Anyway, it's always interesting to see what the exceptions to the natural gender assignments are. With ``natural gender'' in the usual sense (male/female grammatical gender), it seems that an enormously common exception is construing children as neuter. With animate/inanimate gender, I don't know enough examples to say what is common, but I can mention that in Basque, tables are construed animate, and I've heard that in Ojibwey (in some spelling; what used to be called Chippewa), stones are animate. I'll have to check into all of this stuff later. Right now I just wanted to get the entry in so I could quote the late Stanislaw Lem (d. April 5, 2006).

In the prologue to his Wysoki Zamek (1975), he ruminates on memory. Michael Kandel's translation from the Polish (Highcastle: A Remembrance, 1995) has this at page vi:

  I really don't know when it was that I first experienced the surprise that I existed, surprise accompanied by a touch of fear that I could just as easily have not existed, or been a stick, or a dandelion, or a goat's leg, or a snail. Or even a stone. ...

I guess now I need to explain one or another of the anthropic principles. Knowledge is inconveniently interconnected and never-ending.

Next page, Lem writes that ``For a while I firmly believed that my soul--or rather, my consciousness--was located four or five centimeters inside my face, behind the nose and a little below the eyes. I have no idea why.'' Could it be that he has a Japanese soul? I can't say I've studied this matter adequately, but in the US certainly and, I think, in the West generally, the gesture to indicate oneself is a closing of the fingers of one hand into a fist with the thumb pointing at one's chest or belly, typically acompanied by a slight motion of the hand or thumb towards the body. In Japan, the gesture is pointing with an extended index finger at one's nose.

Lattice constant is 6.058 Å.

This is an equal-opportunity disengenuousness, because no scientific evidence is ever conclusive beyond a metaphysical doubt.

The initialism I.S.S. is now sometimes used to refer to the system before consolidation. I don't know what the practice was at the time. I suppose I could find out.

The same issue of Esquire, Bruce McCall takes a whack at Golf.

Okay, then, let's inject some interestingness. German uses a total calque of independent: unabhängig -- literally `not hanging off.' Wow!

Very important for heavily inflected languages is lemmatized entries. That is, entries for different forms of a word given together under a base form of the word as headword. This sort of intelligent lemmatization was expected in the traditional indices verborum. In other languages like, well, mostly in English, intelligent lemmatization has to do mainly with distinguishing homographs.

Indie is also a kind of rock music, related to grunge and goth, descended from punk, but all the categories are mixed up these days. NIN is an indie band. There's an indie music newsgroup: <rec.music.industrial>.

Indigenous is ultimately from the Latin indigena, `native [person].' This was constructed from indi- + gignere. The prefix indi- or indu- was an ancient (even for Latin) combining form of the preposition in. The heavily contracted gignere, in the passive, means `to be born.'

Indigent is ultimately from the past partiple (which provides the -nt) of Latin indigere, `to lack.' This was constructed from indi- (also) + egere, `to want.'

Get your tickets now.

Typical speeds for tectonic plate movements are in the range of 1-10 cm per year. The most rapid collision, of the Indian Ocean plate thrusting against the Eurasian plate, is estimated at as much as 20 cm/y, and is raising the Himalayas on the order of 1 cm/y. Thumbnails and children grow at comparable rates. Something to think about the next time someone says ``geological time scales.''

My first flights, age 18 months, were in little propeller planes over the Andes, crossing the cordillera between Argentina and Chile. One time when we encountered an especially bad patch of turbulence, my mother pretended that we were on an amusement park ride -- Uuu-up!!! Doownnn! Wheee!!! The other passengers stared with wide eyes set in green faces. I have one word for those of you reading this now who were along with us for that ride: Chill. If we die, we die. If we live, the baby froths with drooly joy instead of bawling in terror.

In origin, the word comes from Latin meaning `nonspeaking,' hence a very young child. Very quickly, the meaning in Old French was extended to include a boy or youth, hence the military term infantry (unmounted soldiers).

The earliest recorded Middle English use is consistent with this contemporary Old French usage, and in England today, some schools for the early primary grades are called Infants' Schools. Nevertheless, the semantic field of infant has generally shrunk back toward its original sense.

Among French-speakers, informations is a faux ami. The French word information functions both uncountably, as in English, and countably, primarily with the sense `piece of information.' Given the sense of the countable use, the plural is very similar in meaning to the uncountable use. E.g., ``ces informations sont confidentielles'' means `this information is confidential.' However, it seems that the plural tends to be used in the sense of `news items.'

This situation in German is similar to that in French, with singular form Information and regularly-formed plural Informationen. The word is regarded as having been borrowed into German directly from Latin rather than from French; the first extant instances (I like to say that) date from the fifteenth century.

The plural (informaciones) occurs in Spanish, but the singular (información) is usually understood as uncountable. For whatever reason, the erroneous use of informations in English by people more comfortable in Spanish doesn't seem very common to me, and I know a lot more people whose native language is Spanish than whose native language is French.

I'm not going to research the situation in Russian, but I will mention that a Russian-speaking friend just sent me an email that included the phrase ``another info.'' (It could be due to one of his other languages, but those don't have as much absorbed Latin.)

Their homepage is very focused to advertising and support, with little PR (i.e., little of interest that isn't closely related to their products).

None of this is even remotely like Alexander's solution of the knotty Gordian problem.

Properties interpolate between those of InAs and of GaAs.

The particular alloy composition in InGaAs that lattice matches InP is In_0.53Ga_0.47As, for which

Effective mass m^* = 0.041 m₀
density = 5.5 g/cc
longitudinal sound velocity = 4.74 km/s
Deformation-potential constant E_i for acoustic-phonon interaction = 9.2 eV
Transverse elastic constant c₁₂ = 39.56 GPa
Piezoelectric constant h₁₄ = 254 MV/m
Lattice constant a = 5.862 Å
LO phonon energy = 34.5 meV
Static dielectric constant = 13.88
Optical dielectric constant = 11.34

Properties interpolate between those of InP and of GaP.

I remember a conversation with a Polish colleague once, in which he was trying to get me to pronounce a Polish word that contained an en with an acute accent. This was evidently a palatalized en. I pronounced it that way, and he kept saying that I almost had it, but that palatalized en wasn't quite right. He was never able to explain how to correct it in a way I could understand, and I wasn't able to hear the difference. Looking into it now I think it may have been that Polish dentals t and d, as well as n, are articulated more nearly dentally (tongue against upper front teeth) than they are in English or Spanish (tongue just a little bit further back, against the gum).

In any case, I think that in Spanish there is really no difference between nie and ñe (in any dialect I am familiar with), but that historical spelling counts for something.

For a more interesting and possibly nonexistent INIS, see FEMIS.

Inklings is a clever name. On one hand, an inkling is a perceived clue or suspicion, but the word can be seen as a play on ink and the gentilicial ending -ling (hence meaning something like a printer's devil or more loosely anyone associated with writing).

The Inklings Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to the Lives, Thought, and Writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Their Friends, by Colin Duriez and David Porter, was published in 2001 (St. Loius, Mo.: Chalice Pr.). Our library owns a copy but it's out, and I'm not going to trouble anyone with a recall just to satisfy your idle curiousity. But I will try to work up an Apostles entry. We do already have a Bloomsbury entry.

The usual normal modes of a system are defined to describe deviations from equilibrium. In that case, the total configurational energy of a system with many degrees of freedom is expanded in increasing powers of a configuration-coordinate vector.
[More precisely, in powers of u = r - r_e , which measures the deviations u_i (of particles labeled by i) from their equilibrium coordinates r_ei.]

The zero-order term is a not-very interesting constant. The first-order term is the dot product of the configuration coordinate deviation vector u with a constant matrix the represents a generalized restoring force. In equilibrium, the restoring forces vanish.

The lowest-order term that does not usually vanish is the second-order term, a constant matrix dotted with two copies of u. This constant matrix is called the dynamical matrix. Its eigenvectors are the normal modes. If the second-order approximation is correct, then it is possible to excite individual modes of the system independently. The frequency of oscillation of these excited modes (eigenvectors) is given by their corresponding eigenvalues, which in terms of the preceding description, for a system of particles of identical mass m, are mw²/2, where w (read ``omega,'' please) are the eigenmode frequencies. If the particles have varying masses, or the coordinates are not chosen as orthogonal Cartesian position coordinates, or the system consists of more complicated fundamental objects (extended objects with internal angular momentum, say), then a direct analysis of the potential energy function alone is not exactly appropriate. Instead one uses a Hamiltonian or Lagrangian formulation, and through equivalent steps arrives at a dynamical matrix whose eigenvectors again describe independent modes of harmonic oscillation and whose eigenvalues are the squared frequencies.

To be continued after dinner. (Not the most recent dinner.)

All the contractions mentioned are for singular or uncountable nouns. There are no corresponding in contractions for feminine gender or plural number, that I am aware of, but I've been surprised once already today, so you never know. (The preposition in governs only an accusative or dative object, depending on the sense.)

Do not confuse this conference with the Northwest Conference on Philosophy (at the University of Portland in 2006 [58th annual meeting]).

The INS has a reputation for poor customer service, though I just phoned them and on just the second try they humored me with only mild contempt (of course, I'm not a ferinner). Among the many hypotheses to explain why they treat foreigners so shabbily, one that hadn't occurred to me before is simply institutional: they're part of the Justice Department (DOJ)! Most of their intradepartmental colleagues (see DOJ org chart) organize their entire thinking in terms of good guys and bad guys, while INS deals with ``us and them.'' The confusion is irresistible.

Lattice constant is 6.479 Å.

The guide is apparently compiled from phone interviews with students at 300-odd colleges deemed worth profiling. They're vague on the interview methodology, but here's a clue to help you judge its accuracy. The clue is from their entry for the University of Notre Dame, which begins with this paragraph:

Not far off the interstate in South Bend, Indiana, a statue of a bearded man in flowing robes stands atop the library of the University of Notre Dame. ``Touchdown Jesus,'' as he is known to students, is representative of all that Notre Dame stands for--Catholic ethics, a rigorous education, and football.

Set aside a few minor flaws in this sentence -- the campus of Notre Dame is outside, not in, South Bend; the university has a number of libraries, though Hesburgh Library (the one with Touchdown Jesus) is the largest; the robe looks tightly wrapped and hangs vertically, so if ``flowing'' means anything, then this one isn't. But apart from the minor errors there is this boner: Touchdown Jesus is not a statue that ``stands atop the library,'' it is a part of a mosaic that covers most of the front of the building above the second floor. The building faces south toward the sacred football stadium, and Touchdown Jesus's line of sight is along the center of the field, from goalpost to goalpost. His arms are raised so it looks as if he is about to make the hand signal that football referees make for a touchdown.

I imagine a staffer at Yale was told that Touchdown Jesus is ``on'' the library and imagined the rest. It suggests the kind of misunderstanding that can occur in phone-it-in ekphrasis. I suppose one might argue that a zebra Jesus is somehow ``representative of ... rigorous education.''

The Insider's, or Not-so-far-outsider's, Guide to Colleges is written in the standard stilted style of undergraduates. Still, though better-written than the average freshman paper, it is filled with authentic-sounding local-informant quotes. So if you want to build up a taxonomy of undergraduate errors across the academisphere, this corpus has the advantage that you might at least be able to stomach it. Notes toward that taxonomy project:

1. Nearest-noun concord: ``During the winter, going to the hockey games are a MUST!''
2. Mixed idiom: ``a last-ditch resort.'' (Save me a rut.)
3. Ill-considered qualifier: ``We're not just a bunch of NYU rejects.'' (CUNY turned us down too!)

Meteorologists also use the term a little bit. That reminds me that the reason we call the study of the weather meteorology, and use related terms like meteorological and meteorologist, is that Aristotle believed that meteors were the highest sublunary phenomena. Come to think of it -- he was right. And just to be sure he was right, the IAU has defined meteoroid to be the object that only becomes a meteor, and naked-eye visible in the sky, when it enters the Earth's atmosphere.

You know, that bit about tricks could be a problem for a site that was supported by the government of a jurisdiction in which prostitution is, um, not to put too fine a point on it, uh, not, like, you know, legal. (Some things are just so hard to talk about that it's better to keep quiet and die.)

``The site was designed by Internet Sexuality Information Services, Inc. (I.S.I.S.), and sponsored by AIDS Healthcare Foundation, with funding from the Los-Angeles-County Sexually Transmitted Disease Program.'' It seems like a good idea: ``In Los Angeles, there's an easy way to tell your sex partners you have HIV or another STD. Send them a free inSPOTLA ecard, ANONYMOUSLY or from your email address, right here.'' The only problem I see is that it doesn't help people who have casual sex, but only those who've gone so far down the path of lifelong commitment that they've actually exchanged email addresses. I mean, they'd practically already be married, if only it were legal. ``Partners.'' Committed partners who couldn't guess who might be sending them a you-may-have-caught-something-nasty notification (a ``dear John letter,'' so to speak). That could be a major share of the population, I suppose. But still I wonder what that ``OT'' is really about. Hmmm.

There's a glossary of power-line insulator terms on the web. I use a couple of power-line insulators, well-washed with acid, as the closest I can get to traditional-style tumblers (see discussion at Bottoms up! entry) that I can get without blowing my own glass.

It was pale yellow, about three inches wide and four or five inches long, almost a half inch thick, rounded at the edges -- it looked like weathered old urea foam. Most of the center was covered by a rectangle of some sort of white adhesive that looked shiny and hard. The adhesive had tiny green and red specks on it. I looked more closely, and I realized it was a Pop-Tart.

At least it hadn't fallen out of my car.

When I returned after work there was just a dark red gelatinous smear on the ground. The accumulated evidence, and subsequent research, suggest that it was a frosted strawberry Kellogg's Pop-Tart. Further research on this particular food item is described at this SPT entry.

In the early 1920's, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working at the University of Toronto (UofT) discovered that the pancreas produces a substance that could arrest the symptoms of diabetes (vide DM). They called that substance insletin, after the islets of Langerhans where it is produced (vide pancreas), but insulin was the term that stuck.

Insulin is a protein, so if it is taken orally it is broken down into its amino acids before being absorbed through the intestines. Thus, insulin must be taken some other way -- typically still by injection, as of 2003.

Insulin is what is known as an active transport agent: it interacts with structures in the cell and on its surface, with the result that glucose (see blood sugar) enters the cell much more rapidly than it would by mere osmosis (passive transport).

Later in the twenties, it was noticed that insulin is more effective if taken with yeast extract. This was the first hint of the existence of GTF, q.v..

``Verily and forsooth,'' replied Goodgulf darkly. ``In the past year strange and fearful wonders I have seen. Fields sown with barley reap crabgrass and fungus, and even small gardens reject their artichoke hearts. There has been a hot day in December and a blue moon. Calendars are made with a month of Sundays and a blue-ribbon Holstein bore alive two insurance salesmen. The earth splits and the entrails of a goat were found tied in square knots. The face of the sun blackens and the skies have rained down soggy potato chips.''

``But what do all these things mean?'' gasped Frito.

``Beats me,'' said Goodgulf with a shrug, ``but I thought it made good copy.''

Tom Clancy is probably the most famous insurance agent in the world right now. He wrote his first book, The Hunt for Red October, in his spare time while working at his family's insurance agency. According to Be Your Own Literary Agent by Martin P. Levin (1995), he still puts in one day a week at the office.

Benjamin Lee Whorf, an unduly respected linguist-sociologist, was a fire insurance claims adjuster in Hartford, Connecticut, if memory serves (and it'll have to; 'cause I ain't lookin' it up).

int is the basic type declaration for integers in C, and C is a pretty strongly typed language, so you better use it.

There are also type modifiers signed/unsigned, short/long, so C has essentially four integer variable types, five if you count char, and zero complex variable types. If you want a halfway graceful way to use complex numbers in C, you have to move to C++.

Grove (the former CEO; vide Grove giveth and Gates taketh away, and following entry on Grove's Law) came out in fall 1996 with a book about the company's wild ride of the previous few years. Time magazine did a fawning puff piece on Grove in 1997 or so.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have been stars of the dusky HOS firmament ever since PUP published their Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985). In his paper at the 1991 Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in History of Science, Shapin declared that ``within a generation'' the externalist-internalist debate ``seems to have passed from the commonplace to the gauche.'' This was not wishful thinking. On the one hand, among scientists there is no debate because ``history of science'' that does not attend the details of the science is not taken seriously -- it is regarded as popularization literature at best. The facts on this hand are somewhat beside the point, however, since HOSers regard scientists, in the main, as mostly incompetent to study the history of their disciplines. I kid you not. For the same conference, Steven G. Brush was ``assigned'' (his word) the topic ``Should scientists write history of science?'' [His answer (briefly: yes) was published in Osiris, vol. 10, pp. 214-231.]

Shapin is right, rather, because the debate is over among the new generation of HOSers, though with a different conclusion. It is indeed considered in poor taste, among these, to criticize a colleague for any research deficiencies that may point to their ignorance of the underlying field.

(Shapin's paper, ``Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science As Seen through the Externalism-Internalism Debate,'' was published in History of Science, vol. 30 (1992), pp. 333-369.)

• The First International was the IWMA (q.v.), which lasted from 1864 through 1876. Founded by Marx and Engels, it was eventually taken over by Bakuninists.
• The Second International was the Socialist International. Founded in 1889, it went very national during WWI, and was subsequently in opposition to the Third International.
• The short-lived Second and a Half International was part of an attempt at reconciliation of the Second and Third (socialist and communist) Internationals.
• The Third International was Lenin's International, the Communist International, eventually known as Comintern. Founded by Lenin in 1919, it was disbanded by Stalin in 1943.

Artist	Foo
Sheena Easton	Back
Neil Young	Crime
Marianne Faithfull	Easy
Melanie [Safka]	Garden
Gerhard Schöne	Highlife
Nina Gordon	Horses
Billy Idol	Hot
Nick Gilder	Hot Child
Bruce Springsteen	It's Hard To Be A Saint
Vertical Horizon	Life
RUN-DMC	Livin'
Des'ree	Living
Michael Bolton	Lost
Tikaram Tanita	Lovers
ELO	Night
Allen Shadow	Poet
Unbekannt	Rain
The Replacements	Raised
The Virus	Rats
John Miles	Stranger
The Lovin' Spoonful	Summer
St. Lunatics or Nelly	Summer
Shabazz The Disciple	Terror
B Manning	Workin' Hard

There is a group called ``Orphans In The City.'' Also, a Dutch group that usually calls itself by the Indian name (whatever that means) Maqtewék Moween has (with obvious good reason, I think) tried out some other names, and recorded as ``Friends in the city,'' at least in 2002. (Try http://www.moween.com if the previous link doesn't work.)

Joe Jackson released an album called Summer In The City, recorded live in New York (presumably some Summer), and six of its fifteen tracks are covers (mostly pop rock, but including Ellington's ``Mood Indigo''). The title track is first, a cover of the Lovin' Spoonful's classic.

(BTW, a little tip in case you want to track down lyrics or learn anything else about rock on the web: Netscape makes it easy to disable Javascript, and thus turn off much of the popup and popunder onslaught. If you use Infernet Explorer, you can't turn it off directly, so you'll have to install some other software to get it done. The preceding was written before pop-up blockers became standard, but it's an evolutionary arms race.)

Alice Cooper hasn't given up touring, but he has a regular gig as a syndicated DJ. There's a section of the program during which he answers email from fans and other listeners who write that they love his show. Around mid-October 2006, he received an email from a woman who said she had written a song. He read off the banal lyrics in a monotone and said he hated it. It was a song about going into the city. Alice said it had been done before, a large number of times. Listen to an expert.

I had only ever encountered this expression in the restaurant context, until I read the following in a Los Angeles Times Opinion page piece (``Muslims -- India's new 'untouchables''' by Asra Q. Nomani, December 1, 2008):

What has irked me these last years is how the world has glossed over India's problems. In 2006, for instance, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, whose Cohen Group invests heavily in India, said the U.S. and India were "perfect partners" because of their "multiethnic and secular democracies." When I asked to interview Cohen about the socioeconomic condition of Muslims, his public relations staffer said that conversation was too "in the weeds." But, to me, the condition of Muslims needs frank and open discussion if there is to be any hope of stemming Islamic radicalism and realizing true secular democracy in the country.

Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s[,] Ayers and Dohrn are [not, to any thinking person] ambiguous figures in American life.

They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb designed to kill army officers in New Jersey accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980.

They didn't actually turn themselves into authorities for another decade or so. (Bill Ayers, at least, became a respected educrat.)

INTS

INTernational Switch.

INU

Inertial Navigation Unit.

Inuktitut

The language of the Inuit. It's not a very inktuitive terminology, but then it's not English.

Inuktitut is spoken by the Inuit of central and eastern arctic Canada.

inurbs

INner subURBS. Formed on the pattern of exurbs, but exurbs makes better etymological sense: ex- (`outside') + urbs (`city').

As of January 2006, inurbs has been getting a fair amount of press, and seems to be a recent coinage, possibly by Congressman Mark Kirk (R-IL), who is concerned that since the 1990's, inurbs have been trending Democratic. That's how it looks right now, and it may well be an independent neologism, but I've seen inurbia used without definition in a paper dating back to 1976. (Exurbs and exurbia are long-established usages.)

INV

INVerse, INVert, INVerter.

Inversion

In semiconductors: situation in which doped material is forced by applied field to have free charge carriers of polarity opposite that for which it is doped. That is, when p-type material is in inversion, a large positive potential makes electrons the majority carriers, and inverted n-type material has majority holes. Inversion usually occurs at the edges of a bulk region.

For example, in a normally biased n-channel (p-channel) enhancement-mode MOSFET, p-doped (n-doped) material just beneath the gate is driven into inversion when the gate-source voltage V_GS exceeds V_Tn (when -V_GS exceeds -V_Tp).

invert

This word is used as a noun by civil engineers in North America, New Zealand, and Australia, and almost not at all in the UK. It refers to the bottom of the inside of a pipe. Thus, under normal operation, the depth of water (or, uh, whatever) in a septic tank is the vertical distance from the outlet invert down to the bottom of the tank. Since pipe thickness may vary, ``invert'' is a useful term for defining construction codes. The inlet invert of a septic tank (i.e., the invert of its inlet pipe) is typically required to be at least a couple of inches above the outlet invert.

It's useful to know the term ``invert'' so you can understand the report of the septic tank inspection. Also, if the contractor who did the inspection is (in the best possible interpretation) incompetent, knowing this term (and others like outlet baffle, inlet baffle, etc.) helps you produce a professional-sounding report of your own inspection for use in fighting with the title company. Then again, my agent, in commenting on the fiasco last year, said that (in the dozen or more years she'd been an agent) she had never had a client have to perform his own septic inspection (before me). So maybe you needn't worry about this, if you don't mind having a brand new septic tank with a major leak in it.

inverted siphon

This is a pipe whose height falls below the height of both of its ends. This situation is given a special name because it makes possible the use of gravity flow across a topographic depression.

In aqueducts both ancient and modern, an open conduit or channel will feed a closed channel (a pipe) that serves as a conduit. Ancient pipes sometimes passed beneath the surface of an open body of water. A nice feature of this is that the water pressure outside the pipe reduces the net stress on the pipe itself (i.e., the external pressure partly cancels the internal pressure). In the (pretty good) approximation that water is an incompressible fluid, this means that the stress on the pipe is the same everywhere below the surface that it would be if the pipe ran along the (external) water's surface.

Archaeologists normally use the term ``siphon'' for inverted siphon, since siphons were difficult to build before the invention of pumps. To prevent the imprecise conflation, hydraulic engineering in the US officially sanctions the term ``sag pipe.''

To limit maximum pressure in a siphon, the Romans often elevated their inverted siphons on venter bridges.

Ancient siphon pipes were commonly made of lead or terracotta. It is interesting that the Athenians, who had plenty of excess lead from their Laurion silver mines, used terracotta also.

invisible ink

Everyone knows about invisible ink -- it's ink that becomes visible only after some treatment. A very popular invisible ink, used to demonstrate the idea to children, is lemon juice. Lemon juice applied to paper is hard to see once it dries, but turns brown with heat that won't brown the paper it's applied to (much). This is easy to demonstrate using a fountain pen. (That's the traditional type of pen that is filled from an inkwell, one or two steps of technical evolution beyond the quill that one cut with a ``pen knife.'')

I rehearse these facts because a faulty recollection of them is the best explanation I can think of for the following story.

On January 6, 1995, two Pittsburgh-area banks were robbed by a pair of armed men. One of the two, who had committed bank robberies alone the previous November, was arrested just six days later. His accomplice, MacArthur J. Wheeler, was identified by an anonymous tip and arrested the following April, less than an hour after a local evening news program broadcast pictures of him that had been taken by surveillance cameras.

When detectives went to arrest him and told him how he was identified, Wheeler protested ``But I wore the lemon juice. I wore the lemon juice!'' Someone had told him that applying lemon juice to your face makes you invisible to the camera. Though skeptical, he tested the idea with a Polaroid camera and was pleased to discover that he was nowhere in the picture. Detectives speculated that perhaps the film was bad, or that he made some mistake such as pointing the camera the wrong way. During the robberies, the lemon juice was burning his face and eyes, making it hard to see and forcing him to squint. They should have told him that after the robbery, they had heated the camera.

invitado

`Invited,' in Spanish. Invitado (feminine form invitada) is the past participle of the verb invitar, `to invite,' and in the usual way functions as an adjective. In a way that is much more usual in Romance languages than in English, the adjective functions as a substantive (i.e., noun), and so invitado is the standard word meaning `guest.'

You might wonder, then, whether it doesn't sound self-contradictory or at least awkward to say ``uninvited guest,'' which would have the direct translation ``invitado no invitado.'' Perhaps it is not happenstance that Spanish has a special word for this kind of guest: colado. (Yes, the female form of this is colada.)

INVMTC

International NonVolatile Memory Technology Conference.

invoke

Did that word evoke any thoughts? I invoke the sainted spirit of E.B. White and enjoin you to see the evoke entry.

involucrum tabacinum

Latin for `cigar.' Vide Nova Verba Latina, a Patre Josepho Maria Mir scriptum, Barcinone, 1969.

You should see the translation for motorcycle!

INWO

Illuminati New World Order. INWO is a trading card game in which every weird thing in the tabloid papers is true, and there are secret conspiracies everywhere. Each player represents a group of the Illuminati . . . the "secret masters" who were behind everything from the Kennedy assassination to the cancellation of "Max Headroom." The objective is to take over the world.

INXS

An Australian rock band. Pronounced ``In excess.''