T

Tackle. An offensive position in American football. The activity (to tackle) is abbreviated ``Tck.''

T

Absolute Temperature.

T

Testosterone.

t-

Ter-. When long chemical names are abbreviated (do I really need to point out that we're talking organic nomenclature?), the ter- indicating a tertiary carbon is often abbreviated to t-. Cf. s-.

T

Thymine. A pyrimidine base of DNA that pairs with the purine base Adenine (A).

T.

Latin, Titus. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing the full tria nomina.

T

Tritium symbol. Tritium is the two-neutron isotope of hydrogen (H). It's unstable (it decays radioactively) and occurs naturally only in trace quantities. The main source of tritium is collection from stored nuclear weapons, where it is produced as a decay product of the slowly aging nuclear fuel.

T

T-shaped place or thing. Shaped like a capital tee. Do I really have to explain a tee intersection? In steel beams with a tee cross section, one straight part called the stem joins the middle of another straight part.

More interesting, especially in close elections, is the demographic structure -- the political geography, in a sense -- of Pennsylvania. The main population concentration in Pennsylvania is the Philadelphia metropolitan area in the southeast. The second-largest is the southwestern region that was originally built up by mining and manufacturing -- main city Pittsburgh. The rest of the state is called the T. This is not really a homogeneous area, including as it does the port of Erie, the state capital Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Dutch country, Allentown, and the Poconos, but it's a convenient term nonetheless.

Ta

Tantalum. Atomic number 73.

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

TA

Teaching Assistant. Typically a graduate student. Responsibilities vary by school, discipline, POM. In science and engineering disciplines, TA's tend never to have sole or primary responsibility for an individual course; emphasis tends to be on grading, and on teaching laboratory and recitation sections of large-enrollment courses. TA's may be the only instructors with whom students have contact hours in courses that are all-laboratory, but course material is usually chosen by the supervising faculty. In other disciplines, two-way student-instructor interaction is more highly valued, and many introductory-level courses are taught only in small class groups. TA's assigned to teach such courses in the humanities (A&L) or the social fields often have more creative responsibility than TA's in technical fields. Cf. RA, GA.

TA

Tel Aviv. Israel's largest city. A tel is a mound site formed through long years -- typically centuries -- of human habitation. (The single-el tel is transliterated Hebrew; the Arabic cognate is normally transliterated with two els -- tell -- for the convenience of Scrabble players. Oh wait -- maybe that's not necessary.)

Aviv is the Hebrew word for Spring (the season, not the hydrological feature; you realized this because I wouldn't capitalize just any noun). Putting all this together, we see that Tel Aviv could be Anglicized to Springhill. Actually, aviv has a more technical meaning associated with barley ripening, and gives its name to the corresponding month, starting around the time of the vernal equinox. Aviva is a common Hebrew woman's name.

TA

Terminal Adapter.

T&A

Oh, I can't say it! I'm so fastidious!

TA

Traffic Advisory. (Aviation term.)

TA

Transverse Acoustic. Refers to transversely polarized acoustic phonons. TA phonons interact with charge carriers by DA interaction. Cf. LA, TO.

TAAD

Taiwan Academy of Aesthetic Dentistry.

TAAS

Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. A battery of tests of reading, writing, and math skills taken by Texas public school students in grades 3-8, and in grade 10. It was hyped wildly by the campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush to become the education president.

The TAAS was instituted around 1991 by his Democratic predecessor Ann Richards, a woman best remembered for making fun of W's father at the 1988 Democratic Convention (I think that was it). It was sweet revenge for dad when W won that statehouse.

The TAAS is primarily an instrument of state educational policy, since various penalties and a few incentives are associated with schools' pass rates on the test, particularly at tenth grade and with particular attention to separately tabulated scores for blacks and Hispanics.

Steadily increasing scores on the test, and a decreasing gap between white and nonwhite students, have been called the ``Texas Miracle.'' This is not a complete fraud, since schools statewide have been feverishly ``teaching to the test.'' This has come partly at the expense of non-tested subjects (i.e., dumbing-down of curriculum to the level of the minimal-standards test, as well as shift of class time and other resources away from science, history, etc.), but it has also involved increased overall dedication to teaching, prompting the TFT to support the TAAS.

Most of the apparent steady improvement, however, reflects illegitimate factors. Independent authorities have found that the already-easy tests have been getting progressively easier. Strong indirect evidence for this claim is the fact that Texas scores on almost all other standardized tests have shown little or no improvement. In many large school districts, there have been suspiciously large increases in the number of students categorized as learning-disabled or non-English-proficient (and hence exempt from inclusion in test averages). There are indications that marginal students have been pushed into GED programs, where they do not count as drop-outs but also do not take the TAAS. In various cases that have been settled or are being prosecuted, it appears that test forms have been altered, good students' ethnicities reclassified, and scores simply misreported or not reported.

Some inconsistent correlations suggest widespread fraud, but perhaps the clearest sign that the numbers are being cooked is in the official drop-out rate, which the Texas Education Agency reports as having fallen from an annual 6.1 percent in 1989-90 to 1.6 percent in 1998-9. The latter figure is impossible to square with graduation numbers that are about 70% of enrollment numbers for the same cohorts in seventh or ninth grade.

For a bit more, including the article source of some of the opinions above, see the Mandate of Heaven entry.

tab

    No web browser I am aware of includes indentation in its paragraph formatting.  Inserting a tab in your HTML source won't do the trick, because almost any whitespace sequence in the mark-up is equivalent to a single space.  (The exception is ``preformatted'' text between <pre> and </pre> tags, but that can only be used to indent fixed-width lines of mono-spaced characters.)  There are a number of bad solutions to this problem.  One popular approach is to abuse the definition-list tags (with the compact option), but that doesn't always work.  In general, it's better to save list tags for their intended purposes, particularly as browsers often have difficulty with nested lists.

     More effective for graphical browsers, and recommended in some HTML books, is to use a transparent graphic and control the space with the width parameter (define the height also, or some browsers will scale that).  One problem with the transparent-graphic approach is that unless you control the font size (and the client doesn't over-ride), all bets are off.  Another problem is that it doesn't work with nongraphical browsers.

What works:
Nonbreaking spaces (coded as &nbsp; or &#160;). For example:
     &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
     &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
     &#160; &#160; &#160;
     &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
       &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
         &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

Yeah, it's ugly, but it's fairly reliable. ``El que quiere celeste, que le cueste'' as they say. Also, if you want double-spaces after your periods, you can achieve that by inserting a &nbsp; between the final punctuation and the white-space following it. (The double-spacing is primarily an English-language practice. It began as an attempt to reproduce in typing the slightly larger-than-normal spacing that typesetters use at the end of a sentence. The legibility-enhancing space is nominally one-and-a-half em's, I think. LaTeX has a declaration \frenchspacing to turn off this feature.)

TAB

Tape Automated Bonding or occasionally Tape Array Bonding. A microelectronics packaging technology.

TAB

Technical Advisory Board.

TAB

Büro für Technikfolgen-Abschätzung (beim Deutschen Bundestag). Technology Assessment Bureau (of the German Parliament). Cf. the corresponding US OTA (defunct) and British POST.

TABE

Test of Adult Basic Education. Used by some colleges in placing nontraditional students.

tabla

In El delito de traducir, published in 1985, J.C. Santoyo mentions that since the earliest translations into Spanish, King Arthur's ``round table'' has been rendered inaccurately by the faux ami ``tabla redonda'': table's Spanish cognate tabla means `board,' usually a rectangular one. (A ``tablero de juego'' is a `game board'; a ``tableta de escribir'' is a `writing tablet.') An accurate translation of ``round table'' into modern Spanish is ``mesa redonda.''

Santoyo wrote then that ``hoy no se habla ... de la Mesa, sino de la Tabla Redonda...'' [`today no one speaks ... of the Table, but of the Round Board...']. Googling in January 2006, I found that ``mesa redonda'' was about 12 times more common than ``tabla redonda'' on pages with ``rey Arturo,'' though in pages that also include the word mort or morte, the frequencies are comparable. I wasn't going to take issue with Santoyo's judgment of common usage in Spanish; I was going to put it down to the passage of time and make the text of these two paragraphs an entry for the word melioration.

But first I had a look in Corominas y Pascual. The `table' sense of tabla cognates is common in Catalan, Gallo-romance, Italian, etc., not to mention French, though Portuguese and Galician usage is parallel to that of modern Spanish (i.e., Castilian). However, it turns out that in Old Castilian tabla at least briefly had the sense of `table' also. So I decided that the semantic movement was a bit too complicated, and this information became a tabla entry. Let no one say that there is no logic to the placement of entries in this glossary.

TABOR

TAxpayers' Bill Of Rights. A Colorado constitutional amendment passed by referendum in 1992 that limits the growth of government spending.

tabs

Tablature: list of notes. Particularly sensible music notation for percussion and string instruments, in which note duration is not well-controlled.

TAC

Telus Advanced Communications.

TAC

Test Access Control. (Aviation term.)

TAC

Thrust Asymmetry Compensation. (Aviation term.)

TAC

Toronto Arts Council.

TAC

Total Allowable Catch. Of fish, in the only usage I'm aware of.

TAC

Total Area Coverage. Image-printing term.

TACE

TransArterial Chemo-Embolization. Embolization is (in this context) the introduction of a substance into a blood vessel in order to occlude it. In cases where surgery is not an option, embolization is sometimes used to starve a cancer.

tach

TACHometer.

TACOM

Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command. Mission is to provide the US Army with ground vehicles, armament, and support equipment needs.

TACS

Total Access Communications System. A UK analog cellular standard from the 80's.

TACSY

TAilored Correlation SpectroscopY (COSY). There's also something called Exclusive Tailored ... (ETACSY).

TACT

Textual Analysis Computing Tools.

I don't know anything about it, but I do know this:

``A gentleman is never unintentionally rude.''

I think Osbert Sitwell (Edith's brother) said this, but I'm not sure.

Hmm. I guess I better have something to say about TACT after all. Okay: it's an extension of COCOA.

tad

Just a little bit.

TADS

Text Adventure Development System.

TAE

The American Enterprise. House organ of the American Enterprise Institute.

Tae Kwon Ton

Kung Food Fighting.

TAF

The Africanist Foundation. A small press listed in the 2000-2001 R.R. Bowker Publishers, Distributors, & Wholesalers of the United States.

TAF

TransAfrica Forum. ``Justice for the African World.''

TAFE, Tafe

Tertiary And Further Education. Australian usage.

TAFF

Thermally Assisted Flux-Flow. A model of the mixed superconducting state [P. H. Kes, et al., Superconductor Science and Technology, vol. 1, p. 242 (1989)].

TAFIM

Technical Architecture Framework for Information Management.

TAFKAC

The Archive Formerly Known As Cathouse. A site that hosts the ``AFU and Urban Legends Archive.'' The expansion of TAFKAC is not prominently (if at all) given on the site. There is, however, a cool logo, not as far as I know pronounceable.

TAFKAP

The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. For a while he went by a gumby/ankh symbol displayed here, not as far as I know pronounceable. It seems this all had to do with some sort of dispute with his label, or his former label, poor exploited thing, but for whatever reason, since May 16, 2000, he is officially The Artist Who Wants To Be Known As Prince Again.

This is reminiscent of the problems that the Republic of Macedonia is having: FYROM.

To say nothing of former-republics-of the SU. And the basketball `Team Formerly Known As The Washington Bullets.' Now unknown as the Washington Wizards (!).

See also TAFKAC, TIFKAD, and HLN.

TAG

Technical { Assessment | Advisory } Group.

TAG

Technology Advocacy Group. A NASA acronym. It's probably important to get straight at the beginning whether one is dealing with a TAG as defined in this or the preceding entry.

TAG

Treatment Action Group. An AIDS advocacy organization.

TAGD

Texas Academy of General Dentistry. A constituent of the AGD.

Tagung

German: `conference.'

TAI

Temps Atomique International. A temporary-personnel agency that specializes in providing nuclear physicists wherever they are needed throughout the third world. See, it says so right here:

Qu'est-ce le Temps Atomique International (TAI)?
Le Temps Atomique International est une échelle pratique de temps destinée à être utilisée dans le monde entier. Le TAI est une échelle uniforme et stable; il ne suit pas par conséquent les légères irrégularités du mouvement de rotation de la Terre.

TAI is a weighted average of times kept by atomic clocks around the world (over 200 as of July 2004), computed by BIPM. It is estimated to be accurate to within a tenth of a microsecond per year. Cf. UTC.

TAIC

The idiots In Charge. Another variant of TPTB with even more attitude. ``A'' does not stand for Attitude. (Just to be completely explicit: it stands for a compound noun.)

tailback

Halfback. See running back for discussion.

anurous

Tailless.

Why is this entry alphabetized by definition instead of by headword?
Because yesterday a disk problem munged A.html -- that's why.

tailless

Anurous.

There, happy now?

tailor

Man walks in and wordlessly holds up a pair of slacks.

Tailor asks, ``Euripides''?

Man asks, ``Eumenides''?

Taine

At one time, a reference to ``Taine's formula'' would be immediately understood as a reference to Hippolyte Taine. His ``formula'' was that all literary productions could be understood in terms of ``race, milieu et moment'' (roughly `ethnicity, environment, and time'). Taine meant race in a cultural rather than biological sense. His milieu and moment referred to those things that distinguish an individual from his group. Apparently milieu referred to formative influences and moment to remembered experiences. I suppose he must have thought it was possible to disentangle these. Taine's formula does not strike everyone as vacuous. The current fashion in tripartite theories seems to be race-class-and-gender.

TAJ

The Acts of Jesus. A fanciful reconstruction by vote of the Jesus Seminar.

Take your coat off.

You're working up a sweat with all this heavy reading.

taking offense

Frankly, I am outraged by how easily offended you are.

tal

Spanish, `such.'

Talent

TAlbot LEichtbau Niederflur Triebzug. Yes, it's a backronym in German as well.

TAL

Transatlantic Abort Landing. Space shuttle abort plan; other options: AOA, ATO, and RTLS.

Tal

German, `valley.' Earlier spelling -- Thal. Word that gave rise to dollar (explanation at 2 bits entry).

talc

An extremely soft mineral, Mg₃Si₄O₁₀(OH)₂ -- hardness 1 on the Mohs scale of ten. White in its pure form; naturally occurring form may be greenish or gray due to impurities. The stone feels kind of soapy, i.e. slippery without feeling oily or greasy. Bleach on the fingers and other alkalis often have a similar feel.

Name from Persian talk > Arabic talq > Old Castilian talco > Medieval Latin talcum. [Old Castilian evolved into New or Modern Castilian, the language called ``Spanish'' in English, and talc is still talco (q.v.), in Spanish.]

Mmm. Feels good on the skin.

TALC

Textile/Apparel Linkage Council.

Mmm. Feels good on the skin.

talco

Spanish word for `talc' (q.v.), and etymon of the English word.

The usual flow of vocables between Latin and Spanish has naturally been from the former (and earlier) to the latter (and later). This word is one of the exceptions. Since Latin continued to be widely used for learned, ecclesiastical, and some official communications for centuries after Spanish and other Romance languages became established, there was a need to coin Latin translations of new terms. Because most of Romance vocabulary was derived from Latin, the natural way to fit new words into the Latin system (where all nouns must have a gender and a declension, and all verbs a conjugation, etc.) was by back-formation: creation of a word that would have evolved into the corresponding Romance form.

This was relatively straightforward for Spanish, because the original derivation from Latin was straightforward. In particular, most Spanish words ending in -o are masculine nouns (see LONERS) derived from Latin nouns of the second declension. Most of the original nouns in turn are masculine or neuter. Spanish, like all major Romance languages other than Romanian, retains only masculine and feminine genders, so neuter nouns were naturally collapsed into the masculine. [The Spanish noun forms represent a kind of consensus regularization of the more complex Latin system: the most common Latin singular form (for dative and ablative cases) ended in -o, and the accusative singular -um of classical Latin had a similar sound, since Vulgar Latin and even Late Latin dropped final m's.]

It is mildly interesting that in back-construction, the Spanish masculine talco became a Latin neuter talcum rather than a Latin masculine talcus. This is slightly surprising. It is true that gender is not always preserved when a word is loaned between languages, but it does tend to be preserved under conditions that apply here: the source language (Spanish) is well understood by the user of the destination language (Latin), which has available the readily identified gender, and preserving gender does not conflict with the morphology of the destination language. I can't think of any precise comparanda, but of some relevance is the word naranja (feminine in Spanish and French), whose ultimate form in English (orange) and French was influenced by a Latin neuter (aurum); see details at the adder entry. Possibly there was a preference for giving chemical substances neuter gender; elements named in the modern era generally end in -ium (neuter second declension in Latin) or -on (neuter second declension in Greek).

One of the main patterns of phonological change that occurred in the transition from Latin to Spanish is lenition, in particular the sonorization (a/k/a voicing) of isolated stops (labial p to b, dental/alveolar t to d, palatal k to g). This sometimes occurs initially (Late Latin cattus > Sp. gato, `cat') but is primarily intervocalic. Hence L. vita > Sp. vida (`life') and acutus > agudo (`sharp' in various senses). Sometimes the loss of an unstressed vowel conceals the fact that there was originally an intervocalic stop. Thus, for example, Latin aliquod gave rise to algo. So talicum could have given rise to talgo.

Talgo

Tren Articulado Ligero Goicoechea-Oriol. (Spanish: `Goicoechea-Oriol light articulated train.') Talgo is a Spanish manufacturer of railway vehicles founded by Alejandro Goicoechea and Oriol in 1942. [The last link offers Spanish and English; there's also a Talgo Deutschland, Talgo Oy (Finnish), and Talgo America (apparently aimed at the North American market).]

There doesn't seem to be much information on Oriol, but Alejandro Goicoechea was a designer who was willing to try some unusual tactics to reduce weight and friction. I guess Oriol put up the money. Over the years, Talgo has designed trains with variable gauge (since 1968) and the ability to lean into curves (since 1980), but the main constant feature has been light weight (notice the name). I'll fill in more details when I don't have to reorganize them every time I learn something new.

talking about computer music

Like dancing about computer architecture.

The epigram ``talking about music is like dancing about architecture'' has been attributed in a few forms to a few people, among them the avant-garde performance artist Laurie Anderson, her inspiration William S. Burroughs, and the singer Elvis Costello. Costello, at least, has denied paternity. One of the earliest attributions I've found is from April 8, 1987, St. Petersburg Times (Florida), in a review by Peter Smith of books about the history of rock'n'roll. He attributed the epigram (with ``writing'' instead of ``talking'') to Martin Mull. Mull is probably the most obscure person to whom I've seen it attributed, so I'd put my money on his being the neologist.

Tallahatchie

A river in Lafayette County, MS -- the county William Faulkner lived in. Faulkner made the Tallahatchie river, name unchanged, the northern boundary of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

Tallahatchie Bridge was made famous by the early sixties song ``Ode to Billy Joe.'' It was reputedly a hit in Latvia (.lv). To this day, still no inquest into the doings that fateful day up on Chocktaw Ridge.

tall, thin man

An engineer who works at every level of integration from circuits to application software. Defined by Carver Mead.

TAM

Temporal Associative Memor[y|ies].

TAM

Total Available Market.

TAMC

Textile/Apparel Manufacturing Communications.

TAMCS

Textile/Apparel Manufacturing Communications Standard.

tameiki

Japanese: `sigh.' Japanese is such a difficult language, it's a major three-or-four-syllable effort even to sigh.

My friend Marvin used to sigh with an ostentatious ``sigg,'' but this was ahistorical. The ``gh'' used to be pronounced (when this was still a common sound in English) as /x/ (i.e., like the ``ch'' in loch or Bach).

Last time I talked with him, Marvin was studying Sanskrit.

TAMP

Transitional Assistance Management Program.

Tampon

Le Tampon is the fourth-largest city on the French island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean.

TAMU

Texas A&M University. Nobody uses this acronym. They use A&M. Alumni, students, and football team members are called ``Aggies.'' Alumni are called ``former students,'' in an end run around the alumnus/alumna/alumni/alumnae front four.

``Aggie'' is derived from the Agricultural in A&M. Aggie is itself abbreviated Ag, with plural Ags.

The Texas A&M logo is ATM, with a large tee and kerning to give a printer fits.

TAN

Tananarive, Madagascar. An STDN site.

tan

TANgent. Sine divided by cosine.

TAN:, Tan:

TANgential. Used in email subject headings, as for example on the Classics mailing list, to indicate that the topic is tangential to the subject originally discussed under the rubric or not really on-topic for the list. Usually all-caps, which confusingly suggests an acronym. Also used as an adjective (without the colon). Cf. OT. Whether OT, TAN, or some other code is used depends mostly on the accidents of a forum's history and composition. Compare the business form.

TAN

Tasman Air Services. An ICAO identifier.

TAN

Total Area Networking.

Tanakh

The Hebrew Bible or, in Christian terms, the Old Testament. The word is an acronym of the words

• Torah (the first five books of the Bible, or pentateuch)
• Nevi'im (`prophets')
• Ketuvim (`writings' -- i.e., the historical books, etc.)

TANF

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. A state-administered program of federal (US) cash aid to indigent mothers. In Indiana , this program -- along with Medicaid and Food Stamps -- is administered by the FSSA.

tangent, We're getting off on a

This is what the suit says when his competent subordinates move from his airy generalities to brass tacks that the suit ``manages'' but does not understand.

GENDER FAIRNESS ALERT:
The pronoun his above is not meant to imply that the suit is male. The suit may be female, or a eunuch of either sex, or both, or ... look, what I'm trying to say is, I don't care which bathroom he uses.

tango

1. A Japanese word meaning `word.'
2. An old East Indian weight whose name, more commonly tang or tanga, survived as the name of one or another coin.
3. A Spanish flamenco dance, of Arabic origin. Tango was originally the Spanish word for a Gypsy (Gitano) or Moorish (Moro) dance festival. (See MILF for comments on Moro.)
4. A sexy and complicated Argentine dance, and the music that goes with it. (The accordion player should emote like crazy, so the camera has something to go to when the dancers fall over.) It takes two to tango because otherwise the woman would fall on her back and crack her head, and the man would look pretty silly gliding an air dance partner. The dance is punctuated with sudden stops, so it's a bit of a skill to keep time with the syncopated music and look half-way graceful. The dance is generally believed to be of African origin, but I think few people in Africa do ballroom jazz dance.
5. Latin `I touch.' First principal part of tangere, etymon of tangent.

I wonder under what name they market TANG in Latin America.

tanj

There Ain't No Justice. Used as a profanity (both the phrase and the acronym) by characters in Larry Niven's "known space" novels and stories.

TANK

Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky. The on-line route map is really hard to read. Generally, it looks like TANK serves the Kentucky part of the Cincinnati metropolitan area, including Covington.

tankini

A biKINI in which the top is a TANK (typically haltered, rather than with spaghetti straps). I guess it's technically a 'kini 'cause the midriff is bare. Whatever. ``Slims and shapes the torso.'' Available with padded halter top.

You know, I remember in the early days of feminist social criticism (until about 1973), how the party line was that girdles and bras and iron maidens were all tools of patriarchal oppression. Burn your bra! (Take it off first. Better yet, buy a more flattering size, and burn it.) Happy days are here again, I suppose.

In one of the increasingly loopy interviews hyping the release of the 2003 movie ``Troy,'' Brad Pitt (``Achilles'') predicted that it would soon be common for men to wear skirts. This is nothing. I'm waiting for the articles in men's magazines that explain how certain styles will flatter my figure. You know -- should I go the double-breasted look to appear more imposing? To correct for girlish shoulders, how much padding is too much? I've got a little too much tummy -- what to wear?! what to wear?!

Here's an ironic disconfirmation of Mr. Pitt's prediction: in Summer 2005, ABC aired a six-hour miniseries called ``Empire,'' putatively about the civil war that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. It was comically anachronistic, and just wrong in places where it wasn't impossible. At one point, Octavius is shown lacing up his pants. What, no zippers?

tanstaafl

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Used as a word by characters in Robert A. Heinlein's 1966 novel ``The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.'' See also TNSTAAFL. Cf. PMYMHMMFSWGAD.

TAO

Taiwan Association of Orthodontists. The TAO of orthodonty.

TAP

Taxpayer Assets Project. ``Founded by Ralph Nader in 1988 to monitor the management and sale of government property.'' Undoubtedly a laudable concern. But speaking from my own experience at government research labs and a state university, I would say that governments have a crazy-bookkeeper mentality: they don't believe in depreciation and they think real estate is free, so your 1988 IBM AT collects dust in the hallway while the paperwork for its efficient and responsible-to-the-taxpayer disposal languishes in accounting.

Also, every so often the fire inspector comes around and demands that the hallways be cleared of these fire hazards. The obvious solution is to take the garbage back into the overcrowded lab. You'd love to call OSHA and have the accountants, firemen, and environmental experts duke it out, but you know they'd only shut down your project.

TAP

Test Access Port (MIPS processor).

TAP

The Airline of Portugal. (Transportes Aéreos Portugueses, founded on Einstein's birthday in 1945.

TAP

The American Prospect. A journal of political and social opinion.

TAP

The American Psychoanalyst.

TAP

Training Access Point. Insert student?

TAP

Tuition Assistance Plan. A need-based New York State program for college students.

TAPA

Tennessee Academy of Physician Assistants.

TAPA

Transactions of the American Philological Association. Also TAPhA. Marilyn B. Skinner was the editor until the end of the last millennium. It only seems like a long time, but classicists take the long view.

Journal catalogued by TOCS-IN.

tapa

Spanish `lid,' and a name for one or another food specialty, depending on country.

TAPAC

Tel Aviv Performing Arts Center.

tapateo

Spanish `tap dance.'

TAPhA

Transactions of the American PHilological Association. This is the abbreviation preferred by l'Année Philologique, which generally uses Ph as the abbreviation for philological and related words. I only which they had decided to abbreviate their own name as laph instead of APh. Same as TAPA supra.

Abbreviation used in cataloguing by TOCS-IN.

tapioca

Explained here.

tapir

Odd-looking critter.

TAPPI

Technical Association of Pulp & Paper Industries.

TAPSHA

Technology & Physical Science History Associates. ``[A] professional consulting group able to bring to life in word and deed the cultural significance of humans' evolving attempts to understand and exploit the world they perceive.'' Publishes ISHTCP.

tapuz

Hebrew, `orange (fruit).' This is a contraction of tapuakh zahav, coined in the forties. It's no longer written with an abbreviation mark, so many Israelis are unaware that it's a contraction.

Tapuakh, `apple' in Modern Hebrew, has a less certain meaning in Biblical Hebrew. The Hebrew Bible refers at various places to tapuakh for a fruit tree and its sweet fruit, prized for its shade, etc. This unlikely to have been apple, because the apple was rare, not native, and had meager fruit where it did occur in Biblical areas. Various alternatives have been proposed (citron, quince, and apricot) each with its own botanical or historical problems. Fig and pomegranate are presumably ruled out by Joel 1:12, since this lists those along with tapuakh. There's also some ambiguous evidence from an Ugaritic tablet.

The Greek word mêlon, and malum and pomum in Latin, likewise evolved in the direction of increasing specificity, toward apple. Simultaneously, other fruit came to be called pomum de ambr', pomum bosci, etc., with ample apple etymons scattered across the grocery shelves of Europe. Interestingly, in Modern Hebrew potato is tapuakh adamah, reminiscent of the French construction (pomme de terre).

tar

Tape ARchive. Name of Unix command for a program originally designed to manage tape back-ups. Kind of odd, in that it takes some options without a prepended hyphen. Now used for preserving directory (or ``path'') structure in transferring sets of files among different machines or media.

TARA

Technology Area Review and Assessment. Term used by some government largess agencies. Or government-largess agencies -- it makes the same amount of sense both ways.

Tara

The name of the mansion in GWTW?

TARC

The Team America Rocketry Challenge. Co-sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) and the National Association of Rocketry (NAR). ``[A] national model rocket competition for U.S. high school and middle school students. A grand prize pool of over $50,000 in cash and savings bonds will be shared by the top ten teams.''

tardiness

Showing up less than twenty-four hours early for tomorrow's schoolday.

TARDIS

Time And Relative Dimension[s] In Space. (Originally ``Dimension,'' later ``Dimensions.'') The Doctor's time-travel device on the BBC's Dr. Who.

TARP

Troubled Assets Relief Program. Legislate in haste, repent at leisure. The program was tossed together by panicked sages [US Treasury Secretary Henry (`Hank') Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke], then passed and signed by a stampeded Congress and President. I think that in the rush, they left out a hyphen. Obviously, they intended it as a relief program for troubled assets: a troubled-assets relief program. Time corrected this error; by November the assets relief program was itself troubled.

TART

Tahoe Area Regional Transit.

TARU

Technical Assistance Research Unit. Name for a truck or van operated by the NYPD and staffed by plainclothes officers. It seems to be a general term, as TARU vehicles of different sorts have been used both for surveillance and crime-scene investigation.

TAS

TASmania. A mania for Tas! Actually, an island south of eastern Australia, and a state comprising that and some smaller nearby islands.

TAS

Thallium Arsenic Selenide. Used as second-harmonic generation (SHG) crystal to 5µm wavelengths.

TAS

The American Spectator. ``TAS'' is common in the magazine, but the website seems to prefer the acronym ``AmSpec.'' One wonders if TAS wasn't originally a pun on TASS.

From the first issue (Nov. 1977) through September 1985, it was published in Bloomington, Indiana (by the Saturday Evening Club), where IU's main campus is located. Bob Tyrrell (R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.), who has always or virtually always been the magazine's editor-in-chief, was a right-wing provocateur or gadfly there as a student. (``Conservative provocateur'' sounds oxymoronic.) The editorial offices moved closer to the national political action in 1985 -- Arlington, Va.

David Brock was a prominent contributor with investigative pieces like ``The Real Anita Hill'' (March 1992, p. 18ff) The magazine had one or two splashy scoops in the way of Clinton scandal-mongering. (Didn't everyone? There was enough to go around.) Some time toward the end of the Clinton years, though, it ran into the ground; it was bought and completely remodeled for a different kind of audience that didn't happen to materialize. In the year 2001 a lot of marginal magazines folded (for another example, see the Zn entry). A year or so after that failure, TAS was refloated, again under Tyrrell's editorship. That's from memory; I'll have to check the details.

A political opinion magazine with a similar name but the opposite (left-wing) political, uh, view, is The American Prospect.

TAS

The Animated Series. A cartoon version of Star Trek that originally ran in two seasons, 1973 and 1974, airing 22 half-hour episodes.

TAS

True Air Speed. Not the same as Indicated (IAS).

-tas

A Latin ending used to construct nouns.

tasa

Spanish word meaning `rate, evaluate.' In Latin America, it's a homophone of taza, meaning `cup.'

TASA

Texas Association of School Administrators.

TASM

Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile. Cruise missile like the TLAM, but with active-radar terminal guidance.

TASS

Telegrafnoje Agentstvo Sovietskovo Soiuza. Russian: `Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union.' A defunct news agency and propaganda organization.

tasse

French, `cup.'

Tasse

German, `cup.'

Tasteful Longing

It's a bore, but the raciest scene is in the G-rated trailer.

TAT

Thematic Apperception Test. What do you think it means?

Oh, alright: it's a rorschach, but with black-and-white figures that are identifiably human rather than blotches. Created back in 1935 by Henry Murray and colleagues. The science of psychology has advanced so far in half a century that the test is now used in 1999.

There are also a Children's Apperception Test (CAT) and a Senior Apperception Technique (SAT).

tat

To weave lace. At one time, Nottingham was a center of the world lace industry.

TAT

TransATlantic (cable). TAT 8, using optical fibers, was laid in 1988 and carries 8000 channels. In fact, it can manage to carry 40 000 channels by time-division multiplexing. The latest cables laid are TAT 12 or 13.

Satellite phone link is higher-tech, but it has a major disadvantage: the speed of light is so slow that there is a noticeable delay in the transmission.

TATB

TriAminoTrinitroBenzene.

tatemae

Japanese, `social appropriateness.'

TA/TF

Technical Assessment/Technical Forecasting.

Tau

Taurus. Official IAU abbreviation for the constellation.

Tau Bate

A member of TAU BETa Pi. Cf. Deke. Five or six Dekes have been president of the US, but no Tau Bates have, not even Herbert Hoover. The reason is evidently that most Tau Bates are too smart to be president.

Tau Beta Pi

National Engineering Honor Society.

Members are informally called ``Tau Bates.'' For the next meeting, wouldn't it be cool if the conference venue were the Bates Motel? No, I guess not.

A glass case across from our Engineering Library entrance displays a number of framed and mounted commendations. A typical one reads

The Secretary's Commendation
for 1998-99 is given to
[Our State's Name] [Greek letter indicating our chapter]
for the perfection of its reports
to the headquarters office.
Presented at the 94th Convention on October 8, 1999.

Okay, it's nice to know that the 2005 Convention is number 100, and I'm glad that we made the secretary happy. It's great to know that we won this commendation four times in the 1990's and all, but we need to find a more appropriate place to display this. Someplace less conspicuous, lest other chapters become envious, God forbid -- stranger things have been known to happen. The deserving people who actually made the perfect reports, especially if they have moved elswewhere, are the ones who deserve to have the commendations as mementos, to display in their own homes.

taupe

1. Brownish gray (brownish grey in the UK), or
2. grayish brown (greyish brown).

So many possibilities -- what a vague term!

TAUSA

TransAtlantic University Speech Association. Parliamentary debating organization of the late seventies and early eighties.

Taxasaurus

The Republican then-senator for New York, Alphonse D'Amato, speaking during a Senate budget debate in 1993, used a drawing of ``Taxasaurus'' as a visual aid. As he stabbed the picture with an oversize pencil, he shouted

``Now is the time to kill the `Taxasaurus' monster! Kill the dinosaur, kill him now! If you don't he's going to eat more jobs. So take this lead pencil and give him lead poisoning.

Kill him!''

Until the end of 2000, the other New York senator was a donnish Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan [Ftnt. 5]. As source of freakishly contrasting senators, if not as a birthplace of presidents, New York still conceded nothing to Virginia. [Ftnt. 7]

Well, okay, Charles Shumer defeated D'Amato in the latter's bid for a fourth term in 1998. When Moynihan retired in 2000, he was replaced by his hand-picked successor, outgoing First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although famously thin-skinned, she was scrupulously correct and modest in office. She was widely expected to pull a Cornelia Wallace for 2008, but the voters didn't cooperate. More precisely, the voters in the Democratic primaries cooperated, but she lost the delegate race to Mr. Obama's superior performance in caucus states and with superdelegates.

"The age of chivalry is past," said May Dacre. "Bores have succeeded to dragons."

The Young Duke (1831), bk.ii, ch.5.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

More on the passing of the age of chivalry at the calculator entry.

TAXI

Transparent Asynchronous TRANSmitter/receiver Interface. You could think of the ex as representing a cross, to stand for crossing or motion in opposite directions, or you could think of, ah, never mind. TAXI is an interface that provides connectivity over multimode fiber links, at a speed of 100 Mbps.

taxidermy

They say the only things that are certain in life are death and taxes.

Taylor

Frederick W. Taylor. One of the pioneers of ``scientific'' production management. A former-day Deming. (I don't have a Deming entry, but I take a little ill-tempered swipe at him in the TQM entry.)

TAZ

Die Tageszeitung. German: `the daily newspaper.'

TB

Tail Back. An offensive position in American football.

TB

Tampa Bay. In Florida. I have a football team (the Buccaneers), therefore I exist. Kicko, ergo sum.

TB

TeraByte. 2⁴⁰, or approximately 1.0995 × 10¹² bytes. As of this writing, that's still rather a lot.

Tb

Terbium. One of four different elements named after one puny village. [The others are Erbium (Er), Yttrium (Y), and Ytterbium (Yb). Ytterby is in Sweden.] Atomic number 65. A rare earth (RE) element.

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

TB

Total Body. A productive term and initials meaning aggregated for the whole body. Total body irradiation (TBI) is the total radiation dose received by a body, total body potassium (TBK) is the total mass of potassium in a body, etc.

A total body workout is a set of routines to exercise the whole body, or a complete set of exercises or something. I don't think it can be regarded as an aggregation of workout for the whole body, and it's not very commonly referred to by the initialism TBW either.

TB

Translation Buffer.

TB

Transparent Bridging.

TB, tb

Très bien. French: `very good.'

TB

TuBerculosis. Old, very old name: ``consumption.'' Also ``white plague. This detailed page is served by the Salk Medical Student Pages at the University of Tennessee, Memphis.

A related disease caused by the same bacillus is scrofula.

Infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis is extremely widespread. It is estimated that two billion people (or roughly one third of the world's population) is infected, that new infections occur at a rate of between 8 and 10 million per year, and about 2 million people die of TB each year.

TBA

ThioBarbituric Acid.

TBA

To Be { Announced | Arranged }.

TBAD

Thermoanaerobium Brockii Alcohol Dehydrogenase.

TBBA

Terephtal-Bis-4-n-ButylAniline. It's used as a plasticizer for polystyrene.

TBC

Thermal Barrier Coating.

TBC

To Be { Chosen | Confirmed }.

T.B.C.

Toilet-Bowl Cleaner. A euphemism; cf. BO.

TBC

Two-Beam Coupl{e|ing}.

TBD

To Be { Determined | Decided }. In fact, we might call the whole thing off. Probably will. We just added this item as a come-on to entice you to buy in. Once you're committed, we'll substitute something inferior. It's classic bait-and-switch.

TBD

To Be Done. NASA and maybe some others give it this meaning.

TBE, tbe

Très bien état. French: `very good condition.'

TBGA

Tape Ball Grid Array. Click on this search for images.

TBI

Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

TBI

Total Body Irradiation.

TBI, T.B.I.

Traumatic Brain Injury.

TBII

Tau Beta Pi is the National Engineering Honor Society. It was founded at Lehigh University in 1885. Their national headquarters at University of Tennessee, Knoxville maintains a homepage.

.tbk

ToolBooK. Filename extension.

TBK

Total Body Potassium. For humans, this is roughly 0.2% of total body mass.

TBM

Theater Ballistic Missile. Like the Soviet SS-22, an intra-continental ballistic missile. ``Theater'' is here used in the same sense as in European Theater of Operations (ETO), PTO, etc.

Also expanded Tactical Ballistic Missile. I guess that lobbing one of these babies is mere tactics, while going intercontinental is strategic. I never really understood this terminology. Would that such knowledge were completely obsolete.

TBM

Ticket[s] By Mail. Airline fare abbreviation.

Hmmm .. theater tickets ... missive missiles ... it's practically the same acronym.

TBM, T.B.M.

Tomato, Basil, and Mozarella. As of July 2007, this abbreviation seems to be used only by the Italianish restaurant chain Così. Whether by design, coincidence, or kismet, there's also...

TBM

Total Body Mass.

TBMD

Theater Ballistic Missile Defense.

In March 1996, during the campaign for Taiwan's first direct presidential elections, the PRC test-fired ballistic missiles off the Taiwanese coast. Some of the missiles landed within sixty kilometers of Yonaguni (Japan's westernmost populated island). In a 1996 Joint Declaration of US President Bill Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, Japan agreed to provide the US with logistical support during regional ``contingencies.''

In August 1998, North Korea fired a three-stage Taepo-dong 1 missile over the Tohoku region of Honshu (Japan's main island). A Pentagon report leaked in 1999 estimated that since 1996, China had stationed 150 to 200 M-9 and M-11 missiles aimed at Taiwan in its southern regions. In the years since these incidents, Japan has increased its cooperation with the US on TBMD.

TBN

Total Body Nitrogen.

TBP

TATA-[box-]Binding Protein.

TBP

TriButyl Phosphate.

TBRTS

Triple-(quantum) Barrier Resonant Tunneling Structure.

TBS

Technetium (Tc) Bone Scan.

TBS

Thermal Bus System. NASA acronym.

TBS

Tokyo Broadcasting System. As it happens, on April 1, 2009, Tokyo Broadcasting System, Inc., became a certified broadcasting holding company and changed its name to Tokyo Broadcasting System Holdings, Inc. (TBS Holdings).

TBS

Total Body Sulfur. For humans, this is roughly 0.2% of total body mass, or 140 g (4.4 moles) for a 70 kg man.

TBS

Turner Broadcasting System. Oh, okay, Systemzzz. Whatever. Originally the bullhorn of the Mouth of the South. Since 2001, along with the other former Turner properties (TNT, TCM, Cartoon Network, the various CNN's), organizationally a part of the WB network, which in turn is part of Time Warner. Cetera.

TBT

Technical Barriers to Trade.

TBT

To Be Tested.

TBT

TuBerculosis (skin) Test.

TBTB

The Bald and The Beautiful. Is that two sets or one? Well it's not a TV set. It's not even TV show. It's just a little set-theoretic joke. The TV show, and an expansion of TBTB in current use, is ``The Bold and The Beautiful.'' At least it's not double tuberculosis.

Also abbreviated B&B, the show has been running since 1987, when the lead character, Brooke Logan, was played by Katherine Kelly Lang, born (Katherine Kelly Wegeman) in 1961. As of 2011, she's still playing the same role (now Brooke Logan Forrester). I guess at some point you stop worrying about getting typecast and start worrying about getting wrinkles.

TBTB

The Powers That Be. This initialism is used when the word Powers is pronounced ``bastards.''

TBTF

Too Big Too Fail. That is, of an economic enterprise, too big to be allowed to fail, because the collateral damage would be too great, or presumably at least greater than the costs of propping up the TBTF enterprise.

.tc

(Domain name extension for) Chad. Once a part of French Equatorial Africa. In French the country name is spelled Tchad. (Hence the t in <.tc>. It's also Tschad in German -- where it may be treated as having either neuter or masculine grammatical gender -- and Txad in Catalan. As Mark Twain noted in connection with da Vinci's name, foreigners pronounce better than they spell.)

According to Chad's Wikipedia entry at the time I checked, ``[i]n the 7th millennium BC, ecological conditions in the northern half of Chadian territory favored human settlement...'' That was probably the last time.

TC

Tank Commander.

TC

Tax Coordinator. Interesting. I guess there'd be little point in using the abbreviated form for tax collector, since according to the standard rules that would be written T$$$!%#&*@!#%%$$$$C!!!.

TC

Teachers College. It's not mispunctuated; it's a proper noun, see? TC is one of the preeminent ed-schools of the US -- faint praise indeed.

TC was founded in 1887 by Grace Hoadley Dodge as the New York School for the Training of Teachers. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler was appointed its first president, and that same year he created a laboratory for performing experiments on children, called the Horace Mann Lincoln Institute for School Experimentation (see HML). That school became independent of TC in the 1940's.

TC actually got the name Teachers College, already without the apostrophe, along with its permanent charter in 1892. In 1894, it moved to its current digs on West 120th Street, hard by Columbia University, and in 1898 it became affiliated with Columbia University.

The words MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO are engraved high on the front of Teachers College at Columbia (on West 120th Street, facing south to Pupin Hall, which houses Columbia's Physics Department). You want to know what those words mean? Go to school! I mean, look it up. At the ASICS entry.

John Dewey joined the faculty in 1904. This was regarded as a good thing.

TC

Technical Committee.

One of the girls who hung around with the hoodlum gang a friend mine belonged to (back in the day) used to be called ``TC.'' This name was never in the vocative case, or even within her earshot. I'm not gonna tell you what it meant, but it had nothing to do with technical committees.

TC

TechniColor. A composite-particle scheme for dynamical symmetry breaking. Listen carefully: the underlying Lagrangian for ``strong'' subatomic particle interactions has gauge symmetry. (The symmetry group is the special unitary group SU(2), which has three generators of infinitesimal transformations from which all group elements can be constructed; one thinks of the three generators as colors, ground states are singlets of ``white,'' etc.) Massive exchange bosons require a gauge-symmetry-breaking term. Old-style schemes used an ad hoc scalar field -- the Higgs field. The Higgs field had a nonzero vacuum expectation value and coupled to the intermediate bosons. The coupling term, evaluated with the broken-symmetry vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field, looks like a mass term for the bosons.

This had problems, however. In particular, in the low-energy regime the Higgs field self-coupling approaches zero, so it doesn't minimize energy with nonzero vacuum expectation (remember your basic Landau-Ginzburg theory). This is called the coupling problem, naturally enough. Another problem is the hierarchy problem: the Higgs mass is sensitive to the full spectrum of all particles of any mass, which suggests difficulties when one finally gets to four-force unification.

One bright idea to address these problems is to suppose that the Nambu-Goldstone (symmetry-breaking, mass-generating) bosons are not elementary but composite. A simple way to produce these is from a fermion-antifermion pair, like the pions (u/u-bar, d/d-bar). In TC, the fundamental fields that replace the Higgs scalars are two-component fermions that also give rise to mass.

Extended TechniColor (ETC) is an extension of this scheme, designed to address the problem that t and b quarks are a lot more massive than u, d, s and c.

Don't ask me what that means.

Tc

Technetium. Atomic number 43. The lowest-Z element, by far, that does not occur naturally on earth. (Not surprising, since it is also the lightest element with no stable isotopes.) In the group of Mn, one period down.

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

T&C

Telemetry And Command. NASA acronym.

T&C

Terms And Conditions (of a contract).

TC

Thermal Control.

TC

ThermoCompression (bonding).

TC

ThermoCouple.

TC

Think C.

tc

Thread Count. A 600tc sheet has 600 threads per inch. That is, supposedly, 600 threads per inch lengthwise (600 threads per inch of weft) and 600 threads per inch of width (warp). This is pretty approximate. Typically the counts of threads per inch of warp and of weft differ by a few percent (either direction may have the higher thread count) and the stated count is somewhere approximately half-way between. Thread counts are naturally given under zero tension. (Stretching reduces the thread count. Duh.)

Another source of approximation is that all modern textile mills are made to metric scale, and they typically have round numbers of threads per centimeter. Then 150 threads per cm would be 381 threads per in. Naturally, this number must be rounded, since non-round numbers feel rough and uncomfortable against tender customers' skin. Moreover, somebody is going to round 381tc up to ``390tc'' or ``400tc.'' In the absence of a legal requirement of exacting honesty, one can hardly expect other mills to label their equivalent textiles with the inferior-seeming ``380tc.'' Just hope they don't round to the nearest multiple of 500.

TC

Top dead Center. Usually abbreviated TDC.

TC

Transaction Capabilities.

TC

Transmission Convergence.

TCA

TeleCommunication[s] Adapter.

TCA

Television Critics Association. A US and Canadian group founded in 1978. Hey -- everybody's a critic. Why only 200-odd members? (As of 2006; hyphen optional.)

TCA

Tennessee Classical Association. The association of classicists of Tennessee.

TCA

Texas Classical Association. The association of classicists of Texas.

TCA

Threshold-Crossing Alert.

Alea iacta esto!

Okay, it seems that comment may be obscure. You may remember how, in the Prior item (not the prior entry; I mean the Arthur Norman Prior item), we talked about Julius Caesar and the Rubicon in a familiar way, as if it were a reference anyone should recognize. It's not that really, it's just a pivotal event in world history. The Latin phrase above is one guess (that of Erasmus) as to what exactly Caesar said as he crossed the Rubicon. (There are slightly differing reports of his precise words. The phrase given means `let the die be cast.' Another version, alea act est, means `the die is cast. Perhaps he said it in Greek.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was a signal act tantamount to a declaration of war (with the Senate, although that could always be smoothed over and talked away, and his sometime ally Pompey, who raised troops).

TCA

Tile Council of America.

TCA

Trans-Canada Airlines. Former name of Air Canada.

TCA

TriCarboxylic Acid. Vide TCA cycle.

TCA

TriChloroAcet{ ate | ic }. Esters and acids of the following TCA.

TCA

1,1,1-TriChloroethAne. This doesn't seem like a very sensible acronym, but the A distinguishes this from trichloroethEne, which almost couldn't be anything else. There's another reason, or at least mnemonic, for this acronym, clear in the previous entry.

A degreasing agent and an HCl source for oxidation in IC manufacture, until its use was discontinued for ecological reasons.

TCA

TriCyclic Antidepressant.

TCA

Truckload Carriers Association. The other large trucking-industry trade association is the ATA.

TCA cycle

TriCarboxylic Acid cycle. The Krebs cycle. Staged oxidation of a pyruvate that leaves some energy in the form of the free energy of attachment of an extra phosphate group to AMP or ADP to produce ADP or ATP. Oxidation goes completely to carbon dioxide, and is accompanied by reduction of NAD+ to NADH.

TCAD

Technology Computer-Aided {Development|Design}. Not very different in principle from computer-aided engineering (CAE), but different professions tend to settle on different terms. TCAD is the term of choice in the analysis and design of microelectronic circuits, for example. It's ill-formed, of course, since it means computer-aided technology design, but evidently there was a desire to preserve the recognizable C-A-D.

TCAF

Toronto Comic Arts Festival. (Drawn, not stand-up.) In 2013, it's the weekend of Mother's Day. I don't know if that's a rule.

TCAN

TriChloroAcetoNitrile. Other haloacetonitriles popular in water treatment are BCAN, CAN, DBAN, and DCAN.

TCAS

(Air) Traffic Collision Avoidance System.

TCB

Taking Care of Business. The initialism has also frequently been used in constructions in which it could be construed to mean business, as in ``Takin' care of tee cee bee.''

A well-known version of this construction occurs in Aretha Franklin's cover of the song ``Respect.'' The song was written by Otis Redding, who recorded it in 1965; it charted #35 in the US. After Aretha Franklin's single ``I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You'' became a hit, Atlantic Records quickly arranged for her to record and put out an album (released under the same name as the hit single). ``Respect'' was one of the songs Aretha wanted to record. A number of changes were made to the lyrics, some necessary to change the perspective to that of a female singer. The lyric ``Take care, TCB'' was suggested by Aretha's sister Carolyn, who sang backup on the album. See the song's listing at the spelling in lyrics entry for more context. See also the entry for Sock it to me.

TCB

ThermoCompression Bonding. Press while you heat.

TCBY

A chain of yogurt shops. I think the expansion was changed from ``This Can't Be Yogurt'' to ``The Country's Best Yogurt.''

TCC

Temperature Coefficient of Capacitance.

TCC

Transitional Child Care.

The TCC program provides up to twelve months of child care to working AFDC recipients upon loss of eligibility for AFDC due to increase in earnings from employment. The idea is obviously to diminish the economic disincentive to work provided by AFDC. TCC and AFDC-CC were created by Title III of the Family Support Act of 1988, Public Law 100-485.

TCCS

Trivial Configuration Control System.

``TCCS is a freely-available system to support what we call project control, a simple but powerful form of software configuration management. TCCS is implemented as a front-end to the two most common source control systems in POSIX-compliant environments, RCS and SCCS. TCCS provides a common command-line interface to both systems, and extends them by supporting multi-release, multi-user, multi-platform development.''

TCD

Thermal Conductivity Detector.

TCD

Ton[ne]s of (sugar) Cane per Day. Small sugar mills have slicing capacity of around 5000 TCD and down. The trend is toward larger mills.

TCD

TransCranial Doppler.

TCD

Trinity College, (of the University of) Dublin. People really do call it that -- ``tee cee dee.''.

TCDLA

Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers' Association. The official form of the name excludes the apostrophe. Either way, I think the ambiguity is delicious.

TCE

Tax Counseling for Elderly. Ask yourself this: where you're going, do you expect to meet many bean-counter types? okay, okay: the TCE is a program of the IRS ``designed to assist taxpayers age 60 or older with their tax returns.''

TCE

Thermal Coefficient of Expansion. BKA CTE.

TCE

TriChloroEthylene. Modern, IUPAC-approved name: Trichloroethene. Once a common cleaning solvent, it was found to be a potent carcinogen and replaced by carbon tetrachloride (CCl₄), which subsequently was found to be a potent carcinogen.

TCF

The Century Foundation.

T.C.F.

Touring-Club de France.

TCF, Tcf

Trillion Cubic Feet. A convenient unit for estimated natural gas reserves. ``Trillion'' in the American sense: million million (explanation at billion). One Tcf of natural gas generates about one Quad of energy.

TCH

Traffic CHannel. That should be most of them. Non-traffic channels are for control and such.

TCI

Tele-Communications Inc.

TCI

Test Cell Input.

T.C.I.

Touring-Club Italiano.

TCID

Tissue Culture Infectious Dose.

TCIE

The Center for Industrial Effectiveness at UB.

TCIF

TeleCommunications Industry Forum.

TCL, Tcl

Tool Control Language. Pronounced ``tickle.'' Originally written by John Ousterhout when he was at UC Berkeley.

This is the WWWVL site for Tcl and Tk.

An interpreted script language. From the comments at whatis.com, I guess Sun supports it.

TCLEP

Texas Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism.

TCM

Tandem Connection Maintenance.

TCM

Thermal Conduction Module.

TCM

Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Oh! It's got an acronym, has it? Well, then -- it's legitimate.

TCM

Trajectory Correction Maneuver. NASAnese.

TCM

Trellis-Coded Modulation. A channel coding scheme. Generalizes serial coding by splitting bit stream into parallel channels and creating an extra channel of error-correction words corresponding to the parallel words in the other channels. Interestingly, though it has been shown that serial codes have a rigid upper limit bit rate (a rate above which decoding time diverges), it is assumed but it has not been shown that TCM is similarly constrained (though with a higher bit rate limit).

Okay, maybe it's not that interesting.

TCM

TriChloroMethane. CHCl₃. Note that carbon tetrachloride, whose standard IUPAC name is tetrachloromethane, might be abbreviated in the same way; that usage does not appear to occur, however.

TCM

Turner Classic Movies. Since 2001, along with the other former Turner properties (TNT, TBS, Cartoon Network, the various CNN's), organizationally a part of the WB network, which in turn is part of AOL Time Warner Et Cetera. Oh wait -- now it's just ``Time Warner.''

TCN

Third-Country National.

TCNA

Tube Council of North America. ``...represents 12 manufacturers of metal, plastic and laminate tubes, as well as 22 suppliers to the industry.... the only trade association for the tube industry in North America.... established in 1957 as the Collapsible Tube Manufacturers Council and reorganized in 1966 as the Metal Tube Packaging Council of North America. It assumed its present name in 1983.'' For condoms try Condom Country instead.

TCNE

TetraCyaNoEthylene. You could think of the CN as representing the cyanide radical CN (carbon nitrogen) rather than the cee and en of Cyano. Whatever makes you happy.

TCNQ

TetraCyaNoQuinodimethane. A conducting polymer.

TCO

Test Cell Output.

TCO

Total Cost of Ownership.

Whaddaya mean, `and my first-born son'!?

TCO

Transnational Crime Organization.

TCO

Transparent Conductive Oxide. Comes in pretty handy for photovoltaic (``solar'') cells.

TCP

Test Coordination Procedure.

TCP

Transmission Control Protocol.

TCP/IP

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.

TCR

T-Cell Receptor. The structure of one has been determined by XRD

TCR

Technical and Cost Review.

TCR

Temperature Coefficient of Resistance. Wires often have such a small heat capacity that any temperature-measuring device in (conductive) thermal contact with a wire makes a large perturbation in its temperature. Wires also generally emit too little radiation for their temperature to be measured by a pyrometer (an IR radiation thermometer) against background. Instead, a convenient way to determine the temperature of a conducting wire is to measure its resistance at two or more known substrate temperatures (using low current to minimize Joule heating) to determine the TCR. Then under test conditions the wire can be its own thermometer: its resistance can be converted to a temperature.

TCR

Thyristor-Controlled Reactor.

TCS

Tech Central Station. ``Where free markets meet technology.''

TCS

Test Control Supervisor.

TCS

Thermal Control S[ubs]ystem[s].

T.C.S., TCS

Touring-Club Suisse/ Touring-Club der Schweiz. `Suisse' and `der Schweiz' are French and German, resp., for Switzerland.

TCS

Transmission Convergence Sublayer.

TCSUH

The Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston.

TCT

Tandem Connecting Trunk. Telephone line connecting end office (EO, q.v.) to a tandem office. Calls involving a tandem office are generally toll calls. The shortest toll calls involve a subscriber on one loop of an EO, connected via one TCT to a tandem office, through another TCT from that tandem office to a second EO, via another loop to the other subscriber. (Pre-divestiture, ``tandem'' was ``toll.'')

tct., Tct.

TinCTure. Prescription abbreviation that really stands for Latin tinctura.

TCT-STAMI

TransCatheter Transplantation of Stem cells for Treatment of Acute Myocardial Infarction.

TCU

Texas Christian University.

TCV

Tokamak à Configuration Variable. An experimental reactor at CRPP Lausanne, Switzerland.

TCWF

Toxic Custard Workshop Files.

TCXO

Temperature-Compensated Crystal Oscillator.

Next section: TD (top) to TFX (bottom)

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