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y
Spanish conjunction corresponding to English `and.' It is pronounced like the vowel i. (In Catalan, it is spelled i.) The letter y used to be a spelling variant of i in Spanish, but as Spanish spelling has been tamed over the years, the vocalic use of y has been reduced to this conjunction and to the ends of words such as hay (`there are'), and is also preserved in some surnames (e.g., Yglesias -- an old spelling of iglesias, `churches').

The conjunction is derived from the Latin et. In Iberia, at least, the t was lost early on. (In Italian, a consonant persisted in softened or reduced form: Classical Italian used ed for `and,' and ed is still used today to avoid hiatus before words beginning with an e sound and, very rarely, some other vowels.)

In Portuguese and Galician, et simply evolved into e. There are at least a couple of plausible theories of how the vowel was raised to an i sound in Spanish and Catalan, but there are problems with each.

To avoid hiatus in Spanish, the conjunction is replaced with e when it precedes a word that begins with the same sound (i.e., one whose spelling begins with i or hi, or with y in cases where that is pronounced as a vowel). Conversely, in Galician the usual e becomes i when the conjunction precedes a stressed e sound.

Y
pYridine. Pyridine is one of the simplest heterocyclic aromatic compounds. It's basically a benzene ring with a nitrogen substituted for one of the carbons (or one of the CH units, if you prefer). Admire my ASCII art:
       H         H
        \       /
         C-----C
        //     \\
       //       \\
  H---C           C---H         benzene
       \         /
        \ _____ /
         C-----C
        /       \
       H         H
       H         H
        \       /
         C-----C
        //     \\
       //       \\
      N           C---H         pyridine
       \         /
        \ _____ /
         C-----C
        /       \
       H         H

The ``basically'' is a pun. Also for yucks, here's pyrimidine (py):

       H         H
        \       /
         C-----C
        //     \\
       //       \\
      N           C---H         pyrimidine
       \         /
        \ _____ /
         C-----N
        /
       H

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y, Y
Latin character used, inconsistently, for the Greek letter upsilon. In German, the letter's name is upsilon. In Spanish, its name is i Griega (`Greek i'). Similarly in French i grec. In English, its name is written wye. In fact, it turns out that there's plenty of information on wye at the wye entry.

Y
Yield.

Y
Short for YMCA, YWCA, etc.

Y
Yttrium. One of four different elements named after one puny village. [The others are Erbium (Er), Terbium (Tb), and Ytterbium (Yb). Ytterby is in Sweden.] Atomic number 39. Not a rare earth (RE) element, like its three cognates (atomic numbers 68, 65, and 70, in alphabetical order by name) but found in most rare-earth minerals. Yttrium is used as a red phosphor in television screens.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

ya, YA, YA-
Yet Another ... . As in yacc. Yahoo, YAM and YARC. Good prefix to use when all the obvious names are taken.

YA
The Yosemite Association. ``[A] not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the support of Yosemite National Park through a program that includes membership, book publishing and sales, outdoor seminars, and visitor services. Established in 1923 [as the Yosemite Natural History Association, its name until at least 1973] the association was the first such `cooperating association' in the U.S.''

BTW, Yosemite is pronounced ``yo SEM mitty'' (not ``YO z'mite'').

YA
Young Adult. This usually doesn't mean young-at-heart adult.

I still remember the first time someone called me ``sir,'' or maybe just the first time I noticed, but it was probably the first time over all, because it was a shock.

I've been reading recently that colleges are reinstituting supervision and rules and all that in loco parentis stuff. They claim that the parents and even many of the students are asking for it.

``asking for it''

Sure. Off-campus housing is cheaper anyway.

I've usually seen YA as a book classification in libraries. There it means too stupid for words. I don't know when ``young adult'' became a common expression. Mark Twain, criticizing the biblical commandment against adultery, based his discussion on the following groups:
      Children at birth.
      Children in the cradle.
      School children.
      Youths and maidens.
      Fresh adults.
      Older ones.
      Men and women of 40.
      Of 50.
      Of 60.
      Of 70.
      Of 80.
      Of 90.
      Of 100.
I estimate that by ``fresh adults'' he meant people who had reached the legal age of majority (21) or consent (a bit younger). [It's hard to fix a date on this text. Mark Twain died in 1910, and this appears in the eighth of Letters from the Earth, compiled from his papers by Bernard DeVoto between 1937 and 1939 (and finally allowed to be published by Twain's daughter Clara Clemens in 1960).]

Y.A.A.
Youth Achievement of America, Inc.

YAAS
Yet Another Acronym Server.

yabbit, yabbut
Interjection: ``yeah, but.'' This sounds weak. Say ``you're committing the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi.'' The next time, just say ignoratio elenchi. If you're not trying to convince the audience, force your interlocutor to admit he doesn't know what the phrase means, and then say ``a particular instance of a general problem.''

You'll never survive on staircase wit. Plan and practice your ad lib persiflage.

Some googling suggests that the eye dialect form yabbut is about twenty times as common as yabbit. Yeah, but the author of this entry prefers ``yabbit.''

[Football icon]

YAC
Yards After the Catch. Football term. Pronounced ``yack.''

YAC
Yeast Artificial Chromosome.

yacc
Yet Another Compiler Compiler. A Unix utility.

yad
Hebrew: `hand.'

YAD
Yeast Alcohol Dehydrogenase.

YAF
Young Americans for Freedom. An organization formed at William F. Buckley's family estate in Sharon, Connecticut in 1960. US President George W. Bush was a ``Left-wing Utopian Interventionist''? Gee.

YAF
Young America's Foundation. ``The Voice of Freedom on Campus.'' This is ya.org, Buckley's is yaf.com -- this is likely to cause unintentional confusion, unless it's intentional.

Just now, I got 2770 Google hits for the for-Freedom group (hence YAFree) and 7580 for the Foundation (YAFound; I searched by full quoted names), but only 11 in common. On its homepage, the YAFree crows ``YAF Sponsored CPAC 2002 A Success!'' However, at CPAC's page of links to sponsors, YAFound is third among the four sponsors listed out of alphabetical order at the top, and (naturally) YAFree is last among the rest.

The YAFree homepage explains that ``CPAC was founded in 1974 by YAF and a couple other [sic] great conservative organizations. It is the largest gathering of conservatives in the world.'' CPAC's history page doesn't mention YAFree, but does have a link to the YAFound luncheon.

YAFound sponsors the National Journalism Center, founded 1977.

YAFIYGI
You Asked For It, You Got It.

For a while, Toyota used this as its advertising slogan. Sounds equivocal to me. I guess they couldn't use BK's ``special orders don't upset us'' because when you buy a new Japanese car (in the US, at least) you can't order options or option packages or color schemes. You just tell the dealer what you want, and if they got it, you can take delivery (maybe). If they don't got it (or maybe for other reasons), they start calling you with a great deal on a more expensive model. What Toyota meant by ``you got it'' was that they paid attention to customer preferences in a general way. Presumably the implication was that other companies design cars to minimize the overlap with the preferences of their potential customer base (probably because that way, they don't have to build as many cars, expand production capacity and other laborious things). After a few weeks of the run-around, what I wanted to buy was second-hand. Sorry: I wanted to acquire a previously owned motorcar.

YAG
Yttrium Aluminum Garnet. [Rhymes with ``bag.''] Occurs in the name of a very common and powerful laser: Nd:YAG.

YAGE
Yearbook for Ancient Greek Epic. The project was launched in 2014 and scheduled to be published annually by Brill starting in 2016. It is intended to be a platform for the dissemination of cutting-edge, synthetic research on Ancient Greek epic -- the entire epic tradition from Homer to Nonnus. No, I never heard of him either. Nonnus sounds like no one I know.

Yahoo
One suggestion for an expansion, back when it was but one of many similar and thin lists of webpages, was Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle.

YAIC
Yet Another International Conference. I'm introducing this acronym today because we need it yesterday.

Yak-
YAKovlev. Prefix for some Soviet aircraft, incl. Yak-42. Ya transliterates the Russian letter that looks like an R facing the wrong way.

yakuza
Japanese: `outlaw, suspicious character, outsider.'

English: `Member of the Japanese Mafia.'

YALSA
Young Adult Library Services Association. A division of the ALA. YALSA defines young adult readers as those aged twelve to eighteen. I define age twelve as younger than ``adult.''

yam
A so-called ``sweet potato'' that is not a sweet potato. Carrot-to-yellow color. A tuber first domesticated in Southeast Asia, not related to the nightshade family of New World plants that includes the potato.

The ``sweet potato'' that is a sweet potato was first domesticated in South America, where it is usually called batata. The pulp of the sweet potato is white like an ordinary potato's.

YAM
Yet Another Modem.

Yamaha
In a Jewish synagogue (like, as opposed to a Christian or Moslem synagogue, I suppose), the men do not wear Yamahas. If your spell checker tells you they do, think again. Use your head!

(It's exam time again; the student bloopers are roaring in.)

Yankee
Yankee has definitions scoped like a Russian doll, and there are versioning problems too. A typical version goes like this:
  1. Outside the US, a Yankee is someone from the US.
  2. In the US, a Yankee is someone from the North.
  3. In the North, a Yankee is someone from New England.
  4. In New England, a Yankee is someone who eats apple pie for breakfast... with a fork.

There are more minimalist versions that leave out the apple-pie level, but these are told only by the humorless. Some others neglect the fork and some mention the ch'duh cheese. No competent version mentions both the fork and the ch'duh; humor requires balance.

There is a common sort of imprecision in the usual definition. For example, the statement ``in the US, a Yankee is someone from the North'' is understood to mean ``in the US but outside the North, a Yankee is somebody from the North.'' This form is obviously unusable for humor. The terms used to define Yankee more precisely are themselves also ambiguous. The ``North,'' for example, may be the US minus the 11 or 13 states that seceded from the Union, or that North excluding the West, or those states north of the Mason-Dixon line defining the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania, or on the generally northern side of ``the Mason-Dixon Line'' defined by borders of the slave states in 1860, or Labrador (in principle). Similarly, New England may comprise the six New England states, or the three (or four) northernmost New England states, or the region of derhoticized speech (which excludes not only Connecticut but also Martha's Vineyard). Some versions of the Yankee definition insert a ``someone from upper [or three-states] New England'' level. This is overdoing it.

yap
Slang verb meaning prate, speak. Slang noun for mouth that needs to be shut. Not complimentary.

YAP
Youth Action for Peace. I must admit, organizations that use a term like ``International Secretariat'' start out with a credibility handicap.

YAPC
Yet Another Perl Conference. ``The Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPCs) are grassroots symposia on the Perl programming language under the auspices of the Yet Another Society (YAS).

YAPN
The Yorkshire Ancient Philosophy Network. According to their official blog, they have ``been meeting regularly since October 2009 to support the research activity of those university staff and postgraduates working on Ancient Philosophy within Yorkshire who wish to participate.'' Yeah, yeah, okay. All I care about is, do they pronounce it "yappin'"?

YapSEED
YAP State Education Enterprising Department. Yap is one of the federated states of Micronesia.

YAR
Yemen Arab Republic. The Yemeni country with capital in Sana'a. There used to be two Yemens. North Yemen became independent when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918. Britain granted independence to South Yemen in 1967. For a while during the Cold War the two Yemens played out a low-key Middle-East version of the North Vietnam/South Vietnam. Unlike the situation there or with Korea, the Democratic People's Republic was the more southerly state. Nasser took Egypt into Yemen and eventually discovered that he had a Vietnam on his hands. He found a face-saving way to withdraw, more quickly than the US did from its Vietnam (Vietnam). The two Yemens merged into one Yemen (see .ye) on May 22, 1990. It turned out that all the fighting is tribal, and continues sporadically whenever a rich neighbor feels like sending money to one of the sides.

YARC
Yet Another RPN Calculator works only with Java-capable web browsers. Uhhh... I may have the address wrong, or it may have died.

yard rat
Depending on the part of the country: deer or child.

White-tailed deer are also called white-tailed rats.

yard sale
A sale of things displayed in a yard, whether in boxes or hanging on a clothesline or sitting on or rolling off of tables or lying on the grass or whatever else. Expect rain.

Sale, like many other nouns, has multiple acceptions. An adjective (possibly in the form of an attributive noun) that modifies such a noun frequently determines which acception is meant. For example, a ``yard sale,'' ``garage sale,'' ``library sale,'' or ``sidewalk sale'' is a sale in the sense of ``an event in which multiple items are offered for purchase,'' conducted either in a place of the sort named or in the driveway. ``Rummage sale'' uses the same acception of sale. The items placed for sale in the aforementioned sorts of sales are usually second-hand; that is, they have already been retailed once. I'm going mad. Long ago, when I still watched television, I saw a horrifying human-interest story about a fellow who was documenting all the mundane, quotidian details of his life. Every day he would document his day, typing out where he went and what he did, what he had cooked and eaten, perhaps eventually giving a stool count. Recording his day seemed to take up a large portion of his day. He hadn't given much thought yet to how this information might be used, but

[I have to insert a paragraph break every so often so as not to upset the editor] he expressed a hope that someone someday would be able to use it. I remember that Harry Golden mentions somewhere a fellow who put down on paper the entire contents of his mind. I thought that must be an exaggeration, but then again, someone who decided to do this might have a relatively empty head. Harry Golden thought it was wonderful that this fellow had done this, and I suppose I'd agree that it's handy for someone somewhere to have done it. (This was mentioned either in For Two Cents Plain or in Only in America.) I imagine that the records of that poor all-recording wretch could be of some scientific use, though they could never represent a typical case (in the usual acception of ``typical case,'' rather than the typical acception of ``case,'' I think).

Anyway, another acception of sale is ``an offering of items for sale with special purchase incentives [usually reduced price or otherwise sweetened terms]'' to move the goods faster. (Well, I didn't say ``ritual offering.'') This acception is signaled by the use of intensifiers to modify the noun sale, as in clearance sale, blow-out sale, and blow-out clearance sale! The word special in the acception definition indicates that the items for sale are items that are regularly sold under non-sale conditions by the same retailer offering the items for sale.

A third acception. Let me interrupt to repeat Dr. Johnson's definition of lexicographer: ``a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.'' A third acception, as I was writing, is similar to the previous, so read carefully: ``an offering of special items for sale.'' The implication is usually that the items are not special by dint of being inferior to the usual ones.

The preceding two acceptions of sale may be signaled by the use of adjectives that describe what is being sold. A ``tent sale'' is a sale in one of these senses, but it may be a sale of tents or a sales event held in a tent rather than in the retailer's usual sales space.

The fine distinctions made above may be ignored, or may not fit. A local book discounter (Bargain Books) sells new and used books, and most of its new books are damaged goods or (most often) are consigned there after failing to sell at higher-priced regular outlets. They have a permanent banner outside that says ``Giant Book Sale.'' Fair enough.

A fourth acception of sale is ``the transfer of a property (or obligation) in exchange for money.'' In other words, it's a purchase; but since the verbs sell and purchase have complementary senses, a sale is a purchase as seen by a seller rather than a buyer. The customer makes a buy or a purchase; the salesperson makes a sale.

A sale in the preceding acception is the individual event that the other sorts of sale are supposed to encourage en masse. The plural of this sale can function as an uncountable noun (``same-store sales,'' etc.) but is generally construed plural. The word sales, construed singular, refers to business aspects of retailing.

If this were a serious dictionary, the above paragraphs would be numbered definitions under a sales entry. We don't do that. All we're really doing is putting off the day when we explain the Yarkovsky effect.

YARO(B)BA
Yet Another Review Of (Bernal's) Black Athena.

YAS
Yet Another Society. YAS is a non-profit corporation (tax-free in the US) for the advancement of collaborative efforts in computer and information sciences. They sponsor YAPC.

YAT
York Archaeological Trust. (York in England.)

yaw
Rotation about a vertical axis. In other words, change in azimuthal angle. The etymology is a mystery, but conjectured Scandinavian -- in which connection, see yrast.

YAWN
Young Adults With Narcolepsy. That group used to own the domain <yawn.org>. Evidently, they failed to renew their registration in time, and some other group snapped up the valuable name. This is a common danger. Don't get caught napping!

YAWN
Yet Another Wonderful Novelty.

A neologism attributed to Liam Quin.

YB
YearBook.

Yb
Ytterbium. One of four different elements named after one puny village. [The others are Erbium (Er), Terbium (Tb), and Yttrium (Y). Ytterby is in Sweden. There's a mine there, as you can guess.] Atomic number 70. A rare earth (RE) element.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

YBA
Young British Artists. Predominant styles, as of 2000: Neo-Dadaism and anything shocking. Give 'em credit -- it's becoming increasingly difficult to shock anyone. Necrophilia, the nexus of scatology and eschatology, bodily fluids incorrectly placed, something unpleasant to do with children? It's been done.

YBC
Yerba Buena Center. Located at third and Mission, in San Francisco, California. In his SF Chronicle column for October 14, 1993, Herb Caen commented
The City That Knows How but not when. Took 30 years to get things off the ground and it isn't finished yet, but we are all proud, are we not? We tore down a lot of affordable housing and rousted a small army of old drunks, but it was worth it. The old drunks plus their young lawyers delayed Yerba Buena (''Good Herb'') for years. What got their dander up was the late Justin Herman, Robert Moses-like czar of redevelopment, saying that ''I'm not gonna let a bunch of old drunks get in my way.'' When they heard that, the old drunks sobered up and got a steely glint in their eyes, just like the pioneers.

YBCO
Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (YBa2Cu3O7-x), (or YBa2Cu3O6+x). A high-TC superconductor. Also ``Y123.''

YBG
Yerba Buena Gardens. Part of YBC.

Y.C.A.
Yacht Club Adriaco. Italian for `Adriatic Yacht Club,' based in Trieste. Founded in 1903. That was a hundred years ago, wasn't it?

YCA
Young Concert Artists.

Y.C.C.
Yacht Club Cagliari. Italian for `Cagliari Yacht Club,' at Cagliari. The one at Cupa is abbreviated Y.C.Cupa or YC CUPA (don't be misled by capitalization).

YCC
Youth Crisis Center of Jacksonville, FL.

Y.C.L.
Yacht Club Lignano. Italian for -- get this -- `Lignano Yacht Club.'

YCL
Young Communist League.

yclepe
Call by the name of. Somewhat out of use these past four or five centuries. Synonym of clepe, q.v.

In the LION database, I can find six instances of yclepe in poetry published since 1477, with a cluster early in the 19th century, but no instances in prose. The past participle form yclept carried on. Following are the most recent prose instances that I can find of yclept, that were published on paper. (The first number is the year of publication.)

  1. From p. 137 of Augusta J. Evans's Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice.
    W--- gave her young men liberally; company after company was equipped, furnished with ample funds by the munificence of citizens who remained, and sent forward to Virginia, to make their breasts a shield for the proud old ``Mother of Presidents.'' The battle of Bethel was regarded as part of an overture to the opera of Blood, yclept ``Subjugation,'' and people watched in silence for the crimson curtain to rise upon the banks of the Potomac.
  2. From p. 241 of Bret Harte's urban sketch ``Seeing the Steamer Off'' (pp. 238-244) published in Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands, and Other Sketches.
    Yet there is certainly something to interest us in the examination of that cheerless damp closet, whose painted wooden walls no furniture or company can make habitable, wherein our friend is to spend so many vapid days and restless nights. The sight of these apartments, yclept state-rooms, --- Heaven knows why, except it be from their want of cosiness, --- is full of keen reminiscences to most Californians who have not outgrown the memories of that dreary interval when, in obedience to nature's wise compensations, homesickness was blotted out by sea-sickness, and both at last resolved into a chaotic and distempered dream, whose details we now recognize.
  3. From p. 427 of Arthur Train's My Day In Court, just a couple of pages after the author has gotten through gently chastising the ``brilliant'' classical scholar John Jay Chapman for being too ``exalted'' a writer in his efforts to be published in the lower-brow (those were the days) Saturday Evening Post.
    It is indisputable that, in quantum at least, the purveyors of women's fashions gave the final boost to American literature. The history of that originally sui generis enchiridion, yclept the ``fashion magazine,'' is as entertaining as it is amazing.

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YClS
Yale CLassical Studies. Journal catalogued by TOCS-IN.

Y.C.N.
Yacht Club Napoli. Italian, `Naples Yacht Club.'

YCS
Youth Cohort Study.

YD
Youth Dynamics Active Christian Youth Ministry. Interdenominational.

.ye
Yemen domain-name code. Old North Yemen (YAR) and South Yemen quietly united in 1990, and continue their war civilly, so to speak.

Inoffensive data on Yemen is found in the factbook entry from the latest edition of the CIA Factbook

More at the aa entry, really.

YEA
Yield Enhancement Analysis.

YEA
Youth Education in the Arts.

Yeah, sure pal.
Not a chance.

[ # ] years young
An expression that always protests too much. Cf. youthful.

yegg
A thief, esp. a safecracker.

yellow brass
A brass paler than red brass because it's got more zinc (Zn) and less (say one third) copper (Cu).

yellow-dog Democrat
Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, roughly speaking, Southern resentment of the Republican party gave the Democratic party a strength among whites that was proverbially expressed thus: that they would vote Democratic even if the party nominated a yellow dog. Cf. blue dog.

yellow sheets
A daily publication of the (US) National Quotation Bureau, which lists bid and asked prices, and brokerage firms that make a market in corporate bonds traded in OTC shares.

YELT
York English Language Test. ``The YELT test evaluates your ability to read, write, comprehend and speak English at university level [which requires you to use and utilize pleonasm and, also, redundancy too]. It also helps determine whether you require additional English as a Second Language (ESL) courses as part of your university program.''

The test has two parts: written and oral. It is offered regularly in the greater Toronto area (the York Université/University area), and by arrangement elsewhere.

yen
A yearning, a hankering desire.

yen
The basic monetary unit of Japan. (Hence the abbreviation, if it can be called that, JPY. This currency code doesn't even disambiguate usefully, since ``yen'' is not the currency of any other nation.)

Something that many Japanese have mentioned to me is that the Japanese monetary unit is really the ``en'' and not ``yen.'' Sometimes they express puzzlement that it is called yen in English. It's not really very puzzling. Foreign visitors to Japan have often transcribed the language they heard there using their native phonetic systems, and their records make clear that a palatal glide before the /e/ was a common, though not universal feature of Japanese. This occurred initially as in en/yen and also in the name of the city of Edo or Yedo. I'm not sure if the Yedo pronunciation was actually used by Edo (or Yedo) people. (It might be like ``New Joy-zee,'' a New York-accented pronunciation of New Jersey that many people think is a characteristically New Jersey pronunciation.) The question is interesting as Edo became the new national capital of Tokyo (actually with quantitative ``long'' vowels: Tôkyô), and in the post-WWII period television has made the Tokyo dialect dominant throughout Japan. The Tokyo dialect today certainly does not have a palatal glide before the e, but other dialects still do. For example, the word êga (`movies') is pronounced something like ``yegwa'' in Kyûshû and the Ryûkyûs.

Many names that begin with E in English have Russian forms that begin with Ye. For example, Yelena Bonner (Andrei Sakharov's widow) has the given name equivalent to Elena. Elizabeth is Yelizabeta, etc. The Cyrillic character that represents the palatalized e looks like the Latin E, and often the change is not marked in transliteration. For example, in French newspapers, ``Yeltsin'' and ``Eltsin'' appear to be about equally common transliterations of the former Russian president's name.

The situation with Russian ye is not quite the same as that with the Japanese ye. In Japanese, ye represents an alternative pronunciation of e. In Russian, there is a phonemic distinction between ye and e. The latter sound has a distinct symbol. (It looks like a backwards-facing lower-case epsilon. No -- it doesn't look so much like a three: use the other epsilon glyph. Actually, the character looks like the symbol that mathematicians use for `such that,' but without the dots.)

Judging from dictionary pages, the nonpalatalized e is about three times more common word-initially than the ye. Many of the initial-ye words are cognates or loans of words that had an initial epsilon-upsilon in Greek and that typically (Eugene, Europe, eunuch) but not always (evangelic) became palatalized in English. Most of the rest seem to come from the old Slavic word stock. I'm sure that a ye- development from Indo-European e- is a common Slavic phenomenon. I recall that conjugations of the copula in which one expects e- from Latin often have je- in some Slavic languages. In Czech, je is `is.' If there is a main pattern in ye/e, it might be that recent loans preserve unpalatalized e-. Please don't ask me about noninitial ye/e. I don't know these languages; I just look stuff up in dictionaries.

ye olde golfe clubbies
This entry, and the entries it links to, scattered around the glossary, are under reconstruction. I'm not very interested in this topic, so the reconstruction will take a while.

  1. niblick (entry ready)

One way to learn about this subject might be to visit the USGA Museum. It was founded in January 1936, about a year before the National Baseball Hall of Fame was established in Cooperstown, N.Y. It was the first museum in the country dedicated solely to a sport, if we stipulate that golf is a sport. By 2008, it had accumulated ``more than 42,000 artifacts, a library of more than 20,000 volumes, more than half a million photographic images, and several thousands [of] hours of historic film, video, and audio recordings. Together, the museum's collections present a comprehensive history of the game's development in the United States over the course of nearly 250 years. They are also the finest collection of golf memorabilia in the world.'' (I'm cribbing from here.) On June 3, 2008, the USGA opened a new facility -- the Arnold Palmer Center for Golf History. More than 2,000 artifacts are on display, twice as many as before. ``Among notable treasures, visitors [can] see the golf clubs, golf ball, and scorecard used by Francis Ouimet during his stunning victory in the 1913 U.S. Open, a remarkable moment in American sports history recently immortalized in the Disney film, `The Greatest Game Ever Played.' ... Visitors will learn that all but two American Presidents of the 20th century were avid golfers as evidenced by clubs and balls used by several chief executives throughout the exhibitions.'' What exhibitions?

The Museum and the Palmer Center, as well as some golf equipment testing laboratories, are all located together on a woodsy campus in New Jersey. To get there, just get off I-78 at exit 33 and follow the brown signs. That's what I did, as I happened to be driving through on Superbowl Sunday in 2009. It was open (it's closed only Mondays and major holidays), but the museum closes at 5pm and I got there at 4:30 and admission is ``$7 for adults, $5 for USGA Members,'' etc. [I like that wording.] I explained my mission to the docents (``to learn about old golf clubs like mashies and niblicks'') and one of them explained to me that although they had some vintage clubs, there wasn't much in the way of explanatory material. He suggested that I look on the Internet if I wanted to find out about it. So there you are.

Yes
A rock group. Slightly heavy-metalish.

Yes!
The answer, surrender, according to another rock group. You' gotta let it -- you' gotta let it go.

yes
One feature which distinguishes Japanese from English is the much greater burden of communication that is borne by the listener than the speaker in Japanese. The speaker is less responsible for being clear or direct, and the hearer is required to listen more actively: to disambiguate and to read between the lines. This indirect mode of communication is facilitated in Japanese by the fact of a relatively homogeneous culture, so the listener is usually in a better position to guess what is tacit. Perhaps as a result, Japanese listeners tend to give much more vocal encouragement to a speaker, corresponding to ``uh-huh,'' ``you don't say,'' ``do tell,'' ``yes, dear'' and other vacuous nonsense spoken in English. In conversational analysis, this is called back-channeling. In Japanese, one often back-channels the word hai, meaning `yes.'

In addition, the Japanese language has politeness words and forms (keigo) that have no parallels in English. The absence of these makes some inexperienced Japanese speakers of English uncomfortable.

For both of the above reasons, or at least one, or maybe neither (hey, it's just hypothesis) it happens (this is not hypothesis) that inexperienced Japanese speakers of English tend to hold up their end of conversations in English with a lot of ``yes'' spoken in an ambiguous, half-questioning tone. You couldn't do half as well in Japanese, so you're a one to complain. Anyway, after a bit of this, what typically happens is that you end up asking a question, and you get back a ``yes'' that you think might be an answer or might be ``uh-huh.'' So you rephrase the question as a negative, and you still get a ``yes,'' but you're still not sure what's happened to the conversation. For those moments, you can use the following phrase. Commit it to memory, it's almost as useful as Watashi-wa nihongo-o dekimasen. (`I can't do Japanese.')

Ima `yes'-to iwareimashita-ga, sore-wa watashi-no shitsumon ni taitsudu kotae des ka? Soretomo tanaru aizüchi des ka?
(This isn't even split up properly into words, but never mind -- just say it slowly and pronounce every syllable.) What this asks, and not very politely, is whether the ``yes'' you're getting is an answer or just back-channeling. In the next lesson, you will learn how to interpret the answer. Until then, at least you got all that frustration off your chest.

That Japanese yessing business can be a hard habit to break. One day I had dinner with my cousin Vicky at Steve's wife's Chinese restaurant in Santa Barbara, and our waiter replied to the first order with hai. So I ordered in Japanese. (You know, like watashi-wa `kung pao chicken'-o onegaishimasu. The first time I assimilated the object marker -o into onegai, and he didn't understand. Jeez, ya gotta make allowances for the California accent! Yeah, yeah -- you don't look so Japanese yourself.)

You know, people think the US is just a bilingual society (English and Spanish), but it's not. Yesterday I went to the info desk at the Mishawaka Barnes and Noble to ask after a title. I told the clerk I preferred the German rather than the translation, and he continued our conversation in accented but serviceable German.

YES
Young Epidemiology Scholars. A pair of competitions -- one for students (top prize USD 50,000) and one for teachers (USD 20,000). The YES competitions are funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and administered by the College Board. The idea is to bribe high school students and teachers to learn about epidemiology and public health issues.

The YES Competition for students is open to high school juniors and seniors who apply epidemiological principles to a specified area of health. Student awards will total up to $456,000 each year, including $50,000 college scholarships for two national winners. The deadline for the 2003-04 Student Competition is February 6, 2004.

The YES Competition for teachers invites high school teachers from a variety of disciplines to submit models for innovative classroom curricula that incorporate epidemiological methods. Each year as many as 18 teachers or teaching teams are selected as regional winners, and each receives a $5,000 award. Of these, up to six are selected annually as national winners, and each receives an additional $15,000 award. Winning curricula will be posted to the YES Web site and will be widely available to teachers. The deadline for the Teacher Competition is December 1, 2003

Yes-men
Ugh! We despise them! We all despise them!

Yes, you're wondering ...
I anticipated your objection. I will confuse you with a deceptive rephrasing.

yet
A word that means, in general, even now. When Francis Scott Key wrote ``The Star-Spangled Banner'' (i.e., 1812 or 1813), he could count on listeners understanding ``does that ... banner yet wave'' in the sense ``does that ... banner still wave.'' That is yet in the sense of still. Today, it is far more common for yet to mean already.

YFC
Youth For Christ. Many are called. Few are home. Leave a message after the beep.

YFCY
Your First College Year. A survey of college freshmen administered by cooperative post-secondary institutions across the US for the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI, q.v.). YFCY was developed jointly by HERI and Brevard College's Policy Center on the First Year of College as a follow-up to HERI's annual CIRP Freshman Survey. It was first administered nationally in 1999.

``Both the paper and on-line versions of YFCY include space for your campus to ask up to 30 optional questions of local relevance and allows institutions to indicate up to 190 various student subgroups [sic] on the survey.'' Can we say ``fragmented''? Sure we can! (But compare SRTE.)

YGIAGAM
Your Guess Is As Good As Mine.

YHTBT
You Had To Be There. Usenet acronym.

Yiddish
Yiddish is a Germanic language. It's a variety of High (i.e., originally southern) German that anyone who speaks standard Modern German can mostly understand (which is more than I'd be willing to say for some of the High German varieties spoken in Switzerland). It was essentially the colloquial version of German spoken by Jews, another local language like Plattdeutsch or Franconian or Schwabisch. (It should be noted that Standard German is, to a fair approximation, High German vocabulary spelled in High German and pronounced in Low German. This accounts for some of the differences between Standard German and other High German varieties like Yiddish.) The vocabulary of Yiddish is roughly 90% Germanic and 10% or less Hebrew, with a smattering of Slavic words.

Large numbers of Jews first began to speak Germanic around 1250, when Jews migrated from northern Italy and northern France into Lotharingia. Those immigrants spoke languages referred to as Judeo-French and Judeo-Italian, what they themselves referred to as Laaz. This is an extension of the meaning of the Hebrew La'az, which designated a foreign-language gloss, in Hebrew transliteration, of a Bible passage. The assumption behind this specialized term was evidently that the Jewish reader who had trouble understanding the Hebrew words of a passage would know the foreign language by sound and would of course also be able to read Hebrew. La'az came to be identified in medieval Europe with Latin, duh. Or with what people continued to think of as Latin, even after it had become Romance. Laaz is the source of a few Romance loans in Yiddish, just as Knaanic (a Slavic Jewish language) is the source of a few Slavic loans. Most of the Slavic loans were picked up directly by Yiddish-speakers living (as most eventually did) in Slavic-speaking regions. I imagine that most Romance cognates in Yiddish came in through Germanic.

Examples? Oy! Examples from Laaz, he wants! I don't have anything authoritative. In fact, I'm not sure a decent etymological dictionary of Yiddish exists; I certainly have none good or bad. However, one very common word I can think of is the Yiddish verb pronounced benchn, meaning `to bless' (usually referring to prayers recited after a meal). This is evidently cognate with German benedeien, which has the same meaning. Both are evidently derived from the Latin benedicere. The standard German word was benedien in Middle High German, borrowed from the Italian benedire (the German etymology is according to the Deutsches Wörterbuch of Hermann Paul). This looks sufficiently different that it looks like the Yiddish has a separate etymology. (It doesn't seem to have a Slavic cognate -- at least not Polish or Russian.)

More later. I only put in this entry because I wanted to point out what is obvious to any German speaker but less obvious to an Anglophone: the word Yiddish is simply the adjective meaning `Jewish,' transliterated from Yiddish or German into English. The German spelling is jüdisch (yih is probably as close as English phonemes can get to German jü-). (And in case it isn't obvious, English was originally just the adjective form of Angle, as in Angles and Saxons. The shift from A to E is an instance of umlaut.

yield
The fraction of product conforming to spec. Common yields tracked by SPC: wafer fab yield (fraction of wafers that complete wafer processing); wafer probe yield (the fraction of dice on a wafer whose simple test structures meet device specs); assembly yield (fraction of units that are assembled correctly); and final test yield (fraction of packaged units that pass functionality tests).

YIG
Yttrium Iron Garnet. Thin YIG films are used in nonlinear optics applications like multipliers.

YIM
Yahoo! Instant Messenger.

Yippee!
Hooray!

yippie
Youth International PartY (member). A word modeled on hippie (< hipster < hip, or maybe directly from hip) and suggesting the enthusiasm of the interjection Yippee.

YITP
C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. It's located at SUNY Stony Brook. You know, Chinese has about 300 common surnames. (I've also read that there are only about 500 total, but I am skeptical.) So every time you use one of the names for an ITP, you're reducing the stock of available ITP names by a significant fraction. Japanese, on the other hand, has upwards of 100,000 surnames, and there aren't as many Japanese as Chinese.

YITP
(Hideki) Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics. It's located at the University of Kyoto.

YIVO
Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut. That's a transliteration of the Yiddish name.

Yiddish is written in Hebrew characters. The Hebrew letter aleph, a ``silent'' stop consonant, is the first letter of the majority of words -- like Institut -- that begin in a vowel. The name of the character is written alef in the standard transliteration from Yiddish. So the question arises, why is the alef at the end of the acronym pronounced and transliterated as O. I'm not sure yet. I imagine it has to do with the fact that the acronym is written without ``pointing'' (the small marks around a consonantal character that indicate vowels). Hebrew is usually written without pointing; this doesn't work very well with the Germanic vocabulary of Yiddish, but there is evidently still a tendency to omit them in some situations. In general, the alef character may be silent, (``shtumer alef''), may have an ``a'' sound (``pasekh alef'' -- an alef with a pasekk underneath), or may have one of the sounds transcribed as ``o'' (``komets alef''). I'm not sure why the final alef in YIVO is interpreted as an o.

The standard English translation of ``Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut'' has always been `Yiddish Scientific Institute,' but technically the translation `Jewish Scientific Institute' is equally accurate. YIVO was founded in 1925 as a social-science research institute concerned with Ashkenazi Jewish culture (which was mostly Yiddish-speaking, until it was annihilated in WWII), and as a teaching institute with a focus on the Yiddish language. Thus, the translation with ``Jewish'' is too general, and the translation with ``Yiddish'' is technically too narrow, but probably better if understood loosely. In any case, during WWII YIVO moved to New York City. The acronym was sealed, and the organization is now known as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. (In fact, the acronym appears to be sealed in Yiddish as well. The institute's logo, or at least its homepage, gives the name in Yiddish under the English, and in Yiddish it says Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut - YIVO.)

Y'know, times are tough everywhere.
  1. You know I'm going to give you the shaft.
  2. I could care less. (Cf. Been There, Done That.)

Most people have a working vocabulary of at least a few thousand words. Once I helpfully pointed out to my college roommate that by contrast, he had a vocabulary of a few hundred clichés. ``Thanks a lot, bub.''

More on clichés at the franchise entry.

It's there, just keep reading!

YJA
ICAO's code for the airport in Jasper, Alberta, Canada. (Y? C YUL, yul c.)

YJTYK
You Just Think You Know (YKWIS?)

YKK
Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha. `Yoshida Industries Limited.' A company, founded by Tadao Yoshida in 1934, that today manufactures about 90% of all zippers world-wide.

YKWIS
You Know What I'm Saying.

YL
Young Learner[s]. Well, that's the hope, anyway.

YLE
Finland's national public service broadcasting company. ``YLE operates five national television channels and thirteen radio channels and services complemented by 25 regional radio programmes.'' (Quotes and statistics here and below are from this pdf confession.) YLE concentrates on being extremely boring, a goal for which they strive languidly by a number of means:

I haven't been able to find an acronym expansion for YLE, but it's probably something like ``Your Spinach Eat.'' Hmmm... spinach is pinaatti. Okay, well, something like that anyway. They also use an English initialism FBC, which is pronounced ``finish brawdkasting kumpanee'' in American. YLE written alone is uniformly capitalized, so it appears to be an acronym (y is vocalic in Finnish, so this is pronounceable). YLE is inflected like an ordinary word, yielding forms like YLEssä and YLen (but note that the adverb ylen means `extremely'), but in Finnish this does not indicate that the word is not an acronym or initialism (see USA). On the other hand, YLE resembles words beginning in the root yle with senses related to `general.' (Yleensä means `generally,' yleisö `public,' and yleis is an adjective meaning `general.') YLE uses a compound yleisradio that can evidently be understood as `public radio.' So YLE is either a clever acronym or something else, such as the abstraction of a root for use as a name. It reminds me of those irritating ING advertisements. YLE isn't in any of the five Finnish-to-Something dictionaries I've had a chance to check; I should probably just ask someone who knows.

In 2004, over 90% of YLE's funding came from television fees. At a shade under 200 euros, Finland's annual television fee is typical for Europe.

YLF
YLiF4 (Yttrium Lithium Fluoride). Alternate material to be doped with Nd for a laser gain medium. Nd:YAG is more common. Hughes wants to use it to upconvert IR to visible light.

YM
Yang-Mills. Chen Ning Yang and Robert L. Mills. In work they published in 1954, they developed a field theory for fields more general than the electromagnetic field that satisfy a natural generalization of gauge invariance. Quantum Yang-Mills fields are the basis for essentially all of modern elementary particle theory. Adjectives like Einstein-Yang-Mills (EYM) and Yang-Mills-Higgs (YMH) are used to indicate the presence of certain ingredients (gravitational fields and Higgs fields, respectively).

ym
Young & Modern. A magazine that is neither. Didn't ``ym'' used to stand for ``Young Miss''? Perish the retrograde thought! Today YM stands for -- tah-dah! -- (it's still cool to do an oral drum-roll, isn't it?)
Your Magazine
This could be confusing on an order form. Your Name, Your Address, Your Magazine. (Answer: AK, 6CG I4, NR.)

Description of one magazine website: ``a magazine dedicated to teen age [sic, and I'm gonna be sic again] women, has a contemporary flair and a youthful sense of style.'' Get a second epinion.

YMA
Young Muslim Association. A Kenyan Charity organization.

YMCA
Young Men's Christian Association. The World Alliance site is substantially under construction as of 1997.04.14, but the European Alliance of YMCA's has it together. The YMCA in San Diego County (California), for some reason, has captured the http://www.ymca.org/ URL. They serve a list of links.

In some foreign languages, the acronym has been taken over as a word, so there is no alternative acronym. That appears to be the case at least for Italian.

YMH
Yang-Mills-Higgs. See YM (for Yang-Mills).

YMHA
Young Men's Hebrew Association.

YMMV
Your Mileage May Vary. Of course, everybody's mileage varies, depending on how they drive. What they mean is a logical consequence of this: that your mileage will differ from the figure stated. Used colloquially to suggest that one's results other than gas mileage may differ.

Two branches of the US government are in the business of calculating automobile gas mileage. The NHTSA computes CAFE. Completely independently, the EPA provides mileage estimates that appear on new-automobile stickers.

YN
YeomaN. Naval rank abbreviation. Productive in

The United Federation of Planets will also use yeoman as a rank in its starships. Yeoman Rand will be cast as Captain Kirk's romantic interest, but then the script will diverge from original plans.

YNC
Chief YeomaN. Naval rank abbreviation.

YNCM
Master Chief YeomaN. Naval rank abbreviation.

YNCS
Senior Chief YeomaN. Naval rank abbreviation.

YND
ICAO's code for the airport in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada.

YND
Young New Democrats (Canada).

YNHA
Yosemite Natural History Association. That name is now history; see the Yosemite Association entry.

YN1
YeomaN, First Class. Naval rank abbreviation.

YN2
YeomaN, Second Class. Naval rank abbreviation.

YN3
YeomaN, Third Class. Naval rank abbreviation.

y|o, y/o
Spanish, `and/or.'

YO, y.o., y/o
Year[s] Old.

YOB, y.o.b.
Year Of Birth. A component of DOB.

yob
An adult not intellectually much advanced beyond YOB. Okay, more precisely: a young punk. British slang in use since the 19th century, derived from spelled backwards of boy. Also yobbo. Cf. IUBS.

YOD
Year Of Death. For prominent ancient persons, the YOD is usually more reliably known than the YOB.

YOGAOIL
You Only Go Around Once In Life.

I'm sorry to say I didn't think of this acronym myself. The literal sense of the word yoga (i.e., as opposed to the transferred or metaphorical religious sense) is `path.' Yoga discussion in this glossary is still rather limited -- just the jaw-dropping and TM entries (no, not even that TM entry). Look, why don't you read about llamas instead?

(Of course, we also mention Yogi at the CX entry.)

yoghurt
A variant spelling of yogurt. Googling in December 2003 suggests that this spelling has captured only about 20% of the world market for English-language communication of this fermented milk product's identity. (Yoghourt is not unknown, but holds under 1% of the world word-market share.)

We mention yogurt at entries for ICBY and TCBY, as well as FLF, iced cream (mmm-mmm! good entry!), KL and Medef. And now also TM.

YoL, YOL
Year Of Languages. Wow. What will they think of next?

YOLO
You Only Live Once. Well, at least for most of us, there's only one life we can currently be pretty sure we will ever experience. Go to church and see if they'll give you a rain-check or something. I've also heard of this thing called ``life insurance'' -- maybe they'll give you a refund if life doesn't work out.

YoL2005
Year Of Languages 2005. I've heard that this is going to be the year of languages in the US, but it could be just a rumor. Oh look! It must be real, it's being promoted by ACTFL. I'm so psyched!

There was an official European YoL in 2001. See EYL. I can't believe I've put in three entries just for this silly advertising gimmick.

yori
Yori is the romaji spelling of a Japanese word that means `reliable.'

YOS
Yttrium OrthoSilicate. Laser material.

You can't convince me I'm a fool!
Just so.

You just don't understand!
You just don't agree!

You never know.
You usually have a pretty good idea.

young at heart
Emotionally immature.

Your membership to <domain name> has been accepted.
I applied?

``Please access your member benefits'' means `please click on the ad banners.'

youthful
Old.

In ``Give Me One Reason,'' Tracy Chapman sings

this youthful heart can love you ...
followed by
but I'm too old to go chasing around, wasting my precious energy.

You've got mail!
You've been spammed, most likely.

You won't be disappointed.
Personalsese. Short for ``I'm not making any promises you can ever claim I reneged on.''

YOW
ICAO's code for the airport in OttaWa, ON, Canada. Follow a link for
  1. enlightenment (YUL) or
  2. entertainment (EEK).

Yow
An interjection used by Zippy the Pinhead.

[Phone icon]

YP, yp
Yellow Pages. In US, Canadian, and UK telephone books, the yellow pages list businesses ordered by product or service. (Some phone books and phone book sections list businesses alphabetically by name, in what are typically called ``business white pages.'' The personal listings are then retronymically the ``residential white pages.'' Or at least they were, back when most phones connected to land lines.)

In the US, back when the phone company was a regulated monopoly (Ma Bell), the yellow pages mostly referred to a volume produced by that monopoly. Everywhere I've lived in the US since the 1980's, I've had at least two different, competing yellow-pages volumes delivered to my home. In Britain, the ``Yellow Pages'' trademark is so broad that Sun Microsystems was forced to rename its Unix software of that name to Network Information Service. Come to think of it, I've been typing nslookup for so long, I don't remember when I first dealt with a Unix that refused to recognize ``yp.''

YPBCO
Yttrium Praseodysium Barium Copper Oxide (Y1-xPrxBa2Cu3O7-x),

YPE
Youth Training in Peace Education. Winner of the $3,000 top prize in the Gigot Center's fourth annual Notre Dame Social Venture Plan Competition. How do they keep a straight face?

YPG
Yards Per (North American football) Game.

YPR
Yale Philosophy Review. An undergraduate publication.

Ypres
A Flemish town dating back to the Middle Ages. Well known primarily for major, typically ghastly, WWI battles fought there.

YQFP
Yamamoto Quantum Fluctuation Project at Stanford Univ.

yr., YR
YeaR.

YR
Yield Ramp. A new broom does not sweep well.

Y&R
The Young and the Restless. A CBS soap opera, first appeared in 1973. Currently the most popular daytime soap.

Y&R
Young and Rubicam. Very good ampersam.

slacks, loafers, fatigues
Come as you are.

Some readers are probably wondering Y I have placed this entry out of apparent alphabetical order. Y not?? I'm trying to take some of the pressure off C.html (Casual wear, Clothes make the man).

YRA
Yacht Racing Association in the San Francisco Bay area.

yrast
Scandinavian word meaning `fast-spinning,' used in nuclear physics to designate high-spin nuclear states. What do those guys up there know that we don't, that makes them so interested in spin? See also yaw.

The word yrsel, `dizziness,' occurs in a Swedish economics joke on a Finnish page which I have the least trouble (and that's still enow) accessing from England.

I have never encountered the usage vertiginous nuclear state.

For more on spin, see english.

YRBS
Youth Risk Behavior Survey. An annual CDC survey of high-school students. The webpage is defunct. Try YRBSS.

YRBSS
Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System. ``The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) monitors priority health-risk behaviors and the prevalence of obesity and asthma among youth and young adults. The YRBSS includes a national school-based survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state, territorial, tribal, and local surveys conducted by state, territorial, and local education and health agencies and tribal governments.''

Yreka
A town in Siskiyou County of northern California, sixty miles inland and twenty-two miles south of the Oregon border, served by I-5.

The name is pronounced wye-REEkuh, and was originally meant to be spelled Wyreka, but a clerk's error in Sacramento changed the name. The town of Yreka lies in the Shasta valley, and Mount Shasta comes into view soon after you head south out of town. Shasta is the name of a band of the Wintun tribe, and in Wintun, wai means `north' [see A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (1925), p. 356]. It appears that Wyreka was the Shasta name for what we now call Mt. Shasta [Kroeber, p. 897], with the meaning `north mountain.'

Martin Gardner reported many years ago that there was a Yreka Bakery in Yreka (on West Miner St.). After the Yreka Bakery went out of business in the 1960's, a Yrella Gallery took its place. A new Yreka Bakery (a deli) has since opened on the same street.

The rock group Pep Squad recorded a CD called Yreka Bakery, distributed by the Tooth & Nail label. It's not like a vanity press or anything. They actually expect to make money doing this stuff. It's a big world.

There's a Noel Anna Leon in Los Angeles. I don't know for a fact that that was contrived by anyone other than the parents of a Noel Anna Leon. (I once sat on a plane to Oklahoma City next to a woman named Noël; she said everyone mispronounced it ``nole.'') Other, less exotic contrived-palindrome business names elsewhere include Lion Oil and Elite Tile. Across the US there are dozens of independent businesses named ``Nola's Salon'' and ``Nola Salon.''

Arizona's Anozira housing development and various of Canada's Adanac-named companies slip easily into palindromicity. There's an Atokad Park, known for its race track and fair grounds, in Dakota County, Nebraska, but that lends itself with dangerous ease to ``Atokad Parc.'' Adaven, Nevada is a ghost town. (If you want to learn a little more and risk having your computer hanged, by all means follow this link.)

Breaking news -- even before it happens, we're on top of the story!

There's an Aragain Products in Niagara Falls. If they start writing their name in palindrome form, we may be among the first to let you know!

Long-time information-seekers realize that I am loathe to obtrude my own personal opinions into this serious reference work, but a few, very rare occasions require a deviation from that strict policy. This is such an occasion.

<OPINION>
Taking the location name spelled backwards as your business or enterprise name is not classy or clever. It demonstrates profound lack of imagination. Change the name now, before it's too late!
</OPINION>

YRNA
Yukon Registered Nurses Association.

yrneh
This is the old (early twentieth century) unit of reluctance. ``Reluctance'' is an apt term to associate with this kind of backward-spelling nonsense. I don't know how or if yrneh was pronounced. Like ``irony''?

Reluctance is the inverse of inductance, and the unit of inductance is the henry, for Joseph Henry. (Joseph Henry and Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction independently and at about the same time.)

One henry is one joule per square ampere, or one ohm-second. The ohm is the unit of resistance, and the inverse of resistance is conductance. In like manner, the unit of conductance was the mho, so one yrneh was equal to one mho per second. Back then, any electrical engineer with taste had to gag several times a day. Eventually, the mho was renamed the siemens. There evidently wasn't a strongly felt need for a unit of reluctance, so yrneh didn't get a spiffy rebranding but was simply allowed to fade out of use. Anyway, they couldn't recruit the obvious name -- that of Faraday -- because that was taken for the unit of capacitance, the farad. (Yeah, someone -- Arthur Edwin Kennelly in 1936 -- did make the obvious proposal of the ``daraf'' as the unit of electrical elastance -- inverse capacitance. Mercifully, that caught on only as an oddity. It's evidence that there may be a God, though apparently One with a limited attention span.)

To add to your amusement, the inverse of permittivity is (or was -- I don't think anyone bothers any more) reluctivity. Permittivity is given in units of henry/meter, and reluctivity in yrneh-meter.

It is unlikely to be of any use to you, so I will mention the following. In the old system of cgs electromagnetic units, some of which are still in common and even standard use in magnet technology, a yrneh was equal to one millimicrogilbert per maxwell. Oh yeah, gotta love that.

yrs.
YouRS.

YSA
Youth Service America.

YSAG
Yttrium Scandium Aluminum Garnet.

YSAS
Youth Substance Abuse Service. Your friendly neighborhood pusher? No, it's the Australian government party-poopers.

Mission statement: ``YSAS will improve the health and well-being of young people affected by the use of alcohol and other drugs [decongestants?], through direct care, workforce development, and public policy advocacy.''

YSG
Yellow SuperGiant. It's not Jolly Green's wax bean big brother. It's a kind of star.

YSO
Young Stellar Object. This entry is serious. `Young' is in astronomical terms. Of course, in principle this could also refer to Shirley Temple.

Shirley Temple Black was in Czechoslovakia in 1968, I'm not sure in what capacity (sometime in 1968 Nixon did appoint her as a US representative at the United Nations). Dubcek remembered her old movies. She was scheduled to dine with him on the day the tanks rolled in. The former prime minister and political prisoner eventually dined with the US ambassador to Czechoslovakia and former child actress in 1989.

YSP
Young Shakespeare Players of Madison, WI. ``Young'' means 7-18 y.o..

YSZ
Yttria-Stabilized Zirconia. Used as a substrate for growing YBCO, which it's a good lattice match to.

.yt
Mayotte domain name code.

An island in the Mozambique Channel, about one-half of the way from northern Madagascar to northern Mozambique. Administered by France and claimed by Comoros, it claims a 200 nautical-mile exclusive economic zone. In other words, they claim the entire sea between Comoros and Madagascar. Right.

Inoffensive data on Mayotte is found in the factbook entry from the latest edition of the CIA Factbook

YT
Postal abbreviation for the Yukon Territory of Canada (.ca). Capital: Whitehorse.

Interestingly, the abbreviation used in political-geography hierarchical domain names is yk, as in <.yk.ca>.

YTD
(This) Year-To-Date. I.e., from the beginning of the year to this date. As opposed, say, to year-over-year.

YTG
Yukon Territorial Goverment.

YTL
Yeni Türk Lirasi. `New Turkish Lira.' The standard international symbol for the currency is TRY. As of Einstein's Birthday in 2009 (the last time that I checked at <www.xe.com/ucc>), 1 TRY was worth 0.419 UK pounds (GBP), 0.585 US dollars (USD), and 0.453 euros (EUR). This is one of those instances where substituting ``plus'' for ``and'' would be an especially bad idea. More accurate numbers were available, but even the third digit wasn't stable on the scale of an hour. Pity the arbitrageurs.

YTO
YIG-Tuned Oscillator.

YU
Yeshiva University.

.yu
Yugoslavia domain-name code. Rump Yugoslavia currently consists of the old Serbian and Montenegran republics, plus the once autonomous region of Kosovo. If you look on the TV maps, you notice that Serbska, the independent Serbian republic that was carved out of the old Bosnia (plus one of the ``autonomous regions'' of the old Yugoslavia) has quietly been absorbed into Serbia. On the other side, Montenegro is negotiating for separation, and Kosovo is de facto independent. Serbia and Montenegro had asserted the formation of a joint independent state, but this entity was not formally recognized as a state by the US; the US view is that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) has dissolved and that none of the successor republics represents its continuation.

Country information on what is identified as ``Serbia and Montenegro'' from the latest edition of the CIA Factbook

Yuban
A coffee brand generally supposed to be a contraction of YUletide BANquet.

Yugoslavian Nudism
A survey is included in Paul Fussell's Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, (Summit, 1988). The book title is not a comment on the subject of this entry.

(I'm short on wye entries, so I waived the relevance requirement, okay? Lay off, already!) More Fussell content at the Tourism entry.

Yuhoo!
Black Elk Speaks is an edited transcript of meetings that the poet John G. Neihardt had in 1931 with an old Oglala Sioux medicine man and holy man named Black Elk. At the meetings, other old Indians were present, and some of them contributed their stories. Standing Bear was four years older than Black Elk, and they had been good friends since boyhood. Chapter 4 of the book relates a great bison hunt in 1873. Standing Bear contributes some recollections of that hunt, including this:
I remember that hunt, for before that time I had only killed a calf. I was thirteen years old and supposed to be a man, so I made up my mind I'd get a yearling. One of them went down a draw and I raced after him on my pony. My first shot did not seem to hurt him at all; but my pony kept right after him, and the second arrow went in half way. I think I hit his heart, for he began to wobble as he ran and blood came out of his nose. Hunters cried ``Yuhoo!'' once when they killed, but this was my first big bison, and I just kept on yelling ``Yuhoo!'' People must have thought I was killing a whole herd, the way I yelled. ...

yukon
Name once used for the field quantum in Yukawa's theory of the strong interaction. After some initial confusion, the charged pion turned out to correspond very roughly to yukon.

YUL
IATA code for Dorval International Airport in Montreal, QC, Canada. Almost all Canadian airports have IATA codes beginning in Y, and almost all IATA airport codes beginning in Y are for Canadian airports. Naturally, one of the exceptions (YUM) follows immediately.

YUM
IATA code for the airport in Yuma, Arizona.

Yuman error
On the afternoon of September 8, 2011, a utility worker doing maintenance near Yuma, Arizona, triggered a cascading series of electrical grid failures that resulted in a massive blackout in southern California, western Arizona, and northern Baja California. [In detail, most of San Diego County was affected, along with parts of Orange County and Riverside County (OC is the next county north along the coast from San Diego County, Riverside County borders OC on its west and SD County on its south); Yuma County, Ariz., was affected, along with Tijuana, Mexicali and other cities in Mexico's Baja California state.] The affected area has more than five million inhabitants.

yumpie
Young Upwardly Mobile Professional. Approximate synonym of yuppie that lost out in the lexicography sweepstakes.

Yuppy
Nickname of Bernard Shaw's sister Elinor Agnes Shaw, older by a year. She died of TB at the age of 21 in 1876. In 1888 he met Karl Marx's daughter Elinor.

yuppie
From Young Urban Professional and diminutive/affectionate ending. Other, rather less successful neologisms have been attempted as perturbations: `buppie' (black ...) and `puppie' (Polish) are two I'm aware of, although I only have the New York Times's word on the latter (in business section lead article for May 14, 1996). Frumpie is sometimes incorrectly used for FRUMP, or maybe affectionately for frump.

YUV
A common, if not exactly popular (or at least not intuitive) coordinatization of color space. Y is luminance; the chrominance signals are defined by
U = B - Y ; V = R - Y, where R and B are red and blue signals. Not as straightforward as RGB, though equivalent, and much more efficient. Color encoding used in SECAM.

YVO
YVO4. Yttrium OrthoVanadate. Laser material (Nd-doped, as usual.)

yw
Your Welcome. Chatese. No, not ``you're welcome'' -- that's something ordinary peeps ryt

YWCA
Young Women's Christian Association.

YWHA
Young Women's Hebrew Association.

YWIA
You're Welcome In Advance. Email abbreviation much rarer than TIA. Really, there's no need to thank me for providing this valuable information.

YWLS
Young Women's Leadership School. Informally known as the East Harlem Girl's School. A small, academy-style junior high school in Spanish Harlem. Opening in fall 1996, it is New York City's first single-sex public school since the eighties. Wise institutions like the NYCLU and NOW, which have solutions to the problems of our schools, if only we would listen, again, and whose concerns are broader than those of the parents who want their kids in the school, are of course opposed.

If this weisenheimer analysis does not quench your thirst for knowledge about YWLS, see the interesting article ``The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools'' by Wendy Kaminer in the April 1998 Atlantic Monthly. Also, there was a report (meta-analysis of studies) and press release by the AAUW in March 1998, essentially saying that there was negligible evidence that sex segregation was of any use to HS girls. This from the organization that fanned the flames only a few years ago by issuing a report to the effect that girls were ill-served by coed schools.

Y.Y.
Essayist Robert Lynd's pen-name, or pen-initials, or whatever. So far, his only other appearance in this glossary is at the O.O.P. entry. Send in your requests.

yy
The last two digits of the year. Technically, these are known as the ``least significant digits.'' Representing dates by using just yy led to the ``Y2K problem'' -- programs mistakenly treating early dates in the 21st century as prior to late dates in the 20th.

yyyy
The last four digits of the decimal numeral for the year. For the next few millennia, that will be all the digits of the year, so long as we keep the Gregorian calendar. Cf. yy.

YYZ
ICAO's clever code for Lester B. Pearson International Airport, serving Toronto. It's Canada's busiest airport. The way to remember it is: the first wye is for Canada: ``I don't know why wye.'' The last letter is Z.

Y123
Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (Y1Ba2Cu3O7-x), a high Tc (~100 K) superconductor better known as YBCO.

Y2K
Year 2000. A problem in programs for computers that should have been retired and sold for scrap long ago. An opportunity for hype and fear-mongering. A dud, history. See the yy entry.

Y211
Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (Y2BaCuO5), a high-Tc superconductor also known as YBCO.

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