- Jo.
- Joel, Joseph, Joeline, Josephine, and
some other names. Not used for John (Jno.).
Except in the case of John the Baptist (Jo.
Bapt.).
- .jo
- (Domain code for) Jordan.
- jo
- A sweetheart. Specifically, a Scrabble® sweetheart. The
kind of sweetheart that is cherished because it's a two-letter word that enables a ``player''
to discard a letter J that is no longer wanted. It does sound rather
heartless, but it's accepted by all three
major Scrabble dictionaries.
- JOAD
- Junior Olympic Archery Development.
`` Our most important asset in archery, just as in life, is our youth.'' Tough
luck for me.
- job
- Here's an unusual use of the English language:
I got a job by accident.
When we were graduate students in physics, and we observed as each student in
turn disappeared beyond the event horizon of the final public oral (FPO), to be torn apart by the tidal forces of the
job-market black hole, one of the few triangulation points we learned was the
following datum:
Job offers are bosons.
That is, they obey Bose-Einstein (B-E) statistics
-- if you are in a one-job-offer state, your probability of transitioning to
a two-job-offer state is twice the probability that the poor guy with no job
offer will get even one. The injustice of this situation is obvious, since the
person with no job offers needs a job offer much more than the person with two,
who is going to turn down one of the offers anyway. It is said that the market
is cold, and while no precise temperature measurement has been reported, it
appears that we may be close to the Bose Condensation (BEC) regime, where all the job offers condense on one
applicant. On the basis of this observation, I think that an effective jobs
program would be to give that one applicant a secretary. That way, not only
would the secretary have a job, but the excess job offers could be turned down
promptly, creating a population inversion, etc.
Even I get tired of teeteringly extended metaphors, and I hadn't even discussed
lasing. It is probably fair to note that early
research on job offer statistics is implied in the classical research of Saint
Matthew (Matthew Principle) However, I
first learned about quantum job-offer statistics from Steve, a student of
Arthur S. Wightman, so it may be that the principle has now been placed on a
rigorous axiomatic field-theory foundation.
New research suggests that MOTAS statistics are
also bosonic.
For more detail on job stats, try following the link at the BLS entry.
- JÖB
- Jahrbuch der Österreichische Byzantinistik.
- Jo. Bapt.
- John the Baptist. The guy who lost his head two thousand years ago.
Not used as a given name in English, but in some other languages, such as
French (Jean-Baptiste, abbrev. J.-B.).
Note that normally, Jo. abbreviates Joel and some
other names, and John is abbreviated Jno..
I've also seen JBap used, by HJ people who think nothing of posting
ten-thousand-word messages every couple of days for months on end,
all under the subject head ``Historical method.''
- JOBOP, JobOp, Jobop
- Job Opportunity.
- job out
- A term patterned on drop-out. A job out is someone who is lured out
of a technical training program by a job.
- JOBS
- JOsephson (junction) Broadband Spectrometer.
- Joburg, Jo'burg
- JOhannesBURG, South Africa.
- JOCV
- Japan
Overseas Cooperation Volunteers. The Japanese
Peace Corps.
- JOE
- Java Objects Everywhere.
- Joe
- Short for Joseph. Hey -- where' you
goin' with that gun in your hand?
- joey
- Baby kangaroo. A kid sister of Carrie Fisher, who's on a TV show.
``Ellen'' vel sim.
I'm goin' down to shoot my ol' lady, you know I caught'er messin'roun' with
another man.
- joggers with umbrellas
- I thought of that today when I didn't see it. That's how free association
works, probably.
- John
- Elton's last name. He was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight.
- JOHNNIAC
- JOHN von Neumann Integrator and Automatic Computer. An early computer
built by the RAND corporation and based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann and
named in his honor. Like all computers of its era, it was a one-of-a-kind
machine that could not exchange programs with other computers
(even other IAS machines). Then again, the programs were pretty short.
JOHNNIAC operated from 1953 until February 11, 1966, logging over 50,000
operational hours. The machine currently takes up space at the Computer History Museum in
Mountain View, California.
The preceding information, but not the crucially important attitude component,
was cribbed from the JOHNNIAC
entry at Wikipaedia, the
free encyclopaedia, with an extra vowel because this is SBFary, the free glossary.
According to the Giant Computers
file, this computer contained about 3000 tubes,
no crystals, and about 200 relays, and occupied 250 square feet. It was
used for scientific calculations for general research.
- Johnny Rotten
- Gerard is taken with the album title:
Never mind the bollocks.
JR got back together with the rest of the Sex Pistols for a recording session
or concert or something, in 1997, so he could insult them and give a filip to
his sagging solo career.
- Johnson
- Johnson is the second
most common surname in the US.
When Gary and Susan married in Scottsdale, one of my tasks, as a local, was to
taxi some of the out-of-town guests, including Gary's sister. Sitting in the
back seat, she asked about the frilly black garter on the floor of my car. I
had to explain about how a famed composer of liturgical music, David A.
Johnson, had passed away not long before, and how, as a direct and unavoidable
consequence of the Law of Unintended Consequences, a letter of
condolence had arrived at CSSER, where another
David A. Johnson was an ASU graduate student in
EE. It was decided to celebrate David's passing with
a memorial quaff at a nearby bar, within walking distance of EE for the badly
decomposed body himself. Seeking to show the proper respect, I called a few
funeral homes for information, but they all said it was an east coast thing, or
an Italian thing, and they had no idea where I
could get a black armband, so I went out and bought a black garter as the
next-best thing.
Then Gary's sister asked me about the castanets.
One of the problems with having a popular name like David Johnson, in addition
to people mistaking you for another David Johnson, is people mistaking you for
another David Johnson when it's really you. This happened to Orioles
manager Davey Johnson, who on the same day at the end of the 1997 season (a)
was fired from his job and (b) won the American League Manager-of-the-Year
honors. It was the same guy, but the team owner obviously thought that
the Davey Johnson who did such a good job was a different Davey Johnson than
the one he was firing. I guess. Perhaps owner Angelos was confused because
the same Davey Johnson had managed teams in both American and National Leagues
(none of which had ever finished lower than second place). Perhaps Mr. Angelos
was confused because Davey Johnson had managed the team to a second-place
finish the previous year, but this year the team was in first place from the
first day of the season to the last. Perhaps Mr. Angelos was just confused.
Maybe Davey Johnson can pretend to be the different DJ who won the award and
get his old job back as a new DJ. Reminds me of the new Richard Nixon.
There ought to be some way to take advantage of this kind of thing.
Legally, I mean.
- JOI
- Jewish Outreach Institute.
- JONES
- Joints, Obvious (cardiac), Nodules (subcutaneous), Erythema marginatum,
Syndeham's chorea. The major criteria for acute rheumatic fever, in mnemonic
form. (From Seth
Wright's list at Vanderbilt.)
- Jones, LeRoi
- Imamu Amiri Baraka.
- Jopará
- A mixture of Spanish and Guaraní.
- JOPES
- Joint (Military Services) Operating Planning and
Execution System.
- Joseph
- Joseph was a snitch. It says so at Genesis, ch. 37, verse 2: he would go
and rat to Dad on his own older brothers. That's the real reason they hated
him. It wasn't the coat.
No one likes a snitch. His own brothers wouldn't even talk to him (37:3). God
spake directly to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Joseph? Let him interpret dreams.
- Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
- Joseph's father gave him a garment that was described in Hebrew as
[transliterated; I'll get around to Unicode in a
decade or two] k'tonet passim. The first word means `garment' of some
sort, but the second word is a mystery, at least as of 1995, which is the most
recent literature I've looked at. (Of course, some speculations are expressed
confidently. Shame on me for being taken in.)
The Septuagint (LXX) translates the term with
chiton polikilon, `many-colored coat.' But the Septuagint translation
came many centuries after the text of Genesis was first composed (the Hebrew
continued evolving, though), and it appears that `many-colored' was a guess.
(Most of the relevant Genesis chapter, 37, appears to have been written by the
J author. In fact, the sentence that introduces
the famous garment calls Joseph's father ``Israel,'' and that is generally
regarded as a reliable indication that the author was J. However, the other
two contexts of k'tonet passim in this chapter are E, so the clause with
this phrase is considered E. Textual criticism, ugh.)
Another traditional interpretation is that passim here means `with
sleeves,' and that is the translation favored by, for example, the
revised standard version (``robe with sleeves'').
Yick. No one ever seems to mention that -im is a plural ending, and for
`sleeves' one might expect the dual ending -ayim. I mean, to the extent that
the -ayim is possible or probable, its absence counts as weight in the balance
against the sleeve interpretation. (Ah say, ah say gimme that ollllllld time
relijun! The KJV, in His Own English,
says ``coat of many colors.'' Yea and Amen!)
For a word like passim, it's natural to seek
occurrences elsewhere in the Bible. In addition to the three occurrences in
the Joseph story (ch. 37, vss. 3, 23, 32), k'tonet passim occurs in
II Sam. 23:18, where it describes a garment worn by the daughters of
kings.
That's the uncertain state of affairs as it stood, in limbo for a couple of
millennia. In the twentieth century, there was some new old information.
Among cuneiform inventories (written in Akkadian, another Semitic language),
one kind of clothing listed is kitu pishannu and kiutinnu
pishannu [details in JNES vol. 8,
p. 177 (1949)]. These were ceremonial robes for draping over the statues of
goddesses, and pishannu apparently denoted gold appliqué
ornaments. (The ornaments were sewn on; they would come undone and require
resewing, at which time they would appear in the inventories.)
I'm not sure how firm this Akkadian stuff is, but it's good enough for me.
Anyway, you can see that title ``Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor
Dreamcoat,'' for a musical by Andrew
Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, takes no unusual liberties in translation.
- journal
- A circular disc concentric to a shaft, which
rests in a complementary bearing and
supports centered rotation when the shaft is subject to lateral stress, as
in a camshaft or crankshaft. Cf.
magazine.
- journalistic balance
- In a 1984 conversation with Edna O'Brien,
Philip Roth commented (Shop Talk,
p. 109) that she ``write[s] about women without a taint of ideology or, as far
as I can see, any concern with talking a correct position.'' Her reply began
thus:
The correct position is to write the truth, to write what one feels regardless
of any public consideration or any clique. I think an artist never takes a
position either through expedience or umbrage. Artists detest and suspect
positions because you know that the minute you take a fixed position you are
something else--you are a journalist or you are a politician.
- journalistic instinct
- The courage to ask a question which accurately reflects the ignorance
of one's audience, combined with the wisdom to accept an answer only if it
is consonant with one's own sincerest prejudices.
- jovial
- For thoughts on the common adjective jovial, you obviously don't
want the JOVIAL entry -- that's about a computer
language. See the JPO entry instead.
- JOVIAL, Jovial
- Jules's Own Version of IAL. IAL was the original
name of Algol, and Jovial was similar to Algol 60.
I don't know who this fellow Jules is, or perhaps was, but he was apparently
associated with the US Air Force, since that was
the main customer for Jovial. And is! The felicitously named
USAF JOVIAL Program Office, based at Hill
AFB, has a
webpage that was updated as recently as April 2006. Then again, the
B-52 was last
manufactured in 1962, and the plan is for the Air Force to still be flying it
in 2040, so I suppose this isn't all that surprising.
- Jowett
- Benjamin Jowett, of course, born in London, 1817. Often referred to as
``Jowett of Balliol,'' the college at Oxford where he was master from 1870
until his death in 1893. A Church of England clergyman, he also served as vice
chancellor of Oxford.
The following bit of doggerel, written about him during his early years as a
lecturer, expresses something of his personality and the pronunciation of his
name:
First Come I
My name is Jowett;
It is not knowledge
If I don't know it.
Another instance of poetry used to elucidate the pronunciation of an English
name is given at the Pepys entry. The poems
convey the pronunciation information in rhyme as well as meter. Of course,
many kinds of poetry do not use rhyme. That is particularly true of poetry in
Ancient Greek (which will become relevant to this entry later) and
in Latin (whose most prestigious poetic forms were
adapted from Greek). As Dante wrote in Vita nuova, in his day (around
1300), the ``poet'' word was reserved for writers of Latin verse, and the rest
were mere ``rimatori.''
Japanese poetry also doesn't make much use of rhyme. (Frankly, with mostly
synthetic verb conjugation and with a verb-last syntax, rhyme might get pretty
boring and even silly, though it seems to work in German despite the V2 structure.) So haiku is based on syllable
counts. For an instance of pronunciation clarified by haiku, see
the homogeneous entry.
- Joyce
- You needed password authorization to access
<www.jamesjoyce.org>. This
seemed fundamentally wrong, and sure enough, they no longer have a DNS entry.
- Joyce ACC
- Edmund P. Joyce Athletic and Convocation Center Fieldhouse. Across Juniper
Road from the Notre Dame Football stadium.
Frequently mis-expanded (or at least unofficially expanded) as ``Joyce Athletic
and Convention Center.''
When WNDU-TV's first transmission tower was
completed in June 1955, its blinking red beacon was installed eighteen inches
below the apex rather than at top, as is normal. You might think that this
displacement would have endangered any barnstorming pilots coming in to land
(VFR) at South Bend
Regional, but not to worry: at the top was ``a gilded statue of Mary,
mother of [an avatar, as I understand it, of] God,''
according to
WNDU, which goes on to point out that
The simplicity of the sculpture is overwhelming.
Frankly, if the closest most people will get to see it is 570 feet (the height
of the original broadcast tower), why spend money making a complex speculative
likeness?
Maybe it is the simplicity of the faithful that is overwhelming.
In 1415, as the friar Jan Hus (`John Huss' in English) was being burned alive
at the stake, he remarked, or quipped (with great presence of mind, IMO):
O sancta simplicitas!
[`Oh Holy Simplicity!'] This was apparently a reference to a peasant adding a
faggot to stoke the fire. It was also presumably an allusion to a comment of
Saint Jerome -- Veneratoni mihi semper fuit non verbosa rusticas sed sancta
simplicitas. [`I have always revered not crude verbosity but holy
simplicity.'] Then again, maybe he was misheard and actually said ``Oh Holy
Shit!''
That hasn't aught to do with this entry, I guess, except that the tower
functions as a lightning arrestor, so the statue is scarred up some after
fifty years. What does have to do with this entry is that in June 1955, Father
Edmund P. Joyce demonstrated his athleticism by climbing to the top of the
570-foot tower and blessing the statue. Just how close did he have to get?
Couldn't he bless it from the ground? In 1970, the statue was lifted to the
top of WNDU's new 1000-foot tower, but it wasn't necessary to rebless it
because it had already been blessed fifteen years earlier. Why didn't they
think ahead in 1955 and first put it at the top of a two-foot tower so that it
could be blessed at a convenient height? Then they could transfer it to the
new (570-foot) tower with no need for a rebless climb (just as it wasn't
needed in 1970). These clerical types just aren't practical.
Father Edmund Joyce, C.S.C., died in Spring 2004.
In a press release dated November 23, 2005, the University of Notre Dame
announced that it had reached an agreement with
Gray Television, Inc., under which Gray
acquires all of the capital stock of Michiana
Telecasting Corporation, the university-owned company that operates WNDU-TV,
for $85 million in cash, most of which will be invested in the university's
endowment. Student internships at WNDU-TV will continue. The agreement is
subject to certain conditions and regulatory approval, and is expected to be
completed before June 30, 2006. According to the press release, WNDU-TV ``is
the NBC affiliate serving the South Bend-Elkhart,
Ind., television market, the nation's 87th largest Designated Market Area
(DMA).''
Eighty-seventh largest DMA out of roughly two hundred? A four-syllable rank?
This is humiliating. No wonder all our local stations are in UHF Siberia
(WNDU is channel 16,
WNIT is 34, WSBT is 22;
there's at least one other). Gray previously announced its acquisition of
WSAZ-TV, the NBC affiliate serving Charlestown-Huntington, W.Va. Where?
Gray Television, headquartered in Atlanta, will own 35 stations when the WNDU
and WSAZ acquisitions are complete, reaching approximately 6 percent of total
U.S. TV households. This is not making me feel better. Of these 35, 16 are
CBS affiliates, 10 are NBC affiliates, and 7 are
ABC affiliates. Twenty-five of the stations ranked
No. 1 in local news audience, and 24 are No. 1 in overall audience within their
respective markets. Is this impressive? Why sure: the 35 stations serve only
30 TV markets, so at most 30 could be first. I don't know if any more than six
of these markets are served by a No. 2 TV station.
- Joy's Law
- Computing power of the fastest microprocessors, measured in MIPS, increases exponentially in time. Roughly,
(Year-1984)
uP speed = 2 MIPS
Oh joy.
While RISC processors are following this trend, the
essentially CISC personal computer uP's have been
scaling more slowly. Cf. Moore's Law
and Rent's Rule.
Bill Joy is a co-founder of Sun
Microsystems, Inc.. In addition to this ``Joy's Law,'' he has other,
noneponymous laws, such as ``The smartest people in every field are never
in your own company.'' I bet this makes him real
popular with his own employees. To compensate, they hold regular Gates-hates
(not their official or even unofficial name, but accurate). You could see this
sort of thing evolving into those Goldstein scream things in 1984. Which reminds me of the famous advertisement that
Apple Computer used.
- .jp
- (Domain code for) Japan. There's a Japanese <--> English
Dictionary Server.
Here's another. A major resource
for learning Japanese is also available online. A clutch of Japan
FAQ's is available.
International telephone access number 81.
Impress your non-Japanese
friends with authentic-sounding Japanese profound gibberish!
Here's the Japanese
page of an X.500 directory.
The hierarchical structure of domains under the .jp nTLD is described under
JPNIC. Appart from <google.jp>, an
important Japanese search engine is NAVER.
- JP
- Jerusalem Post.
- JP
- Jet Prop{ ellant | ulsion }.
- J. P.
- Justice of the Peace.
- J. P.
- John Pierpont (Morgan) (1837-1913).
- JPC
- Johnson Publishing Company,
Inc. ``The world's largest Black-owned publishing company is the home of
Ebony and Jet magazines.
Also part of the company are Fashion Fair
Cosmetics, Supreme Beauty Products, Ebony Fashion Fair and Johnson
Publishing Company Book Division.''
- JPC
- Joint Publishing Company, Ltd.
(In Hong Kong.)
- JPCERT
- Based at JPCERT/CC (next). A member of FIRST.
- JPCERT/CC
- JaPan Computer Emergency Response
Team Coordination Center. ``Emergencies'' are security breaches.
See CERT for other relevant organizations.
- JPEG, jpeg
- Joint Photographic Experts Group of the CCITT.
Also refers to the compressed graphics encoding defined by this group. There's
a
jpeg-faq for this. Graphics files encoded
according to this scheme often take a .jpg extension. Pronounced
``Jay-peg.'' Cf. MPEG.
- JPG
- Jean Paul Gaultier. He's the guy trying to get non-Scottish guys to
wear skirts. Not a common expansion of this acronym.
- .jpg, .JPG
- Common filename extension for JPEG files.
- JPh
- APh abbreviation that used to stand for the
Journal of Philology, now long-defunct, in which A. E. Housman
published many of his papers, and which now stands for the Journal of
Philosophy.
- JPL
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
- JPL
- Journal of Philosophical Logic.
- JPNIC
- JaPan Network Information Center.
- JPO
- Japanese Patent Office
Others here.
- JPO
- Jovial Program Office. Sign me up! Errr, what's this business about
``orders'' and ``conscription''? The
Air Force runs this thing!? It didn't sound so
serious. It turns out that Jovial is a
programming language, so I suppose JPO does sound serious -- compared to JPPO.
They write it ``JOVIAL Program
Office,'' and I suppose they have a point with the all-caps, since it's an
acronym and all, but what I want to talk about is joviality.
I can see in principle how Jove could be what is called jovial. If I were the
Olympian top dog, or pot
god, or some other permutation, I imagine that I could find my way to a
permanent high. But his reported activities suggest that like JPO, Jove is
basically about target acquisition and force projection. All you hear is
thundrous lightning thrown and nymphs raped by Jove. And when a mere man calls
his wife a ``goddess'' (not even a ``domestic goddess'' or a genia
loci), rightly suspicious sister Juno is decidedly not the kind of babe he
has in mind. ``Saturnine,'' on the other hand -- that I can see.
- JPS
- Japan Physical Society. When spelled out, it's
normally Physical Society
of Japan.
They publish JJAP, JPSJ, and PTP.
- JPS
- Jewish Publication Society. Based in Cambridge, UK. Known principally for its translation of the Jewish
Bible (``Old Testament'' from a Christian
POV), NJPS.
- JPSJ
- Journal of the
Physical Society of Japan.
- JPSV
- Jewish Publication Society Version. The (Jewish) Bible translation of
published by the JPS in 1917. Superseded by the NJPS. They just keep coming up with better bibles;
you can't stop progress.
- JPW
- An orgy that begins the Friday following Ash Wednesday of the sophomore
year. Extra-large sweat-shirts with the letters J - P - W
are on sale at the university book store.
It must have been a long time ago that I wrote the first paragraph of this
entry. At the University of Notre Dame (in Saint Joseph County, Indiana), JPW
stands for Junior Parents' Weekend. It sounds a bit like it's promoting
teenage pregnancy, but it's actually a juniors' parents weekend: a weekend when
the parents of juniors enrolled in the university come to visit their kids and
see what their $30,000 or so a year is buying. I'm not sure how they pick the
weekend. In 2008 it was the second weekend after Ash Wednesday (Feb. 16-17),
so secular considerations may intrude.
This annual ritual was instituted in 1952 by then-president Father Theodore
Hesburgh. (For more about names ending in -burgh, see the
Pgh entry.) Father Hesburgh (``Father'' is not
his first name, so this isn't an instance of nomen est omen) felt that
``parents should become more involved in their students' lives at Notre Dame
before the following year's graduation ceremony,'' according to an article in
the student newspaper in 2008, when about 1750 parents were expected for JPW.
A quick bit of googling suggests that Harvard is the only other school with a
Junior Parents' Weekend. Harvard is a more demanding school, though: they also
have a Freshman Parents' Weekend.
Saint Mary's College, which neighbors Notre Dame, has a Sophomore Parents'
Weekend.
- JQR
- Jewish Quarterly Review.
- jr
- James River. They have a clever logo, displayed on a paper towel
dispenser they make in a bathroom around the corner from where I'm typing
this right now. The paper towel dispenser is in the bathroom near
here, but they made it elsewhere. You probably guessed that, even though
my original sentence was ambiguous. The truth is, I guessed it too. I
have no way of knowing for certain. Maybe they snuck in here one night
and set up a paper-towel dispenser factory in the Men's Room. Probably
not. They certainly don't make it there ``right now.'' I know that; I
was just there.
As you've probably guessed, I win a prize this month if I add enough stuff
to the neglected J section of this glossary. For more on paper
dispensers, see the TP entry. Also, see the image
of
JR's toilet paper on exhibit at the VTPM.
- JR
- Japan Railways. Seven companies created in the privatization of
Japanese National Railways (JNR) in 1987. Even in Japanese, this entity is called ``Jei Arr.''
- JR
- Journal of Religion. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.
- jr.
- Junior.
- JRA
- Journal
of Roman Archaeology. (There's a
UK mirror site.) Catalogued by TOCS-IN.
- JRA
- Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis.
- JRAS
- Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
- JRC
- European Commission Joint
Research Centre.
- JRCN
- Japan Committee for
Research Networks.
- JRE
- Jeunes contre le racisme en Europe. `Youth
against Racism in Europe.' It doesn't seem to have its own website any more,
but maybe it was always rather decentralized. It seems clear from its
communiqués or whatever that it was a leftist organization and that the
focus of its opposition was fascist parties. So maybe it foundered in the
usual leftist schismatism.
- JRF
- Junior Research Fellow.
- JRitSt
- Journal of Ritual Studies. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.
- JRNS
- Journal of the Russian Numismatic Society (RNS,
q.v.). Published in the USA.
- JROC
- US Joint Requirements Oversight Council.
- JROTC
- Junior ROTC.
- JRRT
- John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Tolkien's last name is widely misspelled,
mostly as * ``Tolkein.''
I read The Hobbit, and Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary gave me a copy of
The Silmarillion for my birthday that I recall enjoying, but my interest
flagged about halfway through LOTR. I prefer his
nonfiction. In LOTR, I really felt that he broke faith with the reader when
Gandalf the Grey came back as Gandalf the White. Oh, you hadn't read it yet --
you didn't wanna know. Tough. You shouldn't have been surfing into spoiler
danger, then. Here, go surf
this tribute.
Here's a helpful timeline.
There's an Electronic Tolkien
Encyclopedia Project (ETEP).
The Tolkien Usenet newsgroups generated an faq and a LessFAQ (less frequently
...), no longer maintained (since perhaps 1996), and Steuard Jensen has created
a supplement. See his Meta-FAQ.
- JRS
- Jesuit Refugee Service.
``A worldwide network to accompany refugees and displaced people and offer
practical and spiritual support.''
- JRS
- Journal of Roman Studies. An annual publication of the
Roman Society (SPRS). Journal catalogued by TOCS-IN. ISSN
0075-4358.
- JRTC
- Joint Readiness Training
Center. A facility covering 106,000 acres of Ft. Polk in Louisiana.
- JS
- Jesus Seminar. See JSem.
- JSA
- Junior State of America.
Sort of like a model UN. ``The Junior State is a nationwide, non-profit,
non-partisan political education organization for students in grades 9-12.
We are run completely by and for students, and we hold many events
throughout the year to help further our goals of student political
awareness and involvement.'' So far they haven't declared war on any
Canadian Youth Parliaments.
- JSAE
- Japanese Society of Automotive Engineers. They
sure whupped the SAE for a few years there.
- JSAI
- Japanese Society for
Artificial Intelligence. (You and your browser had better be
Japanese-capable).
- JSC
- Johnson Space Center.
- JSCAS
- Japan Society
for Computer Aided Surgery.
- JSCAS
- Johnson Space Center Astronomical
Society.
- J-school
- Journalism SCHOOL. It's widely reported that top of the heap is the
Columbia School of Journalism
(i.e. Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism).
- JSCS
- Journal of the
Saudi Chemical Society. If you can't read Arabic, then you may not
recognize the link
there to the English version of the contribution guidelines.
``Work submitted for publication must contain original scientific work which
has not been published previously. However, work which has appeared in print
in the form of an abstract or as a published lecture, report, or thesis is
normally acceptable.''
``The manuscript may be written in either Arabic or English. An abstract in
Arabic or English must accompany the submitted papers. Furthermore, a complete
abstract in the language other than that of the manuscript must be included.''
Two issues per annum ``(temporary).'' (Temporary since 1996, at least.)
It's not stated whether being a member of the SCS, or of some other group, has any effect on
the likelihood of your paper being accepted.
- JSEA
- Jesuit Secondary Education Association.
A membership organization serving Jesuit (SJ) high
schools in the continental United States and Puerto Rico. Forty-Six
members as of September 1998.
- JSem
- Jesus SEMinar. A bunch of scholars who get together and vote in a vain
attempt to achieve ``consensus'' on what words in the gospels Jesus did or did
not say. Each person in the shifting membership votes red (that's Jesus!),
pink, gray, or black (no way!).
- JSF
- Joint Strike Fighter. ``Joint'' in the sense
that all of the services (Army, Navy, Air Force...) are buying essentially the
same bird.
- JSIAM
- Japan Society
of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
- JSMJV
- Joseph Snerdly Mohammed Jackson Version. An illustrated edition of Ye Holy Bible. This doesn't exist yet, but it's
coming. In order to satisfy the surge in religious feeling, yet accommodate
and be welcoming to the diversity of everlastingly true interpretations of that
good book, services will arise to provide customized print-on-demand versions.
It'll give a whole new meaning to the term ``family bible.'' You'll visit a
website, fill out a detailed form stating your requirements (e.g.:
)
There will be a dramatic increase in the number of people quoting chapter and
verse, when they get to choose the wording.
- JSNT
- Journal for the Study of the New Testament.
- JSPS
- Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science. Hmmm, maybe you'd prefer to read English A private foundation
chartered by Emperor Showa in 1932, reestablished as a quasi-governmental
organization within the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture
(Monbusho) in 1967. A researcher visiting here from JSPS gave a talk on VCSEL's. He claimed that JSPS is the Japanese equivalent of the US NSF. The JSPS budget in FY 2000 was 135.2 billion yen, or roughly a billion
dollars US. The NSF had US$3.897 billion for FY 2000 (that's over 5% of the US
government's budget for research).
- JSS
- Journal of Semitic Studies.
- JSSI
- Japan Society
of Snow and Ice. If you or your browser lack Japanese capability, you can find some English-language
information on this topic at the SBF snow
blower entry.
- JSSST
- Japan Society
for Software Science and Technology.
- JST
- Japanese Standard Time. They don't use daylight
saving time (DST) there at any time of the year.
Just like Hawaii (which has the highest percentage of ethnic Japanese of any
US state) and most of Arizona. The Navajo reservation in Arizona does use DST,
however. During WWII, US forces had Navajo
servicemen send spoken messages in their obscure language (particularly obscure
to the Japanese) as a kind of what we might now call ``secure communication.''
The Navajo engaged in this were called ``code talkers.'' There are a few other
places that don't use DST, amounting to about half the world.
- J-STAGE
- Japan Science and Technology
Information AGgregator, Electronic.
- JSTARS
- Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System. A 707 outfitted for
reconnaissance against enemy ground forces.
- JSTF
- Japan Science and Technology
Foundation.
- JSTOR
- Journal STORage. ``Redefining
access to scholarly literature.'' Back issues of paper-printed journals.
- JSU
- Jackson State University. It's a HBCU located in Jackson, Mississippi.
- JSUM
- Japan Society
of Ultrasonics in Medicine.
- JSWS
- Jane's Strategic Weapons Systems.
Not available for purchase to the general public, whoever that is. For a list
of information services offered by
Jane's Information Group, see our entry for
Jane's Fighting Ships.
- JT
- Jahn-Teller.
- JT
- James Taylor.
- JTA
- Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
- JTA
- Joint Technical Architecture.
[For the US Department of Defense (DoD).]
- JTA
- Joint Test Assembly. Another definition for the same DoD acronym. I thought they kept a big acronyms
book to prevent this from happening. JTA's are assemblies of components in
weapon-like configurations delivered by a weapons contractor to the DOD for
flight testing under field conditions. Inside, the ``physics package'' (gotta
love it), consisting of the cased HE and nuclear materials components of the
nuclear weapon, is replaced with ballast to simulate and electronic test
equipment.
- JTAG
- Joint Test Action Group.
- JTAP
- JISC Technology Applications Programme.
[JISC is the UK's
Joint Information Systems Committee.]
- JTD
- Jahn-Teller Distortion.
- JTEC
- Japanese Technology
Evaluation Center ``and its companion World Technology Evaluation Center
(WTEC) at Loyola College provide assessments of foreign research and
development in selected technologies under a cooperative agreement with the
National Science Foundation (NSF).''
- J-Term
- January-Term. A short session between Fall and Spring semesters of the
academic calendar, used for short course.
- JTFA
- Joint Time-Frequency Analysis.
- JThS
- Journal of Theological Studies. Catalogued by
TOCS-IN.
- JTIC
- Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency
Center. (They don't do, they just write about it. Sort of like
Penthouse Forum.) For a list of information services offered by
Jane's Information Group, see our entry for
Jane's Fighting Ships.
- JTIDS
- Joint Tactical Information Distribution System
(UK).
- JTPA
- Jobs Training and Partnership Act.
- JTS
- The Jewish Theological Seminary
of America.
- JTS
- Journal of Theological Studies.
- JTS
- Jump The Shark. A television
series is said to jump the shark when it airs a particularly lamentable episode
that heralds the show's decline. Often this show involves a, ah, let us say,
daring premise (Josh cloning a thought-to-be-dead Reva, or Reva
time-traveling, on GL), and demonstrates final
exhaustion or jettison of the original artistic inspiration.
The term is not applied to the first show or the pilot: there is an underlying
assumption that every show has achieved some sort of level from which it can
decline. It is fashionable to pretend that each show has only one JTS moment,
but the reality is that if a show declines only as fast as standards generally,
there is nothing to prevent it from gaining a new loyal following during its
post-JTS decline. These fans will eventually find their own JTS moment, and so
on.
The term was coined in reference to the episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz went
water-skiing in California and jumped a shark.
- JTSM
- Jane's Terrorism and Security Monitor.
For a list of information services offered by
Jane's Information Group, see our entry for
Jane's Fighting Ships.
- jua jua
- One Spanish version of English `ha ha.' If
the sound of the letters jua as read in Spanish were transliterated into
English, it would be written ``hwa.'' Still, on the web, if not among my
friends, it appears that ja ja is much more
common.
Jwa jwa is also seen, but rarely. The letter w is principally for
foreign loans. (We're not talkin' FIM here.)
Okay look, if you don't find this intuitive, here's what to think of: comedies
of the silent era. No canned laughter, of course, but after someone was
humiliated for the amusement of everyone else (not a rare occurrence), a lone
horn would intone hwa-hwa-hwaaa on a descending scale.
- JUCO
- JUnior COllege. Term used in describing the struggle of scholar athletes
to get the strongest possible education.
- Juday
- There are a number of toponymic Judays north of South Bend,
Indiana. Some of these apparently antedate
the puzzling story about
Cary Grant. Not he nor anybody else seems to have been able to track down
with any certainty the origin of the story of his saying ``Judy, Judy, Judy.''
The repeated name is pronounced in an affected way, with both syllables
stressed, and the second syllable sounding a bit like ``day''; this is
sometimes indicated in eye dialect by
writing the name ``Juday.''
Locally, the name comes from meandering Juday Creek, north of the
University of Notre Dame. It's
not clear how that name in turn arose. An 1863 map labels it Sheffield
Creek, and in the late 1880's it was referred to as ``The State Ditch.'' I kid you not..
- judge names
- People whose names include common non-name words, or whose names are odd in
some other way, end up on the bench surprisingly often. A number of them are
listed in the Nomenclature-is-destiny
entry. Here's a complete list of the judges listed there; you can decide which
fit the bill above.
Not mentioned there, because it's hard to state precisely and with certainty
some way in which his name turned out to be unusually appropriate, is John
Minor Wisdom. He's mentioned in the black
Republicans footnotes. I guess from the text quoted there that Judge
Wisdom was known by his last two names (Minor Justice), as Judge Learned Hand
was.
The following is from the chapter entitled ``Judicial Levity'' in Arthur
Train's nonfiction My Day In
Court (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939), p. 61.
Even the names of the defendants and other trial participants
sometimes had a humorous aspect.
I had a case in the Supreme Court Criminal Trial Term before the
present Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals,
Cuthbert W. Pound, which no doubt he remembers. The defendant's name was
Schornstein (chimney), that of his counsel, Firestone, my own, Train (also
suggestive of smoke and cinders), while the judge and clerk rejoiced
respectively in those of Pound and Penny.
What a knee-slapper, oh boy!
- JUGFET
- A Field-Effect Transistor made out of a gallon container for
moderately-priced alcoholic beverages. Frankfort Kentucky's belated answer to
the Leiden Jar. Okay, maybe not. JUnction-Gate Field-Effect Transistor. Now
generally called JFET.
- Juggalo, Juggalette
- Members of the rap group ICP (that stands for
Insane Clown Posse, but visit the entry anyway) at some point started to refer
to themselves as Juggalos. (The plural is formed without an e.) Lyrics
in their Carnival of Carnage CD make
reference to the jugula' (vein, to rhyme approximately with strangle-uh, and
mentioned in the context of neck-breaking), and also to juggling
(metaphorically). There might be some reference to gigolos too, but probably
not to boogaloo dudes (vide Day Tripper
entry).
The next album, The Great Milenko, included a rap entitled ``What is a
Juggalo?'' that doesn't answer the title question in any essential way. As the
term is used by ICP fans, a Juggalo is an ICP fan. (Unless he is an ICP member
who isn't a fan. I don't know if this second category is, or is conceived to
be, nonempty yet. Positive enthusiasm isn't very cool, you know, if you're a
Juggalo.) A Juggalette (or Lette) is a female ICP
fan, and the term Juggalo is typically used in the complementary sense of a
male ICP fan. Juggalettes can be enthusiastic about ICP and some other groups
(but not eminem!) and not suffer any coolness deficit. (Juggalos should say
that they really like ICP, but that they don't consider themselves Juggalos.)
To signal their coolness and belonging, Juggalos and Juggalettes can use
expressions like ``down wit' de clown'' (DWTC) and
MCL, and buy ICP merchandise. No secret decoder rings yet, though
they could come in handy.
Los and Lettes are unexceptional young white
people (``caucasions'') who are often bored and who think of themselves as
nonconformist. They make careers as associates in the retail service
profession. They like 2 party! Have fun! They used
to wear clown make-up occasionally. There's probably a white-face angle in
this somewhere, but I don't give a %^*##@!!, and that's cool. F off.
Peace.
There's a large Ukrainian community around southern Ontario, extending into the
Detroit and Buffalo areas. I don't know how my
homies in ICP happened to chose the name Milenko (probably for scansion,
dontchathink?), but ICP is Detroit-based. Milenko sounds like a Ukrainian
surname (a large fraction of Ukrainian surnames end in -ko). And Mihalenko
(also Mihailenko or Mihajlenko) is a moderately common Ukrainian surname. But
it turns out that Milenko is mostly a south Slav (Slovenia to Macedonia) man's
given name. I figured I ought to explain that.
- Jughead
- Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display! A
search engine for gopher space!
Veronica is another gopher-space search engine!
Archie searches anonymous ftp servers (by
filename or file pathname only)! The other major teen characters in
the Archie comic book series (Reggie and Betty) don't seem to have any
engines named after them! Gopher servers and gopher-protocol support are
disappearing fast!
- Jukka Ammondt
- A Finnish Elvis
impersonator who sings the King's songs in Latin. I probably should write
the Finnish Elvisimpersonator who..., but
you never know with these crazy Northern types. (I hear that the Finns aren't
even Scandinavians.) At least one CD has been released. See here for
details. Last I heard, he was working on a Sumerian version.
- juku
- Japanese term for a wide range of schools or
classes. In practice now, if not otherwise qualified, it refers to cram
schools.
Cram school makes a lot of Japanese kids miserable, and somebody has to take
the blame. Hence kyoiku-mama.
- Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Syndrome
- This syndrome deserves to be better known, maybe. It's an exaggerated
startle reflex that was first reported to the medical community by G.M. Beard,
at the 1878 conference of the American Neurological
Association [see ``Remarks upon `jumpers or jumping Frenchmen','' J.
Nerv. Ment. Dis. vol. 5, p. 526 (1878)]. The following
description, at least partly a quote of Beard, is in an article at
OMIM (see item
244100):
In response to sudden sensory input, abnormal reaction occurred. For example,
if one of them was abruptly asked to strike another, he would do so without
hesitation, even if it was his mother and he had an ax in his hand. If given a
short, sudden, quick command, the affected person would respond with the
appropriate action, often echoing the words of command. Some, when addressed
quickly in a language foreign to them, would echo the phrase.
Beard found it among French-Canadian lumberjacks in the Moosehead Lake area of
Maine. Many of the lumbermen had origins in the Beauce region of Quebec, and
the syndrome has been documented there and also reported in five offspring of a
French-Canadian fishing guide in Wedgport, Nova Scotia. In some cases, there
was a family history of the syndrome. All this suggests that the condition is
hereditary, but does not exclude a necessary environmental trigger. A 1986
study (see the OMIM article for reference) concluded that the cases they
studied were related to the specific conditions in lumber camps in the 19th and
early 20th centuries. They also concluded that `jumping' is not a neurologic
disease but rather can be explained in psychologic terms as operant
conditioning.
Georges Gilles de la Tourette translated Beard's 1880 article on the syndrome,
and this may have stimulated him to study certain patients making peculiar
sounds and movements. This research led him to describe the disorder that soon
bore his name (see GTS).
- jumping up and down
- When you think about it, there's a lot to ponder in this phrase. Most
people really just jump up repeatedly and allow
gravity to complete the cycle. This seems most efficient. I'll finish
the entry when I'm ready to make a complete final report.
The only time that anyone can recall George Washington jumping up and/or
down in excitement was when he received word of French ship arrivals around Yorktown, which meant that
he had Lord Cornwallis completely surrounded. Cornwallis's subsequent
surrender marked the end of the military action in the Revolutionary War.
- junction isolation
- Doping to achieve electronic isolation between devices. E.g.:
Integrated-circuit BJT's are fabricated as a sequence of successively enclosed
doped regions; an npn presents an outer n
(collector) region. For junction isolation (JI),
this is fabricated in an n epi layer on a p substrate, and different
devices are separated by thick p regions that reach down to the substrate.
The substrate and these doped regions constitute a single electrical node which
is connected to the most negative voltage on the chip, so that the electrical
path between any two transistors is collector-to-collector, through a pair of
junctions equivalent to a pair of opposed, reverse-biased diodes.
Cf. ROx, dielectric
isolation, LOCOS. One striking difference
between junction isolation and dielectric isolation is that within the same
technology, JI'd pnp transistors have much lower
fT values than npn transistors,
whereas dielectric isolation tends to give comparable fT
values.
An early form of JI is (or better ``was'') CDI.
- JUNET
- Japan Unix Network. A researchers' net. (Do
not confuse with JANET.)
- Jungbrunnen
- `Fountain of youth' in German.
The noun Brunnen (`well') is masculine.
- Jurassic Park
- A work of fiction. Vide dinosaurs.
- jury of your peers
- Jury of idle busybodies and suckers too stupid to wangle their way out of
serving.
- JUSE
- Union of Japanese Scientists and
Engineers. Look, this is the order they give. I have a better idea, but
they didn't consult me.
- juser
- The username of Joe User. A restricted subset of foos.
- just coincidence
- Ed Turner, vice-president of CNN, is no relation of Ted Turner, network
founder.
See also the nomen-est-omen item on Samuel Johnson,
Jr.
- just desserts
- Uh, no. See the second definition under
deserts.
When others write ``just desserts,'' you should ridicule their ignorance
mercilessly. Draw it out. Ponder at length whether there are meals that
are postprandial repasts, entire of themselves (just desserts), or if all
deserts are by their nature part of the meal they, conclude. Then run away.
- Just Desserts
- A chain of cafés in the Toronto area. The first one opened
no later than 1994.
- A café in Winnipeg, founded in 1998.
- A cake bakery in the San
Francisco Bay Area, founded in 1974 by Elliot
Hoffman and Gail Horvath.
- A
website for dessert recipes. Its ``team leader'' is
``Saggitarius,'' sic.
- A page of
recipes in the Berks Web's
Authentic Berks County
Recipes. Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking.
Berks County is in
Pennsylvania.
- Third in Savannah chef Paula Deen's The Lady & Sons
trilogy of cookbooks.
- A book by Jerry Oppenheimer, subtitled Martha Stewart the
Unauthorized Biography (sic: no colon within subtitle, just
in my comment to subtitle).
- Title of a book by G.A. McKevett, part of his Savannah Reid
Mystery Series, which also includes Killer Calories, Sugar and Spite, Sour Grapes,
Peaches and Screams,
and Death by Chocolate (another hackneyed title).
- A book for people with guilty esophagi. ``Features 50 delicious
desserts which can be made using fair trade ingredients. Indulge with a
clear conscience in treats such as: tiramisł, coffee éclairs,
pancakes with banana and orange filling, dark chocolate mousse,
hazelnut and chocolate torte.'' It's printed on ethical paper.
Desmond M. Tutu, gourmet and Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa,
endorses the publisher of this book.
- A one-act play for two
actresses, by playwrights Norma Cole and Nancy Elliott. Funded by
a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. It's about man's
inhumanity to woman, or something like that.
- A made-for-TV romantic comedy from Hallmark Channel. It first
aired in February 2004.
- A band
built around a sax-and-guitar singing duo. It gets a lot of
airplay on college stations, if you know what I mean.
- The trademarked name of a three-color jar candle manufactured by
Yankee
Candle Company.
Taylor's `Just Desserts' specializes in New
Hampshire maple-syrup products.
- Just do it.
- This was/is a campaign slogan for a sneaker company (oh! I'm sorry,
that should be ``athletic shoe'' company). I think it's Nike.
I read the following interesting advice in Some of my best friends are
writers, but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one! by Robert Turner (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Pr., 1970). It's in the chapter
on getting past initial writer's block -- attacking page 1:
One other warning. The subconscious is a slippery, sneaky little devil,
too. At times, it will try to dodge all your attempts to nudge it into
motion by conning you that you are too sick, too hung over, too depressed,
too tired to try to write. And that if you do write, it will be
appallingly bad, not up to your usual standards; so, forget it. You may
even attempt to do a few pages, then read back over them and decide that
it is true. What you have just written is sheer tripe, so what's the use
of going on?
Ordinarily, this will just not be true. Forget it. Write anyhow. Unless
you are practically a hospital case or have the shakes so bad that you can't
hit the right typewriter keys, what you write under these conditions will
probably not be any worse than at any other time. It will just seem
that way. If you will just persevere, sometime later, when you reread it,
you will realize the truth.
- just don't get it
- Just don't agree; labor under a different enlightenment.
- Just my personal opinion.
- Oh wait, I just remembered: I've got a fully documented analysis here
in my hip pocket.
Cf. JMO.
- just packaging
- Righteous, honest, and complete wrapping.
- Look, don't be so smug. Packagers've got to feed their families
too.
- juvie
- Juvenile detention facility. No, not room 203 after school. Prison. (And
the word is slang. I'm not going to write ``JUVenIlE'' as if juvie were
an acronym; that would be juvenile.)
Stephanie Wilder apparently burned out as an English teacher in juvie and took
a job recruiting deep-foundations and geotechnical professionals. In
Foundation Drilling (see ADCS) she wrote
that she had found frustrating similarities. One is that both juvenile
delinquents and geo industry professionals are tight-lipped and suspicious of
outsiders. Another is that in both the juvenile justice system and the deep
foundations industries, personnel are often needed in a hurry, but when an
appropriate candidate is available the hiring decision often takes too long.
- JV
- Joint Venture.
- JV
- Junior Varsity.
- JVIB
- Journal of Visual Impairment &
Blindness. A publication of the AFB.
- JVM
- Java Virtual Machine. In mid-July 2001,
Microsoft
acknowledged that JVM would not come pre-installed with its next Windows
``upgrade,'' Windows XP.
- JVST
- Journal of Vacuum
Science & Technology.
- JVT
- Current-density (vs.) Voltage (as a function of) Temperature.
Cf. IVT.
- JW
- Jehovah's Witness[es].
- JWA
- Japan Weather Association.
- JWA
- The
Journal of World Anthroplogy. Available free on the internet.
- J-walking
- Crossing the street on foot, if the street
is bounded by two regulated intersections. If you want to get technical, this
is probably vague. On the other hand, this is probably not a frequently cited
violation. Also,
that woman you were approaching, who crossed to the other side, that wasn't
J-walking, or jaywalking either. There's a secret codicil to the law now;
everybody else got the announcement in the mail, but it wasn't broadcast so
you wouldn't find out. It's now legal to cross the street to avoid you.
- JWCI
- Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. Catalogued by TOCS-IN.
- JWGT
- Joint Working Group Group on Telemedicine.
Sounds like an infomercial cooperative, but it's sponsored by the US
government's National Agricultural Library (NAL).
- JWI
- Jewish Women International.
- JWI
- Journal of Women's Imaging.
Settle down, settle down. It's a quarterly that ``focuses [ooh, good word] on
all clinical imaging modalities, as well as on health care policy and economic
issues related to women's imaging. The Journal is intended to serve not only
radiologists, but [yes? yes?] all the physicians who are an integral part of
the team required to provide health care to women.'' Alright then, I guess
I'll order Playboy instead.
JWI is the official journal of the AAWR and has an
association with SAWI (qq.v.). It would seem
to make more sense the other way around.
- JWOD
- Javits-Wagner-O'Day. The JWOD Program,
subsidized by the US government, ``provides a wide array of custom solutions at
a fair market price while creating employment opportunities for people who are
blind or have other severe disabilities.''
The original Wagner-O'Day act
``Javits-Wagner-O'Day Act'' is the popular name
of an act that
became law on June 25, 1938.
``In 1971, under the
leadership of Senator Jacob Javits, Congress amended this Act (41 U.S.C. 46-48c)
to include people with severe disabilities and allow the Program to also
provide services to the Federal Government.''
(According to 41 U.S.C. 46 nt., it may
be cited as the ``Javits-Wagner-O'Day Act.'')
- JWR
- Jane's World Railways.
- JWR
- Jewish World Review.
- JWV
- The Jewish War Veterans
of the United States of America, ``organized in 1896 by Jewish Veterans of
the Civil War, is the oldest active national veterans' service organization
in America.''
- JYC
- Jacques-Yves Cousteau. His friends actually pronounced this as an acronym.
Transliterated into English, the acronym is something like ``Zheek.''
With various collaborators, he invented relatively lightweight and
self-contained apparatus for breathing underwater
(scuba). Almost as important, they invented good
watertight goggles and underwater camera housings, and JYC became world-famous
with films and books about his explorations. I still remember watching this
stuff on TV as a kid. His ship was called the Calypso; whether for the Greek
legend or the Caribbean music, I don't remember. He died on June 25, 1997, at
the age of 87, and you can find more information about him in obituaries from
then, like this reverent one
still up at the IANTD website.
A detail about capitalization. The pronunciation of JYC as an acronym is
mentioned in various French-language articles I can pull up from the 1990's --
mostly obituaries. For example, the AFP
announcement commented en passant, ``JYC, comme tous ses amis
l'appelaient....'' The 26 articles that mentioned the nickname generally wrote
it in all-caps, with the single exception of one article with ``Jyc'' in Le
Figaro (out of four). But here's some really big news: as of 2004,
French-language articles in Lexis-Nexis finally use accented characters!
- J-1
- Visa type for a ``short-term
scholar'' [clever phrase!]. Also professors and au pairs (would
that be aux pairs in
French?) and a variety of other guests. Category
includes graduate students, foreign guest lecturers, participants in meetings
(workshops, seminars, conferences,...). They're permitted to receive direct
compensation as well as payment for travel expenses. There is
a limit on
how many hours per week an au pair may be
required to provide child care services, but
professors do
not benefit from this kind of protection.
Cf. J-2 visa.
- j10n, J10N
- Japanization. A particular L10n.
- J-2
- Visa type for person present in the US as the spouse of someone on a
J-1 visa.
- J2EE
- Java 2 platform Enterprise Edition.
(