Hence, on the CTC-CLC page we see first travailleuses et travailleurs (`female workers and [male] workers') and then travailleurs et travailleuses. Oh so delicately balanced and ... ladies first. What?! What did I say?

The rot spreads. Here's an example from German. The principal German-language electronic forum for history of science is the DGGMNT-sponsored Oldenburg Mailingliste. The mailinglist homepage explains that it is for ``der Kommunikation zwischen Wissenschaftler/-innen'' (`communication among scholar/-ettes,' if scholarette rather than scholar were the feminine form of scholar). For worse, see VIAL.

By the way, the corresponding, higher-traffic English-language HOS mailing list is MERSENNE. As of 2004, these are both basically just announcement lists, primarily for conferences and jobs.

CLD

Culturally and Linguistically Diverse. I think they mean different. That ASHA sees a need for this qualified sense of diverse sheds an interesting light on the sense of the unqualified term as normally used.

CLDCC

Ceramic LeadeD Chip Carrier (q. v. for further information). Mnemonic assistance: the expansion of CLDCC has one more D than that of CLCC.

CLE

Continuing Legal Education. State bar associations set requirements on the number of CLE credits lawyers must get in order to continue practicing. Loosely, people use CLE to mean ``CLE credit.'' A lot of private companies have sprung up to offer CLE's. A lot of them are worthless; prefer conferences, but choose them on the basis of the hotel accommodations.

clean-room class

A ``class 100'' clean room has no more than 100 particles 0.3 microns or larger per cubic foot of space.

CLEAR

Council on Licensure, Enforcement And Regulation. Self-described as ``the premier international resource for professional regulation stakeholders.'' It was conceived in the 1970's ``as a resource for any entity or individual involved in the licensure, non-voluntary certification or registration of the hundreds of regulated occupations and professions. Since its inception, CLEAR's membership has included representatives of all governmental sectors, the private sector, and many others with an interest in this field.''

CLEC

Competitive Local Exchange Carrier[s]. Telephone exchange. The local Bell (ILEC) still owns the cables, but the CLEC offers a competing service over them. CLEC's, like ILEC's, are often just called LEC's.

The local baby Bell does not have a monopoly on local service, but they'll have little incentive to stop acting like a monopoly if you continue to act as if they do and are. Visit the relevant Business.com pages to see how many options you have.

In the US, real competition among local service providers began after passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (enacted and signed February that year). That act was intended to increase competition in both local and long-distance phone service, by specifying how CLEC's could function and how ILEC's could also compete in long-distance service. The act also deregulated cable TV rates and included among its provisions the widely detested CDA, q.v.

cleek

A golf club. I imagine it's an onomatopoeic name for golf clubs (putters, obviously) of a certain heft, from back in the innumerate nonstandard times. Just the other day, Gary stated ``you really have no interest in golf, do you.'' I was about to point out that I have entries in the glossary for various golfic or golfological terms, but he clarified ``I mean you have no interest in playing golf.'' That's right.

CLENE

Continuing Library Education Network and Exchange.

CLEO, CLEOS

Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics. Three held annually, sponsored by OSA. Pronounced /kli:ou/ (``KLEE-owe''). There's now also a CLEO/Europe.

CLEO is sometimes written Cleo, and occasionally participates in the AAP pleonasm ``CLEO conference,'' but most people I know who go to CLEO know better. CLEO used to be called CLEOS -- Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optical Systems.

Cleo

Short for CLEOpatra. The famous Cleo was Cleopatra VII.

CLEP

College-Level Examination Program. ``CLEP is based on the premise that some individuals enrolling in college have already learned part of what is taught in college courses through noncredit adult courses, job training, independent reading [and what about all those National Geographic specials, huh?!] and study, and advanced high-school courses.''

Earn College Credits for What You Already Know!

As of 2001, there were 34 separate CLEP examinations.

clepe

Call by the name of. A rare word, but it was good enow for Shakespeare, and it's good enough for me. Actually, concordances show the bard used it a handful of times, and parts (verb forms of) yclepe a couple of times. Chaucer used clepe extensively. Moving a little further back in time, however, a dictionary of thirteenth-century English that claimed to be quite comprehensive (Coleridge 1863) gives the general sense `call,' and offers clipie as its preferred spelling.

A really useful word, and one which should be reintroduced into common use, is hight.

Clever

Compact Low-Emission VEhicle for uRban transport. (Those capitals represent the official derivation of the name. Obviously, it should really be Compact Low-Emission VehiclE for urban transpoRt, but we won't insist.) It's a motorized tricycle with an aerodynamic-looking aluminum-and-plastic body and chassis. It's one of those high-morality vehicles: short-ranged (200 km), slow, and feeble, so you can't do anything an MEP wouldn't do on camera, EU-funded, university-designed, compressed-natural-gas-burning... you know the routine. (The project, or the funding request, was begun at the Institute for Motor Vehicles at TU Berlin; a European consortium was formed in 2002, funded under the Fifth Framework Programme of the EU Commission. At the roll-out in April 2006, much of the hoopla went to the University of Bath, England. The elegant web pages have text that looks like it was outsourced to Romania.)

It's a two-seater, but to reduce the front-end surface area (to about one square meter) the passenger sits behind rather than beside the driver. Also, in order to reduce the length and weight of the vehicle, the legs of the rear-seat passenger have been removed. The designers are hopeful that ``with the backing of a major manufacturer, it could be on sale within five years for around'' GBP 5000 (USD 9000), to people who lack the coordination to ride a bike. BMW, which provided some backing for the project, is thinking of manufacturing it if, as expected, the EU imposes CAFE-like standards.

Most people, when they learn the name of this car, think it's a reference to (or a dig or whatever at) the Smart (not I, because I'd never heard of the Smart). The Smart vehicles have all been four-wheelers and have demonstrated their continuing viability by failing in the marketplace ever since 1994. Recently, however, demand at six-month-waiting-list levels has been achieved by reducing production. The Smart was originally intended to be high-tech, innovative, you-know-that-routine-too. It never quite worked out that way. Clever was in fact designed to reduce emissions mostly by brute force: punier vehicle, ergo punier emissions. The target was to design a vehicle with half the weight, power, front-end surface area, and emissions of ``the smallest and most economical mass-produced vehicles (for example [the] Smart Diesel).'' (Those are given as 800 kg, 30 kW [40 HP], 2.2 m², and 100 g of CO₂ per km. The Clever is supposed to weigh about 400 kg empty, develop 15 kW, and emit 60 g/km. It's just too bad they didn't cut the number of wheels in half, too.)

The most touted and probably the most galling feature of the Clever design is an electronically computed tilt mechanism that leans the vehicle into turns. The idea is that because its profile resembles a motorcycle's, it's top-heavy and prone to tip over, but because it's a tricycle in an egg, it can't be intelligently maneuvered like a motorcycle. The designers call the computed-tilt feature ``fun.'' It's not fun. Fun can be a characteristic of things that you do. The things that are done to you are fun only for the engineer and the mad scientist.

CLHS

California League of High Schools.

CLHS

California Lutheran High School.

CLHS

Cass Lake High School. Well, FWIW, here's a link for the reunions of their class of 1978.

Just look around you, people! What do you see? That's right, tons -- literal megagram units -- of CLHS entries. So what are you going to do from now on? Louder -- I can't hear you! That's right, you're going to use CLBHS.

CLHS

Center Line High School. In Center Line, Michigan.

CLHS

Central Lafourche High School. In the town of Mathews [sic? sic], right smack dab in the middle of Lafourche Parish, Louisiana.

As a veteran of visits to high school web sites, I have one piece of advice: have something to do while you're waiting for the page to load. Knitting a decorative headscarf for your garage would be a good project.

CLHS

Chautauqua Lake High School. Officially ``Chautauqua Lake Central School'' -- CLCS, but we're not doing CLCS today. (I think it's on the schedule for May 22, 2007.) So far as I can tell, the Chautauqua Lake Central School District has two school buildings: a high school and an elementary school. The ``middle grades program'' (grades 6-8) is in the lower floors of the elementary school.

As I was clicking around trying to figure that stuff out, I was thinking that I was really wasting my time big time. But I actually learned something moderately important. The middle grades program has a wonderful facility of which everyone can be justly proud, with so many computer labs you trip through them on your way between classes. On the other hand, it is stated as a matter of pride that ``students learn Spanish or French,'' as if that were not a meager selection.

CLHS

Christ Lutheran High School. In Davenport, Iowa.

CLHS

Chung Ling High School. In Malaysia.

CLHS

Clear Lake High School. For the Lakeport Unified School District in California. Their ``links page'' is their real homepage.

CLHS

Common Lisp HyperSpec.

CLHS

Concordia Lutheran High School. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, which we mention elsewhere. Institutions named Concordia are usually Lutheran schools, so they could just have called the place ``Concordia High.''

CLHS

Cypress Lake High School. Part of the School District of Lee County, Florida.

CLI

Call Level Interface.

CLI

CathodoLuminescence Imaging.

CLI

Command-Line Interface. Cf. CUI, GUI, WYSIWYG.

CLI

Command-Line Interpreter.

CLI

Commission[s] locale[s] d'information. Local information committee[s].

CLIC

Complete Line Interface Circuit. Generally, that's a unit with SLIC (Subscriber Line Interface Circuit), CODEC (coder/decoder) and assorted other goodies depending on application.

click

Apparently the most common spelling of a slang term for kilometer, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to use one of the less common spellings which begin in k.

clickstream

Web server request logs.

CLID

[Telephone] Calling-Line Identification.

clinical breast exam

Oh, ``clinical.'' No wonder the insurance won't reimburse me for services rendered. But I'm the lowest-cost provider!

clinically proven

Yeah, we had a clinic once that couldn't prove the superiority of our products. They obviously weren't very competent. So we hired a different research outfit -- much better results since then. Very scientific.

CLIPS

C-Language Integrated Production System.

CLIR

Council on Library and Information Resources.

CLIVAR

CLImate VARiability and Predictability. A ``core project'' area of WCRP.

CLIVE

Computer-aided Learning In Veterinary Education. A <CA-> acronym, made less odious by suppression of the trite vowel.

CLLM

Consolidated Link Layer Management. (That's for the ATM Link Layer.)

CLK

CLocK signal or voltage level.

ClMed

Classica et Medievalia.

CLMS

Component Library Management System. Part of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) environment.

CLNAP

ConnectionLess (CL) Network Access Protocol.

CLNP

ConnectionLess (CL) Network Protocol.

CLNS

ConnectionLess (CL) Network Service.

CLO

Chief Language Officer. A CXO roughly 50 times less common than the one immediately below.

CLO

Chief Legal Officer. The preferred term for the Tribal Chief of Police. (It's preferred by me.)

If there's only one company lawyer, then I suppose either she or one of his bosses is it. (Sorry, my Chief Language Officer has not authorized me to use the singular ``their.'') We have a short list of CXO's that nevertheless probably manages to include some CXO's that you don't need to be aware of, so visit!

CLO

Collateralized Loan Obligations. Introduced by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in Spring 2000 to provide an alternate source of credit to small businesses. (The Japanese central bank long ago lowered interest rates to stimulate the economy, but banks did not respond by significant increase in loans.) In the CLO system, banks offering new loans to small businesses turn around and resell the credits to trust banks. These trust banks transfer their rights to companies that issue bonds, with the rights as collateral, and sell them to institutional investors. The loans are backed by the Tokyo Credit Guarantee Association, which sets credit-worthiness requirements on the companies applying for the loans.

Cloacina

The Roman goddess of sewers.

clock

Find one here.

clockwise

Do not attempt a piecewise translation of this word. The suffix -wise in English only happens to be spelled and pronounced in the same way as the adjective wise. The suffix means something like way or manner and is cognate with the German -weise. Likewise, ``likewise'' has nothing to do with like wisdom. In German, clockwise is ``Uhrzeigersinn.''

For Spanish, there is really no one-word translation; if you want a precise translation, it might be ``según las manecillas del reloj.'' In most contexts, ``hacia la derecha'' (to the right) will do. Many years ago in Argentina (back when this was still an industrially advanced country), my father bought a product with instructions that had been translated rather literally into Spanish from English (or possibly from Japanese by someone rather more familiar with English than Spanish). The instructions featured the phrase ``reloj sabio'' fecklessly attempting to modify a verb. That phrase (as well, for that matter, as the formally poetic ``sabio reloj'') means `wise clock.' Cf. pole.

CLOS

Common Lisp Object System, an OOP built into Common LISP.

closed channel

A liquid channel in which the liquid is completely in contact with the channel wall. This is opposed to an open channel (q.v.), in which a free surface is open to gas or vapor. The water pipes in ordinary indoor plumbing are closed channels, and fluid flow in a closed channel is also commonly called pipe flow. The bang you may hear when you shut the faucet is called water hammer.

Roman aqueducts used open channels except in inverted siphons; urban distribution was in narrow pipes usually operated as closed channels.

closed shop

A closed shop is a workplace in which only members of a (particular) union are hired. This differs from a union shop, in which new hires are required to join a union. The two terms are naturally conflated, since in both cases one can say that ``union membership is a condition of employment.'' The Taft-Hartley Act (``The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947''), passed by a Republican-dominated Congress over the objections of labor unions and the veto of President Truman, included among its provisions the outlawing of closed shops, but not union shops. Since closed shops are no longer legal, there has been some meaning creep. Also, now that the provisions of the act have been long accepted, union leaders no longer refer to it as the ``Slave Labor Act'' (in public, anyway).

You might suppose the distinction is minor, but it's not. Closed-shop labor contracts give unions the right to control who may join them, and thus who may work. Union-shop contracts require the union to admit all hires. The union may, however, expel a member for cause. In that case, however, so long as the member continues to pay union dues, or service fees (see agency shop), the union is forbidden to make any effort to affect the employee's job status. (Discussions of race discrimination in employment tend to focus on employer racism, but unions were also an interested party. The Taft-Hartley act limited their power to act on their interest.)

The Taft-Hartley Act also forbade secondary boycotts, strikes in jurisdiction (representational) disputes, certain kinds of featherbedding, and union contribution to political campaigns. It gave the president the right, for strikes in key industries (transportation, energy) to impose a ``cooling-off'' period requiring strikers to return to work for sixty days, and required union officials to take an anti-Communist oath.

In the years following the passage of this act, many states passed ``right to work'' laws banning union shops as well. There are 21 such states as of 1997.

The Taft-Hartley law also banned the direct employer deduction of union dues from pay, but that is now a negotiable matter, and common.

closer

Of course you know the noun closer -- one who closes (it's the standard name for a class of employees at fast-food restaurants). You also know its homograph, with unvoiced s, the adjective closer, comparative of close. There's a third word closer that is widely used in linguistics. It refers to vowels, and it means ``more closed'' -- it's the comparative of the adjective (the past participle) closed.

Here's something, uh, closely related: The Mexican presidential election of 2006 ended up as a close race between the PAN and PRD candidates.

During the election-night coverage, reporters often used the expression ``elección cerrada,'' which literally means `closed election.' This usage, while not exactly un anglicismo, doesn't make a lot of sense except as an English-influenced expression. At least one reporter I heard used the expression ``elección acercada,'' which means something like `approached election' [an election brought closer together]. It's difficult to make a loan translation of the English term ``close election'' because close has a particular set of acceptions that do not coincide in a single word in Spanish. The closest approximation (you will pardon the expression) of the adjective close in English is the word cercana in Spanish, but ``elección cercana,'' means `nearby election.'

There are, of course, various ordinary Spanish expressions for a close race or election. The head of IFE called the election ``estrecha'' (`narrow'). Rough equivalents are apretada (`pressed') and reñida (`[closely] fought').

CLP

Cell Loss Priority.

CLP

Country Liberal Party (of Australia).

CLR

Cell Loss Ratio.

CLR

Common Language Runtime. I've seen this described as ``a platform for compiling, debugging, and executing .NET applications.'' So it's very clear that it's a Windownese term, and moderately clear what CLR is for, and what it in some sense does, but I have no idea in what sense it is a platform.

CLRC

Central Laboratory of the Research Councils. ``[O]ne of Europe's largest multidisciplinary research support organisations.'' Naturally, it's not exclusively European, and it's not central either. (According to an earlier version of the homepage, it operates from three ``sites: Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire [near where Lewis Carroll was born], Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire [nothing to do with the Rutherford Labs in Cambridge], and [now without marquee space on the homepage] Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire.''

When you try to visit the CLRC page, you reach what looks like the CCLRC page instead.

CLS

Claude Lévi-Strauss. For your convenience, we have distributed our information on this person in the following entries:

1. downtown Holland
2. fishing
3. floating signifier
4. FU
5. LS
6. OWI
7. Pittsburgh

CLS

ConnectionLess (CL) Server.

CLS

Continuous Linked Settlement [system]. A system for settling foreign-exchange (FX) transactions. The system was developed by the CLS Group founded specifically for that purpose in 1997. The system, as finally introduced in 2002, is a service CLS Bank International (``CLS Bank''). CLS Group has two main operating companies: CLS Bank and CLS Services. CLS Services provides technical and operational support to CLS Bank.

By the end of 2003 CLS had been adopted by all the world's biggest banks, and was settling more than half of the dollar-value of daily foreign-exchange transactions.

The 70 or so banks and other financial institutions that support CLS account for a substantial majority of cross-currency transactions, but as of the end of 2003, only 11 currencies were eligible for CLS settlemen: Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Danish krone, euro, Japanese yen, Norwegian krone, pound sterling, Singapore dollar, Swedish krona, Swiss franc and US dollar. Additional currencies are to be added. The Hong Kong dollar, New Zealand dollar, and the Korean won are due to become CLS Bank ``eligible currencies'' in 2004, once the full CLS Bank and regulatory approval processes have been satisfied and the technical implementation completed.

Cf. RTGS.

CLS

Cracked Lap Shear (specimen).

CLS

Critical Legal Studies. Oh, it's just an abomination and a tragedy, a travesty and a shame. Once upon a time, legal studies was clear-minded and rigorous, and never at odds with any lawyer's notion of what the law ought to be. Alas.

CLSD

CLoSeD.

CLSF

ConnectionLess (CL) Service Function.

clubbell

A piece of strength-training equipment that is basically an asymmetric dumbbell -- a weight in a form resembling a club, baseball bat, or bowling pin. They're traditional in India, as kettlebells are traditional in Russia, and so in English they've traditionally been called Indian clubs. The term clubbell is a trademark registered by one ``Guru Sonnovavishnu,'' no wait, ``Coach Sonnon,'' for a brand of Indian-style clubs made of polyurethane and steel (instead of wood like the traditional sort). As with kettlebells and Nordic Track and all the rest, extremely optimistic claims have been made. Just remember: anything you don't use is just as effective as anything else you don't use. See also dumbbell.

Club Med

Club Méditerranée, S.A. A Paris-run chain of vacation villages. Starting in 1950 with a village in Majorca catering to working-class French families, it has expanded to over a hundred villages today, located not just off the southern coast of Europe but on all continents that are not Antarctica, and a couple of cruise ships.

In the 80's, Club Med had the reputation of a modern Bacchanal. Today it is best known as a useful basis for plays on words that rhyme with bed.

Some further information can be found at the G.O. entry.

I regularly meet people who are surprised to learn that Hard Rock Cafés are a real chain of, well, night clubs, let's say (though I've eaten breakfast at one) and not just a figment of an overactive tee-shirt maker's imagination. So that probably makes two things you learned today. I don't run with a very fast crowd, I guess.

CLUE

Compensated Laser Ultrasonic Evaluation.

CLUT

Color Look-Up Table.

CLT

Central Limit Theorem. Everyone's favorite excuse for assuming a ``Normal distribution.''

CLTA

California Language Teachers Association. The California affiliate of SWCOLT (the Southwest Conference on Language Teaching), which is in turn a regional affiliate of ACTFL (the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages).

CLTA

Canadian Library Trustees Association (a division of the CLA). Cf. ALTA.

CLTS

Cryogenic Linear Temperature Sensor.

Clueless

There was a movie by this name in 1995, starring Alicia Silverstone. To tell you the truth, I'm, well, I don't really know a thing about this movie. But it's mentioned in a growing number of entries, currently including

• Baldwin
• Betty
• lightness

CLV

Constant Linear Velocity. See CAV for context.

CLWR

Commercial Light-Water (nuclear) Reactor. Light water is water in which the hydrogen is the frequently-occurring (no neutron) isotope.

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