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GL, G-L
Ginsberg-Landau.

GL
GluconoLactone.

GL
Grand Luxe. `Great Luxury.' Follows the name of a car model and indicates no particular distinction, other than that it is not the same as vehicles that have a different set of letters following the model name. Cf. GLE, GLI.

GL
Graphics Language.

GL
Graphics Library.

GL
Gravitational Lens.

.gl
(Domain code for) Greenland. It's not just USAF bases, you know. I think the major export is ice cores.

GL
``Guiding Light.'' A CBS daytime soap opera. Originally a radio soap, it made a successful transition to television, unlike most other radio soaps (such as ``Stella Dallas'' and ``Ma Perkins''). It premiered on TV in 1952 and ran every season until 2009. Okay, I'm not sure what happened the year of the scriptwriters' strike. Couldn't they ad lib it? Couldn't they go through the motions in their sleep? Maybe they could turn up the melodramatic organ noises and just mumble through a few episodes.

GLA
Gate Logic Array.

GLA
Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheres.

GLAAD
Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

GLAD
GLancing-Angle Deposition.

Gladly
You mean ``Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear,'' a beloved character in children's stories?

glam
Stylish slang (what else?) for glamour, glamorous.

A large class of words ending in -our in Commonwealth spelling take an -or ending in the US spelling. This occurs only when the o[u] is an unaccented shwa. Examples include the words with American spellings arbor, ardor, candor, color, dolor, endeavor, favor, flavor, honor, humor, labor, neighbor, rigor, savior, valor, vigor. In both orthographic regimes, the -ous adjective form ends in -orous. American thus avoids a stem change. [The same principle, of minimizing stem lengthenings upon the addition of suffixes, can be seen in the more conservative American usage respecting the duplication of final consonants when a suffix begins in a vowel.]

Words ending in an -our that is not an unaccented shwa are spelled identically in American and British. Some examples, all with the same vowel, are contour, detour, velour.

Another pattern that yields an identical spelling is the double r. The words error, horror, mirror, and terror are now written without a u in British English, although some -rrour spellings have been common in the past. One -or spelling that used to be fairly universal is furor, but the Italian spelling furore seems to have become very popular in Britain.

The singular spelling, in American, of the word glamour, may be due to its meaning: France and French are historically associated with glamour. To suggest, often mockingly, a greater sophistication or stylishness, a French pronunciation will be affected. (And then, of course, the not-a-shwa rule mentioned above kicks in.) [Another of instances of such an affectation, also playing on the prestige of French, is the use in Spanish of the pronunciation of bien as ``bian'' (q.v.).]

Moreover, the -our ending is recognized as characteristic of words borrowed from French, whereas words borrowed (directly) from Latin more typically end -or. Awareness of this is supported by the presence of words and phrases in English, such as amour [not completely incidentally, there's a site for Dorothy Lamour], tour de force and foubarre du jour. Consequently, any word ending in -our may be identified (or misidentified) as of French extraction and pronounced homestyle for effect, as occasionally occurs with colour, honour, and sometimes imperceptibly with velour (the Modern French cognate is velours). On our next broadcast: ``Lexical Profiling: Is it Right?''

The irony is that this happens more often with glamour, whose -our does not reflect a French etymology. A further irony is that the word evolved from the now quite unglamorous word grammar (used to suggest sophistication).

In the song ``You're in My Heart,'' Rod Stewart sings

You're essay, in glamour -- Please, pardon the grammar --

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GLAH
Greek, Latin and Ancient History. Name of a department at the University of Calgary. Host of the 1999 Conference of the CACW

GLAME
GNU/Linux Audio MEchanics. The version current on May 5, 2001 is 0.4.1, so perhaps it's premature to call it, as many do, ``the gimp of audio processing.'' It's really more like the toddler. Oh wait -- that's ``the GIMP of audio processing.''

G. L. Arnold
Pseudonym used for a time by George Lichtheim.

glass ceiling
Shrill feminist leaders like bisexual lawyer Patricia Ireland (former airline stewardess; nice gams!) petulantly accuse America's corporate leadership of erecting a ``glass ceiling'' -- an invisible barrier that prevents women from advancing to the highest levels of management.

Nothing could be further from the truth! Far from constructing a glass ceiling, the fact is that today's corporate leadership found this ceiling already in place when they arrived! It's been there all along! Today's corporate leaders are completely innocent, see?

In reality, today's corporate leaders are the victims of their own virtue: solicitous of the interests of their female employees, they recognized that as long the glass ceiling was in place, no women could be promoted into higher management, because then subordinates could look up their skirts from below the glass ceiling!

As you can imagine, solving this problem has been assigned a very high priority. At this very moment, memoranda are being drafted to request the commitment of resources for drawing up guidelines for the selection of committees that will look into making recommendations on possible ways to address the many, many difficulties foreseen, such as reflection (the generalized `black patents' problem), protocol during ethernet cable installation, and how to deploy carpeting in common areas without inadvertently elevating the status of corporate serfs and industrial sharecroppers. These are challenging problems, but there is a patient confidence that they will soon, or eventually, be overcome. Remember, it took ten years to put two men on the moon, and the moon was already opaque.

This site is studying the glass ceiling building code as well. They're pretty rash, talking about shattering barriers without considering the danger of laceration.

glaze over
What the eyes of random strangers do after they hear a 'tischer's honest response to ``What's your field?''

Not just any strangers. Only random strangers.

GLB
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual.

The rock group Ten Years After had a hit with ``I'd Love to Change the World'' in 1971. It begins with these lines:

Everywhere is freaks and hairies,
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity?

(Maybe that ``hairies'' is ``Hares,'' short for Hare Krishnas.) I'd love to change the glossary and include this, but I don't want people to think I'm a homophobe or some other kind of social pervert. I've considered presenting this strictly as a historical or musical datum, but still I fear the PC police. I guess I'll just have to leave it out. Again as so often, it is you the glossary patron who loses out.

GLBC
Georgia Legislative Black Caucus.

GLBT
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Trans{gender[ed]|sexual}. Unity in schism.

The ``Federal GLOBE's chartered purpose is to eliminate prejudice and discrimination in the federal government based on sexual orientation...''

GLOBE is systematically capitalized: ``www.FedGLOBE.org: Serving the U.S. Federal Government GLBT community since December 1997.'' If it's an acronym, I don't know where the big O comes in. That's why I put it here instead of in its own GLOBE entry.

GLBTQ
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender[ed], Queer. The Q is also less often expanded as ``Questioning.'' I've also seen ``Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, and Queer.'' That's much rarer, which is just as well: it ought to be written GLBTTQ but can't, because that's taken.

Here's what AHD4 (2000) has to say about the noun queer:

  1. Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a homosexual person.
  2. Usage Problem A lesbian, gay male, bisexual, or transgendered person.

Queer is a ``reclaimed word.'' You're only allowed to use it if you are the kind of person who can take direct personal offense when it is used by someone else who could not take direct personal offense when it was used.

I'm sure there are some clever theories to explain why GLBTQ is not equivalent to Q and hence not redundant. But perhaps one may be forgiven (No! You may be forgiven nothing!) for suspecting the author of ``GLBTQ'' of wanting to pad the initialism to suggest that this group is diverse and large. An alternate possibility, which nothing in my experience supports, is that the Q group is giddily captious, and that not having one's particular sexuality honored by inclusion in the initialism is an opportunity to take offense.

Just for the record, this entry came as soon as I happened to notice the initialism, on December 13, 2005. Stay tuned for the next extension. Update: as of February 24, 2007, it's still GLBTQ! Danger! If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward!

Oh -- I was just out of it. I was contemptibly ignorant of GLBTI, GLBTIH, and their various, um, permutations. I'll be sure to add entries for those very soon. But why does G so often come first? Isn't that sexist?

GLBTTQ
From a defunct webpage, courtesy of Google.com:
The non-heterosexual community is not one community but many, and individuals identify themselves in a variety of ways. We have used the names 'gay,' 'lesbian,'  'bisexual,'  'Two Spirited,'  'transgendered' and 'queer' to compose the acronmy glbttq (which could be pronounced glub-tok), but we recognize that this list is not complete, and that there are many other terms people use.

GLC
Greater London Council.

GLCA
Great Lakes Colleges Association.

GLCM
Ground-Launched Cruise Missile.

GLE
Grand Luxe Executive. `Great Luxury' Executive. Follows the name of a car model. Cf. GL, GLI.

GLI
Grand Luxe (fuel-)Injection. Follows the name of a car model. Cf. GL, GLE.

Glimpse
GLobal IMPlicit SEarch. A ``very powerful indexing and query system that allows you to search through all your files very quickly. It can be used by individuals for their personal file systems as well as by organizations for large data collections. Glimpse is also the basis of GlimpseHTTP, which provides search for web sites, and it is the default search engine in Harvest...'' which ``is an integrated set of tools to gather, extract, organize, search, cache, and replicate relevant information across the Internet.''

Glimpse is based on agrep, which you might (as I did) suppose stands for (University of) Arizona grep. In fact, it stands for Approximate grep -- it's fault tolerant.

UB's Wings makes available a glimpse search tool. It's one among many hundreds.

GLIN
Global Legal Information Network. Are you sure this information is legal?

g-line
The g line of the mercury spectrum, with a wavelength of 436 nm, was used for semiconductor (silicon) photolithography starting in the 1980's. Not the same as g-string, which was used for seminude (silicone) photography starting in the 1960's. Cf. i-line.

GLIS
Geographic and Land Information Society. Name of a member organization of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM). Around the turn of this century, it merged with another ACSM society, the American Cartographic Association to form the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS). Anyway, I can't have made that up -- I probably read it or possibly misunderstood it at the ACSM website. But GLIS seems still or again to be in business.

GLL
GaLiLeo. NASA probe.

GLN
Global Location Number. EDI term.

GLN, Gln
GLutamiNe. An amino acid. Also ``Q.'' To deepen your confusion, see Glutamic acid (GLU) below.

GLNDSMC
Gays and Lesbians of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's College (NDSMC). An organization not affiliated with these Roman Catholic institutions in the same way that other student organizations are. This is not a surprise.

Glinda was the Good Witch of the North.

global warming
Brrrrrrrrrrrr!!! Bring it on! Do the window defrosters too!

GLOCHANT
GLObal CHange and the ANTarctic. An SCAR program.

GloMo
GLObal MObile information systems program of DARPA.

GLONASS
GLObal NAvigation Satellite System[s].

gloog
The sound of a gas breaking through a liquid surface or barrier.

GLORIA
GLObal Research in International Affairs (center). See PRISM.

glossariolalia
A disorder characterized by inability to control the addition of new entries to an already bloated glossary.

[column]

GLP
Gold Latin Poet[ry]. The ``A'' team. Vergil and Horace, and maybe Ovid (vide SLP).

GLPHR
Global Lawyers and Physicians for Human Rights. What a skin-crawly combination.

GLQ
An academic periodical with four numbered issues per volume, and one volume per year. Here are a couple of excerpts of an inaugural note ``From The Editors'' (Carolyn Dinshaw and David M. Halperin), pp. iii-iv of vol. 1, no. 1, November 1993:
Time for a new journal.
    Not that there's exactly a shortage of journals--or even journals that publish work in lesbian and gay studies. For two decades the Journal of Homosexuality has provided a home for research--especially in the social sciences--by and about lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people. Lately a spate of journals has featured articles and special issues on topics in lesbian and gay studies. But there hasn't been a journal dedicated solely to this interdisciplinary field, a field that is at once rapidly expanding and delimiting itself. We need a journal that can keep up with all this new work, can pause to look at what's becoming lesbian and gay studies even as it happens, and crucially, can provide opportunities for critique of the field-in-progress. This is GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

(You've convinced me! And I just happen to have a contribution available, recently reje--umm, I uh, that I recently withdrew from consideration for Journal of Homosexuality. I think it would be perfect for your journal!) Three paragraphs later:

    So much for G and L. What about that Q? It takes us in two directions at once. Towards the academic legitimacy of quarterly, with all the genteel associations that centuries of critical quarterlies guarantee. [Excellent! I'm coming up for tenure next year!] And in the opposite direction, towards the fractious, the disruptive, the irritable, the impatient, the unapologetic, the bitchy, the camp, the queer. [They've got my department chair's secretary down to a tee.]

GLR
Georgia Legislative Review. A publication of the Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy (SCSPP) at Clark Atlanta University (CAU). Begun in 1973, revived in 1991 as an annual report.

GLSEN
Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network. Pronounced ``glisten.''

GLSVLSI
Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI. Sponsored by ACM and its SIGDA. Since 1991.

GLU
General Logic Unit. Doesn't seem to have anything to do with military intelligence (MI). Too bad.

President Eisenhower's stock has gone up dramatically over the last few decades, as we've had the unhappy opportunity to compare him to his successors. Something similar has been remarked of Algol.

GLU, Glu, glu
Glutamic Acid. An amino acid. Also ``E''! Not to be confused with Glutamine (GLN or Q) or with Glycine (GLY or G). In case you're wondering how they came up with some of these one-letter codes, the answer is, in part, by elimination. There are twenty amino acids and only twenty-six alphabetic characters, and some serious alliteration. There are four amino acids whose names start in A.

glue
White glue is polyvinyl acetate (PVA) resin. Yellow glue is an aliphatic compound resin, but Bob Villa didn't give precise details of the chemistry. He said you can sand it. I think it's white glue with yellow dye. Hide glue is hydrolyzed collagen.

glug
Normally spelled gloog.

gluhwein
Mulled wine, glogg. The name gluhwein refers to a German concoction that is spiced, usually sweetened wine, usually served warm. Happy New Year! The German word, Glühwein, literally means `glow wine.' I think this refers not to how the wine looks, but how you feel and your face looks after you drink enough of it.

GLuke
The Gospel of Luke. One of the synoptic gospels. Use of G in this way is systematic, if not productive. The entry for GMatt is longer.

glycerine
Traditional name for what is now ``gycerol'': 1,2,3-propan-tri-ol, or something like that. Good lubricant for a room-temperature application: unjamming locks and jar lids. Mixed with hide glue as a plasticizer, to increase flexibility and resiliency of final bond. Attractive because it's non-toxic in small quantities (in contrast, say, with glycol.) Tremendous quantities are produced as a byproduct of the saponification process. Even so, it's more expensive than sorbitol, which is also used as a glue plasticizer (and which is less volatile, so leads to longer-term plasticity). I guess we just don't wash enough.

GLY, Gly, gly
Glycine. An amino acid. Also ``G,'' unsurprisingly. If you want surprises, see Glutamic acid (GLU).

glycol
1,2-ethan-di-ol, or something like that. Very popular automobile engine antifreeze. Not at all a good thing to ingest. Observe that it is absent in the meth-drinker classics Tears of a Komsomol Girl and Spirit of Geneva.

glycogen
A linear polymer of glucose molecules. Glucose in your bloodstream (I assume you are a human; if you are a robot just archive the page and don't ask silly questions) is absorbed in small quantities by all muscle cells, and when not used it is hydrolyzed into glycogen for storage. When your muscle cells need a sudden burst of energy, like when your girlfriend's husband appears (`fight-or-flight,' it's called), enzymes in your muscles anaerobically convert the component glucose molecules into pyruvic acid. (Actually something that's almost pyruvic acid.) You quickly use up this energy source and lose strength. Also, the acid build-up makes your muscles hurt. (The acid is lactic acid.) If you keep exercising at a lower pace, the acid burn goes away faster, because the lactic acid diffuses from your fast-twitch muscles to your slow twitch muscles, which can use lactic acid almost as if it were glucose.

For longer-term effort, you need to get some oxygen in there, both for final aerobic conversion of pyruvic acid (via the Krebs cycle), and for the (completely aerobic) conversion of fatty acids.

Under normal conditions -- i.e., when you're not exercising -- something like a third of the energy used by your muscles may come from glycogen.

.gm
(Domain code for) Gambia.

My suggestion for an advertising campaign theme, whenever the country gets serious about tourism, is ``Gambolling in Gambia.'' They can use it royalty-free until they build the casino, but I want a cut from ``Gambling in Gambia.''

GM
General Manager.

GM
General Motors. The largest employer in Buffalo, even after spinning off a third of its work force into independent parts suppliers in the 1990's.

GM
Genetically Modified. The introduction of genetically modified food products is stirring up a lot of controversy and resistance in Europe, but the issue sleeps in the US. (On the other hand, foods and drinks sterilized by irradiation were introduced long ago in Europe, but met resistance in the US.)

GM-related AAP pleonasms are beginning to occur, as for example in these minutes from the British House of Commons.

GM
Government Motors. A jocular, or rueful, re-expansion of the GM initialism. It was motivated by the arrangments surrounding GM's bankruptcy in 2009, leaving GM about 70% US-government owned (temporarily -- i.e., for the foreseeable future -- i.e., with no end in sight).

gm., gm
GraM. Older-style and less mystifying abbreviation of the metric mass unit (normally g). It also had the neat quasipalindromic property (to a decent order of approximation) that .316227766 gm = 316.227766 mg.

GM
Grand Master. A computed chess ranking.

GMA
Glycol MethAcrylate.

GMA
Good Morning America. A morning TV program from ABC. Something vaguely to do with news.

GMA
Grocery Manufacturers of America. Unappetizing name.

GMA
Gulf of Maine Aquarium.

GMAB
Give Me A Break.

GMAC
General Motors Acceptance Corporation. An achievement in the annals of euphemism, standing for an auto loan division. Pronounced as an initialism (``gee em ay cee'').

GMAC
Graduate Management Admission Council. They explain that they're ``the people behind the GMAT® -- the test used by nearly 2000 business schools.''

GMAC explains that it ``has worked with business schools around the world for nearly 50 years, so [they] know the MBA and its possibilities better than anyone [else].''

In resources intended to ``help you decide whether an MBA is right for you,'' they explain that ``[j]ust wanting the degree is not enough. ... Business school admissions counselors want to see evidence ... the typical MBA candidate ... can clearly articulate his or her motivations for wanting to earn an MBA. You are not ready if: ... Your career goals are no more specific than `I want to command a higher salary.' ...''

This is overly wordy despite drastic editing, so you can guess that there is a simple truth being hidden here. There is. The simple truth is that B-schools want applicants (supplicants, in the case of the bigger-name schools) to flatter the schools' conceit that they are imparting wisdom rather than a credential. So don't just sit there staring at the blank essay portion of your application form. Do something! Specifically: Get Up! Turn Around! Pull Down Your Pants and Give 'Em What They Want!

Just don't say you want to live a quality lifestyle and that that takes a lot of do-re-mi, which an MBA can help you earn or at least make. Those who deal in money prefer to think that they deal in something else -- service, knowledge, facilitation, education. The MBA is actually a pretty straightforward transaction: you give them money, and they give you a receipt called a diploma. The receipt proves that you were good enough to be admitted to whatever school you paid for. If you do very well as an undergraduate, then your college professors will recommend that you go for your MBA directly. In most cases, they recommend that you learn about the business world by doing business in the business world. In either case, your educational achievement is recognized in the fact of admission.

Once admitted, for appearances' sake, you should take some courses. There are both two-year and one-year programs, tailored to fit different circumstances. It's possible to compress a two-year program down to as little as 11 months because, again, the MBA is not about what you learned in order to graduate, but what you learned in order to be admitted. They could compress it down to nothing: you could be admitted in April, attend orientation in June, have your yearbook picture taken in October and attend December commencement, but this kind of program is still unusual among the better-name schools. On the other hand, if you've got a lot of time, then you can start an MBA part-time. The solid business case for taking MBA courses on evenings and weekends rests on the fact that you're a masochist.

G-man
Government MAN. More information at the G-men. If you just came here following the link at that entry, well, like, what did you expect?

GMark
The Gospel of Mark. One of the synoptic gospels. Use of G in this way is systematic, if not productive.

Mark is widely regarded as the oldest of the four gospels, although according to Irenaeus, Matthew wrote a gospel in Hebrew while Peter and Paul were still alive, and Mark wrote his after Peter and Paul had died.

Albert Schweitzer's view of GMark was highly influential throughout the twentieth century. He argued that Mark's intention was to portray Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. Mark uses the book of Daniel (the most apocalyptic OT book, and perhaps the vaguest as well) and borrows the ``Son of Man'' epithet (unexplained in Daniel, as various others are unexplained). However, Mark also uses Isaiah, Psalms, and Exodus. And of course, over the century or so before the gospel was canonized, it may well have been re-edited...

(A Hermeneutical Law: to the analysis of every canonical document there is a can of worms that includes ``manuscript tradition.'')

(A sociological fact: Bible hermeneutics is done only by those who can bear spending their lives on invisible tissues of uncertainty layered on uncertainty.)

The MK mentioned at the 419 entry has explained many times that, while missionaries are happy to give free Bibles to those who ask, they prefer to start potential marks out on (sorry, I mean, to begin the salvation of souls with) the Gospel of, uh, Mark. Then they move on to some other N.T. books. The O.T. is a bit unsavory in places, maybe not so edifying. Ol' Mr. Tetragrammaton, you know, He was a bit hot-headed in His younger days.

Hark! Our Nigeria-raised MK has repented her earlier words:

> Silly me.  The main reason, of course, for holding off on the Old
> Testament was all that polygamy & animal sacrifice.  Plus disemboweling
> enemies.

Well, now, not so fast, there! You've got to take the good with the bad. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water. (And don't toss the plastic food-item baskets in the trash containers.)

[column] Some believe they see influences of Homer in GMark, either as allusions or as a narrative model. Hey, why not? FWIW, it has also been claimed that the narrative part of the Old Testament was redacted in Hellenistic times on the basis of Homer as a narrative model. A version of the Homeric Mark thesis was published by Dennis McDonald The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). (He argues mostly for the Odyssey, a little for Iliad). This is reviewed by Douglas Geyer in ``Homer or Not Homer? Mark 4:35-41 in Recent Study.''

GMAT
Graduate Management (School) Admission Test. A half-day standardized test run by ETS, designed in consultation with the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).

GMatt, GMatthew
The Gospel of Matthew. One of the synoptic gospels. Use of G in this way is systematic, if not productive.

The question at the center of NT text criticism is why the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke partially agree and partially disagree. Other scriptures adopted part of what is found in Matthew (the gospel of the Ebionites borrows much of it but excludes GMatt's genealogy and infancy accounts; the Diatessaron, which cribs in sequence from Mark, Luke, and Matthew, also omits Matthew's genealogy). Luke, however, does not merely omit material found in GMatt; he has a number of differences, both substantive and minor, particularly in the birth narrative (BN, q.v.), passion narrative (PN, q.v.), and resurrection story. If one doesn't want to accept that Luke simply rejected sections of GMatt (or that Matthew rejected portions of GLuke, if one takes the less common view that Luke wrote first) then the simplest solution is to suppose that there was another source, now lost (and never attested, FWIW), from which they both worked, called Q.

In the simplest, ``two-source'' hypothesis (2SH), the agreements of Matthew and Luke arise simply from their common use of Q, and the disagreements arise from their independent use of their imaginations or different additional sources or both. (Both appear to have borrowed extensively from Mark, although in places they also agree against Mark. For Luke, close textual analysis seems to have convinced many that his work is indebted to a number of sources, possibly including the gospel of John or some proto-John document.)

Alternative hypotheses suggest themselves if one is willing to accept that Luke rejected portions of GMatt or that Matthew rejected portions of GLuke. (Don't try this at home! You could burn yourself forever!) The three-source theory (3ST, q.v.) and the Farrer Hypothesis (FH, q.v.) are just such hypotheses, assuming respectively that a Q did or did not exist.

An interesting feature of GMatt is the occurrence of a dozen or so ``fulfillment quotations,'' as they are known. These are passages where the gospel says (using Greek that is quite formulaic) ``...in order that what was said by the prophet would be fulfilled, when he said [insert O.T. quote here].'' Most other O.T. quotations in the N.T., whether in GMatt or other books, have wording that closely resembles the Septuagint (LXX). The fulfillment quotes (in Greek, of course) are expressed differently than in the LXX, and tend to resemble more closely the sense of the Hebrew that we have available to us, suggesting that Matthew or a Matthew redactor read the O.T. in the original Hebrew and made his own translations. [You may ask why the evangelist Matthew or a redactor of his writings would have done a better translation job than the LXX translators, but it's not assumed that he did. The Hebrew text (and, apparently to a lesser degree, the Greek text) continued to evolve after the LXX translation, and so diverged. Any later Greeking of the Hebrew would be closer to that later Hebrew, and probably closer to the Hebrew that eventually came down to us.]

You got all that? Good, now here's a further complication: outside of the fulfillment quotes, when Matthew quotes the O.T. his Greek is closer to the LXX than Mark's or Luke's. Oy gevalt! Also of interest (well, of equal interest): Matthean priority. Saint Mark says ``grrr.''

Back there when we introduced ``a Matthew redactor,'' you may have started to think that early copyists may have introduced changes to the gospels that make it impossible to sort out from apparent similarities and differences now, what the original dependences may have been. (For example, the couple of non-Matthian fulfillment quotes may be not Markan but redactorial.) In a word: yup.

GMA welding, GMAW
Gas Metal Arc Welding. Also called MIG. Implicitly, the metal is not tungsten (GTAW, TIG) or some other high-melting metal, but instead is a ``filler metal'' that in addition to conducting current to the arc at the weld point, also becomes integrated in the bond. The gas -- helium (He), argon (Ar), or a mix -- serves as a coolant; it flows axially along the electrode, which guides it to the bond. GMAW tends to heat a substantially larger area than GTAW.

GmbH
Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung. German for (commercial) organization with limited liability. Like the popular British ``Ltd.'' (partnerships).

GMBP
Good Medicine in Bad Places. A distance medical consulting initiative of sorts.

Gmc, Gmc.
GerManiC. I suppose you could analyze that as ``crazy about spears.'' The root ger or gar originally meant spear (so a german was a spearman -- spear carrier or spear thrower, I assume both). Cf. SN. The same root is the basis of such words as guerre in French, guerra and guerrilla in Spanish.

In words that English gets from Norman French, the initial gee is often softened into the double-u glide (thus we have guarantee from French and warranty from Norman French). French guerre's Norman cognate is our word war.

Actually, I'll have to look into this a little further. It seems the Germanic root is reconstructed as beginning in w.

Outside of the English-speaking world, one of the places where Shakespeare has traditionally been very popular is Germany. Of course, they have always used translations into modern German. In the movie MASH, the guys bring in a ringer, Capt. Oliver Harmon Jones (played by Fred Williamson), whose nickname is ``Spearchucker.''

GMC
General Motors Corporation. Marque used by GM for its trucks. (Except for those marketed as Chevies or Hummers.)

GMC
Giant Molecular Cloud. An interstellar gas cloud with a mass in the range of 104 to 106 solar masses.

GMC
Global Marketing Committee.

GMD
Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung mbH (Society for Mathematics and Data Processing) in St. Augustin. They changed the name by accretion. Now they're GMD -- Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH (Eng.: GMD -- German National Research Center for Information Technology.

GMDC
General Merchandise Distributors Council. ``Since 1970, the voice of the supermarket general merchandise and health and beauty care industry.''

Bad lawyer infestation at that site: ``I assume full responsibility and hold GMDC harmless for all information I obtain from or provide to the system. GMDC does not endorse, affirm or in any other manner warrant the content, accuracy or completeness of such information or assume any liability for same.''

GME
Graduate Medical Education.

G-men
Government MEN -- informal name for FBI agents. The obvious singular form is also used. The term went mercifully out of circulation just in time to avoid having to be improved or neutered into something like ``G-persons.'' Cf. T-men.

GMENAC
Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee.

GMHN
Georgia Mental Health Network. I've got Georgia on my mind.

GMHS
Global Message Handling Service.

GMI
Giant MagnetoImpedance. See GMZ.

GMO
Genetically { Manipulated | Modified } Organism. Pull the Switch, Igor!

GMÖOR
Gesellschaft für Mathematik, Ökonomie und Operations Research. `German Society for Mathematics, Economics, and Operations Research.' Merged with DGOR in 1998 to form GOR.

GMP
Good Manufacturing Protocols.

GMP
Guanosine MonoPhosphate. Cyclic GMP is released by mast cells and mediates bronchoconstriction. Cf. GDP.

GMR
Giant MagnetoResistance. A phenomenon found in layered or superlattice materials, in which ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic layers alternate. The effect apparently arises from large magnetic-field dependence in the interface scattering. First discovered in Fe/Cr superlattices [M. N. Babich, J. M. Broto, A. Fert, F. Nguyen Van Dau, F. Petroff, P. Etienne, G. Creuzet, A. Friederich and J. Chazelas, PRL 61, 2472 (1988)] and in single sandwiches of Cr between Fe layers [G. Binash, P. Grünberg, F. Saurenbach and W. Zinn, PRB 39, 95 (1991)].

Here's something.

GMR
Giant Monopole Resonance. A nuclear giant resonance. Typical energy, ignoring isospin (i.e. electrostatics), about <aitch-bar> omega = 41 MeV A1/3.

GMS
Global Manufacturing System.

GMSK
Gaussian-filtered Minimum-Shift Keying.

GMSV
Good Morning Silicon Valley. A tech feature of the San Jose Mercury.

GMT
Greenwich Mean Time. Greenwich is pronounced `GREN-itch.' Time kept by the Greenwich observatory, which defined the zero meridian. GMT has been replaced by UTC. The observatory was relocated and eventually closed.

GMTA
Great Minds Think Alike.

I agree.

GMTR
Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope. In India.

GMU
George Mason University.

GMW
Gram Molecular Weight. The mass of a molecule in units of 931 MeV/c², labelled with the units grams per mole (g/mol).

GMZ
Giant Magnetoimpedance. The letter Z represents impedance.

gn
Good Night. Chatese.

GN
Gastroenterology Nursing. The Official Journal of the Society of Gastroenterology Nurses and Associates, Inc

[column]

Gn.
Latin, Gnaeus. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing the full tria nomina. Much less common than Cn., q.v.

.gn
(Domain code for) Guinea.

GNC, GN&C
Guidance, Navigation, and Control. NASAnese.

GND, gnd.
GrouND. Electronically, this is called ``earth'' in the UK and tierra in Spanish. More about the latter can be found at this SICS entry.

GNER
Great North Eastern (England) Railway.

GNIAR
Greater Northwest Indiana Association of Realtors.

GNIS
Geographic Names Information System. Looks like they put a lot of work into it. It helps to know that they call a city or building a ``feature.''

GNMA
(US) Government (US) National Mortgage Association. It's usually called ``Ginnie Mae.'' (Perhaps ``Gran Ma'' might be a better alias for this acronym, but Fidel Castro nationalized that in 1960.) Ginnie Mae is a wholly government-owned corporation within the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Ginnie Mae was created in 1968, out of portions of the FNMA (``Fannie Mae'') that were not sold off when Fannie Mae (until then a government entity) was launched as a GSE.

GNN, gnn
Global Network Navigator. Lame.

GNP
Grand National Party. One of South Korea's major political parties. Ahead of elections in April 2004, it holds 147 seats in the 273-member National Assembly. That looks like a majority to me, but GDP is called the ``opposition'' because the president is of a different party. If parliamentary elections go in April the way opinion polling has gone in March, that won't be a problem any more. (Actually, President Roh is of no particular party, and he's not acting president. It's complicated. See the MDP entry.)

GNP
Gross National Product. Differs from GDP in including nationally-owned but off-shore product, excluding foreign-owned product. In other words, GNP goes by ownership, GDP by location.

GNR
Graphene NanoRibbon.

GnRH
GoNadotropin-Releasing Hormone. (See hMG.)

GNS
Global Navigation System.

GNSO
Generic Names Supporting Organization (of ICANN). Successor of DNSO.

Folks extremely unhappy with ICANN got a hold of the domain gnso.org first. It's an ugly joke. Their http://www.dnso.com is funnier.

GNSS
Global Navigation Satellite System[s].

GNT
Greek New Testament. At the college level in the US, the GNT is typically third- or fourth-semester reading for Ancient Greek course sequences.

GNU
GNU's Not Unix.

Reclaimer: In the words of Dave Barry, ``I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.'' A recursive name; I don't know why they didn't call it UNUNU and make it palindromically recursive.

The long-range goal is to provide a complete alternative to Unix that looks like it but is free in every sense of the word (vide FSF). As John Maynard Keynes said, ``In the long run, we are all dead.'' At least, Keynes is dead, and GNU is far from complete. However, various useful pieces are available: The very popular editor emacs, some PostScript-related products (Ghostscript, Ghostview, GSview), a command shell with a good name (bash), a debugger (gdb), an assembler (gas), and C/C++ compilers (gcc/g++, originally written by Richard Stallman, later modified by Michael Tiemann and others). The compilers were an issue in the mid-nineties -- at a certain point, Sun released an operating system (Solaris 2 = SunOS 5) that did not come bundled with C compilers. Because of the intimate relation of Unix and C (the former was written in the latter, for instance), this bundling was once traditional, but lately the trend has been to leave it off. It's hard not to feel cheated. The main advantage of new operating systems is that they force customers to spend money on new software that is in no noticeable way better than the earlier software. (Although that's not as bad as the retrogression represented by successive versions of MS Word.)

G.O.
Gentil Organisateur. Has the meaning at Club Med that ``associate'' has at Wal-Mart: lowly on-site employee who may be required to perform any sufficiently demeaning task.

GO
Government of Ontario [Canada (.ca)] trains and buses, connecting Toronto to its suburbs. This was a misnomer for a period of precisely four years (1998-2001, incl.), when the province dumped it onto the municipalities involved. Cf. TTC.

On the model of federalize, you'd think provincialise in the sense appropriate here might be useful. Googling up some ersatz usage research, and even discounting the French hits, provincialise (in the governmental sense) appears vastly to outnumber deprovincialise and de-provincialise. Partly, this is because in many cases the latter idea is more gracefully rendered as nationalise or federalise.

The ugliness of the term provincialize is reflected in the fact that the first 5% or so of hits are dictionary entries, and that it appears on pages of fashionably post-modern literary criticism and at kinky pornography sites. In an interesting contrast with the -ise spelling, there are almost 50% more hits for the (I estimate) 60% uglier term deprovincialize. (This is probably because provincialism is regarded as a naturally occurring backward condition, rather than the result of some nongovernmental provincialization process. The next time I handle this entry I'm going to have to use the scoop.)

Fascinating, the things you learn when you study ground transportation.

GO
Grandes ondes. French for `long wave[s]' (LW).

GOALI
Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry. NSF initiative.

GOALS
Greek Orthodox American LeaderS, Inc. They have a mailing address at Voithia, their ``independent educational publication.''

gob
Expectorate saliva on a mostly downwardly directed trajectory.

gob, g.o.b.
Good Ordinary Brand. Brands wye or zed, probably.

GOC
German Open Championship. A dance tournament (Tanzturnier), apparently. You know, unpleasant things can happen if you allow demmid furriners into yer contests. For example, the American Guild of Town Criers ``was founded on July 5th 1997 at historic Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.'' In 1999, Ontario swept the trifecta of this ancient tradition. And the America's Cup, oh man, don't get me started!

GOCE
Gravity-Field and Steady-State Ocean-Circulation Explorer. Why not ``GraFSSOCE''? As I write this in 2004 there's still time to change the name! Launch is set for 2005; it will be the first of the Earth Explorer Core Missions planned as part of ESA's Earth Observation Programme. I observe the earth all the time, sometimes from pretty close up, but the ESA has something else in mind: to ``provide global and regional models of the Earth's gravity field ... with high spatial resolution and accuracy.''

GOCO
Government-Owned/Contractor-Operated. Is this a good idea?

God
A number of things have been said and written about the subject. Following is one, uncertainly attributed to Roger Weddis:

There was an old man with a beard,
Who said, ``I demand to be feared!
So address me as God,
And love me, you sod!''
And Man did just that. Which was weird.

GOD
Glucose OxiDase. The way sugar intended it.

GOD
Guaranteed Overnight Delivery. A truck freight company.

godasse
In an interview once, Samuel Beckett was asked whether ``Godot'' (in his famous play ``Waiting For Godot'') represented God. What could he say? He suggested that this wasn't the only possible interpretation. That Godot reminded him of the French word godasse, slang for shoe or slipper. He didn't suggest that it reminded him of godet, which would probably have been equally false but less absurd. To this day, I frequently write ``godess'' instead of ``goddess.''

God helps those who help themselves
This makes it difficult to apportion credit accurately. It's like those tricky macroeconomic multiplier effects. The analogy isn't perfect: with MPS as usual representing the marginal propensity to save, the factor would be 1/(1 - MPS) rather than 1/MPS = 1/(1 - MPC). (I suppose MPC is the marginal propensity to consume in eternal damnation, and MPC+MPS=1 if purgatory is but a temporary correction. As Keynes said: ``In the long run, we are all dead.'')

GOER
(New York State) Governor's Office of Employee Relations. In January 1997, after eighteen months of negotiation with the Graduate Student Employees Union (GSEU), agreement was announced on a four-year contract. This required ten months of mediation, after the GSEU in March 1996 declared negotiations to be deadlocked.

GOES
Geosynchronous Operational Environmental Satellite. More here. Also Geostationary G, also Orbiting for O. Whatever.

GOG
Gemeinschaft Ostdeutscher Grundeigentümer. (Germany.)

GOG
Gerichtsorganisationsgesetz. (Germany.)

GOG
Gift Of God. Sorry, no MAGOG entry yet, but...

GOG
Government Of Greece. GOT Magog?

GOG
Gynecologic Oncology Group. ``[A] non-profit organization with the purpose of promoting excellence in the quality and integrity of clinical and basic scientific research in the field of Gynecologic malignancies.''

GOGO
Government-Owned/Government-Operated. Oh, yeah, ``go-go.'' Reflects the energy and committed enthusiasm of hired help, selected on the basis of standardized yawn.

GOI
Gate-Oxide Integrity.

GOI
Government Of Israel.

GOIC
Gulf Organization for Industrial Consulting. This entry is probably not very important for an Electronics Glossary, and it really didn't come up in Stammtisch discussions, but I like the sound of the acronym. Seems to consist of the same membership as the GCC, with the addition of Iraq. Founded in 1976. Hmm.

GOK
God Only Knows. Email usage.

gol, GOL, ¡¡GOL!!!!!!
Spanish, `[soccer] goal.' The longest word in the Spanish language, typically requiring a minimum of twenty seconds for complete articulation.

gold
Used for metal contacts and interconnects in higher-priced versions of chips (aluminum is the low-cost default). Better than aluminum for its corrosion resistance and ductility; it's also slightly more conducting [but silver (Ag) is better, see the metal resistivity entry]. Also, gold serves as a recombination center, so BJT bases were once gold-doped to reduce storage-time delays. Ditto rectifiers and thyristors, to this day. Platinum can do it too. Probably any sixth period transition metal can. That practice has been superseded by the use of Schottky clamps to prevent BJT's from going into saturation and accumulating storage charge in the first place.

``Gold records'' (500,000 units) are recognized by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).

More general information on gold at the Au entry. For a bit on the geology of gold mines, see the pluton entry.

Giordano Bruno, describing his own times (born ca. 1564, burn 1616), wrote

Cut-purses, miles of cheats, enterprises of scoundrels, delicious disgusts, foolish decisions, crippled hopes, virile women, effeminate men, and everywhere the love of gold.

Here's a random datum: on March 17, 1968, a new two-tier system of gold prices was instituted.

Gold Dust Woman
A song written by Stevie Nicks, which she sang (sings?) with Fleetwood Mac. I don't care if you got up at 4 AM, it still shouldn't be on the playlist for as early as 10 AM. Demmid insensitive deejays.

[column]

Golden Age
The golden age of Rome is generally taken as spanning the first century BCE to about the middle of the first century CE. It was followed by the Silver Age, which lasted through about the second century.

golden birthday
The nth birthday of a person who was born on the nth day of the month.

golden horseshoe
The metropolitan area near London. Okay, I guess it would be a little clearer if I pointed out that I obviously mean the metropolitan area about 100 miles east of London, Ontario, or called it the Toronto or Toronto-Hamilton metropolitan area. But that would spoil the fun, now wouldn't it?

golden mean, golden ratio, golden section
The positive number equal to its own inverse plus one. It also equals its own square minus one. It's the limit of the ratio of successive terms in the Fibonacci sequence. Either way, it's
               ____
              /
  1    +     /  5
           \/
  -----------------

       2
or about 1.618 033 988 749 894 848 204 586 834 365 64 .

An interesting article is Roger Fischler: ``How to find the "golden number" without really trying,'' Fibonacci Quarterly vol. 19, pp. 406-410 (1981). On the other hand, without even trying to get out of your seat, you can visit the related pentagram entry. The golden ratio is twice the cosine of 36 degrees.

In German, the number is called ``der Goldene Schnitt'' (equivalent to `the golden section').

golden spike
A slightly undersized 5.5" × 0.5" rail spike of 18-karat gold-copper alloy, the last spike driven in the construction of the first railroad across the North American continent. Hammered home (with a silver hammer) on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. Read all about it at the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum. I imagine they must have replaced it eventually with one that was not such a strong temptation to theft.

If your concept of North America stretches as far south as the South American nation of Colombia (it shouldn't), then the preceding statement is not true. In January 1855 the Panama Railroad was completed, connecting the port city of Colón (q.v.) at Limón Bay, on the Atlantic, to Boca del Monte, a bay on the Pacific near Panama City (called simply Panamá in Spanish).

goldfish
Domesticated carp.

goldfishing
Television parlance for people shown speaking while their voices are not heard. It's like Pink Floyd's ``Comfortably Numb'':
Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're sayin'.

Just don't think of gill slits.

gold standard
There are at least three kinds of gold standard. Let's get one out of the way immediately: a physical standard of length can be made of gold. If I ever have anything interesting to say about this, maybe I'll put it at the ab- entry.

Gold has been a standard of value since prehistoric times, and a monetary standard since there was coin. (For something about the transition between bartering with gold and paying with gold coin, see Hackgold.) Hence, ``gold standard'' can be understood as the fixing of the value of a currency against the value of gold. (I should probably add that in ancient times it was usually not the only monetary standard. There was silver, of course, and Herodotus reports that at one time the Spartans used iron money. This may or may not have been an example of monetized metal tools, called utensil money.)

It has had that meaning in English for centuries. For example, in 1696, one Thomas Neale published A PROPOSAL For Amending the Silver Coins OF ENGLAND, And the Possibility of it, without any Great Charge to the NATION. Demonstrated In Two Different Ways. It contains ``A Table to Reduce gradually the Price of the Ounce Troy of Gold Standard to 4 l. an Ounce. being esteemed Sixteen times the value of Silver Weight for Weight) the same having first been raised to 5 l. 6 s. 8 d. which is the proportion of Silver to 6 s. 8 d. an Ounce, the Gold Standard Coined or not Coined esteemed a like, by reason that Gold esteemed 16 times the value of Silver Weight for Weights, is the highest Rate that ever was.''

According to page 16 of A Short History of Technology, a heroically bad work described at the self-published entry, ``Darius the Great was the first to establish the gold standard.'' (Of course, there is not a single gold standard, although for many years following WWII, there was a single gold standard for the US dollar. It became unsustainable during the Nixon administration.)

Finally, gold has long been understood as a metaphor for the best. As Chaucer wrote, ``if gold ruste, what shal iren do?'' Hence, ``gold standard'' can be understood as the highest standard -- the best, to be regarded as a standard of comparison. I have to say, though, that the monetary standard was the only kind of gold standard I can recall ever having heard until my old college roommate Dennis, by then a radiologist, started talking to me about ``gold-standard'' diagnostic technologies and treatments and what-not. It doesn't seem to be exclusively medical jargon, however. News of the Weird describes itself as ``the gold standard of weird-news reporting.''

Golf
German: `Gulf.'

GOLF
Global Oscillations at Low Frequency.

golf
How the Scottish sabotaged the pastime of walking. The epidemic is worldwide. See also PGA. In detail, the game consists of hitting a small ball from the grass into the woods, and then crawling around looking for the ball in the wrong copse.

The only sport involving a ball that has thus far been played on the moon by a human. Moreover, the first experiments in untethered balloon flight were conducted by the Montgolfier brothers [Joseph-Michel (1740-1810) and Jacques Étienne (1745-1799)]. Another technical tie-in: a duffer is also called a ``hacker.''

The main importance of golf, however, is neither as sport nor anything technological, but as a business lubricant. I'm not talking about elbow grease here. The need to grease the gears of business (to say nothing of the palms of officialdom) is nothing new. For a sixteenth-century view, here is part of Guicciardini's ricordo C179 (in the translation of Domandi):

When I was young, I used to scoff at knowing how to play, dance, and sing, and at other frivolities. ... But later, I wished that I had not done so. ... [S]kill in this sort of entertainment opens the way to the favor of princes, and sometimes becomes the beginning or the reason for great profit and high honors. For the world and princes are no longer made as they should be, but as they are.

GOM
Gate-Oxide Monitor.

GONGO
Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organization. An NGO organized by one or more G's.

gonorhea
Misspelling of gonorrhea.

Good Girl
Saboteur against the sexual revolution. The rallying cry of this particular counterrevolutionary movement is evidently The Return of Doris Day.

There's probably a female declension of saboteur, and if I knew French I'd certainly use it so that you would feel ignorant and inferior. If someone lets me know by email what the female form (of the word) is, I'll happily insert it and return to pretending that I know French, just like all us sóphístícátés.

Good Grief!
The Charlie Brown oxymoron. Not explained at the Peanuts entry.

Without the exclamation mark, the title of a Foo Fighters song (vide s.v. fu).

Good HumorTM
A brand of ice cream.

good humor
Nicholas Lemann's TNR review of David Brooks's On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) In the Future Tense begins thus:
A funny man is an angry man.

What is this, some kind of proverb? No. High-school English teachers promote the doctrine that essays should begin with generalizations. I wish they'd amend that to the doctrine that essays should begin with generalizations that are not obviously stupid. The review (August 2, 2004 issue, pp. 27ff) does not satirize the book's title, so it's an easy syllogism that Lemann need not be an angry man, if the claim were true. What we have here is fairly typical: humor sometimes masks anger, so Lemann just strips away all qualification, tears down any useful distinction, and states a nice, gnomic, barefaced lie. I HATE NICHOLAS LEMANN!!!!!

But seriously folks, it seems to me that humor and humorists come in for a lot of generalizations that happen not to be true. (The BUR seems to be something of a rehash. Why not visit our bobo entry again? Or just keep reading.)

good humour
Here's something from Walter Allen's The English Novel (1954). On page 119 of my Dutton paperback edition, he makes the following assertion:
Comedy deals with the conflict between illusion and reality: ``Know thyself!'' is the imperative of every comic writer.

Allen is discussing the novels of Jane Austen. I do apologize for mentioning her almost in the same entry with an amateur ``comic sociologist'' like Brooks, but there are some circumstantial similarities. Later (p. 120), Allen continues:

... those most attached to Miss Austen's novels have usually preferred the later ones, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, which were written after an interval of more than ten years. During that long silence, the reason for which we do not know, Miss Austen's mind grew graver; it is as though she could find folly, self-deception, irresponsibility, silliness, the individual's lack of knowledge of himself, no longer merely funny; more and more as she realized their consequences they became contemptible, even hateful, to her.

Good luck!
This is something the radio announcer says after announcing a call-in contest (``the ninth caller who can correctly...'' or some such). When you think about it, you can actually imagine some senses in which it is not utterly meaningless.

good money after bad
Frederick Douglass observed:
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

If I think of something better, I'll move the current content of this entry to an entry for triage or planned obsolescence or something.

Goodness rewarded.
  1. By accident (74%)
  2. Grudgingly (22%)

(Percentages may not total 100% due to rounding.)

Good things come to those who wait.
A lie told to children.

Good Times
Not a virus but a hoax. There are FAQ's available as web documents and via ftp. (For more on viruses, try F-PROT's virus information resource.)

goose crossing
A crossing for pedestrians that goose-step! Also, the pedestrians are geese.

GOP, G.O.P.
Grand Old Party. The younger of the two major political parties in the US. Republican party. I wrote a lot more under the D entry for Democrat.

GOP
Gulf of Papua.

GOPAC
Gingrich's (federal election law-) Overstepping Political Action Committee. Apparently. I'll be sure to correct it if I learn different.

gopher
Alludes both to University of Minnesota emblem/mascot and to the jocular noun `go-fer.' See also <gopher://gopher.tc.umn.edu>.

Usual port, assigned by IANA, is 70. For technical details that will allow you to write your own client or server, see RFC 1436. Note also that there is a Gopher+ (that's by gopher, by http it's at http://ftp.sunet.se/ftp/pub/gopher/gopher_protocol/Gopher+/Gopher+.txt), incorporating extensions to the original protocol.

Veronica was once a common gopherspace search engine.

Go Postal
A chain of retail outlets where you can buy stamps and bullets. The drive-thru is open all night. There's a bulk discount for government employees.

This is a prophylactical entry; if a chain of such stores by this name should suddenly happen to come into being, the entry will already be in place. I put the entry in around 1996 or so. There's a company founded in 1991 that sells tee shirts illustrated with politically conservative humor, and it occurs to me that I should mention one of their ``hot'' shirts (in 2008, and since at least 2006). It's emblazoned with the words ``Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms'' in large letters, followed in smaller letters by ``should be a convenience store, not a government agency.'' (Sure, it's a different idea, but there are some common elements.)

GOR
Gesellschaft für Operations Research, e.V.. German `Society for Operations Research.' Founded on January 1, 1998, from the merger of DGOR and GMÖOR.

Gordon
A boys' given name in English, occasionally shortened to Gordy and even Gordo. Many Anglophone Gordons eventually learn that gordo is a Spanish adjective meaning `fat' [in the sense of obese]. In the usual way, it can also function as a noun (the term substantive is particularly apt here).

What you won't find in most dictionaries, because it is simply a regular inflection of the basic term, is gordón, a noun meaning `very fat one.' I figured you'd want to know.

Gordon Rule
A basic requirement for graduation from bachelor's programs in the state of Florida, State Rule 6A-10.30. The rule applies to students who first enrolled in any college or university after October 1982. I wonder if you have to have been continuously enrolled since September 1982 to get out of the requirement. The requirement has two parts: completion of 24,000 words of composition in four courses (12 semester hours), and completion of two courses (6 semester hours) of mathematics at the level of college algebra or higher.

Do you have to pass those completed courses? (Always looking for the loophole.) Hmmm. Seems there's more to it.

See UCF's explanation.

gore
A triangular piece of land.

GORILA
Godart et Olivier: Recueil des Inscriptions en Linéaire A. (Louis Godart et Jean-Pierre Olivier).

gorp
A synonym of foobar. Tentative etymology suggested by FOLDOC: CMU [dialect of Hackish], acronym of `Good Old Raisins and Peanuts.' SBF suggests a philological survey of the back issues (parchment) of MAD magazine.

GOS
Global Observing System. A network of over three dozen manned land-based weather observation stations, and a larger number of automated stations. Part of the World Weather Watch (WWW).

GOSH
Great Ormond Street Hospital. A London hospital for kids. No kidding.

GOSIP
(US) Government OSI Protocols (also `Profile'). A more tightly specified set of protocols required by the US gov't.

GOSS
Government Of South Sudan.

GOT
Government Of Turkey. This isn't official or anything, but the abbreviation is apparently used (with GOG) internally by the US State Department.

GOTV
Get Out The Vote. Used attributively, as in ``GOTV effort'' (also known as ``the ground game'' of political campaigning).

[column]

Gouni iraba gouni shitagae.
Japanese: `When in Rome, do as the Romans do.' (The word gouni doesn't refer to a particular place; here it effectively means `a place.')

.gouv.fr
The French government's subdomain. Cf. .gov.

GOV
Geschäftsordnung des VIAL. VIAL? It's a slow day, I admit it.

.gov
(Name code for top-level domain of US) GOVernment. However, the US Department of Defense has its own top-level domain: <.mil> (not to mention .arpa). For a while, it seems the .gov domain was used only for the federal government, but now state governments have .gov addresses also. For more on state government website addresses, see the .us entry (or the state's entry under its USPS code).

The same name (gov) is widely used as a government subdomain within a ccTLD (see next entry).

.gov.
A common second-level domain name for government sites within a country's national domain (ccTLD). For example: e.g., *.gov.uk. Countries that use only two-letter second-level domain names often use .go. for their government sites. The Canadian government uses .gc. under its ccTLD. Then there's <gouv.fr>. That's the longest variant I've seen, but the letter yoo is essential to demonstrate to the world that France is stalwart in its independence, and valiant in protecting the good countries from Anglophone imperialism, while remaining Windows-compatible.

government ``initiative''
Underfunded project pecking along on ``seed money'' that is supposed to find a rainmaker and germinate.

GOX
Gaseous OXygen.

Go8
Group Of 8. The first universities established in Australia.

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