It happens that Kum is part of the transliteration of some East Asian names. ``Kum & Go'' is a chain of (about 300) convenience stores. There's one in Alliance NE. There's a Teekay Shipping Corp. headquartered in Nassau (in the Bahamas) that provides international crude oil and petroleum product transportation services through a fleet of medium-sized oil tankers. There's an alleged artist who calls himself or herself TK TK TK and who has exhibited a work entitled ``TK TK TK.'' You can't win.
In the October 6, 2000, New York Times (Friday, late Edition), in Section E (Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk), pg. 24, the movie guide states ``[a]n index of reviews of films opening today appears on Page TK.'' I think that's an error.
The previous September 10, in Section 3 (Money and Business/Financial Desk), pg. 8, the Times reported that ``In a sharp reversal, the Standard & Poor's 500 communications services index, which rose 18.2 percent last year, has dropped 26 percent from a mid-December high, to TKK.TK.'' At the time, apparently, SBC was trading at ``$ TK.TK, 23 percent off its 52-week high of $55.50'' and Verizon, ``which traded at $66 in April, [was by then] at $ TK.TK.'' 2000 was a bad year for tech stocks. It looks like a space or period may immediately precede this kind of TK, but not a dollar sign. ``WorldCom hit a 52-week low of $32.56 in August'' but was then trading ``at $ TK.TK,''
In the July 9, 2000, Los Angeles Times, the page-one book review (they read books there?) was of The Boomer, a novel by Marty Asher; ``Alfred A. Knopf: TK pp., $15.'' [In April 2010 a book fair in LA boasted that it was the world's largest. Some news reports mentioned that something like ``they read books there?'' was a common reaction.]
TK Theaters and theater tk is a common venue for reviewed movies. Somebody should start a chain.
I can only enter a few of these medical abbreviations at a time, or I get nightmares.
Here's some actual, factful informational data [from the July/August 1996 Lingua Franca, reported by R. J. Lambrose on p. 9]: William Shatner attended McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1952 with a degree in Commerce. He was third-string quarterback. [If he'd been a real football player, he would have majored in Sociology.] The building at 3840 McTavish Street, on the Montreal campus, has been unofficially named the ``William Shatner University Centre.'' (Canadians have to use British spelling to prove that they're not yahoos like us southerners.) A sign out front proves this, but the university doesn't recognize this as official until Shatner satisfies one of two requirements:
- Donates half or more of the cost of the building.
- Dies.
McGill should be careful, considering the fiasco at Stevens.
You can visit the First Church of Shatnerology (FCOS) to learn nothing else useful, but have a good laugh. For a while (around 2004) there was a Second National Church of Shatnerology. They communed at a geocities site, but it seems now that group has dissolved. Perhaps they were absorbed by Priceline.
Interestingly, Shatner played the title role in an 80's cop show called ``T.J. Hooker.'' Unfortunately, the tee stood not for Tiberius but Thomas. I don't know what the jay stood for. The show also featured Heather Locklear. I guess she was always set to ``stun.''
An instance of TKO is described at the ion entry.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
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When the word acronym first appeared in the 1940's, it usually referred to a pronounceable sort of initialism like Nabisco that is ``pronounced as read,'' and unlike NRA in which the word is pronounced as the sequence of names of its letters (here ``en arr ay''). (Granted that in the case of vowels, the distinction not sharp.) Sometimes this condition of pronounceability was noted explicitly, more often implicitly in the choice of examples or by uncertain reference ``pronounced like a normal word.'' It may be objected that English is not very phonetic, so the pronunciation of a new ``normal word'' is not obvious. Even so, English words normally have at least as many vowel letters, counting wye, as syllables, and this is not true of initialisms pronounced as letter-name sequences (if they contain a consonant).
Eventually, the pronunciation stipulation came to define the ``strict sense'' of the word acronym, while the majority of people came to ignore the distinction between acronyms sensu strictu and other initialisms somehow pronounced as words.
TLA in particular, unless you pronounce it something like 't lah, is not, strictly, an acronym. Hence, if you understood TLA to be a three-letter acronym, then TLA was not itself a TLA. That's too bad (zu schade), because much of the appeal of TLA is in the fact that it is supposed to describe itself. Indeed, most three-letter initialisms are not acronyms in the strict sense, making the acronym TLA a not-very-widely applicable term.
This doesn't bother most people, but for those who prefer precision, SBF recommends t.l.a., in which a. obviously stands for abbreviation.
You know, this used to be a more fun entry before we got all precise. Here's what the entry used to look like:
Three-Letter Acronym. Not denotatively equivalent to TEA.
Nowadays art is about nothing but itself, so this acronym must be art.
Yet Another Acronym Server (YAAS), which had the goal of finding a meaning for every possible combination of three letters, has gone to URL heaven. The Great Three-Letter Acronym Hunt is online.
The story is told of President Calvin (``Silent Cal'') Coolidge, that a woman approached the taciturn president at a reception, saying she had made a bet that she could get three words out of him, and he replied ``You lose.''
Cal Coolidge's wife has been quoted as saying that Cal often first learned of his cleverest lines when he read them attributed to him in the morning papers.
TLC formed in 1991. The group was developed and first managed by Perri ``Pebbles'' Reid, an R&B star (known for her hits ``Girlfriend'' and ``Mercedes Boy'') then married to L.A. Reid. Lisa ``Left Eye'' Lopes was the group's rapper; Tionne ``T-Boz'' Watkin and Rozonda ``Chilli'' Thomas handled the vocals. So I'm told.
TLC's name was possibly the only word associating them with tenderness.
The ``Left Eye'' nickname referred to Lopes's trademark glasses, featuring a condom in the left-eye lens (but publicity photographs didn't often show them, you know?). You can see the condom in the video for ``Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg,'' mostly in the last half minute or so. The condom is in the standard square packet, propped in place.
On April 25, 2002, shortly before 6 pm, Left-Eye died after a roll-over accident -- she drove her SUV off the edge of a two-lane country road outside La Ceiba, a town on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. None of her many passengers was killed. (First reports described the accident as a head-on collision; possibly it was -- head on into a tree.)
It's amusing to (me to) note that nafta, in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, means `gasoline.' (In Chile it's bencina, and from Bolivia northward, it seems all other Spanish-speaking countries use gasolina. Of course, neighbors tend to understand each other, even if they prefer different words.)
TLCAN es un convenio [`agreement'] entre Méjico, Canadá, y los EEUU. (You don't need me to translate all of that.)
Since everyone can read French -- even people like me who don't actually know the language -- the TLF is a very useful reference work. The 1992 edition is copyrighted by the C.N.R.S. (published by Gallimard). It troubles me that they keep the subtitle Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle (1789-1960), but usage examples and citations date to at least as late as 1989. I relied on this 16-volume paper version until June 14, 2007, when I realized that I could access the electronic edition (TLFi) through my university connection. From now on I'll do my weight-lifting at the gym. (After just one more year, I also realized that the TLFi was available free to everyone, and not just through my university connection.)
See, for example, K. R. Farmer and R. A. Buhrman, ``Defect dynamics and wear-out in thin silicon oxides,'' Semiconductor Science and Technology, 4, #12, pp. 1084-1105 (December 1989).
Note before you click on the Entrez button, that it is optimized for a slow connection by default; if you don't select the fast-connection radio button, you will see only short versions of some of the longer entries.
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The TLG's CD-ROM #D (ancient Greek texts) contains 838 authors and collections from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD.
I didn't just not make up the lyric. I also didn't make up the abbreviation. A shorter one, though with a different inflection, would be US. That might explain the rarity of this one.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
A trademark identifies a good or service. Intellectual property people always distinguish this from a trade name (or business name), which identifies a particular company or corporation. A trade name may or may not be trademarked. The latter is the case if all you do is register the trade name with the state's registration office for corporate names or fictitious business names. You can't always do this at your local county courthouse. At least, I think that in most states you can register an individual enterprise ``doing business as'' (DBA) with the county, but once we had to trek through Amish country clear to Harrisburg just to register a corporation in Pennsylvania. As long as we were there, we visited Gettysburg. What the hell.
A lot of big corporations are registered in Delaware, because they like the laws there. Sort of like ships flagged by Liberia.
The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) offers a Trademarks FAQ.
There's an online Trademark Directory, but during the preview period the database is about empty. On the other hand ``No charges will be made during this preview period.'' Also, it looks like they've been in the preview stage for over two years. Oh boy! It pretty much takes the laurel for well-designed useless site.
If you want something considerably more useful, visit the Trademark Database of the US PTO.
Onset is rapid (hours to weeks), with about half of all patients suffering the worst severity of symptoms within the first day. Most begin to recover within one to three months, but those who don't have a poor prognosis for recovery. As of 2004, there are treatments that benefit some TM patients, but no cures. Suffice it to say that new experimental treatments are being pursued. The incidence of TM is estimated to be roughly a few cases per year per million of population.
If the Department of Commerce (DOC) had its own law officers, would they be ``C-men.'' Would that bother the Navy? Anyone else?
Singular form is T-man.
- Be thou ware.
- ... not for any reason withstanding ...
- ... neverthe more or less ... [I have no idea what this would would mean, but it looked good]
- ... in y'know, like asmuch as ... [there's a pretty good chance that before this web page was published, this short phrase was never before, like, spoken]
Nosy minds want to know.
I should probably let you in on a little secret about chat rooms, which may help you understand better the context of ``TMI.'' To be blunt, chat rooms are not seminar rooms. They're more like bathrooms, or the walls of toilet stalls. ``TMI' does not just encapsulate three little words. It doesn't even encapsulate two little words and one long word. It encapsulates an entire philosophy. How's that for compression? The philosophy is sometimes expressed ``how bout a topic we cn ALL talk about?''
Okay, I just saw ``TMI'' used as the name of a TV feature. Of course, Newton Minow was right when he said that it is a vast wasteland, but he had the consolation of believing that this was the fault of TV executives, rather than a reflection of what people would watch when given a choice.
Cf. DBS.
Pennsylvania and Massachusetts both have many towns named for places in the Jewish and Christian holy land. Tennessee has Memphis, a religious center of Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt, and Nashville is known as the country music Mecca.
The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Tennessee state government links. TNNet has a Tennessee links page. USACityLink.com has a page with some city and town links for the state.
Back in the 1980's, a graduate school friend of mine wanted to do research in North African communities. She would have gone to Libya, but she couldn't travel there alone -- she'd have had to have been chaperoned by a near male relative. So she ended up doing her research in Tunisia. Of course, first she had to have a new passport issued her; the stamps from Israeli customs would have disqualified her from entry into either country.
One inch long, 0.571 inches at the mouth. Crimps 1/8 inch cable at the neck (50 ohm cable; 75 ohm cable is 0.15 inches in diameter).
Content-Type: application/ms-tnef
It's a characteristic bit of Microsoft arrogance. It contains font style and size, color and other format information (some version of RTF, Rich Text Format) processed by MS Exchange and MS Mail, and it was already present in Windows 95. If you send it to an email list, or send mail to yourself (in Cc: or Bc: -- ``Carbon copy'' or ``Blind copy'') it, you don't notice anything amiss when you read your own mail because you're reading through your own mail user agent (MUA), which is TNEF-savvy. Evidently it's supposed to, or used to, create a file called WINMAIL.DAT. An old file at URL http://www.annoyances.org/win95/win95ann5.html#13 explains how to fix it (if the ``#13'' isn't heeded, scroll down or search for WINMAIL.DAT; they don't mention ``TNEF''). I think that addresses the problem.
If the online Win95 annoyances guide doesn't enable you to fix the problem, you can buy the O'Reilly & Assoc. Office97 Annoyances_ book (seems to have some kind of turkey or dodo on the cover). According to Annoyances.org, the corresponding web version isn't up yet -- hey, they're not a charity. Alternatively, switch to Eudora Pro or Eudora Lite or something else. I know switching software is a big pain, and it really shouldn't be necessary if you can find a Win95 guru around. My experience with Eudora on Mac and Windows95 is pretty good, although it's too easy to send mail that's too wide. Using Netscape as a mailreader has problems similar to those with MS products: arrogant proprietary choices. In particular, it tends to attach an html version of your message, and angle-bracketed text like ``<grin>'' can disappear.
TNN was purchased in 1999 by Viacom, which has scrambled to get it away from its unprofitable roots in Country. A Canadian informant reports that by autumn 2001 the station was expanding TNN as ``The National Network.'' At least they preserved the stressed ``nash'' phonemes. And national has a nice international ambiguity. Come to think of it, if they ever want to come home, they can claim that National actually meant Country. (It appears that, for a little while at least, they avoided expanding TNN altogether, possibly in hopes that people might forget the original expansion and hence not be jarred by the new one.)
Okay, now it's Summer 2003, Viacom is a division of MTV, and ``The New TNN'' bills itself as ``the first network for men.'' They've apparently either given up trying to come up with an appropriate expansion for the T - N - N , or -- I see: it's in the fine print (see this page). Still ``National.'' They need a new expansion; the tee should stand for Trashy.
Specifically what happened is that they wanted to leave the TNN expansions behind and call it ``Spike TV,'' but that was spiked at the last minute. On the last day before the launch of the new programming, they had to change all the logos because Spike Lee sued over the name. They settled out of court in July 2003, and since August 11 of that year TNN has been called ``Spike TV.''
Spike was already a common nickname when Shelton J. Lee's mother gave it to him, and like Biff or Candy it carries certain connotations owing little to anyone currently bearing the name. This is so obvious as to invite suspicion of cynical opportunism in Mr. Lee's pretense that an entertainment product with the name Spike infringes his own rights. But it's perfectly possible to believe that he is genuinely convinced of his own talent, importance, and general entitlement. What's his is his and what's yours is his too. This gives him an authentic empathy with the solipsism and possessiveness of a child, so it's very appropriate that he's done a children's book.
The TNN flap wasn't the first instance of Spike Lee's entertainment-product avariciousness. In 1989, it became known that Norman Jewison, who had directed a number of films that dealt with racism in America, was planning to do a film biography of Malcolm X. Lee protested that the biography of such an important figure in American history should not be done by a Canadian like Jewison. Wait-- I think I got that wrong. It had to do with the color of his skin. Jewison worked a year on the project and had hired Denzel Washington to play the lead, but he was eventually forced out (the film rights to ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X'' were owned by producer Marvin Worth). When he bowed out at the end of January 1991, Jewison denied he was stepping down because of pressure to have a black director handle the picture. (His autobiography, This Terrible Business Has Been Good To Me, published late in 2004, does not maintain this fiction.) At the time he also said that he didn't know how to make the movie (it would have been his 27th directorial project). Spike Lee, who was eight when Malcolm X was murdered, ``inherited'' the project; he made the movie with Denzel Washington, and he shared screenwriting credit with Arnold Perl, who had made a Malcolm X documentary that was released in 1972. Now mind: I'm not arguing whether Jewison would have made a better or worse film than Lee, I'm only observing that Lee's general objections to a white director had as a specific beneficiary himself.
It's also worth noting, quite apart from its politics, that this rag has been for a number of years an illiterate assault on the English language. For example, in a January 16, 2006, back page article, a threnody for the late Senator Eugene McCarthy, Editor-in-Chief Martin Peretz wrote this: ``We knew we were working with folk whom you knew might defect the moment the assassinated president's brother decided that his time had come.'' Never mind whether ``his time had come'' is not unfortunate wording; most people are either smart enough to know how to use ``whom'' or smart enough not to use it. TNR is stupid enough to not know and use it, as here, rather consistently incorrectly. Some of the less trite errors are more amusing. For example, elsewhere in the issue Alan Wolfe writes ``As benefits a work of apologetics....'')
Here's the beginning of an article that appeared in June 1917 in the short-lived publication The Seven Arts (pp. 133-146). Entitled ``The War and the Intellectuals,'' it was contributed by Randolph S. Bourne:
To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world's people. ...
I'm pretty sure ``new-republicans'' refers to those associated with TNR. Bourne was a regular contributor to TNR on a variety of subjects, though particularly on education; he was a popular advocate of John Dewey's educational theories. (John Dewey, incidentally, supported US entry into the war.) If you haven't heard of Randolph Bourne, one reason may be that he died at age 32, during the flu pandemic of 1918. Regarding Bourne's ``publicists'' and ``practitioners of literature,'' don't fret it much: Bourne was usually vague on what he meant by ``intellectual.'' For that matter, even in his own day few college professors could burnish the matte luster of that word.
There's a monthly that was launched around 1960 and published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) called Commentary. (More at the link; it's now independent of the AJC.) Commentary also drifted (but much further) to the right. (I mean, every few years they publish an article arguing against evolution!) Frank Manciewicz is usually credited with the observation that The New Republic is like a Jewish Commentary. (The point presumably being that the subject matter and authors of Commentary are not particularly Jewish, and that the politics of TNR is much closer to that of American Jews. I think what this must all mean is that Commentary is the Canadian TNR.) Somewhere to the right of Commentary, politically, is JWR.
Frankly, the TNR-Commentary comparison has aged poorly, especially since TNR seems to have dispensed with copy-editors. A better comparison is provided by newish (since 1992?) First Things and Commonweal, each of which is something like a Catholic Commentary. There doesn't seem to be a Protestant version yet, or I'm not aware of it. There are, of course, generally Protestant journals that are more focused on religion. Approximations of FT/Commentary/Commonweal: Christianity Today (a monthly of Protestant evangelicals, founded in 1955) and the Christian Century (not very denominational, as the name implies; so leftist it holds out hope of salvation for Democrats).
I think that 2002 was the big shake-out year for journals, though many of the survivors have been shaky. TNR's circulation shrank from about 101,000 in 2000 to about 60,000 at the beginning of 2007. TNR's specific problem, however, may be political polarization. Between 2004 and 2007, the circulations of such liberal magazines as The Nation and The Progressive have increased. I think the conservative journals have just held their own -- Commentary, at least, has held steady at about 25 thousand. More centrist TNR has lost readership, consistent with the political-polarization storyline. In late February 2007, TNR announced a major overhaul, selling controlling interest to CanWest Global Communications and switching to fortnightly publication. (There, see? TNR is the Canadian TNR!)
My grandfather resided in the US for a while in the days after Prohibition was lifted. At the time, local jurisdictions had more stringent laws restricting the sale of alcohol. One such law in New York City allowed on-site consumption of alcohol only to accompany food. One way around this was simply to offer a ``free lunch'' to anyone buying a drink. My father says that this is the origin of the phrase -- lunch wasn't really free, you had to pay for the drink.
Still, market mechanisms intrude. My grandfather wasn't much of a drinker; he would resell his drink to someone who wasn't hungry, so lunch came out pretty cheap.
Hmm. It says here in You Might As Well Live (John Keats's book about Dorothy Parker) that in the gay nineties (that's the 1890's, son), a man could have a free lunch with a five-cent beer. Page 16.
H C NO
3 \ / ²
\_____/
/ ___ \
O N_____/ / \ \
² \ \___/ /
\_____/
\
\
NO
²
Created in 1863 by J. Wilbrand. (At the time, in Germany, the name ended in the now no-longer-standard toluol, q.v.)
The 2,4,6- (for the positions of the nitro groups) is usually implicit, since a straightforward synthesis puts the groups preferentially at para and ortho positions.
In May 1998, Geri Halliwell achieved solo fame by leaving the phenomenally successful Spice Girls in mid-tour. That year, Aaron Spelling was casting for a new Charlie's Angels series and considered her for a part. She was rejected as too chunky, although in July it was reported that actor Randy Spelling, Aaron's son, had pleaded with dad to reconsider. In a few of the many stories about the Spice break, it was even rumored that the possibility of a role in the show contributed to Geri's decision to leave. In any event, an Angels remake didn't materialize that year. A big-screen version was filmed in 1999 (released 2000).
Since 2001, along with the other former Turner properties (TCM, TBS, Cartoon Network, the various CNN's), TNT has organizationally been a part of the WB network, which in turn is part of Time Warner.