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.eh
(Domain code for) Western Sahara.

EHAC
National Environmental Health Science & Protection Accreditation Council. Based in Portland, Oregon.

EHCC
Eye Health Council of Canada. Founded in January 1996 as ``a partnership between Canadian Optometry and the Ophthalmic Industry, dedicated to educating the public about the importance of quality eye health care.'' The national public education division of the Canadian Association of Optometrists (CAO).

EHD
ElectroHydroDynamic[s].

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eheu
A Latin interjection meaning, roughly `alas!'

Supposedly, heu is an equivalent interjection, but all the classicists I know seem to write only ``eheu.''

EHF
Frequencies above 30 GHz.

EHL
École Hôtelière de Lausanne.

EHL
English Home Language. Shorthand expression used by many educational institutions to distinguish students who speak English at home from those who don't (non-EHL, NEHL).

EHLLAPI
Emulator High Level Language (HLL) Application Programming Interface (API) from IBM.

EHM
Extended Huckel Method. Crude method for constructing molecular orbitals: combining atomic orbitals and ignoring all electron-electron effects.

ehp, EHP
Electron-Hole Pair.

EHP
Engineering Honors Program.

EHR
Economic History Review. It's ``published quarterly and each volume contains over 800 pages. It is an invaluable source of information and is available free to members of the'' EHS. Really, what more could you ask? ``Publishing reviews of books, periodicals and information technology, The Review will keep anyone interested in economic and social history abreast of current developments in the subject. It aims at broad coverage of themes of economic and social change, including the intellectual, political and cultural implications of these changes.''

EHR
Education and Human Resources. A directorate of the NSF.

Ehrenfest's Theorem
For a particle of constant mass m, described by position coördinate r(t) evolving in time (t), in a potential V(r), the classical time evolution is described by (what we call) Newton's equation:
	  d²
	m -- r = - gradV(r) .
	  dt²

If we can ignore spin, the corresponding quantum mechanical motion is described by Schrödinger's equation. For this quantum mechanical motion, a consequence that can be derived from the Schrödinger equation is Ehrenfest's theorem, which states that

	  d²
	m -- <r> = - < gradV > .
	  dt²

This does not mean that the average position obeys Newton's law, despite the resemblance. The reason is contained in a definition:

A statistician is a person who, standing with his feet in ice water and her hair on fire [hey, (s)he's just an average person], will declare:

``On average, I feel fine.''

In order for the average position <r(t)> to obey Newton's law precisely, it would be necessary for the right-hand side (r.h.s.) of the last equation (i.e., in Ehrenfest's theorem) to read -gradV(<r>) . Note carefully the ordering of operations: in Ehrenfest's theorem, gradV is evaluated first, then an average is computed; in the alternative version, the average of r would be computed first, then the potential would be evaluated at that averaged position. The computation of an average implies, speaking, the repeated evaluation of the quantity to be averaged.

Temperature	-----------	Feeling
		     ^
		     |
    hot		    Head	not fine at all
		     |
		     v
		-----------
		     ^
		     |
		     |
		     |
		     |
    ok		    Body	     fine
		     |
		     |
		     |
		     |
		     v
		-----------
		     ^
		     |
    cold	    Feet	not fine at all
		     |
		     v
		-----------

<Temperature> = ok		<Feeling> = not fine

Ehrich-Schwoeble barrier
The free-energy barrier experienced by an adatom diffusing on a crystal terrace, when it approaches a step downward from the plane it is on. (I.e., the energy cost associated with the reduced coordination of the adatom at an edge.) A corresponding barrier tends to reflect surface vacancies from the inside edge of a step. The magnitude of the effect varies -- in many metal surfaces, reflection from these edge barriers is perfect; in Ge grown at low temperatures (gotta get a reference here), there is a slight (1%) difference in diffusion upward and downward across terrace edges.

The reflection barriers, combined with the increased probability of adatom binding at the inside (lower) edge of a crystal step between edges, lead to a growth instability: low-temperature growth is unstable against the formation of mounds, and becomes amorphous for sufficiently thick growth layers. Similarly, sputter etching can be unstable against the formation of deep pits.

EHS
Economic History Society. ``The Economic History Society exists to support research and teaching in economic and social history, broadly defined.'' (This is in contrast with the Economical History Society, which exists to support research and teaching in all history, broadly defined, but on the cheap. You know -- silent approval, free grins, that sort of thing. A link? Are you kidding? Websites cost money!)

``The Society also acts as a pressure group working to influence government policy in the interests of history, alongside other societies, such as the Social History Society, the Agricultural History Society, the Urban History Group and the Association of Business Historians, and in concert with professional bodies such as the Royal Historical Society, the Historical Association, the History in Universities Defence Group and the Academy of Learned Societies in Social Science. In addition, the Society regularly liases with funding bodies such as HEFCE, SHEFCE, the AHRB and the ESRC.

The EHS was founded in 1926, a good time to study a bad spot of economic history as it was happening. It's based in the UK and holds its meetings there, but ``is very keen to attract new overseas members as well as those from Britain.'' A subscription to EHS is included in the price of membership (GBP 21, as of 2004).

EHS, EH&S
Environmental, Health and Safety.

EHU
Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. If you have any trouble understanding the expansion, you're going to find the linked page rough going. For an alternative, see our UPV/EHU entry.

EHV
Extra-High Voltage.

EI
Airline Carrier code for Aer Lingus. (From first two letters of country name Eire.)

EI
Electronic Installation.

EI
Electron Impact.

EI
Electron Ionization.

Ei
Engineering Information, Inc. They produce Compendex.

EI
Enterprise Integration.

EIA
Electronics Industries Association. A trade association; members are electronic equipment manufacturers; recommends standards. Founded 1924; based in Arlington, VA.

Occasionally, as in CEG's homepage, the first word in the name is written ``Electronic.'' Perhaps this reflects the aversion of North American Anglophones for plural attributive nouns, and a misconstrual of ``Electronics'' as a plural. More likely, perhaps, is an unconsidered reflex that two plurals never follow each other. The problem is that ``Electronic Industries'' can include radio broadcasters and accounting firms, in which electronic equipment is a tool but not a product or the reason for creating the product. Any radio program is an electronic transmission. A radio program about VLSI is an electronics transmission. Everyone knows this, so why am I belaboring the obvious? If everyone knows it, then why doesn't everyone, to say nothing of the EIA/CEG, get it right?

EIA
Enzyme ImmunoAssay.

EIA
Equine Infectious Anemia.

EIA/CEG
EIA's Consumer Electronics Group, representing U.S. manufacturers of audio, video, home office, mobile electronics, multimedia and accessories. They have a somewhat boosterish homepage, but what do you expect?

EIAJ
Electronics Industries Association of Japan. EIAJ was roughly the Japanese counterpart of the American JEDEC or SIA. In 2000 it merged with JEIDA to form JEITA.

EIA RS
Earlier designation of EIA Recommended Standards documents, obsolete usage since about 1982. For a long time now, ``EIA RS-464'' has been simply ``EIA-464,'' etc.

EIA U
EIA Unit. A height unit for standard rack-mount equipment and frames, discussed in soporofic yet inadequate detail at the U entry. Let's go there now!

EIA-2
Second-generation Enzyme ImmunoAssay.

EIB
European Investment Bank.

EIB
Excellence In Broadcasting (Network). The stations that broadcast the Rush Limbaugh program, an ironic comedy show starring Rush Limbaugh.

EIC
Earned Income Credit.

EIC
Editor-In-Chief.

EIC
Equivalent IC.

EICAS
Engine Indication & Crew Alerting System.

EICMC
Enterprise Integration (EI) Corporate Management Council.

EID
Emerging Infectious Diseases.

EID
Engineering & Installation Division (of the USAF).

EIDE
Enhanced IDE. IDE is a disk-only small-computer interface. EIDE attempts to make up its deficiencies relative to SCSI without giving up IDE compatibility.

EIDE hard disks have > 528MB.

EIDF
Electronic Interception and Direction Finding.

EIDLT
Emergency IDentification LighT.

EIDS
Electronic Information Delivery System.

EIDX
Electronics Industry Data eXchange association. Electronics Industry trade association for its own use of EDI.

EIE
Easily-Ionized Element.

EIEC
EnteroInvasive E. coli.

EIEIO
Easily-Ionized-Element Interface Observation. Also the refrain in the children's song ``Old MacDonald.''

EIEIO
Earthwide Internet Education and Information Organization. And on his farm he had some disks.

EIF
Electronic Industries Foundation.

EIF
Entry Into Force. Normally predicated of an agreement -- the EIF of an agreement is the taking effect of that agreement. The abbreviation seems to especially popular with the military, whether they're talking troop disengagements or arms procurement.

EIF
European Investment Fund. ``[T]he EU specialized vehicle providing venture capital and guarantee instruments for SMEs.''

EIGRP
Extended Interior Gateway Routing Protocol. A Cisco proprietary routing protocol for IP and ISO CLNS networks.

EIIF
Electronics and Information Industries Forum.

EIL
English as an International Language.

EIN
Employer Identification Number. Two digits, hyphen, seven digits.

EINSA
Equipos Industriales de Mantenimiento, Sociedad Anónima; (SA).

Einstein said ...
Someone told me that they heard that Einstein said ... .

(Einstein didn't say ... .)

EIP
Electronic Incentive Program.

EIP
Enterprise Information Portal.

EIP
Equipment Improvement Project.

EIPBN
Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication.

EIR
Equipment Identity Register. Part of the cellular voice reference model.

Eire
Irish Gaelic name for the big island across the Irish Sea from Britain. Except that in Irish Gaelic, strictly speaking, it's Éire. By article four of the Irish constitution, it's also the name of a country (.ie) in ``the Irish language,'' i.e. Irish Gaelic. The country is also known as the Republic of Ireland. I think maybe there's a certain political edge or point to this naming business: to insist on a name for the country that is identical with the name of the island is to imply, uh, I'll have to think about this. Cf. FYROM.

Although Irish Gaelic is the first official language of the country, most people now speak English. Gaelic is spoken mostly in rural areas, mostly along the west coast.

Here's an official copy of the Irish constitution.

EIRP, eirp
Effective Isotropic Radiated Power. Often stated in dBW. Note that the FCC often issues broadcast licenses constraining the direction of broadcast from an antenna.

EIS
Electronic Instrument System.

EIS
Entry Into Service. Commissioning.

EIS
Environmental Impact Statement.

EIS
Executive Information System. Talk to the janitor, he knows what's going down.

Eis
German, `ice.' More about Italian ice in Germany at the iced cream entry. The term Eis is now commonly used for ice cream. Cf. Eisen.

EISA
Extended Industry Standard Architecture. A 32-bit data path bus compatible with the 16-bit ISA.

eISBN
Electronic ISBN. It's not a special kind of ISBN -- the version of a book sold in electronic form simply has a different ISBN than any printed version.

Eisen
German, `iron.' Eisenhauer is an old word for ironsmith (hauen, meaning `to strike,' is cognate with English `hew'). The sound of this German word can be closely simulated in English by pronouncing the name ``Eisenhower,'' which presumably explains why that surname is so spelled.

Cf. Eis.

Eisenhower
WWII general, and US president 1953-1961. Vide Eisen.

Eisenhower Interstate System
The Dwight D. Eisenhower National (US) System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Called the ``Interstate System'' by people who don't want to overtax their lungs because they might have to say something again later today.

More on the interstate system at I-.

Eisenhower Network
A collaboration intended to improve K-12 mathematics and science education in the US. Or at least slow the decline. ``Eisenhower Network'' is short for National Network of Eisenhower Regional Consortia and Clearinghouse. This is a perfectly sensible name when you know that the ``Eisenhower Network consists of ten Eisenhower Regional Consortia and the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse.''

The awkward comprehensiveness of the longer name reminds me of Gulliver's report from the Academy of Lagado's School of Languages.

The first Project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.

The other, was a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great Advantage in Point of Health as well as Brevity. For it is plain, that every Word we speak is in some Degree a Diminution of our Lungs by Corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortning of our Lives. An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on. And this Invention would certainly have taken Place, to the great Ease as well as Health of the Subject, if the Women in conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate had not threatned to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the manner of their Ancestors; such constant irreconcilable Enemies to Science are the common People. However, many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man's Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us; who, when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave.

Stop me if I've told you this one before...

In Tokyo once, I looked on at the chance sidewalk encounter of two acquaintances. The men both bowed, then one bowed a tick lower, then the other insisted, rapidly bowing another tick lower. But no... This onedownsmanship went through a few iterations before they finally bowed their good-byes and moved on. Walking away, each man rubbed the small of his back.

In 2003, total health spending in Japan was only 7.6% of GDP, as against an OECD average of 8.1%. Also, despite a steady decline (from 76% in 1975 to 54% in 2000), the rate of smoking among Japanese men remains very high (second in the OECD only to Korean men). Yet in 2003, Japan also had the highest life expectancy among OECD countries. I can explain this paradox: it's the exercise.

I need a bobbing-toy entry.

EISS
European Influenza Surveillance Scheme.

EIT
Encoded Information Type.

EIT
Engineer In Training. What you may be called, officially, after passing a test now designated the Fundamentals of Engineering exam (FE, q.v.). See also PE (exam) and National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES), which administers the tests.

EIT
Enhanced Interrogation Technique. A term whose use spares one the pain of deciding whether the technique is torture, or of saying so.

EITF
Environmental Institute Task Force at UB.

eizu
Japanese name for AIDS. It's not a coincidental similarity; the Japanese word, written in katakana, represents a domesticated pronunciation of the English acronym. Formally, at least, Japanese words can only end in a vowel or n, and most consonant clusters can't occur. A final vowel u comes closest to no vowel. (Thus, ball was borrowed as boru.) Hence, eizu is about as close as Japanese can come to the sound of the original, except perhaps for the missing consonant d.

Whether and how reliably that missing consonant might have been inserted is a somewhat ticklish question because it may already be in there. The dental alveolar plosives of Japanese are affricates to a greater or lesser degree when they precede i or u. Thus, the t series of sounds (in the ``fifty-sound table'' of Japanese) is {ta, chi, tsu, te, to}. The voiced version of this, the d series, is represented {da, ji, zu, de, do}. The zu syllable is really a voiced version of tsu, and really does sound like dzu... to a degree. I just spoke with a Japanese friend of mine, and to my ear she does clearly pronounce a dz cluster for this syllable, but the d is very slight. On the other hand, she grew up in Hiroshima, and I have read of the dz pronunciation of z as a specific feature of the Tôkyô dialect. (Granted that the dialect of Tôkyô has increasingly been the dominant or standard one since the advent of television, it has not extinguished the use of local vocabulary and pronunciation -- the pitch accent in particular has resisted standardization.) From what I can recollect of other Japanese I have known, I do think a stronger d sound in ``zu'' is probably more common in people from Tôkyô. Until I've asked some other Japanese friends, I'll stick with that.

It does happen that the s series of syllables, when voiced (i.e., when marked with the relevant diacritic), yields a z series {za, ji, zu, ze, zo} with a ji and zu graphically distinct from those in the d series. The ``zu'' in eizu is in fact written (in katakana) as a voiced su. That would appear to make much of the previous paragraph irrelevant, which is why I waited until this paragraph to mention it. But please read on.

As a practical matter, Japanese make no distinction in pronunciation between the zu sounds of voiced tsu and voiced su (as likewise between the ji sounds of voiced shi [of the s series] and voiced chi). That's why their Hepburn Romanizations are identical. Indeed, it's a source of inconsistent kana spellings. Anyway, I specifically asked to hear eizu pronounced. More theoretically, it appears that Ancient Japanese did not have a consonant s, but only ts. Hence, the Japanese zu sound ultimately developed as much from tsu as from su. (This absence of an independent /s/ in Japanese is somewhat paralleled by the absence of /z/ in Ancient Greek. The zeta representated an affricate /dz/ or /ds/. The letter z is pronounced /dz/ in Italian today, and in German, which has done a lot of devoicing over the centuries, z represents the affricate /ts/.)

Relevant, but too much of a burden for the previous paragraph: The voiced and unvoiced versions of Japanese consonants have historically been more like allophones than distinct phonemes. For example, a few centuries ago in Japanese, initial consonants tended to be devoiced, and the initial consonant of the second root in a compound tended to be voiced, etc. This accounts for many of the alternative pronunciations of individual kanji. English and German offer partial parallels or antiparallels. In modern German, for example, most final consonants are devoiced, and the initial s sound is always voiced (i.e., is pronounced /z/). Of course, local dialects offer exceptions and variants of these rules. In English the voiced/unvoiced pairs s/z and th/th (you can figure it out) were originally allophonic. While this is no longer generally the case, the -s inflections (as plural and possessive markers for nouns, and to indicate the third-person singular of nonmodal verbs in the present tense) are still voiced or devoiced according to the ending of the words they are attached to. (Generally, the voicing is assimilated: -s after a voiced consonant or vowel is pronounced /z/, even if the vowel is epenthetic, as in churches. Following unvoiced consonants, -s is pronounced /s/.) Aspiration of English stops is still completely allophonic, on the other hand, afaik.

EJ
Economic Journal. The official journal of the Royal Economic Society.

EJ
Encyclopaedia Judaica. Published in 16 volumes, 1971. Supplemented by yearbooks.

EJ
Environmental Justice.

Actually, I myself live in a toxic waste dump, but one of these years I plan to pass a vacuum cleaner over the accessible parts of the floor.

I'm waiting for Commodity Justice to become fashionable. It's just a crime that I can't have the same stuff rich people have. It's having a negative impact on my well-being, in particular my affective state. That in turn compromises my immune system, increasing my susceptibility to many fatal diseases. I need a federal luxury-supplementation program to save my life!

(And don't say you disagree. That's very stressful for me....)

EJ, eJ
ExaJoule. 1018 joules.

EJAP
Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy. It's philosophy, but it's not as bad as continental philosophy.

EJAS
European Journal of American Studies. ``The European Journal of American Studies is produced by the European Association for American Studies, a federation of national and joint-national associations of specialists of the United States (www.eaas.info) regrouping approximately 4000 scholars from 26 European countries. It publishes three or four issues each year. Each issue is either thematically composed or incrementally evolutive. It welcomes contributions from Americanists in Europe and elsewhere and aims at making available reliable information and state-of-the-art research on all aspects of United States culture and society. Contributions will be submitted to the approval of the editorial committee following specialized peer-review.''

EJB
Enterprise JavaBeans.

EJC
European Jewish Congress. Also Congrés Juif Européen. Its main offices are at 78 Avenue des Champs Elysées. In 2003, France has the largest Jewish community in the EU. The EJC is a branch of the WJC, and serves as the diplomatic representative in discussions involving the 2 million European Jews and their respective governments.

Estimating (as well as defining membership in) the Jewish community is quite difficult, but 2 million is probably a fair estimate for all Europe. The largest Jewish community in Western Europe after WWII has been France, with 600,000 for decades. In apparent reaction to anti-Jewish violence that peaked in the Summer of 2001 but has continued, Jewish emigration to Israel (aliyah) rose to a level that has remained roughly constant (up to 2004, this writing) at about 2000 per year from France. This is most of the aliyah from western Europe as a whole.

The UK comes in second with roughly 300,000, and most other western and central European countries have much smaller Jewish populations: 40,000 Belgium, 30,000 Italy, and down. The Soviet Union was once estimated to have a couple of millions, mostly in the European part, but many of these emigrated to Israel when it finally became possible to do so without risking becoming stuck in the USSR as a refusenik. About 700,000 emigrated from the USSR and the countries that succeeded it between 1989 and 1995, and current estimates of the largest populations are 450,000 for Russia, 300,000 Ukraine, 50,000 Belarus. However, these numbers continue to shrink rapidly...

The exceptional case is Germany, where over half a million Jews lived before Hitler came to power, and where somehow there were 15,000 left by the end of WWII. By 1990, the Jewish population of reunited Germany had risen to 33,000. In a historic development, however, there has been a flood of Jewish emigration to Germany as part of a larger general emigration from the former Soviet Union. As of 2003, Germany had the third-largest Jewish community in Europe, with an estimated 200,000. In 2002, 19,262 Jews from the FSU settled in Germany. (In the same year, fewer than 10,000 emigrated to the US. Israel for the first time had fewer Jewish immigrants from the FSU than Germany did -- 18,878. This was down from about 44,000 in 2001. The decline, attributed to the Intifada, has continued, with the number down to about 10,000 in 2004.)

European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe is published biannually in association with LBC-CJE and the Michael Goulston Educational Foundation.

EJL
European Journal of Mineralogy.

EJO
Electronic Journals Online. OCLC's term for the online publications service it offers.

EJOR
European Journal of Operational Research.

EK
Eisernes Kreuz. German, `Iron Cross.'

EKD
Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland. German, literally the `Evangelical Church in Germany.' In Germany, however, evangelisch means Protestant, and probably Lutheran (use evangelisch-lutherisch to be precise). Cf. Reformed.

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EKC
Epidemic KeratoConjunctivitis. The name of an infectious viral disease that is often epidemic. It is caused by adenoviruses of the Mastadenovirus family.

EKG
ElectrocardioGram. [K is from the standard transliteration of the Greek word for heart, which begins with <kappa>.] Now much more commonly in English ``ECG.''

ekisupato, ekisupâto
Japanese for `expert[s].' The word is an English loan, obviously. The a in this word is long. That is, its duration extended, very roughly double the duration of a short vowel. This may be indicated by a macron over the a when that is convenient, or by a caret or circumflex over the a if that's all that's available, or by an IPA-style colon following the a if it won't confuse your reader. Often it's not indicated. Iirc, at least one of the names that is normally transliterated as Yoko is more precisely Yôko. (The a is lengthened to represent the sound of ``ar'' in the original. This use of vowel lengthening in English loanwords is very common.)

ekkusu-sen
Japanese for X-ray[s]. The word is half-transliterated and half-translated from English. Ekkusu represents the letter X, and sen represents `ray' or `rays.' This sen is a kanji that is normally translated `line,' but which is also used in expressions for light beams (kosen) and the proverbial (in Japanese as in English) ``ray of hope.'' In Chinese, X-ray is translated in a similar way, with a kind of transliteration of X and using a Chinese word for ray this is typically translated into English as `light.' (It's pronounced something like ``kwan,'' iirc, but looking up the pronunciation of a Chinese hanji starting from an English word that contains it is inconvenient. I'll just wait until the next time I chat with the Chinese friend who, err, ahem, I'll update this resource just as soon as I am able to contact our Chinese-language expert.)

There are, of course, other kinds of ray, translated by other Japanese terms. (For example, the fishy ray is an ei.) There are also other kanji with a reading sen. One sen is legal tender that you could toss on any Scrabble counter-top. It's worth its own entry.

Another Japanese word for X-ray is rentogen, after the discoverer. In German, X-rays are still called Röntgenstrahlen, but in Japanese almost as much as in English, the eponym has fallen out of use. Rentogen looks like an anagram of the alternate German name spelling Roentgen, but it's not so cute. ``Rentogen'' is the Romanization (according to the system of James Hepburn) of the Japanese spelling, which consists of five katakana characters.

EKL
English as a Kitchen Language. In a PowerPoint presentation entitled ``The inner, outer and expanding circles: A reconsideration of Kachru's circle model for world Englishes,'' Roland Sussex at one point contrasts ESP with EKL. The latter seems to be his own coinage; it seems to me that EKL would be a particular ESP, but PPT slides are not very articulate. Kachru's is a well-known taxonomy of English use.

EKMS
Electronic Key Management System.

EKN
Eta Kappa Nu. Electrical Engineering Honor Society.

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ekphrasis
A written description of a work of art. Like Keats's ``Ode on a Grecian Urn.''

ekpwele
A former monetary unit of Equatorial Guinea. The Equatorial Guineans must have realized that having a currency that foreign bankers could pronounce would be a great boon to their economy, and quite sensibly switched to something else. (What is it now, the Equatorial Guinea guinea?) On the other hand, it's still legal for all three major Scrabble dictionaries. It's whatchamightcall a ``ten-dollar word.''

EKU
Earliest Known Use.

EKU
Eastern Kentucky University. Founded in 1906.

EKV
ExoAtmospheric Kill Vehicle. For ballistic missile defense.

E & L
Educational and Library (books).

el
Name of the twelfth letter of the English alphabet.

Human infants can normally hear and distinguish far more sounds than adults can. As they learn language, they lose the ability to distinguish any two sounds, but they gain the ability to identify quickly what phoneme (i.e., which domain of sounds regarded as equivalent within the language) a sound corresponds to. In other words, they learn phonemics rather than phonetics. (More on that at emic.) A famous example is the r/l distinction: speakers of European languages typically distinguish at least one arr and at least one el sound. In contrast, Japanese and Chinese who do not, as children, learn a language that makes such a distinction tend to find it difficult to hear the difference.

For emphasis, let me restate this in contrast to a common misconception: It is well known that native speakers of Japanese and Chinese have difficulty learning to pronounce the r/l difference if they learn, say, English late (by late I mean no earlier than about 12 years of age). Many people think that this is fundamentally a difficulty in sound production, but that is not entirely the case: it is apparently at least partly a difference in brain wiring for language perception. Nerve connections in the infant that would have developed to process the difference have atrophied or not formed, and the brain capacity has been utilized differently. This happens to all speakers of all languages -- the only difference is that the particular set of abilities discarded and reinforced is different, according to the language[s] learned. For example, speakers of English have difficulty hearing the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds (b and bh, for example, in Hindi transliteration) or the difference between the sh sounds more carefully transliterated ``sh'' and ``shch'' from Russian. There are native speakers of German -- from some regions -- who don't distinguish between the ch of ich [/i:ç/ in the IPA] and the ch in German Bach [/bax/ in the IPA].

Some people learn to pronounce the r/l distinction reliably as adults, even without learning to hear the distinction reliably. This is the hard way, but sometimes it's the only way. (I know one such person well. From her speech I mightn't have realized that she can't hear the difference. When she hears a new word that contains an arr or el sound, however, she has to ask which sound it contains in order to know how to pronounce it.)

EL
ElectroLuminescen{ce | t }. Producing light under the influence of a charged current (beam). `EL displays' are one kind of Flat Panel Display, but the term is ambiguous in principle, since CRT's use a flat layer of EL phosphors to turn a cathode ray (electron beam) into a visible point of light.

el, El
ELevated train. Usage in New York and other cities. In New York, ``el'' referred to an early elevated light rail system. Later, some parts of that system were integrated into the subway system. The original elevated lines were too light to carry the subway trains, so even where parts of the old el system remain in use, it's a different set of rails and cars. The term el may have been used for a while to refer to the stations or railway corridors of the old el system, or loosely to the service that replaced them, but today the term ``elevated subway'' is widespread for the elevated lines that run in the boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens.

Chicago usage is a bit different; see L.

In December 1931, New Masses published (pp. 16-7) Langston Hughes's ``Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria.'' Hughes explained in In The Big Sea, (pp. 320-1) that the poem was ``modeled after an ad in Vanity Fair announcing the opening of New York's greatest hotel. (Where no Negroes worked and none were admitted as guests.)'' It's a bit of a downer, as poems go. Not upbeat at all. Here's an excerpt:

Don't you know they specialize in American cooking?
Ankle on down to 49th Street at Park Avenue. Get up
off that subway bench tonight with the evening POST
for cover! Come on out o' that flop-house! Stop shivering
your guts out all day on street corners under the El.

(I encountered an instance of the `L' spelling, also with a New York flop-house context, in a book from 1947. It's described at the L entry.)

Allen Ginsberg's ``Howl'' begins

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
...

(The meter has been described as Whitmanesque; according to Ginsberg, ``[i]deally each line of 'Howl' is a single breath unit.'') Well, the first part of the poem was typed out ``madly in one afternoon'' in 1955 in San Francisco, where Ginsberg had been living since the previous year. But I think elevated trains (not counting the later BART system) are the one of the few forms of mass transportation San Francisco lacks, and until 1953 Ginsberg had spent most of his life in Patterson, New Jersey, and in New York City. It's not entirely crazy to adduce Ginsberg's poetry cautiously as evidence of linguistic usage. A personal acquaintance who influenced Ginsberg (particularly between 1948 and 1953) was William Carlos Williams, who urged Ginsberg to write in a more colloquial American idiom. Williams wrote an introduction for the first edition of `Howl.'

Although ``Howl'' made a big splash and Ginsberg a lot of money, the poem ``Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)'' is considered the better of his two greatest works. Kaddish is the name of a kind of doxology, which is recited (mostly in Aramaic) in a few versions at various points during Jewish services. One version (most of the full text, minus a sentence or two) is the ``Mourners' Kaddish,'' the characteristic prayer recited by immediate family of the deceased. I worked with a guy (David) whose family knew Allen Ginsberg's family back in the 1950's. David's mother objected to ``Kaddish,'' saying it was all true, but one shouldn't write it. (Naomi Ginsberg, Allen's mother, died after a long emotional decline through mental illness.) Always the bridesmaid. I know by email and have met in person someone who was once called a Stalinist, in print, by Noam Chomsky. (The journal did not publish his reply, though perhaps Chomsky's politics can be regarded as generally self-refuting and rebuttal superfluous.) Alas, always at least a couple of degrees of separation. I have a couple of letters from Albert Einstein...written to my late great uncle Fritz (mentioned at the ZNR entry).

Lawrence Ferlinghetti knew Allen Ginsberg at first hand. In 1956, Ferlinghetti's recently founded City Lights Books published Howl and Other Poems. United States Customs officers and the San Francisco police seized the edition and charged Ferlinghetti with publishing an obscene book. The court case, which ended in acquittal in 1957, established Ginsberg's national reputation. But Lawrence Ferlinghetti had already established his own reputation as someone who wrote poetry that mentioned the el. His 1955 work, ``20,'' began

The pennycandystore beyond the El 
           is where I first 
                                 fell in love 
                                                 with unreality

But the poem of Ferlinghetti that is all about ``the El / careening thru its thirdstory world / with its thirdstory people'' is ``12.''

Living in the nearby suburbs in the 1960's and 70's, and listening to news radio regularly, I never heard of any `el.' 'El no!

Robert Kelly (b. 1935) mentioned ``the El'' in at least a couple of poems, including one from 1981, but he's so preposterously prolific that it can't be very significant. In ``Skies'' (copyright 1992, Black Sparrow Pr.), he uh, sang

...in 1946 when he walked, not cold but certainly tired, all the way home from Fulton Street, at first under the el and then the open spaces where Sunrise Highway starts, then the other, smaller, older el on Liberty Avenue, where these city streets, smirched with scabby snow, felt clean and wonderful and...

Ah, poetry!

You know, if you look up poetry on the basis of just about any nonaesthetic principle, you find a lot of really bad stuff. In 1974, I think, Daniel Hoffman (b. 1923) wrote ``Stop the Deathwish! Stop It! Stop!'' There he mourns the loss of once-useful knowledge:

is there many a man around who knows
by rote the dismantled stations of the El,

Later he observes that by then, ``about as few use rhyme as wigwag....''

The El is habit-forming. Of the poets and poetasts mentioned above, all with the possible exception of Ginsberg mentioned the el in at least two works, as have Angela Jackson, Jerome Rothenberg, and Constance Urdang.

In Spanish, un elevado is, in a traffic context, `an overpass.'

EL
English Language. See EXL for more specialized terms.

EL
Experiential Learning. This is a technical term (educant) used by people who sincerely believe they are rendering a useful service. EL courses ``offer activities that engage the learner directly in the phenomenon being studied, but don't provide a service to the community and may not give students planned interaction with community organizations or individuals. For example, students in a class addressing environmental issues might be assigned to test water samples in a nearby lake.'' Somehow I don't think they consider chemistry lab experiential. It's classroom-based, so it's dry, abstract, and disengaged from reality. Cf. CBL, CBR.

ELA
Emergency Liquidity Assistance. A service that the European Central Bank (ECB) provides to banks in the Eurozone.

ELAN
Emulated Local Area Network.

ELAP
Ethernet Link Access Protocol.

elastic limit
The magnitude of strain beyond which the relation between stress and strain ceases to be linear. This is never a precise point, because linearity is approximate. However, often there is a significant kink or bend in the stress-strain plot, which can be identified as the elastic limit. Also, all materials under tensile (``pulling'') stress eventually either break or deform (rearrange microscopically so that when applied forces are removed, the material relaxes back to a different shape than previously). The elastic limit is a kind of marker for this effect as well: for strains much beyond the elastic limit, deformation or catastrophic breakdown (breaking) occur.

elastic tape measure
Life is full of compromises. In soft goods as in software, if you want user-friendly, you may have to give up a little accuracy.

ELBW
Extremely Low Birth Weight (LBW). Newborn weight less than 1 kilo (2.2 lb.). A ticket to the NICU.

ELCA
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

ELD
English Literacy Development.

ELDOR
ELectron DOuble Resonance. Isn't that in Middle Earth somewhere?

elected tyrants
Many national leaders have been elected to office after first gaining power, or attempting to gain power, by extraconstitutional means. There doesn't seem to be a good or accepted term for the phenomenon, making it hard to track down instances. So I'm collecting some instances here.

I haven't encountered or invented a good term for the phenomenon or for persons so elected, but I think of them as ``elected tyrants.'' Here I understand the word tyrant in the original sense of the word tyrannos. As explained at the linked entry, the word originally meant `usurper' -- someone who took power by irregular means (usually by force or menace). This did not necessarily imply that the ruler was widely unpopular or generally ignoble. Holinshed wrote of the historical Macbeth:

To be briefe, such were the woorthie dooings and princelie acts of this Mackbeth in the administration of the realme, that if he had atteined therevnto by rightfull means, and continued in vprightnesse of iustice as he began, till the end of his reigne, he might well haue béene numbred amongest the most noble princes that anie where had reigned.

The term ``elected tyrant'' is bound to be interpreted at first blush as equivalent to ``elected dictator'' -- someone elected to hold dictatorial powers. Too bad. ``Usurper'' sounds a bit too monarchial. The entry's gotta have a head term.

The question of legitimacy, and whether authority is duly constituted, is a very difficult one to address in the general case. Broadly, I agree with the careful wording of Jefferson, that governments derive ``their just powers from the consent of the governed.'' Consent expressed through free elections to offices defined by agreed law, however, confer a higher order of legitimacy than does the sullen or fearful resignation of those without hope of overthrowing hated rulers. For this entry I limit consideration to the modern era, so I needn't puzzle over the Roman Senate's endorsement of every Caesar proclaimed by the Praetorian Guard.

Jefferson's formulation implicitly contains a vague notion of majority or plurality, since universal consent rarely occurs (unless one lowers the bar of ``consent'' to ``absence of active resistance''). Modern constitutions vary in how they deal with the absence of majority agreement. It may be considered an unsolved problem. For my purposes, someone who comes to power by legitimate (or constitutional) means, either by direct election or by an indirect election that voters understood beforehand to have the effect of putting a winner in power, is ``elected.''

Within the modern era, I also ignore elections rigged by, say, systematic miscounting or exclusion of legitimate candidates. This can be a fuzzy line to draw, since not just an election but an entire electoral system is often rigged by limits on free speech and free assembly. My interest is in situations where the electorate had a real opportunity to reject or punish tyrants, and did not do so. Neither do I condemn such popular choices generally. The election of an executive is a blunt instrument for the expression of popular will, and voters compromise.

Tyrants (in the sense of this entry) often atempt to ``legitimate'' their rule ex post facto, by changing the constitution and whatnot. Like I care.

This entry will be visibly under construction. For any missing details, you know how to search.

election against the will
That sounds like the way I often feel in early November, but that's not its legal meaning. ``Election against the will'' designates the right of a surviving spouse to override the what is stated in a decedent's will and to take a certain state-designated percentage of the assets.

election day
US national elections, and, for convenience, many other elections, are held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. We won't give the proof, but it turns out that this formula prevents election day from falling on the first of November. When election day was set by Congress in 1845, they wanted to avoid conflict with the day that many merchants balance their books from the preceding month (October, in this case). It's been suggested that they also wanted to avoid holding elections on November 1 because it is All Saints Day (you know -- the religious festival celebrating the end of Halloween). Tuesday is supposed to be preferred because it gives people in outlying areas time enough to trudge to the polls without having to start on Sunday. November because harvesting is allegedly over for the year, but travel is still not impeded by snow. FWIW, apple harvesting in New York and New England runs through about the middle of October.

None of this explains why it wasn't the second Wednesday in November, but there you go -- it has to occur on some date.

election month
The period of weeks, following election day, during which battalions of lawyers for the contending candidates battle to determine who won the election.

electrical appliances, simple, and the Athanasian Creed
In A Certain World (1970), Auden explained the success of Behaviorism:
Of course, Behaviourism ``works''. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

electrical banana
is goin' to be a sudden craze; is bound to be the very next phase. They call me Mellow Yellow! Apologies to Donovan. LSI implementation apparently beta-tested for Woody Allen's ``Sleeper'' (1973). Then again, maybe it's a stealth plug for his movie ``Bananas'' (1971). You will doubtless be fascinated to know that this glossary also has a banana plug entry.

Another point of comparison between the two movies is that the Woody character in Sleeper was named Miles Monroe. That doesn't sound like a comparison, does it. Just wait, I wasn't finished. The name Monroe recalls James Monroe, fifth president of the US. Whether one is thinking of American history or not, the first person with the given name Miles that one is likely to think of is Miles Standish, a ship captain best remembered for not getting the girl. In Bananas, the Allen character is Fielding Mellish. Mellish suggests nebbish, a Yiddish word for an earnest, ineffectual loser. As you know, the -ish ending in English, like -like, contains the idea of approximation. It may thus imply imperfection, or failure to achieve.

``Miles Davis''? He's history.

Certain unusual first names convey a certain sense of aspiration. This is manifestly clear in the case of names commemorating a famous person (e.g., George Washington, John Wesley, Martin Luther, Henry Fielding). Foreign names, and names more commonly occurring as surnames, also have this effect. Depending on how things play out, such a name may have an inspiring or even a demoralizing effect on the bearer, and may convey prestige, pretentiousness, or some other impression. A given name Fielding, followed by Mellish, will suggest to some a pretentious hope unfulfilled. In the movie, Fielding's parents still hope that he'll become a surgeon like his father, even though it is clear to others, such as a patient, that his ideal career path may lie in other directions.

The Woody Allen character doesn't measure up to his name, just as the little tramp, Charlie Chaplin failed to measure up to his ill-fitting clothes. A name is an identity: what you are called is in some measure who you are. Whether the power of names was deemed mystical or psychological (I'm lapsing into freshman-essayese here, aren't I) names have long been manipulated as tools of personal growth (forgive me, you know I didn't invent that phrase). Often the name change is minor. For example, a nickname may be substituted for the formal version of a name. James Earl Carter, Jr. used ``Jimmy'' from the beginning of his political life. He apparently never had his name legally changed to Jimmy, so in 1976 he was obliged to go to court to assure that his name appeared as Jimmy Carter on the national presidential ballots. The original name was particularly infelicitous after 1968, as the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr. was James Earl Ray. (Some questionable history anent political nicknames and their advantages here.) Other ways to make a minor change include having a new name that is an extension or apparent modified version of the original (e.g., Abram to Abraham) or a change of emphasis (Thomas Woodrow Wilson to Woodrow Wilson).

Major name changes are also associated with major turns in a person's life. John Rosenberg abandoned his wife and kids and changed his name to Werner Erhard. I suppose this may have been convenient. He invented the name Werner Erhard after reading an article on West Germany in Esquire magazine which mentioned Werner Heisenberg and Ludwig Erhard (then the FRG economics minister). He later went on to found est.

I'm going to type Werner Erhardt here for people like me who can't remember the exact spelling, so they'll get a prophylactic hit on the search engine. And Jack Rosenberg for good measure.

In MST3K, there was a character named Dr. Lawrence Erhardt (yeah, with a final tee). An FAQ explains that Josh Weinstein came up with the name on the basis of Werner Erhard, with Lawrence chosen for its pretentiousness. JW thought it had an evil ring. What, he was thinking maybe of Lawrence Welk? (And-a one and-a two, Ig-or!) Josh Weinstein was one of the original creators of the show, writing and doing the voice of Dr. Larry Erhardt and some other characters in the first two seasons. Larry Erhardt disappeared abruptly when JW left, and was eaten by a giant spider in a later episode.

He was credited as J. Elvis Weinstein. If your name is Joshua and you think that's too pretentious, you can use Josh, a homonym of a word meaning kid, joke.

Josh Phillip Weinstein played a hippie in Mars Attacks! (1996). This is also a science fiction piece, a spoof of 1950's alien-invasion movies. What is it about that name?

I am not going to spell out why I am reminded of John Aristotle Phillips, but he's mentioned in the CANDU entry.

More on names at the Nomenclature is destiny entry. More on bananas at the potassium (K) entry. More on Woody Allen's Sleeper at the health entry.

(Charlie Chaplin's screen pants were too large, but his jacket was too tight. Look for my Ph.D. dissertation on the deeper significances of this.)

Once on MST3K, the robot companion Tom Servo remarked ``Emby Mellay? That's not a name, it's a bad Scrabble hand!'' What is that, a reverse rebus? Eye dialect hits the big time!

Electric Prunes
A California rock group that came out with ``Mass in F Minor'' in 1968. The lyrics were in Latin. I don't think it's been reissued on CD; you'll have to look for it in vinyl. They're probably good for electric constipation.

electroless plated
Precipitated onto a surface without need for current to reduce the metal oxidation state.

electromigration
The drift of ions in response to an electric field. This is particularly a problem at Al/Si ohmic contacts, where the effect increases the diffusion of Si atoms into the Al. Since the Al/Si alloy has a higher resistivity, the alloy has even higher fields, increasing the effect. Eventually, electromigration can lead to catastrophic breakdown.

electrophoresis
See what the HP Journal has to say about it.

electrophotography
A corona-charged photoconductor film is selectively discharged by exposure to a light pattern, and the electrostatic pattern is then developed by fusing of pigmented plastic particles to paper. The basic idea in xerographic copying (image reflected by mirror from illuminated scanned segment of document) and laser printing (image created by direct raster scan of photoconductor by laser).

electrostrong unification
A Google search on "heavy quark system" on January 28, 2013, yielded 137k ghits.

ELED
Edge-emitting LED.

ELEED
Elastic LEED.

Elevator being serviced.
Service technician visited this month.

Elevator out of order.
Some bone-head who can't tell the difference between ``FAN'' and ``STOP'' called this one in.

ELF
Eclectic Literary Forum. A magazine from Tonowanda, New York.

ELF
English as a Lingua Franca. Pidgin.

ELF
Extremely Low Frequency. 30-300 Hz, which is indeed low for radio communication. The range is used for communication with submarines in deep ocean. The idea for ELF communication was part of Tesla's vision of a world in which not only signals but usable power were transmitted by air. The wavelength at ELF is comparable to the altitude of the bottom of the ionosphere; ELF waves use the earth and the ionosphere as the sides of a waveguide.

ELFEXT
Equal-Level Far-End CROSSTalk.

El-Hi, elhi
ELementary and HIgh School, or ELementary to/through HIgh School. Primary and secondary education, or pretertiary. ``Prepostsecondary,'' suggesting ``preposterous,'' has been reported. ``El-hi'' seems to be used primarily the book trade, as in ``El-Hi publishers.'' US book sales totaled $24 billion in 1999. Of that, elhi sales constituted $3.42 billion.

ELI
English Language Institute at UB.

eLib
Electronic Libraries Programme. What're these guys thinking? -- They have a toybox that features ``EEVL'' followed by ``CAIN''!

ELINT
ELectronic INTelligence. No, not computers: Intelligence in the sense of espionage product. Also, ELINT is the name of a particular ELINT code. Cf. EW.

ELISA
Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay. Method for measuring the quantity of a dissolved substance. An antibody to the substance is developed and produced in quantity. Accurate measurement uses an enzyme that binds to antibody complexes formed when antibodies are added to solution.

elites
A book entitled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses was ``released'' by the University of Chicago Press on January 18, 2011. An online article based on the book (I don't think it quite qualifies as a review) was published the same day in Inside Higher Ed. One of the authors is Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, and he is quoted as saying that the problems outlined in the book should be viewed as a moral challenge to higher education. Students who struggle to pay for college and emerge into a tough job market have a right to know that they have learned something, he said. ``You can't have a democratic society when the elite -- the college-educated kids -- don't have these abilities to think critically,'' he said.

This made me laugh out loud. Another thing you can't have in a democratic society, or any other one, is an ``elite'' that constitutes a quarter of the adult population.

elitist
Current meaning accurately defined here as ``what I've never been taught, can't be bothered to learn, and probably couldn't even if I tried, so am determined to screw up thoroughly for everyone, and you in particular.''

Eli the ice man
Electronics mnemonic:

Voltage (E) in an inductor (L) is ahead of current (i) [by 90° of phase].

Current (i) in a capacitor (C) precedes voltage (e) [by 90° of phase].

ELL
English-Language Learner. This term is used in language-acquisition research to distinguish students learning English as a second language. Occasionally it must occur to researchers that students whose first language is English (EO) are also learning English, in some sense. That's the sense that always occurs to me, but terms like know and learn are necessarily vague.

ellipsometry
The measurement of light-polarization rotation by matter.

The Cardona group has a 500-word introduction.

ELM, Elm
ELectronic Mail or Easy-to-Learn Mail program, a message user agent (MUA). Freeware. A daughter or step-daughter code is Pine.

This faq is associated with the comp.mail.elm newsgroup.

ELMAS
ELectrochemical MicroAnalytical System.

ELMB
Embedded Local Monitor Board.

ELO
Electric Light Orchestra. A rock band. One of those with a ``<Foo> In The City'' song title.

ELO
Epitaxial Lift-Off.

ELODIE, Elodie
A ``cross-dispersed échelle spectrograph permanently located in a temperature-controlled room in the first floor of the 1.93-m telescope building'' at OHP. It's hard to find an expansion of this acronym, if that's what it is, and I've checked technical articles going back to 1996. In French texts, the instrument's name is sometimes written in all-caps and sometimes not.

Élodie is also a common-enough woman's name in French. From its Visigothic roots, it can be interpreted to mean `foreign riches.' My understanding is that the correct spelling uses initial É and not E, but the instances I can find instantly, of the personal name, all use plain E.

I find this apparent coyness about acronym expansions irritating. It occurs with acronyms in all languages I've had any substantial experience of, but Francophones seem to take greater liberties in divorcing acronyms from their expansions. See, for another example, fémis.

The newsiest application of ELODIE has been in the successful search for exoplanet. In 2006, it is being succeeded in this role by SOPHIE. Sophie is also a woman's name, but this SOPHIE has an unobscure expansion.

ELP
Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

ELRA
European Language Resources Association.

ELS
Energy Loss Spectroscopy. Usually EELS

ELS
Equidistant Letter Sequence[s]. From such mundane concepts can grow major controversies.

ELSI
Ethical, Legal and Social {Implications|Issues}. Is it right that I should have a separate entry for this term, given the entries following it? Am I breaking any laws? What do people think about this? How will this decision impact mankind in future centuries?

ELSI
Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications.

``The National Human Genome Research Institute's (NHGRI) Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Program was established in 1990 as an integral part of the Human Genome Project (HGP) to foster basic and applied research and support outreach. The ELSI program funds and manages studies related to the ethical, legal and social implications of genetic and genomic research, and supports workshops, research consortia and policy conferences related to these topics. The ELSI program at NHGRI is the largest supporter nationwide of ELSI research.''

This reminds me of the line attributed to LBJ (regarding FBI director-for-life J. Edgar Hoover), that it was ``probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.'' (This appeared in the NYTimes on October 31, 1971; I have no idea whether it's accurate.) For more LBJ mots, apocryphal and canonical, see the Veep entry.

ELSI, ELSI in Science
Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in Science. A project of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The ``ELSI in Science program is a pilot project designed to stimulate discussions on the implications of selected areas of scientific research. These modules probably will be most useful to educators and students at the middle school through high school level. However, we hope that other visitors will find the information interesting and useful as well.''

ELT
Emergency Locator Transmitter. A system that automatically transmits a distress signal from a crashed or downed plane. The systems are meant for planes other than commercial passenger aircraft operated in controlled airspace (since the latter are continually tracked anyway). Thus, the main beneficiaries are the operators of small private planes. They are also the main opponents. Reminds one of motorcycle helmet laws.

The first systems, mandated by many countries in the 1970's, transmitted analog signals at 121.5 MHz.

New digital systems under development will transmit digital bursts of information at 406 MHz.

ELT
English Language Teaching. This term seems to be Commonwealth English, like one-off.

Sometimes the term is used rather loosely. For example, the University of Manchester offers an M.Ed. in ELT. My personal experience is that when I took a cab from the Manchester airport, the driver understood me but I did not understand him. I had more success in the shops in town, and a friend of mine is a Mancunian/English bilingual, with a smattering of ancestral Ukrainian. Well, in case you had any doubt, this information is useless.

ELTM
English Language Teaching Management. And you thought the last entry was useless.

ELV
Expendable Launch Vehicle. NASA acronym.

ELVIS
projekt elvis wants you to propose an acronym expansion for ELVIS. Hint (?), they are (or maybe just were) a project group concerned with virtual, scientific-technical laboratories on the internet.

Go to their site and hear the music for ``Your Teddy Bear'' sounding like it's being played by an Oktoberfest accordion.

ELWC
English as a Language of Wider Communication. One of four categories defined by E. Judd for describing the function of English in different ``sociopolitical contexts.'' There will be a brief description at a future entry for taxonomies of English language use.

EL2
A deep trap in GaAs. See G. N. Martin, A. Mitonneau and A. Mircea, ``Electron Traps in Bulk and Epitaxial GaAs Crystals,'' Electronics Letters 13, #7, pp. 191-193 (1977).

Pressure studies by George Samara demonstrated that EL2 is an antisite defect.

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