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LI
Lactose Intolerance. Lactose is the principal sugar in milk, and it is normally broken down by the enzyme lactase.

The custom of drinking milk or consuming milk products into adulthood is not universal. It only began with the domestication of animals, and did not become universal even among agricultural societies. In crude approximation, one may say that milk is a Caucasian taste. (Mnemonic: white.) In the US, milk and milk products are used extensively in prepared foods and restaurant meals, which is okay for probably ninety percent of the population.

Back in 1977 or so, when Warren and I were in college, he came down with this persistent intestinal problem -- severe gas pains. He went to a bunch of doctors who failed to diagnose his problem, although in retrospect it was as obvious as the color of his skin. He eventually visited a doctor who happened to be black like him, and who diagnosed LI. When the lactose isn't broken down by the body's own enzymes, intestinal flora feast on it and release gas.

If you are in a food-service profession, or even if you just happen to be raising children in Alabama, you may find our Hold-the-cheese entry instructive.

L.I.
Langelier Index. A pH measure of relevance to hard water. Its value is given by
L.I. = pH - pHs ,
where pHs is the pH of a solution with the same concentration of Ca2+ at the point where it is just saturated with calcium.

The idea is to keep the L.I. high enough to prevent precipitation of calcium carbonate (formation of ``scale'' or ``sinter''), but not so high that one risks corroding metal pipes.

If vapor pressure were measured this way, its L.I. would be something like the difference between actual temperature and the dew point.

LI
Laser Ionization. Vide LIMS.

.li
(Domain name code for) Liechtenstein.

Here's the Liechtensteinian page of an X.500 directory.

According to the principality's government, ``[a]s an important part of its sovereignty, Liechtenstein pursues an independent and active foreign policy.'' In 1990, it even joined the UN.

LI
Linguistic Inquiry. A journal.

LI
Linux International.

Li
Chemical symbol for LIthium. At Z=3, the lightest alkali metal, unless you count cold, compressed hydrogen.

Early in the twentieth century, lithium bromide (LiBr) was used as a sedating tranquilizer. This led to our use of the word ``bromide'' for a trite, not to say slumber-inducing, saying. Somebody (I forget who: probably Gelett Burgess, but maybe Don Marquis) wrote ``Are You a Bromide?''

It turns out, however, that the psychoactive element is lithium. This was discovered, quite accidentally, by John F. J. Cade in 1949. Unfortunately, by the 1940's, lithium was considered dangerous, because its use as a sodium substitute in cardiac patients led to some deaths. Cade found that lithium was effective against bipolar disorder (then called manic depression). That story is told at the alkali metals entry here and in Peter D. Kramer: Listening to Prozac. [It helps Kramer make one of his central points, which is, roughly, that a successful therapy can define a diagnosis. That's part of the idea of the title: listen to the successful therapy Prozac, it tells us something about what we might or should call emotional health. See also this ED entry.]

Because of the distrust of lithium, and because of Cade's obscurity, lithium therapy did not catch on again until the sixties. I remember, though, a lot of glossy lithium ads in my grandmother's Journal of the American Psychiatric Association from those days. The ads were glossy, not the lithium. By that time they were marketing it in the chloride.

The group Nirvana had a song called Lithium, 4:19 in the album version. Its first words, sung morosely by lead vocalist Kurt Cobain, are ``I'm so happy.'' KC eventually committed suicide.

Learn more about the chemical element lithium at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Lithium batteries are kind of unusual. Normally, a battery has

  1. a positive electrode coated with a chemical species to be reduced,
  2. a negative electrode coated with a chemical species to be oxidized,
    and
  3. an electrolyte to move ions around.

A simple example would be Ag2O [silver (I) oxide] to be reduced at the anode, and Zn [zinc] to be oxidized at the cathode, with a water electrolyte. Lithium, however, is just burning to be oxidized, so one doesn't need anything special at the positive electrode -- water electrolyte itself serves as the oxidizing agent, with hydrogen being reduced and hydrogen gas being evolved.

LI
Long Island. It stretches ENE from Manhattan, NY. Sometimes LI is used in place of the state abbreviation NY.

LIA
Laser Institute of America.

LIA
Linear Inductance Accelerator.

liaison
One of the words most frequently misspelled in résumés. It's not the hardest word to spell, but if your work history includes words like debris, a résumé, let alone good spelling in it, may be unnecessary.

I have encountered the new English verb liaise. You shouldn't use this word, no matter how convenient or useful it is, because that would be an innovation.

It's a French word, and in French one of the things it refers to is the transition between two words. One well-known consequence of liaison occurs in the pronunciation of a word-final letter ess (or zee or ex). A final ess preceding a consonant is silent (as illustrated by a pun or two at the lasagna entry), but it is normally sounded when the following word begins with a vowel sound (i.e., begins with vowel, possibly preceded by a silent aitch).

liar
The Indonesian word meaning `illegal.' I mean, is that cool or what? Cf. air.

LIAR
Lexicon of Inconspicuously Ambiguous Recommendations. A ``means by which the [writer of a letter of reference] can convey unfavorable information in a way that the candidate cannot perceive as such'' if the possibly litigious candidate should at some later time exercise his or her right to read the letter. See excerpt of posting by Brent Smith to classics list. An example:

(3) To describe a candidate with lackluster credentials: "All in all, I cannot say enough good things about this candidate or recommend him too highly."

liar
Unappreciated ironist. (It's an alternative interpretation, okay?)

liason
You mean liaison.

Lib
Libra. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

Lib Dem
LIBeral DEMocrat. A member of the UK's third major party.

libel law
A mechanism for those who can afford pricey legal flunkies to bankrupt the honest.

liberal arts
Grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The first three, considered more elementary and more necessary to be known, are called the trivium. The presumption that they are elementary gave rise to the expression `trivial.' The remaining four are called the quadrivium.

Although this division of school subjects dates from the middle ages, it is helpful to recognize, as Vico reminds us [ ftnt. 33 ] that the original sense of the root liber was `noble.' Unfortunately, though, he was wrong; liber, a cognate of Eng. leaf, is related to the Gk. elphtherios (`freedom'). The association with nobility probably developed later, from the unfortunate fact that it was mostly the noblemen who were free.

The Seven Liberal Arts are illustrated/personified/epitomized here.

LIBF
Lust-Induced Brain-Freeze. A concept introduced in Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys: A Fairly Short Book by Dave Barry (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 32.

LIBID
London Interbank BID rate. You take what you can get, and sometimes you can get screwed. It's just a pun, okay? Better than LIBF, in the long run.

libido
A Latin term, also spelled lubido, with a constellation of meanings around the idea of `longing, desire.' It's a feminine noun of the third declension (gen. sing. libidinis or lubidinis).

Sigmund Freud adopted the term for his psychoanalytic theory, in which context it is defined or described as a psychic drive or energy. Since I'm not qualified to opine (or at least, since I know nothing about the subject), I can fatuously affirm that the great utility of Freud's concept is in its liquid or fungible aspect. Desire, in ordinary terms, is thought of as something fixated on an object. In Freud's understanding, this was a bit too rational. Libido in his theory is desire that can be transferred to a different object, or that can be an underlying drive. The term is particularly associated with sexual desire. Here we bump into a common irritation with Freud: from time to time, he issues disclaimers briefly but carefully explaining that it doesn't have to be about sex. Then he goes back to ignoring anything that isn't to do with sex. See LIBF for a more plausible theory.

LIBOR, Libor
London InterBank Offered Rate. Benchmark interest rate of the British Bankers' Association, reflecting the short-term rates at which its banks lend to each other. Cf. LIBID.

libraries
At UB and at ND. In case I lose my bookmarks file, or can't access it. You don't matter; this glossary is really just for my own information, and because it costs me nothing I'm letting you see it too. If neither of these library systems is convenient for you, build your own glossary.

The translation of library into another Western European language is usually a cognate of the French word bibliothèque (German Bibliothek, Spanish and Portuguese biblioteca; exception: Italian libreria). In French, librairie (librería in Spanish, llibreria in Catalan) means `bookstore.' For more of this sort of noncorrespondence of words and translations, see the faux ami entry. For online Spanish bookstores, see the links on this page (Librerías Españolas). (They're mostly small. The best database I could find of books in Spanish is the Consultas page at Librería Canaima. Casa del Libro offers to email you the results of a search if their search form doesn't return any results.)

libre
French and Spanish, `free' in the sense of having liberty, not in the sense of the Latin, French, and Spanish word gratis.

I would mention the conventional ``free as in speech, not as in beer,'' but I won't, since it's not very original.

librería de viejo
A Spanish term meaning `used book store.' Literally, the term means `bookstore of old,' although it can be interpreted as `old person's bookstore.' Other terms in use are librería anticuaria (`antiquarian bookstore') and librería de viejo y antiguo (store selling books that are `old and very old' or `old and antique').

Librería Verde
`Green Bookstore.' The name of a New-Ageish Spanish-language bookstore.

libro
Spanish, `book.'

LIBRO, Libro
Library of IBerian Resources Online. A site maintained by AARHMS.

LIBS
Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy.

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LibStud
LIByan STUDies. Standard TOCS-IN abbreviation. I imagine there are different titles that may correspond to different journals or things outside of classics.

LIC
Line-Interface Computer.

LIC
Low-Intensity Conflict. Anything short of ``conventional war,'' whatever that is.

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LICS
Leeds International Classical Studies.

LID
Light-Induced Drift. See, for example
Vladimir M. Shalaev, Constantine Douketis and Martin Moskovits: ``Light-induced drift of electrons in metals,'' Physics Letters A, vol 169, pp. 205-210 (1992).

LIDAR
LIght Detection And Ranging.

[Phone icon]

LIDB
(Telephone) Line Information DataBase.

LIDHA
Long Island Dental Hygienists' Association. I'm just a sucker for a beautiful smile and nicely placed apostrophe.

LIE
Long Island Expressway. A parking lot.

lie
No, no, it wasn't a ``lie.'' It was a surprise -- albeit an unpleasant one.

LIF
Laser-Induced Fluorescence.

Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech.

Life
You've got to learn to take it one disaster at a time. If time permits.

Life
They say that Life is a picture magazine.

life I used to know, The
A rock lyric. Like babybaby, the phrase does not occur in any other context.

Life+50
A judicial sentence of life plus fifty years in prison. That's so they can't bury you outside. No, not really. Beyond the symbolic, there is a practical reason to impose a formal sentence term that exceeds the longest (life, ``All Day'') that can be served. The idea is that at some later time, sentences may be reduced in a sort of batch-processed way: legislation, judicial ruling, parole laws, or a broad executive commutation may reduce life sentences to as little as time-already-served. The extra time in the formal sentence is partly an imperfect way of assuring that hard time will be served.

Life+50
The copyright protection (CP) rule in some of the world today. In Life+50 countries, literary, dramatic, & musical work published, performed, communicated, or recorded and offered for sale in an author's lifetime are protected for the life of the author plus fifty years from the end of the year of the author's death. This is approximately, but not exactly, forever. The other common rule is Life+70. Can you guess how Life+70 differs from Life+50?

Life+70
This is not explained at the Life+50 entry (q.v.). The US and the EU follow the Life+70 rule and are pushing the rest of the world to follow their lead.

LIFFE
London International Financial Futures Exchange.

LIFO
Last In, First Out. Like a stack. Also a protocol for protecting employees with seniority from lay-offs. Also one approach to asset accounting (particularly inventory).

LIFT
Logically Integrated Fortran Translator. Hey! Is dis some kinda sophist'caded disrespect at solid, family-values-upholding original-flavor FORTRAN? Huh?!!

LIGA
Lithographie, Galvanoformung, Abformung. German for [X-ray] `Lithography, electroforming, [plastic] molding.' Not just any combination of those processes, but a particular ``micromachining'' technique important for the formation of microelectromechanical systems (vide MEMS).

LIGBT
Lateral Insulated-Gate Bipolar Transistor. See, for example:
R. Jayaraman, V. Rumennik, B. Singer, and E. H. Stupp, ``Comparison of High-Voltage Devices for Power Integrated Circuits,'' IEDM Technical Digest, 258-261 (1984).

liger
The offspring of a LIon and a tiGREss. Cf. tigon.

ligero
Spanish adjective meaning `light,' in weight or on one's feet, or `gentle' or `graceful.' You get the idea. From the French léger. The female form of ligero is tigona. Just kidding -- it's ligera.

Light Brigade
The Light Brigade ``is the leading fiber optic training organization in North America having trained over 16,000 people since 1987 in both public courses and custom classes delivered at customer sites throughout the world. The company also writes and produces fiber optic training videos and CD-Roms. The Light Brigade also manufactures and distributes custom cable assemblies, fiber optic products and supplies.''

``Light Brigade'' must have seemed a clever punning name, and it is unquestionably memorable, but it works because most people do not remember the true nature of the exploits of the famous ``Light Brigade.'' A famous poem by Tennyson immortalized the dramatic action of this brigade, able to make stunning rapid progress because it was light. Another consequence of its light armament, and also of its reckless rapid advance, was heavy casualties. The charge of the light brigade at Baklava on the Crimean peninsula, on October 25, 1854, was a pointless exercise in glorious suicide, as futile as Pickett's Charge a decade later. French General Bosquet commented ``C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre.''

lightening rod
A rod that is used to lighten, evidently. A creamer-impregnated swizzle stick, probably. The locution is used by senior editors of TNR and other illiterates.

lightness
An interview with Alicia Silverstone was published by London's Sunday Telegraph on March 12, 2000. Commenting on her body of work (actually, I don't know what the context was, but I just wanted to write ``body of work''), she had these observations on ``Clueless'':
Very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it's true lightness.
I hope she can clear up my questions about gravity during her next in-depth interview. I also look forward to her cameo in ``SCUBA Diving Basics.'' She needs to do more work in a bathing suit or with something nonverbal in her mouth, so this will be perfect.

Milan Kundera is another blond public intellectual. (A silver blond, aetatis causa.) He also pondered lightness, but his thoughts were not highly profound, and he didn't do anything for oceanography either (see being).

lightning
Electrical discharge of clouds. Here's a practical, nontechnical discussion from the NOAA.

LIGO
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. It's ``a facility dedicated to the detection of cosmic gravitational waves and the harnessing of these waves for scientific research. It consists of two widely separated installations within the United States -- one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana -- operated in unison as a single observatory.'' As of 2006, it's being constructed by Caltech and MIT, and funded by NSF.

LIGT
Lateral Insulated-Gate (Bipolar) Transistor. Same as LIGBT.

LIJP
Leaf Initiated Join Parameter.

like
Here are some representative examples of the use of like. Most of the examples illustrate a new use of the word that I first noticed in the 1990's, in which it introduces an approximate quote or paraphrase, or perhaps just invented speech that represents unspoken thoughts or attitudes.

Likes romantic walks on the beach.
Personals ad cliché. Personals-ad copy editors have a macro so they can enter this phrase in at most three keystrokes. Four keystrokes in states with no beaches. Unique is <meta>-U. Sincere is <meta>-S. There's a special key sequence for removing the words candlelight dinner.

When 2001: A Space Odyssey was in production, Arthur C. Clarke made a remark to the effect the MGM publicity department must have typewriters with a single key that would type ``Never before, in the history of motion pictures.'' 2001 was released in 1968. It's 2003. We still don't have colonies on the moon or manned interplanetary expeditions, but we have achieved keyboard shortcuts (and calmly uncooperative computers, but that is no news).

li'l
Eye dialect for indifferently articulated pronunciation of little.

LILAA
Literacy In Libraries Across America. A program, not a declarative sentence. Was it successful? I don't know -- I haven't been to the library to read the results.

LILA/ILAB
International League of Antiquarian Booksellers / La Ligue Internationale de la Librairie Ancienne. The ABAA is its national association for the US.

(Notice how the French version of the name is librairie corresponding to the English booksellers? More of that sort of situation is discussed at the libraries entry.)

LILCO
Long Island Lighting COmpany.

LILT
Lab for Integrated Learning and Tech. At Illinois State. ``Serving the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Business 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM Monday through Friday.''

LIM
Lotus-Intel-Microsoft. (These companies have certain communication formats for PC's in common.)

lima
Lima is a Spanish word, and you know what that means... ¡Fiesta! ¡Fiesta de Polisemia! [`Polysemy Party!'] Let's get some drinks and meet at the next entry.

lima
The name in most varieties of Spanish for the fruit called `lime' in English. The same word can be used for the lime tree. A more specific name for the lime tree is limero (although the same word applies to a person who sells limes). Mexico uses different names for the lime and lemon: see limón.

lima
The name in Spanish for the tool called a `rasp' or `file' in English. To use that sort of file is limar, so lima also means `he files.' (Here `he' is a generic third person. You wouldn't want to be in he's shoes.) It's also a couple of other conjugated forms of the same verb.

Incidentally, sandpaper (or emery paper, etc.) is lija (of uncertain origin). To use sandpaper, of course, is lijar.

The English word file, for the tool mentioned here, is Germanic in origin, and unrelated to the English word file borrowed from the French fil and file. That's one can of worms, to be opened later.

Lima
The capital of Peru, and a common placename in the US. The Lima in Indiana is pronounced LEE-muh, in a fair English approximation to the Spanish name (and coinciding with the English pronunciation of the Peruvian capital's name). The name of the Lima in Ohio is pronounced LYE-muh, like the bean (in English).

The Lima in Ohio has ``City'' in its official name, but with a population of something over 40,000 it's hardly any bigger than the ``Town'' I grew up in, which no one ever called a city. Whether one uses a word like city or town depends on more than just population and zoning ordinances. A city tends to be regarded as a slightly exceptional thing. You can have a string of towns one right after the other, but people are not yet used to the idea that many cities could sit cheek by jowl. So Lima, surrounded by rural Ohio, is separate enough to be a city. Westfield, one of many similar-size bedroom communities along the rail line west from New York City, is a town.

The Lima in Indiana, incidentally, is not a municipality but a township. It's a rectangle about five miles wide and four miles high. (On the map, that is. I'm avoiding a more natural description while I reassess my capitalization convention on compass directions.) It's along the Michigan border in Lagrange County. Look, a picture is worth a thousand words. You want to know more, look in Township Atlas of the United States, published by Andriot Associates of McLean, Virginia, in 1979. Those are actually the associates of John L. Andriot, compiler and editor of this wonderful reference. Anyway, the radio stations in that part of Lagrange County, and people from around there, use the placename about as everyone else uses the name of a town. Elsewhere in Indiana, there's also a Peru.

Isabela Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942. She lived in Chile until the military coup that overthrew the president, her uncle Salvador Allende. She left. Smart move; I know less prominent people who stayed. She must be the most famous writer in Spanish now living in the US, though in recent years she has been writing novels in English.

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LIMC
Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae. Lessee, this probably means `Alphabetized list of Icon Graphics for Mythological Classics.' I dunno, go check it out and see. Oh, wait, here's a more elaborate site.

Hey, it takes up an entire shelf and it's mostly in foreign languages!

lime
A few green citrus fruits. The real lime, Citrus Aurantifolia, grows throughout the tropics and in the Western hemisphere is common as far North as Mexico. Until a hurricane did in the main orchards in 1926, they were grown in the Florida Keys, where Key Lime pie was invented. Another fruit, essentially a lemon (Citrus Limon) hybrid, is called Tahiti lime or Bears lime (Citrus Latifolia). This tastes like Key lime but is less tart. It's sold green so you can tell it's not a lemon. Most lime sold in the US is Tahiti lime.

Let the State of Florida tell you more about tropical and subtropical fruit.

Another interesting thing about the Florida Keys is that the US states that have prominent strings of islands are at the extreme geographic corners -- Alaska (Aleutian island chain), Florida (Florida Keys), and Hawaii (Hawaii). Then again, maybe it's not so interesting. You wouldn't expect Iowa to have a major island chain. A lot of Atlantic coast states have lines of what some are pleased to call barrier islands. See OBX.

limelight
A bright light used for magic lanterns in the eighteenth century, generated by calcium flares (sticks of CaO).

limestone
Calcium Carbonate. As ``rocks'' go, it's pretty water-soluble. As ionic salts go, it's not very soluble.

Limey
[Chiefly British:] A pejorative noun meaning ``British'' or ``English.'' This word is an underappreciated feature of the English language. Somewhat like sesquipedalian, it refers unfavorably to most of those people who know and use the term. This is not normal. Does the French language have a disparaging term for Frenchmen? (It's a rhetorical question; don't interrupt.) Human languages do not usually have a derogatory term for people in general: If one says, ``every person can be bought,'' the derogation occurs in the sentence as a whole, but there is no word that one could use to replace person that, standing alone, would be recognized as pejorative and general. (But see yahoo.)

The word Limey originally referred only to British sailors, but was later extended. (It was a reference to sailors' eating of citrus to prevent scurvy. The Germans pioneered the practice of vitamin-C supplementation with Sauerkraut. This was adopted by the British first; the switch to citrus came later.)

The word Limey ironically undercuts itself -- it's a weasel word to itself. It'd be downright postmodern, if it weren't so retrograde. Another class of words that may be regarded as self-denying, in a contrived sort of way, are heterological words like monosyllabic.

LIMM
Light Intensity Modulation Method.

LIMM
Lotus-Intel-Microsoft Memory.

limo
English, short for LIMOusine.

Limo
German, short for Limonade (`lemonade'). I guess if the caddy is a lemon, that's what you must make. (This joke worked a bit better when this entry and the previous one were integrated into a single confusing entry for the unrelated English and German words.)

Well, that was based on what I learned long ago. Apparently though, the meaning has drifted. Now Limo and Limonade both mean `fizzy drink,' and if you mean lemonade you have to say Zitronen-Limonade (literally `citrus lemonade').

limón
The Spanish word that general means `lemon.' In Mexico and some parts of Central America (at least Guatemala), the word is used for lime. Lime there seems to be much more popular and common than lemon. I've read that the Mexican term for lemon is limón francés (the second word means `French'). A few years ago (mid-aughts, I guess) asked a couple of people at the local Mexican grocery store (Supermercado Rosales) and they didn't seem aware of the term. The standard term in Mexico and Guatemala seems to be limón amarillo (amarillo is `yellow'). In the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, a lime is called a lima. Some Mexicans and Guatemalans use lima for `lemon,' completely inverting the usage elsewhere.

limpia
A Spanish word meaning `cleans.' That is, it's the third-person singular indicative present tense form of the verb limpiar, meaning `to clean.'

The same word, or string, let's say, also functions as the female form of the adjective `clean.' Note that the stress in limpia falls on the first syllable. This is considered the penult (the penultimate syllable) because the final ia is pronounced as an a with a palatalization of the preceding consonant. In Spanish words with two or more syllables, the default stress is on the penult if the final letter is s, n, or a vowel, and on the ultima (final syllable) otherwise. An explicit accent (acento gráfico), in the form of an acute accent on the vowel of the stressed syllable, is used to indicate deviations.

Finally, limpia serves as the familiar () singular imperative. That is, ¡Límpialo! means `Clean it!' The explicit accent occurs because the enclitic pronoun lo doesn't change the location of the stress in the verb (such invariable stress is a general pattern in Spanish).

The word limpia also occurs as the first element in various compound nouns, in much the same way that cleaner (in English) occurs as the final element. Here are but a few examples:

It's obvious that the element limpia in the examples above is related to the lexeme limpiar, and it happens to coincide with three identical forms. If one had to choose one of those and say it occurs in the compound, the indicative form (meaning `it cleans') seems to make sense, but it's not necessary to make this choice.

Earlier I implied that the familiar second-person singular verb forms in Spanish are associated with (singular nominative `you'). That's true in most of Spanish-speaking world, but not in Argentina and Uruguay, and not in most of Central America and western Colombia. There the familiar forms are associated with a pronoun vos, and a different set of conjugations. The imperative form for vos is limpiá.

There's a lot more to the various second-person forms, but here I just want to round out the discussion of explicit accents in Spanish. As noted above, accentuation is used to indicate stress. The default rules make it unnecessary to indicate stress in the majority of words, and an acute accent is used to mark the default behavior. In addition, accents are used to make semantic distinctions among very common homophones. For example, means `you' (in the restricted sense detailed above) and tu means `your.' In the sentence ``Sí sé si se acentúa'' (meaning `yes I know if it is accented'), means `yes' and si `if,' while means `I know' and se is a reflexive pronoun used to construct a kind of passive voice (as discussed at the Ú. entry).

In the preceding examples of accents making a semantic distinction, the words distinguished were monosyllables, so there was no unstressed syllable to distinguish from the marked one. Semantic accent marking also occurs in multisyllable words. For example... wait a second: is it really possible I never explained this before? I think I'm going to hold off until I'm sure I haven't.

limpiaparabrisas
A Spanish masculine noun meaning `windshield eh wiper.' Sorrry, I meen dee wiper off de-- okay enough of that. It's an official ``queer Spanish word.'' The word is evidently constructed from limpia (`it cleans') and parabrisas (`windshield').

LIMS
Laboratory Information Management System[s]. Perkin-Elmer would like to sell you one.

LIMS
Laser Ionization Mass Spectroscopy. Just like SIMS, but with laser light rather than an ion beam doing the ablating. Works in laser ionization (LI) mode (implicitly--ionization of bulk material) and laser desorption (LD) mode.

LINAC, linac
LINear ACcelerator.

lin/ax
A combination of LINseed and flAX that fuels Google's PC's. It is gathered free at nearby open space preserves. Lin/ax kernels continue to be at the core of Google's open space lin/ax system.

LiNbO3
Lithium Niobate. Nonlinear (optics) crystal.

Lindemann criterion
An empirical observation about the melting temperature. The condition is that the mean-square vibrational displacement of the atoms in the solid is 10% of the nearest-neighbor distance at the melting point. This was described by F.A. Lindemann Physikalische Zeitschrift (vol. 11, pp. 609-612) in 1910. The term (viz., Lindemann criterion) is now applied to improved forms of the criterion, such as the form proposed by J.J. Gilvarry in Physical Review vol. 102, pp. 308ff (1956).

The Lindemann criterion is also applied -- as appropriate -- to the sublimation point rather than the melting point.

Linear
LIncoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (Program). In New Mexico.

line frequency
DC power distribution was very popular in the US until the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893, and when Niagara Falls went online at 25 Hz in 1895. After that Edison had lost the argument, and the only question was what frequency. Steinmetz at GE, and Tesla at Westinghouse, independently decided 60 Hz was best (lamps didn't care much, for motors the decision had to do with motor speeds, number of poles, etc.). Since Westinghouse (and GE as licensee) had clear title to important patents, they dominated the business and 60 Hz became standard throughout North America. In Europe it took longer. In 1918, London alone had ten different frequencies and twenty-four different voltages. All or most of Europe eventually settled on 50 Hz (3000 cycles per minute). Much of the rest of the world ended up with the frequency determined by colonial or neocolonialist or whatever control (I.e., 50 Hz in Australia, Africa and most of Asia, 60 Hz in the Philippines and some South American countries -- Brazil and most of the countries with a Pacific coast, IIRC.) Korea and Taiwan are at 60 Hz. Japan ended up weird, with one part at 50 Hz and another at 60 Hz.

The wiring FAQ has some info on how delivered power (at least to distribution substations) is three-phase, and on voltages.

The reason for the switch from DC to AC was fairly well known, I thought: In order to have voltage supply at least approximately independent of the number of customers, customers must represent loads in parallel. If you think of the distribution system and users as parts of a voltage divider, you see that as you increase the number of loads in parallel, the largest fraction of the voltage is dropped by the distribution lines. The solution was thicker cables and more closely spaced dynamos. Edison and backers had all the patents free and clear, and were perfectly happy to continue in this approach.

The alternative was AC power, which could be transmitted at high voltage and stepped down by transformers. Edison tried valiantly to kill this technology, particularly by raising the safety issue. (Although as presented, the concern was deceptive, it was nevertheless true that in practice, transmission lines would carry very high voltages and be more dangerous.) The DC partisans brought their safety case to the New York state legislature at the time when a more-humane execution method was sought, and painted such a picture of instant death that the legislature bought the first electric chair (AC, of course). (A ghastly bungled horror, BTW; the condemned not only smoked, he also continued to gasp.)

A practical problem in AC distribution, however, was the absence of a good motor. Nikola Tesla, motivated at first by a desire to create a brushless motor, came up with the idea of an induction motor that ran on AC. His asynchronous design developed high torque even when starting; with this and his complete design for a polyphase power system, he revolutionized the industry. Westinghouse, who had made his money from the design of the air brake for trains (and an early evangelist for standardization) had already licensed some European designs for part of an AC distribution grid, and he soon bought Tesla's patents for a cool million. That brings us close to 1893.

In the days of DC, a few miles was "long distance." The first customer for Niagara Power, in 1895, was (what became) ALCOA, 22 miles away in Buffalo.

lingot
French for `ingot.' Borrowed into Spanish as lingote. There are two main relationships possible between Fr. lingot and Eng. ingot: Either the French word is derived from the English one, or it is not. The first possibility has the advantage of a straightforward Anglo-Saxon etymology and a similarly constructed word (Einguss) in German, but suffers from the difficulty of accounting for the initial el. No one ever seems to mention (I mean, the major etymological dictionaries don't, and I haven't checked the primary literature) the possibility that l'ingot might have been reinterpreted as lingot, or à l'ingot as au lingot.

Those who deem the insertion of an initial el an insuperable problem generally assume that the French word (with a Romance origin) was adopted into English, and don't see the loss of the el as a problem in English. (I suppose lingot might have been misunderstood as l'ingot. Why does this sound familiar?) The leading etymon candidate on the French side is Latin lingua (`tongue'; a typical ingot looks vaguely like one, and when the mold first starts to fill, the metal looks like an extending tongue). There are some detailed technical problems with this, including (as I understand it) the fact that in the process of gaining a Romance -ot, the word would be expected also to have exchanged its i for an e or a. Alternative Romance derivations have their alternative technical problems. Similar sorts of problems have been adduced for the Anglo-Saxon derivation.

linguist
Professional and (what is almost the same) academic linguists are often anxious that you understand that knowing a lot of languages is not what linguists are about -- that a linguist may study a lot of languages and may know things about a lot of different languages, but needn't be able to speak any of them. I'm okay with that. (And I'm more okay with that than with many linguists' belief that what they do qualifies as science. Some do linguists do science, many don't.) I do, however, want to point out that what they're trying to do is corral the meaning of the word ``linguist.'' For a long time it has been a synonym of polyglot. Their effort is prescriptive, like any other attempt to command language usage. Prescriptivism -- describing how language should be rather than how it is -- is something that linguists generally claim to regard as foolish or vain or in some other way bad. (This attitude is part of the reason why linguistic enlightenment is one of the great disasters that befell language education in post-WWII America.)

There is a synonym for linguist that does not, at least in principle, also have the sense of polyglot. That word is philologist, which deserves its own entry that I haven't written yet.

Linguistics
This is the fundamental science, since everything that can be expressed can be expressed in some language. (I understand that there's a contrary opinion, but they have failed to articulate their position to my satisfaction, so they're wrong.) The MSU English Department has a page of useful language and linguistics links. So does the University of Rochester Linguistics Department.

There is an Ethnologue Database of world languages.

Some translation and language information is available at ECHO.

There's a site associated with The Linguist List.

links
German adverb meaning `on the left' or `to the left' (politically or not). This particular word doesn't seem to have any cognates outside of High German. Incidentally, the German word corresponding to the English gulf is Golf. Some years ago, in fact, VW sold a four-wheeled vehicle also called the Golf. What ``High German''? These guys must think they're Highlanders.

LINT
Leichter Innovativer Nahverkehrs-Triebwagen. `Lightweight Innovative Short-range Motor Coach.'

Linux
Freeware unix-like operating system for PC's originally written by Linus Torvalds. Documentation and code are available from the official site as well as the Linux Documentation Project. Here's another site. There's even a dedicated host for Linux International (LI). This site discusses the pronunciation as well as other matters.

LIOD
Laser-Induced Optical Device.

LION
LIterature ONline. ``[A] fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 192 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources'' as of late 2006. Also called the Chadwyck database. Coverage tails off after 1924, on account of a little something yclept copyright.

``Lion King''
A Disney animation based without acknowledgment on the Japanese anime series of the seventies, ``Kimba, the White Lion.'' Perpetuates an unfair characterization of hyenas. At least the big cats are not vegetarians, as in the Japanese original.

lion hunting
The mathematical theory of lion hunting was developed informally at Princeton in 1937. Dinner-table results were extended by Frank Smithies and Ralph P.Boas, Jr., and published under the pseudonym of Pondiczery.

The most famous method was that of inversive geometry:

``We place a spherical cage in the desert, enter it, and lock it. We perform an inversion with respect to the cage. The lion is then in the interior of the cage, and we are outside.''
It was published in American Mathematical Monthly. Readers were appreciative of the careful concern for such practical details as having hunters and hunted on different sides of the cage.

The name Pondiczery, spelling anglicized to Pondicherry, occurs as the name of a rich Indian prince in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That's in chapter three. In chapter four, radical measures against chocolate-industrial espionage are described. How does Grandpa Joe know all this stuff?

Liouville
Once, after giving a lecture on statistical mechanics, Professor Arthur S. Wightman was approached by a student in the class, who asked him about Louisville's Theorem.

What?

Louisville's Theorem.

``Louisville's Theorem''? I am not aware of any theorem by that name.

The Louisville Theorem. You just proved it during class!

I did?

Yeah. The one about how the volume of a phase space region is conserved under Hamiltonian evolution.

Oh! You mean Liouville's Theorem!

[In the preceding reconstruction of dialogue, the student's cogency has been enhanced for brevity.]

Less mild spelling correction is described at the Dr. entry. Anyone who came here from the Flourine entry might now, having read the above cautionary tale, wish to visit the F entry. And if you came from the Furrier Series entry, you're looking for Fourier Series. We don't have an entry for that yet, but in search engines, ``spelling counts.''

LIP
Large Internal (data) Packets.

LIP
Lightning Instrument Package. Used in the CAMEX.

lipid
Roughly speaking, the nonpolar chemicals typically found in living organisms. That is, fats and oils, waxes, most things that feel oily to the touch, and quite a few that don't. (That is not the same as things that feel slimy to the touch! The mucous coating of the throat and other internal passages exposed to air is highly polar.) For low molecular-weight compounds, ``polar'' and ``nonpolar'' might be approximately synonymous with water- and oil-soluble, respectively, but this is not true for tissues. [If it were, we would say with the Wicked Witch of the West (movie version only!): ``I'm melting! Melting!'' Of course, what she really meant was dissolving, but in the circumstances, this inaccuracy might be forgiven even a witch. As Saki wrote in The Comments of Maung Ka: ``A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.'' In the preceding quote, tons was probably not intended to be understood literally. You know, on second thought, it wasn't really dissolving either. It was some sort of dematerialization, a slow-motion bottom-up implosion -- almost as if she were descending into a hole in the stage.]

In practice, ``lipid'' is a catch-all term intended to include everything that isn't a protein or a carbohydrate. To define lipids more positively, if that is the term, one may say that most lipids are fats and oils. Fats and oils, as materials, consist overwhelmingly of chemicals called triglycerides. Other common lipids are fatty acids, steroids, some vitamins, and phosphoglycerides. The Hormel Institute studies lipids.

Lipids play an indirect rôle in the microelectronic device fabrication process, because without them there'd be no one alive to staff the fab line, see?

lipogram
A ``letter-dropped'' text. A text with one or more letters of the alphabet completely absent. It's not very challenging if you do this with one of the less common letters. The most famous lipogram in English is Gadsby, subtitled A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter ``E.'' It was written by Ernest Vincent Wright, initially longhand, and eventually with the E of his typewriter disabled. (BC-era spell-checking!) It seems his main motivation was to show that it could be done; another of his books was The Fairies That Run the World and How They Do It (1903). (He did, however, express the sick hope that ``[t]he book may prove a valuable aid to school children in English composition.'') The book was reportedly written in 165 days, but a lot of the numbers associated with this achievement are a bit uncertain. The book was published in 1939 (the introduction is dated February that year) -- or maybe ``circa 1939'' -- but whatever the case, Wright reportedly died the day it was published, age 66 or, um, 67. He excluded abbreviations like Mr., since ``for those words, if read aloud, plainly indicate the E in their orthography.'' He excluded Mrs. for the same reason, though I don't think anyone still read that aloud as ``mistress'' by then. He even excluded all the numbers between 6 and 30 (inclusive). The entire horrifying achievement is available on line.

Georges Perec, who was circa aet. 3 when Wright's inspirational story of youth was published, undertook similar but longer project in French. La Disparition (1969) was written without any e (which is the most common letter in French, as it is in English, where only about one third of words are e-less). With these projects, the question one is bound to ask, and bound not to receive an adequate answer to, is ``Why?'' Well, he liked word games. The book grew out of his involvement with the famous experimental writers' group Oulipo. At least we can say definitively that Perec (1936-1982) survived the stunt. (FWIW, one of the many mildly interesting and largely pointless foibles of Oulipo is that published lists of its membership did not distinguish between living and dead members.)

Perec wrote another, less well-known lipogram: the short story ``Les Revenentes,'' which excludes all vowels other than e.

Perhaps the most heroic lipogram is the translation of a lipogram from another language. Gilbert Adair's lipogrammatic translation of La Disparition was published in October 1994 by HarperCollins (postdated to 1995). It couldn't be titled The Disappearance, of course; it was A Void. The title character is Anton Vowl, who goes missing. (In the original, the character is named Anton Voyl; voyelle is French for `vowel.')

lipoprotein
A conjugated protein whose prosthetic group is a lipid. Less obscurely:
a protein which is bonded to a lipid. This is the principal means of transporting lipids in the blood. Due to the great variety of lipoproteins, ordinary chromatographies and electrophoresis cannot determine precisely the lipoprotein content in blood samples -- chemical characterization is laborious. Instead, blood tests report back the fraction in different ``density'' ranges: sometimes VLDL, and LDL, HDL -- very low, low, and high ``density.''

It is now the common and intellectually slovenly practice of the medical profession to refer to the whole class of lipoproteins by the term cholesterol, which is the name of a completely different chemical which does not happen, itself, to be a lipoprotein. Imagine: premeds take a minimum of two years of college chemistry. Sheesh!

Usage: ``We won't feel comfortable until we get total cholesterol below 200.'' [Notice the use of the ``medical we,'' a first and second person singular personal pronoun in Hospitalese, construed plural.]

lips
Labia.

LIPS
Logical Inferences Per Second. Thousands is KLIPS. That reminds me -- I have to trim my mustache.

LIRA
Laboratorio Integrato di Robotica Avanzata. Italian `Laboratory for Integrated Advanced Robotics.' Called the ``LIRA-Lab'' -- the only official AAP pleonasm I can think of. It might have something to do with the fact that, until Italy adopted the euro, its currency was the lira.

``LIRA-Lab is now located in Villa Bonino, a beautiful XVII century building with frescos and old slate portals, surrounded by a nice garden with palms and cherry trees.''

lira
Italian word for pound, from libra. (Plural form lire: a regular feminine noun.) The official currency of Italy until the adoption of the euro. Because a lower-case el is easily mistaken for the digit 1, the lira currency was normally abbreviated with a capital el.

Through most of the post-WWII era, the lira had a value of roughly 0.1 cents of a US dollar. When I was there in 1989, you could still find a few coins in one- and five-cent (i.e. cents of a lira) denominations. If you needed a custom-made washer, I guess you could drill a hole through the center. Alas, where can one be a millionaire so easily any more? One way to find out is to read magazine covers. Archivos del Presente, an international-affairs door-stop published in Buenos Aires, lists its price in the various countries where it allegedly circulates. For Year 8, no. 30:

LIRR
Long Island Rail Road. Operates the commuter railways from Long Island to New York City (NYC). Was privately owned, now part of the New York MTA.

If you noticed that Queens is on Long Island and also, technically, if you insist, part of New York City, beware: noticing things like that is one of the seven warning signs of Captiousness. Treatment is available; send money and we may be able to help you.

Yes, they really spell Rail Road as two words, but it took Mark two emails to convince me.

liquid measure, traditional
1 chopin	= 2 gills
1 pint		= 2 chopins
1 quart		= 2 pints
1 pottle	= 2 quarts
1 gallon	= 2 pottles
1 peck		= 2 gallons
1 demibushel	= 2 pecks
1 bushel	= 2 demibushels
1 kilderkin	= 2 bushels
1 barrel	= 2 kilderkins		(a barrel is a firkin)
1 hogshead	= 2 barrels
1 pipe		= 2 hogsheads
1 tun		= 2 pipes
Note that if a pint is a pound, then a tun, at 2048 pints, is about a ton. Note also that at 512 lb., the hogshead is perhaps optimistically defined.

Traditional French liquid measures, when still used in the seventeenth century, seem to have been about twice the size of the corresponding English measures (I think the weight measures were comparable): a chopine was 16 oz., or two English chopins. Half a chopine was a septier (8 oz.), and a quarter chopine was a posson or, confusingly, poisson. This according to Elizabeth David: Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices (Penguin, 1994), p. 102.

LIS
Legislative Information System (of the US Library of Congress).

LIS
Library/Information Science. There's that weasel word science again, this time playing coy about Library.

LIS
Lost In Space.

LISA
Large Installation System Administration. Name of annual conference sponsored by USENIX SAGE.

LISA
Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. A space-based gravitational-wave observatory, jointly sponsored by the ESA and NASA.

LISA
LIght-Switching Array.

LiSAF
LiSrAlF6. Lithium Strontium Aluminum Fluoride. With chromium doping (Cr3+:LiSrAlF6), this is a vibronic laser material.

Lisbon
A town in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio (only two counties; cf. Rome), Pennsylvania and Tennessee. Seventeen states.

LISFAN
Lost In Space Fannish AlliaNce.

LISN
Line Impedance Stabilization Network[s].

LISP, Lisp
LISt Processing language.

Try

Listen to your heart.
Favorite saying of the ventiloquist crotch.

listmom
Gendered administrator of a mailing list (like a ListProc or LISTSERV, infra).

ListProc
A brand of mailing list software from CREN. (ListProc home here. Useful user documentation here.) If there's a listing of listprocs from the vendor, I guess it's in the ``members-only'' area.

LISTSERV
A brand of mailing list software. The term is a registered trademark owned by L-Soft international, Inc.. The latter serves a Catalist (L-Soft SM), ``the official catalog of LISTSERV lists.'' They only list the (14K as of summer 1997) public LISTSERVs on the internet (out of 55K total), omitting an unknown number on intranets, and also excluding mailing lists from sites running ListProc (from CREN), freeware packages like MAJORDOMO, the commercial package Lyris and any of the free web-based mailing list servers (a few are listed in the mailing list entry).

(As of Nov. 15, 1999, those numbers are 27,842 public lists out of 147,082 LISTSERV lists.)

For other mailing list indices and search tools, see the general mailing list entry.

As a matter of usage, although other software is common, ``listserv'' has become an alternative generic term for mailing list or mailing-list software.

lit.
Literature. Also, alas, litterature. To be fair, the Italian cognate is spelled with a double tee. But if you start being that fair, you end up turning a blind eye to independance because it looks like the French spelling. (In fact, it's a bilingual misspelling: the French word is indépendance.)

LITA
Library and Information Technology Association. A division of the ALA.

LiTaO4
Lithium Tantalate. Laser substrate material. Ferroelectric above 400 °C.

lit-crit
LITerary-CRITicism. Adjective and noun (the noun is often also hyphenated).

Literary History of England, A
The title of a work edited by Albert Croll Baugh that I cite elsewhere in this glossary. It's a single large volume divided into four books with five original authors. For reference purposes, it may be handy to list the major divisions:
Book I.    The Middle Ages
           Part I.  The Old English Period                   ... pp. 3-105
	                 (to 1100; by Kemp Malone)
           Part II. The Middle English Period              ... pp. 109-312
	                 (1100-1500; by Albert C. Baugh)
Book II.   The Renaissance                                 ... pp. 315-696
                (1485-1660; by Tucker Brooke)
Book III.  The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century     ... pp. 697-1108
                (1660-1789; by George Sherburn)
Book IV.   The Nineteenth Century and After              ... pp. 1109-1605
                (1789-1939; by Samuel C. Chew)
This describes the first edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948). It was published the same year by Routledge & Kegan Paul of London, and in a second US edition by Prentice-Hall of Englewood Cliffs, NJ, also in 1948.

The cutoff date of 1939 reflects the original intention of bringing the history near the present; publication was delayed by the war. A subsequent edition (1967) added authors and pages to books II-IV, but I probably won't cite that. The books were also published as separate volumes.

[column]

Lit. Hum.
Literae Humaniores. See Greats.

lithopedion, lithopaedion
Stone baby. From the Greek, `stone child.' A calcified fetus that results from an ectopic pregnancy. If the fetus corpse is too large to absorb, the body calcifies it as a way to protect itself from infection. An extremely rare event.

In its January 24, 2000 issue, the American Cynic reported that doctors in Taiwan operating on a 76-year-old woman found a twenty-gram lithopaedion from a miscarriage the woman suffered when she was 27. The Cynic reported that

It's an extremely rare event, recorded only three times before in medical history. ... The earliest recorded case of a lithopaedion dates to 1582, when a rocky fetus at least a quarter-century old was found in a French woman's abdomen.

Stone Baby is the name of Joolz Denby's maiden effort as a novelist. Every book is a labor of love.

This was intended to be a humorous entry, but I hadn't gotten around to finishing it. Until I do, I'll mention that in reality, and in contradiction of an enormous number of news reports, lithopaedia are not quite so rare, occurring in about 0.0045 percent of pregnancies.

litotes
A figure of speech in which an emphatic statement is implied by the negation of its (unemphatic) opposite. An unacceptable example would be ``a is not less than b'' for ``a is greater than b.'' Understatement is an even more important aspect of litotes than negation. ``a is not less than b'' is a litotes for ``a is much greater than b.''

Isn't it amazing how the use of abstraction and mathematical language can take all the interest out of a thing? I could have used the example of ``Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.'' Then I would have pointed out that this was not litotes if you regard Dorothy's statement as tentative, and definitely litotes if you think she really suspected that they were very far from Kansas. However, if I had used this example first instead of the boring example involving a and b, you might still be reading this entry. I guess I used the dry example to speed you on your way. Don't mention it! If Judy Garland had been listening to the background music, she'd have realized immediately that they were somewhere over the rainbow.

BTW, litotes is the singular form. The plural form is litotes. Don't get them mixed up! The original Greek term equivalent to litotes was apophasis (don't use it!) and it got mixed up with itself.

For more on being very far from someplace, see the I dunno entry.

litron
A French dry measure, used by retailers of pulses, millet, salt, etc. in seventeenth-century France. A litron of flour was 12 oz., according to François Pierre La Varenne, in his Nouveau Confiturier, qui Enseigne la manière de bien faire toutes sortes de Confitures, tant sèches que liquides, et autres delicatesses de bouche, published in 1650. What kind of ounces? Ahh, mon ami, now you know why the French adopted the metric system.

LitterMaid
``Computer technology creates the only self-cleaning litter box!'' according to the print ads. COMTRAD Industries also uses the words ``No Questions Asked'' in its advertising. I wouldn't either. The LitterMaid advertisement shows a cat hunched in a refractory posture, scowling with growing alarm at a gadget-mad owner (out-of-picture, stage right). The gifs don't do it justice. See the hardcopy, p. 161 of the June 9, 1996 New York Times Magazine.

little A
Aeronautics at NaSA.

little green men
It was that or magenta grass. Those old color TV's are difficult to adjust.

LiTZ
See LTZ below.

Litz wire
From German Litzendraht, `braided wire.' Special wire for high-frequency applications. The problem solved is that with ordinary wire, the skin depth at high frequency restricts current to a thin outer layer. The current-carrying capacity of ordinary wire in these conditions increases only linearly with circumference or radius, which is to say only as the square root of the area or nominal (low-frequency) conductance. (It also decreases as the inverse of the skin depth, or as the -½ power of the frequency.)

Litz wire consists of many fine insulated conducting filaments intended to be not significantly larger in radius than the skin depth. If these filaments were parallel or merely twisted together, however, it would not solve the skin depth difficulty: in such a configuration, the magnetic field and Faraday effect of all the separate wires would add constructively, so that only the outer layer of filaments would conduct. Therefore, an additional aspect of Litz wire is a braiding which brings all filaments to the surface periodically and which reduces the vectorial B-field sum in any filament.

LIU
Line Interface Unit.

LIUC, Liuc
Libero Istituto Universitario Carlo Cattaneo. Also Università Carlo Cattaneo. At Castellanza - Varese. For other free universities, see FU yourself.

LIUNA
Laborers' International Union of North America. Referred to as Laborers' rather than by acronym. Founded in 1903 as the International Hod Carriers and Building Laborers Union. Membership over 800,000 as of early 2004. ``Binational'' (Canadian and US) would be more precise than ``international,'' if this map of its organizational regions is any indication.

LIV
Link Integrity Verification.

LIV
Luminescence-I-V (current-voltage). A simultaneous (``double y-axis'') plot of luminescence and voltage versus current. Common for laser diodes.

This has nothing to do with the chemical phenomenon of luminescence.

LIVA
Light-Induced Voltage Alteration. I've seen the woman's name spelled `Leeva.'

liver of sulphur
A name common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century for the solid obtained by heating sulfur and potassium carbonate (K2CO3) together in a closed vessel. In composition, it was a mix of potassium polysulfides.

* Liverpuddle
Diminutive or affectionate form of Liverpool, after pool <--> puddle. Completely unattested usage, but confidently (not to say fatuously) inferred from the gentilicial noun Liverpudlian. There are other gentilicial nouns for Liverpudlians, such as Scouse.

The fab four were Liverpudlian.

The liver is an organ with many functions, including the recovery of iron (vide Hb) from worn-out blood cells. Back in the days when bleeding or `leeching' a patient was among the lesser tortures performed by members of the medical profession (who were in fact often called leeches themselves), there was a need for large-scale leech production. This was done in large pools filled with leeches. Old horses not eaten or turned to glue were pushed (not led!) into these pools and quickly died by exsanguination. That's one way that large mammals brought down by hyenas die: the hyenas pack-attack and rip open the underbelly, and the animals go into shock as they're disemboweled. This is a nicer and probably a quicker way to go than being killed by a lion. Lions typically take the animal around the neck and wait for it to suffocate if they haven't broken its neck.

I know why I didn't go into biology.

I suppose none of this is etymologically relevant to the name of Liverpool, but so what?

In one of his books (The Periodic Table, maybe), Primo Levi described how paint left too long in the can forms a soft solid. The process is called `livering.'

And now, Shock! Indignation!. It turns out, as you may see for yourself, that the Liverpuddle neologism is not so neo.

livid
A bluish-black color, like a good day-old bruise. I know, I know: you thought it meant red, or pale, or angry. And the dictionary agrees with you.

[column] Fine. In Latin, the word lividus meant `black-and-blue.' That's what livid originally meant in English. The word was used figuratively, in phrases like ``livid with anger' or loosely, as in `livid [i.e., darkened but not in a blush] with fear.' As a result, for various users of the language, livid came to mean crimson (the imagined color of anger) or furious or ashen or pale. As these meanings propagated, dictionaries came to list them.

On the facts as listed in the preceding paragraph there is general agreement, but beyond, the descriptivists and the prescriptivists part company. The descriptivists will argue that the lexicographers' work is descriptive and not normative. The prescriptivists say ``you blithering idiots! If your scruples prevent you from from reaching out the ink-stained hand of hope for the poor wretches floundering among dictionary pages in search of knowledge and guidance, how dare you tell the lexicographer his business!?'' A dictionary cannot help but be normative: it lists only the senses it can find in its source corpus, so it already uses a coarse measure of frequency to bias the meanings listed, and then confounds the process by inconsistent and inaccurate indications (obs., rare, arch.). And a dictionary is prescriptive by default -- it can't help but be: this is how people use it. The only question is not whether to be prescriptive, but what criteria to use.

As this balanced presentation clearly demonstrates, the prescriptivists have the full force of reason on their side. If you want further proof, however, consider this: among academics and all university humanities-type people, descriptivism is dominant and prescriptivism is considered discredited.

Now that you are completely convinced of the truth of the prescriptivist position, you want to know what criteria to use. Fortunately, I will tell you. It is not straightforward, however, but requires the application of considered judgement. Rome wasn't built in one glossary entry, you understand? You don't unnerstand? I mean SEND MONEY, dammit! The oaks of wisdom don't bloom in a freakin' desert, you know.

Okay, okay. Here's a light drizzle of the wisdom storm that will drench you when you subscribe. A major purpose of prescriptive semantics is efficiency, and one principle of efficiency resembles a statement of Occam's razor:

Thou shalt not multiply meanings unnecessarily.
Say, for example, you had a word that meant red, grey, blue, black, and white, and the meaning couldn't be determined from context. Such a word is useful for communicating that the speaker isn't sure what he means to say. Now we apply the second Occam-like principle:
Thou shalt not multiply words unnecessarily.
As it happens, we already have plenty of words that communicate a variety of different kinds of personal confusion on the part of the speaker, such as alterity, deconstrudle (that's the prescriptivist spelling, not the descriptivist one), dimension, discourses, and parameter, and, uh, various sorts of filled pauses.

After further impartial and careful analysis too subtle to describe for free, the certain conclusions are drawn that

  1. Conventional expressions like ``livid with anger'' are to be retained for the use of the uncreative, but in these expressions, livid is not to be regarded as having an independent meaning. That is, ``livid with fear'' means about the same as ``ashen-pale from fear,'' but livid does not have a productive sense `ashen' that can be applied in new phrases.
  2. In certain restricted cases, livid can be used as if in the mistaken sense crimson, as an intentional malapropism, to suggest ignorance in an ironic way. This use requires a valid and current literary license.
  3. In all other cases, livid describes the bluish-black of recently bruised skin.

You're welcome. You can send the check blank, but don't forget to sign.

living wage
A term allegedly coined by a Catholic theologian, the Rev. John A. Ryan. He certainly popularized the term, publishing a book by that title in 1906.

lixiviation
According to the Watts' Dictionary of Chemistry (1892):
The application of water to solid mixtures, for the purpose of extracting the solid parts.

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