(Click here for bottom)

ad
ADvertisement. Look, all three major Scrabble dictionaries accept even admass. A fortiori, they must accept ad (and its plural ads).

Challenge!

Okay, okay: mere logic can't guarantee that a word is valid, but in this case the ``reasoning trick'' happens to work.

AD
Aggregate Demand. A macroeconomic fiction.

AD
Agriculture Dept. That is, the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

AD
Air Defense.

AD
Alzheimer's Disease. Related entries: Alzheimer's Association (AA), ApoE4, NSAID, PHF.

Old name: Presenile dementia.

AD
American Demographics Magazine. This indie mag publishes some of the most intriguing research anywhere in the Geisteswissenschaften (vide War of the Words). For example, research reported there found that roach spray sells especially well among lower-class southern women because killing roaches represents a symbolic fantasy fulfillment for these consumers: they tend to regard roaches as very similar to their husbands. There was differential analysis to determine whether the larger size of the roaches was correlated, but...

Other research found that many overweight men deliberately buy shirts that are too tight because they want to emphasize their protuberant bellies.

.ad
(Domain name code for) Andorra.

Rec.Travel offers some links. The CIA Factbook has some basic information on Andorra.

A.D., AD
Anno Domini. Lat.: `(in the) year of (the) Lord.' There is a widespread incorrect belief that AD stands for ``After [Jesus's corporeal] Death.'' This would require three dating eras: Before, During, and After. As it happens, dating in more than three eras that include A.D. has been tried (see explanation at B.C. entry). Cf. CE.

One of the clever turns of phrase in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was returning to the archaic form ``Year of our Lord,'' and naming years as ``Year of our [Henry] Ford.'' (I've seen AF used to represent this dating scheme, though I don't think it occurs in the book. Since it seems reasonable to treat Ford as a gens, the Latin nominative would probably be Fordius, yielding Anno Fordii.) The book begins in 632 AF, or 2540 AD, making 1909 of our era -- the year the Model T was introduced -- year one of the Fordian. The book was published in 1932. Perhaps the 632 date was selected to suggest an uneasy proximity in time. There may be something similar in the other classic dystopian story of the mid-twentieth century, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book was finished in nineteen forty-eight. (It was published in 1949, and Orwell himself was finished in 1950.)

Another expression, more common in Britain, was ``Year of our Grace.''

English is unusual, among European languages, in using a foreign-language expression to designate dates in the current era. It seems that most other languages now use a native expression for A.D. (as well as B.C.).

There is a sketchy introduction to Latin declensions in the A.M. entry that explains why, if you tried to find anno and domini in a Latin dictionary, the closest you'd probably come would be "annus, -i, m." and "dominus, -i, m."

If you wanted to be pretentious, you could read off ``A.D. 2000'' as ``Anno Domini 2000.' If you did that, however, you'd want to be consistently grammatical and use the plural for ``A.D. 2000-2004'': ``Annis Domini 2000-2004.'' If you have to look it up, you're probably safer saying ``ay dee 2000....''

The words century and decade were once used like dozen -- to refer to a number (100 and 10, like 12) of anything, but eventually the use became restricted to years. Hence, if we were to decline A.D. properly in ``1st century A.D.,'' it would be Annorum Domini -- `[century] of years of the Lord.' Here annorum is annum in the plural genitive form.

[column] Even in Late Roman times, this abbreviation, and mode of reckoning dates, was not used. The ASGLE serves two kinds of lists of epigraphic latin abbreviations, which include both common and at-all reported (in APh 1888-1993) meanings for AD.

AD
Analog Devices semiconductor device prefix. They used to serve a nice glossary.

AD, A/D
Analog-Digital. ADC is analog-to-digitial converter.

AD
Application Development.

AD
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Druckbehälter. German: `Pressure measurement Working Group.'

A.D.
Assembly District. Most US states have bicameral legislatures, and the lower or larger house is often called the Assembly.

AD
Assistant Director. In movie and TV-show production, this turns out to be a productive suffix. In fact, for clarity AD is often rendered as 1AD (for first assistant director), distinguished from the 2AD, 3AD, and 22AD. (22 = 3 mod show biz -- no wonder they have huge cost overruns! -- see the second second entry for details. Let me be clearer about that: I mean the first and only second second entry. Ummm, just follow the link.) Some productions have a 4AD. That hat may alternatively be labeled AAD (additional AD) or Key PA (key production assistant).

The novel The Second Assistant, by Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare, was published in 2004, and it is subtitled A Tale from the Bottom of the Hollywood Ladder. I decided to acquire the book for insights into the assistant-director pecking order of Hollywood, and to assure an adequately long and discursive AD section of the glossary. It was only after I had invested fifty cents in a previously read exemplar that I realized that the eponymous second assistant -- the heroine Elizabeth Miller -- was not any order of assistant director, but just a gofer at a talent agency. At least it saved me reading the book. (Skimming, however, I notice that at least one ``third assistant'' is mentioned.)

AD
Athletic Director. A good athletic director lets the university president think that he (the president) is more important.

Look -- any doofus can come up with a weak pun involving athletic directors and athletic supporters. I'm just not any doofus, so I'm just not gonna.

ad, a.d.
Auris Dextra. Lat., `right ear.' Not the right one as opposed to the wrong one. The right one as opposed to the left one. That is, the one on the right side of your or anyone else's head. A good operational method for determining which is the right ear is to measure the distance between any given point on (preferably the outer surface of) the right shoulder and each ear. The shorter distance corresponds to the right ear. This method breaks down for owls, giraffes, and other neck contortionists, and for people without shoulders (or ears, though then it hardly matters). If you're having difficulty with these instructions, you probably need to have your head examined by a professional.

This stuff is more amusing to write than to read, I imagine, since if you're not in the mood you don't write it, but you could come upon the entry any time while reading, and the probability that you'll be in the right mood to read it then is zero. (That's not exactly zero. It's just ``more or less'' zero, except that it shouldn't be negative.) An earlier version of this entry advocated an operational definition involving a mirror, but since your own right ear is reflected as the left ear of your image, the wording was problematical.

These puppies usually come in pairs. The other one is a.s.

An alternative possible (well, conceivable anyway) translation of the Latin would be `fortunate ear.'

ADA
Academy of Dispensing Audiologists. Sounds like PEZ for the ear.

``The Academy of Dispensing Audiologists®, founded in 1976, provides valuable resources to the private practitioner in audiology and to other audiology professionals who have responsibility for the concerns of quality patient care and business operation.''

A heavily laden sentence like this is a sort of anagram that has to be unpacked: A ``quality patient'' does indeed provide ``valuable resources'' to the ``business operation,'' but you have to be a ``private practitioner'' to really tap into that cash.

ADA
Air-Defense Artillery.

ADA
American Dental Association.

ADA
American Diabetes Association. The main diabetes entry in this glossary is DM.

ADA
American Dietetic Association. The US ICDA member.

ADA
American Disability Association. Their three-point mission includes this somewhat disabled language: ``promote awareness of disability culture'' and ``enhance ... access to freedom.'' There is also a nice little demonstration of the atmospheric approach to adjectives, in which the adjective du jour is salted over any noun it might fit. Hence, a diverse diversity of diverse things are diversely described as ``diverse'': disabilities, a perspective, and employment opportunities.

ADA
Americans for Democratic Action. Organization formed in January 1947 at the Willard Hotel by Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Reuther, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. This ADA played a pivotal role in the struggle to purge communist sympathizers from the Democratic party, and helped to defeat Henry Wallace's independent candidacy for the presidency in 1948.

ADA
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

ADA
Assistant District Attorney (DA).

ADA
Authorised Depository Agent.

ADA
Australian Dental Association.

Ada
Automatic Data Acquisitions. The putative acronym justification for naming a programming language after the Countess Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who became a supporter and explicator (``apologist,'' in the nonprejudicial sense) of Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) is quite a feminist heroine, so it's not always safe for a person (as opposed to a relatively anonymous glossarist) to point out that there is some serious question as to whether her mathematical competence was all it is now cracked up to be.

The HBAP (Home of the Brave Ada Programmers) WWW Server has a pretty complete set of links. Unfortunately, they're only useful if you want to use Ada or coerce someone else to use it. And here's an Ada Clearinghouse. It boggles the mind. Okay, some minds.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes source code for four Ada programs and identifies ALGOL and Simula as similar languages. If you just came here from the ALGOL entry, you shouldn't find that surprising. Now Simula, that almost sounds like a sexy language. Is there a Stimula? No? Why not?

ADAA
Alberta Dental Assistants Association.

ADAA
American Dental Assistants Association.

ADAA
Anxiety Disorders Association of America. Is this partisan, or do they have an outreach program for Republicans?

ADAAF
American Dental Assistants Association Foundation. ``The Foundation is committed to enhancing the profession of dental assisting [thanks for the correction; I'd have thought it was called assistance], promoting education and research relevant to the industry and complimenting [oh, thank you again, I'm sure!] the efforts of the American Dental Assistants Association. The Foundation was established in 1992 by the Board of Trustees of the American Dental Assistants Association to augment the status of the dental assisting profession and further efforts for education and research related to the pursuit.''

ADAAM
Air-Directed Air-to-Air Missile.

ADA&C
Alberta Dental Association and College.

adagio
Italian for `at ease.' A common notation in sheet music, understood as `in a slow tempo' or `slow and graceful': slower than andante but faster than larghetto.

adagio
Spanish for `adage.'

ADAMS
Agencywide Documents Access and Management System.

ADAP
Airport Development Aid Program. US government program. Read about it in an item from 1976.

[column]

ADAP
Archaeological Data Archive Project.

(Also, Tumay Asena serves a Searchable database of archaeological publications.)

Adaptec
A data communications hw and sw company. See their homepage.

ADB
Asian Development Bank. Established in 1968 as part of a regional-development banking system sponsored by the UN. Headquartered in Manila, serving over fifty members, including the Central Asian states that used to be soviet republics. Japan and the US are the largest contributors of funds to the ADB, each responsible for providing a 16% share of the prescribed $23 billion capital. There's also an ADBI.

Fighting Poverty in Asia and the Pacific!

Between 1968 and 1999, Pakistan received loans worth $1.75 billion, making it the second-largest beneficiary of the bank's operations. About 55% of the loans came from the ADF. As soon as I find out which is the largest beneficiary of the bank, or whether any of the loans have ever been repaid, I'll be sure to insert that information.

ADB
Australian Dictionary of Biography.

ADBF
ADaptive BeamForming.

ADBI
Asian Development Bank Institute. ``Asian Development Bank Institute was established in December 1997 in Tokyo through the joint efforts of the ADB and the Government of Japan.''

ADC
Access Deficit Contribution[s]. According to A paper on universal telecommunications service in Europe (a so-called continent):
``The view in the United Kingdom is that British Telecom incurs additional costs by its licence obligation to provide universal service. OFTEL, its primary regulator, has accepted this and requires some of its competitors to pay Access Deficit Contributions.''

ADC
AIDS Dementia Complex.

ADC
Allyl Diglycol Carbonate. A plastic.

ADC
Amperes DC. Term parallel to AAC and VDC.

ADC
Analog-to-Digital (AD) Converter.

ADC
Automatic Data { Collection | Capture }.

ADCA
Automatic Data Collection Association.

ADCB
Asymmetric Double Cantilever Beam.

ADCC
Antibody-Dependent Cell-mediated Cytotoxicity.

ADCCP
Advanced Data Communication Control Protocol. One of the high-level data link control (HDLC) family of protocols. I've seen the P expanded ``Procedures.''

ADCIS
Association for the Development of Computer-Based Instruction.

adcom
ADministrative COMmittee.

adcom
ADmissions COMmittee. This is the committee that admits responsibility after a disaster. It evidently has no connection with the adcom, which takes credit before the disaster.

Hmmm. That makes sense and all, but it's been suggested to me that the word admissions refers to students, somehow.

ADCP
Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler.

AD&D
Accidental Death & Dismemberment. A kind of insurance coverage.

ADD
Analog-Digital-Digital. Audio CD's may be designated AAD, ADD, or DDD. The successive letters indicate whether analog or digital equipment was used in the respective stages of production: (1) original recording, (2) mixing and editing, (3) mastering (transcription).

ADD
Apostrophe Deficit Disorder. People with ADD aren't willing to add an apostrophe to arent. They can't write can't or don't write don't, but don't some of them write cant! And they won't write won't, but are wont to write wont. The disorder can afflict anyone's writin' and ever'one's readin', whether they're ignorant of the proper use of apostrophes or not. (In the latter case, ADD is a sort of ADD.)

ADD
Apostrophe Disorder Disorder. This disorder is manifested mostly in men's, women's, and children's failure to place the apostrophe after the ess when forming plural nouns' possessive forms.

AD'D'
A shorter way o' writin' ``Apostrophic Dis'rder D'sorder,'' which is short for Apostrophic Disorder Disorder, whate'er that'd be.

ADD
Attention Deficit Disorder. ADHD is used more often now.

ADDA
Attention Deficit Disorder Association.

adder
A kind of snake that goeth-forth-and-multiplieth with logs.

Actual true fact: the word adder used to be nadder, but people hearing `a nadder' thought they heard `an adder,' and ignorance triumphed. (The Old English word was nædre.)

Changing in the opposite way, newt evolved from ewt, though the alternative eft did not get tagged. The same error occurred with awl (the cobbler's tool), which was often called nawl in the 15th through 17th centuries. For a similar example, see the nonce entry. The word druthers is based on a reananlysis of ``I'd rather,'' but here I think the error is intentional. These are generally instances of mistaken analysis of phrases. When the result is the loss of an initial sound, it is evidently an instance of apheresis.

A somewhat similar process is believed to have played a role in the evolution of our word orange. The fruit and the word both entered Europe from the Arabic-speaking world, and the Arabic name is typically transcribed naranj, close to the Persian (narang) and South Asian names (e.g., Sanskrit naranga). The Spanish (naranja), Medieval Greek (nerántzion), and early Italian (narancia) names all preserve or preserved the initial consonant, as some regional Italian varieties still do (e.g., Venetian naranza).

The English word comes from the Old French (contemporary with Middle English) orenge. The initial en is believed to have been lost in French (and later in Italian) at least somewhat as it was lost from nadder; the repeated en in une norenge (please don't hold me to the spelling) being simplified to une orenge (une orange, in Modern French). An added factor is that in medieval Latin manuscripts, the name of the fruit became associated through its color with the word for gold (aurum). (German has, in addition to a French cognate, the word Apfelsinne -- `apple of Zion.')

Going only slightly further afield, Ancient Greek had a common pun based on the preposition apo, which is contracted to ap' before a vowel: apo nou means `from a mind'; ap' onou means `from an ass.' This is especially compelling spoken or when written, as was once the case, without word spacing. I suppose that if in doubt, you could split the difference and translate this as `out of mind.'

ADDS
Antarctic Data Directory System.

ADDS
Army Data Distribution System.

addy
Address. I didn't make this up. I saw it in a mailing list posting.

ADDY
Registered trademark of an award bestowed by the AAF. May the Lord have mercy on your wretched soul.

ADE
Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis. See ADEM.

ADE
Advanced Development Environment.

ADE
Arizona Department of Education.

ADE
Asociación de Dirigentes de Empresa. Argentine `Association of Business Managers.' The name adopted in 1983 by the organization that had been, since its founding in 1942, the ADV (for `sales managers').

ADE
Association of Departments of English (and of writing programs and divisions of humanities).

ADEA
American Dental Education Association. Formerly AADS. (Don't just follow the link! It's a game -- you're supposed to try to guess first.)

ADEA
Age Discrimination in Employment Act (of 1967).

Here's the closing paragraph of an Ole Miss job advertisement of September 2002:

The University of Mississippi is an EEO/AA/Title VI/Title IX/Section 504/ADA/ADEA Employer.

If it weren't for acronyms and law-code numbering, job postings would consist mostly of disclaimer text. See the AA/EOE entry for more on want-ad etiquette.

ADEBA
Asociación de Bancos Argentinos. `Association of Argenitine Banks.' If La trama política de la apertura económica en la Argentina (1987-1996), by Aníbal Viguera (Ediciones al Margen, 2000), had an index, then I might be able to tell you ... Ah, here we go (pp. 45-6): ADEBA was a grouping of Argentine banks; while ABRA (you shouldn't ask) represented foreign banking with a presence in Argentina, and included Argentine subsidiaries of some of Argentina's largest foreign creditors. In the 1990's, reform of the financial sector led to the near disappearance of privately owned Argentine banks, and in 1998 ABRA and ADEBA merged to become ABA.

[dive flag]

ADEC
Asia Dive Exhibition and Conference. Why would they want to exhibit or conference at a dive? Don't they have any nice places?

ADEC
Association of Death Education and Counseling. ``Death Education''? Just do what comes naturally -- it's as easy as falling down. It seems a waste to train for something you'll only do once or twice.

ADEM
Acute Disseminated EncephaloMyelitis. Acute inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. A risk of many vaccines. It used to be especially common with antirabies vaccine, when its manufacture used animal spinal-cord cultures.

Aden
An important port of Yemen, located on -- get this: the Gulf of Aden. Alright, I admit I don't care either. I'm only putting this entry here to lay the groundwork for possible future humor opportunities. (Wordplay, linguistic subversion, whatever.) So we're prepositioning. It's a sleeper. It's the Manchurian Entry. You are getting verrry sleeeeepy. When I say ``control gee,'' you will wake up and have no recollection that this glossary entry ever took place.

ADF
American Dance Festival. Terry Teachout had a tutorial eulogy for American Dance in the July 1996 issue of Commentary.

ADF
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dermatologische Forschung. German `Dermatology Research Working Group.'

ADF
Asian Development Fund. The arm of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that extends ``soft loans'' -- loans at zero interest.

She worryin' about the back rent -- Hah!
She be lucky to get the front rent!

George Thorogood, ``Housewoman Blues''

The nice thing about soft loans is that when you finally admit that they're nonperforming, you only have to write off the principal, and not any expected interest. Always remember: the key to long-term sustainable virtue (particularly charity) is doing it on someone else's nickel.

ADF
Automatic Direction Finder. A/k/a radio direction finder. [Avionics.]

ADF
Automatic Document Feeder. When the ADF light goes on on the photocopier, that's what's malfunctioning.

ADF&G
Alaska Department of Fish and Game. In 1998, their Hunter Education and Hunter Services statewide programs were joined to form the Hunter Information and Training program: HIT. It's gratifying to see that even governmental organizations are finally coming around to see the importance of felicitous acronyms. Trailer: A future glossary entry will celebrate a similar achievement by the postal service of a nearby country.

ad finem, ad fin.
Latin: `at [or near] the end,' in full and common abbreviated forms.

ADFL
Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaïre.

ADFL
Association of Departments of Foreign Languages.

ADFRF
(NASA's) Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility. Became DFRF, now DFRC.

ADH
Alcohol DeHydrogenase. One of three enzymes important in the formation of volatile compounds in ripening fruit (see the LOX entry).

ADH
AntiDiuretic Hormone.

ADH
Arkansas Department of Health.

ADHA
American Dental Hygienists' Association.

ADHD
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Same as ADD.

adhesion
Oliver Herford and an actor protected by anonymity are supposed to have had the following exchange once:
	     Anon.: I'm a smash hit.  Why, yesterday during the last act,
		    I had everyone glued to their seats!
	   Herford: Wonderful!  Wonderful!  Clever of you to think of it!

See also prosthetics and URW.

Near the end, if not exactly in the last act, of Rocky Horror Picture Show, Frank-N-Furter immobilizes his prey with a sonic transducer. When Brad Majors says ``It's as if we're glued to the spot!'' the standard audience response is ``My socks! I can't move my socks!''

ADHF
American Digestive Health Foundation. A conspiracy of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) working together to ``advance digestive health through financial support of research and education in the causes, prevention, treatment, and cure of digestive diseases. To advance its digestive agenda [sic], the foundation has established four independent ...'' Look, you know that all they really want to do is ``advance'' your health by making you feel guilty about eating food that tastes good instead of diced bean sprouts in tepid spring water.

Add homonym
Fishy as a tack.

ADI
Acceptable Daily Intake. The plural (ADIs or ADI's, depending on your punctuation convention) also occurs.

ADI
After-Develop Inspection.

ADI
Alternating-Direction Implicit. A class of numerical integration schemes that mix implicit evolution along one dimension with explicit along the remainder, cycling the direction that is integrated implicitly. The compromise has the stability that one cannot get from purely explicit evolution, but is often much more tractable than fully implicit schemes.

ADI
Alzheimer's Disease International.

ADI
Analog Devices, Inc.

ADI
Association of Dental Implantology UK.

ADI
Attitude Direction Indicator.

A diamond is forever.
An advertising slogan created for the DeBeers cartel by the Ayer advertising agency. Of course, at room temperature diamond is an unstable allomorph of carbon. Eventually, and a lot sooner if you cook it, it turns to graphite. As advertising slogans go, however, this one is still pretty accurate.

ADIO
Analog/Digital Input/Output.

adiós
Good-bye in Spanish. `To God' (a Dios) contracted to one word. I suppose it's short for some earlier longer phrase that expressed a more complete thought, but offhand I don't know particularly. French has the similar adieu, which was borrowed into German and eventually corrupted into tschüss.

ADIRU
Air Data and Inertial Reference Unit.

A.D.I. (Sc.), A.D.I. (Science)
Assistant Director of Intelligence (SCience). This abbreviation occurs in Wizard War; it was the position held by the book's author within the British Air Ministry during WWII. Post-war, the position was elevated to D. of I. (R).

[column]

Adj, adj.
Adjective. Ancient Greek grammarians did not regard this as a separate part of speech. They grouped what we now call nouns and adjectives together in one part of speech. Now you're beginning to understand why the old philosophers are often translated as having written stuff like ``the wet'' or ``the warm.''

Greek is inflected, so it is not surprising that word order is looser than in English. Things could get sticky, however. Greek has verbal expressions like to hygiainein, which literally translated would be something like `the to be healthy.' The definite article to is specifically the neuter singular. A reasonable translation of the phrase is `a state of good health' -- note that the distinction between definite and indefinite (indicated by the absence of a definite article) is not as sharp in Greek (or in most languages that have the distinction) as it is in English.

Some languages don't have words that fit our lexical category of adjectives. These languages typically use verbs to express ideas we use adjectives for -- something like ``the man goods'' for ``the man is good.'' The German verb schweigen is like that; it means `to be silent' the same way to roar in English means ``to be roaring.''

ADJ
(Brazilian) Associação de Diabetes Juvenil.

ADJ
Australian Dental Journal.

adjectives ending in -ly
This list is only as complete as I was able to make it before I began to feel like doing something more interesting, like HTML mark-up:
  1. aldermanly
  2. bimonthly
  3. birdly
  4. biweekly
  5. bodily
  6. brambly
  7. brotherly
  8. bubbly
  9. burly
  10. canoodly
  11. chilly
  12. clerkly
  13. comely
  14. costly
  15. courtly
  16. cowardly
  17. crawly
  18. crinkly
  19. crumbly
  20. cuddly
  21. curly
  22. curmudgeonly
  23. daily
  24. dangly
  25. dastardly
  26. daughterly
  27. deadly
  28. disorderly
  29. doctorly
  30. early
  31. easterly
  32. eely
  33. elderly
  34. fatherly
  35. fortnightly
  36. friendly
  37. frilly
  38. gainly
  39. gangly
  40. gentlemanly
  41. ghastly
  42. ghostly
  43. giggly
  44. gingerly
  45. girly
  46. gnarly
  47. godly
  48. goggly
  49. goodly
  50. googly
  51. grandfatherly
  52. grandmotherly
  53. gravelly
  54. grisly
  55. growly
  56. grumbly
  57. heavenly
  58. hilly
  59. holy
  60. homely
  61. hourly
  62. husbandly
  63. jangly
  64. jingly
  65. jolly
  66. jumbly
  67. kindly
  68. kingly
  69. knightly
  70. knobbly
  71. knubbly
  72. lawyerly
  73. leisurely
  74. likely
  75. lively
  76. lonely
  77. lordly
  78. lovely
  79. lowly
  80. maidenly
  81. manly
  82. marbly
  83. masterly
  84. matronly
  85. mealy
  86. measly
  87. melancholy
  88. miserly
  89. monthly
  90. motherly
  91. mumbly
  92. needly
  93. neighborly
  94. nightly
  95. northeasterly
  96. northerly
  97. northwesterly
  98. nubbly
  99. oily
  100. only
  101. orderly
  102. pearly
  103. pebbly
  104. portly
  105. prickly
  106. princely
  107. puddly
  108. pugly (this one is slang [< pug ugly], so it's okay if you didn't know it)
  109. purply
  110. quarterly
  111. queenly
  112. ripply
  113. rumbly
  114. scaly
  115. scholarly
  116. scraggly
  117. scrawly
  118. shambly
  119. shapely
  120. sickly
  121. silly
  122. sisterly
  123. slatternly
  124. slovenly
  125. sly
  126. smelly
  127. snarly
  128. sniffly
  129. snively, snivelly
  130. snuggly
  131. southeasterly
  132. southerly
  133. southwesterly
  134. sparkly
  135. spiderly
  136. spindly
  137. spinsterly
  138. sprawly
  139. spritely
  140. squally
  141. squealy
  142. squiggly
  143. squirrelly
  144. stately
  145. statesmanly
  146. straggly
  147. studly
  148. surly
  149. swirly
  150. teacherly
  151. timely
  152. tingly
  153. tinkly
  154. tinselly
  155. touchy-feely
  156. unearthly
  157. unfriendly
  158. ungainly
  159. ungodly
  160. unholy
  161. unlikely
  162. unmanly
  163. unwomanly
  164. unruly
  165. unscholarly
  166. unsightly
  167. untimely
  168. unworldly
  169. waddly
  170. weaselly
  171. weekly
  172. westerly
  173. whirly
  174. wiggly
  175. wifely
  176. wily
  177. wobbly
  178. womanly
  179. woolly
  180. worldly
  181. wriggly
  182. wrinkly
  183. yearly
  184. yeomanly
  185. yonderly

Some of these, particularly those having to do with time periods, also function as adverbs. I've omitted nouns that function attributively (i.e., adjectivally), as in assembly hall, fly paper, jelly doughnut, lily pad, etc. I've also omitted many of the possibly nonce forms that arise from the still-productive un- prefix (unmaidenly, unstately, etc.). Some -ly adjectives arise from the application of -y to words ending in l or le, and this is also still productive. The latest such production in the above list is probably canoodly. The -ly ending itself is still producing adjectives. I think birdly is a jocular recent instance.

ADL
Activities of Daily Living. As opposed to the activities of hourly or fortnightly living. YMMV.

The quotidian activities normally referred to as ADL's include eating, dressing and bathing. I've had days when I omitted to do one of these. More advanced stuff comes under the IADL heading.

ADL
Advanced Distributed Learning.

ADL
Advances in Digital Libraries. A conference.

ADL
Alexandria Digital Library.

ADL
A netlist format.

ADL
Anti-Defamation League. Of the Bnai-Brith.

adlect
To adlect (to or into a rank or role) is (or rather was) to use the power of adlection to so elevate a person or persons.

adlection
Appointment to a governing body (especially the Roman Senate) or elevation to a position of higher status, by decision of the emperor as opposed to election. The verb adlect was backformed from this, evidently on the pattern of elect, election. Adlection was introduced by the first Roman emperor, Julius Caesar, and the term seems to be used only in reference to the pre-medieval Roman empires.

ADLIB
Advanced Database Linkages In Biotechnology. Apparently defunct when I looked for it in January 2005.

[column]

ad lib.
Latin ad libitum, roughly `as one wishes.' The word libitum is constructed from the past participle of libere, `to please.' Ad libitum is used in musical notation to indicate that a movement may be omitted or altered by the performer. Of course, the performer may omit or alter whatever he likes, or unintentionally, but this is the way the thing is stated. What it really means is that the composer is inviting the performer to improvise. The usual definition entails the polite and not unreasonable assumption that the performer normally attempts to follow the composer's specific intentions closely.

ad lib
Adverb meaning `extemporaneously, in an improvised way.' A somewhat extended use of the Latin ad lib. Like native prepositional phrases, this adverbial is placed after the verb. (``He spoke ad lib.'')

ad-lib
Improvisational or extemporaneous. An adjective applied mostly to speech productions in social intercourse. I said ``social,'' you pervert!

ad lib
Improvisation. A noun referring mostly to speech productions in social intercourse. I hope that explanation was clear; I just made it up off the top of my head.

A word game called Mad Libs®, which produced absurd phrases, was popular in ancient times (created by Leonard Stern and Roger Price in 1953, and first available commercially around 1958). This probably contributed to the popularity of the term ``ad lib'' among the unwashed masses and to its use as a noun, and to the general decline of civilization.

ad-lib
Verb meaning `improvise,' particularly in a speech or other performance. Derived from ad lib. Sometimes written without the hyphen.

[column]

ad loc.
Latin, ad locum. `at the location ....'

You're probably asking: ``like, where else, dude?''

ADLS
Adaptive Device Locator System. It's kind of fun even if you're not looking for anything, like window[s] shopping.

I pronounce ADLS as ``addles.'' You should too.

ADM
Academy of Dental Materials. ``The Academy of Dental Materials was founded in 1941 as a consortium of dental professionals who were interested in the development and application of new materials to dental care. The objectives of the Academy are: 1) to provide a forum for the exchange of information on all aspects of dental materials; 2) to enhance communication between industry, researchers and practicing dentists; 3) to encourage dental materials research and its applications; and 4) to promote dental materials through its activities.''

ADM
Adaptive-Delta Modulation.

ADM
Add/Drop Multiplexer. See also ADM 3X.

ADM, Adm.
ADMinistrat{ or | ion }. Cf. sysadmin.

Adm., ADM
ADMiral[ty]. See VADM for the etymology of admiral.

ADM
Archer Daniels Midland. ``Supermarket to the world'' in the opaque description given in the sponsor segments of public TV. Apparently the antitrust division of the Treasury Department decided it meant ``lecithin price-fixer for the world.''

An article entitled ``3 Giant Feed Companies Agree to Settle Price-Fixing Charges'' in the Wednesday, August 28, 1996 New York Times (C1 -- first page of the business section) describes Archer Daniels as a ``giant grain concern that has long been one of the nation's most influential and politically powerful corporations.'' The article reported that Kyowa Hakko Kogyo of Japan and Sewon America, Inc. would plead guilty, and Ajinmoto Company of Japan no contest in a plea bargain on criminal charges concerning an alleged conspiracy to fix prices in the 600 megabuck market for the food additive lysine, which they produce. In the agreement, one executive from each of the companies pleads guilty to a criminal charge and provides testimony and documents for an investigation whose apparent central target was ADM. I haven't been keeping up with this story, but I was always curious about this sponsor of public broadcasting programs.

In September 1998, three former executives of ADM Co. were convicted of conspiring with Japanese and Korean competitors to fix prices and allocate production for lysine. On July 9, 1999, they were sentenced to prison terms. It was a really weird situation (and I really mean that): the government informant Mark Whitacre had been embezzling millions from the company after alerting Federal investigators to the price-fixing scheme in 1992. He got a nine-year term for that, which he was already serving on July 9. Prosecutors had argued that the two others sentenced, Michael Andreas (son of former chairman Dwayne Andreas) and Terrance Wilson, had masterminded the scheme. Judge Blanche Manning ruled that they had not, but that Whitacre (their subordinate) was a manager of the conspiracy. The lawyers for Andreas and Wilson objected to this unexplained ruling, and the lawyer for Whitacre did not -- all strange since managing the conspiracy increased culpability and, under Federal sentencing guidelines, required Whitacre's sentence to be increased. I'm sure there's something important here that I'm not understanding, and I don't think it's résumé padding.

ADM
Arnowitt-Deser-Misner. The ADM split is a procedure for recoordinatizing a patch of spacetime into a decomposed canonical form expressed in terms of the three-space metric and a lapse function and shift function (a three-vector) that represent how different time slices fit together.

ADM
Assyrian Democratic Movement. A movement of Assyrians in Iraq.

Last year I got into a conversation with the limo driver on the way to Newark Airport, and I took a guess from accent and appearance that he was Serbian. He said that I was close -- he was from Turkey. So he was Turkish? No, Aramean. My jaw fell off. I knew who the Arameans were, er, are! His turn to drop jaw.

ADM
Average Daily Membership.

ADMA
Aviation Distributors and Manufacturers Association.

admass
MASS-media ADvertising. An acronym, with plural admasses. One hardly needs to be reminded that Madison Avenue is a philistine enemy of the English language. All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept this word, but TWL98 draws the line at the plural.

ADME
Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion.

admin
Short for sysadmin. Cf. Adm.

Admission is free and open to the general public.
It's educational, so no one is interested. If they said that admission is selective and you have to stay for four years, they could charge $100,000.

ADMSEP
Association of the Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry. Mark Reed of Dartmouth Medical College is a member. Mark Reed is a member of the Electrical Engineering Faculty at Yale. This would be quite interesting if they were the same person. For related ruminations, see the Johnson entry.

ADM 3X
Add/Drop Multiplexer (AMD) for DS3.

ADN
Acción Democrática Nacionalista. Spanish: `Nationalist Democratic Action,' a Bolivian political party.

ADN
Ácido desoxirribonucleico. Spanish for `DNA,' q.v. (The doubling of the r of ribo- after the prefix is conventional for Spanish: the sound of initial r is much closer to that of -rr- than to that of -r- within a word -- cf. ARN.)

ADN, adn
Any Day Now. Chatese, texting abbreviation.

Pigs will fly. (I mean fly economy class.)

ADN
Associate's Degree in Nursing.

aDNA
Ancient DNA.

ADO
(Microsoft) ActiveX Data Object[s].

ADO
Army Digitization Office.

ADO
Assyrian Democratic Organization.

One time when I took a limousine from my mother's house to Newark Airport (EWR), the driver asked me to guess where he was from. Looking at his face and not the displayed cabbie ID, I guessed he was from Serbia or thereabouts, and he said I wasn't too far off. He was from Istanbul, and he was an Aramean. He was astounded that I knew what an Aramean was, and I was astounded that there were still people who call themselves Arameans. It was like going fishing and reeling in a coelacanth. The cab companies that serve the New York-area airports really go out of their way to give you a cosmopolitan experience.

Oh -- I see I already told this story at the ADM entry. Anyway, he treated the terms ``Assyrian'' and ``Aramaic'' as equivalent. There's a historical reason for this.

ADO, Ado
Common abbreviation for Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing.

adobe
Sun-dried (i.e., not oven-fired) clay (Nontechnical term: mud) bricks (typically with straw inside); also the material for those bricks, and buildings made from such bricks. Appropriate only in dry climates, since the mud dissolves away in the rain; still, pre-Columbian pyramids in Mexico still stand, while limestone pyramids in Egypt are dissolving in the acidic rain. Adobe bricks tend to be much larger than standard (concrete) bricks.

Adobe Flash plugin has crashed
Adobe Flash plugin is dysfunctioning normally.

Adobe Systems Inc.
Adobe made PostScript and makes a variety of related software products. More than with most software, there is some confusion about what PostScript and Adobe fonts are.

The thing to understand about fonts generally is that text and graphics are treated very differently (by printers and by computers and computer screens). While in principle, there is no difference between the physical method used to produce the image of an alphabetic character or a graphic of the same size, in terms of raw memory there is a great difference: the single black-and-white graphic (no grayscale) takes as much memory as the single character, but a page of text contains many repetitions of the same characters, while every character-size region of graphic requires its own memory-hogging description.

Adobe fonts are different kinds of character descriptions. Adobe fonts (type 1) are described not by bit maps but by parameters for scalable curves that define the boundaries of a character.

ADOE
Associated Dealers Of Europe. A Dutch-based B2B group. They have tabs for Audi, Volkswagen, Land Rover, Peugeot (the French connection), and Seat. ADOE's website says it ``is specialised in sourcing new cars within the EU for delivery in the United Kingdom.'' Audi and Seat are VW subsidiaries, and Peugeot is the second-largest European automaker after VW. I don't get what Land Rover is doing there, exactly. ADOE demonstrates a charming versatility in sourcing UK-manufactured cars for delivery in the UK. Ford-owned Land Rover was put up for sale in June 2007. (It's still up for sale as of this writing, September 2007.)

ADON
Assistant DON. Not a mafia usage. Look, just follow the link, nobody will get hurt.

ADONIS
Article Delivery Over Network Information Systems. The way journal subscription prices have been rising over the past few years (say 10-15% per year, with a fraction of that figured to compensate for the libraries that cancel), it seems 1996 will see rapid growth in electronic journal access. The main journals in which I have published are all moving to put their articles on line.

Gee, now it's the year 2000 and I'm still reading hard-copy.

ADP
{Administrative | Advanced | Automat{ic|ed}} Data Processing.

ADP
Adenosine DiPhosphate. Vide ATP.

ADP
Aéroports de Paris. Operates Roissy-CDG and Aéroport d'Orly (ORY).

ADP
Ammonium Dihydrogen Phosphate (NH4H2PO4). Along with KDP a popular crystal for second-harmonic generation in nonlinear optics. Cleveland Crystals offers a tutorial. Cf. AD*P.

AD*P
Deuterated ADP (q.v.): Ammonium dideuterium phosphate. They even use deuterated ammonia. (ND4D2PO4). Most properties, as one would expect, are similar to the majority-isotope ADP. However, the piezoelectric coefficients can be almost a factor of as much as five larger for fully-deuterated AD*P.

ADPCM
Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation. ITU-TS standard for voice digitization and compression, for transmission on up-to-32Kbps channel. Differs from mere DPCM in decreasing the sampling rate when samples vary more slowly.

Dallas Semiconductor lists some here.

ADPA
Alcohol & Drug Program Administration of the ``Los Angeles County Department of Health Services - Public Health,'' which you're welcome to parse yourself.

ADPE
Automated Data Processing Equipment.

ADPS
Automated Data Processing System.

ADPSR
Architects, Designers & Planners for Social Responsibility.

ad q.s.
See q.s. (That's not what it means; it's what you should do.)

ADR
Accident Data Recorder.

ADR
Achievable Data Rate.

ADR, A.D.R.
Additional Dialogue Replacement. It is really additional, because it's usually a ``replacement'' for something that wasn't there in the first place. It's not usually what you would call dialogue either. It's also expanded as ``Automatic Dialogue Replacement,'' although it doesn't seem especially automatic. Many initialisms conceal inappropriate expansions, but this one is outstanding. Well, it stands out, anyway. What the initialism really needs is additional work, replacing the work that was not initially done in creating it, and which isn't just dialogue.

Okay, a little more directly, with the stern warning that the explanation following is written by someone outside the industry (that would be me) who is just trying his best, or maybe his second best. The movie industry has a number of terms for various related kinds of work that it finds important to distinguish. (The pay scales are different; that'd make it important to you too.) Some of this technical terminology refers to ``dialogue,'' which in the industry can mean any utterance of the human voice, even if it is a monologue or a scream. (Sometimes the oddity of including howls in ``dialogue'' seems a bit much, and they refer to ``dialogue and vocalizations.'')

If the dialogue of an individual artist visible on screen is replaced by the same artist, that is called dubbing or post-synchronization. If the visible actor's voice is replaced with someone else's voice, that is revoicing. (Yes, this is also inconsistent with ordinary usage for foreign-language dubbing.) Dialogue can also be a voice-over or commentary out of vision, which may or may not be recorded by a voice actor who appears and is represented as being the speaker. The movie ``What's Up Tiger Lily?'' offers an example of the latter. The studio took it out of Woody Allen's hands when it was 60 minutes long and lengthened it by adding 19 minutes of perfectly irrelevant footage of the ``Lovin' Spoonful'' and added commentary by someone mimicking Woody Allen's voice. (Don't tell me that for that kind of movie, irrelevance is a plus; I said it was ``perfectly'' irrelevant.) In the closing credits, Allen's commentary is also revoiced. Or perhaps the precise lingo would have the movie just recommented there.

Dubbing, post-sync, and revoicing are closely related to the performance of an individual character seen on screen. Voice-overs and commentary are a step removed from this: they are the performances of individual characters, however sketchily identified, who are not on screen. As explained in this pay-scales agreement (see Appendix FI, on p. 48), A.D.R. (Additional Dialogue Replacement or Automatic Dialogue Replacement) is not predominantly concerned with performance in character but has to do with the creation of atmosphere and general characteristic sounds and dialogue to fit with the action, often over crowd scenes.

ADR
Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator.

ADR
Aggregate Data Rate.

ADR
Alternative Dispute Resolution. Mediation or arbitration (vide AAA).

ADR
Alzheimer's Disease Research. The name, in the linked instance, of a program of AHAF.

ADR
American Depository Receipt. A common way for foreign firms to list on the NYSE. A number of shares are bought and transferred to a US-based trust, and then receipts representing the shares are issued and traded in the US. By breaking up the group of shares outstanding into pools traded separately, one avoids the use of a foreign transfer agent.

Besides avoiding those hassles, it has an additional positive advantage. An ADR may represent more than one share of the original stock, and this allows the normal price range of a board lot to be conformed to different exchanges: For example, the usual prices for shares traded on the FTSE are about a tenth of the prices seen on the NYSE, and would run afoul of ``penny stock'' rules on shorting and margin in many brokerages. The ADR's for British Telecom and British Steel each represent 10 real shares.

It seems like things might get trickier if one wanted to go in the other direction: trade in receipts for US shares at prices conventional for FTSE.

ADR
ASTRA Digital Radio. ASTRA is a European satellite system. The system was proposed by the Société Européenne des Satellites (SES).

ADR
Automated Dialogue Replacement. I've seen this described as a ``process by which dialogue recorded on-set is replaced after the event in more controlled studio conditions'' but the process is unclear to me. See this other ostensibly equivalent ``ADR'' for other stuff I don't understand.

ADRC
Agence des douanes et du revenu du Canada. English name: Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (CCRA). It used to be called Revenu Canada (RevCan), but they changed the name in 1999. If you were waiting for this glossary to alert you to the change, you may have some late penalties to pay.

In fact, the ADRC (or the CCRA, if you prefer) no longer exists as such. Wait, wait, don't cheer yet. The taxman just discarded some of his less lucrative distractions and changed his name. Now you pay taxes to the ARC (CRA in English).

adret
A French word for the side of a mountain (more) exposed to the sun. See ubac.

ADR gauge
Analog-to-Digital Recording (tide) gauge.

ADROIT
Analysis of Dispersal Risk Occurring In Transportation. Simulation code developed at Sandia National Laboratories for the Defense Programs Transportation Risk Analysis study. Used to evaluate the accident risk posed by the expected transfers of weapons, plutonium, weapons components, and tritium reservoirs. This code can accept ERAD data sets to model explosively driven events.

ADS
Advanced Digital System.

ADS
Advanced Distributed Simulation. Cf. DIS.

ADS
Alaska Dental Society. I-I-I c-c-can't-t st-top ch-chat-ter-ering!

ADS
Alternative Depreciation System.

ADS
American Dialect Society. Their homepage claims: ``Founded more than a century ago, the American Dialect Society still is the one scholarly association dedicated to the study of the English language in North America - and of other languages or dialects of other languages influencing it or influenced by it.''

Founded 1889, a constituent society of the ACLS since 1962. ACLS has an overview.

AdS
Anti-de Sitter (space).

ADS
Archaeology Data Service. It ``supports research, learning and teaching with high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology. The ADS promotes good practice in the use of digital data in archaeology, it provides technical advice to the research community, and supports the deployment of digital technologies.''

ADS, ads
Astrophysics Data System. Funded by NASA.

ADS
Automated Data System.

ADS
Autonomous Decentralized System[s]. There's an international symposium -- ISADS.

ADSAM
Air-Directed Surface-to-Air Missile.

ADSC
Association of Drilled Shaft Contractors, originally founded in 1972. It now styles itself ``ADSC: The International Association of Foundation Drilling.'' (See the sealed acronym entry for similar name evolutions.)

ADSC's flagship periodical is called Foundation Drilling. My comments on it are based on the issue of June/July 2007. It's a saddle-stitched heavy-paper glossy of approximately 78 inside pages, four-color throughout, with good non-smearing ink and probably quite healthy advertising revenue. One of the regular features is called ``Slide Rules.'' It sure does.

[Phone icon]

ADS-L
American Dialect Society (email discussion) List. A mailing list ``for members of the American Dialect Society [ADS] and interested others. Our primary topic of conversation is dialects of North American English, but we do wander off topic frequently.''

Archives searchable back to 1992.

ADSL
Asymmetric Digital Subscriber { Line | Loop }. A telecommunications protocol for standard (plain ol' copper) phone lines with a nominal data rate of 6.144 Mbps, originally intended for MPEG compressed video. Here're a couple of pages of semitechnical description. Here's an explanation that's a bit more useful if you know Japanese. It also helps if you visited it before it went 404. Whatis?com offers a little information.

``Asymmetric'' refers to the fact that the downstream half of the duplex (from central office (CO) to home) accommodates 6.144 Mbps, while upstream is only 640Kbps. The multiplexing is by OFDM.

ADSP
AppleTalk Data Stream Protocol.

ADSU
ATM Data Service Unit (DSU).

ADT
Abstract Data Type.

ADT
ADulT. Airline fare abbreviation. Child is CHD.

ADTDL
Army Doctrine and Training Digital Library. They offer an acronym search.

ADTS
Automated Digital Terminal Systems.

ADTV
Advanced Definition TeleVision. Name preferred by FCC over HDTV.

ADU
Accessory Dwelling Unit. A separate housing arrangement within a single-family home. An ADU, according to Medicare is ``a complete living unit and includes a private kitchen and bath.''

adult beverage
I just heard this term in a radio advertisement. It can't just mean ``alcoholic beverage,'' because that would make it a pointless euphemism. It must have a more specific meaning. It's a funny term. Cocktails usually have funny names. ``Cocktail'' itself is a funny name. An ``Adult Beverage'' is probably a bourbon and Geritol on ice.

adult education
An attractive single woman of my acquaintance is looking for a man. (It has been made clear to me with really quite unnecessary emphasis that I am not that man.) She's in a hurry, so she signed up for some evening classes (ooh, I'm takin' it on the chin). You know: get out, get into circulation, meet people ... of the appropriate gender. Appropriate people of the appropriate gender. (Latest update: she didn't find the man. She went to plan B: IVF-assisted single motherhood. Gary was as weirded out as I was, and he also thought I was takin' it on the chin. I haven't even told him that she's doing another round, for gender balance or whatever. See the Oxbridge entry for whole population segments takin' it on the chin.)

In one course, she visited eight different jazz clubs in as many weeks. Enrollment: eight women, zero men. Maybe this is understandable. The other course (there's precedent for calling this sort of thing a ``course'') is like the jazz club thing but with pubs. Night classes focusing on pubs, homework measured in mugs and pitchers -- you'd expect some men might sign up for this sort of education, and you'd be right. Enrollment: sixteen women, two men. One of the men actually showed up. For the second, uh, class meeting, fewer women showed up. I guess they just didn't have a sincere interest in ale.

Single women go in for adult ``education''; single men go in for ``adult'' books. (Book)Mark my words, it'll come to this: adult education courses about adult books. You'll know why. Lesson I: how to tell a romance novel from an adult book by its cover. (Romance novels are swash-font positive.)

The term ``student body'' will never have the same meaning for me again. (Not that it ever did, though.)

Ladies, here's a good kind of course to take to meet guys: driver safety courses. Check out the PTD entry for details. The sex distribution is a bit more representative of the driving population, but getting signed up for this is trickier than for beer or jazz-club education. Still, it may not be necessary for you to get caught speeding; maybe you could arrange to impede the flow of traffic or something. Check out the laws in your state.

Robert says a course in Internet Technology that he took at Stanford had a fairly even gender distribution, but most students were married. A Japanese language course he took in the mid-nineties had a reasonable distribution of singles also. Alright, more good ideas for the lonely cardiac muscle: one of my guard pals at the library, by way of conclusion to his regular rant about incompetent library management, says he's been married to his wife for about a century (I didn't catch the precise figure), ``God bless her. BUT, of the 200 employees in the library, 180 are women, and THAT's the problem.'' I told him that this wasn't going to change anytime soon. Light bulb! One for the guys! There's even a cute one working at circ, and they have a regular turn-over of work-study girls.

Getting back to that liquid culture course, you know, I'm wondering just what kind of ``man'' would let someone else tell him what brew he should drink. Hmm. Well, the first pub I entered the first time I visited England, I said to the barmaid ``I don't know the beers here. What do I want to drink?'' I figured she would recommend whatever people with my accent drink. She chose a Foster's. I liked it, and I'm not even from Oz. (There should be more about the Aussie accent at the Polish entry. More accurate stuff, anyway. But there isn't.)

Update 2002: there's another text-based mate-search tool: personals! In my continuing [throat-clearing noises] sociological research, I have become aware of a paperback tome entitled Playing the Personals, based on research by one Claudia Beakman, assisted by experienced author Karla Dougherty. On page 9 they state

Personals Commandment #1:

Thou Shalt Not Be Embarrassed
As they explain, ``it's time for personals to shake off the stigma and come out of the closet.''

Well, heartened by this, let me stride right out of the closet into the foyer and finally get this off my chest: I admit it, I uh, I use the personals. (You probably haven't recognized me from my ads, since there I'm taller, leaner, younger, wealthier, more cultured and yet more down-to-earth, and all-around more impressive, but I'm still that same old modest, honest Al that you've never met.) Hmm. It says here on the back cover that ``Claudia Beakman is a pseudonym for a vice president of a major television company.'' Oh. Thanks, girlfriend.

Anyway, the relevance to this entry (``adult education,'' remember?) comes on page 7. (And maybe further on; I haven't, like, made a thorough review of the text, you know?) The dilemma is posed, and brand-X dating strategies are fairly reviewed and trashed:

Over the years, you've ... spent a fortune taking courses you had no interest in pursuing. You've taken scuba lessons even though you don't know how to swim. You've spent hours in art museums and libraries, and all this culture has been grand, but your feet ache and you're getting tired and you're still alone.

It turns out that the answer is as simple as reading your newspaper, once you've got this volume of expert advice, which you can purchase at finer book discount warehouses anywhere. I got mine off a dollar table at Bargain Books. They have a location near you if you live between Ann Arbor and Chicago. (More about this chain at the OOP entry.)

I probably should have mentioned earlier that there's an emerging, or sharpening, semantic distinction between ``adult education'' and ``continuing education,'' at least in the US. ``Adult education'' is tending to mean remedial education: high-school education for adults who dropped out (possibly before they were adults). Many attend adult education classes in order to earn a GED. Increasingly in contrast, ``continuing education'' refers to college courses taken by adults not matriculated for a degree. (Often they're preparing for a certification, like MOUS.)

FLASH! Here's something that might be useful to single men: According to Suzanne Freeman, in her article ``End of Discussion: Why I'm leaving my book group'' for the Winter 2005 issue of The American Scholar ($6.95 / $9.00 Canada):

In many ways, it's difficult to avoid being a member of a book club these days, especially if you're female. Almost all of my women friends belong to one, and some to more than one. Nobody can say for sure just how many of these groups there are across the country, but the estimated number has quadrupled, from 250,000 ten years ago, to a million or more today. If, by some miracle, you have managed to miss this bandwagon, there are now all kinds of self-styled experts who are ready to help you hop aboard.

Okay, here's another one for the ladies: gyms. No, not those silly places that are mostly about jazzercise or spinning or yoga or Pilates or whatever is popular these days. I don't mean a place with a swimming pool, and you know I don't mean ExerciseUSA, which has different days for men and women. I mean weight rooms. Places with lots of black padding, free weights, and machinery that looks like it sprang from the frothy imagination of an elementary-mechanics textbook author. Oh yeah, maybe some aerobics machines to warm up. The clientele at the blue-collarish workout club I used to go to is great for the girl who likes a man in or out of uniform: lots of cops and national guard reservists. It averaged no less than 85% male any time of day. Of course, that was the problem for me. I mean--the time of day, of course! Now I'm a member of an Anytime Fitness club, with 24-hour card access. (Even there, police officers form a disproportionate fraction of the membership.)

adv.
ADVerb. <-- That's a capitalized period, see? I capitalize the parts of a term that appear in its abbreviation, usually. (I usually use boldface instead of capitalization with foreign terms. The notion behind this is that readers of this glossary have a good enough idea of how capitalization works in English that using capitalization to indicate abbreviation source letters causes no confusion. Boldface is used with foreign terms because capitalization conventions in other languages are different and unknown to many users of this resource. Overall, this is a stupid approach. I should never have started using extra capitalization to indicate the obvious, but after a few thousand entries it was a case of stare decisis. I envy all the web-based lexicographers who just use capital letters, but this resource is just a bit too discursive for the shouting approach. If I live long enough, there will probably be a fix of some sort, but there are other priorities right now. I should probably explain this situation in some sort of help file, but no one ever reads help files. I simply expect everyone to read through the glossary multiple times, so everything gradually becomes clear despite my inarticulateness. That's how science books work, by the way. Jack, the editor of his own scientific journal, was the first person to advise me to read backwards from the end when proof-reading my own article. That never really worked for me; maybe I should try doing it with a mirror, like Leonardo.

Francesca tells me that when she copy-edits a long work, she goes straight through from the beginning and then goes back and does the first 20% over again. She explains that it takes the first 20% or so to figure things out, so she has to go back and recheck that part. See also the discussion of mission creep under DGE.

Oh yeah:) That was just an aside. The real subject of this entry is adverbs. And adverbials. As is typical in linguistic typology, one word (adverb in this case) names both a syntactic role and the kind of single word that can serve that role. An adverbial is a phrase that plays the role of an adverb; it's short for adverbial phrase. Most adverbials are prepositional phrases.

In English, adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and larger syntactic units like sentences. The last are sometimes distinguished from the others, and may have different meanings. In most cases, it's not a big deal. Probably the one adverb (or is that two?) whose usage causes the greatest fury is hopefully.

The verb adverb hopefully indicates that the agent performing the action of the verb is hopeful (an adjective). ``He asked hopefully'' means that he asked with hope (probably of a satisfactory answer). Hope implies uncertainty and concern, so this adverb also implies trepidation. The sentence adverb hopefully indicates that the speaker or writer of the sentence is hopeful, rather than the subject of the sentence. ``Hopefully things will go well'' means that the speaker hopes that things will go well. This usage is widespread, and irritation at this usage is also quite widespread, but less so. One objection to the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb is that it's superfluous. It can usually be replaced with an expression like ``it is to be hoped that'' (which may seem overformal) or ``I hope that'' (which may seem overpersonal). Another objection is the ambiguity of expressions like ``Hopefully he told her.''

In Spanish, a large class of adverbs are constructed by applying the suffix -mente to an adjective. French uses -ment in a similar way, but -ment words in English are nouns (see next paragraph). French adverbs in -ment correspond to English adverbs in -ly (e.g.: cordialement, probablement). The preceding statements that contain the word French should be understood to represent my own ignorant guesses. (But sincere ignorant guesses! Or is that sincerely ignorant guesses?)

The -ment ending in English yields a noun from a verb stem. This also comes from French. It goes back to the Latin suffix -mentum, which when added to a verb stem yielded a noun. (Spanish constructs such nouns with -mento or -menta.)

AFAIK, Germanic languages all have cognates of -ly. Dutch and Afrikaans use -lijk and -lik. German has -lich, but the distinction between adverbs and adjectives has largely disappeared. That is, the uninflected form of an adjective is also an adverb, something like fast in English. (Please don't bring up adjectival predicates.) German does have a large class of adverbs (ending in -weise, cognate with English -wise) that do not function as adjectives. For some further discussion of that distinction, see the see through entry.

ADV
Asociación de Dirigentes de Venta. Argentine `Association of Sales Managers,' founded in 1942.

It's slightly cute that the acronym suggests something as relevant as advertise, but it doesn't do so in Spanish. Aviso is Spanish for `advertisement,' and advertir is `warn.' That's right, amigo, we're talkin' falso amigo. So it was no great loss to Acronymia when ADV became ADE in 1983.

AdvanceTrac
A Ford synonym for electronic stability control. For other synonyms, see the ESC entry.

advice
I suggest you always give patently stupid advice that no one in his right mind would or even could follow, and add that ``if you don't, you'll be sorry!'' or words to that effect. They won't, and then when things go wrong, you can say ``I told you so'' or words to that effect. Keep a safe distance.

Don't worry about things going right. They never do, and when they do, nobody will mention it. When they mention it, say ``just wait,'' ``we're not out of the woods yet,'' or words to that effect.

Freud theorized that depression is aggression turned inward (or so it is claimed). I theorize that advice is New Year's resolutions turned outward.

advThanksance
THANKS in ADV ANCE. The usage TIA is much preferred.

The corresponding phrase in Spanish is gracias de antemano (a more literal translation would be `thanks beforehand'). There's no special reason why you should know any of that.

It is more important to know that the head term is a rebus-like

           p l a y
          --------- ,
          word word
and hence repugnant to the discriminating reader. Therefore, its use should always be accompanied by advapologiesance.

The word advance seems to entice punsters. During the US Civil War, North Carolina's Zebulon Baird Vance was by far the most effective state governor in the Confederacy. Among the less significant things he did was to invest, on behalf of the state, in a blockade-runner that was named the Ad Vance. (You probably want to know how successful it was. It would be funnier if I simply observed the fact of your interest and left it at that, but I'm a bit compulsive, so I'll have to tell you. Fortunately, some of you don't care.) The Ad Vance was launched in July 1862. This is surprising, because Vance was first elected governor of North Carolina on August 6, 1862. Maybe I'll look into that some day. The Ad Vance made 20 successful voyages before being captured by the USS Santiago de Cuba in 1864.

The use of word infix in rebus-like representations of prepositional phrases in in was the theme of the February 3, 2000, NYT crossword puzzle, constructed by Thomas W. Schier. Here are the theme clues and answers (punctuation and capitalization follow constructor conventions):

"1960's sci-fi series"         SPLOSTACE
"Arrives ahead of schedule"    EGETSARLY
"Example"                      POCASEINT
"Start, as a chain of events"  MOTSETION
"Jack Benny's theme song"      BLOLOVEOM
"Write or call"                TOUCKEEPH

ADW
Aged/Disabled Waiver. A Medicaid program established in 1982 by Medicaid, which also in some places (e.g., chapter 500 of the Medicaid Regulations) expands ADW as ``Aged/Disabled Home and Community-Based Services Waiver.'' Bureaucrat humor. (The first expansion I gave is used in the text of chap. 300, though the running head uses the same expansion as ch. 500.)

``You will, I am sure agree with me that if page 534 finds us only in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.'' This declaration occurs in chapter 1 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear. Donald Knuth quotes it on page 463 of his The Art of Computing: I. Fundamental Algorithms. The quote occurs at the end of chapter 2 (``Information Structures''), which I suppose is Knuth's paratactic way of noting that it's possible for chapter 2 to be long and chapter 1 short.

Francis Bacon, ``I do not pronounce upon anything.'' This appears at V, 210 of his Collected Works. Nice of him to point that out. (You can imagine my shock when I first read that and mistook the comma for a period: V. 210.)

This State of Florida document expands ADW as ``Aged and Disabled Adult Waiver.'' That seems to imply that it doesn't cover disabled juveniles. I think that's wrong, but fortunately, I don't have to find out.

adynaton
A figure of speech which indicates impossibility by comparison with an acknowledged impossibility. ``When pigs fly.''

I don't know if something like ``an ice cube's chance in hell'' or ``an ant's chance at an aardvark convention'' always qualifies. (Of course, the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno burns with cold.)

A figure of speech that's usually more poetical, but which has a similar-sounding name, is asyndeton. The latter word seems to me to be much more common, but googling seems to indicate that it's only somewhat more common.

ADZ
Airport Development Zone.

ADZU, AdZU
Ateneo de Zamboanga University. A Jesuit school in Zamboanga Peninsula (an administrative region of the southern Philippines comprising three provinces previously known as Western Mindanao). It was founded as a parochial school in 1912, and the institution includes a grade school (on the same campus as the colleges of the university) and a high school on a separate campus.

Such an arrangement is not entirely unknown even in the US. I know a couple of elementary-school teachers who work on the campus of a university in southwestern Michigan. The terminological inconveniences are minor. (``I graduated from Ateneo de Zamboanga University High School.'')

adzuki
A Japanese bean.

ADZY
ADviSorY. Phonetic aviation acronym. And I thought Broken English was the international language of science.

adzy
Like an adze.

(Click here for top) Previous section: .ac. (top) to AC-3 (bottom)

Next section: AE (top) to AF2 (bottom)

[ Thumb tabs and search tool] [ SBF Homepage ]













































Space above was intentionally left free of glossary definitions so that links to bottom of document can appear at the top of the screen display.

© Alfred M. Kriman 1995-2017 (c)