UML definition.
omg, OMG
Oh My { God | <God-euphemism> }. Useful in chat-rooms. Hence
lowercase.
OMI
Optical Mode Interference. Mechanism in certain LC displays.
[See M. Schadt and F. Leenhout, Appl. Phys. Lett.
50, 236 (1987).]
OMIA
Online Mendelian
Inheritance in Animals. Cf. OMIM.
OMIM
Online Mendelian Inheritance
in Man. ``This database is a catalog of human genes and genetic disorders
authored and edited by Dr. Victor A. McKusick and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere, and developed for the
World Wide Web by NCBI, the National
Center for Biotechnology Information. The database contains textual
information, pictures, and reference information. It also contains copious
links to NCBI's Entrez
database of MEDLINE articles and sequence information.''
omission
Remember, you can't spell omission without miss. Oh wait,
now I think of it, you can. Just write om ission and uh, delete
the space.
OMPI
Organisation Mondiale de la Propriété Intellectuelle
or Organización Mundial de la Propiedad Intelectual. French and Spanish,
respectively, for World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO).
OMR
Optical Mark Reader. A scanner for grading bubble-sheet forms (for
answers to multiple-choice exams, say).
OMRI
Open Media Research Institute.
A ``unique public-private venture between the Open Society Institute and
the U.S. Board for International Broadcasting.''
OMS
Orbital Maneuvering System.
OMS
Organización
Mundial de la Salud. Spanish, `World Health Organization'
(WHO). Also l'OMS, in
French (Organisation mondiale
de la Santé).
Cf. OMC.
OMSRV
This would make a euphonious acronym, but it doesn't seem to stand
for anything yet. When it does, we will be ready.
OMT
Object Management Template.
Not explained very clearly here.
OMT
Object Modeling
Technique.
OMT
{ Organisation mondiale du tourisme |
Organización Mundial del Tourismo }.
Spanish
names of the UNWTO (see WTO).
OMT
Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment. The extra special therapeutic
ingredient that makes osteopathic medicine (see DO) so much more effective than ordinary medicine.
OMVPE
OrganoMetallic Vapor-Phase Epitaxy (VPE).
ON
Old Norse.
ON
Postal abbreviation for the Canadian
(.ca) province of Ontario. Capital: Toronto.
(Ottawa, the national capital, is also in Ontario.)
Ontario is Canada's most populous province, with an estimated 12.28 million
people in October 2003, or 38.7% of the population. Quebec is second.
on
A Japanese word meaning `debt, gratitude.' In
appropriate context, it is sometimes used for
on yomi.
ONCE
Organización Nacional
de Ciegos de España. `National Organization of
the Blind of Spain.'
Their ``about'' text begins ``En la ONCE siempre hemos sido un grupo de
personas muy transparente,'' which means `at ONCE we have always been a
very transparent group of people.' This explains immediatamente why I
had so much trouble seeing them, though detecting what is transparent is
perhaps less of an incremental handicap for the very blind.
Anyway, the at-ONCE collocation doesn't correspond to a pun in
Spanish. ONCE, read as
the ordinary word meaning `eleven,' requires
plural agreement, making puns on the singular acronym troublesome to construct.
``At eleven PM,'' for example, is ``a las once de la tarde.''
once, las
Las once, Spanish for `eleven
o'clock.' Yeah, this entry might be superfluous, but I can afford the
bandwidth.
onces, las
Las onces, Spanish for `(the)
elevens' (though I really want to write `the elevenses') is a repast
traditionally taken at 5PM, at the end of the siesta, which follows the
traditional heavy midday meal. The ``eleven'' was originally a euphemism for
aguardiente, which has eleven letters. Aguardiente is `rum'
(also Sp. ron, Ger. Schnapps, Fr. eau de vie -- pronounced
eau d'vie). The word aguardiente is a contraction of
agua (`water,' see AWWA) and ardiente
(`burning,' a cognate of Eng. ardent).
The technical destinction seems to be that while aguardiente originally
meant rum, it now refers to any distilled liquor, while
ron still refers exclusively to distilled liquor made from sugar cane.
ONDCP
White House Office of
National Drug Control Policy.
ONE
(Netscape) Open Network Environment.
one
This one?
one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer
This is the refrain of a song written by John Lee Hooker, and if it isn't
also the title then the title is ``The House-man Blues.'' I don't know right
now. Willya lemme slide? I'll have the answer for you in a month, next, I
dunno. The song was popularized, at least for my generation, by George
Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers. (I dunno if they're s'posed t'be
the destroyers from Delaware or of Delaware. Might be both.)
Anyway, it was never very clear to me what the beer was for, since the purpose
was to get drunk. (Mixing different kinds of alcoholic drinks is also reputed
to cause worse hangovers, but I can't say I've performed properly controlled
studies of the phenomenon.) Then (April 17, 2008) I read the following (a
column by Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ, entitled
``Hillary and Obama in Small Town [sic]''), which I think may explain
it.
So it came to pass last Saturday night, in what is surely the most preposterous
photo-op in campaign history [what, not tank-bobblehead Dukakis?], Hillary
Rodham Clinton of Wellesley and Yale was pounding down Crown Royal whisky from
a shot glass at Bronko's bar in Indiana. A friend emailed that if she really
wanted to win Pennsylvania, she would have drunk some of the draft beer in her
left hand, dropped the shot glass into the mug and slammed that back. But hey,
her heart was in the right place.
oneesan
Japanese: `big sister.' Cf. oniisan.
One man's...
meat is another man's poison. A proverb.
``One man's Mede in another man's Persian.'' A play on this proverb, alluding
to the sloppy conflation of the two peoples by Herodotus.
ONE NIGHT STAND
Goes with ONE BED. ONE way or another, depending on hyphenation.
one-off
British, `one-time thing.' Cf.
one-shot,
nonce.
To get some idea of the floruit of this term, I did searches of all years (to
2006) in the LION database (350,000 works of
English and American poetry, drama, and prose, and 175 full-text literature
journals). Five poems turned up -- one in each of the years 1991, 1992, 1993,
1996 (posthumous), and 1997 -- that had ``the one?off'' (first three instances)
or ``a one?off'' (last two), with ``?'' normally a hyphen, though a space or
other punctuation would yield a hit. They were all by authors in Britain or
some kind of British orbit. (In chronological order they were: Seamus Heaney,
Irish; Iain Bamforth, say Scottish; Kamau Brathwaite, let's say Indonesian,
since that might piss him off, although he was born in Barbados and slowly
discovered his African spiritual roots, because he used a virgule instead of a
hyphen, and anyway poets deserve no mercy, in fact, let's make Seamus Heaney an
Englishman; Donald Davie, English; Edwin Morgan, Scottish.) There were no hits
in the drama or prose categories. (There were various false positives like
``will cast such a one off'' in prose literature of the 16th and 17th cc.)
One of my two favorite ...
Diplomatic declension of ``my favorite.''
One of the only ...
Which one of the only?
one-shot
An American expression that may correspond to the British term
one-off, but which is not as fashionable
in ordinary speech, whatever ordinary is. (I mean colloquial.) The meaning of
one-shot seems to be a natural development of the phrase ``one shot''
with shot understood in the now common, originally metaphorical sense
of attempt. I did some LION searches for
one-shot like those described at the one-off entry, and found
only one relevant instance, though it was clear from context that it meant one
successful try. It was in poetry, of course, published in 1991 by
Cornelius Eady. (Eady is currently -- 2006 -- a professor in the University of
Notre Dame English Department).
I thought to add this entry only because I had happened across another
instance in a July 15, 1948, letter from the American novelist John O'Hara (to
James Thurber; see the Selected
Letters of the latter, p. 95). O'Hara wrote: ``Fletcher Markle has
been trying to get the radio rights for a one-shot of [O'Hara's novel
Appointment in] Samarra.'' (He priced it much dearer than the
show could afford, because they had made a botch of his novel Pal Joey a
year or two previously.)
And then, of course, there's the circuit...
one-shot
An electric circuit that outputs a single pulse signal in response to some
trigger. The output signal is intended not to depend on the form of the
triggering signal, but simply be output reproducibly a fixed time after the
trigger condition is met (the toggle of a switch, an input voltage crossing
a threshold with positive slope, that sort of thing). It's very useful for
experimental apparatus, allowing one to focus data capture on those times when
is data to be captured.
One size fits all
We don't have your size.
One Way
The tree-lined road that runs parallel to Two Way, or that's named for our
illustrious Mr. One.
one week
The difference between a bad haircut and a good haircut. Cf.
8 days.
ONG
Organización No-Gobernamental. Spanish, `Non-governmental
organization' (NGO). Hongo (the aitch is
silent) means `fungus' and `mushroom.'
oniisan
Japanese: `big brother.' Cf. oneesan.
online dating
Professional good ol' boy Joe Bob Briggs once (in the 1980's, I imagine)
made this prediction:
The nineties are gonna be the decade when the woman starts nagging you before
you even meet.
Only
Pre-tax price is.
ONO
Oxide-Nitride-Oxide. Alternating layers of silicon oxide and silicon
nitride, useful in microelectronic device fabrication because the different
dielectrics are etched by different chemicals, allowing for clever masking
tricks.
Ono, Yoko
Artist, and widow of John Lennon.
ONR
Octane Number Requirement. The minimum
octane number that will allow engine operation without knocking.
ONR
Office of Naval Research.
The OXR that inspired the term OXR.
ONS
(UK) Office for National Statistics.
on second thoughts
A phrase used in New Zealand to mean ``on second thought.''
on spec
ON SPECification. I.e., meeting
specified design criteria. A common expression in engineering, although
an even more common expression in engineering is not on spec.
on spec
ON SPECulation. A standard phrase in
publishing, especially in magazine publishing.
Say you have an unsolicited
book or article proposal, or a manuscript, to submit to a publisher. If you
send it in directly, ``over the transom,'' it goes in a slush pile, to be
read by a lowly junior assistant editor. [No one is under any obligation
to read past a loss of interest, of course. ``To read'' in this context
means to begin to read, and possibly to spurn after paragraph one.]
In order to avoid this anonymous fate, you write an author query to an
editor that your mother's friend's sister knows, or who belongs to another
chapter of your frat, or else your agent has lunch with his contact. If
there is interest, your work is accepted ``on spec,'' which just means that
the editor will read it (in the sense defined previously), no promises.
ONT
The
Original New Testament. You'll have to read about it at the ANT entry; I feel bad now about how I'm wasting my
time, so I'm not going to repeat my comments.
ONU
Organisation des Nations Unies. French name for the `United
Nations.' Since the name ``United Nations'' was coined by US President
FDR, it's fair to call this a translation.
Strictly and generally speaking, ONU is not the translation of
``Oh noooo!'' At least, it wasn't.
ONU
Organización de las Naciones Unidas. Spanish name for `United Nations.' Incidentally,
the League of Nations was called ``La Sociedad de Naciones'' for no
strong reason obvious to me. Spanish does have a perfectly serviceable cognate
of league -- liga. The Hanseatic League, for example, is (or
anyway was, and now is called) Liga hanseática.
The Security Council is called Consejo de Seguridad, and I suppose the
General Assembly is Asemblea General, but I don't recall.
The six official languages of the UN are English, French, Spanish,
Russian, Arabic (since 1974), and Chinese, in order of decreasing likelihood of
the corresponding initialisms being included in this glossary.
ONU
Optical Network Unit.
onus probandi
Latin: `burden of proof.'
onychophagia
Nail-biting. Literally `nail-eating,' of course.
on yomi
Japanese for `loan reading.' (Cf. on.) That is, for a reading of kanji according to the original Chinese
(subject, of course, to the vagaries of many centuries' parallel evolution
in Japan and China). In English discussion of Japanese, the half-translation
``on reading'' is common.
oo
Well, if you don't have an infinity sign (
) in your character set, oo may have to do. A
Stammtisch FDT.
- FAQ: Is infinity odd or even?
- Short answer: Infinity is not an integer, and does not
obey the same mathematical rules as integers. For example, any
finite number added to infinity yields infinity. In particular,
+ 1 =
.
It is therefore evident that the notion of ``odd or even'' could
not be extended to infinity in any very natural or useful manner.
- Long answer: Hmmm, hard to say. Some days it is and some days
it isn't. It depends on the weather.
- No.
J. Wallis introduced the symbol in De sectionibus conicis [`Of
conic sections'], Oxford 1655.
OO
Object-Oriented. This compound adjective occurs as part of other
expressions, the most common being object-oriented programming,
objected-oriented design, and object-oriented analysis and design, in order of
increasing pretentiousness. Not too surprisingly, ``object-orientated''
appears to be considerably less common than ``object-oriented'' even in the
UK.
O/O
Ore/Oil. Ships with
separate cargo hold(s) for ore, as well as tanks for oil. Cf.
OBO.
OO
SkyWest Airlines. If you wait too
many decades to start your airline,
all the sensible two-letter designations are taken.
OOAD
Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. If it's a
big project, maybe you want to use something like RUP.
Whenever I see this initialism (which is not often, but is too often), it
reminds me of TomJoad. In Grapes of Wrath++, he executes destructor
calls on a couple of Person instantiations, and declares a static method for
ooppressed Ookies.
OOB
Out-Of-Body. An OOB experience is a footless walk on the wild side.
Don't forget to come back.
OOD
Officer On Duty.
OOD
Object-Oriented Design. Looks ODD to me. In my
circles, to use an expression like OOD would be pretentious and unserious, so
I've never heard it and don't know whether it rhymes with wood or
food.
OODB
Object-Oriented DataBase. Reminds me of Clarence
Oddbody, Angel Second Class.
OODBMS
Object-Oriented DataBase Management System.
OODBS
Object-Oriented DataBase System. Considering the
record structure already built into any DB, object-orientation is not a steep
hill to climb. It's a wrap...per.
OOF
Other Official (fund) Flows.
OOF
Out Of Frame. How evocative.
OOIDA
Owner-Operator Independent Drivers
Association. You'll understand now when an Ethiopian trucker roars past,
singing ``Roodoomès! Roodoomès! Roodoomès!
Roodoomès!''
OOK
On-Off Keying.
OOLP
Object-Oriented Literate Programming.
OOM
Order[s] Of Magnitude.
Oompa-Loompa
A race of knee-high aliens. (No, their legal status isn't specified. What
are you, some kind of trouble-maker? I didn't say they were illegals,
now did, I? I also didn't say my friends could use you in a one-way deep-sea
diving experiment either. Let's be reasonable about this: making all those
individual little candy pieces can be labor intensive. We wouldn't want to
limit consumer choice by overzealous government intrusion in the private
sector, now would we? I knoew you'd see it our way.) They
labor in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. This is one of
at least three references to that classic work (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
to occur in these webpages. This may be a sign of my rather attenuated
exposure to literature, either as such or such as it is. I hope everyone
understands that the factory makes chocolate,
but that it is not itself made out of chocolate, mostly. That is important.
Have you been to
Hershey's
Chocolate Town, virtually [like its nonvirtual (`real') mirror] in
Pennsylvania Dutch country?
They spoke Oompa-Loompish in the old country, where they were preyed upon by
hornswogglers, snozzwangers and whangdoodles, lived in tree-houses and
subsisted on green caterpillars. Now they speak English and eat chocolate,
but they still maintain their traditional costume. See chapter 16. No
apparent connection with Oompa bands.
OOP
Object-Oriented Programming. Explained on this page.
OOP
Out Of Pocket (expense).
OOP, O.O.P.
Out Of Print.
Robert Lynd (Y.Y.) published an essay called ``Out of
Print.'' (It is chapter VIII in his 1923 collection The Blue Lion and Other
Essays.) He begins with the following observation, which may at first
puzzle the modern author.
There is a pleasure in seeing a book, if it is one of one's own books, going
out of print. It encourages a faint hope that, even if one allows for the
numerous people who have bought it by mistake, a man or woman here and there
may have actually liked it.
In Lynd's day, a book went out of print when all the printed copies had finally
sold out. It was a kind of sales milestone. No longer. Technology has made
small printing runs and multiple printings cheaper. So books tend to go out of
print more quickly, and when they do it just means that demand fell. In
addition, the philosophy, the ``business model,'' of publishers has changed.
Until some time in the 1960's, successful publishers made most of their money
(when they made money) off their backlists, so books tended to stay ``in
print'' longer than they do now. The entire business was ``inefficient'' in
economic terms. Printing houses ran as something approximating charities, and
editors were poorly paid. (Like Ivy League professors in the old days, they
might be presumed to be independently wealthy.) In the early 1960's some, uh,
media companies began to think that ``properly'' run, the old houses
might actually yield reasonable return on
investment.
They started to buy up the old houses, and eventually the business was run by
businessmen instead of book people. To their accountants, the costs of storage
seemed to loom large. Also, changes in US tax law (particularly the way that
depreciation is calculated on unsold books) effectively penalized the
warehousing of slow and sporadic sellers, and fiction profits began to be
dominated by a few big names. (It should be noted that the US book market has
an unusual sales arrangement. Unsold books can be returned to the publisher
for a refund. This concession-like arrangement was conceded by publishers
during the Great Depression, and they were never able to roll it back.)
(The story at university presses was different but probably not better. There
was a great expansion in the number of university presses to go with the
increasing expectation of published research from professors. Then along about
the 1980's or 1990's, universities began to expect their academic presses to
sell some of this academic dust to the public and turn a profit.)
The enormous bookstores (Crown and Barnes & Noble, and Borders) put a large
fraction of their small competitors out of business in the 1990's. Now as an
oligopsony (and in B&N's case as a publisher -- hello, vertical
integration) they have the leverage to reduce publishers' profit margins. I'm
sure there's more to it, but these changes are often cited as contributing
factors in the decline of the book industry in pre- and early internet days.
Anyway, what happens to a title now is that as soon as sales flag it is
remaindered to discounters or mulched. (Sometimes this can be handled very
poorly. A friend of mine now retired from the book business told me about one
book that was used for a large sociology course at some university. The course
was only offered once every three years, and the company wouldn't store them
that long, so after two years they'd mulch the unsold copies, and the next year
they'd do a new print run. The three-years thing does sound a bit odd, but I
can believe that a regular course rotated instructors, and every three years or
so a guy would teach it who wanted that one book. Of course, if it had been a
small-enrollment course, that guy would have been
SOL, which is about what OOP often means to an
instructor.)
An ad for Loome Theological Booksellers
asserts that ``99.9% of the books ever published are now out-of-print,'' but
immediately concedes that ``[o]f course, most books ought to be out-of-print.
They weren't very good when they were first published; they haven't gotten any
better with age.'' Then they go on to offer themselves as a solution to this
nonproblem. Among the nonlamentable nonlosses that they can make nongood, one
example they list is that ``not less than 241 different books on the life or
thought of [Karl] Barth [1886-1968] have been published,'' yet only 16 remain
in print. I'm flabbergasted. They buy and sell used books.
That reminds me -- you remember Bargain Books, the discount bookstore (you
guessed this, right?) that I mentioned back at the adult education entry? The store sells
remaindered titles, many of them from academic publishers. It's owned by a
former college professor. Specifically, he was a theology professor. His
chain has an unusually good selection of theology books.
oopem
The accusative of oops, a third-declension Latin noun. I'm sure oops is a Latin noun; it
was just left out of all the dictionaries by mistake, and happened not to occur
in any of the texts that have survived. I mean, it's not really possible for a
language to have as few words as Latin is supposed to have had, so this must be
one of them.
OOPL
Object-Oriented Programming
Language.
OOPS
Object-Oriented Programming Software.
How true that is!
OOPSLA
Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages
and Applications. A conference.
OORDBMS
Object-Oriented Relational DataBase Management
System.
oort
Dutch, `place, point, corner.' Cognate of German Ort.
Oort Cloud
Name for a vast cloud of small bodies orbiting, if that's the word, about
the sun at a distance of about one light-year. It is named after the Dutch
astronomer Jan Henrik Oort (1900.04.28-1992.11.05), who proposed it in 1950 in
order to explain the origin of comets. The existence of the cloud is now
widely accepted among astronomers.
OOS
Out-Of-Sync.
OOS
Out Of Service.
OOTW
Operations Other Than War. Military term, pronounced ``ootwa,'' for
thumb-twiddling exercises between wars, like peace-keeping and humanitarian
relief.
OP
Omega Rho.
OP, Op
Operation. Usually not operator, which due to pervasive
telephonic influence is abbreviated ``Oper.''
OP
Order Parameter. No, not price or quantity. A parameter characterizing
the degree of order. Many order-disorder transitions are second-order
(different sense of ``order'') transitions that can be studied by
renormalization group methods. This analysis requires, principally, a
Hamiltonian and an order parameter.
![[column]](images/column.gif)
OP
Ordo Praedicatorum. Latin:
`Order of Preachers.' Better known as the Dominicans. Since 1216.
Probably the best-known Dominican priest, though one not much celebrated by the
order today, was Tomás de Torquemada.
Usage note: the initials O.P. after a name is used both by Dominican Roman
Catholic priests and by women and non-priest men in the religious Order of
Preachers. (A similar practice applies to S.J.)
I notice that the pseudonymous author of Promptorium parvulorum (1499),
mentioned at this entry, is
described as ``Galfredus Grammaticus dictus, frater Ordinis S.
Dominici.'' Draw your own conclusions.
O&P
Organization & Procedures.
OP
Original Poster. I.e., the person who emailed the original posting.
OP
Overhead Projector. [Wasei eigo only.]
Opa
German, `grandpa.' Cf. Oma.
OPA
Office of Price Administration. A US government agency created to assure
equitable distribution of items in short supply (i.e., to administer
rationing) and to control prices during WWII.
In April 1942, the OPA issued the ``General Maximum Price Regulation,'' which
limited all retail prices to whatever was the highest price they had reached
during March 1942.
OPA
One-Photon Absorption. Awkward conflict with the OPA instrument, next.
OPA
Optical Parametric Amplifier. Awkward conflict with the OPA phenomenon, previous.
OPA
OPAque.
OPAC
Online (usually library) Public Access Catalog.
Here're a bunch in
Japan. That of the
British Library is now
available. Has been for a while. See also OLCC.
opacity
Tallulah Bankhead said
They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze.
They should photograph me through linoleum.
For more on Shirley Temple, see YSO.
OPALS
Optical Parallel Array Logic System. A parallel-processing optical
computer proposed by J. Tanida and Y. Ichioka, Applied Optics,
25, pp. 15655-1570 (1986).
OPAS
Organização
Pan-Americana da Saúde. Name in Portuguese of the
Pan American Health Organization (PAHO); cf.
OPS.
OPASTCO
Organization for the Promotion and
Advancement of Small Telecommunications COmpanies.
``... a national trade association
representing more than 500 small, independently owned local exchange
carriers (LECs) and their affiliate
telecommunications companies.
Primarily serving rural areas of the United States and Canada, these commercial telephone companies and
cooperatives range in size from fewer than 100 to as many as 100,000 access
lines and collectively serve more than 2.5 million customers.''
op. cit.
Notation in references (footnotes or endnotes): `in the work cited'
[Latin opere citato.] This once-popular abbreviation was frequently
a frustrating nuisance because it was often unclear which previously
cited work was meant. Approximate synonym of
ibid. and idem.
Cf. loc. cit.
OPC
Oligomeric
ProanthroCyanidins.
OPC
On-line
Philosophy Conference. Inaugurated in 2006.
OPC
Optical Proximity Correction. Adjustment of photolithographic exposure
(pattern and/or duration) to compensate for the proximity effect.
Qualitatively, this entails underexposing on the inside of a curve or
bend in the desired layout, and overexposing on the outside.
The usual approach in photolithography uses a binary pattern (i.e.,
mask opaque or clear), and OPC is done by adding or subtracting serifs of
window area. This causes further unevenness away from a bend, that must
be compensated by higher-order serifs, leading to a kind of diminishing
ripple of correction moving away from any bend.
OPCR
Original Program Clock Reference.
OPD
Optical Path Difference.
OPEC
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries. ``An
international Organization of eleven developing countries which are heavily
reliant on oil revenues as their main source of income. Membership is open to
any country which is a substantial net exporter of oil and which shares the
ideals of the Organization. The current [2002] Members are Algeria, Indonesia,
Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.''
Op-Ed
OPposite the EDitorials. A page of outside commentary, usually on the
odd page (recto) facing the even-numbered page
(verso) containing a newspaper's editorials.
OPEI
Outdoor Power Equipment Institute.
Every year around April they start airing public service announcements about
the safe operation of snow-blowers. (Don't stick your hand into the
snow-throwing chute -- that sort of thing.) At least that's when I've heard
them in Indiana in 2008 and previous years. I was out of state a lot in April
2009, but I just heard the PSA again in mid-May.
If they're going to keep this up I think they should move their operations to
Australia.
open channel
An open channel, from the civil engineering standpoint, is not necessarily
what one might intuitively suppose. A liquid conduit is considered open if
it has a liquid-gas interface. It does not matter whether the liquid runs
along the bottom of a pipe or in a channel open to the sky, or in a
subterranean channel. What matters is that the liquid has a free surface.
The hydraulics of the situation changes dramatically if there is no air
space, because liquids in most cases (most cases being water or oil) are
incompressible to a large degree. In an open channel, continuous flow can
accommodate obstructions or variations of various sorts by changing height:
lower water velocity leads to higher water level, hence greater cross-sectional
area, and flow is maintained. Without a gas space to expand into (i.e.
in a closed channel), this does not
happen. Other things do; see water hammer.
As a practical matter, most open-channel flows of interest are macroscopic.
More specifically, they are in channels wide and deep enough that the flow
is turbulent. (The parameter that determines whether flow is turbulent or
not is a `dimensionless group' called the Reynolds number, Re.)
Ordinarily, the most important dimensionless group characterizing open
channel flow is the Froude number (Fr,
q.v.).
``Open conduit'' and ``open-conduit flow'' ought to be equivalent to
``open channel'' and ``open-channel flow,'' but the former terms are rare.
Funny how the semantic field divides up. Channel became a dead metaphor
for a broadcast frequency band and more recently for internet data streams
that function similarly. Both channel and conduit are metaphors
for paths by which information flows in human organizations (e.g., ``the
proper channels,'' ``back channels,'' ``a conduit for information'').
(See also back-channel.)
The words channel and canal both translate into Spanish and French as
canal (which is also used both for TV
channel and water channel). For a related confusion, see the Mars entry.
OpenGL
Open Graphics Language. The
dominant environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D
graphics applications.
Opening of the American Mind
Rebuttals or rejoinders to Allan Bloom's Closing of the American
Mind. There are two significant items by this title that I'm aware of:
one is an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. New York Times Book Review, July
23, 1989. Another is a book by Lawrence Levine published by Beacon Press,
subtitled ``Canons, Culture, and History.''
Open on Sunday's!
Good for you. Sunday's what?
OPEN ROME
Organize and Promote Epidemiological
Networks
Réseaux d'Observation des Maladies et des Epidémies. The French part is
roughly `disease and epidemic monitoring networks.'
OPER, Oper.
OPERator.
Opera
The copyright status and arrangements for opera are a bit different than
those for other musical works. Whereas a radio station can simply play most
music and send conventional royalties to ASCAP,
broadcast of an opera recording requires prior approval, much like publication
of a book excerpt.
Only recently, librettos for Puccini's operas became available in paperback.
The name opera is simply the Italian word for `work.' It is singular
(the plural is opere, I guess). For more on this, see the opus entry.
Opera Buffa
Opera not intended to be taken seriously. This seems to imply that there
is some other kind.
Oh, well, alright: buffa is supposed to be farcical, rather than
merely amusing or unraucously comical. Enlightened now?
A number of years ago, my senior colleague G. Mahler composed a work that was
largely classical (as opposed to quantum) mechanical and described this opus as
opera buffa. This is all true.
I just noticed that thin horizontal line in my screen. It's distracting.
Opéra, French
I find it only slightly less amazing that someone would write opera in
French than that someone would write opera in English. You probably don't
care what I find amazing. Okay, I understand. Sniff. I'll go away now.
In French, opera buffa is called
opéra bouffe. It's an interesting situation, since the original
Italian essentially means `Frog Opera,' I think. Well, it means something
related to frogs, anyway.
Early in his career, Clint Eastwood acted in a lot of spaghetti westerns.
(For Sergio Leone? You could look it
up. At IMDB.)
Westerns are also known as horse opera. If they'd been made in France instead of Italy,
they might have been called opéra boef.
Okay, now I'm really going away.
Soon. Possibly it bears mentioning that westerns are also called ``oaters.''
Not that I've ever heard anyone call them that, but it's one of those
crossword-puzzle words -- nonexistent but plausible. You notice how
movie horses never eat? I guess the forage in Hollywood is not tasty.
Probably laced with too many recreational chemicals. (You say you have seen
movie horses eat? Bullshit! If that's so, then where do they put it? Because
movie horses certainly don't shit.)
All these years later, it occurs to me that the only reason I started to write
this entry was to provide a cross-reference to the
Berlioz entry, a link for which I ended up
forgetting to include until now. In order not to have a one-sentence
paragraph, I'll add that Russian opera is mentioned at the entry for
the Judgment of Paris.
OPET
Oriented PolyEsTer. I guess ``OPEST,'' while more appropriate, had poor
resonances.
OPF
Orbiter Processing Facility.
OPFET
Optical Field-Effect Transistor.
Here's a short bibliography.
OPFOR, opfor
OPposition FORce. Generic designation in combat training exercises.
Oph
Ophiuchus.
Official IAU abbreviation
for the constellation.
OPI
Open Prepress Interface.
OPIE
Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, Inc. At 4:25 EST, on December 24
1995, they broadcast a public service announcement (PSA) about safety, children, and riding mowers, on AM
radio station WBEN in Buffalo. Okay, it was a nationally syndicated program,
but really, we're not the only people still expecting snow this season. Medialink admits they
put this together. Maybe they should time their winter announcements to
follow hysterical reports of global warming.
OPIE is now on web, so you don't need
to snailmail or phone their offices at
341 South Patrick St.
Alexandria, VA 22314
+1 (703) 549-7600
They apparently don't deal in snow blowers.
OPIM
OPerations & Information Management.
OPIVITA
OutPatient Intravenous Infusion Therapy Association. Every time an
organization with a cool acronym allows its domain name to lapse, the world is
impoverished.
OPL
Optical Path Length.
OPL/BPO
Ottawa Public Library /
Bibliothèque publique d'Ottawa. In
answer to the obvious question: it's not abbreviated simply ``BPO'' to prevent
confusion with the Buffalo Philharmonic. (Oh -- you
wanted the correct answer? How borrring.)
OPM
Office of Personnel Management. The US government has at least one.
OPM
Organization & Procedures Manual.
OPM
Other People's Money. I suppose the popularity of this phrase is due to
Margaret Thatcher. She famously said that ``[t]he problem with socialism is
that you eventually run out of other people's money.'' The form in quotes
preceding is the received pronouncement -- the form popularized by bumper
stickers and such. (See the Voltaire entry
for a similar use of ``quotation'' marks.) The received form paraphrases a
comment she did made in a 1976 interview: ``...Socialist governments
traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's
money.''
ÖPNV
German, öffentlicher Personennahverkehr.
Literally `Public Local Passenger Traffic.' Local public transport.
In the US, there's no acronym for the general concept.
OPO
Optical Parametric Oscillator. Two lasers are heterodyned in a nonlinear
material, producing sum and difference signals. Especially useful to achieve
IR pulses (fs to ns), as there are few good IR laser sources [the best are
the CO2 laser at 10µm and
free electron laser (FEL)]. Temperature-modulation
of the laser sources is now used to fine-tune OPO's.
OPP
Oriented PolyPropylene.
OPPAGA
Florida State Legislature's)
Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability.
oppo
OPPOnent or OPPOsition. As in ``oppo research'' -- digging dirt on an
opponent for when the campaign ``goes negative.''
opportunity
Yes -- if you act now you can send us money!
See also the ABPT entry.
OPRAF
Office of Passenger RAil Franchising. The governmental body that
decides which company (see list) gets to
control which dismembered fragment of the murdered corpse of British Rail.
Note: the views expressed in this glossary do not necessarily reflect
the opinions of OPRAF.
Oprah
In 1992, William F. Buckley referred to the host of television's
highest-rated talk show as
... the black lady who is alternately fat and thin, I forget her name.
In an act of sublime revenge, Oprah started a monthly book club. Okay, not
quite monthly. According to a People magazine profile of various of the
lottery winners, I mean authors of selected
books, it's about nine books a year. Come think of it, that might be
monthly if you don't count the TV off-season.
Okay, Oprah quit that; it was increasingly difficult to find books she felt
``absolutely compelled to share.'' A victim of her own unrealistically high
standards, I guess. Others are rushing to fill the literary void. Kelly Ripa
is starting something similar (``Reading With Ripa''), which will concentrate
on commercial fiction. (Kelly Ripa is the woman who plays the TV role of Regis
Philbin's wife or granddaughter on ``Live With
Regis and Kelly.'') The Today Show and USA
Today are starting book clubs, too.
Further update: according to the books page at
Oprah.com, ``When the book club ended a year ago, I said I would bring it
back when I found the [sic] book that was moving...and this is a great
one. I read it for myself for the first time and then I had some friends read
it. And we think [Steinbeck's East of Eden] might be the best novel
we've ever read!''
I wasn't sure where to mention it, so this could be as good a place as any:
Regis Philbin is an alumnus of the University of Notre
Dame.
OPRI, Opri
Office de protection contre les rayonnements ionisants. `Office of
protection against ionizing radiation.' An organ of the French health ministry.
Has been known to conspire with SPR.
Ops
In Roman mythology, Ops was the wife of Saturn and the mother of Jupiter.
In Greek mythology, Saturn was Kronos and Jupiter was Zeus. In stories about
those two, Zeus's mother is usually Rhea, so she's probably the best Greek
correspondence of Ops.
Ops was female, although it wasn't necessary specifically to point this out
explicitly. I'm paid by the word; she was the goddess of abundance -- the
personification of ops, Latin for `might,
power,' in particular `power to aid.' The very antithesis of oops! (Oops!
I meant antithesis oopis -- gotta use the genitive.)
OPS
On-base Plus Slugging (percentage). The sum of the on-base percentage
(OBP) and the slugging percentage (SLG). The OBP has a value between zero and
two. As is typical with baseball statistics called percentages, this value is
stated or written as the first three digits in the decimal expansion.
(When written, the decimal point is sometimes shown and sometimes not.)
OPS
Ontario Philosophical Society.
OPS
Organización
Panamericana de la Salud. Name in Spanish of the Pan American Health Organization
(PAHO); cf. OPAS.
OPSD
OEM Products and Services
Division. Of Intel, for one.
OPSDEP
OPerationS DEPuty. Explained at this page.
Cf. DEPOPSDEP.
OPS/INE
OPerations System/Intelligent Network Element. Sounds obscene, don' it?
OPSR
Office of Private-Sector Relations.
OPT
Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Opt.
OPTim{a[l]|um}.
Opt.
OPTional.
OPT
Ovulation Predictor Test.
This reminds me of sheep. To determine if a sheep
is pregnant, you (or perhaps someone more experienced) insert(s) a tube to
listen for something called the `winds of pregnancy.' No joke. That's all I
remember from a book about Basque folkways. That, and the look of helpless
concern on the inverted ewe's face. Another contribution to research at the
crucial nexus of language and pregnancy is the
shacked up entry.
South of Basque country in Spain is Catalonia. Orwell's book based on his
Spanish Civil War experiences there is called Homage to Catalonia, and
marks a turning point in his politics. Catalan, by Alan Yates and
Carter Brown, published by Teach Yourself Books, London, 1975, offers
translations for phrases that you might find useful. Among them:
I am prepared to raffle the goat.
It is sobering to contemplate the improbable series of misadventures and
diminishing fortunes that would take one to the brink of uttering this phrase.
(On the other hand, if it were late November 2008 and you were Illinois
governor Rod Blagojevich, you could probably use a few different ways to say
``I am prepared to raffle the Senate seat that has been held by President-elect
Barack Obama.'')
Wikipedia has a
meat raffle entry.
Catalan, by the way, is an international language. It's the local language in
the Sardinian city of Alghero.
optical isolation
Transmission of voltage level through an optical link in order to
isolate two circuits. A mandatory application is in medical electronics:
sensors contacting the body must be optically isolated from any power
equipment, as a stringent guarantee against accidental shock.
optics
Sir Boss: "What do you know of the science of optics?"
Applicant: "I know of governors of places, and seneschals of
castles, and sheriffs of counties, and many like small
offices and titles of honor, but him you call the
Science of Optics I have not heard of before;
peradventure it is a new dignity."
Sir Boss: "Yes, in this country."
[ 29 ]
Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court (1889), ch. 25.
opus
Latin, `work.' The (nominative) plural form is
opera. There is rarely any good reason to use the stupid naturalized
form opuses, except to condemn it.
Most related words that come from Latin contain the root oper-. The
reason is that opus is a third declension noun, indicated ``opus,
-eris'' in traditional dictionaries. Most of the related words and declined
forms of the noun are based on the modified root represented by the genitive
form operis. Romance languages use noun forms based on a collapsed case
structure, and the standard form of a noun is usually based on an oblique case.
Hence the derived form in Italian: opera.
If you simply voice the stop consonant and lose the unstressed middle vowel,
you get the Spanish cognate obra. (English uses, as a rule, whatever
forms it pleases, usually from more than one language. Hence opus,
operation, operetta, et ceterra.)
Since you asked... the particular oblique form that was the model for the
later collapsed or simplified case structure was typically the ablative or
accusative. These cases had more functions than the dative, and prepositions
(real prepositions) in Latin only took accusative or ablative objects.
Starting from the ablative turns out to work better for Spanish. I think
starting from the accusative works better -- i.e., gives a better fit to
the forms that actually occurred -- for French.
The difference is slight, especially when you remember that final em's weren't
being pronounced in post-Classical Latin, and that anyway a lot of final
syllables died in the creation of Old French.
OPUS, O.P.U.S.
Optimising
Public Understanding of Science and Technology. A project once funded by
the European Commission, 2000-2002. On the surviving pages you can see the PUS acronym oozing everywhere.
OPV
Oral Polio Vaccine.
OPV
Organic PhotoVoltaic.
OPW
Orthogonalized Plane Wave.
OPX
Off-Premises eXtension.
OQ
Optical Quality.
OQAR, O-QAR
Optical Quick Access Recorder.
OQL
Object Query Language. An OQL names the possible queries that can be made
to an ODMG, defines the views that result in answer.
I think. Cf. ODL.
OQLF
Office québécois de la langue
française. You need to know what that means in English?
That's your problem.
O.R.
Oedipus Rex. See O.T. (Oedipus Tyrrannus).
OR
Office Regenerator.
OR
Offner Relay.
Vide A. Offner, Optical Engineering, 14, p. 130 (1975).
OR
Olympic Record.
OR
Operating Room (in a hospital).
OR
Operations Research.
A couple of sites are WORMS and
Michael Trick's Operations
Research Page.
OR
Oregon. USPS abbreviation.
State named after the spice oregano. At least, that's a better theory than
any offered by niggling etymologists.
The Villanova Center for Information Law and
Policy serves a page of Oregon state government
links. USACityLink.com has
a page with mostly city and town
links for the state.
ORB
Object Request Broker. CORBA terminology for
its central concept,
explained here by what?is.com
ORB
Office Repeater Bay.
ORB
Online Reference Book for Medieval
Studies.
orb
The word is used loosely today, though it once had a precise technical
meaning. In the time of Copernicus, author of the revolutionary De
revolutionibus orbium coelestium [`Regarding the Revolutions of the
Celestial Orbs'], an orb was the three-dimensional analog of an annulus. That
is, an orb was the region between an outer spherical surface and an inner
sphere completely within the outer sphere. A sphere was a solid body: the
region up to some distance from some center. For some purposes, of course, it
was not necessary to maintain a distinction.
orbit
James A. Traficant, Jr., was once a colorful member of the US House of
Representatives, representing a district in Ohio (Akron, Youngstown, and
environs) as well as assorted, um, special constituencies, such as himself.
(As an act of mercy, I'm going to warn those who are not regular readers of
this glossary that they can expect very little information on orbits in this
entry.) On April 11, 2002, Traficant was convicted by a federal court in
Cleveland of a laundry list (I just had to use that evocative term; actually
the list had ten charges) of crimes of corruption.
The charges included taking bribes (e.g., free labor and materials from
construction businesses in exchange for intervening on their behalf with
federal regulators) and kickbacks ($200,000 total; $2500 per month from his
administrative assistant alone), illegally requiring his congressional staffers
to pitch in on his boat and his farm (literally in the latter case, with
pitchforks), ordering a staffer to destroy evidence, and cheating on his taxes
(yawn).
Traficant served as his own attorney in the trial. It's a truism that a lawyer
who represents himself has a fool for a client, but Traficant is not a lawyer.
Anyway, the same fool had beaten the rap in 1983. He convinced a jury that he
took $163,000 in mob money as part of a one-man undercover operation he had
been running as Mahoning County sheriff. He had earlier achieved folk-hero
status by his refusal, as sheriff, to evict out-of-work steelworkers who
couldn't pay their bills. The acquital apparently cemented his reputation, and
he rode the ensuing wave of popularity into Congress the next year. (The IRS
is not bound by the findings of a mere criminal court, however, and they
garnisheed his wages for $108,000 that a tax court decided he owed on the
$163,000 in bribes he didn't declare. And this can't be double jeopardy, since
the US constitution says that mustn't happen.)
Upon conviction on all ten criminal charges in 2002, the 60-year-old Traficant
faced up to 63 years in the slammer, plus various fines. Federal guidelines
recommend something in the neighborhood of five to ten years in such cases, and
prosecutors in the case recommended that he do at least 7 1/4 years. Such
precision! The judge rounded that up to eight years when he sentenced
Traficant on July 30.
Here is one of the less creative examples of Traficant's color. It involves
the then House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt. Democrats were in the minority
from 1994 to 2006. By the time of Traficant's conviction, Gephardt (D-Mo.) had
already pointedly stopped referring to Traficant as a Democrat when speaking
with reporters. Perhaps that had something to do with Traficant having voted
in 2001 for Republican J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) rather than Gephardt to be
House Speaker. (One factor may have been his fellow Democrats' beginning to
distancing themselves as his prosecution grew imminent.) In the normally
party-line vote, Traficant's break with his party had no effect. However, the
Republicans' margin in the House was only five votes, and it was feared on the
Democratic side that his symbolic vote signalled a readiness to vote with the
G.O.P. and weaken Gephardt's bargaining power. The party refused to give the
nine-term Trafficant a single committee assignment. On a related note,
Traficant often called colleagues ``Mr. Chairman'' even when they didn't head a
committee. I suppose it was easier than remembering who did.
Gephardt suggested privately to Traficant that he resign. (This was apparently
before the conviction; after the conviction, Gephardt called publicly for his
resignation.) According to Roll Call, Traficant's reaction was to call
for Mr. Gephardt to perform a reproductive act upon himself. A potentially
reproductive act, I suppose. In principle, perhaps. Okay, here's a tiny-bit
more creative: late in the 2002 trial, he said of the prosecutors, ``They
have the testicles of an ant.'' I suppose at least some of the prosecutors
would have to have been all male, if this remark was supposed to have some
exculpatory value in Traficant's defense. Perhaps he planned to reveal the
prosecutors' plans for the formic gonads, but didn't get a chance. U.S.
District Judge Lesley Wells ordered Traficant to sit down and gave him another
of her scolding lectures.
Incidentally, if the ant-testicles comment tickled some brain cell off in a
corner of your brain somewhere, it might have been because of Fred Allen's
famous comment -- ``You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood and put it into
a flea's navel and still have room left over for
three caraway seeds and an agent's heart.'' (I've seen various versions of
this, and perhaps more than one is correct, but I very much doubt the versions
that involve eight caraway seeds -- that's an exageration.) Fred Allen
broadcast his humorous remarks on his own radio show from 1934-1949. Traficant
broadcast his best material from the House floor (1985-2002), making frequent
reference to his anatomy and necessary bodily functions, and to ``Star Trek.''
His speeches usually ended with the line ``Beam me up.''
That reminds me, since this is the orbit entry, that I should circle back to
the point. Under House rules in effect at the time, a felony conviction
triggered an automatic investigation by the Committee on Standards of Official
Conduct (the ``Ethics Committee'' for short). [Under current rules, the House
doesn't wait that long any more.] A subcommittee was named, a set of charges
was drawn up (closely paralleling the criminal counts), Traficant was given a
chance to respond on July 15, and on July 18 the committee unanimously
recommended his expulsion. A report on The Hotline the next day
collected Traficant quotes from other news sources, including this comment
about members of the [news] media:
Many of them are so dumb they could throw themselves at the ground and miss.
That would be an eccentric orbit. This bit was harvested from <CNN.com>
on July 18, and appeared elsewhere. (I first found it in Ted Reuter's 449
Stupid Things Democrats Have Said, p. 85.) Traficant was expelled by the
House on July 24.
Like any comedian, Traficant recycled his material. (See the
boobs entry for another example of material that
may have been recycled.) In researching this here orbit entry I discovered
that in June 2000, he made a floor speech about the US Supreme Court. Here are
some excerpts, in the same order in which they were quoted, from the
Washington Times of June 22, 2000.
The Supreme Court says pornography is OK and it is OK to burn the flag, that
communists can work in our defense plants, that it is OK to teach witchcraft in
our schools and that it is OK for our students to write papers about the
devil.
But the Supreme Court says it is illegal to write papers about Jesus, it is
illegal to pray in school, and now the Supreme Court says it is even illegal to
pray before a football game. Beam me up.
I thought the Founders intended to create a Supreme Court, not the Supreme
Being. Think about that statement. I yield back a Supreme Court that is so
politically correct they are downright stupid, so stupid they could throw
themselves at the ground and miss.
Oh, and, one last thing about the events of 2002. The ethics committee
recommended expulsion rather than lesser penalties such as censure or reprimand
because of ``the gravity of the offense from the gentleman from Ohio,'' in the
words of Rep. Howard Berman of California. Gravity is the force
that keeps moons and planets in orbit, of course, but never mind. This
conventional Congressional use of ``gentleman'' reminds me of an amusing
incident (it's amusing now, anyway) from the time shortly after my mom and her
family emigrated to Bolivia. Her stepfather never mastered the
Spanish language in its entire subtlety, and
at that time he had already not mastered Spanish. (I recycle
my material too.) So one day when somebody was
trying to break into their house, he called the phone operator and reported,
``¡Un señor quiere entrar en nuestra casa!'' The operator
responded, ``Entonces déjelo entrar.'' Except for the critical
words, the quotations are approximate, and I'm sparing you the German accent.
Anyway, the first sentence means: `A gentleman wants to enter our house!' To
which the reasonable response was `So let him in.'
Actually, that reminds me of another true story, involving a restaurant owner
and one of his most valued employees. I won't identify these persons any more
precisely because, you know, someone might get in trouble. The employee
didn't speak much English in those days, so the owner took the trouble to mine
a Spanish dictionary for some useful words. One of the words is querer,
`to want.' (This verb occurred above in the phrase ``quiere entrar,''
`wants to enter.') So when the owner wanted this employee to come help him, he
would say ``[nombre del empleado], te quiero,'' meaning `[employee's
name], I love you.'
That ought to remind anyone of Alexander Bell's famous telephone message [to
his own assistant in another room] on March 10, 1876. (``Mr. Watson, come
here; I want you.'') Here there was no language difficulty, but there had been
some communication difficulty. The message is described as the first
transmission of a complete (and comprehensible) sentence. However, that
doesn't mean that the ability to send an intelligible message had been
impossible before that date. Bell's attorney had filed a patent application on
the previous St. Valentine's Day (so appropriate), and the patent had been
granted three weeks later, on March 7 (those were the days). Apparently Bell
had been working to improve his invention without actually being set up to
transmit a message. (I suppose he mostly just talked to himself over the phone
to see how well it was working, but I'll have to look into it.) The famous
first message was sent ``accidentally.'' The first public demonstration of the
telephone took place before a meeting of the AAAS in
Boston the following May 10.
ORD
Office of Research and Development. They don't actually do the research or
development. They handle the submissions, paperwork, negotiation, and
compliance associated with (mostly government-funded) research contracts at
a university. The ORD page
at Jackson State (JSU) plays a catchy tune.
ORD
O'HaRe International Airport, out Dere near Chicago, IL.
You are free to speculate why I gave up attempting acronymic explanations of
IATA airport codes. Here's
its status in real time from the ATCSCC.
Ah -- the mystery of the name is solved! Orchard Place Airport was built
by the federal government in 1942 for use by the nearby Douglas Aircraft plant.
It was declared surplus in 1946 and deeded a thousand acres to the city. As a
civilian airport it was known as Chicago Orchard Airfield and Douglas Field
(hence the O - R - D). In 1949, Chicago renamed its older
airport Midway Airport, in honor of the Battle of Midway, and named the new
airport O'Hare Field, in memory of Medal of Honor winner Edward ``Butch''
O'Hare, a navy pilot killed in action in the South Pacific.
ORD
Optical Rotary Dispersion.
ORD
Oxidation-Reduced Diffusion. Hey, it could go either way: there's also
OED.
orden de arresto
Spanish, `arrest warrant.' Sometimes I
wonder why I put in some of these entries. I hope I'm not revealing too much.
Orders of Chivalry
Quick guide (from a friend of a
friend) -- ignoring obsolescent orders, from highest to lowest:
- The Most Noble Order of the Garter
- The Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle
- Order of Merit
- The Most Honourable Order of the Bath (three classes)
- The Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George (three classes)
- The Royal Victorian Order (five classes)
- The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (five classes)
- The Order of the Companions of Honour
- The Distinguished Service Order
- The Imperial Service Order
ORECK
The surname of a guy who sells vacuum cleaners. His company is named after
him. Even though it's in all-caps, it's not an acronym. The letters are very
blockish, and the `O' could be mistaken for a `D.' To me it always looks like
`DRECK.'
ORF
Open Reading Frame. A sequence of DNA base
pairs (bp's) that is intelligible code for a
peptide chain.
Here's a
tool for their interpretation.
ORF
Österreichischer Rundfunk. `Austrian Broadcasting.' A public
broadcasting station with three radio and two television channels.
ORFEUS
Orbiting
Retrievable Far and Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrometer.
.org
ORGanization. The top-level domain name for
nonprofit organizations. Mostly. This includes
many educational institutions (particularly now that the set of institutions
permitted to have subdomains under .edu has been
restricted) as well as religious organizations. For example,
<http://www.fa.org/> is Friends Academy,
a K-through-12 Quaker Day School.
Incidentally, ``Quakers'' is a name, initially somewhat pejorative, that was
eventually adopted by a religious group called the Society of Friends.
The Shakers came by their name in similar fashion. In Israel (.il), members of the ``secular'' majority (i.e.,
those with lax religious observance) call the ultra-religious haredim,
which translates roughly as `tremblers.' I think that's still pejorative.
A number of apparently for-profit organizations now have .org URL's (I'll let you find them).
.org.
ORGanization. A second-level domain name under various ccTLD's. Japan (.jp)
and many other countries with consistent two-letter second-level domains use
<.or.>. France (.fr) uses .asso. to be
different. The o represents a hole.
organic chemistry
The chemistry of carbon compounds. Really: the chemistry of any and all
compounds that include one or more carbon atoms. This includes a few chemicals
that it is sometimes more appropriate to study in the context of other
groupings of compounds, but that's okay.
The idea of dividing compounds into organic and inorganic was introduced by
Léméry in his Cours de Chemie (1675). There the compounds
which are created by reactions in the mineral world were classed as inorganic,
and those which were known to be created only in the animal and vegetable
worlds were classed as organic. (This is not exactly how the distinction was
originally formulated, but it is effectively what we now understand the
distinction to have been.) It was eventually found that all organic compounds
so defined happened to contain carbon, although some inorganic compounds (note:
by the original definition) also contained carbon.
organometallics
Organometallic compounds, or metalorganics. Compounds of metals with
organic compounds. Many such compounds -- as for example
TEG, TMG,
TEA -- are used in the
CVD growth of compound semiconductors.
orgullo
Spanish, `pride.' Adjective orgulloso (`proud'). See empingorotado.
Ori
Orion.
Official IAU abbreviation
for the constellation.
oriented times three
Hospitalese for knowing the date, one's name, and where one is.
I never know the date without looking at my watch.
ORISE
Oak Ridge Institute for Science Education.
ORIT
Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores,
Organização Regional Interamericana dos Trabalhadores,
Organisation régionale interaméricaine des
travailleurs.
(Best guess expansions reconstructed from English.) Spanish, Portuguese, and
French, resp., `Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers.'
ORIT/ICFTU
Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers/International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions. That's the usual English expansion;
for more on ORIT see previous entry.
Oriya
The language of the
Indian state of
Orissa. (An official provincial language listed in the
Indian Constitution. About 10 million speakers.) The language is written
in an alphabet that
has only about two characters, maybe three in good light, which look roughly
like Q, 4, and |. Children in school are indoctrinated in the idea that if
you write | and scratch it out, or if you use different squiggles for the tail
on the Q, then these represent different letters. (Cf. minim.)
Our colleague Nihar is from Orissa, giving us an opportunity to test the
strength of the indoctrination on an otherwise intelligent victim. The hold
that this fantasy has on him was strong. He insists that the Oriya alphabet is essentially the same as the Sanskrit (Devanagari) original, and that the
horizontal line across the top was left out historically for practical reasons:
back when the writing was on organic material, straight lines that ran along
the underlying grain could destroy the wood or leaf being written on. [This is
obviously false, because that story was made up to explain the absence of
horizontal lines in runes (see thorn entry). Nihar
probably borrowed it. For similar instances of borrowing, see the Shiva entry.
If you get so far as to follow the Halaka link,
note that in Orissa, Halka is pronounced more like Haluhka.]
Over the very same beer (Honey Brown, mostly) that discovered Nihar's
hopeless indoctrination, we pondered the secret of
gupta.
ORM
Observatorio del
Roque de los Muchachos.
ORNL
Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
oro
Spanish for
`gold.' Also Italian. Okay: it's Italian, and
also Spanish. Look, if we all remain calm and reasonable, there's
enough word for everyone. Please, people! It's a small word, we all
gotta share!
Cf. ouro.
OROM
Optical Read Only Memory (ROM). In other words,
CD-ROM.
orpiment
Arsenic trisulfide (As2S3). A yellow mineral often
found in conjunction with realgar. Once used as a yellow pigment, whence its
name: Middle English < Old French <
Latin auripigmentum = aurum (`gold') +
pigmentum (I'll let you guess what that meant). Now an ore of arsenic.
orrery
A mechanical model of the solar system. Usually not entirely to scale,
because the Sun is so big and the Moon is so close. What is to scale is
the ratio of orbital rates. We had one or two of these in my elementary
school, but we didn't learn a name for it. It's named after Charles Boyle,
Fourth Earl of Orrery (1676-1731), a grandson of the famous physicist Robert
Boyle, First Earl of Orrery (1621-1679). In 1713, the fourth earl paid
clockmaker George Graham to create the first mechanical solar system model.
The device was named (by whom I am not sure) orrery in the Earl's honor.
Awwww. At least it wasn't designed by Robert Hooke, instrument maker to the
first earl. Hooke misses out on a lot of credit; in its early years, the Royal
Society was practically Hooke's lecture-and-demonstration series.
The orrery caught people's imaginations because that was precisely what they
lacked. For an allusion to orreries, see the Dickens excerpt at the
v.a. entry.
ORRO
Oral Roberts' Rules of Order. Well,
okay, it's not real book and the acronym is -- unsurprisingly, I guess --
not much used. On the plus side, the acronym is a palindrome, it makes an appropriately allusive connection between the numinous and the
numismatic, and the book title has a fine sort of surreality. Possibly
depending on what you think of Oral, that might
should be Roberts's.
Look, I don't make this stuff up, you know. I'm not that creative. Dan (a
fellow who co-stars in the Berlioz entry) worked
in a book store where someone actually came in and asked for ``Oral
Roberts' Rules of Order'' by name. (You'd have known that if you'd followed
the Oral-Roberts link.) I wish Dan had asked the customer to describe the book
first.
ORS
Optical Remote Sensing.
ORS
Oral Rehydration Solution.
There used to be a song, surprisingly not popularized by Dean Martin,
that began ``How dry I am.''
ort
Crumb or table scrap.
Ort
German, `place, point, corner.' See a. a. O.
and AOK for examples of use. The Dutch cognate is
oort.
There is an older German word, cognate with Dutch oorete and the English
word ort. For a crumb more on that, see the
miga entry.
ORT
Ooty RadioTelescope. In India. The
temptation to write OoRT must be resisted, because the name Oort is
already taken (for Oort Cloud).
ORT
Organization For
Rehabilitation and Training. Although I've also seen (`... through
Training.') Originally
called Obshestwo Propostranienia Truda, `Society for
Handicrafts and Agricultural Work,' when founded as a Jewish-poor aid
society in 1880 at St. Petersburg, Russia.
ORU
Oral Roberts University. A school
founded by the person it was named after.
ORV
Off-Road Vehicle. A steady mount
for the drug-store cowboy.
ORY
IATA code for Aéroport d'Orly, (south of
and) serving Paris, France. Operated by ADP.
o.s.
Oculus sinister. Latin: `evil eye' or `left eye' --
one of the two, anyway. My oculist must be an occultist. Cf.
o.d. More information at
TLC.
OS
Old Saxon. Precursor of Old English.
O.S.
Old Style. Refers to English dates under the Julian calendar. See
explanation at CY (Calendar Year) entry.
OS
Operating System. Visit the
FAQ for the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.research.
IBM uses the term System Control Program
(SCP).
OS
Optical Scan. An OS ballot or test form has open outlines (ovals
typically, rectangles or diamonds sometimes) for possible responses (votes or
answers). A response is indicated by the filling-in of an outline, typically
with a #2 pencil. Perhaps the use of pencil is a
hold-over from when the marks on paper forms were detected by conductivity. I
suspect ink is detected as well as graphite now, but who wants to find out the
hard way (or worse: not find out) that it isn't? Okay, this year (2008) when I
voted in the primary, I noticed that the booths where we filled out the OS
ballots were only equipped with pens.
Modern OS ballot machines typically regurgitate ballots with overvotes so that
voters can correct their forms. The machines I've used accept paper ballots
that are printed on both sides, and can read ballots inserted in at least a
couple of different orientations. The scanned votes are tabulated and
reported, but the individual scanned ballots are also collected in an internal
bin and afterwards transported to a central counting station for any possible
recount. (I think the votes are generally tabulated in the limited sense of
being separately summed. I don't recall any instance of the government doing
crosstabs, except in the limited sense of preventing overvotes.)
OS
Optical Spectroscopy.
Os
Osmium chemical symbol. Osmium has an atomic number 76.
That means it has 38 protons and... 38 more protons! (The atomic number is the
total number of protons in the nucleus.) Osmium is one of the
platinum-group metals.
Learn more about osmium at
its
entry in WebElements and
its entry at
Chemicool.
OS
Out of Stock. Publishers' abbreviation.
OS
Oxygen Saturation.
OSA
Obstructive Sleep Apnea. The most common type of sleep apnea, in
which there is a loss of muscle tone in the tongue, throat and larynx during
sleep, causing partial (hypopnea) or complete (apnea) blockage of the air
passage. The diaphragm increases pressure progressively to compensate, and
the sleeper repeatedly awakens or almost awakens. Cf. Central Sleep
Apnea (CSA).
OSA
Optical Society of America. See
their ``OpticsNet.''
ôsama
A Japanese word for `king.' That little hat over the o isn't a crown, by
the way. It's a way of indicating that the o is long. (``Long'' in the
traditional sense of duration, ``vowel quantity.'') The word is actually a
sort of compound, written with two kanji. The first
kanji, is pronounced ô and can be used for `king.' The second
kanji represents -sama, a formal version of san (equivalent to
Mr., but not marking gender).
OSAPS
Ohio Section of the American Physical Society.
What I have to say to them is: ``O you Silly Acronym PutzeS.''
OSB
Oriented-Strand Board. A wood construction building material.
Osbourne, Ozzy
As a public service, I'd like to point out that Ozzy Osbourne is looking
increasingly like Yoko Ono. It's probably not contagious, unless living your
private life very publicly is contagious.
OSC
(U.S.) Office of Special Council.
``[A]n independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency. Our
primary mission is to safeguard the merit system by protecting federal
employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices, especially
reprisal for whistleblowing. OSC also serves as a safe and secure channel
for federal workers who wish to disclose violations of laws, gross
mismanagement or waste of funds, abuse of authority, and a specific danger
to the public health and safety. In addition, OSC enforces and provides
advisory opinions regarding the Hatch Act, and protects the rights of federal
employee military veterans and reservists under the Uniformed Services
Employment and Reemployment Rights Act [USERRA]
of 1994.''
OSC
Ontario Securities Commission. Performs functions similar to those of the
US SEC.
OSC
Operations Support Center. In the wake of TMI, the NRC ordered
that licensees of operating nuclear plants establish an OSC at each plant, ``separate
from the control room and other emergency response facilities as a place
where operations support personnel can assemble and report in an emergency
situation to receive instructions from the operating staff. Communications
[are required to] be provided between the OSC,
TSC,
EOF, and control room.''
OSC
Orbital Sciences Corporation.
(Listed on the NYSE as ORB.)
OSCA
Optical Sensor Collaborative Association.
OSCAR
Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio.
OSCE
Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe. The old CSCE.
OSD
Open System Direction.
OSERS
Office of
Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. ``[C]ommitted to improving
results and outcomes for people with disabilities of all ages.'' How can they
hope to achieve anything when they're stuck in the feckless Department of Education?
I assume in French this would be l'osers.
OSF
Open Software Foundation
(``Oppose Sun Forever'').
OSF
Oxidation-induced Stacking Fault. (That's ``stacking'' at the microscopic
level -- crystal planes all bent out of shape.)
OSJ
Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction. NASD term
for an office where supervisory activities take place (customer orders are
reviewed and endorsed, advertising or sales literature for use by an NASD
member's associated persons is approved, etc.)
OSHA
Occupational Safety and Health
Administration. (Or `... Act.')
O'Shag
O'SHAuGhnessy. A classroom building at Notre Dame
University. Cf. Shaq.
OSI
Open Society Institute.
A project of/Somehow related to/Funded by the
Soros Foundation.
The term ``open society'' was popularized, or at least prominently used, by
Karl Popper; the title of one of his best-known books was The Open Society
and Its Enemies (in two volumes: ``The Spell of Plato'' and ``The High Tide
of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath''). It was issued in various
editions. George Soros fancies himself a philosopher and is a disciple of Karl
Popper. Well, he's a follower, anyway, at least in the sense that he came
afterwards. None of those who can think much think much of George Soros as a
philosopher, but everyone recognizes that he has a lot of money. He has
published a book with the title Open Society [Reforming Global Capitalism
Reconsidered]. ``The concept of open society is based on the recognition
that our understanding of the world is inherently imperfect....'' Well isn't
that deep.
OSI
Open Systems Interconnection. See the elucidation from
FOLDOC, or from whatis.com.
A seven-layer model defined by ISO as a reference
for standardization of electronic communication systems. The seven layers
are
- Physical Layer
Defines the physical connections over which data are transmitted.
- Link Layer
Mode of transmission of bits, the code, including error, parity bits.
- Network Layer
The arrangement of the physical connection into a circuit.
- Transport Layer
Control and error-handling.
- Session Layer
Host-to-host message ritual.
- Presentation Layer
The kinds of data objects that are commonly understood.
- Application Layer
User application.
OSID
Origination Signaling IDentifier.
OSL
Optically Stimulated Luminescence. Some folks at Dalhousie
University Division of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology have an interesting
application.
O-SLM
Optically addressed Spatial Light Modulator (SLM).
OSMA
NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance.
OS/MVS
Operating System with Multiple Virtual Storage.
OSOW
OverSize/OverWeight permit.
OSP
On-line Service Provider.
OSPD
Official SCRABBLE Players' Dictionary. In its domain, this dictionary has
greater authority than any other dictionary. To find out what that domain is,
geographically, see the SOWPODS entry.
The first edition of the OSPD was produced by the
NSA in 1978 and listed all of the
rules-acceptable 2- to 8-letter words found in five popular American collegiate
(i.e., abridged) dictionaries. Allowed inflections of the base words
were mostly listed in the entries for the base forms. (In my opinion, however,
it is missing a great many of the -ly adverbs.) This list was published as a
Scrabble dictionary by Merriam-Webster. M-W
produced a second edition at some point, which included words that had been
added to a later edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (the
MWCD8 had been one of the five originally
consulted); it seems that the other four were largely ignored in this revision.
The first two editions had both been valid in North American tournament play.
The third edition added further new words, but was also, controversially,
expurgated of some ``objectionable'' words. (Missing are at least three
obvious four-letter words,
and tournament-valid pejorative terms for members of various
racial and ethnic groups.) The OSPD3 was not used
for tournament play. Instead, a supplementary list of words was used with the
OSPD2 (see OSPD2+). Eventually (1998), an
Official Tournament and Club Word List (OTCWL or, for short,
TWL, q.v.; also abbreviated OWL) was created
by the NSA as the official arbiter for word rulings at North American clubs and
tournaments. Following the publication of OSPD4 (still expurgated) in 2005, a
second edition of the TWL was created (available at the beginning of 2006).
M-W has been the publisher for both editions of the TWL.
All editions of the OSPD have maintained the restriction of listing base words
no longer than eight letters. Although a rack only holds seven tiles, it is
possible to construct words longer than eight letters by connecting different
letters already on the board. To establish the validity of a longer word that
is not an inflected form of an 8-letter-or-shorter base word, there is a
designated official dictionary. For OSPD1, that was the MWCD8 and then the
MWCD9. For subsequent editions of the OSPD, it has usually been whatever was
the latest edition of the MWCD.
OSPD2+
Official SCRABBLE Players' Dictionary 2nd edition PLUS.
The OSPD second edition had been the official
dictionary for North American tournaments, but the third edition was published
with expurgations. In reaction, the National
Scrabble Association created a
(vide OSPD supra),
An updated
but expurgated version of the OSPD2, not valid for tournament play.
This webpage
lists words that were new in the OSPD3 (i.e., added since the OSPD2).
OSPD3
Official SCRABBLE Players' Dictionary (vide
OSPD supra), 3rd edition. An updated
but expurgated version of the OSPD2, not valid for tournament play.
This webpage
lists words that were new in the OSPD3 (i.e., added since the OSPD2).
OSPD4
Official SCRABBLE Players' Dictionary (vide
OSPD supra), 4th edition, new in
2005. ``More than 100,000 playable two- to eight-letter words including 4,000
new entries.'' Sure, it's ``endorsed by the
National SCRABBLE® Association,''
but the official list of words valid in NSA tournament play is the TWL. The NSA serves
a list
of two- and three-letter words that were new in the OSPD4.
Although this is the second expurgated edition, it still contains the words
gyp and slave, which were originally ethnic slurs. (I've actually met some of
the people who object to the time-honored master-slave terminology. I
understand that some people view that as racially offensive; I view that view
as insufficiently historically broad-minded, but I suppose context matters.)
Of course, the Scotch brand name for adhesive tape originally arose from an
ethnic stereotype. Oh look, the verb scotch is in the OSPD4, and the
payment-arrangement adjective Dutch. (I think that's still capitalized;
Scrabble tiles don't care.) That doesn't offend anyone? They should raise
their consciousness! Get outraged, people! It's your right and responsibility
to be maximally aggrieved! To say nothing of all the Indian tribes named after
other Indian tribes' uncomplimentary epithets for them.
FWIW, growing up in Germany in the 20's and 30's,
my mother learned the common expression ``das kommt mir spanisch vor,'' meaning
roughly `it's Greek [i.e., incomprehensible] to me,'' but extending to
actions and situations rather than just language.
This Wikipedia entry lists
comparable phrases in many other languages, yet a page for the expression
is apparently only available in six languages:
English, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, and Korean (all added some time before
mid-2011), and Chinese (added some time between mid-2011 and early 2013).
These pages contain lists of similar expressions in various languages, with
what we will call home and difficult languages. By home language I mean the
language in which the expression is uttered or written, and by difficult
language the one that serves as metonym for incomprehensibility, the ``Greek''
language. Of the five languages that parallel the Greek-to-me wikipedia page
in English, only Korean seems to lack its own version of the phrase. (That is,
only Korean does not serve as a home language for a version of this expression.
Doubtless, other languages may lack such an expression, but I wouldn't count
its absence on another language's webpage as strong evidence for the
possibility.)
I think it's cute that Esperanto uses good old Volapük as the difficult
(proverbially incomprehensible) tongue. Volapük was an earlier artificial
language, based very loosely on English vocabulary, that was very successful
for a few years among the people who like that sort of stuff, until it was
swept away by Esperanto itself. The Volapük community (of many
thousands of speakers and number of publications) shattered as a dozen or so
improved (i.e., more Esperanto-like) versions were invented in reaction
to that tidal wave. I'm amazed and impressed that Danish also memorializes
that dead artificial language in such an expression.
Greek, Spanish, and Chinese all enjoy widespread
status as ``difficult languages'' for these expressions. English is only
listed as difficult for one home language (Cantonese), but having the language
described as `chicken intestines' goes a long way to make up for this. The
only inconsistency I noticed among the pages (apart from limited language
coverage) is that the (all very similar) English, German, and Hungarian pages
list only Chinese as the difficult language for
French, but the Hebrew page lists Hebrew and
Javanese as alternate difficult languages. They seem to be right about
l'hébreu: when I checked in 2009, one characteristic phrase got
188k ghits for Hebrew, as against 555k for
Chinese; Javanese only got 6.3k, though. Related information can be found at
the gringo and b.
entries.
Once, in the crowded dining room of a Jerusalem hotel, I ate breakfast with an
Italian tourist who told me she didn't speak Hebrew or English. Astonished, I
asked her how she communicated. She knew French. Sometimes my foolishness
amazes me, but mostly I don't notice it.
The other day, I was over at Gary and Susan's, and I started to tell a story
about something stupid and insignificant that I did in graduate school. Then I
stopped myself and said that it's a low-yield story, not very interesting. But
Gary coaxed it out of me. In that spirit, I'm going to just blather on now. I
won't be offended if you browse to another page. I may not even notice.
About ten miles south of Florence along E35, there's a village called
I Cappuccini with a bed-and-board conference center where I stayed for a week
in 1987. A proceedings volume eventually came out of that. We conferees ate
all our meals in a common room, at round tables seating six to eight, served
by a crew of, iirc, three waiters. One of them was an older fellow, and one
day this old waiter started talking to one of my table mates. She happened,
like most of the conferees, to not understand Italian, so I started translating
to her.
[Let me interrupt myself here to point out that this whole
conference-center-with-room-and-board-on-premises deal seems, in my limited
experience, to be more common in continental Europe than in the US or the
UK. I suppose that's partly because conferees can
generally only be counted on to have some facility in the conference language,
and the conference language for international meetings is very frequently
English. (I count the following as corroborative of the hypothesis: I've
also encountered the room-and-board thing in northern England. Also in --
Manchester, actually -- I've had one-way conversations in which the only way I
could tell that the [apparently native English] cabbie had understood me was by
arriving at the correct destination.) But Quebec and Japan seem to follow the
US/(southern) UK plan, and in Japan you can't always count on finding a
passable English-speaker, so I don't know.]
Anyway, the old fellow noticed that I was translating and addressed me
directly, so I put down my silverware and spoke to him directly in Italian. It
turned out that he wanted to know if she was Chinese (which, not to get into
definitional details, she is). Once he got this little drib of information, he
said triumphantly, ``Ho indovinato!'' (`I guessed it!') and trotted off. We
were all like, that was it? Das kam uns spanisch vor.
OSPF
Open Shortest Path First. The name of and strategy implemented by an
Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP).
OSPM
Operating System-directed configuration and Power Management.
OSPRI
On-Site Program Review Instruments.
OSR
Office of Scientific Research. One of the OXR's. Short for (US) Air Force OSR (AFOSR), but you really don't need to know that,
because they're out of money. When you call to beg for money, they can feel
your pain because they're feeling it too. (That's what they tell me, anyway,
but maybe they're just trying to tell me something.) Budget cuts are really
just a way of fostering human understanding that cuts across
organizational lines.
OSRAM diadem
Car lights that look clear when they're off but amber when on. Available
from P.G. Performance.
OSRM
Online Services Reference Manual.
OSRP
Occupant Safety Research Project.
OSS
Office of Strategic Services. WWII
organization that became the CIA.
OSS
Operations Support System[s]. A decision-making component of
Telecommunications Management Network (TMN).
OSSA
Office of Space Science and Applications.
OSSHE
Oregon State System of Higher Education.
OST
(White House) Office of Science and
Technology Policy (OSTP).
OSTA
Ohio State Trappers
Association.
ostensive definition
A definition based on the enumeration of representative examples.
ostium
Medical and anatomical Latin for an opening or passage. This usage extends
the classical Latin senses of the word (`door,
opening of a river'), so the word qualifies as New Latin even though the word
is old. The seaport (now mostly ruins, except for the stadium) that served
ancient Rome is called Ostia.
Implicitly, the term ostium seems to be used exclusively for natural or
normal openings. Accidental openings may be perforations or stomata, and
artificial ostia are now called ostomies. For openings in plants, the Greek
stoma seems to be preferred. For a bit more on the -stom- terms, see
ostomy.
If you hear a Spaniard exclaim ``¡Ostia!'' what he's probably saying is
``¡hostia!'' Hostia (from the identically spelled word in Latin),
means `sacrifice offering.' (The aitch is silent in Spanish.) In Roman
Catholic ritual, hostia is also the name of a round wafer of unleavened
bread, which serves the same purpose. Please don't ask me what I mean by ``the
same.'' Somehow, hostia has also taken on the slang sense of a blow (as
with a fist), and ¡hostia! has become an expression of surprise or
frustration. I've heard Spaniards use this interjection, but never any Latin
Americans.
ostomate
Someone who has had an ostomy. In contrast
to an astomate -- someone or something not having a mouth. Not to be confused
with an estimate (of your auto repair bill), which might also leave you
speechless.
ostomy
A new word whose prevalence, if not exactly popularity, has grown with the
frequency of the procedure. First attested in the 1950's, it meant
stoma in the sense of an artificial opening like a colostomy, ileostomy, etc. -- words from which
the word was abstracted in a back-formation. The situation is similar to that
of ologies -- a jocular term alluding to various mostly academic
disciplines (like thinkology or
sociology). In both cases, the initial
o is a little lexical mortar that was left behind when the Greek
brick of stoma (`mouth') or logos (`word, reason') was broken off
for reuse, although the formation of ostomy was probably influenced by
ostium, q.v. There don't seem to be
any particular ostomies that don't have an o before the stomy. (No,
vastomy is not an exception.) (Contrast
the common words genealogy, mammalogy, and mineralogy.
See also nealogy.)
The existence of two words for what was a surgical sense of the word
stoma allowed a divergence into two sharper senses: an ostomy now refers
to the surgically created opening, while the stoma is the end of the ureter or
small or large intestine that can be seen protruding through the abdominal
wall. Okay, that's enough of that. We don't want to drive away our readers.
If you want to know more, try the UOA.
Stoma, of course, is Greek for `mouth.' Another technical use of the
word is in botany: stomata (plural of stoma) is the name given to
pores on the surface of a leaf that are the main avenue for exchange of gas
with the surrounding air. The rate of gas flow through stomata is regulated by
guard cells that adjust the size of the opening. In addition to admitting
oxygen for respiration and CO2 for photosynthesis, stomata also
allow water vapor to escape. Higher
CO2 levels allow the guard cells to close up and so decrease water
loss, enabling the plant to survive in more arid environments.
In Latin the sense of stoma slid down a bit
-- from opening of the gullet to the gullet itself, hence our word
stomach and cognates in all the major Romance languages. For an
instance of a semantic shift in the opposite direction, see the boca entry.
OSTP
(White House) Office of
Science and Technology Policy (US Government). Founded in 1976.
There used to be a legislative-branch counterpart -- Congressional
Office of Science and Technology (OTA) --
it's been abolished.
Ostwald-Lussac Rule of Stages
In crystallization, the least stable phase forms first, then transforms.
There's probably more to it than that, but the important thing is to begin.
Now that there's an entry for this, I'll probably ask for clarification the
next time an appropriate person shows up at Stammtisch, and the entry will
probably improve. In the meantime, you've been delayed in your net
search for real information...
Ostwald process
A process for the generation of nitric acid from ammonia. The key step is
the first, in which platinum or
platinum-rhodium alloy (in the form of a gauze
mesh to maximize surface exposure to the gases) catalyzes the reaction of
pressurized ammonia and oxygen (800-900°C) to
produce nitrogen monoxide:
4NH + 5O --> 4NO + 6H O .
3 2 (Pt, Rh) 2
The subsequent steps can be conducted in a single vessel. They are an addition
reaction to produce nitrogen dioxide,
2NO + O --> 2NO ,
2 2
and further oxidation and dissolution in water:
4NO + O + 2H O --> 4HNO .
2 2 2 3
Ostwald's Rule
The same thing as the
Ostwald-Lussac Rule of
Stages. It seems that Ostwald's rule is particularly applicable to the
process of condensation from the vapor. Thus, phosphorus vapor condenses first
to yellow phosphorus instead of the more stable red-phosphorous allotrope.
OSU
{ Ohio |
Oklahoma (Stillwater) |
Oregon }
State University.
OSUT
One Station (fighting) Unit Training.
OSUT
On-Site User { Training | Test }.
OSUT-COFT
OSUT-COFT.
OSW
Official SCRABBLE® Words. Used in Britain; see
SOWPODS.
OSWER
Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response.
OSW-I
Official SCRABBLE® Words, International. Used in Britain;
see SOWPODS.
OS/2, OS2
IBM's multitasking operating system rival to
Microsoft's Windows NT. OS/2 had a much
smaller, much more corporate user base than Windows, and since at least 2000,
IBM has been phasing it out, as usual providing a soft landing and
available-for-a-price legacy support. All of the web pages about OS2 that I
used to link to are 404 now. A search
of IBM webspace still yields plenty of articles for the antiquarian.
OS/400
[I think:] Optimized Server (for the AS/400
computers). Originally for host-centric computing, later versions are a code
substrate for server software.
OT
Occupational Therap{ ist | y }. The rehab people use the term to
refer to the recovery of manual dexterity, regardless whether the skill would
be used in work or not.
Internet resource list at O.T.
Online. UB's OT Dept. has a
homepage here. There's also
something there called Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation Science.
O.T.
Oedipus Tyrannus. An ancient Greek tragedy. Spelling usually given in
this Latinized form. Title sometimes approximately translated to Latin
Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King). Last of three plays that constitute
Sophocles's Theban Cycle.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif)
OT
Offensive Tackle. Football position, role, or action.
OT
Off-Topic. Characterizes postings and threads conducted in a (usually
electronic) discussion group that are outside the established subjects of the
forum. Could be misunderstood as On-Topic, in principle, but the point is
rarely to clarify but only to emphasize, so this misunderstanding is unlikely.
Or so I would have thought. Others know better, and realizing that the
abbreviation is ambiguous, clarify it by writing
``OT Topic[s].''
Cf. TAN:, AFLAC.
OT, O.T.
Old Testament. Hebrew Bible. Mostly in Hebrew, a few parts in Aramaic;
Maccabees was preserved only in Greek (LXX), IIRC.
OT, O/T
OverTime. Time worked or played in excess of regular hours. If this
occurs in or to break a tie, the persons involved are professionals or
amateurs, and will in either case not be paid for O/T.
OTA
Office of Technology Assessment. Created in 1972 to advise the US
Congress, sort of like CBO. It doesn't maintain
its own web site because it went out of existence in 1995 (here's how).
There's a memorial site from
Princeton. Looking on the bright side, what's the use of solid technical
information that legislators are going to ignore? Vide IATAFI, executive-branch
OSTP, British legislative POST and German
legislative TAB.
OTA
Operational Transconductance Amplifier.
OTA
Oxford Text Archive. A repository of electronic text for use in humanities
research, founded in 1976. It currently contains about 2500 (literary,
linguistic, and reference) texts in 26 languages (but mostly English), variously
encoded (but moving toward SGML).
OTAN
Organización de Tratado del Atlantico Norte. Spanish for
`North Atlantic Treaty Organization' (NATO). Also French: Organisation
du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord.
otan jobi omedato [gozaimasu]
Japanese: `happy birthday [sir/ma'am].'
OTB
Off-Track-Betting. Betting on races (usually horses) that takes place away
from the racetrack premises. Usually involves an electronic communication
technology. Haven't seen an EE course listing for
it, though.
OTB
Out-of-The-Box.
OTC
Over-The-Counter. Refers to stocks traded outside of a stock exchange.
This does not necessarily, or even usually, mean ``directly''; the stock
usually goes through a stockbroker. In principle, a holder of commercial
stock who knows a potential purchaser can always make a sale directly. ``OTC
stocks'' are those not listed on a major exchange. Timely information on
broker-handled OTC trades is available from OTCBB.
All of the above information is a guess. You get the information you pay for.
Non-prescription drugs are also referred to as ``over-the-counter,'' which
suggests that prescription drugs, by contrast, are sold under the counter.
As for the acronym OTC itself, I've only seen it used in this sense in
FDA documents.
OTC
Ozone Transport Commission.
``... comprised of government leaders and environmental officials from 12
Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, the District of Columbia, and the United
States Environmental Protection Agency [EPA].''
OTCBB
Over-The-Counter Bulletin Board.
``[A] regulated quotation service that displays real-time quotes, last-sale
prices, and volume information in over-the-counter (OTC) equity securities. An OTC equity security
generally is any equity that is not listed or traded on NASDAQ or a national [US] securities exchange. OTCBB
securities include national, regional, and foreign equity issues, warrants,
units, ADRs, and Direct Participation Programs
(DPPs).''
OTCWL
Official Tournament and Club Word List. I've also see ``OTaCWL'' used by a
member of the NSA dictionary committee. Usually
called TWL (which see) or OWL.
OTD
On-Time Delivery. A part of Just-In-Time (JIT)
production.
OTDR
Optical Time-Domain Reflectomet{er|ry} (TDR).
OTEP
Operational Test and Evaluation Plan.
OTF
Optical Transfer Function.
OTH, OTH-B
Over-The-Horizon (Backscatter) Radar. Radar using long-wavelength beams
bounced off the ionosphere. Intended for military early-warning systems.
others
We are here on earth to do good to others.
What the others are here for, I don't know.
-- W. H. Auden
OTIS
``OTIS is an acronym for Operative
Term Is Stimulate and has changed its name to SITO because of a trademark dispute with [a litigious art school].''
The web site SITO is an art resource on the web.
OTIS
Optimal Trajectories by Implicit Simulation. A general-purpose program
that is used to perform trajectory performance studies.
OTL
Output-TransformerLess. That is, without an output transformer.
OTL
Out To Lunch.
OTM
Office of Transportation Materials (of the DOE).
OTM
Other Than Mexican. A handy acronym in discussions of US border control
and illegal aliens. Mexicans who cross the southern land border of the US
illegally and are caught tend to be repatriated more quickly.
OTO
OrthoTOlidine. An organic test reagent that turns yellow-green in the
presence of a halogen.
OTOH, otoh
On The Other Hand.
President Truman used to wish for a ``one-handed economist.''
To judge from some discussions, every second person is an avatar. Where
are the elephant heads?
OTP
One-Time Programmable. Characterizes EPROM
or EPLD without the erase window. This can be put
in a plastic plackage, rather than the more expensive ceramic-with-window
package. (In principle, the term might refer to fuse-based programmable
chips, but as used it does not.)
OTP
Ortho TerPhenyl. Ortho refers to position on a benzene ring, abbreviated
o: ``o-terphenyl.''
OTPROM
One-Time Programmable ROM. EPROM without the
erase window. (In principle this might, but in usage it does not, refer to
Bipolar PROM, which is usually programmed by selectively blowing fuses.)
OTPB
Ontario Teachers Pension Board.
OTR
Over The Road. Surface transport. Truckin'.
OTR
Oxygen Transmission Rate. Used in packaging industry to characterize the
properties of films for sealing/storing/transporting perishable products.
OTR
Ozone Transport Region.
OTS
One True
Shatner. Of course you knew that, you were just checking that the
SBF glossary had it right. Oh you of little faith!
ÖTSI
Österreichische Turner-Syndrom Initiative.
OTT
Office of Transportation Technologies (of the
DOE).
OTT
Over The Top.
OTTI
Office of Travel and Tourism
Industries. An office within the International
Trade Administration of the US Department
of Commerce.
Looks a bit like Ötzi the iceman.
OTTOMH
Off The Top Of My Head.
Ottowa
If the Canadians had chosen this name for
their national capital, would it be more or less frequently misspelled or
misspelt than Ottawa?
Yow! Make a parallel universe and test the hypothesis.
OTV
Orbital Transfer Vehicle. NASA acronym.
ou
Ancient Greek: `no, not.' Pronounced ``ooh.'' Just so you know there's at
least one Indo-European language in Europe whose ``no'' doesn't begin in en.
It's pretty typical of Greek to be the outlier, probably for reasons having to
do with the early migration and spread of IE-speaking
peoples. There are three closely related forms: ouk, ouch, and
ouchi. Note that ``ch'' here, as is usual in Greek transliteration,
represents the letter chi, pronounced as an aspirated version of kappa.
Ouk and ouch are the forms used when the word is followed
immediately by a word beginning with a vowel. If the vowel has rough breathing
(represented by a diacritical mark in Greek and an initial aitch in
Latin and English) then ouch is used.
Otherwise (smooth breathing, no initial aitch) ouk.
Ouchi (pronounced approximately ``oo-kih'') is just no. I didn't
say okay -- I said no. FWIW,
``okey'' is a common Spanish spelling of
okay (an American English loan, of course).
This reminds me of the Portuguese expression pois não,
which has its own entry não.
OU
Hoo, mi?
OU
Orthodox Union. That is, the Union of
Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, founded in 1898. Their server is up
on Saturday. This is ``modern Orthodox,'' so some people who want to keep
so-called ``glatt'' kosher disdain the little U-in-a-circle symbol.
OU
University of Oklahoma, at Norman.
For my convenience, there's a link to the OU
Press at the OU Press entry
For an incomplete list of ``universities of'' with the U transposed in the
abbreviation, see this U entry.
ouch
A form of the word for no or not in Ancient Greek. See
ou. If you actually wanted to say
ouch in Ancient Greek, you'd exclaim papai! This is probably the
appropriate place to mention that the Stoic movement in philosophy traces its
origins to two followers of the Ancient Greek screwball Parmenides --
Zeno and Democritus (the latter is the Romanized form of Demokritos).
The word stoic is derived from stoa, loosely translated as
`porch' (more at stoep).
I hope you are thoroughly confused and entertained.
OUCH
Organised Unitary Content Hypothesis. Unified model for various patterns
of impaired semantic memory, proposed in 1990 by Alfonso Caramazza, Brenda
Rapp, Argye E. Hillis, and Romani.
ouchi
I don't want to put in any spoilers here, so just go to the
ou, oo-kay?
ought to
Won't.
OUI
Operating Under the Influence. Look, surgeons are paying malpractice
insurance out the wazoo -- is it really necessary to criminalize a little
nerve-steadying self-medication? I guess the answer is `yes.'
OUI
{ Organization-Unique | Organizational Unit } Identifier.
Ouija
`Yesyes,' in FrenchGerman (oui and
ja, resp.). According to an expert interviewed on May 12, 2007
(i.e., that Saturday morning), on C2C,
Ouija boards don't work so good during rainy weather. You tend to get a meaner
sort of spirit. I never knew. She pointed out about these spirits that ``half
the time, you don't even know who you're talking to.'' I must admit, I never
had this pointed out to me in such stark quantitative terms. ``You have to ask
yourself, `Why are they hanging around?' [As opposed to going to some
other, better place that they might or might not be eligible for, I think she
meant.]'' Some time later in the show, callers-in complained that their Ouija
board spelled out stuff that ``didn't look like any known language.'' I
imagine that they were expecting English. You probably have to be an
accomplished linguist to use these things.
ouk
It sounds like Alley-Oopianese, but it's really Ancient Greek. See
ou, see me.
OUL
IATA code for airport in Oulu, Finland.
OULS
Oxford University Library Services.
OULSPC
Oxford University Library Services (OULS)
Payment Card. This glossary is the place to find out what acronyms
like this mean, because the editors of Outline, the house organ
of the Oxford University libraries, try to avoid expanding their common
acronyms but once every four or five issues.
OULSR
Optical Unidirectional Line-Switched Ring network.
ounce
A measure of copper foil thickness. One-ounce foil is 0.0014 in thick.
I.e., one-ounce foil has a density of one av. ounce
per square foot.
OUP
Oxford University Press has WWW sites in
the UK and in the US.
Many of the better out-of-print OUP books reappear in quality, low-cost
editions from Sandpiper books. Also, apparently a division of the same company
is PostScript,
a warehouse of ``[p]ublishers' overstocks, reprints and remaindered editions
from major publishing houses and independent and university presses'' sold by
mail order.
OU Press
University of Oklahoma Press.
The university press of the University of Oklahoma at Norman (OU).
ouro
Portuguese for `gold.' From the Latin aurum (source of the chemical symbol Au) and cognate with the French or. There's also
a cognate in Spanish and Italian, but you don't want
to go there.
outcry witness
A witness who encounters the complainant shortly after the time that a
sexual assault is alleged to have occurred.
outer-ear infection
Children get inner-ear infections (frequently, in many cases). They grow
out of that in time. Adults are more likely to get outer-ear infections. If
you're into pain but want to avoid any unsightly physical trauma, this is the
ticket, the
primo stuff! I can't recommend it highly enough! More than an ear ache, this
will radiate over your face to all the places where evolution has thoughtfully
(okay: adaptively) provided a high density of nerve endings. There's
interesting variety too: from discomfort, stuffiness, and dull pain to
throbbing and sudden piercing jabs that stagger you. Don't worry about
the treatment. Ear drops for topical antibiotic and a little ineffective
cortisone -- you'll continue to have swell pain for a week (after having waited
a pain-filled week or two expecting it to go away on its own).
Go swimming today in a warm public pool with insufficient chlorine.
Some of you pain amateurs are probably scoffing -- ah, what's a little ol' ear
ache? Exactly! The problem with most other painful ailments is that one way
or another they elicit sympathy. Other people have had it, or it's well-known
to be bad, or it's unknown but sounds or looks terrible. And sympathy is
soothing, which is counterproductive of really intense suffering.
For the pain aficionado, the special attraction of ear ache is that it
sounds minor, so you seem like a whiner to complain about it at all
and you get hurtful contempt instead of sympathy. (Whine to someone who's
had a heart operation, if you're not getting enough contempt.) It's great!
Bonus misery: you have to eat mushy foods or have pain with every bite.
outfield
It is a charming feature of baseball (or an irritating one, if that's how
you feel) that it is played on a field whose dimensions are only partly
specified by the rules of the game. (And I'm not even talking about the strike
zone.) The cricket outfield is likewise of variable dimensions.
Okay, I've said enough about that. My real motivation for this entry is to
point out that while the Japanese adopted the word out when they adopted
the game (it gets transliterated back as auto), they coined
gaiya for outfield. That's a two-kanji word, and the first kanji
(with sound gai and corresponding to `out') is the same one that occurs
in gaijin (`foreigner'). Gaikan means `surface, exterior.'
(Gaiken means `outline.' No cigar, though: it's a different kanji.)
out of your element
But we have something similar (though heavier) just below it on the
periodic table.
output impedance
| VOUT / IOUT |
and/or
| dVOUT / dIOUT |.
Output impedance on an amplifier or gate is generally intended to be
low. The reason is that the output signal is generally encoded as
a voltage, and one wants current draw by any following input stage to have
the smallest possible effect on that voltage level. Methods to diminish
output impedance include emitter followers and Darlington pairs.
Cf. input impedance.
outreach specialist
Advertiser.
out years
Years further into the future.
OV
Organización Vecinal. (Plural:
Organizaciones Vecinales. Spanish,
`neighborhood organization[s].'
OVA
Original Video Animation.
OVCSEL
Organic VCSEL.
OVDP
Outside Vapor-Deposition Process.
ovens
Hello, boys and girls! Today we're going to learn an important fact about
ovens! When the oven in the kitchen is ``on,'' the door of the oven is warm.
Sometimes very warm, sometimes not so warm. Meanwhile, the inside of the oven
is hot! Very hot! Here is the important fact: when we say that ``the door of
the oven is warm,'' we mean that the outside of the oven door is warm.
The inside of the oven door is very, very hot, just like the other parts
of the inside of the oven. When daddy forgets this and brushes the inside of
the door with his elbow, he may scream some unusual words. We should forget
those words.
Overcoming Writing Blocks
It's the title of an old paperback I have. It's got a clever cover: yellow
lined paper as a background, with a fountain pen twisted into a pretzel. Do
you know what a fountain pen is? It's a pen that shows your age. No, it
doesn't have a digital display, and it's not short for ``Fountain of Youth''
pen. The one on this cover shows that it's an old book. I've had it for a
long time. I've been planning to get around to reading it, also for a long
time. Not that I plan to take a long time to--
Oh alright: it's by Karin Mack, Ph.D. and Eric Skjei, Ph.D., ©1979. It
wasn't published by an academic press, so there's a chance it's readable.
Personally, I don't really have writing blocks to overcome. At any given
moment, I usually have at most one writing block to overcome. Unfortunately,
that one block is the one that prevents me from writing the project I'm trying
to work on. While I'm blocked on that, though, I can ``work on'' any other
writing project, so long as I don't make any actual progress.
It's interesting that they call these monsters ``writing blocks'' instead of
``writer's blocks'' or ``writers' blocks,'' but it does avoid the problem of
where to put the apostrophe, if you insist on discussing these monsters in the
plural. Before we get into that, however, I ought to mention that
demonstrate, monitor and monster all have a common
Latin root. Frankly, I thought I already had. You
know, I really don't feel like doing all that etymological research again, now,
so what say I leave the demonstrate/monitor/monster discussion for later.
There, I feel much better already. Actually, it's explained at the
epenthesis entry. What the heck, let's peek
inside and see if they explain why they use the plural and the present perfect.
Hmm. They don't say, immediately. I notice that this is another one of those
books that I don't and likely won't feel like summarizing into an entry. So
from your point of view, my reading this book (if that comes to pass) is a
waste of time. To say nothing of this entry.
overnight success
In show-biz, some people say it takes years to become an overnight success.
Those people are called optimists.
Overseas Contingency Operation
War. A particular one (but not just any particular one) that has not
attained to a permanent name.
The Washington Post
reported on March 25, 2009,
that a memo recommending this term had been emailed during the previous week to
Pentagon staff members. The Defense Department's Office of Security Review
noted that ``this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or
'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use
'Overseas Contingency Operation.' ''
The memo said the direction came from the Office of Management and Budget, the
executive-branch agency that reviews the public testimony of administration
officials before it is delivered. (No, I don't understand that.) Not so, said
Kenneth Baer, an OMB spokesman. ``There was no
memo, no guidance... This is the opinion of a career civil servant.''
Coincidentally or not, senior administration officials had been publicly using
the phrase ``overseas contingency operations'' in a war context for roughly a
month before the email was sent.
OVERT
Ontario Volunteer Emergency Response Team.
overtone
An overtone is a harmonic with frequency above the fundamental. Because
both harmonics and overtones are labeled by ordinal numbers, the correspondence
between harmonic and overtone names can confuse. Pay close attention:
The first harmonic is the fundamental frequency itself. The first harmonic has
a frequency that is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency, but it
happens that the multiplication factor is unity.
The second harmonic has twice the frequency of the fundamental. This is the
first overtone.
The third harmonic (thrice the fundamental frequency) is the second overtone.
In general, the nth harmonic has n times the frequency of the fundamental and
is also called the (n-1)th (or ``n minus first'') overtone.
When people talk about the harmonics of a tone, they are often implicitly
excluding the fundamental. In other words, they mean the overtones (also ``the
overtone series''). The usual way this sort of distinction is made in
mathematics is with the qualifier ``proper.'' For exaple, a proper subset of a
set is a subset other than the whole set itself or the empty set.
Yes, of course there's a zeroth harmonic. The term is used to refer to the
constant term in a Fourier expansion.
Despite the use of ordinal naming (``second harmonic'' instead of ``double
harmonic,'' etc.), when push comes to shove harmonics are really thought of as
general multiples of a fundamental frequency. Hence ``half harmonic'' for
a signal with twice the period of the fundamental. The ordinal naming is thus
unfortunate, because in English most fractions share a name with an ordinal
(compare ``one third'' and ``the third''). The same is often true in the
ordinary sloppy usage of languages like Spanish
that maintain a distinction (``un tercio'' vs. ``el tercero'' corresponding
respectively to the last English example).
Overtone and harmonic are words that tend to be used to refer to individual
tones in relation to another often implicit tone (the fundamental). Another
set of terms exists in music to describe pairs of tones (whether sounded
simultaneously or sequentially). The same words are used to refer to the
separation (``interval'') of these pairs. (I know -- a distinction only a
lexicographer might care about.) Obviously, since one tone may be expressed
as the harmonic of another, the terminology of individual harmonics/overtones
has a natural relation to this interval description. However, because
instrument tuning usually involves a compromise among incompatible goals for
frequency ratios of different pitches, the precise sense of most of these terms
is an involved matter to discuss. The two unambiguous basic terms are the
unison (two sounds at the same pitch) and the
octave (one sound at twice the pitch of the other).
overweaning pride
You can hardly get any more Freudian than that.
OVI
Open Verilog
International.
Ovid
Probably another town in upstate New York, just NW of Ithaca, where
Ulysses made his home. There's a public discussion forum on Ovid accessible
from Sean Redmond's Homepage.
He also serves a page of Recent Ovidian
Bibliography.
OVL
OVerLay. Overlay in olde-tyme computing days referred to the patching
together of code when a program or its data was too large to keep entirely in
the CPU's RAM (usually core). The idea was that the program would be
separated into relatively independent pieces that could be loaded sequentially,
with data discarded when possible or stored elsewhere if necessary (typically
in sequential-access files). The program ran as an overlay of the separated
pieces. By the 1970's this process had become essentially transparent to the
user, done automatically by the compile-and-load sequence. On some
minicomputers, it was still necessary to do it by hand. In 1979, for example,
I had to hand-overlay a Fortran program that had previously run on a mainframe,
in order to get it to run on a Data General Nova.
In current use, overlay normally refers to partial or complete overlap of
2D graphical information. See, for example Brad Hansen's
definition.
OVMA
{ Ohio
| Oklahoma
| Oregon }
Veterinary Medical Association. See also AVMA.
OVMA
Ontario Veterinary Medical
Association. See also this CVMA and
CVO
OVNI
Objeto Volador No Identificado.
Spanish for `Unidentified Flying Object' (UFO).
OVP
Office of the Vice President. Albert Gore, US Vice President from 1993 to
2001, was regarded by himself as an expert in technological issues. Dick
Cheney, US Vice President from 2001 to 2009, was regarded by everyone as an
oil-industry executive. (It was thus just a short step, for those so inclined,
to eventually regard him as Satan.)
ÖVP
German, Österreichische Volkspartei. `Austrian People's Party.'
OVP
Over-Voltage Protection. Transient suppression.
OVTAA
Oregon Veterinary Technician and Assistant
Association. Formed in June 2005. ``Our mission is to promote the
profession of veterinary medical support staff and foster recognition and
understanding of the roles of Veterinary Technicians and Assistants in the
State of Oregon.''
OW
Old Westminster. A
former pupil of
Westminster
School (The Royal College of St. Peter at Westminster, in London). The
plural form is OWW.
OW
One Way (ticket).
OWC
Oxford
World's Classics. An OUP imprint established in 1901. ``Making available
popular favourites as well as lesser-known books, the series has grown to 700
titles - from the 4,000 year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the
twentieth-century's greatest novels.''
OWDM
Original Water Depth Mine.
OWI
Office of War Information. A US WWII
organization. Pierre Lazareff directed OWI's program of broadcasts to
France. Claude
Lévi-Strauss spent the war years in New
York, and he worked for OWI to pick up some extra money. He and some other
exiles would show up two or three times a week to read news and propaganda
texts issued by Lazareff's office. He was usually chosen to do
Roosevelt's speeches because it seemed that his
voice could be heard best over the jamming.
OWI
Operating (a motor vehicle) While Intoxicated. (Intoxication by the
Holy Spirit, Love, etc. don't count. We're talkin' chemicals ingested or
injected here.)
That's the Indiana State acronym. Other states use DWI, DUI, etc. I think some
state should use OUI.
OWL
Online Writing Lab. The
English Department at
Purdue University offers one. It seems
they're not alone, but... teaching engineers to write! What a wonderful idea!
Why didn't anyone think of this before?
OWL
Official Tournament and Club Word List. A list defined by the
NSA (no, not that
NSA), and better known as TWL (q.v.).
The second edition, promulgated in 2006, is called OWL2 or, more commonly,
TWL06.
OWL2
The second edition of OWL.
OWM
Office of War Mobilization. Created in Spring 1943 to coordinate the
activities of various US institutions created during
WWII to distribute manpower and strategic materials
(let's not call it ``central planning,'' okay?). Those other institutions
included the NWLB,
WMC, and WPB.
The OWM was headed by former senator and Supreme Court justice James F. Byrnes.
owned by the people
Operated by bureaucrats accountable to no one. In the case of news
organizations, it means the lunatics are running the asylum.
O-WORM
Optical-disc WORM.
OWU
Ohio Weslyan University. In Delaware,
Ohio. That's the town of Delaware, not
the state, in the state of Ohio.
Established in 1842, like three other institutions mentioned here.
OWW
Old WestminsterS.
Plural of OW, q.v. The
TLA is used both for all former students of
Westminster School collectively, and for plural but proper (oh, very proper!)
subsets thereof.
Former pupils of
Westminster
School (The Royal College of St. Peter at
Westminster) in London.
Owww!
That hurt!
ox
Castrated adult male bovine. Plural form: oxen. Until VAX (or should that be ``until and since''?),
ox was the only common Modern English word using the -en plural (-an in
Old English, regular nominative plural ending for weak-declension nouns).
ox, Ox
Popular semiconductor industry morpheme for silicon dioxide. Vide
thinox, thickox.
Forms uncountable (`mass') noun: no plural form. The materials are frequently
used in electronic isolation. The
morpheme is not used in isolation; use ``oxide.''
OX
Hug (``O'') and kiss (``X''). Plural form: OOXX.
OX
Ottawa eXchange or
something else.
OX
Outlook eXpress. Not a common abbreviation for Outlook Express (see
OE or OLE) among native
English speakers, despite the fact that oxen are also
stupid.
OX
Overnight eXpress. A truck freight company.
oxalic acid
A complexing agent for Zr and Mo. There's more to know, but I don't know
it.
Oxbridge
A term used to refer collectively to England's OXford and CamBRIDGE
universities. It was reported on December 5, 2008, that one Sally Adams, in
her fifties, was appealing for an egg donor to help her to have a child. She
was reported as having asked that only women who are Oxford or Cambridge
graduates come forward. As India Knight wrote in the Sunday Times
(Dec. 7), ``the donor must have gone to Oxbridge. The egg must be bright. The
egg must know its quads.'' Ms. Adams, described in some articles as an
academic, explained that ``Oxford is a very good catchment area. Many of my
roots are there, I own a house in North Oxford of which I am the landlady, and
I studied at Oxford University. Oxford and Cambridge are the seats of people
[sic] who are both academic and intellectual and often very altruistic.
An egg donor needs to be under 32 years old and I am looking for someone who is
educated, intellectual and possibly has a connection with the colleges.''
Adams has already found a sperm donor (they're always easier to find, aren't
they?) from London, but has not yet acquired an ``appropriate'' egg donor. She
said she would fund the IVF treatment using the
rental income from that house she owns. In the UK it
is illegal to pay egg or sperm donors, but Adams has said she would pay for all
medical expenses. (The NHS will only provide for
a limited number of IVF attempts, and Adams long ago exhausted that number.)
News outlets that felt like putting a negative spin on the story had no
difficulty finding people with Oxbridge pedigrees (pardon the expression) to
wring their hands and bloviate on the ethical dangers of amateur eugenics.
Some commentators, like India Knight, found the choosy ``egg-shopping'' creepy.
So Adams should just take pot luck? (Knight's reaction just goes to show how
far we've come. Gamete-shopping is as old as sexual selection; yet IVF is now
less controversial.) Mark (don't bother looking; he's not identified in or
anywhere near this entry) thinks that it's at least kind of weird: ``If she
wants someone else's sperm and someone else's egg, why bother with
pregnancy?'' Who knows? Maybe Adams already has a surrogate uterus lined up.
Personally, given her associations, I just think it's very open-minded of Adams
to consider Cambridge donors. I guess she wants to avoid inbreeding.
Coming eventually: an entry for the Repository for Germinal Choice (a/k/a the
Nobel Prize Sperm Bank). FWIW, that bank, which operated from 1979 to 1999,
did not supply sperm to single women or lesbians. (This was at the insistence
of founder Robert Graham's wife.)
Oxford unit
A measure of the quantity of penicillin, assayed in terms of its
antibacterial activity. One Oxford unit is the
amount of penicillin which, when dissolved in 50 cubic centimeters of meat
extract broth, just completely inhibits the growth of the test strain of
Staphylococcus aureus.
That's the apparently standard definition, quoted by Donald G. Anderson, M.D.,
in his article ``Penicillin'' in The American Journal of Nursing, vol.
45, no. 1, pp. 18-20 (Jan. 1945); see ftnt. 1 on p. 18. By late 1945 it
was possible to grow pure crystals of penicillin, and it was found that one
milligram of penicillin corresponded to about 1,650 Oxford units (see this
page, browsed 2007.07.12).
OXR
Informal generic term for the research funding agencies US military
(AFOSR,
ARO,
ONR;
ARPA/DARPA,
DOD).
Oxy
Occidental College.
oxygen
Vital for life of most organisms you can think of, apart from anerobic
bacteria, which lack just a couple of necessary enzymes. Some anaerobic
bacteria die on exposure to air. But then, so do fish. If the air you
breathe has an oxygen partial pressure substantially less than 1/5
atmosphere, you will lose consciousness. Then it will be very difficult
to do whatever it was you had planned to do with that gas-handling
equipment, but that will no longer be your biggest problem. Oxygen gas
is molecular oxygen -- O2.
oxymoron
A word or more usually a term that is self-contradictory. From the Greek
oxy- (sharp) + môrón (dull).
Oxy-Nitride
SiOxNy
oxytone
A (Gk.)
word with an acute accent on the ultima. Some extend this definition to
include barytone (grave accent on ultima).
Cf. paroxytone
and proparoxytone, and -- what the hey,
while you're at it -- perispomenon and
even properispomenon. Ancient Greek
doesn't have an exclamation mark, and I think you can see why.
OY
Optimum Yield.
OY
Option Year.
OY
OutYear.
Oy!
Vey?
oyabun
Japanese: `boss, superior.' Cf.
kobun.
oyatoi
Japanese term for a foreigner (especially a foreign teacher), employed by
the (Japanese national) government.
OYOC
One-Year-On-Campus.
O-Z, OZ
Ornstein-Zernike (equation). An exact relation satisfied by the pair
correlation function and the direct correlation function in (as normally
formulated) a homogeneous fluid.
Observe that by using the numerical correspondence associated with alphabetical
order (collating sequence), we have the
gematria:
O - Z = 15 - 26 = -11
P - Y = 16 - 25 = -9
Well, something to think about, anyway, I guess. Close, but not equal.
oz., Oz.
Ounce. The troy and apothecary ounce are equal
to each other and to one twelfth of the corresponding pound. A fluid ounce is
one sixteenth of a pint and an avoirdupois ounce is one sixteenth of the
corresponding pound. A pint of water weighs about one av. pound.
ozone cracking
Elastomer CRACKING caused by OZONE (O3). Concentrations of a
few parts per hundred million in air are enough to produce noticeable effects.
Ozone attacks double bonds on the surface of bulk elastomer (rubber).
ozt.
Troy Ounce.
O2
Chemical formula for molecular oxygen, the stable form of oxygen at
anything like normal conditions. Atomic oxygen, O, is a
free radical. Sounds revolutionary, doesn't it? In chemistry, as in many
scientific fields, radical has its etymological meaning of `root.'
The idea is, a radical is not a chemical species normally found free, but
in combination. A free radical like O is highly unstable and therefore
occurs only in small concentrations. When two oxygen radicals collide,
they have a high cross section for combining.
o5
The symbol of an anti-Nazi resistance movement in
WWII Austria. The
symbol is a roundabout way of representing Ö (o-Umlaut): the letter o
represents itself, and 5 represents the fifth letter of the Roman alphabet;
together they represent oe, which is the way one represents Ö
typographically when the appropriate single symbol cannot be produced. The
Ö, of course, is the initial of Österreich, the name of
Austria in the language of Austria (namely German). I suppose the 5 also can
be taken to represent the letter ess that follows. The word
Österreich means `eastern realm.'
Austria was Adolf Hitler's birthplace. He came to power in Germany in the
early 1930's, and in the last free elections there before the war, his Nazi
party won about a third of the vote. My mother recalls from that time how, as
a child, she was told by my grandfather that he was about to cast his last vote
in Germany. His expectation was correct. In 1938, Hitler scored his greatest
electoral triumph when Austrians overwhelmingly approved a referendum on
Anschuß -- amalgamation into the German Reich. Austrians were among
Hitler's most enthusiastic supporters during the Nazi era. As
WWII
ended, Austria was occupied by both democratic and Soviet Allied troops, and
Vienna was temporarily partitioned like Berlin. It was decided among the
Allies that Austria would be treated as a liberated country rather than as a
part of conquered Germany. At the time, this didn't fool anyone who didn't
want to be fooled, but in the long run, the memory of the elderly is no match
for official history, ignorance, and consoling myths.
The Anschluß made the very name of the country a protest against Nazism,
hence the force of ``o5.'' The symbol appeared during the war as a graffito on
walls around Vienna, and such graffiti were allowed to remain afterwards.
Maybe a few more were added for good measure. At least one guidebook mentioned
that the symbol was carved near the main entrance of a cathedral in Vienna.
However, when an SBF investigator visited in 2002, he was unable to find it.
The Austrian filmmaker Frederick Baker made a five-minute documentary entitled
``Austria o5 2000'' (16mm, color, 2001) which shows various graffiti around
from around Vienna. It received an honorable mention at the 40th
Ann Arbor Film Festival (in 2002).
The following is not directly related to o5, but it continues, unfortunately,
the story limned a couple of paragraphs back.
In October 1999, Austria's far-right Freedom Party dramatically increased its
share of the vote in general elections and became the second-largest party
(Social Democrats 33.3%, Freedom 27.2%, People's Party 26.9%). The Freedom
Party had been moving toward the center until 1986, when Jörg Haider
became party leader. Haider had a long history of nice things to say about
Nazism and Nazis, coupled with less-prominent and not especially convincing
denunciations of Nazism. The entire performance looked to be qualified and
calibrated to skirt effective opposition to fascism while tapping certain
unsatisfied sentiments of the electorate. These included a genuine nostalgia
(among some) for authoritarianism (or what they understood or liked or thought
was the essence of it), resentment of the politically correct suppression of
profascist expression, measured or not, and resentment of the related ``Shoach
business,'' as it is called in Germany (exploitation of dominant antifascism
for gain, political or otherwise).
In 1991, Haider was forced to resign the governorship of Carinthia, Austria's
southernmost province, after praising Hitler's orderly employment policies.
Later he gave a speech before a meeting of Waffen SS veterans and praised their
contribution to building a modern Austria. One might regard these as tactical
rhetorical errors, or as laying a strategic groundwork. People who harbor
half-century-old resentments might be expected to remember a balm of words
administered a decade previous. In any case, over the following decade
Haider's speeches were a little more careful and mentions of Hitler suppressed.
He did a Le Pen, basically, focussing on immigration and patriotic issues, and
criticizing corrupt practices of the coalition of Social Democratic and
People's parties, which had ruled nationally since 1986 (also).
![[dive flag]](images/dflag.gif){kind=small}
