A large class of words ending in -our in Commonwealth spelling take an -or ending in the US spelling. This occurs only when the o[u] is an unaccented shwa. Examples include the words with American spellings arbor, ardor, candor, color, dolor, endeavor, favor, flavor, honor, humor, labor, neighbor, rigor, savior, valor, vigor. In both orthographic regimes, the -ous adjective form ends in -orous. American thus avoids a stem change. [The same principle, of minimizing stem lengthenings upon the addition of suffixes, can be seen in the more conservative American usage respecting the duplication of final consonants when a suffix begins in a vowel.]
Words ending in an -our that is not an unaccented shwa are spelled identically in American and British. Some examples, all with the same vowel, are contour, detour, velour.
Another pattern that yields an identical spelling is the double r. The words error, horror, mirror, and terror are now written without a u in British English, although some -rrour spellings have been common in the past. One -or spelling that used to be fairly universal is furor, but the Italian spelling furore seems to have become very popular in Britain.
The singular spelling, in American, of the word glamour, may be due to its meaning: France and French are historically associated with glamour. To suggest, often mockingly, a greater sophistication or stylishness, a French pronunciation will be affected. (And then, of course, the not-a-shwa rule mentioned above kicks in.) [Another of instances of such an affectation, also playing on the prestige of French, is the use in Spanish of the pronunciation of bien as ``bian'' (q.v.).]
Moreover, the -our ending is recognized as characteristic of words borrowed from French, whereas words borrowed (directly) from Latin more typically end -or. Awareness of this is supported by the presence of words and phrases in English, such as amour [not completely incidentally, there's a site for Dorothy Lamour], tour de force and foubarre du jour. Consequently, any word ending in -our may be identified (or misidentified) as of French extraction and pronounced homestyle for effect, as occasionally occurs with colour, honour, and sometimes imperceptibly with velour (the Modern French cognate is velours). On our next broadcast: ``Lexical Profiling: Is it Right?''
The irony is that this happens more often with glamour, whose -our does not reflect a French etymology. A further irony is that the word evolved from the now quite unglamorous word grammar (used to suggest sophistication).
In the song ``You're in My Heart,'' Rod Stewart sings
You're essay, in glamour -- Please, pardon the grammar --
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
Nothing could be further from the truth! Far from constructing a glass ceiling, the fact is that today's corporate leadership found this ceiling already in place when they arrived! It's been there all along! Today's corporate leaders are completely innocent, see?
In reality, today's corporate leaders are the victims of their own virtue: solicitous of the interests of their female employees, they recognized that as long the glass ceiling was in place, no women could be promoted into higher management, because then subordinates could look up their skirts from below the glass ceiling!
As you can imagine, solving this problem has been assigned a very high priority. At this very moment, memoranda are being drafted to request the commitment of resources for drawing up guidelines for the selection of committees that will look into making recommendations on possible ways to address the many, many difficulties foreseen, such as reflection (the generalized `black patents' problem), protocol during ethernet cable installation, and how to deploy carpeting in common areas without inadvertently elevating the status of corporate serfs and industrial sharecroppers. These are challenging problems, but there is a patient confidence that they will soon, or eventually, be overcome. Remember, it took ten years to put two men on the moon, and the moon was already opaque.
This site is studying the glass ceiling building code as well. They're pretty rash, talking about shattering barriers without considering the danger of laceration.
Not just any strangers. Only random strangers.
The rock group Ten Years After had a hit with ``I'd Love to Change the World'' in 1971. It begins with these lines:
Everywhere is freaks and hairies,
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity?
(Maybe that ``hairies'' is ``Hares,'' short for Hare Krishnas.) I'd love to change the glossary and include this, but I don't want people to think I'm a homophobe or some other kind of social pervert. I've considered presenting this strictly as a historical or musical datum, but still I fear the PC police. I guess I'll just have to leave it out. Again as so often, it is you the glossary patron who loses out.
The ``Federal GLOBE's chartered purpose is to eliminate prejudice and discrimination in the federal government based on sexual orientation...''
GLOBE is systematically capitalized: ``www.FedGLOBE.org: Serving the U.S. Federal Government GLBT community since December 1997.'' If it's an acronym, I don't know where the big O comes in. That's why I put it here instead of in its own GLOBE entry.
Here's what AHD4 (2000) has to say about the noun queer:
- Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a homosexual person.
- Usage Problem A lesbian, gay male, bisexual, or transgendered person.
Queer is a ``reclaimed word.'' You're only allowed to use it if you are the kind of person who can take direct personal offense when it is used by someone else who could not take direct personal offense when it was used.
I'm sure there are some clever theories to explain why GLBTQ is not equivalent to Q and hence not redundant. But perhaps one may be forgiven (No! You may be forgiven nothing!) for suspecting the author of ``GLBTQ'' of wanting to pad the initialism to suggest that this group is diverse and large. An alternate possibility, which nothing in my experience supports, is that the Q group is giddily captious, and that not having one's particular sexuality honored by inclusion in the initialism is an opportunity to take offense.
Just for the record, this entry came as soon as I happened to notice the initialism, on December 13, 2005. Stay tuned for the next extension. Update: as of February 24, 2007, it's still GLBTQ! Danger! If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward!
Oh -- I was just out of it. I was contemptibly ignorant of GLBTI, GLBTIH, and their various, um, permutations. I'll be sure to add entries for those very soon. But why does G so often come first? Isn't that sexist?
The non-heterosexual community is not one community but many, and individuals identify themselves in a variety of ways. We have used the names 'gay,' 'lesbian,' 'bisexual,' 'Two Spirited,' 'transgendered' and 'queer' to compose the acronmy glbttq (which could be pronounced glub-tok), but we recognize that this list is not complete, and that there are many other terms people use.
Glimpse is based on agrep, which you might (as I did) suppose stands for (University of) Arizona grep. In fact, it stands for Approximate grep -- it's fault tolerant.
UB's Wings makes available a glimpse search tool. It's one among many hundreds.
Glinda was the Good Witch of the North.
Time for a new journal.
Not that there's exactly a shortage of journals--or even journals that publish work in lesbian and gay studies. For two decades the Journal of Homosexuality has provided a home for research--especially in the social sciences--by and about lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people. Lately a spate of journals has featured articles and special issues on topics in lesbian and gay studies. But there hasn't been a journal dedicated solely to this interdisciplinary field, a field that is at once rapidly expanding and delimiting itself. We need a journal that can keep up with all this new work, can pause to look at what's becoming lesbian and gay studies even as it happens, and crucially, can provide opportunities for critique of the field-in-progress. This is GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
(You've convinced me! And I just happen to have a contribution available, recently reje--umm, I uh, that I recently withdrew from consideration for Journal of Homosexuality. I think it would be perfect for your journal!) Three paragraphs later:
So much for G and L. What about that Q? It takes us in two directions at once. Towards the academic legitimacy of quarterly, with all the genteel associations that centuries of critical quarterlies guarantee. [Excellent! I'm coming up for tenure next year!] And in the opposite direction, towards the fractious, the disruptive, the irritable, the impatient, the unapologetic, the bitchy, the camp, the queer. [They've got my department chair's secretary down to a tee.]
President Eisenhower's stock has gone up dramatically over the last few decades, as we've had the unhappy opportunity to compare him to his successors. Something similar has been remarked of Algol.
For longer-term effort, you need to get some oxygen in there, both for final aerobic conversion of pyruvic acid (via the Krebs cycle), and for the (completely aerobic) conversion of fatty acids.
Under normal conditions -- i.e., when you're not exercising -- something like a third of the energy used by your muscles may come from glycogen.
My suggestion for an advertising campaign theme, whenever the country gets serious about tourism, is ``Gambolling in Gambia.'' They can use it royalty-free until they build the casino, but I want a cut from ``Gambling in Gambia.''
GM-related AAP pleonasms are beginning to occur, as for example in these minutes from the British House of Commons.
GMAC explains that it ``has worked with business schools around the world for nearly 50 years, so [they] know the MBA and its possibilities better than anyone [else].''
In resources intended to ``help you decide whether an MBA is right for you,'' they explain that ``[j]ust wanting the degree is not enough. ... Business school admissions counselors want to see evidence ... the typical MBA candidate ... can clearly articulate his or her motivations for wanting to earn an MBA. You are not ready if: ... Your career goals are no more specific than `I want to command a higher salary.' ...''
This is overly wordy despite drastic editing, so you can guess that there is a simple truth being hidden here. There is. The simple truth is that B-schools want applicants (supplicants, in the case of the bigger-name schools) to flatter the schools' conceit that they are imparting wisdom rather than a credential. So don't just sit there staring at the blank essay portion of your application form. Do something! Specifically: Get Up! Turn Around! Pull Down Your Pants and Give 'Em What They Want!
Just don't say you want to live a quality lifestyle and that that takes a lot of do-re-mi, which an MBA can help you earn or at least make. Those who deal in money prefer to think that they deal in something else -- service, knowledge, facilitation, education. The MBA is actually a pretty straightforward transaction: you give them money, and they give you a receipt called a diploma. The receipt proves that you were good enough to be admitted to whatever school you paid for. If you do very well as an undergraduate, then your college professors will recommend that you go for your MBA directly. In most cases, they recommend that you learn about the business world by doing business in the business world. In either case, your educational achievement is recognized in the fact of admission.
Once admitted, for appearances' sake, you should take some courses. There are both two-year and one-year programs, tailored to fit different circumstances. It's possible to compress a two-year program down to as little as 11 months because, again, the MBA is not about what you learned in order to graduate, but what you learned in order to be admitted. They could compress it down to nothing: you could be admitted in April, attend orientation in June, have your yearbook picture taken in October and attend December commencement, but this kind of program is still unusual among the better-name schools. On the other hand, if you've got a lot of time, then you can start an MBA part-time. The solid business case for taking MBA courses on evenings and weekends rests on the fact that you're a masochist.
Mark is widely regarded as the oldest of the four gospels, although according to Irenaeus, Matthew wrote a gospel in Hebrew while Peter and Paul were still alive, and Mark wrote his after Peter and Paul had died.
Albert Schweitzer's view of GMark was highly influential throughout the twentieth century. He argued that Mark's intention was to portray Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. Mark uses the book of Daniel (the most apocalyptic OT book, and perhaps the vaguest as well) and borrows the ``Son of Man'' epithet (unexplained in Daniel, as various others are unexplained). However, Mark also uses Isaiah, Psalms, and Exodus. And of course, over the century or so before the gospel was canonized, it may well have been re-edited...
(A Hermeneutical Law: to the analysis of every canonical document there is a can of worms that includes ``manuscript tradition.'')
(A sociological fact: Bible hermeneutics is done only by those who can bear spending their lives on invisible tissues of uncertainty layered on uncertainty.)
The MK mentioned at the 419 entry has explained many times that, while missionaries are happy to give free Bibles to those who ask, they prefer to start potential marks out on (sorry, I mean, to begin the salvation of souls with) the Gospel of, uh, Mark. Then they move on to some other N.T. books. The O.T. is a bit unsavory in places, maybe not so edifying. Ol' Mr. Tetragrammaton, you know, He was a bit hot-headed in His younger days.
Hark! Our Nigeria-raised MK has repented her earlier words:
> Silly me. The main reason, of course, for holding off on the Old > Testament was all that polygamy & animal sacrifice. Plus disemboweling > enemies.
Well, now, not so fast, there! You've got to take the good with the bad. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water. (And don't toss the plastic food-item baskets in the trash containers.)
Some believe they see influences of Homer in GMark, either as allusions or as a
narrative model. Hey, why not? FWIW, it has also
been claimed that the narrative part of the Old Testament was redacted in
Hellenistic times on the basis of Homer as a narrative model. A version of the
Homeric Mark thesis was published by Dennis McDonald The Homeric Epics and
the Gospel of Mark (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). (He argues
mostly for the Odyssey, a little for Iliad). This is reviewed by Douglas Geyer
in ``Homer or
Not Homer? Mark 4:35-41 in Recent Study.''
The question at the center of NT text criticism is why the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke partially agree and partially disagree. Other scriptures adopted part of what is found in Matthew (the gospel of the Ebionites borrows much of it but excludes GMatt's genealogy and infancy accounts; the Diatessaron, which cribs in sequence from Mark, Luke, and Matthew, also omits Matthew's genealogy). Luke, however, does not merely omit material found in GMatt; he has a number of differences, both substantive and minor, particularly in the birth narrative (BN, q.v.), passion narrative (PN, q.v.), and resurrection story. If one doesn't want to accept that Luke simply rejected sections of GMatt (or that Matthew rejected portions of GLuke, if one takes the less common view that Luke wrote first) then the simplest solution is to suppose that there was another source, now lost (and never attested, FWIW), from which they both worked, called Q.
In the simplest, ``two-source'' hypothesis (2SH), the agreements of Matthew and Luke arise simply from their common use of Q, and the disagreements arise from their independent use of their imaginations or different additional sources or both. (Both appear to have borrowed extensively from Mark, although in places they also agree against Mark. For Luke, close textual analysis seems to have convinced many that his work is indebted to a number of sources, possibly including the gospel of John or some proto-John document.)
Alternative hypotheses suggest themselves if one is willing to accept that Luke rejected portions of GMatt or that Matthew rejected portions of GLuke. (Don't try this at home! You could burn yourself forever!) The three-source theory (3ST, q.v.) and the Farrer Hypothesis (FH, q.v.) are just such hypotheses, assuming respectively that a Q did or did not exist.
An interesting feature of GMatt is the occurrence of a dozen or so ``fulfillment quotations,'' as they are known. These are passages where the gospel says (using Greek that is quite formulaic) ``...in order that what was said by the prophet would be fulfilled, when he said [insert O.T. quote here].'' Most other O.T. quotations in the N.T., whether in GMatt or other books, have wording that closely resembles the Septuagint (LXX). The fulfillment quotes (in Greek, of course) are expressed differently than in the LXX, and tend to resemble more closely the sense of the Hebrew that we have available to us, suggesting that Matthew or a Matthew redactor read the O.T. in the original Hebrew and made his own translations. [You may ask why the evangelist Matthew or a redactor of his writings would have done a better translation job than the LXX translators, but it's not assumed that he did. The Hebrew text (and, apparently to a lesser degree, the Greek text) continued to evolve after the LXX translation, and so diverged. Any later Greeking of the Hebrew would be closer to that later Hebrew, and probably closer to the Hebrew that eventually came down to us.]
You got all that? Good, now here's a further complication: outside of the fulfillment quotes, when Matthew quotes the O.T. his Greek is closer to the LXX than Mark's or Luke's. Oy gevalt! Also of interest (well, of equal interest): Matthean priority. Saint Mark says ``grrr.''
Back there when we introduced ``a Matthew redactor,'' you may have started to think that early copyists may have introduced changes to the gospels that make it impossible to sort out from apparent similarities and differences now, what the original dependences may have been. (For example, the couple of non-Matthian fulfillment quotes may be not Markan but redactorial.) In a word: yup.
In words that English gets from Norman French, the initial gee is often softened into the double-u glide (thus we have guarantee from French and warranty from Norman French). French guerre's Norman cognate is our word war.
Actually, I'll have to look into this a little further. It seems the Germanic root is reconstructed as beginning in w.
Outside of the English-speaking world, one of the places where Shakespeare has traditionally been very popular is Germany. Of course, they have always used translations into modern German. In the movie MASH, the guys bring in a ringer, Capt. Oliver Harmon Jones (played by Fred Williamson), whose nickname is ``Spearchucker.''
Bad lawyer infestation at that site: ``I assume full responsibility and hold GMDC harmless for all information I obtain from or provide to the system. GMDC does not endorse, affirm or in any other manner warrant the content, accuracy or completeness of such information or assume any liability for same.''
= 41 MeV
A1/3.
I agree.
Folks extremely unhappy with ICANN got a hold of the domain gnso.org first. It's an ugly joke. Their http://www.dnso.com is funnier.
Reclaimer: In the words of Dave Barry, ``I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.'' A recursive name; I don't know why they didn't call it UNUNU and make it palindromically recursive.
The long-range goal is to provide a complete alternative to Unix that looks like it but is free in every sense of the word (vide FSF). As John Maynard Keynes said, ``In the long run, we are all dead.'' At least, Keynes is dead, and GNU is far from complete. However, various useful pieces are available: The very popular editor emacs, some PostScript-related products (Ghostscript, Ghostview, GSview), a command shell with a good name (bash), a debugger (gdb), an assembler (gas), and C/C++ compilers (gcc/g++, originally written by Richard Stallman, later modified by Michael Tiemann and others). The compilers were an issue in the mid-nineties -- at a certain point, Sun released an operating system (Solaris 2 = SunOS 5) that did not come bundled with C compilers. Because of the intimate relation of Unix and C (the former was written in the latter, for instance), this bundling was once traditional, but lately the trend has been to leave it off. It's hard not to feel cheated. The main advantage of new operating systems is that they force customers to spend money on new software that is in no noticeable way better than the earlier software. (Although that's not as bad as the retrogression represented by successive versions of MS Word.)
On the model of federalize, you'd think provincialise in the sense appropriate here might be useful. Googling up some ersatz usage research, and even discounting the French hits, provincialise (in the governmental sense) appears vastly to outnumber deprovincialise and de-provincialise. Partly, this is because in many cases the latter idea is more gracefully rendered as nationalise or federalise.
The ugliness of the term provincialize is reflected in the fact that the first 5% or so of hits are dictionary entries, and that it appears on pages of fashionably post-modern literary criticism and at kinky pornography sites. In an interesting contrast with the -ise spelling, there are almost 50% more hits for the (I estimate) 60% uglier term deprovincialize. (This is probably because provincialism is regarded as a naturally occurring backward condition, rather than the result of some nongovernmental provincialization process. The next time I handle this entry I'm going to have to use the scoop.)
Fascinating, the things you learn when you study ground transportation.
- There was an old man with a beard,
Who said, ``I demand to be feared! - So address me as God,
And love me, you sod!'' - And Man did just that. Which was weird.
``Gold records'' (500,000 units) are recognized by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).
More general information on gold at the Au entry. For a bit on the geology of gold mines, see the pluton entry.
Giordano Bruno, describing his own times (born ca. 1564, burn 1616), wrote
Cut-purses, miles of cheats, enterprises of scoundrels, delicious disgusts, foolish decisions, crippled hopes, virile women, effeminate men, and everywhere the love of gold.
Here's a random datum: on March 17, 1968, a new two-tier system of gold prices was instituted.
____
/
1 + / 5
\/
-----------------
2
or about 1.618 033 988 749 894 848 204 586 834 365 64 .
An interesting article is Roger Fischler: ``How to find the "golden number" without really trying,'' Fibonacci Quarterly vol. 19, pp. 406-410 (1981). On the other hand, without even trying to get out of your seat, you can visit the related pentagram entry. The golden ratio is twice the cosine of 36 degrees.
In German, the number is called ``der Goldene Schnitt'' (equivalent to `the golden section').
If your concept of North America stretches as far south as the South American nation of Colombia (it shouldn't), then the preceding statement is not true. In January 1855 the Panama Railroad was completed, connecting the port city of Colón (q.v.) at Limón Bay, on the Atlantic, to Boca del Monte, a bay on the Pacific near Panama City (called simply Panamá in Spanish).
Just don't think of gill slits.
Gold has been a standard of value since prehistoric times, and a monetary standard since there was coin. (For something about the transition between bartering with gold and paying with gold coin, see Hackgold.) Hence, ``gold standard'' can be understood as the fixing of the value of a currency against the value of gold. (I should probably add that in ancient times it was usually not the only monetary standard. There was silver, of course, and Herodotus reports that at one time the Spartans used iron money. This may or may not have been an example of monetized metal tools, called utensil money.)
It has had that meaning in English for centuries. For example, in 1696, one Thomas Neale published A PROPOSAL For Amending the Silver Coins OF ENGLAND, And the Possibility of it, without any Great Charge to the NATION. Demonstrated In Two Different Ways. It contains ``A Table to Reduce gradually the Price of the Ounce Troy of Gold Standard to 4 l. an Ounce. being esteemed Sixteen times the value of Silver Weight for Weight) the same having first been raised to 5 l. 6 s. 8 d. which is the proportion of Silver to 6 s. 8 d. an Ounce, the Gold Standard Coined or not Coined esteemed a like, by reason that Gold esteemed 16 times the value of Silver Weight for Weights, is the highest Rate that ever was.''
According to page 16 of A Short History of Technology, a heroically bad work described at the self-published entry, ``Darius the Great was the first to establish the gold standard.'' (Of course, there is not a single gold standard, although for many years following WWII, there was a single gold standard for the US dollar. It became unsustainable during the Nixon administration.)
Finally, gold has long been understood as a metaphor for the best. As Chaucer wrote, ``if gold ruste, what shal iren do?'' Hence, ``gold standard'' can be understood as the highest standard -- the best, to be regarded as a standard of comparison. I have to say, though, that the monetary standard was the only kind of gold standard I can recall ever having heard until my old college roommate Dennis, by then a radiologist, started talking to me about ``gold-standard'' diagnostic technologies and treatments and what-not. It doesn't seem to be exclusively medical jargon, however. News of the Weird describes itself as ``the gold standard of weird-news reporting.''
The only sport involving a ball that has thus far been played on the moon by a human. Moreover, the first experiments in untethered balloon flight were conducted by the Montgolfier brothers [Joseph-Michel (1740-1810) and Jacques Étienne (1745-1799)]. Another technical tie-in: a duffer is also called a ``hacker.''
The main importance of golf, however, is neither as sport nor anything technological, but as a business lubricant. I'm not talking about elbow grease here. The need to grease the gears of business (to say nothing of the palms of officialdom) is nothing new. For a sixteenth-century view, here is part of Guicciardini's ricordo C179 (in the translation of Domandi):
When I was young, I used to scoff at knowing how to play, dance, and sing, and at other frivolities. ... But later, I wished that I had not done so. ... [S]kill in this sort of entertainment opens the way to the favor of princes, and sometimes becomes the beginning or the reason for great profit and high honors. For the world and princes are no longer made as they should be, but as they are.
There's probably a female declension of saboteur, and if I knew French I'd certainly use it so that you would feel ignorant and inferior. If someone lets me know by email what the female form (of the word) is, I'll happily insert it and return to pretending that I know French, just like all us sóphístícátés.
Without the exclamation mark, the title of a Foo Fighters song (vide s.v. fu).
What is this, some kind of proverb? No. High-school English teachers promote the doctrine that essays should begin with generalizations. I wish they'd amend that to the doctrine that essays should begin with generalizations that are not obviously stupid. The review (August 2, 2004 issue, pp. 27ff) does not satirize the book's title, so it's an easy syllogism that Lemann need not be an angry man, if the claim were true. What we have here is fairly typical: humor sometimes masks anger, so Lemann just strips away all qualification, tears down any useful distinction, and states a nice, gnomic, barefaced lie. I HATE NICHOLAS LEMANN!!!!!
But seriously folks, it seems to me that humor and humorists come in for a lot of generalizations that happen not to be true. (The BUR seems to be something of a rehash. Why not visit our bobo entry again? Or just keep reading.)
Comedy deals with the conflict between illusion and reality: ``Know thyself!'' is the imperative of every comic writer.
Allen is discussing the novels of Jane Austen. I do apologize for mentioning her almost in the same entry with an amateur ``comic sociologist'' like Brooks, but there are some circumstantial similarities. Later (p. 120), Allen continues:
... those most attached to Miss Austen's novels have usually preferred the later ones, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, which were written after an interval of more than ten years. During that long silence, the reason for which we do not know, Miss Austen's mind grew graver; it is as though she could find folly, self-deception, irresponsibility, silliness, the individual's lack of knowledge of himself, no longer merely funny; more and more as she realized their consequences they became contemptible, even hateful, to her.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
If I think of something better, I'll move the current content of this entry to an entry for triage or planned obsolescence or something.
- By accident (74%)
- Grudgingly (22%)
(Percentages may not total 100% due to rounding.)
Usual port, assigned by IANA, is 70. For technical details that will allow you to write your own client or server, see RFC 1436. Note also that there is a Gopher+ (that's by gopher, by http it's at http://ftp.sunet.se/ftp/pub/gopher/gopher_protocol/Gopher+/Gopher+.txt), incorporating extensions to the original protocol.
Veronica was once a common gopherspace search engine.
This is a prophylactical entry; if a chain of such stores by this name should suddenly happen to come into being, the entry will already be in place. I put the entry in around 1996 or so. There's a company founded in 1991 that sells tee shirts illustrated with politically conservative humor, and it occurs to me that I should mention one of their ``hot'' shirts (in 2008, and since at least 2006). It's emblazoned with the words ``Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms'' in large letters, followed in smaller letters by ``should be a convenience store, not a government agency.'' (Sure, it's a different idea, but there are some common elements.)
What you won't find in most dictionaries, because it is simply a regular inflection of the basic term, is gordón, a noun meaning `very fat one.' I figured you'd want to know.
Do you have to pass those completed courses? (Always looking for the loophole.) Hmmm. Seems there's more to it.
See UCF's explanation.
The same name (gov) is widely used as a government subdomain within a ccTLD (see next entry).