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N n

N
kNight. The kind that moves gimpy across the chessboard. See more complete information at Kt.

n
Abbreviation for metric prefix nano-, representing 10-9, or one (American) billionth.

Back when most of my work was in nanoelectronics, I named one of my Sun workstations enano. It was a pun.

N
Nematic. A liquid-crystal phase with orientational order and no positional order. If you ignore molecule orientations, the phase is a liquid. Usually in this context, molecules are treated as if they had the symmetry of rods: orientation is characterized by the direction of the long axis of the molecule. (Strictly speaking, it is possible to have a further orientational ordering, associated with rotations of molecules about their major axes. In practice, however, phase diagrams usually involve transitions to different kinds of ordered liquid crystals, such as smectic and cholesteric, as well as to crystalline and liquid phases.)

\n
Newline escape sequence. See the LF entry for equivalences, the B (programming language) entry for etymology.

N
Newton. Force unit in MKSA or MKS system. 9/40 of a pound, in sensible units. 105 dyne, in older approved units.

Usage note: units named after people are not capitalized, but their symbols are. Hence, N abbreviates a unit that is spelled out as ``newton.''

1 N = 1 kg m/s2

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

When people say ``as free as the air,'' they're talkin' nitrogen, 78%, and that can go for as little as pennies on the cubic foot.

Gallium Nitride (GaN) has been used to create blue lasers, so now [I think I entered this entry in 1995] full-color flat-panel displays and area illumination based on compound semiconductors are anticipated. When people talk about the danger of material shortages that might result, they're not talkin'bout nitrogen.

n
Nonideality factor in semiconductors. Simple semiconductor device models (like the Ebers-Moll model) typically contain voltage-dependent factors of the form exp(qV/kBT), arising as ratios of Gibbs factors. The fit of measured characteristics can often be substantially improved by inserting a fudge factor in the argument of the exponent: exp(qV/nkBT).

Although this is essentially a phenomenological correction, it does have some theoretical justification, in a slightly more complicated approximation than that which yields the standard Ebers-Moll equations. If transport across the depletion region is modeled as taking place in two stages, then n = 2 is obtained as a limiting case. Usually the two theoretical approximations serve as bounds on the empirical fit: the nonideality factor lies between 1 and 2. For good Si devices, n in the range of 1.1-1.3 provides a good fit for high voltages, and 1.6-1.8 fits well for low voltages. (The transition between these regions is moderately sharp -- taking place over less than half a volt around 0.65 V -- so there are regions where constant-n is a useful approximation.)

Schottky barrier diodes with low-to-moderate doping, dominated by majority-carrier conduction, are nearly ideal (1 < n < 1.03). Space-charge layer recombination (essentially the ``more complicated'' mechanism described above) and hole injection from the metal can both increase n. Interfacial effects and other cruddy parasitic stuff can also raise n.

The large-n limit is ohmic behavior. As the doping on the semiconductor side of a Schottky is increased and the space-charge layer correspondingly shortened, quantum tunneling comes into play and is said to raise n. This is not so mysterious: a highly-doped Schottky (i.e., a metal contact to highly-doped semiconductor) is simply (precious word, that) an ohmic contact.

See also A and A0.

N
Nonmetal. Click M for metal. (Dial M for Murder, or else this number.)

N
North. Vide compass directions.

n.
Noun.

N
November. Not an abbreviation here, just the FCC-recommended ``phonetic alphabet.'' I.e., a set of words chosen to represent alphabetic characters by their initials. You know, ``Alpha Bravo Charlie ... .'' The idea behind the choice is to have words that the listener will be able to guess at or reconstruct accurately even through noise (or narrow bandwidth, like a telephone). November is a good choice.

N
Number of neutrons in a nucleus.

N
Number of anything. E.g., number of elements in a sample population, number of elements in a finite universe (in the statistical sense of the term), number of terms in a sum.

NA
Avogadro's Number. The number of whatever in a mole.
6.022137 × 10²³ .

Until well into the twentieth century, calculations used Loschmidt's number instead, to get around the fact that the atomic hypothesis was not universally agreed to have been conclusively demonstrated.

NA
N-acetyl-Aspartate. A brain chemical.

.na
(Domain name extension for) Namibia. In 2006, Namibia became the world's largest maternity ward so that all of Angelina Jolie's children could be born in the third world.

You'd suppose the adjective form corresponding to Namibia would be Namibian. But FWIW, they have a bi-weekly (issues on Tuesdays and Fridays) Afrikaans-English newspaper, based in Walvis Bay, called the Namib Times. It was founded by Paul Vincent in 1958 as a bi-weekly trilingual newspaper. He sold it in 2002 when his health started failing. At the time of his death in 2004 it was the country's second-oldest newspaper.

NA
Narcotics Anonymous. On the pattern of that obscure organization ``Alcohols Anonymous,'' I imagine that this must be a twelve-step program for drugs that have come to the terrible realization that they are narcotics. For the benefit of anonymous Francophone narcotics, here's a link to Narcotiques Anonymes (Québec).

N.A.
National Association.

NA
Network Analyzer.

NA
Next Address.

NA
NorAdrenaline.

NA, N.A.
North America.

NA, N.A.
Northanger Abbey. Title and one of the main locations of a novel by Jane Austen.

In chapter 5 of William Cobbett (1925), G.K. Chesterton makes an observation about NA that it was very characteristic of him to make:

We should think it rather odd if a profiteer had a country house that was called The Cathedral. We might think it strange if a stockbroker had built a villa and habitually referred to it as a church. But we can hardly see the preposterous profanity by which one chance rich man after another has been able to commandeer or purchase a house which he still calls an Abbey. It is precisely as if he had gone to live in the parish church; had breakfasted on the altar, or cleaned his teeth in the font. That is the short and sharp summary of what has happened in English history; but few can get it thus foreshortened or in any such sharp outline. ... The romantic reactionary at the end of the eighteenth century might not often find the Bad Baronet in a castle, but might really find him in an abbey. The most attractive of all such reactionaries, Miss Catherine Morland, was not altogether disappointed in her search for the Mysteries of Udolpho. She knew at least that General Tilney lived in an abbey; though even she could hardly have mistaken General Tilney for an abbot. Nor was she wrong in supposing that a crime had been committed by that gentleman in Northanger Abbey. His crime was not being an abbot. But Jane Austen, who had so piercing a penetration of the shams of her own age, had had a little too much genteel education to penetrate the shams of history. Despite the perverse humour of her juvenile History of England, despite her spirited sympathy with Mary Stuart, she could not be expected to see the truth about the Tudor transition. In these matters she had begun with books, and could not be expected to read what is written in mere buildings and big monuments. She was educated, and had not the luck to be self-educated like Cobbett. The comparison is not so incongruous as it may seem. They were the four sharpest eyes that God had given to the England of that time; but two of them were turned inward into the home, and two were looking out of the window. I wish I could think that they ever met.

NA, N/A, n.a.
Not { Applicable | Available }. When you need both senses, make a distinction by using either d.n.a. (does not apply) or, if applicable, n.d.a. (no data available), or both.

NA
Numerical Aperture.

NA
Nurse Anesthetist.

Na
Chemical element abbreviation for sodium (q.v.). The most common alkali metal in the earth's crust. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool, where it was #3 on the Top Five List last time I checked.

NAA
National (US) Academy on Aging. You might not want to graduate from this academy, but it looked like the academy itself might expire. At least its name had been looking badly. The academy survives with the help of a couple of lexical prosthetics implanted in the name: see NAAS.

(To ``look badly'' is not a comment on visual acuity but an expression meaning to ``look bad.'' It seemed to be common back in the 1960's and 70's, mostly among the frail elderly. Presumably it was an overcorrection among those who'd been taught that verbs are modified by adverbs, without recognizing the accepted exception of copula and seem-type verbs. Other common expressions of this sort were ``look poorly'' and ``feel badly'' (i.e., feel sympathy or guilt). Of course, the -ly was added by these kindly elderly folk because they knew that the -ly changes adjectives into adverbs.)

NAA
N-Acetyl Aspartate. Found mainly in neurons, and measurable by proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

NAA
National Aeronautic Association.

NAA
National Amnesia Association. I think someone forgot to create this organization. So this entry shouldn't be here (or here).

NAA
National Apartment Association. A landlords' association. Many of the local affiliates are named something like Apartment Association of [your area here], but there are also the AOBA in metro DC, various PMA's.

NAA
National Aphasia Association. ``[A] nonprofit organization that promotes public education, research, rehabilitation and support services to assist people with aphasia and their families.''

a*pha*sia (uh-fay'-zhuh) n. An impairment of the ability to use or comprehend words, usually acquired as a result of a stroke or other brain injury.

See also Alicia Courville's Speech Disorders page.

Related useless entry: AA for Academy of Aphasia.

NAA
National Archery Association. The national governing body for US Olympic archery. It changed its name to USA Archery and or US Archery, but never came up with a good abbreviation, so one still sees ``NAA'' a lot, in use as if it abbreviated the new name.

NAA
National Amnesia Association. I think someone forgot to create this organization.

NAA
Neutron Activation Analysis. The way this works is, you stick the sample in a nuclear reactor, where it is bombarded by neutrons. Some fraction of the nuclei absorb a neutron, or maybe two, and become unstable (i.e., radioactive). Light elements typically decay by emitting an electron--that is, a neutron emits an electron and becomes a proton, the atomic number (Z) increases by one while the atomic mass number (A) stays constant. (The atomic mass decreases by a small amount.) Detection of the electrons gives information about the kind and relative numbers of atoms originally in the sample.

NAAA
National Alarm Association of America.

NAAA
National Association of Arab Americans.

NAAAS
National Association of Air Ambulance Services. A UK charity with a web presence that seems to evacuate rapidly.

NAABV
National Association of Automotive Buyers and Vendors. Frequently misabbreviated NAAVB.

NAACP
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

NAAEC
North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation. It's a green Christmas in Bureaucracia.

NAAFA
National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

The usenet newsgroups soc.support.fat-acceptance and alt.support.big-folks have lots of FAQ material.

NAAFETEE
North American Association For Exports To Eastern Europe.

NAAFI, N.A.A.F.I., Naafi
Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes. ``Serving the [UK] Services.'' Also written naffy. ``HM Forces' official trading organization.'' A private not-for-profit organization that ``provide[s] community support to members of the British Forces and their families,'' bringing ``retail and leisure services to some strange and exotic places around the world.'' Evidently something like a British USO, but they make it sound like the PX. Until January 1, 1921, it was the Navy and Army Canteen Board.

NAAFP
National Association for the { Advancement | Acceptance } of Fat People? You're probably thinking of NAAFA.

NAAFP
North American Academy of Fitness Professionals.

NAAHA
National African-American Homeschoolers Alliance.

NAALC
North American Agreement on Labo[u]r Cooperation. Part of NAFTA.

NAAPM
National Association for the Advancement of Perry Mason. Name of a Raymond Burr fan club and its quarterly newsletter, based in Berkeley, Calif. Like Burr, it's gone now. It was run by Jim Davidson for a decade.

NAAQS
National (US) Ambient Air Quality Standards.

NAAS
National Academy on an Aging Society. Well, it's true that the vast majority of individual Americans are getting older, and it's true that the average age of Americans is increasing, so in that sense the society as a whole is aging, but the latter facts do not follow from the first one. If there's an up-tick in fertility or immigration, will they have to change the name aging?

NAASO
North American Association for the Study of Obesity. It seems they've been deemphasizing the expansion and prefer the irritating appositive style (example next paragraph). Anyway, they're not promoting obesity.

``NAASO, The Obesity Society is the leading scientific society dedicated to the study of obesity. Since 1982 NAASO has been committed to encouraging research on the causes and treatment of obesity, and to keeping the medical community and public informed of new advances.''

NAAWG
North American Air Working Group. Something set up in 2002 by the CEC Council. The CEC (Commission for Environmental Cooperation) was created by the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC) which is a part, or a dimension or wing-strut or something, of NAFTA. The NAAWG is charged with providing guidance to the Council and facilitating future cooperative work on issues related to environmental air quality.

nab
To discover someone in the commission of a forbidden act.

NAB
National (US) Association of Broadcasters.

NAB
New American Bible. Published in 1970. You call that new?

NABA
North American Broadcasters Association. ``North America,'' in this unusual instance, meaning North America -- at least from Mexico to Canada, and points in between.

NABB
National Association of Burmese (cat) Breeders.

[Football icon]

NABC
National Association of Basketball Coaches.

NABC
North American Bengali Conference (Banga Sammelan). An annual conference held in North America to celebrate Bengali culture, with ``international'' (i.e., subcontinent-based) and ``domestic'' (North American) performers. For many years it's been held the three days from Friday through the first Sunday in July. They don't seem to have a regular website, but for at least a few values of yy, the URL for the year 20yy has been <http://www.nabc20yy.org>.

NABC
North American Bridge Championship.

NABC's, still often informally called ``Nationals'' even by many Canadians, are held thrice annually. They're called the Spring, Summer, and Fall NABC's, and they open in March, late July, and late November -- at different cities in the US and Canada. The 2006 NABC's were successively in Dallas, Chicago, and Honolulu. This list illustrates two decided tendencies in the siting that are apparent from the venues for 1997 to 2012:

  1. The ``Spring'' NABC (sometimes technically in late Winter) is generally in an inland city. (Vancouver, in 1999, was the only solid exception.)
  2. Every year since 2006, and infrequently before then, the Fall championship has been scheduled for a major city that is (a) a seaport or (b) close to Disney World (which is on Seven Seas Lagoon).
Well, they do try to spread them around. The ACBL website serves lists of NABC's past and future.

The main sessions of play (afternoon and evening) usually run 10 days, from a Friday until the second following Sunday. In addition to the major championships that give the tournament its name, lesser games are offered that are suitable for all levels of player; there are morning and midnight games for those who want even more. Consequently, these are the largest bridge tournaments anywhere, except for those involving simultaneous play at many sites.

NABC 2002
North American Bengali Conference (Banga Sammelan) 2002. July 4-6 in Atlanta, Georgia. The twenty-second Banga Sammelan.

The twenty-first was held in Lowell, Massachusetts, July 6-8, 2001.

NABC 2007
North American Bengali Conference (Banga Sammelan) 2007. It's the twenty-seventh Banga Sammelan, the weekend of June 29 to July 1, at Cobo Hall in Detroit. Conference hotels (with negotiated special rates) are the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, the Courtyard Marriott (across Jefferson Avenue E from the Renaissance Center), Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites in Downtown Detroit, and the Doubletree Hotel in Dearborn. When you call for reservations, particularly if you want to stay at the Renaissance Center Marriott, make very sure they understand that it's for your 2007 conference. The 2008 Spring NABC (North American Bridge Championship) is scheduled for March 6-16 in the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center.

NABC-99
North American Bengali Conference (Banga Sammelan) 1999. July 2-4 (Friday to Sunday) in San Francisco, California.

NABE
National Association for Business Economics.

NABI
National (US) Association of Biblical Instructors. Name used from 1923 to 1964, explained at AAR entry.

Nabisco
Originally called the National Biscuit Company.

NABJ
National Association of Black Journalists. What kind of insensitive journalistic hacks would say ``Black'' when the New York Times insists on ``African American'' (sometimes even for African non-Americans)?

Nabokov
As I've noted somewhere, if you mention ``Tolstoy'' to a Russian or Ukrainian, he's apt to reply ``which one?'' as if Leo (i.e., Lev) had not earned one-name default status as much as Shelley has. I haven't encountered the same thing with Vladimir Nabokov, but just in case: the author of Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, and many other works was Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977). His father, involved in the 1917 provisional government, was Vladimir D. Nabokov (1869-1922).

NABR, Nabr
National Association for Biomedical Research. Founded in 1979 to keep the animal rights activists from crippling medical research.

NABS
(Canadian) National Advertising Benevolent Society. ``The National Advertising Benevolent Society is a non-profit organization that was established to assist people in the advertising industry and related businesses who need help due to illness, injury, unemployment, substance abuse or financial difficulties.''

NAC
Network Access Control.

NAC
Network Access Corporation.

NAC
NitroAromatic Compound. NAC's are an important environmental contaminant at old military sites, with the principal NAC being TNT. TNT is known to be toxic (mutagenic) to many plants and animals. It's truly a miracle substance.

NAC
North Atlantic Council. Highest governing body of NATO.

NACA
(US) National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. Nobody can ever remember what this acronym stood for. In fact, when it was set up by congressional legislation in 1915, it was just the Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. The ``National'' was just conventional.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union put into orbit the world's first artificial satellite. It was an 83.6-kg (186-lb.) metal sphere named Sputnik (Russian for `traveler'). Apart from going around the planet once every ninety-six minutes, it performed only two memorable actions: send out a lonely-toy beep, and send the West into a hysterical panic.

On October 1, 1958, NACA was succeeded by NASA.

It is probably fair to mention, in advance of further details, that the US space program suffered a number of embarrassing failures between those Octobers, but that they were the failures not of NACA but of the unprepared Navy program initially selected to carry out the effort.

NACA
National Association for Campus Activities. ``[A] member-based, not-for-profit association composed of colleges and universities, talent firms and artists/performers, student programmers and leaders, and professional campus activities staff. We are a clearinghouse and catalyst for information, ideas and programs promoting a variety of college and university activities, from leadership development to student programming.''

NACA
National Association of Child Advocates. ``They educate decision makers...'' Right.

NACA
Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. ``[Their] mission is to set a new national standard on providing loans to low and moderate income people and those who are considered to be subprime borrowers.''

NADCA
Nepalese Academy of Cosmetic Aesthetic Dentistry.

NA-CAP
North American Computing And Philosophy conference. Coordinated with IACAP.

NACAT
North American Council of Automotive Teachers. It ``is the ONLY international organization devoted to teachers and trainers of automotive technology and its related fields.'' It was difficult when we were first starting out. You can't imagine how hard it can be to get even the simplest idea into a cylinder head, or ``block head'' as we used to say. They never made skulls that thick. Open 'em up and it's obvious that they're basically just ``air heads.'' Ain't nuthin' under the hood. There was constant pressure to ``pass them along.'' If we held them back a year, it would discombobulate the whole assembly line. Things have gotten a lot better since they started putting computers in there.

NAC/CNA
(Canadian) National Arts Centre / Centre national des Arts (canadien).

[column]

NACCP
North American Cambridge Classics Project. A group that promotes and supports the use of CLC Latin-teaching materials in the English-speaking bits of North America.

NACDL
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Not a popular job, but someone really must do it.

NACE
National Association of Corrosion Engineers.

nach
German preposition that in typical contexts is translated `after,' `to,' or towards.' If these seem contradictory, think of chasing after something.

The same word functions as a postposition meaning something like `according to [the object of the postposition].' See m.A.n. for an example.

nAch
Need for ACHievement. A term of art among psychologists.

Shows how much they know. Ask any advertising professional: image is everything.

Nachkriegszeit
German, `post-war period.' Usually the post-WWII period.

Nachname
German: `last name.' German names have the same standard order as English names, so a last name in German is also a family name (Familienname). Vgl. Vorname. Cf. tria nomina.

Nachtrag
German, `appendix.' From nach, `after' and trag, root of the verb tragen, `to pull' or `to drag' (the cognate).

nachtragend
I'm not trying to create a German-English dictionary or anything, but I figured I'd add this entry because of the charming imagery of the word. Eventually I may even give a translation.

NACO
(Canadian) National Arts Centre Orchestra. Keep reading.

NACOA/AOCNA
National Arts Centre Orchestra Association / L'Association de l'Orchestre du Centre national des Arts. A volunteer organization whose mission is to support and promote the National Arts Centre Orchestra. I don't really have to point out that ``National'' here means Canadian.

NACS
National Association of College Stores. Sponsors CAMEX.

NACS
National Association of Convenience Stores.

NACSIS
(Japan) National Center for Science Information Systems of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. There's an OLCC for Japanese libraries.

NACSCAOM
National (US) Accreditation Commission for Schools and Colleges of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Original name of ACAOM.

NACUBO
National Association of College and University Business Officers. ``National'' in the sense of ``American,'' uh, by which of course I mean US. There's also a Canadian analogue called CAUBO/ACPAU. Not too surprisingly, the issues that face college and university business officers differ substantially among different countries. Enteric conditions seem to be more uniform, and the corresponding organization for food services administrators (NACUFS) uses a more expansive notion of ``national.''

That reminds me, in the Summer of 2005, the Royal Shakespeare Company is touring with Euripides' Hecuba. They're doing an English version by the poet Tony Harrison. Vanessa Redgrave stars. The last offering in a season of tragic plays, it should have been the climax. Reviews have been tepid. I'm not surprised. In this self-absorbed century, people -- even actors -- have a very selective ability to empathize.

NACUFS
Gesundheit! Oh look, there's an expansion: National Association of College and University Food Services. ``National'' here means ``the US, Canada, and abroad,'' but the six defined regions cover the US, Mexico, and most provinces of Canada. (Mexico, the US, and Canada are all nations.) There's also an independent organization called CCUFSA.

NACUFS sponsors an annual ``National Culinary Challenge,'' and the winners receive American Culinary Federation medals. The six finalists are required to prepare four portions of an original hot entrée, with side dishes and sauces to balance the plate so that the center of mass is within one centimeter of the center. Okay, I added the words after ``plate.'' Contestants (``culinarians'') have seventy-five minutes to prepare the meal and present it to a panel of ACF judges. In the 2005 competition, it had to include lamb.

NACURH
National Association of College and University Residence Halls. ``National'' here means `Mexican, US, and Canadian.' NACURH has a bunch of regional associations that carve up the map of North America and give it labels that look vaguely like a Scots Gaelic declension: CAACURH, GLACURH, IACURH, MACURH, NEACURH, PACURH, SAACURH, SWACURH.

NACWA
National (US) Association of Clean Water Agencies.

na czczo
Polish, `on empty, on [an] empty [stomach].' Is it really just a coincidence that this phrase is pronounced like a stuttering of nacho?

NAD
Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide.

NAD+
Oxidized form of Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD).

NAD
No { Apparent | Acute } Distress. Emergency-care usage. I suppose that if distress were acute, it would be apparent, but implication doesn't run the other way, so NAD and NAD are not synonyms. Oh dear.

NADC
North American Digital Cellular system. Defined by TIA/EIA IS-54, ``Cellular System Dual-mode Mobile Station-Base Station (BS) Compatibility Standard,'' Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), May 1992.

NADDIS
Narcotics And Dangerous Drugs Information System.

What, no ``other''? So narcotics are not dangerous drugs? That explains a lot.

NADH
Reduced form of Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD).

NADH
North American Digital Hierarchy.

NADP
National Atmospheric Deposition Program.

NADP
Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD) Phosphate.

NADPH
Reduced form of Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide Phosphate (NADP).

NADSFL
National (US) Association of District Supervisors of Foreign Languages. That URL doesn't look very permanent; visit NCSSFL if you encounter difficulties.

NADW
North Atlantic Deep Water.

nae
Scots English for `not, no.'

NAE
National Academy of Engineering. ``[E]stablished in 1964, under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences, as a parallel organization of outstanding engineers... .''

NAE
National Aeronautical Establishment (of Canada).

NAE
National Association of Evangelicals. The largest conservative Protestant group in the U.S. Founded in 1942. Motto: ``Cooperation without compromise.'' On March 6, 2000, the NAE changed its bylaws to allow member denominations to also belong to the liberal NCC. See related information at the NRB entry.

In 2006, not even 80 months after the NCC co-membership decision, headlines read ``Rev. Ted Haggard leaves National Association of Evangelicals after male escort claims he paid him for sex for three years.'' Now, without reading the sordid article accompanying this headline, I can hazard a guess who was the ``he'' that paid, and who the ``him'' that got paid. (``Allegedly''! ``Allegedly''!) But it's not as clear as it would be if they were of different sexes. Things would be a lot clearer 99% of the time if we simply assigned everyone randomly at birth to one of 100 distinct grammatical genders, and referred to them by 100 corresponding distingishable third-person singular personal pronouns. Slime molds do something like that.

NAECON
National Aerospace and Electronics Conference. There was one in Dayton, Ohio, 13-17 July 1998.

Sponsored jointly by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society (AESS).

``NAECON is the premier national forum for the exchange of specialized aerospace electronics and related information. It includes a strong technical program featuring high-quality papers and tutorials, extensive exhibits of the latest technology and applications, and discussions of the latest trends in the area. The theme of this year's conference is `Technology --A Bridge to the Future' [some people think that just because the president of the US uses a meaningless phrase, it's eloquent] and emphasis will be placed on technology development and application of new technologies. NAECON should be of interest to all military, commercial, and academic members of the aerospace and electronic community.''

NAEP
(US) National Assessment of Educational Progress. It shows taht we is stoopit. But suppose you already knew that. Would the NAEP tell you anything you didn't know? Possibly. Education research is usually pretty bad stuff, and the NAEP is the stuff of ed research.

There are, first of all, methodological questions. A school's participation in the NAEP is voluntary, and half the schools selected to participate choose not to. In other words, what we know about the participating schools is that they were in the half of schools, roughly, that chose to participate. After you've controlled for the controllable factors like SES (socio-economic status), race, etc., you still have a skewed sample. If you try to compare poor districts with rich, for example, on the ``low-SES'' side of the comparison you probably have a relatively small fraction of schools whose administrators for some reason feel confident or competent enough to allow participation. On the ``high-SES'' side, you probably have a more representative sampling of rich districts. Thus, you compare best-of-the-worst, putatively, with typical-of-the-best. In effect, you weaken the apparent or poorly ``measured'' effect of all factors that really are effective.

There are also political reasons to be wary of NAEP data. Here, for example, is a footnote (#73, p. 219) from a chapter in The Black-White Test Score Gap ed. Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Pr., 1998). The chapter (6) is ``Why Did the Black-White Score Gap Narrow in the 1970's and 1980s?''

Dramatic changes starting in one particular year also raise the possibility that changes in sampling procedures or participation rates could be distorting results. One conceivable ``explanation'' of the trend data is that black adolescents' scores are overestimated in 1988 for some reason. When the 1986 NAEP results for reading looked inexplicably low, the Department of Education suppressed them, even though focused investigations never found methodological problems that might explain the decline. The 1988 scores for black 17-year-old students look abnormally high, and the black reading decline after 1988 would be negligible if this single data point were eliminated. However, this is not true for thirteen-year-olds, whose reading scores show a steady decline after 1988. Errors that affect only blacks and not whites in 1988, affect blacks of all ages in 1988, and affect black thirteen-year-olds after 1988 appear unlikely.

(My emphasis.)

Here are some excerpts from a Heritage Foundation Report entitled Critical Issues: A New Agenda for Education, ch 3 ``The Growth of the Federal Role in Education,'' by Eileen M. Gardner. The relevant text concerns programs under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Title I provides federal aid to counties for compensatory (remedial) education for educationally disadvantaged students from low-income families. Gardner writes:

Studies assessing the effectiveness of Title I consistently have shown that the goal of the program has never been achieved. Yet Congress steadfastly has resisted efforts to eliminate it. By 1969, however, clear signals were reaching Capitol Hill that Title I was failing to live up to its expectations. Results of congressionally mandated evaluations showed that federal budget officials did not view the program as cost effective; educators complained of red tape, excessive regulations, and unwieldy bureaucracy; and parents of eligible children complained they saw little change in the quality of their children's education. Most telling, perhaps, the achievement test scores of the children served were not significantly better than their non-Title I counterparts. The small improvements they did make proved temporary.

She cites some of the research supporting her claims, and continues

Oddly, these data had no noticeable effect on Congress's views of the program. High levels of funding continued. In fact, by the early 1980s, public policy was forcing researchers to distort data. A prime example is a 1982 report by the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)9 on the reading, science, and mathematics performance of American youth during the 1970s. No grade levels were given; no standardized tests were used. Performance on subjective ``exercises'' created by ``specialists'' determined ``achievement classes.'' ``Lowest'' and ``highest'' were insufficiently defined. No objective criteria for reclassification from one group to another were given. Vague data for Title I eligible schools were given, but Title I students were not identified.

[Ftnt. 9: ``Reading, Science and Mathematics Trends: A Closer Look,'' National Assessment of Education Progress, December 1982.]

Contradictions were unclarified. On the one hand, students within Title I eligible schools were reported to have increased their representation in mathematics and science in the highest achievement class at age nine and to have decreased their representation in the lowest achieving math class at age seventeen. However, a separate chart dividing groups into lowest and highest achievers showed that the lowest achievers at ages nine and thirteen significantly improved in reading but made no significant progress in math (nine and thirteen) and science (nine). At seventeen, the lowest achievers had declined in math, as well as reading, and had made no progress in science.

NAEP
National Association of Environmental Professionals.

NAESP
National Association of Elementary School Principals. Their annual National Convention and Exhibition is in April. Cf. NASSP.

NAF
National Abortion Federation. The ``professional association of abortion practitioners'' in the US

Uh-ohhh: It looks like I missed a period! What will I do!?!?

NAFE
National Association of Female Executives.

NAFEM
North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers.

naffy
Slang version of NAAFI.

nafta
Spanish equivalent of English naphtha in all of its meanings. The common word for gasoline in some Spanish-speaking areas (e.g., Argentina). Overall, bencina (`benzene') is more common.

NAFTA
North American Free Trade Agreement. Among Canada, US, and Mexico, took effect January 1, 1994. Diane Gates compiled a useful list of links.

Among Union opponents: ``No American Factories Turning out Anything.'' (``American'' here used in the sense of US.) In Spanish, TLCAN.

A jealous protectionism of jobs unites all nations. Under (US) federal law, a work visa cannot be issued until it is certified, in this case by a state's Labor Department, that no American is willing to take the job. Thus, when a nightclub in Stuart, Florida wanted to hire a foreigner for an $11/hour job as an exotic dancer, it had to place an ad asking prospective US applicants to send a résumé to the Bureau of Workforce Program Support at the state's Department of Labor. (The ad appeared the week of April 11, 1999; it ran in the Palm Beach Post.)

Paid a wage up front to dance?

Is the state of Florida qualified to make this certification? My friend Mike, a solid-state physicist, had a job bartending nights at a club in Maryland. The proprietor explained to him how to decide whether a girl was a good dancer: If people bought beer, she was a good dancer. [Girl is a technical term here, okay? A term of art. I've been in a bar where the dancing girls happened to be male, although they didn't seem to be. You gotta be careful, you never know what you'll pick up.]

A concern for the AFL-CIO: there are more cheap-labor countries on the mainland of North America (N. Amer., q.v.). Good news for the AFL-CIO: NAFTA will not be expanded! Bad news: FTAA.

NAG
Numerical Algorithms Group, Ltd. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

NAGARA
Sounds like a picturesque medieval Japanese town, but really stands for National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators. Compare Nara and NARA. What the hell, visit the alternating current entry too. It has some information on Niagara Falls.

NAGP
National Assessment Governing Board. ``[A] 26-member board established by Congress in 1988 to set policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The ``Board is composed of state, local, and federal officials, educators, business representatives, and members of the general public.'' Not surprisingly, it's findings are completely at variance with the evident precipitous decline in student achievement that is before the noses of all educators.

NAGPRA
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. In addition the US government website (preceding link), another source of information is this page at the University of Arkansas.

NAGPS
National Association of Graduate and Professional Students.

NAGUA
Numerical Algorithms Group Users Association.

NAGWS
National Association for Girls and Women in Sports. One of six national associations within the AAHPERD.

I guess they noticed that the letter sequence N - A - G has poor associations. Their logo just has ``GWS.''

NAHB
National Association of Home Builders. They have the HOME page, as they put it.

NAHC
National Association of Home Care.

NAHC
North American Hunting Club.

NAHF
National Association of Hispanic Firefighters. They have an official seal with the words ``bomberos unidos'' surrounding a firehat in the middle. See the first miga entry for some relevant comments.

NAHT
(UK) National Association of Head Teachers.

1 Heath Square, Boltro Road, Haywards Heath, RH16 1BL. Cf. NUT.

To be head, or naht to be head -- that is the question.

British `head teacher' is American ``school principal.''

NAIA
National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.

NAIC
National Aging Information Center. A service of the Administration on Aging (AoA).

NAICS
North American Industrial Classification System. NAICS, developed jointly by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, replaces the SIC in the US, slowly.

NAICU
National Associa--
tion of Indepen--
dent Colleges and Univ[ersitie]s
.

The District of Columbia and about three-quarters of the states have an affiliated organization. Some of the state organizations (Iowa, Louisiana, Washington, and Wisconsin) have names of the form <State Name> Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Unfortunately, there is only one NAICU member school in Hawaii (Chaminade).

NAICUSE
National Association of Independent Colleges and University State Executives. ``NAICUSE is composed of the leaders of state associations representing independent colleges and universities.''

NAID
National Association for Information Destruction. ``[T]he international trade association for companies providing information destruction services. Suppliers of products, equipment and services to destruction companies are also eligible for membership. NAID's mission is to promote the information destruction industry and the standards and ethics of its member companies.''

The word national in the name is now used in the common sense of international. There are member companies in Australia, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Germany, Guam, Ireland, Singapore, the UK, and in the US, where the organization was founded.

NAILDD
North American Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery Project. That name sounds just the teensiest bit retributive. If I were you, I'd mind that due date strictly.

NAION
Non-arteritic Anterior Ischemic Optic Neuropathy. According to a statement released by Pfizer, Inc., in May 2005, this is the most common acute optic nerve disease in adults over age 50. I'm not sure how significant this is, after all the qualifiers. An ischemia is a local blood shortage. ``Local'' in the sense of being limited to a particular body region, organ, or tissue. It typically arises from a problem in a particular blood vessel -- vasoconstriction, thrombosis, or embolism.

I can't decide whether this entry should end on the line ``if you keep on doing that you're going to go blind!'' or some other.

NAIRU
Non-Accelerating-Inflation Rate of Unemployment. ``Natural'' rate of unemployment, although there's nothing especially natural about stability.

NAIS
National Aging Information Center.

NAJIT
National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators. Its newsletter has a digital edition called Proteus. They sponsor an unmoderated mailing list called COURTINTERP-L. NAJIT was founded (1978) as Court Interpreters and Translators Association (CITA).

NAK
Negative AcKnowledge character. ``What? Hello? Is someone there?''

``No.''

Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness, The
A 1947 essay by Cleanth Brooks, on Shakespeare's ``Macbeth.'' Sounds at least R-rated today.

NAL
(US) National Agricultural Library. ``... part of the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is one of four National Libraries in the United States.''

NAL
Network Adaptation Layer.

NALLA
NATO Allied Long-Lines Agency.

Allied Van Lines does long-haul OTR moving, but that doesn't seem to have anything do to with NALLA. Oh, well. I was just trying to be helpful.

NALMCO
interNational Association of Lighting Maintenance COmpanies. I think that sometimes, you should just bite the bullet and change the acronym along with the name. Short-term pain, long-term gain.

NALP
The National Association for Law Placement.

NAM
(US) National Air Museum. There couldn't be much to see there unless they've got some smog on display. Hmmm, it seems someone had the bright idea of evacuating some of the displays... the NAM only existed from 1946 to 1966; since then it's been the National Air and Space Museum (NASM).

NAM
National Apostolate of Maronites. ``National'' here presumably means Lebanese.

NAM
National Archaeological Museum. There's one in Athens, appropriately enough. The entire stewardship of archaeological treasures in Greece is a disaster, because it's under the jurisdiction of a Ministry of Culture that is simultaneously very jealous of its power and totally underfunded. If you find something that looks ancient on your land, the only sensible thing you can do is dig it up and hide it under your bed. If you tell MiniCult about it, they'll just immediately rope off your land so you can't disturb it, and spend the next decade or so with the cataloguing of your site sitting in their in-box. Eventually, they'll collect the artifacts and put them in storage awaiting analysis in the indefinite future. The NAM has about the sort of confused web-absence that you would expect from such a system. Here's the ministry's pitiful English page for it.

NAM
(UK) National Army Museum.

NAM
National Art Museum. There's one in Bucharest (Muzeul National de Arta Bucuresti). The UN has upwards of 170 members, so I imagine there are other NAM's.

NAM
National (US) Association of Manufacturers.

NAM
Network Access Machine.

NAM
Network Assessment Model.

NAM
NonAligned Movement. An organization created to épater le bourgeoisie. Founding heroes included Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah (co-chairs of founding meeting in 1961), Josip (Broz) Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Fidel Castro, and Enver Hoxha [socialist and ``socialist'' leaders of India, Ghana, Yugoslavia (host of 1961 meeting), Cuba, and Albania, resp.].

Oh, alright, technically, it was created to find a third way, not aligning with either of the two post-WWII power blocs (US and USSR). Sure. The locus classicus of the ``moral equivalence'' fallacy. [To be excruciatingly fair, Yugoslavia, China, and Albania did follow alternate paths toward the end of socialism, independent and opposed to the USSR.]

With the end of the Cold War and with emergence of some NAM members from poverty (typically through exploitation of their resources by the West), the pretense that this organization has unity or meaningful purpose is often threadbare, but it must continue to exist (this is a universal law of C. Northcote Parkinson). In service of its continued existence, it continues to achieve prodigies of hypocrisy. Perhaps that is its purpose.

You can read online an address by the Prime Minister of India at the XII NAM Summit at Durban on 3 September 1998. About half of the speech is devoted to the issue of rolling back nuclear proliferation. The position is very easy to understand if you simply understand that there are good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are all the countries that have nuclear weapons, and nothing that the bad guys do is ever even remotely progressive. The good guys are the countries that are working so hard to ban the bomb. Most of the good guys have no nukes, but some, like, uh, India, have tested peaceful nuclear devices. India is still with the good guys, though, because India's heart is in the right place. India was forced to develop its peaceful devices by military threats from unnamed neighbors. This is in contrast with the bad guys, who only developed nuclear weapons because they want to destroy the world and harm the environment. Ditto Pakistan. Others coming soon.

There doesn't seem to be an official NAM site. This one from the government of South Africa looks relatively official. Let's try this one for the XIII NAM Summit in early 2003.... Oops: ``[an error occurred while processing this directive].''

NAM
Number Assignment Module.

NAM
Nunavut Association of Municipalities.

NAMA
National Agri-Marketing Association. Based in KS, and by that I don't mean K Street.

namae
Japanese noun meaning `name.' It's not a loan from any European language. It's normally written with two kanji.

NAMB
National (US) Association of Mortgage Brokers.

NAMC
National (South African) Agricultural Marketing Council.

NAMC
National (US) Association of Medical Communicators. Medical Communication is a booming subfield within the Human Communications discipline. Doctors and medical students are being trained in effective communication with patients, honing their rhetorical art on simulated patients (SP's). However, that's all largely irrelevant to this entry, because NAMC is an organization for journalists and others who report medical news to the public.

NAMC
National (US) Association of Minority Contractors. It ``is a nonprofit trade association that was established in 1969 to address the needs and concerns of minority contractors. While membership is open to people of all races and ethnic backgrounds, the organization's mandate, `Building Bridges -- Crossing Barriers,' focuses on construction industry concerns common to African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans.'' They apparently also serve women contractors.

``Covering 49 states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands, NAMC's membership base includes general contractors, subcontractors, construction managers, manufacturers, suppliers, local minority contractor associations, state and local governmental organizations, attorneys, accountants, and other professionals.'' Organizational funding comes from membership dues, federal and state government grants, and private-sector grants and contributions.

I wonder if Vermont is the state where they have no members. In the last debate among Democratic Presidential aspirants before the Iowa Caucuses in 2004, Rev. Al Sharpton sharply criticized former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean for not having any blacks in high positions in his administrations in Montpelier. (I forget the wording.) Former Senator Carol Moseley Brown, who was in the presidential race just to rehabilitate her reputation, defended Dean against Sharpton. In the aftermath of this debate, Sharpton's poll numbers plummeted from 1% to 0.1%. Moseley Brown dropped out of the race, mission accomplished, throwing her support to Dean. Dean's poll numbers slid, and he fell from front-runner to a disappointing third-place finish.

Afterwards, Dean gave a rousing, animated we-will-not-give-up speech to his supporters and campaign workers. The speech was televised, and apparently people over the age of about 25 thought it was a little too animated. He didn't look presidential enough. Throughout 2003, the man looked like he was ready to burst with anger at George W. Bush, and now they notice that he's emotional? What a bunch of uptight honkies. The next week, there was a debate ahead of the New Hampshire primary. Dean actually felt it necessary to spin his performance in that televised pep talk, implying none too subtly that he'd been condescending to his young supporters. Sharpton was consoling, pointing out that if he (Sharpton) had spent the money Dean had spent, and gotten 18% of the vote, he would still be in Iowa celebrating. Apparently some candidates are in the race only to place or show. After the debate, Dean's poll numbers began to rally from his post-Iowa low, but Sharpton's soared immediately, from the neighborhood of 0.1% to the threshold of those heady single-digit heights. With just another factor-of-ten bump, Sharpton could be a contender for third place. See the MOE entry for an explanation of why these numbers are meaningful.

Seriously, Dean needs to find out about fitted shirts. For any given sleeve or chest size, these are available in a number of different neck sizes. Here's a picture of an angry Howard Dean pointing his finger: Furrow-browed Bibi Netanyahu pointing finger

Wait a second. That's Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli PM and current (2004) finance minister, angrily pointing his finger. Here's a picture of Howard Dean angrily pointing his finger: Furrow-browed Howie Dean pointing finger

NAMC
National (US) Association of Mothers' Centers.

NAMC-UM
National Association of Minority Contractors of Upper Midwest. Yes, ``Upper Midwest'' is treated as a proper noun with no article. It's a euphemism for Minnesota. There's apparently a separate NAMC chapter for Wisconsin.

NAMC-WI
National Association of Minority Contractors of WIsconsin. As of January 2004, their webpage is funky. AWOL, in fact.

NAMD
National Alliance for Membership Development. Since 2003 a division of the ACCE, q.v.

NAMD
National Association of Membership Directors. In 2003 it merged into ACCE, q.v.

NAME
National Association Majorettes England. Sic. I am convinced that this organization is not a put-on, based on this page (which very reasonably includes an exoteric preposition in the name) and this other one (now defunct), and the fact that they even appear to have their very own official webpage. As you can imagine, however, tracking down information about this organization on the web is no joke.

``All I want to know is, What's the name of the guy on second?''

``That's right!''

Are you nuts? Good, then visit our majorette entry.

The association was formed on the 6th of January 2002. This new association was born out of the desire for an association for majorettes that would give a broad range of events at regional competitions with qualified judges and also the opportunity of representing England at European and World Majorette Championships, and at the same time keeping their identity as majorettes. At the end of each competition year we hold our National Championships from which we select the England Team for that year.

Name [sic] is affiliated to the National Baton Twirling Association under whose umbrella we are able to take part in the European and World competitions.

NAME's webpages are on N.B.T.A. England's site, but they appear to be somewhat distinct organizations, just as baton twirling and, uh, majoretting appear to be somewhat distinct activities.

Namensschwester
German: female `namesake,' literally `name sister.' Cf. Namensvetter and name twins.

Namensvetter
German: male `namesake,' literally `name cousin.' (Vetter is a male cousin; Cousine is a female cousin.) Cf. Namensschwester and name twins.

N. Amer.
North America. In Spanish: Norte América.

name twins
Two people with the same name. That's a precisely vague definition, because the meaning is not sharply delimited.

Biological twinning is something that normally has to be arranged before birth -- usually in the first couple of days after conception, in fact. Name twins can be made at any time, by marriage and other mechanisms. Jeff Gillooly, husband (1990-1993) and partner in crime of Tonya Harding, changed his name to Jeff Stone in 1995, over the in-court protests of many of the people whose name twin he became.

NAMI
National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

NAMO
National Association of Maritime Organizations. ``The National Association of Maritime Organizations (NAMO) is comprised of maritime-related organizations throughout the United States. NAMO represents its members in all matters on a national level that affect foreign or domestic waterborne commerce using U.S. ports.''

namorido
A Portuguese word that is a blend of namorado and marido. Namorado is `boyfriend' (a parallel construction in English would be `enamoured [one]'). Marido is `husband.' As the frequency or normativeness of marriage has declined, there was apparently a felt need for a way to refer to a long-term male companion or father-of-her-children or significant other or something. Maybe what used to be called common-law marriage. Hence the blend.

Usually, this kind of blend is made possible by the fact that past participles of -ar verbs like amar (`to love') take an -ado ending, while other (-er, -ir) verbs take an -ido ending. In this case, however, the situation is a little bit different. The noun marido comes from the Latin adjective maritus. (Yes, it's ``maritus, a, um.'' The neuter form maritum is necessary for the sense of `paired, closely joined.') Anyway, there was a Latin verb maritare which was derived from the adjective, rather than the other way around. Portuguese also has the derived verb maridar, though it is much less used than various synonyms like casar. (Regarding this interesting word, see this CASA entry.) Very rare is the verb's past participle (p.p.) maridado (Latin maritatus).

The verb morrer (`to die') has both a regular and an irregular p.p. form, roughly like English `die.' In a decent approximation, one may say that the regular and irregular forms correspond: regular morrido with `died,' and irregular morto with `dead.' Portuguese also has words na (a preposition contraction meaning `in the' and a personal pronoun), but it's syntactically difficult to arrange a na morrido collocation to pun on namorido. Namorido still sounds kinda pungent, but then, slang is supposed to. I propose namorto for whatever semantic opportunities may befall.

As I've been writing and researching this (sure, in that order), I've found the the comparison of Portuguese and Spanish enlightening, or somewhat instructive, or at least, well, never mind, it's going in.

The Spanish congener of Portuguese namorado is enamorado, but it is rather more marked and dramatic than `boyfriend.' It's more like `enamoured one' in English. Naturally, then, enamorido (analogue of Port. namorido) would not be a very compelling neologism. Just last January, Laura mentioned a term that now fills that semantic slot in Argentina, but I forgot it. Sorry. The word na is only an archaicism in Spanish, derived from the even more archaic enna for en la, corresponding to the modern Portuguese contraction na.

Except for those referring to words beginning in n, all of this entry's statements about Portuguese also apply to Spanish, with the following adjustments:

  1. There are various slight pronunciation differences of the words spelled identically in the two languages. Most have to do with vowel qualities. The greatest difference is that the d in Portuguese sounds like an English d, whereas the Spanish d (in all contexts above) is pronounced like the voiced th in English them.

  2. Maridado in Spanish is merely quite rare, rather than very rare. Sounds like meat, I know. The vocable tends to be used in food discussions, in the somewhat bian sense of `accompanied' (fancy fast food: ``fish accompanied by chips''). The gastronomical sense also occurs (but is very rare, of course) in Portuguese.

  3. There are slight and increasing differences between the use of morrer in Portuguese and its congener morir in Spanish. The spelling difference represents a phonemic difference, and the r and rr of standard Portuguese correspond reasonably closely to the r and rr of Spanish. However, so far as I know, not being able to pronounce the rr properly (r is easy) is generally regarded as a speech defect throughout the Spanish-speaking world, whereas there are places in Brazil where the distinction is muted and in some contexts disappears.

    Like Portuguese, Spanish has two past participles for this verb. They are morido (for Port. morrido) and muerto (for morto). In Spanish, however, the use of morido has been steadily losing ground to muerto, so that now muerto is used in constructing all analytic conjugations. (This is especially so, that I know of, in Argentina.) A somewhat similar situation within English is that of some old adjectives like brazen, flaxen, leaden, leathern, and silvern. These special adjectives have largely given way to the attributive use of the corresponding nouns brass, flax, (do you even know what that is?) lead [the metallic kind], etc. (Of course, brazen survives in its transferred sense.) Other such adjectives -- golden and wooden spring to mind -- have fared better. So morido vs. morrido. So it goes. In functional terms, verbs make a closer analogy (lit/lighted). In some cases in English, strong forms are displacing the more modern weak forms. Don't tell me ``that makes sense.''

The irregularity of Port. morrer (and Span. morir) has a simple cause, somewhat similar to the cause of the oddity associated with maridar. In all these, an original Latin adjective was carried forward into Romance along with a verb from which it was not derived. At all stages of evolution, the verb also had a regularly derived p.p., which could be used as part of an analytic verb conjugation or as an adjective. (A little useful terminology: a verb form (normally a participle) used as an adjective is called a gerundive, just as a verb form (also normally a participle) used as a noun is called a gerund.)

In the etymology of marido and maridar, a Latin adjective maritus gave rise to a verb maritare. In the case of morto and muerto, the adjective and irregular p.p. is derived from the Latin adjective mortuus, which is in fact a regularly formed p.p. of the Latin verb morior. This is, however, a deponent verb. (Cue disquieting drumroll.) The verbs of modern Romance languages all use verbs that function more or less like active (i.e., nondeponent) verbs in Latin. (Cue disquieting sound effects.) Something had to happen, and something did, but different things in Portuguese and Spanish. The Spanish verb morir, like most cognate verbs in Romance languages, is derived from the Vulgar Latin active verb morire. (Cue monkeys.) A small number of Romance varieties constructed an active verb from moririor. The latter was an alternative form of the deponent, archaic but well-attested, that disappeared in the classical Latin of Rome; it evidently persisted in places. It is presumed that the rr in Portuguese morrer arose from collapse of the unstressed syllable -rir-.

This entry is what Wikipedia would call a stub, the sort of thing that painfully ambushes your toe. It's a twisted stub, and one day when I want to put off grading again I'll extricate the mori- material and create a new entry. Maybe by then I'll have some idea how moririor, a third-conjugation verb like morior (I think), gave rise to -er verbs in Portuguese and some obscure dialects.

I'll be sure to note that morto and muerto, in the respective languages, function as irregular p.pp. of matar -- yes, matar, `to kill,' as in matador. In Spanish, for example, instead of saying that a man was ``matado por la justicia,'' (`killed by [the legal instrumentalities of] justice') you say he was ``muerto por la justicia'' (`dead by justice' -- a marked construction, somewhat like our `put to death'). Imagine: we still don't have a defective-verbs entry!

Exactly how the semantic load is distributed between the regular and highly irregular participles of matar and cognates, however, varies a great deal. It is intriguing that Basque has a complete identity between matar and morir: its verb hil means both `to die' and `to kill.' ``Hil da'' means `he is dead,' while ``hil du'' means `he has killed.' Du and da mean `he has' and `he is,' resp. They are the respective forms of ukan and izan, as an atheist God is my witless, er, witness. These are the auxiliaries of all transitive and intransitive verbs, respectively, even if the transitive verb (like kill) doesn't happen to be taking an explicit target at the time. I'm dying; take me to the Camptown Races. (For enlightenment, see this DD entry.)

Incidentally, although it's not obvious from the orthography, the Portuguese verb morrer is a stem-changing verb like Spanish morir: the normally close o changes to an open o in the third person and the second-person singular of the present indicative. Something happens in the imperative too. The stem change is more extensive in the conjugation of Spanish morir, but apart from the stem change and the past participle, the verbs are basically regular. You wanted to know.

When all that's out, there'll be plenty of space to talk about Italian inamorata and the fact that wife in Portuguese and Spanish is not marida but esposa (that's right: `female spouse').

NAMP
National Association of Mortgage Planners. Really, the only reason I put in this entry is because NAMP and NANP sound so similar. You are reading the dairy of a bad glossarist. I mean the diary of a mad glossarist.

[Phone icon]

NAMPS
Narrow (band) Advanced Mobile Phone Service. Proposed cellular phone protocol. Cf. AMPS.

NaN
Not A Number. (Widely used in programming languages to represent the result of division by zero.)

NANB
Nurses Association of New Brunswick (Canada). In the French-Canadian language, that's Association des Infirmières et Infirmiers du Nouveau-Brunswick (L'AIINB).

NAND
Not AND. The logic function (or gate) whose value (or output) is the negation (inversion) of the AND of its arguments (inputs).

NANDA
North American Nursing Diagnosis Association. It's now ``NANDA International,'' though since it already was, I think they should have become ``NANDA Intercontinental.''

NANDA also designates a general-purpose taxonomy of nursing diagnostic terminology. There are a bunch of these ``standardized nursing languages.''

nando
Nandrolone. A steroid used by athletes.

nano-
SI prefix for 10-9. From a Greek root for small. A midget or dwarf is nanos in Greek (and enano in Spanish). The prefix is abbreviated with the single letter n.

NANOG
North American Network Operators' Group.

NANP
North American Numbering Plan. ``Mask'' for telephone numbers in the U.S., Canada, Bermuda, over 20 Caribbean countries, developed by Bell Telephone in the 1940's. Originally, all numbers were of the form NIX-NNX-NNNN where I=0-1, N=2-9, X=0-9. This allowed switch software to recognize area codes from the second digit. The introduction of cellular phones, and the stupid policy of assigning a large block of (ten thousand) numbers to any company, led quickly to the exhaustion of the mere 160 area codes allowed under the original system, so a new scheme has been replacing the original: NXX-NXX-XXXX. Now there is no numerical difference between area codes and local exchanges, so you have to enter an initial 1 to alert the switching software that the next three digits are to be interpreted as an area code.

It's virtually impossible to pronounce NANP so it sounds different from NAMP. NANP is administered by ...

NANPA
North American Numbering Plan Administration. Administers NANP.

NAON
National Association of Orthopaedic [sic] Nurses. The ``[sic]'' is not part of the name. It's just a way of pointing out `Look! Commonwealth spelling!'' Sic means `thus' in Latin. ``National'' means US in NAON. It's based in Pitman, New Jersey. Founded in 1980. ``Members are the `backbone' of NAON.''

You also want to celebrate International Orthopaedic Nurses Day! Hey -- any excuse for a party. Just don't throw your back out.

NAOOA
North American Olive Oil Association.

NAP
N-Acetyl Penicillamine. Used to treat mercury exposure.

NAP
National Academy Press. Guarantees that all those well-intentioned but worthless and boring studies sponsored by the US National Academies (see NAS) will find a publisher. What's the matter, won't Jossey-Bass take'em?

NAP
Network Access Point. They're basically the places where the parts of the internet ``backbone'' are joined, but what?is.com will be happy to tell you about them in better detail. So will any of the four NAP's themselves:

Keynote, which monitors ISP performance, finds that they are a major bottleneck.

NAPA
National Automotive Parts Association. An auto parts distribution system that was founded as a retailers' cooperative in 1925, it was down to a cooperative of just three members before Genuine Parts Company (founded in 1928) bought NAPA Hawaii. As of this writing (2006), Genuine Parts operates 58 of NAPA's 69 distribution centers. Quaker City Motor Parts of Pennsylvania operates the rest.

NAPBL
National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues. An umbrella organization for minor leagues, founded in 1902. It was renamed Minor League Baseball (MiLB) in 1999.

Minor leagues were classified into A, B, C, and D levels from 1902 to 1911. A top level of Double-A (or AA) was added in 1912, and a level A1 was inserted between A and AA in 1936. In 1946, the top two levels were renamed: A1 became AA and AA became Triple-A (a/k/a AAA).

There was also one league that was Class E for one year: the Twin Ports League in 1943, discussed at the Class E baseball entry.

The lower classifications B, C, and D were eliminated after 1962. Since 1963, the lowest classification has been Rookie League. There are also Winter Leagues (a generic term for leagues that play in the off-season; their names usually include ``Winter League'' or ``Fall League'').

NAPCS
North American Product Classification System. Under development within NAICS.

NAPE
National Association of Private Enterprise.

NAPEHE
National (US) Association for Physical Education in Higher Education.

NAPEM
The National Alliance for Photonics Education in Manufacturing.

NAPIL
National Association for Public Interest Law. ``shaping and promoting the next generation of public interest lawyers.''

NAPLA
Northeast (US) Association of Pre-Law Advisors. Name uncomfortably reminiscent of NAMBLA (no I don't have an entry for that). For other US regional pre-law advising organizations, see the list at (chuckle) SWAPLA.

Naples
You want the ID entry, really.

NAPM
National Association of Purchasing Management. Now the ISM.

NAPPA
North American Potbellied Pig Association. ``Located in the United States, NAPPA is the oldest potbellied pig service organization in the world, offering education and information about the pet pig.'' I dunno -- Wally, who had the office next to mine at ASU, had a pet like that, too. He regarded it as a pet, though it was just an ordinary hog, and when it was full-grown he had it slaughtered.

Remember: for pig accessories, NAPPA. For motorcycle accessories, try a NAPA distributor.

NAPS
Negative-Acting Proofing System. I guess I've cleared up that question!

NAPS
North American Patristic Society. The name is often written with plural ``Patristics'' as the third word, but officially it's singular. Their newsletter is caled Patristics. I dunno. It seems to me that the adjective is patristic, and the noun is patristics. The organization name ought to use the attributive noun, because the society itself is not patristic. I think I'll sleep on it.

Hmm. It seems to have been a consistent spelling error by their original homepage wizard. It's ``Patristics'' after all.

Oh yeah, ``The North American Patristics Society is an organization dedicated to the study of the history and theology of early Christianity.'' They publish The Journal of Early Christian Studies.

NAPS used to hold a members-only session at the annual APS, but in 1980 they went off on their own, and today (2004) they hold an annual meeting in Chicago in May.

NAR
National (US) Association of Realtors. The NAR periodically computes and publicizes an ``affordability index'' which is simply the ratio of median income divided by the median mortgage payment (determined for the same intervals -- monthly income divided by monthly payment, let's say). At the peak of the housing bubble in 2006, the index was at 1.08; at the end of 2008, as the bubble is bursting or rapidly deflating, the index is at 1.42. They don't actually find out what the median mortgage payment is. They take the median price of houses being sold, stir in some assumptions such as 20% down payment, and compute an idealized sort of mortgage payment corresponding to the median house.

NAR
National (US) Association of Rocketry. Co-sponsors TARC with AIA. When we start colonizing places at higher elevations, they can think about merging with the other NAR.

Nara
The historic capital of Japan. Inland from Osaka.

NARA
National (US) Archives and Records Administration.

NARA
National Association of Rehabilitation Providers and Agencies. ``NARA was founded in 1978 to serve as the trade association to represent the interests of Medicare-certified rehabilitation agencies and multidisciplinary rehabilitation businesses that treat Medicare patients. The majority of the 250 members are Medicare Part B providers that contract with long term care facilities for one or more of the three primary rehabilitation services, which are physical therapy (P.T.), occupational therapy (O.T.) and speech language pathology (S.L.P.).'' (Pathology is a service now?) I think NARA originally stood for just ``National Association of Rehabilitation Agencies.''

NARAL
National (US) Abortion and Reproductive rights Action League.

That name turned out to be a foe paw, I think it's called. In particular, the word abortion doesn't have very positive associations, so those who favor it also favor a circumlocution when one is possible. ``Choice'' is the choice euphemism, and the right to abort is ``rights of pregnant women.'' Eventually (possibly as late as 2004 or 2005), they disestablished or something the expansion and started going exclusively by ``NARAL - Pro-Choice America.'' This business works in both directions (the anti-abortion side favors ``pro-life,'' since everyone is pro-``pro'' and anti-``anti''), and maybe I'll have more to say about it after I cook up a shibboleth entry. Cf. NRLC.

NARAS
National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Alternate URL: <grammy.com>.

narc
NARCotics agent. Law officer working on drug-law enforcement. Most applied to DEA agents. Pejorative as well as slang, so I don't think the finer distinctions among different law enforcement agencies are punctiliously observed.

NARC
Nashville Amateur Radio Club.

NARC
National Association of Regional Councils. A ``nonprofit membership organization serving the interests of regional councils and metropolitan planning organizations [MPO's] nationwide [US].''

``Today, regional organizations include not only regional councils of governments--or COGs--but also regional transit, sewer and other public authorities, regional chambers of commerce, regional studies institutes, regional civic organizations, regional faith-based groups and regional leadership forums.''

narcotic
If etymology were semantic law, then narcotic would be a synonym of soporific.

NARF
National AIDS Research Foundation. Founded in Los Angeles with a quarter million dollar donation from AIDS-sufferer Rock Hudson and the support of his friend and sometime co-star Elizabeth Taylor. NARF was incorporated in August 1985 and merged the next month with a similar organization (AMF) to form amfAR.

NARHA
North American Riding for the Handicapped Association.

NARM
Naturally-occurring or Accelerator-produced Radioactive Materials. Traditionally in the US, both of these have been regulated only by the states, with no federal regulation (apart from federally-run facilities). Cf. NORM.

NARP
Neuropathy; Ataxia; Retinitis Pigmentosa. Symptoms that define (and whose acronym names) a mitochondrial syndrome.

narrow fabric
Any textile fabric not wider than 45 cm (about 18 in.). The narrow-fabric industry considers its bailiwick to include ``ribbons, laces, cords, tapes, labels, webbings, wicks, elastics, ropes, straps, trims, fringes and lanyards ... crafted out of different kinds of materials such as leather, cotton, satin, velvet, polyester, teflon, rubber, jute, nylon, fiber glass and also beads.'' They serve a helpful short textile-terms glossary. ``Smallwares'' is sometimes used as a synonym of ``narrow fabrics.''

NARSAD
National Alliance on Schizophrenia and Depression.

NART
National Adult Reading Test. Used as a measure of pre-morbid intelligence of psychiatric patients. This is on the (in some cases now statistically confirmed) assumption that the pronunciation of irregular words is unaffected in various clinical disorders and that performance is highly correlated with general intellectual ability. It is also necessary to ascertain whether NART scores are correlated with other measures used in clinical diagnosis of psychiatric patients, such as BPRS and SANS.

NARTE
National Association of Radio and Telecommunications Engineers.

NARTH
National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. ``[A] non-profit, educational organization dedicated to affirming a complementary, male-female model of gender and sexuality.'' Needless to note, they disagree with the majority or official view of the psychological community that homosexuality is not a disease or disorder requiring treatment as such. ``NARTH is a member of Positive Alternatives To Homosexuality (PATH).''

'nary
Hardly any.

n-ary, N-ary
Having n (or N) arguments or parameters. Term used to characterize functions used in a computer program. Usually only the explicit arguments are counted, and counting is by name (i.e., an array passed as such, whether by name or by value, counts as a single parameter). If you spend a lot of time worrying about this, you probably need to get back to coding.

More at the 0-ary entry.

During the Democratic party's presidential nominating convention in 2000, nominee Albert Gore was suddenly overcome by sexual passion and completely spontaneously decided to give his wife Tipper a long wet movie kiss on prime time television, thus completely inadvertently proving that while his economic program was pure Clinton, he was obviously faithful to his wife (unlike some other people). Al must think that Tipper is quite a number. And Al invented computer functions. He probably also wrote that song about Tipperary. (Sorry. The song just kept going through my mind as I optimized the entry; I had to find some excuse to squeeze it in.)

[column] The Greek root for the number one is hen-. Another song, written by Murray and Weston in 1911, was covered by Herman's Hermits for the US market in 1965. The words came out

I'm Hen-ary the eighth I am
Hen-ary the eighth I am, I am
I got married to the widow next door
She's been married seven times before

The aitch is silent. The lead singer Peter Noone -- ``Herman'' -- is a Mancunian half-heartedly faking a Cockney accent. (Incidentally, his surname is pronounced ``noon'' -- a single syllable.)

In Greek (ancient and modern), the aitch sound is not indicated by a separate alphabetic character but by a breathing mark or spiritus placed over an initial vowel. Originally, there was only a rough-breathing mark; the absence of that mark indicated smooth breathing. Later a smooth-breathing mark (an inverted rough-breathing mark) was developed to indicate the same thing. This was not an improvement; the tops of the letters are cluttered enough with tiny illegible accents.

The rough breathing mark can also appear over the rho, where it roughly (sorry again) indicates aspiration. Aspiration on unvoiced plosives is indicated by a change of letter (kappa to chi, pi to phi, tau to theta). In Latin transliteration, all four aspirated consonants have the aspiration indicated by an aitch (rh, ch, ph, th), but initial rough breathing on a vowel is indicated by an initial aitch (as in hero, herpes, etc.). Farsi (the Persian language) also has that distinction in the arr sound, which is often indicated in English transliteration by r versus hr. (With a fricative, the aspiration is more or less simultaneous with other elements of articulation, so it's not surprising that when explicitly indicated, the feature has appeared both before and after the base letter.)

NAS
National Academy of Sciences. A ``private, nonprofit, self-perpetuating society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. Upon the authority of the charter granted to it by the Congress in 1863, the Academy has a mandate that requires it to advise the federal government on scientific and technical matters.''

They've been proliferating, diluting their prestige among National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, and an Institute of Medicine. The thin end of the wedge was economists, then other social ``sciences.'' It was downhill from there. The same thing happened with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (IAS). When it was started by the Bambergers, partly as a haven for ``European scientists'' fleeing fascism, it was mostly physicists and mathematicians. Today it's mostly historians and social scientists.

NAS
National [US and Canadian] Airspace System.

NAS
National Association of Scholars. The ``only academic organization dedicated to the restoration of intellectual substance, individual merit, and academic freedom in the university.'' Sister organization of the Canadian SAFS.

NAS
Nerve Attenuation Syndrome. Something half the world's population is suffering from in 2021, in the movie Johnny Mnemonic (JM).

NAS
Network Access Server.

NAS
Network Attached Server. A server specialized to file-serve.

NAS
New American Standard Version of the Bible. A revision of the SARV, whose entry is the one to see.

NAS
Numéro d'Assurance Sociale. French, `Social Insurance Number' (SIN). Canadian equivalent of the Social Security Number (SSN) in the US. Unlike the SSN, it contains a 1-digit Luhn checksum.

NASA
(US) National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

NASA
Need Another Seven Astronauts. Gallows humor after the Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. I suppose there must have been someone with the poor taste to revive the joke after the loss of the Columbia in 2003.

NASA
Netherlands American Studies Association. A couple of Dutch-university associations of students in American Studies are VASA and USA.

American Studies was established at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) in 1947, the same year that Secretary of State George C. Marshall gave his famous speech (June 5, at Harvard) proposing elements of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan. NASA (the Dutch NASA) was founded in 1977, at a conference at the Agnietenkapel of the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

NASAA
North American Securities Administrators Association.

Here are some of their tips for not getting taken (from back in 1989, when fraud was not universal).

NASADAD
National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors, Inc. Trying to prevent people from getting too high.

NASAnese
NASA jargon.

NASAP
Network Analysis and Systems Application Program. disaster in 1986.

NASB
New American Standard Bible.

NASC
Nebraska Association of Student Councils.

NASCA
National Association for Scientific and Cultural Appreciation. I'm pleased that the nation of which they are -al is the UK. We're more than well-supplied with this stuff (Atlantis, astrology that works, 666 taken seriously, etc.); it's good to spread the manure, and equanimity in the face of flaming eccentricity is something the British do rather well. (I can only wish it were unusual, but it's far enough out of round to be incontestably eccentric.)

NASCA says it ``is an organisation devoted to areas of science that are otherwise poorly covered.'' It puts one in mind of things better covered, to say nothing of honored, in the breach.

NASCAR
National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing. Cf. VASCAR, NHRA.

I beg the reader's indulgence, but since I have a NASCAR entry and a Spam entry, I can't resist drawing a connection. In a townhall.com column September 10, 2004, Jonah Goldberg ridiculed US Democratic party presidential candidate John Kerry for slumming, in so many words, like a candidate campaigning for votes:

``Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?'' Kerry asked not too long ago, about as convincingly as a French chef lauding Spam.

NASD
National Association of Securities Dealers. On July 30, 2007, NASD changed its name to FINRA and changed its Internet domain from <nasd.com> to <finra.org>.

NASD as ``market of markets''
In the late 1990's, the NASD had the idea that it would become a ``market of markets.'' In 1998 NASD reached agreement in principle to purchase of the Amex, completing the deal that year or the next. They also tried to buy the PhilEx but couldn't reach an agreement.

The anticipated synergies did not materialize and the business model was abandoned. On January 24, 2002, NASD put the Amex up for sale. I still have to check on the current status of that.

NASDA
NAtional (Japanese) Space Development Agency. NASDA was created on October 1, 1969, by passage of the National Space Development Agency Law. It doesn't seem ever to have been called anything like ``National Air and Space whatnot'' -- they evidently just wanted an old-fashioned pronounceable acronym.

NASDA
National (US) Association of State Departments of Agriculture.

NASDAQ, Nasdaq
National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System. A virtual stock market founded in 1971. Virtual in the sense that there is no geographically central trading floor--transactions are conducted and recorded by phone and other electronics. Has surpassed the NYSE in average daily volume. Tends to list more technology stocks. In March 1998, there was news of negotiations to acquire the AMEX. Mmm, let me get back to this entry, I haven't read the newspaper in years.

Stocks listed on the NASDAQ are analyzed by the NSG (NASDAQ Stock Guide?) which is not affiliated with NASDAQ.

[dive flag]

NASDS
National Association of Scuba Diving Schools.

NASDTEC
National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification. ``Dedicated to licensing well-prepared, safe and wholesome educators for our nation's schools.''

``Well-prepared, safe, wholesome'' ... this sounds like lunch. How about learned, demanding, effective?

NASE
National Association for Self-Esteem. A darn useful and important organization, if they do say so themselves. For an alternative, research-backed opinion, see the floccinaucinihilipilification entry. Looks like a real donnybrook! But it's an easy call. I mean, who you gonna believe -- a bunch of behavioral ``scientists'' or a self-appointed committee of educrats?

NASE
National Association for the Self-Employed. Vide etiam SBA, AHBA and CENA.

n-ASER
Neutron-Accelerated Soft-Error Rate (SER). Empirical methods of predicting long-term reliability require some form of acceleration, since time-to-market is much less than installed life.

NASFiC
North American Science Fiction Convention. A NASFiC is held in North America in the occasional year when Worldcon is not.

NASG
New-Age Sensitive Guy.

Nash Rambler
We really ought to have a Nash Rambler entry.

Okaaaay! Well started is half done.

Nash was one of the companies that merged (as part of Nash-Kelvinator) into American Motors (q.v.) in 1954. The Rambler was Nash's most successful line at the time, and much of the early marketing effort of AMC was bent on leveraging the Rambler product and name. They rebadged Ramblers for sale by Hudson dealers in 1954; later the separate marques were dropped and all cars sold by AMC were called Ramblers. That happened in 1958. The same year there was a joke pop song in 1958 about a guy driving a Cadillac (in the 1950's this was a luxury car rather than your grandfather's pimpmobile) and a guy driving a ``little Nash Rambler.'' The story is told from the point of view of the guy in the Cadillac, who describes a race in which the Rambler driver is trying to show him up. The song was ``Beep Beep,'' by The Playmates, and it was on Doctor Demento from time to time. Choose a lyrics page for it from among these.

NASI
National Academy of Social Insurance.
``America's only private, non-profit, non-partisan resource center made up of the nation's leading experts on social insurance. Both in the United States and abroad, social insurance encompasses broad-based public systems for insuring workers and their families against economic insecurity caused by loss of income from work and the cost of health care.

The Academy's scope includes such social insurance systems as Social Security, Medicare, workers' compensation and unemployment insurance, and related social assistance and private employee benefits.''

It must be frustrating to be an expert in a field where everyone has a politically motivated opinion.

NASIG
North American Serials Interest Group. The eleventh annual NASIG conference held in 1996 in New Mexico.

NASILP
National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs. ``North America's [see National entry] only professional organization specifically devoted to fostering study of less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) through self-instructional principles developed for an academic setting.''

NASK
Sorry, I don't read Polish. (See the Polish entry for even less information.)

NASL
National Association for the Support of Long Term Care.

NASM
National Academy of Sports Medicine.

NASM
National Association of Schools of Music.

NASM
National Air and Space Museum. (Was NAM until 1966.)

NASMHPD
National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors.

NASMIC
NAtional (Malaysian) SMI Consultative Center.

NASMSA
National (U.S.) Association of State Motorcycle Safety Administrators. They use the acronym SMSA for State Motorcycle Safety Administrator[s], feigning blithe unawareness of the fact that that acronym has already been claimed by the Census Bureau.

NASN
National Association of School Nurses, Inc.

NASO
National Association of Sports Officials.

NASO
Native American Student Organization. If they followed the usual ``Student Association'' naming convention, it could lead to some confusion.

NASP
National (U.S.) AeroSpace Plane.

NASP
National Association of Sales Professionals.

NASPA
National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. It's a professional organization for ``student affairs administrators, faculty and graduate students.''

NASPE
National Association for Sport and Physical Education. One of six national associations within the AAHPERD.

NASPSPA
North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity.

NASS
North American Spine Society.

NASSH
North American Society for Sport History.

NASSP
National Association of Secondary School Principals. Cf. NAESP.

NASSR
North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.

NASSS
North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

NAST
NPOESS Airborne Sounder Testbed.

NASULGC
National (US) Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.

Too long to pronounce as an initialism, but how to pronounce ``LGC''? My best guess at the spoken form, until I am informed otherwise: ``Nasal Gee Cee.''

NASW
National Association of Science Writers. Science journalists, but you could be forgiven for the misunderstanding.

NASW
National Association of Social Workers. They adopted a revised Code of Ethics in 1996, but here it's early 1998 and they still don't have a web page. What screwed-up priorities! Until the national organization gets virtual, you can visit the California Chapter. Oh, wait, there is a national site. See SW entry for related entries.

NAT
Network Address Translator.

NATA
National Air Transportation Association.

NATAS
National Appropriate Technology Assistance Service.

NATAS
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. NATAS is not the same as ATAS, q.v. I was just about to ask, what's with this ``and Sciences'' shtick? But it seems NATAS is preferring the shorter ``National Television Academy.''

As of 2004, NATAS is having a hard time figuring out how to make internal hyperlinks that work at the natas.tv site linked at the begining of this entry. They seem to have a number of independent, equally official sites. Try the slow-loading emmyonline.org or natasonline.com instead.

NATCA
National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

NATFHE
National Association of Teachers of Further and Higher Education. ``Higher and Higher Education'' would have conveyed the same idea more and more perfectly. The organization was founded in 1904 as the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutes. The silly NATFHE moniker was adopted in 1976. In December 2005, members of NATFHE and AUT voted overwhelmingly to merge, the amalgamation taking place officially on June 1, 2006. NATFHE members were especially keen on this (95.7% of voting members, as opposed to only 79.2% of voting AUT members), evidently because the merger would entail getting rid of the silly name. The new union is called the University and College Union (UCU).

[Football icon]

national
An adjective used in organization names, to mean
  1. American -- as in `National Football League' (NFL).
  2. Not American -- as in `National Football Conference' (NFC). Cf. AFC.
  3. Canadian -- as in `National Hockey League' (NHL).
  4. Of the US and Canada -- as in `National Junior Classical League' (JCL). You actually find some people who think that ``American'' can be used without qualification in Canada to mean ``North American'' or ``Canadian and/or of the US'' or some such. That might be logical, but it might also be inconvenient. Anyway, it doesn't work that way, other than in proper nouns for continental (or so) organizations.
  5. Any-old-countrian -- as in the 100+ `National Contract Bridge Organizations' members of the WBF (details here), which is to say
  6. International -- as in NAID or NWR.
  7. Quondam country (adj.) -- as in TNN.
  8. Of England and Wales (but not all of Great Britain, let alone the UK) -- as in NUT. London-born Kingsley Amis went to live in South Wales in 1948 (he got a teaching position at the University of Wales, Swansea), and he commented in his Memoirs that people there then made no distinction between England and Wales. They thought of themselves as living in England. (And presumably they used ``Englishman'' as a synonym of Briton, q.v.) These people spoke no or little Welsh, and many of them had short histories in the place. Amis noted that the culture was different further north and (of course) in rural areas, though I don't recall any comment specifically regarding the senses of ``England'' and ``English'' there.

A ``national of'' some country is a citizen of that country (not necessarily very carefully construed).

nationalist
In the context of Northern Ireland: of the opinion that it should become part of the Republic of Ireland. I.e., pro-Union-with-the-Republic-of-Ireland. Cf. unionist.

Ireland is predominantly Roman Catholic, and the UK (the union that unionists favor union with) is predominantly, or nominally, or by default or something, Protestant. (Too, the UK monarch has something to do with the state church, which is Protestant.) It happens that many of the Irish leaders in Ireland's struggle for independence from the UK were Protestant. Be that as it may, the partition of Ireland was approximately along religious lines. The parts of Northern Ireland where nationalist parties poll well are predominantly Catholic, and those where unionists poll well are not. In loose but accurate terms, the conflict in Northern Ireland is between religious communities. This is not to say that the conflict in Northern Ireland is about religion per se, any more than the 1960's civil rights struggle in the US was about skin pigmentation per se. Nevertheless, in both cases the grievances, perceptions, goals, etc., are strongly correlated with social identity, broadly defined. However, in the last few days I've added a couple of potentially inflammatory entries. (Ha! Try to find them!) Thus, like the news media, I will prefer to ignore the religious subtext and write as if the N.I. conflict were some sort of unmotivated abstract dispute about value-neutral national alliances.

National Semiconductor
Here.

NATIV
An Israeli bimonthly published in Hebrew since 1988, now under the aegis of ACPR and available online in English. The periodical's name is typically block-capitalized in English transliteration. The Hebrew name of the journal means `path.'

native
An adjective and noun ultimately derived from the Latin nat-, past participial stem of nasci, `to be born.' It's been drifting semantically all these centuries, and now generally implies that the thing so described (as native) is original to some context stated or implied. Hence the term ``native-born,'' whose etymological sense might be something like `born born,' specifies that the sense in which someone is native to a place is that he is, as we used to say not too long ago, ``native to'' the place.

Native
I thought we should have a Return of the native entry, so here it is.

NATLFED
NATional Labor FEDeration. A cult. See longer entry at NLF.

NATO
National (US) Association of Theatre Owners. It's known as ``the other NATO.'' Europe isn't even close to being one of their theaters of operation. The ``theatre'' in the name is not a misspelling or an indication that they have mostly Canadian or any live theater. It's just pretentious.

NATO
National (US) Association of Travel Organizations. During the 1950's, this association conducted a campaign ``to change the observance of certain major holidays to Mondays'' (in the words of James L. Bossemeyer, NATO's executive VP, in his article ``Travel: American Mobility'' for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 313, (1957), pp. 113-6, the source also for the next paragraph).

Specifically, the plan called for the ``observance of Presidents' Day on the 3rd Monday in February, Memorial Day on the 4th Monday in May, Independence Day on the 1st Monday in July, and Thanksgiving Day on the 4th Monday in November.'' Bossemeyer claimed that ``[t]he plan has drawn enthusiastic support from the majority of individuals to whom it has been adequately explained.'' The individuals who did not support it were evidently deemed not to have suffered an adequate explanation (see educate people).

NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They provide some funds for transatlantic research collaborations, and to organize NATO ASI's. Apparently they have some other activities as well.

I just picked up a copy of NATO: A Bleak Picture (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), by S. Vladimirov and L. Teplov. (The translator is not named. I detect a pattern here; read about Trotsky's book.) Concluding the introduction, at p. 25 they explain:

  The aim of this book is to reveal the true nature of the North Atlantic bloc--from the time it was set up to the present day--to demonstrate both the futility and the dangerous nature of its activities. The book also outlines a broad programme of measures which are the only alternative to NATO policy.

I'm afraid the arguments are too subtle to summarize.

NATOA
National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors.

NATO ASI
NATO(-subsidized) Advanced Study Institute. Usually held in Italy in the summer, in my experience. Eligibility to attend, back when that was an issue, was based on work affiliation, so during the Cold War, Vietnamese nationals conducting research in France attended. So I heard.

naturalist
This is one of those words that has had so many meanings over time that if all of them were regarded as possible senses in current use, the word would be almost useless.

The earliest sense (judging from a quoted instance dating to 1581) given by the OED is that of ``[a]n expert in or student of natural science; a natural philosopher, a scientist,'' marked as obsolete. I first encountered this in the ``Historical Introduction'' at the beginning of A.E.H. Love's A Treatise on the Mathematical Theory of Elasticity. On page 4 of the fourth edition (1934) there is this paragraph (of which only the part up to the word ``besides'' is relevant to this entry):

  Except Coulomb's, the most important work of the period for the general mathematical theory is the physical discussion of elasticity by Thomas Young. This naturalist (to adopt Lord Kelvin's name for students of natural science) besides defining his modulus of elasticity, was the first to consider shear as an elastic strain13. He called it ``detrusion,'' and noticed that the elastic resistance of a body to shear, and its resistance to extension or contraction, are in general different; but he did not introduce a distinct modulus of rigidity to express resistance to shear. He defined ``the modulus of elasticity of a substance14'' as ``a column of the same substance capable of producing a pressure on its base which is to the weight causing a certain degree of compression, as the length of the substance is to the diminution of its length.'' What we now call ``Young's modulus'' is the weight of this column per unit area of its base. This introduction of a definite physical concept, associated with the coefficient of elasticity which descends, as it were from a clear sky, on the reader of mathematical memoirs, marks an epoch in the history of science.

The OED quotes the second sentence above up to ``besides'' from the first edition (1892), in which Lord Kelvin was identified as Sir William Thomson. [Thomson was made Baron Kelvin, of Largs in the County of Ayr, only in the same year 1892.] The OED does not quote Thomson s.v. Its quotations for this sense of the word are from the years 1581, 1605, 1654, 1686, 1726, 1752 (publ. 1777), 1795, 1813 (publ. 1846), and 1892. It might be that in some conversation with Love, Thomson used the word naturalist in a way that had become rare, and that Love mistook his usage for a neologism. Some word was needed, but during the nineteenth century the word scientist was coined -- probably by Whewell by 1840, though possibly by someone else as early as 1834 -- and quickly became popular. William Whewell was a highly successful neologist.

Nature
A weekly science magazine.

NAU
Northern Arizona University. In Flagstaff.

NAV
Net Asset Value.

NAV
Norton AntiVirus. Antivirus software for Windows machines that was top-rated by PC magazine from 1997 to 2002. I don't know about 2003 because I'm writing the entry in 2002.

NAVE
NAVE Automatic Virtual Environment. Developed by the Georgia Tech Virtual Environments Group. Like CAVE, but completely PC-based and cheap (a mere sixty kilobucks). See also BNAVE.

navel
In 1975, R. F. Autry was awarded Canadian patent 997,608, entitled ``production of meat snack product.'' The patent was for ``a flat edible dried bar snack having good shelf life and comprising upper and lower layers [kinda makes me nostalgic for ISO 9000 Certification] of an edible collagen film and a thicker center layer of meat emulsion.'' The coatings (upper and lower, above and below; also left and right or front and back -- see below... I mean later on here) are intended inter alia to
  1. contain soft meat emulsions during extrusion,
  2. act as a barrier to oxidation, and
  3. restrain fat leakage.
Yummy!

``A typical formulation for the emulsion [is] 120 lb. chuck tenders, 60 lb navels, 1.7 kg salt, 1 kg dextrose, 250 g black pepper, 100 g red pepper, 90 g mustard, 90 g coriander, 70 g nutmeg, 50 g garlic, 100 g curing mixture, and 100 g starter culture.'' Double-plus yummy. (But it needs way more spices.) ``The emulsion is placed on an edible collagen film about 1 mil thick, covered with another collagen film, and rolled [I think this means flattened with a roller] to a thickness of about 0.25 inch. The sheet is placed in a smokehouse or drier, and heated initially at a low temperature and high humidity to allow the starter organisms to function.'' What is their function, exactly? ``Eventually, a temperature of 150 °F is put in effect for 30 min. When the moisture content falls below 20%, the sheets are rolled and cut into the shape of candy bars and packed. A smoking step can be applied during drying. It is not clear whether the texture of the finished product is similar to that of a typical jerky.'' It isn't entirely clear why they need much of an ``upper'' layer.

The quotes above (including the metric-transition-era units, and the absence of the word ``cook'') are taken from the chapter 18, ``Meat-Based Snacks,'' of Snack Food Technology by Samuel A. Matz (p. 232; see the snack food entry for bibliographic details). It occurs to me that Metzger is German for `butcher,' and that Metzger and Matz bear as close a relationship to each other navels and most people's unconsidered notions of meat or even of mats of meat emulsion. Yummy. Evidently, ``navel'' is a sort of meat-industry synecdoche for um, less commercial cuts of carcass.

navel exercises
In Japanese, heso-ga cha-o wakasu [literally: `navel boils tea'] is an idiom meaning one is extremely funny. Perhaps the definition is recursive in a Zen sort of way. This puts innies and outies in a whole new light, and may go some way to explaining why the obese should be particularly jolly, despite all we imagine we know about ``cholesterol.''

This entry is part of the Japanese belly information ring. Next stop: seppuku.

NAVS
The National Anti-Vivisection Society. Animal-rights activists tend to be vegetarians.

NAVS
North American Vegetarian Society.

People often become vegetarians for moral reasons (cf. other NAVS). Perhaps you are attracted to moral persons. Alicia Silverstone is a North American and a vegetarian (or maybe a vegan; I'll have to remember to ask her next time I have a chance).

According to Desirable Men, Chapter 27 (``Dating the Second Time Around''), p. 195,

Two basic kinds of salads are available in almost every restaurant: Caesar salads and garden salads.

Further on: ``Hostesses of most restaurants are extremely helpful during off-peak hours. ... You may ask, `What is an easy food item to eat?' ... Be honest and let her know that you will be there on a date and don't want to make a fool out of yourself.'' (This is a juicy morsel of advice-book wisdom, inviting comment, but I'm not going to bite.)

Chapter 24 is ``Graceful Exit Lines.'' Here are a couple from p. 175:

(I know the second one worked for Michael Corleone.)

I happen to think that real grace is making ``Mr. Wrong'' think not meeting again was his idea. Here's a graceful exit-stimulation line for that purpose:

If that doesn't work, just promise to call.

For more one what to eat and what not to eat on a date, see these entries:

  1. Hold the onions.
  2. LBI

It's becoming increasingly hard to believe, but the original impulse to create this glossary came from a desire for my microelectronics students to understand those elements of my lectures that might require a level of English fluency not commonly acquired by ESL engineering students. But it's all good: some fraction of engineering graduate students finish up their degrees and, perhaps after a stint as slaves on the fab line to convert their visa status, go on to open a restaurant with the word Tandoori in the name.

Navy NCIS
Short title of the CBS TV show ``Navy NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service'' that debuted in 2003. This is what we call an ``Acronymic AAP: Acronym-Assisted Pleonasm.'' For 2004, the initial word Navy was lopped from both the short and long titles, cruelly depriving us of a prized opportunity for exaggerated whining.

It was created by Donald P. Bellisario, creator of JAG, it fills JAG's old time slot, and its main characters were introduced in a special episode of JAG late in the previous season. For people who liked that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that they will like. Some fastidious types assert that technically it is not a spin-off because none of the previous season's regular JAG cast got a regular part in Navy NCIS.

I don't know how Donald got the extra el in his name -- the Spanish name is Belisario. I see two possibilities. One is that the name is Italian. More likely, however, is that he was so happy with the first el, he figured he'd go with that and do the same thing again. Go with your strength. Do it again. Like JAG and NCIS, or Navy NCIS.

I think that Bellisario needs to be liberated from the endless cycle of violence investigation. That's my pretext, as they say, for mentioning Polisario, which is also known as the Western Sahara Liberation Front. They've been trying to break into prime-time news since 1975, with little success in the US.

The lead character of JAG is officer Harmon Rabb, former Navy fighter pilot. The lead role in Navy NCIS is a naval officer played by Mark Harmon. It's a good thing we're all so smart, or we'd have trouble keeping the different shows straight.

NAWC
National Association of Water Companies.

NAWC
Naval Air Warfare Center. It used to be called the Naval Air Development Center. That kind of unexpected honesty really spooks me. Cf. DoD.

NAWCAD
Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division. Part of NAWC.

NAWCC
National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors.

NAWCWD
Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division. Also, and probably officially, NAWCWPNS.

NAWCWPNS
Naval Air Warfare Center WeaPoNS Division. Also, and probably unofficially, NAWCWD.

NAWGA
National-American Wholesale Grocers' Association. I don't know a website for this organization, but it's part of FDI -- Food Distributors International, so try that.

nawk
New awk.

NAZHA
Neues Ausbildungszentrum bei HARTING. `New Training Center at HARTING.' More specifically, at HARTING Technologiegruppe. Harting is a surname, apparently of the founder of the business, but they like to capitalize it.

Nb
Chemical symbol for niobium. A period-4 transition metal, atomic number 41, named after Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus. The element was earlier known as columbium and had the symbol Cb. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

NB, N/B
Narrow Band.

NB
Neutral Buoyancy.

NB
Postal abbreviation for the province of New Brunswick in Canada (.ca). Capital: Fredericton. That's right, no k. They spell everything a little bit funny up there. Must be the latitude.

Where is Old Brunswick?

New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are known as the Maritime Provinces, or the Maritimes. At the time this nomenclature arose, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador could not be included among maritime provinces of Canada because it was not a province but a separate entity (as explained at the NF entry). If you wanted a definition that works today, you could say that the Maritimes are those provinces all of whose territory is within 300 km or 200 mi. of an ocean coast. The Atlantic Provinces (Maritimes plus NL) would have a corresponding definition with 300 mi.

[column] The 6th Annual University of New Brunswick Ancient History Colloquium is scheduled to take place in Fredericton, NB, on 20 March 1999. The conference is entitled: GREEKS ON THE APPIAN WAY: PROGRESS, DECLINE OR STAGNATION. This link is to the first announcement. Further information will appear on the departmental homepage for Classics & Ancient History at UNB.

Other things probably will happen in NB in 1999, but we're pretty selective.

NB
NorthBound.

N.B.
Nota Bene. Italian, `Note well.' Not Latin, as claimed in this somewhat shorter list of abbreviations, and also by the O.E.D. It merely happens that nota bene has the same meaning in Latin, but that's pure coincidence.

NBA
National Basketball Association.

NBAA
National Business Aviation Association. I could have sworn it was the ``National Business Aircraft Association.'' Maybe it was. The NBAA represents ``corporate planes.''

In September 2007, outgoing FAA administrator Marion C. Blakey spoke to a group of aviation executives at the Aero Club. He warned them that ``[a]irline schedules have got to stop being the fodder for late-night monologues. And if the airlines don't address this voluntarily, don't be surprised when the government steps in.'' According to an AP report, the US DoT estimated that only 70% of US flights had arrived on time the previous July. And my mom's flight from Vancouver was delayed by over two hours yesterday, so this is a serious problem that's hitting home! Blakey advocated pissy little steps like transitioning from 1960's-era radar-based air traffic control systems to satellite-based technology. However, this would cost the commercial airlines $15 billion in new equipment (instrumentation, not necessarily new planes) and would cost the FAA itself 15 to 22 billion dollars, and the result -- according to Blakey -- would only be to reduce delays by about 20%, and to reduce noise for 600,000 people. That's 600,000 people net, and there seems to be more resistance from those who would get more noise than push from people who would get less.

David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association (which represents US commercial airlines) had a number of comments in reponse. Among other things, he observed that in 1970, when Congress established the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, there were 2,500 commercial airplanes and 1,800 corporate jets in the US, and that at the end of 2006, 8,000 commercial airplanes and 18,000 corporate planes were operating 40,000 to 50,000 flights per day in US airspace. He also said that commercial jets made up 40% of air traffic in the congested Northeast. In her own remarks, Blakey had commented that corporate aviators should also be prepared to chip in. I'm going by a news report, so I don't know if ``chip in'' were her precise words. I imagine that the cheaepest way to chip in would be to increase spending on Washington lobbyists. What Blakey had in mind was that ``Flying to and from wherever you want whenever you want is not a free utility. You need to expect to pay for it.''

NBBW
National Black Bookstore Week.

NBC
National Broadcasting Corporation. Parent company is GE.

The Fall 2003 season was not all that NBC hoped it would be, and less. According to NBC entertainment president Jeff Zucker:

Some of our programs just sucked.

(It can't have been the fault of management.)

In 2007, NBC failed to fire William Arkin.

NBC
Not Backward-Compatible.

NBC
Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical. An ``NBC suit'' is one intended to afford some protection against NBC hazards.

Cf. CBS.

NBCC
National Board for Certified Counselors, Inc. ``Promoting Quality Counseling Through Certification.'' (Also used for National-Board-Certified Counselor.)

NBCC
National Book Critics Circle. I'm not sure if this organization has any existence beyond the awards it gives out each year.

NBC Special
In 46 years (to the end of 1996) Bob Hope has done 286 TV specials for NBC. ``Special''?

NBCT
National Board Certified Teacher. A teacher certified by the NBPTS.

NBER
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.. ``[A] private, non-profit, non-partisan organization engaged in quantitative analysis of the American economy.''

NBEW
National Business Employment Weekly. Published by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) company.

NBFI
Non-Bank Financial Institution.

NBME
National Board of Medical Examiners. Related: United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE).

NBMO
NonBonding Molecular Orbital (MO). Wallflower orbitals; they don't have to mix and move up (ABMO) or down (BMO), you know.

NbNW
No, this is not a compass direction. It's an abbreviation of the name of a movie.

NBO
National (contract) Bridge Organization. The terms national and country are occasionally used in other than the precise political sense. For example, the WBF's page for the Central American and Caribbean Bridge Federation (visited December 2006) explains that ``The members of the Central American and Caribbean Bridge Federation are the National Federations of the affiliated countries. Currently, the CACBF comprises 24 member countries, totalling 1,811 registered players, as follows...'' Among the 24 ``member countries'' are Anguilla, Aruba, Bermuda, French Guyana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Netherlands Antilles, and the US Virgin Islands (140 members), none of which is an independent country. District 9 of the ACBL includes the US territories of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, so there's probably a complicated deal there. District 9 has a bit over 1000 members and comprises four ACBL units: 102 (contiguous pieces of Florida's Sarasota and Manatee counties), 219 (the Florida panhandle, from Jefferson County west), 240 (Florida's Seminole, Brevard, Orange, Osceola, and Indian River counties), 243 (Broward County, Florida) and 128 (the rest of Florida, plus Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands). I swear, just writing the names of Florida counties gives me PTSD (the initial trauma having been the 2000 election aftermath). Bermuda also has some odd kind of deal going. Probably counterclockwise.

An interesting omission is Belize, which is an independent country. (It is normally regarded as a Caribbean nation, like Trinidad and Tobago, and not as a Central American country. There's some history behind this.) Belize has plenty of bridge players and has had a few local clubs over the years; I suspect they mostly join the ACBL.

NBP
Name-Binding Protocol.

NBPA
National Basketball Players Association. ``National'' as in ``National Basketball Assocation'' (NBA).

NBPA
National Broadcast Pilots Association. It is ``an organization for pilots and crew members flying Electronic News Gathering aircraft for both television and radio as well as those companies directly involved in making aerial news possible. We are committed to enhancing safety for all ENG crew members through better communication with each other and the local authorities. The association was formed in 1984 by Leo Galanis with the goal of having all ENG pilots talking to each other while working in close proximity. The NBPA now has members in most of the major markets as well as other countries.''

NBPTS
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

Since the 1980's, there have been continuing efforts to reform and improve the quality of teaching in the US. Some reforms are changes in teaching practice dictated by education bureaucrats, about which this glossary entry will be tactfully silent. Some reforms involve increasing remuneration for teachers; it takes special talent to make this idea fail, and -- all other things being equal -- good teaching follows good money.

A very common reform has been to tighten up teacher certification. In principle, this ought to work by providing excluding the least able entrants to the teaching profession or forcing them to improve. In practice, teaching reforms have coincided with a teacher shortage, so that whenever teacher cert has threatened to keep significant numbers of incompetent teachers out of classrooms, states have issued emergency credentials, circumventing the reform. One benefit of teacher testing has been to demonstrate, by the low standards that the tests impose, just how serious the problem is. For references, see

William A. Firestone, S. Rosenblum, B. D. Bader, and Diane Massell, ``Recent Trends in State Education Reform: Assessment and Prospects,'' Teachers College Record, vol. 94, #2 (Winter 1992), p. 254-77.

Diane Massell and Susan Fuhrman, Ten Years of Education Reform: 1983-1993 (New Brunswick, NJ: Consortium for Research in Education, 1994).

NBPTS certification is valid for ten years. Application for certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards requires a $2,000 fee, as of the 1999-2000 school year. That rises to $2,300 beginning in the 2000-2001 school year. Federal funds provide $1,000 toward the application fee for those teachers who complete the process, but not all do. The hoops one is to jump through require 200-400 hours of effort, by estimate of the NBPTS. Many states offer to defray the cost or guarantee wage increments to those successfully certified (NBCT's) and/or those who mentor applicants. The National Education Association (NEA) offers loans as a member benefit for those seeking national certification.

NBR
National Bureau of Asian Research. The ``National'' refers to the US. It's based in Washington. That would be Seattle, Washington. That Washington is closer to Asia, so the bureau has convenient access to Asians who can do whatever sort of research it is that they do.

NBR
Nitrile Butadiene Rubber. A butadiene and acrylonitrile copolymer.

NBS
National Bureau of Standards. Now the NIST.

NBT
Near-Ballistic Transport.

NBT
Nationaal Bureau voor Toerisme. Dutch `National Board for Tourism.' It appears that this and the VVV are part of the ANVV.

NBTA
National Baton Twirling Association. The world body that NBTA is affiliated with is the GA.

NBTA
National Business Travel Association.

N.B.T.A. England
National Baton Twirling Association -- England. Sometimes also called NBTA UK. Founded in 1982.

NBTA Europe
National Baton Twirling Association -- Europe.

The National Baton Twirling Association is the biggest European Association for twirlers and majorettes. It is dedicated to promoting an interaction between twirling countries. The association aims to encourage active participation in twirling countries in Europe, to strengthen the movement internationally and to stimulate the stage of European and World events. Membership is open to all those countries who have an association and organise their own National Championships. Membership is also open for those countries who want to found an association for twirling and/or majorettes in their country and are looking at the possibility to become members of NBTA-Europe. They can ask NBTA-Europe for help to organise it. The member countries are interested in partaking in high calibre European and/or World Championships. When a country is accepted as a member of NBTA-Europe they are allowed to represent their country under the name of NBTA-(name of the country). NBTA-Europe is member of the Global Association for twirling and majorettes.

Yeah, that does seem to suggest that some people regard twirlers and majorettes as not quite equivalent sets. Let me know when you figure it out.

NBTA France
National Baton Twirling Association -- France.

N.B.T.A. Norway
Try NMF. National Baton Twirling Association -- England. Sometimes also called NBTA UK. Founded in 1982.

N.B.T.A. Scotland
National Baton Twirling Association -- Scotland.

[Football icon]

NC
National Champion[s[hip]]. NCAA division I-A football does not have a playoff system. Instead, a perpetually controversial ranking (see BCS) determines which teams are eligible to meet in the major Bowl games. A true National Championship is a pipe dream. Those willing to settle for less than true (the official ``mythical national championship'') can go by the winner of the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Arizona (where the first- and second-ranked teams play each other) or, particularly if the first-place team loses, the final poll rankings.

NC
National Coarse. One of two US standards (the other is NF) for screw dimensions. Speaking of standards...

Various places are generally recognized as the standard-setters for various specialized productions -- particularly food. Virginia is the name to conjure with if you're conjuring glazed ham, Boston is the place for baked scrod, etc. (see the .ca entry for more examples). Boston is also known for well-educated taxi drivers, the same way Bhutan is known for piano players (see the ABPT entry). Haven't you heard this one already? Oh well, for archival purposes, then.

The cabbie picks up a fare at Logan International Airport, and as they're headed for the hotel the passenger asks ``do you know where I can get screwed around here?'' As the driver seems stunned, the passenger continues ``what's the matter, hasn't anybody asked you that before?'' The cabbie replies ``sure, but I never heard the regular form of the past participle before.''

NC
Network Channel.

.nc
(Domain name code for) Nouvelle-Calédonie (a/k/a New Caledonia). I don't know anything about the place, but I think it would be cool if they were a major manufacturer or consumer or whatever of chalcedony, about which I don't know anything either. There's a local government site.

N.C.
No Chord. An indication on guitar music that only the chords should not be strummed in that section.

I guess if you got here by following the link from the guitar entry, then the entry so far has been something of a disappointment. I should add something to make it worth your while. I'll point out that music for guitar is written on an ordinary (G-clef, treble-clef) staff, but the pitches represented by notes on the staff are shifted by an octave for convenience.

NC
No Connection. Pins available for future expansion. Or pins not wired because standard package has more pins than you need.

NC, N.C.
Normally Closed. Switch and relay designation. Also describes museums in Rome. Cf. N.O..

NC, N.C.
USPS and conventional abbreviations for North Carolina. (The USPS abbreviation uses no periods.)

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for North Carolina. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.

See also the Mo. entry for an interesting folk-etymological connection.

NCA
National (US) Candle Association. Most of the computers I have ever bought are now obsolete, but candles keep on burning.

NCA
National Cattlemen's Association. A common name (maybe the old name) of the NCBA.

NCA
National Cathedral Association. A membership organization associated with the Washington National Cathedral (WNC).

NCA
National Command Authorities. The US President and Secretary of Defense or their duly deputized alternates or successors. See the J (for Joint) entry.

NCA
National Communication Association. Former official name, and still the main name I heard used until 1997, was SCA (S for Speech). Cf. ICA.

NCA
North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

NCAA
National Collegiate Athletic Association.

NCAAF
National Collegiate Athletic Association Football.

NCACS
National Coalition of Alternative Schools.

NCACS
North Central Association of Colleges and Schools? You want the NCA.

NCACVB
North Carolina Association of Convention & Visitor Bureaus. A membership organization of NC-destination marketing organizations.

NCAD
(Irish) National College of Art & Design.

NCADI
National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug information. A ``service'' of SAMHSA.

NCAM
Neural Cell Adhesion Molecule (CAM). Not the same as NgCAM (q.v.).

NCAR
National Center for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, CO).

NCAT
National Center for Asphalt Technology.

NCATE
National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. Founded in the mid-1950's. As of the year 2000, fewer than a dozen states mandated NCATE accreditation and most teachers' colleges were not NCATE-accredited.

Whereas law, medicine, and other professions are largely self-regulated (in the US) by organizations of practitioners, the teaching profession (at elementary and secondary levels) is mostly externally regulated, by the states. In most states, licensing requirements for individual teachers are set by state education agencies and state boards of education. Similarly, most states have their own agencies to accredit teacher training institutions, rather than use NCATE.

NCB
National Certification Body. The IECEE has developed a CB Scheme to give manufacturers an expeditious and cost-effective route to certification by NCB's.

NCBA
National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The association for national cattlemen with a beef, I guess. Why not NCA?

NCBA
National Cooperative Business Association.

NCBDDD
National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. Formerly a division (DBDDD) of the environmental health center (NCEH), now a center of its own. (One of the CDC's component ``Centers.'')

NCBF
New Caledonia Bridge Federation. I don't know why it's not called something like la Fédération de Bridge de Nouvelle-Calédonie. By whatever name, it's one of the four NBO's comprising the South Pacific Bridge Federation (SPBF -- Zone 7 of the WBF).

NCBG
Neighborhood Capital Budget Group. An NGO for the neighborhood known as Chicago.

NCBI
National Center for Biotechnology Information.

NCBO
National Center for Biomedical Ontology. Alas, that's not a typo for oncology. At inception in 2005, it is part of the National Centers for Biomedical Computing and funded by an NIH grant of $18.8 million.

NCBWA
National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association.

NCC
National Certification Corporation. It's a US nonprofit corporation ``that provides a [note the indefinite article] national credentialing program for nurses, physicians and other licensed health care personnel. Certification is awarded to nurses in the obstetric, gynecologic, and neonatal nursing specialties and certificates of added qualification are awarded to licensed health care professionals in the subspecialty area of electronic fetal monitoring.''

NCC
National Citizens Coalition. ``For more freedom through less [Canadian] government.'' Founded by Colin M. Brown in 1967.

NCC
National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. A group founded in 1892, consisting of legal scholars and lawyers who draft model laws. These have no legal force as such, but their adoption by state legislatures simplifies interstate commerce by establishing uniformity. State legislatures often adopt these model laws only in part, but even that has the effect of clarifying and sequestering the statutory differences among states. The first uniform law was the Uniform Negotiable Instruments Law, completed by the NCC in 1896. By the early 1920's it had been adopted in whole or in part by every US state (then in existence). Over 200 model laws have been issued by the NCC, the most ambitious being the UCC.

Note that even when the letter of the law is the same in different states, court interpretation may differ, just as British common law is subject to differing interpretations in the jurisdictions where it holds. Indeed, the accumulated variety in the latter is the reason that the ALI (q.v.) publishes its Restatements.

NCC
National Council of Churches. Standard shorthand for National Council of Churches of Christ, which is also abbreviated NCCC (q.v.).

NCC-1701 was (is, will be, whatever) the Starship Enterprise, commanded by Captain James T. Kirk. James is a gospel and Kirk means church. There's a Captain Kirke in Wilkie Collins's novel No Name. For a little more about Collins, read through the entire long Septimus entry. Hang in there! You're bound to find something.

NCC
Navajo Community College.

NCC
Network Control Center.

NCC
Non-Campus Countries. For the most part, these are countries that participate in the University of the West Indies (UWI) but do not host a campus. As of 2004, there are twelve such countries. In addition UWI has a ``special relationship with the Turks and Caicos Islands, so that they are considered one of the NCCs.''

NCCA
National Christian Counselors Association.

[column]

NCCA
North Carolina Classical Association.

NCCC
National Cervical Cancer Coalition.

NCCC
National Council of Churches of Christ. Includes ``mainline'' churches of the US, representing about 50 million churchgoers. The organization is widely regarded as more liberal than its rank and file. An ecumenical body comprising 36 Orthodox and Protestant communions, and 140,000 congregations.

NCCDPHP
National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Part of the US government's CDC.

NCCE
National Center for Computational Electronics.

NCCIS
NATO Command, Control and Information System. Vide C3I. See? WhaddItellya?

NCCLV
National Capital Citizens with Low Vision. Washington, D.C., affiliate of the CCLVI.

NCCMHC
National Council of Community Mental Health Centers.

NCCNHR
National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform. Based in Washington, D.C. Founded by Emma Holder in 1975.

NCCS
National Credit Counseling Services.

NCCS
Numerical Control Computer Sciences.

NCCU
North Carolina Central University. An HBCU.

NCC-1701
A Constitution class starship, first lauched from the San Francisco Fleet Yards in 2245, captained by James T. Kirk, a stiff ex-Shakespearean actor, starting in 2265. Unnerstand? NCC-1701-A through NCC-1701-D were a refit and successors. There's a locally served shrine. Look at this dedicated site for more. Cf. NC-17.

NCD
Negotiable Certificate of Deposit.

NCD
Nonlinear Circular Dichroism. For a measurement technique based on this, see J. B. Stark, W. H. Knox, and D. S. Chemla, Phys. Reb. Lett. vol. 68, pp. 3080ff (1992).

NCDA
National College of District Attorneys. ``America's school for prosecutors -- the education division of NDAA'' (National District Attorneys Association). That's very nice, but I was looking for Justice League of America; don't they have like a superhero summer camp or anything?

NCDB
National Cancer Data Base (of the ACS).

NCDC
National Climatic Data Center.

NCDPI
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. It's ``the agency charged with implementing the State's public school laws and the State Board of Education's policies and procedures governing pre-kindergarten through 12th grade public education.''

NCDS
National (US) Community Development Services, Inc. They conduct large-scale funding campaigns for nonprofit organizations. It does not appear that NCDS itself is a non-profit.

NCE
New Chemical Entity. In the US, the first point at which the FDA becomes officially involved in the development of a new drug is the ``NCE submission.'' A pharmaceutical company submits data on an NCE to the FDA, so that the FDA will permit the company to go forward with animal testing to determine any desirable and undesirable effects. Companies usually file a patent application at this time or before; the patent application takes about two years. You wonder just what you can legitimately report to the FDA or include as claims on a patent application, if you can't yet have conducted even animal experiments to determine any desirable effects of the drug.

I haven't sorted out yet whether NCE is a term for any new chemical for which an NCE submission is made to the FDA, or a classification for only those compounds which the FDA has approved for further research. Given the catch-22 logic of the process, it probably is required to mean both.

NCE
NormoChromatic Erythrocyte. An etymological barbarism intended to mean normal-colored red blood cell. Cf. the merely amusing PCE.

NCEA
National Catholic Educational Association.

NCEE
Northeast Consortium for Engineering Education. Offices in Virginia. Northeast what?

NCEER
National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research. An NSF center at UB.

[Football icon]

NCEES
National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying. Based in Clemson, South Carolina, which used to have a good football program. Creates examinations in the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) and Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE); these are administered by state boards which use them to certify engineers. (Specifically, by an entity that is typically called the [State] Board [of {Examiners|Registration}] for [Architects,] [Professional] Engineers and [Professional] [Land] Surveyors'' or something else. There's an alternate site.] Thank God for the tenth amendment, huh?) States and Territories (``other jurisdictions'') differ in their requirements, much as state bar associations. For example, some allow a PE in one field to ``practice'' in any field.

The exams themselves appear to be rather easy; few will quit working to study for them. In point of fact, passing the test demonstrates the ability to do something right, and secondarily to know which things one is likelier to be able to do right. (I.e., picking the right answer to a question like ``Do eight of the following twenty-four problems.'')

This board certification is of very variable utility. From the point of view of the individual professional, board certification is vital if one wants to put out a shingle and practice as an independent consultant. It is least important for the employee in a corporation, where, depending on the field of engineering concerned, state (or other jurisdiction) requirements can be satisfied by having one PE who can ``sign off'' on work done by a non-PE.

The exams are woefully behind the times, but board accreditation is not very coincidentally unimportant for fields of engineering which are progressing most quickly. A measure of the depth of the mud they stick in, perhaps, is the fact that many of the state boards lack email addresses.

NCEH
National Center for Environmental Health. One of the ``Centers'' that the CDC comprises.

NCEMCH
National Center for Education in Maternal and Child Health. A research center of Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute.

NCEP
National (US) Centers for Environmental Prediction.

NCER
National Center for Environmental Research.

NCES
National Center for Education Statistics. Of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE).

[Football icon]

NCFAA
National College Football Awards Association.

NCFH
National Center for Farmworker Health.

NCF
National Communications Forum.

NCF
National Conversion Factor. A conversion factor between local and national average medical procedure price ranges.

NCGA
Northern California Golf Association.

A useful hint fer furriners: G is ``gee,'' J is ``jay.''

NCGIA
National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. There are three, funded by the NSF: center at UB.

NCGIH
National Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists. Founded in 1938, changed name in 1946 to ACGIH, q.v.

NCGR
National Center for Genome Resources.

NCH
National Coalition for the Homeless.

NCHE
National Center for Higher Education. On Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.

NCHEMS
National (US) Center for Higher Education Management Systems.

NCHI
National Council of the Housing Industry.

NCHM
North Carolina History of Medicine? Oh, very good! It's not that, but it's very close. N stands for Northern, and there's a Durham in there (see CHMD). It's the Northern (England) Centre for the History of Medicine.

NCHR
National Coalition for Haitian Rights. ``[S]eeks to promote the rights of Haitian refugees and Haitian-Americans under U.S. and international law, advance respect for human rights, the rule of law, and support for civil and democratic society in Haiti.'' Unsurprisingly and lamentably, they're not having so much success in Haiti (.ht) as in the US.

NCHRP
National Cooperative Highway Research Program.

NCI
National Cancer Institute, part of NIH.

NCI
Network Channel Interface.

NCIB
National (US) Charities Information Bureau. This was apparently absorbed by the Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB), which merged it with its Philanthropic Advisory Service (PAS). Or something like that. Anyway, the website that's left to go to is Give.org of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance. Or you could give to me.

NCID
National Center for Infectious Diseases. Part of the CDC.

NCIIA
National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.

NCJA
National Criminal Justice Association.

NCJLT
National (US) Council of Japanese Language Teachers. There were 24 regional affiliates (state and multistate associations) when I checked in 2008.

NCJRS
National Criminal Justice Reference Service. Sponsored by the US government.

NCLB
No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

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NCLG
(US) National Committee for Latin and Greek.

NCLG
National Conference of Lieutenant Governors.

NCLIS
National (US) Commission on Libraries and information Science.

NCLIS
National Council for Languages and International Studies. ``The member organizations of NCLIS-JNCL are united in their belief that all Americans must have the opportunity to learn and use English and at least one other language.''

NCLR
National Center for Lesbian Rights.

NCLR
National Council of La Raza. Interestingly, one thing that distinguishes Hispanics or Latinos is the fact of not comprising a single race. I first heard ``la raza'' used by Mexican-Americans in California, and there it made a little bit of sense, but NCLR professes to represeent all Hispanics in the US.

NCMA
National Concrete Masonry Association.

NCMC
Non-Community Mediterranean Countries. Mediterranean countries that are not part of the EU, once called the European Community (EC).

NCME
National Center for Montessori Education. In Norcross, GA.

NCMS
National Center for Manufacturing Sciences.

NCNA
National Council Nonprofit Associations.

NCNA
New China News Agency. Xinhua. Many of the reports are accurate.

NCNW
National Council of Negro Women.

NCO
Non-Commissioned Officer. A noncom, q.v. The term ``commission'' is military usage.

NCOD
National Coming Out Day. October 11. Back before mondayized holidays, Columbus Day was celebrated October 12. That was a kind of coming-in day (it commemorated Spanish landfall in the New World). NCOD is not celebrated during the Gay and Lesbian Pride Month of June. See more under that month at the Hispanic Heritage Month entry.

NCO-HPCC
National Coördination Office for HPCC.

NCOLCTL
National Council of Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages. If you can pronounce the acronym you're ready to take advanced-level Nahuatl. Read the LCTL entry, written in the most commonly taught second language.

NCOR
National Center for Ontological Research.

``Ontology is a fast-growing branch of computer and information science concerned with the development of tools and theories designed to improve the integration and processing of data and information from heterogeneous sources. In response to the needs expressed by a variety of government and industrial bodies, the University at Buffalo and Stanford University have established the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR), which is designed to serve as a vehicle to coordinate and enhance ontology research through the establishment and dissemination of best practices in ontology development and use.''

Feynman is sniggering in his grave. After all, it's not his tax money. You can't take it with you.

NCP
(US) National Oil and Hazardous Substances Contingency Plan.

NCP
Netware Core Protocol. (Novell.)

NCP
Network Control Point.

NCP
Network Control Program. Implemented the ARPANET host-to-host protocol.

NCP
Network Control Protocol. The original host-to-host communication protocol of ARPANET, superseded by TCP/IP.

NCPA
National (US) Center for (US) Policy Analysis. ``[A] nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization, established in 1983. The NCPA's goal is to develop and promote private alternatives to government regulation and control, solving problems by relying on the strength of the competitive, entrepreneurial private sector. Topics include reforms in health care, taxes, Social Security, welfare, criminal justice, education and environmental regulation.''

NCPA
National Collegiate Paintball Association.

NCPC
(US) National Capital Planning Commission. According to itself, it ``provides overall planning guidance for federal land and buildings in the National Capital Region, which includes the District of Columbia; Prince George's and Montgomery Counties in Maryland; and Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William Counties in Virginia, including the cities and towns located within the geographic area bounded by these counties. Through its planning policies and review of development proposals, the Commission seeks to protect and enhance the extraordinary historical, cultural, and natural resources of the nation's capital.''

Sometimes expanded ``National Capitol Planning Commission.'' Its most prominent work has to do with the Capitol Mall in DC. (It seems that the Capitol Mall is officially the National Mall, so it is just the Capitol mall.)

NCPM
Non-Critical Phase Matching.

NCPV
National Center for PhotoVoltaics. Part of NREL.

NCQA
National Committee for Quality Assurance. ``[A]n independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to assessing and reporting on the quality of managed care plans, including health maintenance organizations (HMO's). They've been running an accreditation program for managed-care plans since about 1991.

NCR
National Cash Register. Purchased in 1995 by AT&T, now called ATTGIS.

The original cash register was invented by James J. Ritty in 1879. It was not a convenience, but a way to record transactions and foil larcenous bartenders in his Dayton, Ohio saloon. ``Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier'' became the basis of the National Cash Register Company.

George F. Will wrote about this in his 6 April 1989 column. The column is reprinted in Suddenly (Free Press, 1991), pp. 177-9.

There's a US patent #271,363 issued 1883.01.30 to J. Ritty and J. Birch, for a ``Cash Register and Indicator.''

NCR
National Catholic Reporter. ``The Independent, Lay-edited Catholic Newsweekly.'' Considered left-of-center.

NCR
No Carbon Required. A kind of multisheet paper form that duplicates on lower sheets what is written above. It used to be common to do this by interleaving forms with carbon paper. NCR forms use a microencapsulated dye precursor on the underside of each sheet (except the bottom). Under pressure, the microcapsules (1-20 microns in diameter) rupture and release the transparent dye precursor. This darkens on reaction with a chemical coating or impregnation of the lower sheet. Typically, the transparent-to-dark reaction is an acid-base reaction: the precursor a base and the sheet below acidic. So you can probably erase the copy by applying a strong base, and if you don't erase it, the unneutralized acid will eventually burn the paper.

NCR paper was invented at the company that became NCR Corporation. Microencapsulation was first devised in 1950 by Barry Green, a research scientist at the National Cash Register Company's labs in Dayton (see the NCR entry). On June 30, 1953, he and Lowell Schleicher, another NCR researcher, applied for a patent for the microencapsulation system that is used to produce today's carbonless paper.

NCR paper sheets have a standard sequence of colors:

  1. white (top sheet)
  2. canary
  3. pink
  4. gold

Here's an article on microencapsulation in general, from Technology Today, Summer 1995.

NCRA
National Cooperative Research Act of 1984.

NCRA
National Court Reporters Association.

NCRA
North Carolina Restaurant Association.

NCRECES
National Coalition for the Recruitment of Electrical and Computer Engineering Students.

NCRF
National Court Reporters Foundation.

NCRP
National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements.

NCS
National Cartoonists Society. I wonder if they offer jihad insurance.

NCS
Not Clinically Significant.

NCSA
National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Located on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

First funded by NSF in 1985. One of four NSF-funded Supercomputer centers, along with CTC, PSC, and SDSC). Participates with these in MetaCenter.

Generates freeware like NCSA Telnet and Mosaic (the creators of the latter took their degrees and went off to found Netscape). Conducts HPCC research locally. Grants supercomputer cycles to academic researchers.

NCSA
Nebraska Council of School Administrators. If you happen, for some unfathomable reason, to reside outside of Nebraska, you might find the AASA homepage more relevant. Of course, if you're not a school administrator or an administrated school, you might find that a bit dry as well.

NCSHA
(US) National Council of State Housing Agencies.

nc-Si
NanoCrystalline SIlicon.

NCSL
National Conference of State Legislatures.

NCSP
National Certified School Psychologist.

NCSPE
National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. Based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

NCSS
National Council for Social Studies. ``National'' in the sense that it has ``members in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and 69 foreign'' nations. Founded in 1921.

NCSSFL
National Council for State Supervisors of Foreign Languages. Cf. NADSFL, ACTFL.

NCSY
National Conference of Synagogue Youth. Sponsored by the Orthodox Union (OU).

NCT
Nottingham City Transport. The Nottingham bus system, integrated with the tram system, NET.

In the late 80's, when I went to visit a relative living at a senior facility in Nottingham, the NCT driver got out and walked behind the back of the bus to point out exactly where it was. Well, it struck me as unusual.

NCTA
National Cable and Telecommunications Association. Formerly the National Cable Television Association. Founded in 1952. Don't worry if you missed it, it'll be on again tomorrow.

NCTC
National Cable Television Cooperative. ``A programming and hardware buying cooperative, NCTC represents more than 1,000 independent cable operators, their 6,500 individual systems and more than 14 million subscribers [across the US].''

NCTC
(US) National CounterTerrorism Center.

NCTC
North Carolina Theatre Center.

NCTE
National Council of Teachers of English. Co-sponsored with the International Reading Association a much-pilloried 1996 document titled ``Standards for the English Language Arts.''

The NCTE Annual Convention is in November -- every year.

Sponsors NCTE-talk, an electronic mailing list.

NCTE
Network Channel Terminating Equipment.

NCTM
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

The NCTM was founded in 1920 to defend high school mathematics education from educational reformers. The organization's web site fudges this. Here is how their mealy-mouthed ``NCTM at a Glance'' begins:

Here is how C. M. Austin, the organization's first president, explained the motivation in Mathematics Teacher, vol. 14 (Jan. 1921), p. 1:

During [the preceding decade] high school mathematics courses have been assailed on every hand. So-called educational reformers have tinkered with the courses, and they, not knowing the subject and its values, in many cases have thrown out mathematics altogether or made it entirely elective.

There's a simple reason why the NCTM fudges its history: the enemy captured the fort.

NCTN
NASA Commercial Technology Network. ``Welcome to the NASA Commercial Technology Network (CTN)! -- the online resource for moving technology from the lab to the marketplace.''

NCTR
NonCooperative Target Recognition. You would have thought it went without saying.

NCTTA
National Competitive Technology Transfer Act of 1989. This might be the official bloviated name of the Federal Technology Transfer Act (FTTA), I dunno.

NCUA
National Credit Union Administration. The ``independent federal agency that supervises and insures 7,329 federal credit unions and insures 4,358 state-chartered credit unions. It is entirely funded by credit unions and receives no tax dollars.''

NCV
Nerve Conduction Velocity.

NCV
No Customs Value.

NCVA
US Naval Cryptologic Veterans Association.

NCVEI
National Commission on Veterinary Economic Issues.

NCVMA
North Carolina Veterinary Medical Association. See also AVMA.

NCYAMA
National (US) Catholic Young Adult Ministry Association.

NC-17
No Children under 17 allowed (to see movie). Cf. NCC-1701.

``This Film Is Not Yet Rated'' (2006) is a movie about the movie ratings system overseen by the MPAA. It received a rating of NC-17 because it includes explicit footage from many films that received an NC-17 for sexual content.

N.D.
Naturopathic Doctor. Sounds like M.D., looks like a fatfinger typo of M.D., but ... find out more from their association.

ND
Navigation Display. [Avionics.]

Nd
Neodymium. For years I thought it was `neodynium.' Danm!

Atomic number 60. A Lanthanide (rare earth: RE). There's some relevant historical information at the Di (didymium) entry. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

ND
North Dakota. USPS abbreviation.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for North Dakota. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state. You're probably thinking: ``What `city'?''

n.d., nd
{Not Dated | No Date given}. Loneliness among the footnotes.

n.d.
Not Detectable. Like night life in North Dakota.

[Football icon]

ND
Notre Dame. Inter alia this is the name of a university in South Bend, Indiana. They have a famous football team whose name is an ethnic slur (pugnacious Hibernian). There are a number of Notre Dame domains on the Internet.

When Gilles, visiting the US from France, went to buy a ticket from Boston to South Bend, Indiana, the travel agent gave a knowing smile and said ``ah, football.'' Sure: physicists come from all over the soccer-playing world to South Bend, Indiana, so they can see the Irish play college football. And for kicks, they also take in a computational electronics workshop. I understand that there's a Notre Dame in France too, but that it's not a football powerhouse. (``Hunchback'' -- that must be French for `linebacker.' What does ESPN have to say about this? ``hunchback is not a valid Keyword.'' But ``Harry Potter'' is.)

The full formal name of the university is ``University of Notre Dame du Lac,'' or so I had thought. The university is aggressively beyond the city limits of nearby property-tax-hungry South Bend, and the post office serving the campus uses ``Notre Dame'' like a municipality name. But perhaps this is less of a fiction than I thought. According to the 1922 edition of The New International Encyclopædia (see the education subhead of the Indiana entry, volume 12, p. 94) there were three institutions of higher education under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church at the time: St. Mary's College and Academy for Women, University of Notre Dame at Notre Dame, and St. Meinrad College at St. Meinrad. It begins to look like Notre Dame might be a legitimate place name here. This is important, so I'll have to be sure to sort it out. In fact, it's very important, so I'll have to proceed very carefully and slowly, next year at the earliest (I need to calm down).

ND
Nuclear Disarmament. The campaign for nuclear disarmament (CND) introduced the ``peace symbol'' at least as early as 1958. It is an abstracted superposition of the flag semaphores for the letters en and dee. A posting by Terry Chan to <alt.folklore.urban>, archived here

NDA
National Dance Association. One of six national associations within the AAHPERD.

Interestingly, their abstract symbol is very similar to the international symbol for biohazard.

NDA
National Dental Association. An organization of Black dentists in the US and the Caribbean.

NDA
Nepal Dental Association.

NDA
New Drug Application to the FDA.

n.d.a.
No Data Available. Sometimes it's useful to have this abbreviation available to use instead of NA.

NDA
NonDisclosure Agreement. The AAP-assisted pleonasm ``NDA agreement'' has been observed in speech and writing.

NDAA
National Dental Assistants Association. It's ``the auxiliary arm of the NDA dedicated to serving the thousands of minority Dental Assistants in the field today.''

NDAA
National District Attorneys Association.

NDAA
Nebraska Dental Assistants Association.

NDB
Nondirectional Radio Beacon. For air navigation.

NDBC
National Data Buoy Center. Part of the National Weather Service within the US NOAA. ``NDBC designs, develops, operates, and maintains a network of data collecting buoys and coastal stations.''

NDC
Negative differential conductance. Differential conductance is
	dI
	-- .
	dV
Evidently, NDC is equivalent to NDR.

NDC
Normalized Device Coordinates. Physical device coordinates, translated and scaled to be device independent. (Typically each coordinate ranges from 0 to 1, or from -1 to 1.)

NDD
Non-Denial Denial.

NDDL
Notre Dame (ND) Drum Line. Fascinating the stuff you can learn from the backs of tee shirts.

NDE
NonDestructive Evaluation.

NDEF
NonDestructive Evaluation (NDE) Facility.

NDF
New-Data Flag.

NDF
No Defect[s] Found. Same as NFF, q.v.

NdGaO3
Neodymium Gallate. Laser substrate material.

NDHA
National Dental Hygienists' Association. It's associated with the NDA.

NDI
NonDestructive Inspection.

NDI
National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. Your tax dollars at work aggrandizing politicians you thought you'd managed to vote out. Explanation at the entry for the IRI (corresponding Republican feed-trough).

NDIS
Network Device Interface Specification.

ndl
Naked Dancing Llama. ``Put simply: He's cheaper than psychotherapy, and he also licks people's faces.'' More on llamas at our own llama entry.

NDL
Network Database Language. Standards: ANSI: X3.133-1986 ISO: IS 8907:1987

NDLF
National Digital Library Federation. Same as the DLF, but with a name clarifying that it's a US endeavor, see?

NDM
Nigerian Democratic Movement. It appears that they don't have a web site yet.

NDM
Nonfat Dry Milk.

NDMA
N-NitrosoDiMethylAmine.

NDMS
National Disaster Medical System.

NDMS
Netware Distributed Management Services. (Novell.)

NDN
A progressive think tank and advocacy organization. NDN here is a sealed acronym. This NDN, created in 2005, is the successor of the New Democrat Network (following).

NDN
New Democrat Network. Sounds a lot like the old DLC. The NDN ``is guided by the belief that there is a better set of solutions to our challenges then what is being offered in Washington today. It is the fundamental premise of NDN that we can and must do better -- as a political movement, as a political party, and as a nation.'' Why does this sound so unobjectionable? Because it doesn't contain any specifics. You can read the specifics on this page. Those specifics don't contain any specifics either, but there are six of them. Eventually I'm sure they reach the point of saying something that someone could object to or agree with.

Actually, you may have to do a bit of searching on the site now: ``This website contains the archive of the material of the New Democrat Network, a political action committee from 1996-2002 and a non-federal political committee from 2003-2006. It also contains information from NDN PAC, which was a federal political action committee from 2003-2006. You can visit the New Democrat Network's successor organization, NDN, at www.ndn.org, NDN's think tank for politics, New Politics Institute, at www.newpolitics.net and NDN's Blog at www.ndnblog.org.'' (The quotes are not strict; minor punctuation slips were repaired. Yes, I mention it because it's relevant; sloppy writing, like sloppy dressing, may indicate sloppiness in other things. Also, FWIW, the about page at the NDN site says that ``the New Democrat Network ... operated from 1996 through 2004.'')

[column]

NDOPA
No Dogs Or Philosophers Allowed. Despite the expansion, not a backlash against cynicism. Diogenes is its favorite philosopher. NDOPA is described by its creator and host Ken Knisely as North America's premier philosophy television program, which it may well be.

In the 1980's, Knisely taught (``worked as a philosopher'') in a public-school program for gifted children in Richmond, Virginia. NDOPA began as a live call-in program on a public-access channel in Richmond. One of Knisely's students, Summer Schultz, originated the show's name. She liked to go barefoot in warm weather, and one day as she was about to enter a 7-11 to buy a Slurpee (a federally noncontrolled addictive substance that is a known risk factor for brainfreeze), she was stopped by a sign that said ``No Dogs or Bare Feet Allowed.'' Unfortunately, this made her think. She reflected on how the great thinkers throughout history had similarly been treated as pariahs. I guess she must have felt pretty strongly about going barefoot.

NDP
National Democratic Party (of Germany). The extreme rightist political party probably better known by its German initialism NPD.

NDP
National Democratic Party. The Egyptian government's political party. That is, the political party that controls Egypt. This sounds deceptively like ``ruling party'' in a place like France. How can I put this? Egypt is a nominal and formal democracy.

NDP
Neutron Depth Profiling.

NDP
New Democratic Party. A just-don't-call-it-Socialist-Party, like British Labour (particularly in that party's Foote-loose days). The most leftist of the major Canadian political parties. More at the NPI entry. Don't complain that its politics is not obvious from its name; in Argentina, the more conservative of the two major parties is called the Partido Radical. And in France, the Parti Radical is a centrist party. (The latter's name is a legacy from its days as an anticlerical party, back when there were still a few Christian clerics in France.)

The NDP was created in a reorganization of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1961.

NDPB
Non-Departmental Public Body. Non-departmental in the sense of not being within the administrative structure of a government ministry, err, department. Public in the sense of being established and funded by the government. A term apparently created by UK officialdom to replace an earlier official term: NDPB's used to be called Quangos officially, and are still called Quangos. Here's an exhausting list of NDPB's that share turf with Defra.

NDPS
Novell Distributed Print Services.

NDR
Negative differential resistance. Differential resistance is
	dV
	-- .
	dI
Evidently, NDR is equivalent to NDC.

Two kinds of NDR have standard names: N-type and S-type. These simply refer to current voltage characteristics (CVC for short) whose shapes resemble the capital block letters N and S, respectively. In N-type NDR, the current rises to a maximum, falls, and then rises again. The current is a function of the voltage, although there is a range of currents for which voltage is undetermined. In S-type NDR, the current is not a function of voltage, but the current is function of voltage. Thus, voltage initially increases with current, then falls, and rises again. Notice that in N-type NDR, the differential resistance stays finite, following a +,0,-,0,+, pattern, while the differential conductance diverges (following a pattern +, +inf., -inf., -, -inf., +inf., +). Notice also that, since CVC refers to the I-V plot, and NDR is a most appropriate measure for V-I plots, it might make more sense to speak of N- and S-type NDC. Setting aside the strictly semantic issue, however, the important consideration for convenience and comprehensibility is whether one can deal with a function or must deal with a mere relation (and with infinite derivatives). For this reason, devices like tunneling diodes, which exhibit N-type NDR, are described by I vs. V graphs, while plasma tubes, which exhibit S-type NDR, are represented with V vs. I plots.

Regions of NDR can be unstable; a device in circuit follows smoothly whatever segment of the CVC it is on, until that segment becomes tangent to the load line (this occurs only in a region of NDR), and then follows another segment of its CVC. (The CVC has an overall positive slope, while the load line has a negative slope. Thus, there is always at least one intersection point -- as is physically reasonable: a solution exists. Also, there will in general be an odd number of intersections, except when the load line is tangent to the CVC. At the point of tangency, a stable point and an unstable point are approaching and in effect annihilating; the number of intersection points is changing by two.)

In N-type NDR, hysteresis loops are followed clockwise; in S-type NDR, counter-clockwise.

NDR
Norddeutschen Rundfunks. `North German Broadcasting.'

NDRC
National (US) Defense Research Committee.

NDRL
Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory.

NDRO
NonDestructive Read-Out. A mode of old-style magnetic core memory read-out. Cf. DRO.

NDS
(Novell) NetWare Directory Services.

NDSM, ND/SM, NDSMC, etc.
Notre Dame (ND)/Saint Mary's [College] (SMC). Productive suffix, as in LNDSM, GLNDSMC.

NDSU
North Dakota State University. It's in Fargo, which sounds like a comment.

NDT
National Debate Tournament. There are other debating entries in this glossary.

NDT
NonDestructive Testing. Try link resource from ASNT (American Society for Nondestructive Testing).

NDTA
Nondestructive Testing Association in New Zealand.

NDU
(US) National Defense University.

NDU
(Indiana, US) Notre Dame University. See the ND entry for other NDU websites.

NDVMA
North Dakota Veterinary Medical Association. See also AVMA.

NDWAC
National (US) Drinking Water Advisory Council.

NDY
Not Diagnosed Yet. Acronym used by the army. During the war in Viet Nam, ``NDY nervous'' usually meant battle-fatigued, what in WWI was called ``shell shock.''

Nd:YAG
Neodymium (3+)-doped Yttrium Aluminum Garnet laser. 1.064 micron wavelength. Pronounced ``Neodymium yag.''

High-power 532 nm cw is available commercially in packages where high-power AlGaAs (850 nm) pumps Nd:YAG, and its 1064 nm output is frequency-doubled in an nonlinear optic crystal. Doubled and tripled frequencies are typically used to pump dye lasers. Quadrupled-frequency is also available.

n e, ne
Chatese for any.

Oh how clever. Like qq in French.

NE
Nebraska. USPS abbreviation.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Nebraska. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.

Ne
Chemical element symbol for NEon, a noble gas. Atomic number 10. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

That's noble, you letch, not nubile.

NE
Network Element.

The term is used in the Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) model for just about any component of a subject telecommunications network, including switching systems, circuits and terminals, other than the TMN itself. They're the things the TMN manages.

NE
New England. Some English find amusing the number of tiny places in the US that are named after much larger cities in England (e.g. Plymouth, London). In 1995, the combined population of six small states comprising New England was 13.3 million, when the population of England was about fifty million. I keep thinking up increasingly useless things to know.

There's also a Plymouth that is, or has been, the capital of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, 350 mi. ESE of Puerto Rico. In 1995, the volcano that brought the island into existence came to life itself, and the capital and harbor has had to be abandoned, like more than half of the island.

.ne
(Domain name code for) Niger. Landlocked sub-Saharan former colony and current neocolony of France. Not likely to be confused with Nigeria (.ng).

NE
NorEpinephrine. A catecholamine distributed from the locus coeruleus of the brain stem.

NE
NorthEast. Vide compass directions.

NEA
National Education Association. An industrial union of primary and secondary school educators and administrators. The largest union in the US, with 2.4 million members as of 1998.

NEA
National Endowment for the Arts. An agency of the US government.

[column]

NEA
Near Eastern Archaeology. A quarterly publication of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) since 1998, continuing the earlier Biblical Archaeologist (BA). See AASOR for other publications of ASOR.

NEA
Negative Electron Affinity. NEA semiconductor surfaces are predicted and to some extent confirmed to be good photocathodes. [See ``NEA Semiconductor Photoemitters,'' John S. Escher, ch. 3 of Semiconductors and Semimetals, vol. 15, 1981.]

NEAA
NorthEastern Anthropological Association.

NEA-AK, NEA - Alaska
National Education Association - Alaska (AK). One of the state affiliates of the NEA.

NEADS
NorthEast Air Defense Sector.

NEAHP
New England Association for Health-care Philanthropy.

nealogy
The study of newborns. This word is quite rare compared to its synonym Neonatology. So rare that an unqualified web search for it mostly turns up plays on genealogy that parallel E-mail (gE-nealogy, E-nealogy, etc.). Cf. ECOFIN, neology.

Expert pet breeders value pure breeds best. But these often fail to thrive, whereas mixed breeds thrive and are popular. The same seems true of words. The fastidious lexicographer might disparage automobile, electrocution, sociology, and television as misbegotten Latin-Greek half-breeds, but it looks like these words will be with us for a while.

NEAR
National Electronic Accounting and Reporting (system).

NEAR
Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. A robot spacecraft that's visiting 433 Eros, an asteroid about 25 by 9 by 8.8 miles in size. It did a flyby, within 2500 miles, on December 23, 1998. The goal is to study it from a low orbit for about a year and then land, but technical problems have delayed the attempt until the next close approach in May 2000. Now I read that ``mission will be completed February 6, 2000.'' Maybe they decided it would look too bad if they had too many fatal crash landings in a row.

NEAR was the ``first low-cost Discovery mission.'' It used COTS components, less-than-optimal reliability, that sort of thing. The risk is that even when low-cost missions are cost-effective, spectacular failures like the Mars lander disappearance will erode public support.

NEAS+
National Engineering Aptitude Search+. ``[A] self-administered academic survey that enables individual students to determine their current level of preparation in `engineering basic skills subjects' (applied mathematics, science, and reasoning). The NEAS+ encourages tutoring and mentoring.'' It's a JETS program.

NEASECS
NorthEast ASECS. (ASECS is the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.)

neat
The word you've been looking for: cattle of the genus bos. You know: ``cow or bull.'' The scare quotes are because traditionally, sheep, goats, hogs and horses are all cattle, and cow and bull are generically the adult female and (uninterfered-with) male of many animal species. Neat is the plural and singular form (cf. ships entry).

The place that English-speakers are most likely to encounter the word neat in this acception is Shakespeare's ``Julius Caesar,'' in the neat first scene, spoken by one of the mechanical men:

I am, indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they are in great danger I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat's leather have gone upon my handiwork.
This is spoken by the second commoner, who, in respect of a fine workman is but, as you would say, ``a cobbler.'' As you recall, before the ``surgeon'' sentence, he said
Truly, sir, all that I live by is with the awl: I meddle with no tradesman's matters, nor women's matters, but with awl.

The recover wordplay might be difficult to recreate in another language -- German, say. However, the much of the wordplay here turns on the word awl, and the German word for that happens to be its cognate Ahle. German also has alle -- an adverb and indefinite pronoun with uses overlapping those of `every' and (the cognate, of course) `all' in English. So this is a very translatable bit of wordplay. I was curious how it worked out, so I checked all the Germaned Shakespeare I could find in the library. No luck. Here's what I did learn: the first translator of Shakespeare into German was August Wilhelm Schlegel. His translations made Shakespeare very popular in Germany. There have been many translations since then, but Schlegel's are so much the default that I have seen many editions of his translations, at most minimally reworked, that don't even bother to mention his name. It is reported, however, that the Schlegel versions now account for only a minority of German Shakespeare performances. (To be precise, one should note that the task of translating Shakespeare into German was eventually completed by Ludwig Tieck, Tieck's daughter Dorothea, and her husband Graf von Baudissin. But Schlegel did do the Julius Caesar.) I did find some incomplete Shakespeare translations by others, but no Julius Caesar.

I've read differing opinions on the matter, but at least according to some, Schlegel was most accepting of the bard's puns. Certainly in this same scene under discussion here, Schlegel was resourceful. For example, the wordplay between the precise and loose senses of cobbler is fairly reproduced by having the cobbler say that he does patchwork. (``Die Wahrheit zu gestehn, Herr, gegen einen feinen Arbeiter gehalten, mache ich nur, sozusagen, Flickwerk.'') Similarly, the first quoted item above becomes:

Im Ernst, Herr, ich bin ein Wundarzt für alte Schuhe: wenn's gefährlich mit ihnen steht, so mache ich sie wieder heil.

Here the pun on recover is translated with a pun one could imagine the bard himself using in its place: the cobbler makes old shoes whole again. (In German, heil is `unhurt,' cognate with English heal and hale. Also, heil is an old-fashioned way of saying `whole.' It's found in Bible translations, which dates it roughly to Shakespeare's time.) But the bit preceding this, with the awl pun, Schlegel simply skipped. It's just barely possible that Schlegel translated from a version that didn't include that line -- I'll have to look into this.

neat
One Sunday in the Summer of 1982 or thereabouts, William Safire's ``On Language'' column in the New York Times Magazine was about the language of ordering mixed drinks. One of the terms mentioned was neat, meaning pure, unadulterated (sc., with water: undiluted). It reminds me of Dr. John Snow and the Broad Street pump. Read about it here. (That's an external site. I didn't write it. I know better than to write ``drunk'' for drank, even in this context.) The brewery workers were unharmed.

It turns out that this sense (pure, unadulterated fluid) dates back at least to the sixteenth century. In the twentieth century, according to the OED (June 2005 draft revision), it was extended to mortar -- neat mortar being made from cement and water only, and no sand. In fact, the adjective is widely used for fluids (particularly solvents and polymer resins) in chemistry and in chemical industries. It's a useful word because it doesn't mean quite the same thing as pure or unadulterated. These words are contrasted to impure -- they imply that the adulteration is dirty or generally undesirable. Also, ``impurities'' would generally be present in small quantities at most. Neat does not imply either of these things. It is used in situations where admixture may often be desirable, and in substantial amounts. (It is also used in situations where admixture generally does occur, and gives one a way of emphasizing that one is discussing properties of the pre- or un-mixed fluid.)

The adjectives neat and net are ultimately from the Latin nitidus. The root was widely borrowed from Romance into Germanic languages; in German, nett means `nice' and netto means `net' (the adjective, opposed to brutto, `gross').

NEATA, NeATA
NEbraska Agriculture Technology Association.

NEAVS
New England Anti-Vivisection Society. Founded in 1895. Doesn't seem to have anything organizationally to do with NAVS.

Neb.
Literate English-language abbreviation for Nebraska. Links at USPS abbreviation NE.

NEB
Nonisothermal Energy Balance.

nebbich
The German transliteration of a Yiddish word. Yiddish is written in Hebrew characters. Very roughly 10% of Yiddish is Hebrew words, which are written in the traditional, if not especially consistent, standard Hebrew orthography. Because of the different phonology, the non-Hebrew component of Yiddish is written using different letter-sound correspondences than the Hebrew. The range of variation in Yiddish pronunciation (among native speakers, never mind people who pick up a few mispronounced words of it) is sufficiently large that a consistent phonetic orthography is impossible. FWIW, Yiddish was officially standardized around 1938. Anyway, Yiddish is basically a Middle High German with a lot of loanwords from Slavic (in the dominant eastern dialects) or French (in the western ones) in addition to Hebrew, and it's within the range of regional German languages, so the fairly phonetic German spelling provides a convenient mode of transcription. I guess the specific thing I'm trying to say here is that the ich at the end of the head term here is pronounced like the German pronoun ich, and not like the English noun itch. (Nebbich is of Slavic origin, BTW.)

The word, however spelled, is fundamentally an interjection, an expression of pity or resignation, as if to say ``oh well, what can you expect?'' It is also used as a dismissive noun, to describe a nullity of a person, someone who can't be expected to amount to anything, someone to be half pitied and half contemned, though there is no suggestion of malign intent.

nebbish
An English word derived from the Yiddish word nebbich, used as a noun. It has the same meaning as the Yiddish noun: a person pitiful for lack of ability or drive, someone understandably unsuccessful. This isn't quite the same as a ``no 'count,'' because a no 'count is likelier to be considered lazy. Also, a nebbish is not the same as a shlimazel. A shlimazel is just habitually unlucky.

The esh sound in the English word is an approximation to the ekh sound in the original word, but the esh sound is also common in Yiddish. The people I have known who were native speakers of Yiddish, or of German, Spanish, or any other language with an ekh sound, have tended not only to pronounce the word more correctly but also to use it primarily as an interjection. Those who use the esh pronunciation also use it only as a noun. This gave me the impression, at one point, that there were two words: the noun nebbish and the interjection nebbich. This is almost true, and if the latter pronunciation were able to survive, it might even become true.

NEBIOS
Network Basic Input/Output System.

NEbE, NEbN
Northeast by East, Northeast by North. Vide compass directions.

[column]

nebula
Latin for `cloud.' Term used for various astronomical objects. See discussion at Messier catalog (``M###'') entry. Also the name of a Science Fiction ``writing'' award, probably in honor of the turbidity of the writing.

NEC
National Economic Council.

NEC
National Electric Code.

NEC
National Electric Conference.

NEC
Near East Consulting.

NEC
Nippon Electric Company.

n.e.c.
Not Elsewhere Classified.

NECA
National Educational Computing Association.

NECC
National Educational Computing Conference. Cf. NECA.

NECCO
New England Confectionary COmpany.

[column]

NECJ
New England Classical Journal.

NECN
New England Cable News. A 24-hour regional news network.

NECTFL
NorthEast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. One of the five regional affiliates of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Try the host at Dickinson College (in Pa.) if the first link of this entry doesn't work.

According to an email announcement from the executive director in February 2004, NECTFL is

... a 50-year-old association of language educators at all levels and in all instructional contexts. NECTFL publishes a bi-annual refereed journal and holds a conference every year in the spring. For the next five years, we will be in New York at the Marriott Marquis Hotel. ... About 2,500 people attend the conference, from 40 states and 15 countries around the globe. ...

NEC 9801
A series of 386/486 machines once popular in Japan. Loosely IBM DOS compatible OS. In 1990, the `DualStation 386SX/16' from AST was the first ``dual compatible Japanese NEC 9801 standard and U.S. DOS standard computer.''

NED
National Endowment for Democracy. ``National'' meaning US; ``for Democracy'' everywhere. For some interesting observations on this obviously worthwhile entity, see the IRI entry.

[dive flag]

NED
Network of Egghead Divers.

NED
Noise Emitting Diode. All kinds of diodes can be used in this mode, where a high applied voltage triggers a single sharp ``crack'' or ``pop.'' Existing models do this once and enter a permanent ``off'' state.

NEDB
National Enrollment DataBase.

NEEAN
New England Educational Assessment Network.

NEED
National (US) Energy Education Development. ``The mission of the NEED Project is to promote an energy conscious and educated society by creating effective networks of students, educators, business, government and community leaders to design and deliver objective, multi-sided energy education programs.''

NEEDHA
National Electrical Engineering Department Heads Association.

NEED HELP
PLEASE CALL POLICE

I put the corrugated-cardboard `sun-shade' in backwards. I always do -- I'm an idiot.

Needles to say
A pointed but implicit spelling self-criticism.

NEEDS
National Engineering Education Delivery System. A ``digital library designed for engineering faculty and students of all ages with links to online learning materials in engineering and related areas of science and math.''

need to communicate
I hear a lot about the ``need to communicate.'' Couples counseling, business seminars, they're all into that communication thing. Can we talk? Look, I'm willing to concede that there is often a need to communicate. But there is often also a need not to communicate -- to leave unsaid that which should not be said or which would cost the sayer, to not talk over what one person does and another person won't understand. Why don't I hear more about that, huh? Huh?

nefarious perversion of science
Scientific demonstration of something the speaker wishes were not so.

NEG
NEGative.

negative gas pressure
Perhaps you heard an expression like ``minus six torr.'' That's short for ``one-millionth (10-6) torr.'' Practical ultrahigh vacuum pressures range down to around ``minus eleven torr.''

negative logic
Any electronic implementation of logic in which a low voltage levels represents True, and a high voltage level represents a False. In the early (pre-IC) days of digital logic, this was widely used and made intuitive sense in terms of switching logic: ``True'' meant connected to ground. False meant disconnected, so that in many circuits, the voltage level for False was much less well defined than that for True = ``1'' = gnd., though it was generally positive.

Negative logic is very unusual these days. The choice is essentially arbitrary, but with switching logic rare, the confusion of ``1'' = 0 volts might be decisive. Note that what matters is the relative position of the voltages, not the absolute voltage. Thus, standard ECL, which for noise reasons does use ``1'' = VCC = 0 volts = ground, is a positive logic because logic ``0'' is at a lower (a negative) voltage. Cf. positive logic.

neglect
G.K. Chesterton's William Cobbett (1925) begins with a chapter that he originally planned to title ``The Neglect of Cobbett,'' but which later events induced him to call ``The Revival of Cobbett,'' how prematurely I don't know. He comments there ``that it is not until the first beginnings of the revival that we ever even hear of the neglect. Until that moment even the neglect is neglected.'' (I'm not claiming this is true, as Chesterton did, but perhaps you'll agree that it displays some cleverness.)

NEH
National Endowment for the Humanities. An agency of the US government.

NEHL
Non-EHL.

NEI
The New England Institute. With a name like that, it ought to be
  1. an institute in New England with a very broad mission or
  2. an institute dedicated to the study of New England or
  3. an institute dedicated to the study of a new England.

In fact, according to its homepage, ``[t]he New England Institute is an initiative ... [much verbiage excised] ... [for] cognitive science and evolutionary psychology.'' I learned about this institute in a conference announcement that began ``[t]he New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology (NEI) invites papers...'' Obviously, the original naming of this institute was highly incompetent.

neither would nor could
Here are a couple of typical instances of this construction:

Here's an atypical one, with the word neither functioning as a pronoun, that might cause the non-native reader some difficulty. From Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952), referring to himself and Alger Hiss together in the third person:

Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle.

Incidentally, Virginia Woolf's ``Mrs. Dalloway'' was a Clarissa also. According to the Census of 1990, Clarissa was the 744th most common name for females in the US.

NEJM
New England Journal of Medicine.

NELA
National Employment Lawyers Association. The <BLINK> tag on their page hurt my eyes. Will they help me sue my employer for this?

NELS
National Education Longitudinal Study. A large database for US education research. Another is HSB.

NEMA
National Electrical Manufacturers Association.

NEMD
Non-Equilibrium Molecular Dynamics.

NEMI
National Electrical Manufacturers Initiative.

NEMLA
NorthEast Modern Language Association. It has a reciprocal membership agreement with PAMLA.

NEMO
NanoElectronic MOdeling project. Prime contractor TI Nanoelectronics Group in Dallas.

[column]

nemo
Latin: `no one.'

Jules Verne gave the captain of the submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (more at the chelys entry) the name Nemo. The motto or something of Scotland is Nemo me impune lacessit.

NEMP
Nuclear ElectroMagnetic Pulse. The EMI to end all EMI.

Has referred, in particular, to the electromagnetic pulse generated by nuclear blast. A few years and many events ago, in a climate of feeling called the ``Cold War,'' one of the panics of the West was fed by the thought that even a ``small'' nuclear attack might disable defense systems by EMP, and that solid state systems were more vulnerable to EMP than vacuum tube electronics. Fears increased when a North Korean fighter pilot defected to Japan with his plane, of the model called Foxbat in the West. It turned out to have some vacuum tube electronics on board.

NEMS
NanoElectroMechanical System[s]. Just like MEMS (q.v., but on the scale of 10-100 nanometers rather than 1 micron (1000nm).

NENA
National Emergency Number Association. ``NENA's mission is to foster the technological advancement, availability, and implementation of a universal emergency telephone number system.'' The particular number they have in mind is 911.

nena
Spanish, `girl.' Synonym of niña.

NENM
A personals ad abbreviation. So rare it's probably just an intelligence test. Might mean `Never Engaged, Never Married,' but I wasn't moved to ask.

NENU
NorthEast Normal University (China).

[column] Their Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations publishes a Journal of Ancient Civilizations.

My impression from this and one or two other cases is that much of the trade in scholarly journals about classical antiquity is conducted on a barter system -- the classics department or other entity to which the main editor belongs trades free subscriptions to its own journal for free subscriptions to those of other institutions.

NEO
Near-Earth Object. Stuff that comes too close for comfort. Read up on your NEO basics NOW, before it's too late for you to do anything about it! (The introduction is offfered by NASA's NEO Program.)

neologism
The act of coining a new word or (less often) phrase. More often, the new word (or perhaps phrase) coined.

neology
A less-common word meaning neologism. Cf. nealogy.

NEOUCOM
Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine. In Rootstown, OH.

NEP
National Exit Poll.

NEP
Needle Exchange Program.

NEP
New Economic Plan. Introduced by Lenin. Either it didn't work, or it wasn't tried. Okay, okay: it was a brief period during which the program of nationalization and collectivization was slowed and to some degree reversed.

NEP
Noise-Equivalent Power. The integral of the noise region of the power spectrum.

NEPA
National Electric Power Authority. In Nigeria. See -- bunko spam is good for something. It's educational. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get educated at the lowest possible cost.

NEPA
National (US) Environmental Policy Act.

NEPA
(PRC) National Environmental Protection Administration. The PRC's highest (ministerial) administrative authority in environmental management. Since 1998, its name is more usually translated as State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA).

NEPAD, Nepad
NEw Partnership for Africa's Development. The sense in which this is supposed to be a partnership is that both sides contribute something to Africa's development. The West contributes more money and African governments contribute better governance. You know, this is very reasonable, and it shows a very generous and enlightened attitude about where responsibility lies for the disaster and tragedy that is Africa today. The West has a track record of providing money, and African governments have a record of providing governance. To those who complain that the governance provided has been inadequate, there is the ready answer that the money provided has been insufficient. Indeed, those least disposed to credit this argument would have to admit that with African governments as immoral and incompetent as they are, no amount of aid would be sufficient.

I hope that NEPAD is pronounced ``knee pad,'' because it fosters thoughts of the situations, or postures, that require the use of a knee pad.

NERALLD
New England Regional Association of Language Laboratory Directors.

NERC
Natural Environment Research Council. One of the UK's seven research councils. The research councils report to the Office of Science and Technology within the Department of Trade and Industry.

NERD
Norm Evolution in Response to Dilemmas. A project that ``is part of the Democracy, Ethics, and Genomics Research Project at the University of British Columbia. Go take one of their surveys. Unlike most such surveys, it seems to have question-answer sets that are mostly (about 80%, in the survey I took) carefully thought out.

nerd
Scholastically successful, socially awkward. Cf. wonk. The term first appeared in the literary corpus of Dr. Seuss, as noted in PC magazine (say around 1988) by John C. Dvorak.

NERFET
NEgative Resistance Field-Effect Transistor. The NERFET and CHINT are different modes of operation of the same device.

NERI
National Employee Rights Institute.

NERSC
National Energy Research Supercomputer Center at LLNL.

NERVA
Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application. The NERVA program was initiated in 1961 by the joint AEC/NASA Space Nuclear Propulsion Office. The main contractor was Westinghouse. Aerojet General Corporation also took part, and LANL, which had performed the earlier KIWI research on NTP, participated in a consultative role.

NES
National Eutrophication Study.

n.e.s., N.E.S.
Not Elsewhere Specified. The most lawyerish-sounding abbreviation in engineering.

NES
Network of Emerging Scientists. ``NES was founded as a vehicle for open discussion and level-headed activism regarding national science policy, scientific infrastructure, science education, and a number of other issues like immigration that not only concern emerging scientists but also may affect their employment and funding opportunities.''

It was founded (around 1996) because for years, major science advisory organizations kept foreseeing a coming shortage of scientists, yet newly-minted science Ph.D.'s kept seeing a job shortage. I stopped by the website in 2005, and it looks like it's been moribund since 1999. My theory is that this occurred because science Ph.D.'s keep seeing a job shortage.

NESB
Non-English-Speaking Background. Usage seems restricted to Australia and New Zealand. Used attributively, as in ``NESB parents.'' This nicely manages to express the idea that the parents may or may not speak English, but that it is probably not their first language. It also avoids including any notion of immigration or foreign status; this is useful if there may be native-born NESB people. Contrast the infelicitous ``LEP.''

NESC
New England Science Center. Not exciting.

NESCAC
New England Small College Athlectic Conference.

NESCAUM
NorthEast States (of the US) for Coördinated Air Use Management.

nescience
Ignorance or agnosticism. It is perhaps appropriate that no one is really sure how this rare word should be pronounced, and that no one is willing to assert that any of the many pronunciations used is wrong.

The word can also be written inscious.

NESDIS
National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.

NESEA
NorthEast Sustainable Energy Association.

NESHAP
National (US) Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants. This private organization would like to help you meet them.

NESIS
NorthEast Snowstorm Impact Scale. A scale developed by Paul J. Kocin of The Weather Channel (TWC) and Louis W. Uccellini of the NOAA/NWS National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). The scale is based on snowstorm records primarily from 1950 to 2000 (or from 1950 to 2003) and ranks snowstorms from 0 to 8 (or 1 to 5, apparently in a later version), according to the paper of Kocin and Uccellini linked above (or according to a news report on TWC, broadcast November 29, 2003). ``Impact'' refers to disruption along the Northeast Urban Corridor that extends from southern Virginia to New England. (In contrast, hurricane and tornado scales indicate destructive rather than disruptive power.) Storms rated 1 are common. Storms rated above 4 are the kind that people remember as ``the blizzard of [some year].''

The following is from the second act of Thorton Wilder's play ``The Skin of Our Teeth'' (1942). Antrobus is the inventor of the wheel (Act I), etc.

ANTROBUS: Oh, that's the storm signal. One of those black disks means bad weather; two means storm; three means hurricane; and four means the end of the world.

Later in Wilder's play, unnoticed by anyone but the audience (to the best of my recollection), the storm signal progresses to four discs.

NET
National Educational Television.

NET
No Electronic Theft Act. An ``Act'' in the sense of US Congressional action, not an act in the sense of an action that might be a theft. I hope the distinction is clear.

NET
Nottingham Express Transit. As of 2002 NET was, in the mathematical sense of the qualifier, an improper net, in the same way that an empty set is an improper subset of every set (and every set is an improper subset of itself). Put a little more directly: NET had no lines. The first line went on-line March 9, 2004. Alternative link: <thetram.net>. The trams are integrated with the bus system, NCT.

The first time I went to England, I visited London, Cambridge, and Nottingham, in that order. Coming out of the train station at Nottingham, my immediate reaction was ``Oh wow! Life-size!'' (Well, the taxi area was cavernous, but I was not misled.)

NETLIB
A collection of mathematical software, papers, and databases.

netlist
A file listing parameters extracted from a circuit schematic.

NETRA
New England Trail Riders Association. You need a really big netra, if you want to catch a mothra!

netroots
NET-based grassROOTS support. (Parodic dysphemism: ``nutroots.'') As everyone recognizes, the left and right engage in the political equivalent of ``asymmetric combat.'' A prayer vigil for choice is about as likely as a sit-in for lower capital-gains taxes. Likewise, though the left and right both use the net, they do so differently.

Both sides use it to state and sometimes argue for their positions, but rebuttal and refutation seem to be more popular with the right, and meta-analysis more popular with the left. Politically selective match-making sites seem still to be a specialty of the right -- you might argue that it represents a demographic political grand strategy. Organizing and raising money for (immediate) off-net political activities seem to be a specialty of the left. So netroots in practice are usually netroots on the left. Marshall Wittmann, a conservative (Republican) activist in the 1990's and a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council as of 2006, seems to be the one who coined the description ``McGovernites with modems.'' See Kos.

Netscape Extensions
Netscape has taken the liberty of implementing its own HTML extension proposals, much as DEC implemented extensions of Fortran on compilers for VAXen. Everyone does this who can.

Charlton Rose has made available a tutorial on Netscape Frames.

Netscape 6
``This page works correctly in Netscape 4 (any release) and in Internet Explorer 4 and up. If you have reached this page, you are either using Netscape 6, or are not using a Java enabled browser. To download Netscape 4, click here.''

Progress marches on, but this entry will remain encased in amber.

Network Outrages!
Heading on a list of times and sites, posted on the computer-lab doors. Oh, just noticed they used the alternate spelling: ``Network Outages!''

netto
German: `net' (as opposed to gross). Used pretty much like the English word: as an adjective applied to weight and to monetary amounts, and as a noun (capitalized) implicitly referring to the same quantities. (Of course, historically these were not so different, as for a long time money was defined in terms of standardized weights of precious metals; vide Hacksilber.) See also grosso, `gross' for a usage note.

neu
German for `new.'

NEU
NorthEastern University. So nu -- also NU.

Neuphilologische Mitteilungen
The title of a major journal of modern-language linguistics.

Any journal which aspires to international standing is well advised to become accessible to a large audience. Even among linguists, the Finnish language is singularly inaccessible, and this journal is published by a Helsinki linguistics society. In consequence, the official title has never been in Finnish. On the other hand, when the journal was founded at the end of the nineteenth century, no one pretending to be a linguist could fail to know German; researchers working in German were probably the largest group of linguistics scholars. So it was very reasonable to name the journal in German. Also, Swedish was a very widely used language in Finland at the time, so Finnish linguists would have found it relatively easy to learn other Germanic languages. In fact, Swedish was at the time a very important language in Finland -- in many respects more important than Finnish. Let's talk about that.

During the height of Viking activity in the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Swedes settled along the southwestern coast of Finland. Starting in the twelfth century, Russia began to be an independent military power, and Finland became a battleground between Russian and Swedish empires. In a series of religious crusades and other wars, Finland came increasingly under Swedish control until, in 1323, the Treaty of Pähkinäsaari established a border between Russian and Swedish spheres of influence. (Separated by a fuzzy line running from the eastern part of the gulf of Finland, through the middle of Karelia and thence northwest to the Gulf of Bothnia -- there, does that help? Any line that manages to separate two spheres, whether of influence or anything else, is bound to fuzzy or otherwise differ in some way from a classical Euclidean line.) Anyway, the Finnish tribes were now all in Swedish territory, and the area that would become Finland was administered by Swedes under a few different kinds of Swedish governments (over time), enforcing Swedish laws. Finland was a rural appendage that Sweden controlled, something vaguely like Ireland to the British Empire. During the height of Swedish imperial power in the seventeenth century, the Finnish upper classes became increasingly integrated into the Swedish kingdom's clerical and governmental classes, and came increasingly to speak Swedish.

Sweden's imperial power declined sharply during Charles XII's reign, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Finland became for Sweden a kind of buffer territory. Over the course of various Russian occupations and Swedish-Russian wars in that century, Finnish leaders (i.e., Swedish-speaking officials of the Swedish government, mostly of Finnish origin by the middle of the century) began to see greater benefits as a Russian than as a Swedish frontier province, and thought they might achieve greater local autonomy under Russian domination. (``Finlandization'' is older than you thought.) In 1809, the Finns negotiated a peace with Tsar Alexander I in which Finland became a grand duchy under his throne, with a Russian-chosen administration. Finland prospered and grew under this conservative administration. There's more to know about this, and you can know some of it by reading it elsewhere.

Since this is an entry about a linguistics journal, I'm going to twist this history back around to a discussion of language. The Tsar... Look, I happen to be in the middle of writing this entry. I'm just saving my work so I can go and take a leak. I'll be back before you know it, because I won't save my work again until after I've been back for a while. The main thing is, Swedish was the language of education and the educated classes when the journal was begun, so German and other Germanic languages were natural second languages for the founders of the journal. I think I said something like that before, in the early days of this entry.

So the journal was named in German, and the title was written in a slightly daring irregular font, described immediately below as herausgegeben vom Neuphilologischen Verein in Helsingfors. In subsequent forms, the title page has caused some confusion. (Starting with the 1938 edition, ``Helsingfors'' has been ``Helsinki.'')

The journal got off to a slightly bumpy start. Originally, it was intended to be published in eight issues per year. These were not numbered but dated, the fifteenth of a month. The first year (1899) the issues were dated 15/1 (11 printed pp.), 15/2, 15/3, 15/4, 15/9-15/10, 15/11-15/12. (Except for the first issue, each was 8pp. or, for the double issues, 16 pp.). The second year started with a double-size triple issue 15/1-15/3 (16pp.), then 15/5 (22 pp.), 15/9-15/10 (12 pp.), and 15/11-15/12 (18 pp.). So people got nine issues for their 4 FIM that year (in 68 pp.). This extravagance could not go on, and sure enough, the first issue of the third Jahrgang begins with a letter `To our readers' (An unsere Leser) describing the inauspicious financial circumstances under which the century was beginning; 15/1-15/3/1901 (32 pp.), 15/4-15/5 (36 pp.), 15/9-15/10 (25 pp.), 15/11-15/12 (26 pp.).

When the journal was founded, no educated European could fail to know French, and so the contributions were about equally split between French and German. The following observations about languages occurring in the early issues are based on a quick scan rather than a thorough study. It's not clear whether there was an official policy about languages or just some reasonable expectation. In any case, the first contribution in a third language was an English-language review (by a Swedish-surnamed Finn) of two German English books: Grammatik der englischen Sprache and Lehrbuch der englischen Sprache, pp. 21-22 of the 15/5 issue. Most reviews were in French or German regardless of the language in which the books themselves were written (e.g., Ny-islandsk lyrik, oversoettelser og studier af Olaf Hansen, published in Copenhagen, was reviewed in German), but some of the other English books reviewed got English-language reviews. The fourth language to be used was Danish, in two letters from Karl Verner, published in the 1903 issue of 15/9-15/100 (pp. 91-109 -- page numbering became consecutive through the year after 1902). The first letter is full of linear algebra and seems to have to do with physical rotations by multiples of 15 degrees, and the second is full of drawings of machinery. The issue has a fold-out chart of calculations. It's all about technology for studying phonetics, one century ago.

You get a spooky feeling looking through those early issues. There's a review of yet another new edition of Johann Peter Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, of works by Henry Sweet and Victor Hugo...

The first article other than a book review to appear in English was Anna Bohnhof's lead article in the 15/4-15/5/1903 issue: ``The Mystery of William Shakespeare'' (pp. 39ff). It begins

      In 1848 a certain Mr. J. C. Hart of America threw out some doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays in a book, called The Romance of Yachting, whether in joke or in earnest we do not know. This gave rise to the theory that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays. A controversy began, which has lasted until the present day and will last while »good and sound knowledge will putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome and vermiculate questions, which have indeed a quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality», as Bacon says in his Analysis of the Abuses of Learning.

I have reproduced the quotation marks as they appear in this article and in all articles, regardless of language. It's a sickening precursor of the ugly C++ cin usage.

For 1904 they gave up the calendar-date scheme and started numbering the issues. I'm going to have to look more carefully to see if I can find any sign of the revolt in Finland that coincided with the 1905 Russian revolution.

The history of Finland in the twentieth century is reflected rather oddly in this journal. For example, the greatest Finnish upheavals associated with WWI and the Russian revolution were in 1917, yet in 1916 there was no volume, and volume 18 began in 1917 with the following notice (in number 1-4):

A nos lecteurs
      Pendant toute l'année 1916, la publication de notre revue a été arbitrairement suspendue. Gràce au nouveau régime qui règne maintenant dans notre pays après le rétablissement de a constitution de la Finlande, nous sommes heureux de pouvoir continuer notre oeuvre modeste dans le domaine de la philologie moderne.
      Mai 1917.

La Rédaction.

Neuromantik
German for `neo-romanticism.' A neo-romantic [writer] is ``ein Neuromantiker,'' and his writing is neuromantisch. Funny how the base word is the movement in German and the adjective or practitioner in English. Well, maybe not side-splitting funny, but at least wan-smile funny, okay? Yeah, yeah, puzzled-look funny, knitted-brow, whatever. [Actually, the -ik ending in German often corresponds to -ics in English (e.g., Physik is `physics'). So it's really just an instance where English happened to go with romanticism rather than romantics. Just don't get me started on chiropractic.]

I only put this entry in because it caught my eye. If you're not expecting it, even if you're reading about the popular writer Ludwig Fulda (whose only connection with nerve-neuro-anything was that he committed suicide in despair in 1939), you start reading neur... and you expect something like Neuritis or Neurom (`neuroma'). (FWIW, neu Rom is ungrammatical, but das neue Rom is `the new Rome,' an epithet currently applied mostly to the US. ``Das neue ROM'' is the ROM update. ``Der neue Roman'' is `the new novel,' which looks a bit redundant in English. Etymologically, of course, it's something like ``the new romance.'' ``Der neue Römer'' is `the new Roman.') The initial ambiguity of the word Neuromantik reminded me of unionized, though I can't find quite as perfect a homographic situation along those lines for neur-. Of course, if you stare at even an innocent word like ``neoromantic'' for too long, that starts to look weird too -- especially if your eyes start to go and you start seeing ``necromatic,'' which looks like the worst of necromancy, necrophilia, and movie Draculas combined.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil that ``he who fights with monsters might take care that in so doing he not become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you, also.'' [If the tenses, verb aspects, and grammatical persons seem jumbled there, don't blame me. I'm just being faithful to the original: ``Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehen, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.'']

neurotransmitter amines
Amines mediate perhaps 5% of neurotransmission, but they are the best understood or most easily studied part of the process. Known neurotransmitters include acetylcholine, dopamine (relevant to Parkinson's and schizophrenia), norepinephrine and serotonin. [The famous antidepressant or ``mood brightener'' Prozac is a serotonin-specific re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI).]

never ever
never.

never ever ever
rarely.

never ever ever ever
not that I can recall, offhand.

never ever ever ever ever
I'm ten years old. How old are you?

Never forget that...
Just take my word for it that...

A favorite locution of Nixon (RMN), along with ``Remember:'' and various trite football analogies.

Another popular rhetorical tool along these lines is the more schoolteacherish ``when you consider that...''

New Class, The
A component of the classless society. You remember the classless society: the workers' paradise. Anyway, the New Class was the class of the classless society, so to speak -- the elite. Eventually it was called the Nomenklatura. This is all in English; I have no idea what it was called in Russian.

Alright, let's get to work and take this entry to the next level. The head term was coined by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin around 1870. You know, this would be a good place to say something about Bakunin. Nowadays, I imagine that Bokonon is better known than Bakunin, because more high-school students are required to read Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 sci-fi novel Cat's Cradle than are required to know very much about Europe, such as the fact of its existence. Vonnegut's Bokonon invents a new religion to distract the people of the island of San Lorenzo from their miserable lives. ``What is sacred to Bokononists? Not God; just one thing: man.'' I imagine there are some analogies between Bokonon and Bakunin. Eh.

The novel is about the end of the wold. Oh no, the end of the world! It turns out (for the purposes of this fiction) that at room temperature, liquid water is thermodynamically unstable -- supercooled. (That is, even though it's cooled below the true ``freezing point,'' so that a solid phase is thermodynamically more stable than the liquid phase, it's still liquid because its molecules haven't happened to jump through the microscopic metaphorical hoops necessary to make the transition.) That (fictional) thermodynamically stable solid form of water at room temperature is an allotrope of ordinary ice called ice-9. The kinetic barrier to formation of a crystal of ice-9 is so high that it hasn't happened naturally on the earth's surface yet. A scientist has created it, however, and eventually it is accidentally released into the ocean and seeds the sudden crystallization of the oceans. This isn't really a spoiler because Vonnegut tells you right at the start of the novel that the world will end and pretty much how.

As a matter of fact, water does have a number of allotropes. The usual hexagonal form stable at moderately low temperatures and ordinary pressures is called Ih, and there's a cubic form Ic. Other forms are assigned higher Roman numerals -- II, III, .... The numbers go up to about XII or XIII, as best I can recall, but exclude IX. The reason is that there is a form that was originally numbered IX (a solid form that occurred below room temperature), but which was later discovered to be metastable, so it doesn't appear on a chart of stable allotropes. (None of these solid allotropes is stable at anything like room temperature and ordinary pressure. I seem to recall that ``ice 9'' was used in another scientific context besides a water-ice allotrope, but I can't recall where.)

The apt (or perhaps scientifically ironic) choice of the number nine to designate the dangerous allotrope is unlikely to be coincidence. Kurt Vonnegut had an older brother who became a physicist. Cat's Cradle, like much of Kurt Vonnegut's work one way or another, is autobiographical; the narrator of the story has an older brother who's a scientist also. (I'll have to put something in here about chicken-plucking wind speeds. Stay tuned.)

Let's talk about Bakunin. Okay, I'll talk about Bakunin, you listen. Back in 1843, Richard Wagner became Kapellmeister of the Royal Opera in Dresden (patience -- we'll get to Bakunin!). Come 1848, when revolutions roiled the European continent (but failed to jump the Channel -- another of those kinetic barriers, I suppose), Wagner publicly positioned himself on the left, and that year also he met Bakunin. For various reasons, among them that it was center of the publishing industry, Saxony had a somewhat anomalous political situation in the Germanies, so revolution (and its suppression) came late there.

Dresden is the capital of Saxony. Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war there when the city was fire-bombed near the end of WWII, and he survived the firestorm in Schlachterhaus Fünf. He draws on those experiences in a book whose title is the translation of this designation: Slaughterhouse Five. See also L.T.I.

It's very hard to believe today, but Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was rarely performed in the years after his death in 1827. (All of Beethoven's late works were neglected, but the Ninth required a large number of instrumentalists and vocalists.) Wagner attended a poor performance of it in Dresden, and then in Paris in the Winter of 1839-40 he was inspired by a brilliant performance given by the Conservatoire orchestra. Partly by using cost-saving measures such as employing volunteer extras, Wagner overcame objections to the cost and staged a performance of the symphony in 1846.

In 1849, Wagner staged another performance of the Ninth Symphony. At the end of March that year, Bakunin was in the audience for the final rehearsal. (He was also at the time on the run from the police of many different countries, so attending a rehearsal rather than a public performance had advantages.) After the rehearsal, Bakunin approached Wagner and said that ``even if all music were lost in the approaching world fire, they should risk their lives for the survival of that symphony.'' (The quotation marks enclose my translation of ``...sie sollten, wenn beim nahen Weltenbrand auch alle Musik verlorenginge, für den Erhalt dieser Sinfonie ihr Leben wagen.'') As it happens, the Dresden Opera House, though not quite the whole world, burned down the following May 6.

Well, you know: Dresden, fire, and ice. It struck me as an interesting bunch of connections. Incidentally, the verb wagen, which I translated as `risk' above, is etymologically unrelated to the English word wager (from Anglo-French). Instead, that noun is related by a torturous route that I won't trace to the noun Wagen, which is cognate with the English wagon. (Cf. the VW entry and footnote 31.) The surname Wagner means carter or wagon-maker.

Wagner took part in the Dresden uprising in May, and when it was put down he narrowly escaped arrest with the help of Franz Liszt. He went into exile, spending a few years in Zurich, Switzerland. (He was amnestied in 1862.)

Gee, I almost forgot about the New Class. Bakunin coined the term and used it with something close enough to its current meaning. This is moderately impressive, considering that no Marxist revolution had ever yet taken place to provide empirical evidence. (Though frankly, 1789, 1830, and 1848 provided some good clues to 1917.) (I ain't talkin' Sudoku here, BTW.) Look, I don't really know anything about this. Let me quote some experts, such as Lawrence Peter King and Iván Szelényi, authors of The New Class: Intellectuals and Power (U. Minn. Pr., 2004). At some places, this book looks like a bad translation from the German, so it must be really well-researched. King and Szelényi write on page vii (you didn't expect me to delve deep into the actual text, did you?):

Bakunin accused Marx of advancing a theory that was actually a project by the intelligentsia to exploit the working-class movement. By pretending to represent working-class interests, intellectuals sought to establish themselves as a new dominant class after the fall of capitalism and the propertied bourgeoisie. History did not follow Bakunin's forecast: while intellectuals in the first Marxist-inspired revolution, the Russian Revolution of 1917, did play a formidable role, soon after their victory not only were they squeezed out of power positions by the Stalinist bureaucracies, but many of them perished in the Gulag.

But though he foresaw to some degree that socialism on Marxist principles would be dictatorship by a new elite, Bakunin was not the person directly responsible for the vogue this term eventually had in the 1950's and 60's. That vogue stemmed from a book entitled The New Class by the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas.

In his memoir Life in Dark Ages, Ernst Pawel mourned ``the loss of an entire generation of potential [Yugoslavian] leaders'' during WWII. Writing around 1993, as Yugoslavia was breaking up and Bosnians were being used for target practice, he speculated that this loss ``contributed much more decisively to the current crisis than those hoary `primitive tribal hatreds' reflexively invoked by pompous pundits simulating omniscience.'' (Despite this mocking stance, Pawel makes clear throughout the book that primitive tribal hatreds were very real and could readily become violent.) He continues:

   Perhaps the most representative figure of this truly lost generation is Milovan Djilas, now at eighty-two an unhappy and powerless but still keen observer of the political scene. Born in Montenegro--his ``land without Justice''--in 1911 and already a dedicated Communist in high school, he came to Belgrade in 1929, enrolled in the liberal arts faculty of the university and soon gained the reputation of a charismatic firebrand. In 1933 he was arrested, brutally tortured and sentenced to three years in the Sremska Mitrovitsa penitentiary, which at the time already hosted the elite of the Communist party. On his release he was elected to the party's clandestine Central Committee and became its most notoriously doctrinaire member, the Saint-Just of the proletarian revolution. During the years of Partisan warfare he was Tito's chief lieutenant; after the victory he became Tito's vice president and most likely successor, indisputably the second most powerful man in postwar Yugoslavia.

(Some paragraphs following this seem to be poorly researched or at best interpretively phrased, so I'll free-hand from here.) In the early 1950's, after the break between Tito and Stalin, Djilas started publishing articles demanding reform of the party and the government. This was especially easy for him to do because propaganda was part of his portfolio. Generally speaking, this is called ``giving a man enough rope to hang himself.'' He created a journal called Nova Misao (`New Thought'), in which his own articles were increasingly unorthodox. His criticisms, particularly in a series of articles for the journal Borba from October 1953 to January 1954, led that January to his expulsion from the government and removal from all party positions. He later resigned from the party, though he always continued to regard himself as a communist. He also got a chance to experience how Sremska Mitrovitsa was operated under the new regime.

I should probably say a bit more here about the ideas of Djilas on The New Class, but given the odds against your having read down to this point, I'll just stop abruptly.

New Criticism
A movement or tendency in literary criticism, dominant beginning in the 1930's. (Doesn't sound so ``New'' anymore, eh?) The movement is rather loosely defined -- so loosely, in fact, that there are essentially two loose definitions: broadly loosely defined, and narrowly loosely defined, or vice versa. (It's a good thing you came here for an explanation, because no self-respecting reference work would dare to confuse you with the truth.)

Narrowly defined, the New Criticism was a movement in American literary criticism, dominant in the 1930's and 40's. The core group of New Critics labored in the American hinterlands, influenced by T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson and others on the East Coast and in England. (Don't ask ``what others?'' -- I'm typing just as fast as I'm finding out.) Broadly defined, the New Criticism was a movement in Anglophone literary criticism that included many of the ``influences'' on the narrow group, and was dominant from the 1930's to the 1960's. I'm focusing first on the narrowly defined group because that's how I happened to start out.

The movement got its name from the title (The New Criticism) that John Crowe Ransom used for a major essay on poetry, published in the journal New Directions in 1941. It seems everything was New.

Ransom's title reveals a reliable feature of New Critics: they focused their studies narrowly on poetry. It could be hard to tell whether they viewed poetry simply as paradigmatic, or simply forgot other forms of art literature altogether. This prejudice was not unique to the New Critics, but common to many of the critical approaches to literature that arose around that time in Anglophone academe. Richards's Practical Criticism is a parallel example: only a few sentences into the preface does IAR indicate, in passing, that the literature whose criticism is discussed in the book is all poetry. (By the 1960's, the pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme. As the celebrated charlatan Jacques Derrida would write in De la grammatologie in 1967, ``Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.'' This is typically translated `There is nothing outside the text. N'ya-n'ya.' By implication, everything is a text, and equally worthy of being misunderstood by academic critics. On the other side, we should note that Derrida's rhetorical stance amounted to the claim that there was nothing inside the text either, since it could be twisted to mean anything and hence nothing. Incidentally, ``de la grammatologie,'' can be translated `all about grandmother.' Also, when I say that Jacques wrote this in ``De la grammatologie,'' I don't mean as a marginal comment or graffito or anything: I mean it was part of the text -- it had to be, after all. Page 227, to be precise.)

Some of the most important New Critics were

In case you were wondering, they're listed in diminishing order of how long they lived. Looks like lit professor ain't a bad gig.

(Working, working. Don't complain that the content is incomplete. The content is always incomplete. Rejoice -- yes, I think rejoice is the opposite of intransitive complain -- that I'm rushing out all this content before it's all polished and shit, and at the risk of great personal embarrassment, just so you can have another source to plagiarize your term paper from.)

New Democrats

NeWS
Network-Extensible Window System. A PostScript-based window system from Sun.

Pronounced by some with two syllables (e.g., neewis) to distinguish it from Usenet news[groups].

news
The meaning of this word is no news to you. I just want to point out that the word new has been used as a noun since at least the time of King Alfred. The use of the plural in the sense of novelties, and later in the current common sense of reports of events, arose in the 13th or 14th century, apparently under the influence of the parallel Middle French nouvelles or perhaps the Latin nova. News and words with similar meaning and construction are very natural developments from adjectives like new, and similar developments have occurred independently in Dutch and Arabic.

At the time that the word news arose in English, most people were illiterate and acronyms were rare. The story about the word news being an acronym of ``North East West South'' is untenable, a coincidence that works only in English, and in fact silly.

Here is a short, somewhat idiosyncratic list of online news organizations or sources:

newsgroup
USENET newsgroup, q.v., or a similar electronic forum.

newspaper
It's funny how certain ideas seem to be in the air at some times, for no evident reason. Then again it might be coincidence. In January 2006, the death of the newspaper was again on the collective editorial mind. That month's issue of Commentary had a piece by Joseph Epstein entitled ``Are Newspapers Doomed?'' (He doesn't quite answer the title question explicitly, but he seems to think the answer is yes.)

On January 7, Michael Kinsley had a light-heartedly pessimistic ``Op-Ed'' column on the same topic in the Washington Post. (Op-Ed in scare quotes because I don't consider a column an Op-Ed if it's by someone on the editorial staff of the newspaper whose ``Op-Ed'' page it appears on.)

Here's an example of probably nonlinear extrapolation from that article:

The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn't within about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud by the second quarter of 2007.

new tenure
Term for post-tenure review (PTR, q.v.), to distinguish it from ``continuing tenure,'' the good old days.

New Wave economist
An economist (i.e., an entrail reader who specializes in economic sooth-saying) who believes that ``we have finally managed to tame the business cycle, and [that] big booms followed by equally big busts are history'' in pretty much those words. New Wave economists refer to the bad old days before the taming of the economic cycle as the Old Wave world. Edward Yardeni, a New Wave economist, coined the wave terminology back in the late 1980's, before the economic slow-down that began in 1988 or 1989. During the 1990's, the number of New Wavers (or whatever they came to be called) grew steadily. It's bound to grow again dramatically once the 2002 or 2003 recovery gets some traction.

The previous group of economists who believed that the business cycle could be tamed (but believed this for the wrong reasons, as we now all realize) were the Keynesians (the followers of John Maynard Keynes). Keynesians believed that the economy could be fine-tuned by fiscal policy -- deficit-based government spending to increase in bad times and decrease in good times. Okay, in very good times. In very, very good times. Eventually, anyway. When Nixon announced that he was a Keynesian, you had to know the jig was up. Today we believe in monetary policy.

In Euroland, they believe in everything -- fiscal policy, monetary policy, and fairies. When the French and German economies stall, the French and German governments rack up big deficits (fiscal policy). They don't play games with the currency, because that's controlled by the European Central Bank (ECB) in order to assure stable growth (monetary policy). Before they could join the the euro, countries had to demonstrate the fiscal discipline that would allow a common currency to work, by meeting certain ``convergence criteria.'' In order to make sure that countries continued to exercise fiscal discipline after they joined, penalties are imposed on a country that fails to keep its budget deficit in check (fairies).

New Year
I almost admire people my own age (early geezerhood) who can manage to get excited about this ``event.''

New Year's resolutions
The trouble with New Year's resolutions is that people too often choose only unattainable goals. It's important to include some more modest resolutions, resolve to do things you were going to do anyway, or not start doing things that you weren't going to do. These are confidence-builders. They make it possible to say that you kept at least some of your resolutions. For example, in 2003 I plan not to smoke in the shower, and to lose weight overnight, every night. Also: no shelling hazelnuts with a fish-scaling knife. (Not that anybody would be fool enough to try that. On second thought, see 419.) Also: always have plenty of band-aids in the bathroom cabinet.

Okay, now: let's build on these successes with a more challenging resolution. When I'm striding at a healthy but unhurried pace toward a door ten yards away, and some jerk decides to hold it open for me, I will not rush appreciatively to minimize the time he or she stands there holding it. Instead, I will immediately slow down and grab my hip, and start limping in obvious pain. They want to do a good turn, let 'em put in the hard time. Give 'em value-for-money: do the whole steppinfetchit routine. (And if they grab my elbow to help me along, I'll whack'em with my pocketbook. Must remember to pre-deploy brick.)

Stepin Fetchit used to say about his stage act (not his demeaning turns in the movies) that just getting to center stage was half the act.

Also, if you do decide to resolve to lose weight in the new year, resolve big. Failing to lose five pounds is embarrassing. For the same amount of effort, you can fail to lose fifty pounds, which is heroic.

Somewhere in the glossary I have a list of good ideas. When I find it, I'll place a link to it from here. Until I do, I'll mention here that it's a bad idea to go shopping in a supermarket (Meijers) or hardware store (Menards) wearing a red polo shirt, unless you want to have lots of short conversations with strangers.

In early 2006, there seems to be a greater number than usual of stories in the media about people crowding the gyms on account of their resolutions to get in shape. Some of it is seasonal: Men's Fitness magazine has a smattering of articles on things like adjusting your routine to deal with January crowding, and on designing a home gym, since this is the month you're likeliest to decide to do it. Both stories are in the February 2006 issue (``display until January 31'') also eventually mentioned at the mirrors entry.

The Observer, student newspaper for Notre Dame and Saint Mary's, had a front-page article on January 19 entitled ``Campus gyms see new year influx,'' with slugline ``Motivated exercisers flock to the Rock, Rolfs at spring semester's outset.'' The Rock (nickname for the Rockne Memorial Building, named for legendary chemistry professor Knute Rockne) and Rolfs Sports Recreation Center (named after a donor, I think) are said to be experiencing a flood of ``resolution-makers and fitness faithful.'' (It's a Catholic school, but the Church gave evolutionary theory a general nihil obstat in the 1950's or 60's). The director of RecSports reports that the first 6 to 8 weeks of the Spring semester are the busiest time of the year.

NEXAFS
Near-Edge X-ray Absorption Fine Structure. A spectroscopy used to determine the orientation of molecular adsorbates on single-crystal surfaces.

NexGen
NEXt GENeration. A reasonable adjective but a bad name, because on deployment, it becomes the CurGen. Cf. A (for Advanced).

NexGen
From ``NEXt GENeration.'' A maker of Intel clones until January 16, 1996, when it was absorbed by AMD in a stock swap. NexGen had been the first out with a Pentium clone, but they spent 1995 in red ink.

NexGen was supposed to continue as a wholly-owned subsidiary, but I don't know what kind of distinct existence it maintained. What would have been their Nx686 was marketed as the AMD-K6, next generation in AMD's Superscalar uP series. As it happens, at midyear 1997, AMD reported that it would not be able to meet K6 production targets, not long after engineers had told stock analysts that ``yields had been all that they had hoped for'' (as reported in the 8 Sept. 1997 issue of Semiconductor Business News). [column] Studying the Delphic oracles would have taught the ``analysts'' how to interpret such an ambiguous report.

I'm not sure if it's the same company, but a NexGen with the same URL is now (2004) in the consumer electronics retail business and also offers related services.

NexGen MWS
NEXt GENeration Missile Warning System. According to a pre-award solicitation notice released May 23, 2004, NexGen AWS is a joint project between the Directional Infrared Countermeasures (DIRCM) joint program office managed by Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the Air Force's Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasures (LAIRCM) program office (US government agencies).

NEXRAD
NEXt-generation (Doppler) RADar for weather surveillance. Also called WSR-88D.

This interesting page from the US National Weather Service gives a contemptibly foolish explanation of Doppler radar, if you realize that the word ``phase'' is not a synonym of ``frequency.'' (I.e., if you remember high-school physics.) [It is possible to measure the phase shift of a scattering wave, if there is no frequency shift. That is essentially what a hologram does.]

NEXT
Near-End CROSSTalk. Cf. FEXT, vide crosstalk.

next number in the series
There are infinitely many fairly simple series with a run of initial zeroes of any length you choose. For example, the series whose nth term is (n-1)(n-2)(n-3) has terms 0, 0, 0, 6 (starting at n=1).

I have more to say, but it's also obvious.

ne 1, ne1
Chatese for anyone.

Cf. qq1.

NF
NanoFiltration.

NF
National Fine. One of two US standards (the other is NC) for screw dimensions.

NF
National (US) Formulary.

NF
NeuroFibromatosis.

NF
Postal abbreviation for the Canadian (.ca) province of Newfoundland. After the name was officially changed to Newfoundland and Labrador (italics not required), and at the request of the provincial government, the postal abbreviation (technically ``postal symbol'') was changed to NL.

Newfoundland and Labrador is not (and was not) one of the ``Maritime Provinces.'' Not even two of the ``Maritime Provinces.'' You have three guesses left. (Warning! Spoiler information at the entries for New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island.)

The provincial capital is St. John's. Let's petitition some government to make St. John's's the official possessive form of St. John's. I have no position on whether St. John's should be alphabetized among the SA's or the ST's. On May 29, 2002, the Board of Regents of Memorial University of Newfoundland, in St. John's, recommended to the provincial government that the name of the university be shortened to Memorial University, but as of 2004 I haven't noticed any change in usage. Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec are Canada's two easternmost provinces. Don't people think these things through in advance?

There isn't enough humor in this glossary, so I'll repeat here something that made me laugh at an (I hope) not-entirely-serious page.

A determined contingent of Newfies, thickly muscled from pushing houses down dirt roads to kickstart their furnaces, heavily fueled their boats and quietly embarked upon a vacation.

(Yeah, there was more, but that was the funniest part.)

NF
No Feet (on PEZ dispenser). Term of art among Pezheads. See relevant entry from the local copy of Chris Sharpe's unofficial PEZ FAQ.

NF
Noise Figure.

NF
NonFiction. On May 7, 2000, I checked out the USA Today best-seller lists based on a sales survey (this is immunized against volume orders). Of the top sellers (hardback and paper together), 19 of the top 50, 18 of the next 50, and 19 of the following 50 (i.e., ranked 101-150) were nonfiction.

If I had to guess, I'd say that 38% of book sales by volume are nonfiction.

Barnes and Noble, which used to discount books on the New York Times best-seller lists, now makes up its own best-seller lists as well, and also mixes fiction and nonfiction. Does this trend away from a fiction-nonfiction distinction signal the approaching collapse of the commitment to truth and civilization, or does it herald the dawn of a more nuanced and mature understanding of the radical ambiguity of language?

.nf
(Domain name code for) Norfolk Island.

NFA
National Forensic Association . Sponsors of the oldest national (US) open individual events tournament for colleges and universities. Their championship tournament is held each spring.'' Affiliated with the AFA. There are other debating entries in this glossary.

NFA
No Further Action.

NFAA
National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Based in artsy Miami, Florida. Founded in 1981 as a nonprofit arts organization. (This was a good move, because the arts aren't very profitable for most performers.) See ARTS.

NFAIS
National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services.

You know, abstracting can be done well or badly. Chemical Abstracts is done much better than Physics Abstracts, and they are correspondingly much more heavily used (and more expensive). This isn't just my opinion, you know, this is my professional second opinion. Of course, the situations are not simply comparable. It is rather harder to organize physics abstracts than chemistry abstracts, because chemistry papers can always ultimately be categorized by the substances they study, and there is no comparable principle for physics papers. Also, there are many more chemists and chemical engineers than there are physicists.

NFB
National Federation for the Blind. ``Founded in 1940,'' it ``is the [US's] largest and most influential membership organization of blind persons. With fifty thousand members, the NFB has affiliates in all fifty states plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, and over seven hundred local chapters. As a consumer and advocacy organization, the NFB is considered the leading force in the blindness field today.''

NFB
North Fiji Basin.

[Football icon]

NFC
National Football Conference. One of two subdivisions of the NFL.

NFC
Near-Field Communication. A comm technology standard for contactless-card technologies, for starters.

NFC
National Football Conference Youth Ministry. Wait-- that's not it. Let me look this up. Okay, it's the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry. That's not so easy to parse, when you think of it.

NFER
(UK) National Foundation for Education Research.

NFETARHS
National (Australian) Framework for Education and Training Arrangements for Rural Health Services. Sounds vaguely nefarious.

NFF
No Failures Found. Designation of components returned from the field and reported defective, which subsequently appeared to operate correctly in the laboratory. Generally synonymous with CND, NDF, NTF.

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NFFNSNC
A gravestone witticism so popular that it was even given in abbreviation: Non Fui Fui Non Sum Non Curo. Latin for `I did not exist; I existed; I do not exist; I don't care.' Learn more from Lattimore: Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs, p. 85.

NFFZ
North Fiji Fracture Zone.

NFIEC
Niagara Frontier Industry Education Council.

NFJC
National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

[Football icon]

NFL
National Football League. (There's also an ESPN site.) Governing body of US football; formed from the merger of the NFC and the upstart competitor AFC. As the individual teams in different ``leagues'' of professional baseball now do, the individual football teams play regular-season games against teams both in and out of their own conference. There is a playoff system with separate playoffs for AFC and NFC, and a final round called the Super Bowl, designated by roman numerals and celebrated with virgin sacrifices, between the AFC and NFC champions. After two weeks of intense hype, the game is usually an anticlimax won by the NFC.

Jersey number ranges in the NFL:

1-19:
Quarterbacks, kickers, and punters.
20-49:
Running backs and defensive backs.
50-59:
Linebackers.
60-79:
Linemen.
80-89:
Receivers and tight ends.
90-99:
Linebackers and defensive linemen.
The rules are bent as necessary, if the numbers in some category are exhausted.

NFLC
(US) National Foreign Language Center. At Johns Hopkins University.

[Football icon]

Nfld.
NewFoundLanD. An abbreviation what people used before The Great Punctuation Shortage Cf NF

NFLPA
National Football League Players Association.

NFLPN
The National Federation of Licensed Practical Nurses, Inc.

NFLRC
National (US) Foreign Language Resource Centers.

NFN
No First Name.

Teller, of the famous Penn and Teller comedic magic act, was born Raymond Joseph Teller (on St. Valentine's Day 1948). He legally changed his name to Teller. On his driver's licence, NFN appears in the space for his first name.

NFOM
Near-Field Optical Microscopy. Definitely see NSOM.

NFP
Not For Profit (organization). Sometimes known as a 501 (c) 3 organization, after the relevant section of tax law.

NFPA
National Fire Protection Association.

NFPDI
National (US) Flat-Panel Display Initiative (DoD-funded).

NFPF
(US) National Film Preservation Foundation.

NFR
Nueva Fuerza Republicana. Spanish: `New Republican Force,' a Bolivian political party founded in 1994 by retired army captain Cochabamba Manfred Reyes Villa.

nfrm
New FRoM. Equivalent to the command

% frm -s new

That is, returns data only for email messages with status ``new.''

NFS
Network File System. A scheme to share files in storage media physically controlled by one machine (the NFS server) among different machines. Originally designed by Sun for use in LAN's. Scheme is perhaps overtaxed as presently used. Maybe AFS is better. Maybe we just need 100× our current bandwidth.

NFSNO
National Federation for Specialty Nursing Organizations. According to its homepage, it's ``an organization comprised of 35 specialty nursing organizations representing the interests of approximately 400,000 individual specialty nurses.''

Let's try that again, shall we?

It is composed of 35 specialty nursing organizations.

Therefore, it comprises 35 specialty nursing organizations.

There, now: that wasn't so bad, now was it? Gooood.

Based in Pitman, New Jersey.

NFTA
Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority. Buses in Buffalo and Niagara Falls, NY. Light rail from downtown to the Main Street campus of UB. Operates Buffalo International Airport, which is thoughtfully situated just on the northern edge of the snow belt.

NFV
NelFinaVir. A protease inhibitor used in the treatment of AIDS.

NFWF
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

NG
National Geographic. A magazine and a TV channel.

NG, ng
(Usenet) NewsGroup.

ng
There are three common nasal consonants represented by individual characters in the IPA. The two that are obvious to an English-speaker are en and em, represented /n/ and /m/ (or by [n] and [m], if you're into that sort of distinction). The third is the ng sound. If you really need to have this sound explained, then I probably can't help you. I will point out that the articulation of ng is similar to that of n, but with the back of the tongue raised against the back of the palate, instead of the tip of the tongue against the front.

In the IPA the ng sound is represented by a non-ASCII symbol that looks like a lower-case n, but with the second stroke extended below the line like the descender of a letter j. On the other hand, most languages that have the sound and which use an alphabet script avoid using a separate symbol for it. The earliest instance of this situation is probably Greek. In Greek, two successive gammas (not a digamma!) represent the ng sound. Thus for example, our word angel comes from the Greek word spelled ággelos (`messenger'). The Greeks further recognized that the nasal consonant preceding kappa (unvoiced version of gamma) and chi (aspirated version of kappa) was also sometimes an ng, and represented these by an extention of the double-gamma representation: gamma-kappa represented the consonant pair that occurs in most native English-speakers pronunciation of think, and gamma-chi the nasal sound in a typical reporter's pronunciation of ``Nkomo,'' perhaps. A more native example of the gamma-chi sound which works for some Anglophones is income, since most speakers aspirate the c, but for some the n is just /n/. (And in case you're wondering, Greek didn't have an aspirated gamma sound. I should also note that the chi pronunciation I refer to is the Classical Greek. On the Italian peninsula, the chi was eventually pronounced /ks/, and became our letter ex.)

[Note that throughout this entry, by ``g sound'' I mean what is usually called a ``hard gee'' (not a ``soft'' or ``sweet gee''); in other words, the consonant in the word go.] An ng sound arises naturally from a kind of slurring-together of n with g or k: Since g and k stop consonants are articulated at the back of the mouth, it is less effort to pronounce an ng than an n before the stop. The income example above is an example of this, though English spelling doesn't show it. That is, in + come --> income represents an instance of n + k --> (ng)k. Greek spelling makes this change more visible. For example, the name pancreas was constructed from Greek pan + kréas, `all flesh.' The many compounds that include a pan prefix usually use a Greek letter nu, but pancreas is written págkreas.

The Greek practice of writing gamma-kappa for what we represent by ``nk'' works so long as there are no words that actually have a g-k consonant cluster (like rug-cutter). If there were such words, they were probably rare.

It goes without saying that English spelling does not have a general rule for indicating the n/ng distinction. As usual some general patterns hold imperfectly. In particular, a final nk or ng is fairly certain to imply the presence of an ng. Also, when the letter en precedes a k or g sound (uncle, anger, ankle, banquet, anxious, etc.), it usually indicates an ng, although dialects differ, and not entirely systematically. It is important to observe, however, that ``ng'' may or may not indicate the presence of the stop consonant. For example, ringer and ringlet have no g sound, but Ringo, ingot, and English do. (The difference is noticeable in the German word English, which has no g sound.)

(As a sidelight on the Greek double-gamma practice: in the Korean Hangul script, two g's together represent a harder gee sound, something conceived as lying between /g/ and /k/, even though that is really a voicing difference.)

.ng
(Domain name code for) Nigeria. The oil dictatorship and former British colony. Not to be confused with landlocked Niger (.ne).

Nigeria.com says it's ``the premier Nigerian website on the Internet.''

NG
No Good.

[Football icon]

NG
Nose Guard. A defensive position in American football. Faces the Center (C), who as I have noted, takes an offensive position.

NGA
National Governors' Association.

NGA
National Grocers Association.

NGATM
New Generation Air Traffic Manager. Is that, like, new since Reagan fired all the controllers who went on strike back in 1981?

NGB
National Governing Body. Typically refers to an organization, like USATF (track and field) or USAV (volleyball), that administers competition in an amateur sport.

NGB
Nice Guy, But ...

In Beast of Burden (off the 1978 Some Girls album; lyrics written with Keith Richards), Mick Jagger sang

There's one thing, baby, I don't understand:
You keep on telling me I ain't your kind of man --
Ain't I rough enough?
Ain't I tough enough?
Ain't I rich enough?

(It's so nice Mick didn't lose touch with his ordinary-guy roots.)

NGC
New Graduate College. New wing of the Graduate College, the residential college (local name for a dorm) at Princeton University. There's a semi-abstract statue of a reclining fertility goddess up by the 3000 entries, done in tea-kettle black-enamel on cast iron. When someone put a bra on it, it suddenly looked quite obscene. Elsewhere there's a structure of the sort that Buckminster Fuller called a tensegrity -- a structure held together "by tension forces only." More precisely, it's a structure composed of tubes that do not contact each other, but held rigid by wires ("you can't push a rope," the saying goes). The one at the NGC is made of nearly stainless steel.

Cf. OGC.

NGC
New General Catalog. Of stellar objects. Look here for images.

NGC
Numismatic Guarantee Corporation.

NGC 6543
The Cat's Eye Nebula.

NgCAM
Neural-Glial Cell Adhesion Molecule (CAM). Part of the Immunoglobulin (Ig) superfamily.

NGDLC
Next Generation Digital Loop Carrier.

NGDO
Non-Governmental Development Organization. A subcategory of NGO, q.v.

[column]

NGE
National Greek Exam. (Classical Greek -- mostly Homeric and Attic; see Greek entry for clarification.) Sponsored by the American Classical League (ACL) and the Junior Classical League (JCL). Primarily for high school students in the US and Canada. Not a requirement for admission to anyplace I've heard of, just an academic competition. There are other exams sponsored by the same organizations, in Latin (NLE) and mythology.

NGfL
(UK) National Grid For Learning. A ``... portal [that] brings together a vast and growing collection of sites that support education and lifelong learning.'' It's in the gov.uk subdomain, so it's government-sponsored. What does that mean anymore? Here it means that the vast and growing is selected preferentially from the .uk domain.

NGI
Next Generation Internet. Wait up! Wait for me! I'm almost caught up to the Previous Generation Internet!

NGN
Next Generation Network.

NGO
Non-Governmental Organization. A civic or public advocacy organization.

Refers to any of the charitable and not-so-charitable organizations which volunteer their real or imagined expertise to the public and the public's governments. It also refers to organizations, some of them the same, which generate, transfer, or administer humanitarian and other aid. E.g.: Greenpeace, The Tobacco Council, NOW, ... NGO's are a twentieth-century realization of the Platonic ideal of government proposed in his Republic. Their variety and disagreements raise an issue not much considered by Plato: in the day of the philosopher-kings, which shall be the king's philosophy? The scientific take on this question -- the way science keeps itself honest and on-track -- is: ``how will you measure it''? The sociological terminology is: ``how do you operationalize it''? The political form is: ``who counts the votes''? Luis Alvarez once said:

There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to an opinion as Fermi.

The term NGO also refers to organizations, some of them the same, which generate, transfer, or administer humanitarian and other aid, such as MSF and ICRC.

Spanish for NGO is ONG.

Generally speaking, NGO's are organized as nonprofit corporations, so they are also NPO's. The Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations at CWRU offers Master of Nonprofit Organizations (the ``MNO'' -- sounds a bit too alphabetic) and Executive Director of Management degrees, and a Certificate in Nonprofit Management (this really doesn't sound so good). If they're so good at this nonprofit management stuff, why do they have to charge tuition?

Related acronyms (mostly for subcategories of the generic NGO):

NGRI
(Japanese) National Grassland Research Institute. I was surprised to learn Japan had grassland. Oh, no wait: a usually reliable source says it doesn't, and NGRI's mission is to figure out how to get Japan some grassland. Hmmm, this is sounding ominous. And everyone was wondering why that dynamic new prime minister is putting so much political capital into removing the constitutional restrictions on Japan's military...

NGU
Non-Gonococcal Urethritis. Inflammation of the urethra not caused by gonorrhea infection. Term often refers to urethritis similar to that caused by gonorrhea but caused by Chlamydia trachomatis and occurring as a common early symptom of chlamydia among males.

Ngultrum
The monetary unit of Bhutan, introduced in 1974 and pegged since then to be equal in value to one Indian rupee. In other words, it's worth about two cents of an EU euro or a US dollar, but it's worth 11 points in Scrabble® (all three major dictionaries).

NGV
Natural Gas Vehicle. See IANGV.

NGVTP
Natural Gas Vehicle Technology Partnership.

Ngwee
One one-hundredth of a kwacha (ZMK), the official currency of Zambia. As of early 2006, 1 ZMK is itself worth less than one thirtieth of a US penny, but the ngwee has held steady at a value of 9 Scrabble® points (it's in all three major dictionaries). Ngwee is also the plural form. Or perhaps the singular has never been observed.

N.H., NH
New Hampshire. USPS abbreviation.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for New Hampshire. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.

NH
Northern Hemisphere. Climatological usage.

NHA
National Humanities Alliance. ``...was created to unify public interest in support of federal programs in the humanities. The Alliance is the only organization that represents the humanities as a whole -- scholarly and professional associations; organizations of museums, libraries, historical societies, higher education, and state humanities councils; university and independent centers for scholarship and other organizations concerned with national humanities policies. The Alliance is strictly nonpartisan.

The NHA homepage was first webpage that I noticed had an extra &nbsp; at the end of each sentence to assure proper spacing!

Cf. Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), corresponding advocacy organization for social whutzits.

NHANES
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

NHC
National Hurricane Center. Part of the National Weather Service of the US.

NHC/TPC
National Hurricane Center / Tropical Prediction Center. Seems to be the same as the NHC.

NHD
National History Day. National History Day is not a national history day. It's not even a today-in-US-history site. It's usually a bad sign when an organization chooses a misleading name and then offers to enlighten you. It's the intellectual equivalent of a protection racket (but see the Ulam quote at the abacus entry).

``National History Day is not just one day, but a yearlong education program that makes history come alive through educator professional development and active student learning.'' NHD is an educrat's idea of a useful site. Its main feature is that you get to see a lot of webpages that are refreshingly free of unfamiliar information before you have to face any page containing historical stuff. Its principal sponsor is The WWII Channel.

NHeLP
National Health Law Program.

NHGRI
National Human Genome Research Institute. Part of the US NIH.

NHHC
New Hampshire Humanities Council. It's ``a private non-profit organization that strengthens New Hampshire by providing free public humanities programs in its communities.''

NHHD
Native Health History Database. Sponsored by UNM, just like NHRD, q.v.

NHHS
New Hampshire Historical Society. Founded in 1823, it's ``an independent, nonprofit organization which receives no operating support from the State of New Hampshire.''

NHK
Nippon Hosou Kyokai. `Japan Broadcasting Corporation.'

NHL
National Historic Landmark.

NHL
National Hockey League. There's also an ESPNet site. Hockey is like bear-baiting on ice-skates, but with some other animal.

National here means, or certainly at least originally meant, Canadian. In fact, although a majority of the teams play in the US, a majority of the players are still Canadian, despite the influx of Russians.

One little-appreciated unfortunate consequence of hockey is Tim Hortons coffee. There's no justice: a lockout by the owners cancelled the entire 2004-5 season, but Tim Hortons coffee poured on. (Tim Horton was a hockey player. There was only one of him and his last name was spelled without an ess.)

Amazingly, the most successful hockey players move efficiently and spend much of their time not attacking other players. Fortunately, these facts have not been widely noted. Hockey is regularly touted as a down-to-earth sport played by regular blue-collar sorts of guys. (Senator John Kerry did inestimable damage -- I can't estimate it, can you? -- to the sport's reputation during the 2004 presidential primary campaign in New Hampshire, when he put on skates and a Bruins jersey and played a scratch game with some firemen.) I think that ``regular guys'' are people who go to the race track in hopes of seeing a gruesome accident. On the other hand, my friend Paul ate with the Canucks one day because they were staying at the same Toronto hotel as he was. But that was back when the average NHL player earned under a million dollars. (In 2003, the average NHL player earned 1.79 million USD.)

NHL
Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. The other general class of lymphoma is simply called Hodgkin's disease.

NHLBI
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (part of NIH). See also the Fedworld entry for NHLBI.

NHLPA
National Hockey League (NHL) Players' Association.

NHPA
National (US) Historic Preservation Act.

NHPF
National (US) Health Policy Forum.

NHPP
Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process.

NHPR
New Hampshire Public Radio.

NHR
National Housewives' Register. Old name of National Women's Register.

NHRA
National Hot Rod Association. A drag-racing association. Vide goracing.com, VROOM!

NHRD
Native Health Research Database. ``Native'' here means ``Native American.'' For precision: ``American Indian, Alaska Native, [AI/AN] and Canadian First Nations populations.'' Sponsored by UNM, just like NHHD.

NHRP
Next Hop Resolution Protocol. (Serious entry; not a Warner Brothers joke.)

NHS
(UK) National Health Service.

NHS
(US) National Highway System. Evidently, system does not imply systematic. The different expansions assigned to NHS in the US and in the UK seem to reflect a difference in national priorities.

NHS
National Honor Society. ``The National Honor Society (NHS) and National Junior Honor Society (NJHS) are the nation's premier organizations established to recognize outstanding high school and middle level students. More than just an honor roll, NHS and NJHS serve to honor those students who have demonstrated excellence in the areas of Scholarship, Leadership, Service, and Character (and Citizenship for NJHS). These characteristics have been associated with membership in the organization since their beginnings in 1921 and 1929.''
``... NHS and NJHS chapters are found in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, many U.S. Territories, and Canada.''

NHSA
(US) National Head Start Association.

NHSA
(US) National High School Association. ``[A]n inclusive organization committed to facilitating improvement in student learning and educational practices. Our purpose is to provide opportunities for professional growth and dialogue among high school educators and other advocates of quality education.''

NHSC
National Health Service Corps.

NHTSA
National Highway Traffic Safety Admministration.

NHW
NonHazardous Waste.

NI
Network Interface.

[column]

ni
Name in Modern Greek and some other languages (e.g. Serbian and Croatian) of the Greek letter nu (It resembles an italic vee). Pronounced like that word that cannot be heard, pronounced by the garden-loving knights of Monty Python. (In case you're some kind of cultural illiterate, that means it's pronounced like English knee.)

A good rule of thumb, if you're trying to guess the modern pronunciation of an ancient Greek word, is to change all the vowels to a long ee (/i:/ in IPA). This is called ioticism.

ni
Hi -- it's ni again. Many languages seem to have ``neither ... nor'' constructions. German, like English, couples different words in the construct: ``weder ... noch.'' Spanish uses the same word: ``ni ... ni.''

.ni
(Domain name code for) Nicaragua. If you like variety in your disasters, it's hard to beat dictatorship, war of liberation, communists, Contra war, earthquake, hurricane.

Ni
Chemical element abbreviation for NIckel, a light, ferromagnetic transition metal. Period 4, atomic number 28. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Nickel has an interesting rôle in the formation of contacts to GaAs. A eutectic alloy of gold and germanium (at a surprisingly low 12% Ge) can make a good contact at a point, but it tends to bead on the GaAs surface. In practice, one makes a Gold-Germanium-Nickel contact: starting from the semiconductor surface, one deposits a layer of germanium (say a micron), a layer of gold of about equal thickness, and a layer of Nickel. When the temperature is raised above the melting point of the AuGe eutectic, gold and germanium mix, by forming a melt beginning at their common interface. The liquid AuGe mix, however, does not bead, presumably because it wets the Ni surface. The small concentration of nickel dissolved into the gold-germnanium melt apparently also improves the ohmic contact.

The oldest ancient iron artifacts found in Egypt have high nickel content, apparently because they were made from meteorites found on the ground, rather than from mined iron ore.

NI
Postal code for Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen in German), one of the sixteen states (Länder) of the German Federal Republic (FRG). [Like most of the country information in this glossary, Germany's is at the domain code .de.]

Lower Saxony is the second-largest state, with an area of 47,611 sq. km. Its population was 7,162,000 by the census of 1987, estimated at 7,845,398 for Dec. 31, 1997. Okay, what time on Dec. 31? You know, a couple of hundred people are born and die in that state every day. The very best census data are considered to be accurate at no better than the 1% level. Seven pretended digits of accuracy are purely otiose.

The West German state of Lower Saxony was stitched together in 1946 from a bunch of older states. The capital is Hanover, which is spelled Hannover in German.

NI, N.I.
Northern Ireland. This bit is about the ni. hierarchy of USENET newsgroups.

NIA
National Income Account.

NIA
National Institute on Aging. Part of the US NIH.

NIAAA
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Part of the US NIH.

NIAG
NATO Industrial Advisory Group.

NIAI
(Japanese) National Institute of Animal Industry.

NIAID
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, part of NIH.

NIAP
Northern Indiana Association of Psychology. They've got a shingle on US 33/Bus. 31/S.R. 933, northbound from South Bend, a couple of miles from Michigan.

NIB
National Industries for the Blind. ``Our mission at National Industries for the Blind is to enhance the opportunities for economic and personal independence of people who are blind primarily through creating, sustaining and improving employment.''

NIB
The New Interpreter's Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes. In this new edition of an old, somewhat apologetic standard reference, each volume covers at least two Bible books. Cf. IB.

NIBMAR
No Independence Before MAjority Rule. Also No Independence Before Majority African Rule. The expansion without ``African'' is probably preferable, since the minority being distinguished from the African majority was white and European in origin, but insisted on its African identity.

The European colonial powers granted or conceded independence to their African colonies starting in the 1950's and accelerating in the 1960's. The process was largely complete when Portugal granted independence to Angola and Mozambique in 1975 and 1976. South Africa was somewhat exceptional. Initially settled by the Dutch, it finally came completely under British control in 1910. Very quickly, and in significant measure due to the efforts of Jan Christiaan Smuts, a Liberal government in Britain soon granted a high degree of local self-government to South Africa in 1910. At the time, it was mostly taken for granted by whites -- i.e., by the British and by white settlers -- that South Africa would be governed by whites. South Africa would consist of a black African colony (or colonies) within the territory of an independent European-style nation. Not everyone agreed; the African National Congress (ANC) was founded in 1912.

Despite majority opposition, the minority-rule arrangement must have looked like it had long-term stability. Majority rule did not come to South Africa until the 1990's. Many whites in neighboring Southern Rhodesia (the country now known as Zimbabwe) wanted a similar deal. It wasn't unreasonable for them to suppose they could tough it out indefinitely. They probably saw the US and Canada as proofs of principle that a European presence and eventually -- with the help of immigration -- a European majority could be established over a large territory originally controlled by a non-European majority. (In Latin America to this day, European elites govern some countries with autochthon majorities.) One could also imagine a smooth transition to majority rule in the distant future. The white minority in Southern Rhodesia had a virtual monopoly on modern weaponry, and a history of putting down insurgencies since the 1890's.

Southern Rhodesia had been taken over by stages into the British Empire, starting with agreements that Cecil Rhodes made with local chiefs in the late 1880's to allow mining. In 1953, Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia were combined with Nyasaland (now Malawi) in a Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Under pressure for majority rule in Northern Rhodesia, the federation was dissolved at the end of 1963, and Northern Rhodesia became the Republic of Zambia on October 24, 1964. (After that time, Southern Rhodesia was simply called Rhodesia.) Following the dissolution of the federation, and as the UK moved to grant independence to Northern Rhodesia, the white minority administration in Southern Rhodesia also sought independence under its existing arrangements. This was opposed by the British government, which was formally committed to a policy of NIBMAR.

NIBMAR had been promoted by African, Asian, and Caribbean members of the British Commonwealth for years before the Rhodesias split up. British PM Harold Wilson resisted. Eventually, at the July 21, 1961, Commonwealth conference in London, he accepted a draft resolution formulated by Canadian PM Lester Pearson. Nevertheless, he continued to offer Ian Smith, leader of Southern Rhodesia, deals that fell far short of NIBMAR. They were not enough for Smith, at least in the 1960's, and on November 11, 1965, his administration unilaterally declared independence (see UDI).

NIBW
National Independent Bookstore Week. Is that like a memorial day?

nibble
Either an alternate spelling for nybble, or what to do to savor a snibble.

niblick
The name for a golf club from back in the days of wooden shafts, before the clubs became standardized and numbered. It is ``like'' a 9-iron in the sense that it has a loft angle comparable to that of a 9-iron. That is, the face of the club is about 40 degrees away from the vertical. (More precisely, that's the angle of the shaft relative to the plane of the face of the club at the point where it contacts the ball.) In the early 1960's, 9-irons had loft angles in the low 40's. However, modern clubs are ``standardized'' primarily in the sense that they are mass produced. Nothing prevented club manufacturers from collectively reshaping the clubs over time, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the loft angles of 9-irons were typically in the upper 40's.

Even taking a 9-iron with the same loft angle as a basis of comparison, the clubs differ in other ways: they have different blade shape and face curvature, and the lie angle of the niblick is smaller because it was intended to be hit with a squat, side-winding swing rather than a modern upright swing. See our ye olde golfe clubbies entry for little more.

NIC
National Institute of Corrections. An agency of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) of the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

NIC
Network Information Center.

NIC
Network Interface Card. An internal card for a computer slot, which handles communication between a personal computer and a high-speed net (ethernet, cable modem, or DSL). Also known as a DNI.

NIC
Newly Industrializing Country. Playing catch-up.

NICAP
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. A UFO research organization. Founded in 1957, headed by Maj. Donald Edward Keyhoe USMC (1897-1988), influential in the 1960's.

A night-cap? Don't mind if I do. Aaeeeeiiii!!!

Nice
A city on France's Côte d'Azur. Specifically, it is on la Baie des Anges, less than ten miles west of Monaco. The street running along the beach has the names Promenade des Anglais and Quai des États-Unis. Awww, how... sweet.

NICE
National (UK) Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. Many people regard this as a rather ironically-named bad guys' organization in the NHS. (Cf. N.I.C.E.)

NICE
National (US) Institute For Consumer Education.

NICE
National (US) Institute of Ceramic Engineers. The organization is referred to in sentences as ``the NICE'' (just like ``the ASPCA'').

N.I.C.E.
National (U.K.) Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. The bad guys' organization in That Hideous Strength (1945), the final volume of C.S. Lewis's ``Cosmic Trilogy.'' From the P.O.V. of Lewis, N.I.C.E. might be regarded as an ironic name, since N.I.C.E. is actually evil. Lewis likes to play around a lot with the significance of names. However, I think the case of N.I.C.E. mostly just counts as false advertising.

There doesn't seem to be an official overall title of the series or trilogy or whatever. Unofficially, both ``Cosmic Trilogy'' and ``Space Trilogy'' have been used. The first and second books take place mostly on fictional stand-ins for Mars (``Malacandra'') and Venus (``Perelandra''), respectively. The third takes up as much shelf space as the first two combined and takes place mostly on the Earth (``Thulcundra,'' the ``Silent Planet'').

The first two novels [entitled Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943)], have as their principal bad guy a Dr. Weston. He's a renowned physicist. Ransom kills Weston in Perelandra. (Alright: technically he kills Weston's body, which Weston's moral weakness has allowed to be taken over by the Un-Man. So the killing would be okay even if it weren't already okay because Ransom kills in self-defense.) Dr. Elwin Ransom is the hero of all three novels and a professor of philology. In the third book he is called Fisher King.

You know, C.S. Lewis novels come out pretty badly in a comparison with the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo. At least the Catholic Church made a distinction between what it thought were Galileo's motivations and the effects of his ``errors.'' Lewis makes his star scientist a kidnapper and murderer to begin with, and he goes morally downhill from there.

Nick
Nickname for Nicholas and slang for the devil. If conflation of the devil and Saint Nicholas amuses you, visit this other entry.

nick
British slang about equivalent to swipe, in the sense of steal.

nick
Short for nickname, particularly on IRC and similar electronic fora.

Nick and Jess
You've probably seen this phrase for years as part of the captions that line your escape route (``check-out aisle'') from the supermarket. The story was basically that they were together apart or apart together, or in transit between these conditions. They're celebrities. Neither has completely discarded his or her surname: they're Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson. I think that the surname Simpson originally meant ``son of a simpleton,'' but I don't know a good mnemonic for Lachey.

As celebrities, by definition they're mostly famous for being famous, but they had to become famous (i.e., boot-strap the process) by doing something else first. Jessica's something else was being a ``singer,'' which nowadays means something like ``cute dancing lip-syncher.'' Nick is also a ``singer,'' but I think he became a celebrity through his connection with Jessica. CD's are issued with their names, and possibly they even perform. Somebody seems to buy the CD's, though I'm not sure if this is listening music. It might be more like those recognition gifts that you get when you contribute to public radio: an emblem of your contribution, but not necessarily a thing of any practical value.

nickel
A ferromagnetic metal (Ni) and a US 5-cent coin made from a zinc alloy. Five of just about anything. Another coin that would be worth five pennies today is the shilling.

Nickel coins in other denominations, such as three and ten cents, have also been issued by the US.

[Football icon]

nickel back
The fifth back in a five-back football formation.

nickle
A misspelling of the verb (!) nickel that is accepted by all three major Scrabble dictionaries.

Nick's Patio
Two soups are made each morning, and both are usually available past the next midnight. One of the soups may 86 in the small hours, and by that time it may be wise to prefer the salad anyway. Most years, I've noticed that GFS switches suppliers for iceberg lettuce around December or January, and the salad in local restaurants improves noticeably. (This is the kind of fine, sensitive observation that makes most people tingle with ennui. I shoulda beena poet.)

Croutons (crunchy brown right square prisms of deep-fried bread, very popular) are available on Tuesday and Sundays. Research for this entry is ongoing, and in Fall 2004 they shuffled the options a little bit, but I wanted to share our findings in real time.

I wasn't sure, so one time I asked Mario (the third-shift cashier-and-seater for most nights) whether he pronounced his name ``Mario or Mario?'' He answered no, he pronounced it ``Mario.'' It's a good thing we didn't conduct that conversation in ASCII.

NICMOS
Near-Infrared (NIR) Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer. Homesite here. Technical description this page.

NICS
NATO Integrated Communications System.

NICTD
Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District. Trains from Chicago, IL, to South Bend, IN. Cf. Metra.

NICU
Neonate Intensive Care Unit (ICU). A likely destination for ELBW newborns. That probably about does it for useful related information in this glossary, but the Apgar score entry might amuse some of you sickkos (sickkoes?).

NIDA
National Institute on Drug Abuse. They're against it. Part of NIH.

NIDCR
National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research. Part of the US NIH.

NIDDK
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Part of the US NIH.

NIDDM
Non-Insulin-Dependent Diabetes Mellitus (DM, q.v.). ``Adult-onset'' or type-II diabetes.

NIDR
Network Information Discovery and Retrieval.

NIDRR
National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. It's part of the -- whoa! Part of the US Department of Education (under the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, a charge of the Undersecretary of Education), not part of NIH.

NIE
National Intelligence Estimate. I'd say 100, shortly after the obligatory periodic renorming.

Oh wait -- it's a technical term. It's used by the US CIA (the CIA based in DC, not the one in NY), intended to mean ``Estimation by National Intelligence Service'' (capitalization for impact and prestige only) and actually meaning ``opinion of a single memo-writer, based on analysis that consists of ignoring data that contradicts opinion.''

NIEO
New International Economic Order. On May 1, 1974, the UN General Assembly, at the end of its Sixth Special Session, adopted by consensus two resolutions entitles ``Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order'' and ``Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order.'' As my Uncle Fritz would have commented, they were printed on very good paper.

NIEHS
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of NIH.

NIEL
Non-Ionizing Energy Loss.

Nielsen ratings
The rating is the number of homes with the program tuned in, expressed as a percentage of all homes with televisions, whether or not they are in use. The share is the percentage of televisions in use tuned to a program.

NIF
National (US) Ignition Facility. The ``ignition'' contemplated is of controlled fusion. The main NIF project is a 192-beam 1.8 MJ laser. As of early 2006, NIF was 80% complete and on schedule for full operability in mid-2009.

The Green Scissors lobby (``Cutting Wasteful and Environmentally Harmful Spending'') has a scientifically ignorant protest against it on line.

NIFC
(US) National Interagency Fire Center. In Boise, Idaho, where there's another way to bake potatoes. NIFC is generally not in favor of ignition.

NIFF
Notation Interchange File Format. A standard digital format for the representation of standard musical notation. An open standard.

NIGTC
New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich.).

NIH
National Institutes of Health.

NIH
Not Invented Here. As in ``NIH syndrome.'' Interestingly, then, since the NIH syndrome is a mental problem, it should be a matter for the NIMH. The NIH syndrome is the prejudice that the company has all the relevant expertise and should ignore outside tinkerers and dilettantes. For example, on the advice of its expert panel, the Telegraph Company (which later became Western Union) turned down Alexander Graham Bell's offer to buy the rights to the telephone for $100,000. The in-house experts realized that it was an unreliable, unpromising toy that could never be made to work over long distances and that no one would ever want anyway.

A trivial logical corollary of the proposition that what was NIH is no good is the proposition that if it is any good, then it was invented here. This is the fundamental intellectual reflex of the Microsoft Corporation.

NII
They used to give prizes. I don't remember who ``they'' were, but they gave up the domain name. Oh! I know what to do! Go over to The Internet Archive and paste the URL (http://www.gii-awards.com/winners.htm) into ``The Wayback Machine.'' Ah-hah: NII stands (stood?) for the National Information Infrastructure. The site featured Vice President Albert Gore, and was abandoned some time in 2000. Didn't we have an election that year?

NIIP
Net International Investment Position. The NIIP of a country is the value of foreign assets owned by its residents minus the value of its assets owned by nonresidents.

NIIIP
National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols.

NIJ
National Institute of Justice. A ``component'' of the US Office of Justice Programs (OJP).

I have before me a physical copy of a research report entitled ``The Sexual Victimization of College Women.'' Naturally, I was greatly disappointed that it lacked any racy anecdotal data or illustrations, but it seems to be a fair-minded study by disinterested researchers. (Yaaawn.) See here, the first paragraph of the Conclusions bends over backwards to be balanced. It begins

The sexual victimization of college students has emerged as a controversial issue, pitting feminist scholars who claim that the sexual victimization of women is a serious problem against conservative commentators who claim that such victimization is rare and mostly a fictitious creation of ideologically tainted research. ...

It's too bad the scholars don't have any feminist commentators to lend them any moral support. It sure must be lonely on that half of the political spectrum. Further, when you consider that there are apparently no scholars on the conservative side of the argument, it's surprising that government-funded researchers bravely pretend that they can continue to regard the contending sides in the debate as intellectually or even morally equal. Of course, this was a scientific study, so any bias on the part of the researchers would be irrelevant because it could not possibly affect the study at any stage. I mean, contrariwise, if it could affect the study, then it wouldn't be very scientific, so it didn't. That's logic.

You can download your own PDF version or ASCII text file from a listings page at the NCJRS.

[column]

Nike
Greek goddess of victory; 20th century godess of footwear.

Nike
A charitable organization that raises money by selling sneakers made in Korea at many times their cost of manufacture, and which donates much of the proceeds to individual professional athletes or to the athletic programs of `amateur' university athletes as ``advertising royalties.''

nil
A noun that means nothing. That's not as strange as it sounds. It also functions as an adjective and adverb.

Niles
The name of cities in southwest Michigan (on the Saint Joseph River, and on the Indiana border) and in northeastern Ohio. Both cities were named for Hezekiah Niles (1777-1839). He achieved fame as the editor of the Niles Weekly Register, which he published from 1811 to 1836, and which was one of the most influential magazines of the US in its day. I can't think of any locality that was named for anyone else famous only or primarily for his work as a journalist or commentator.

The Niles in Michigan is close to where I live, so it's mentioned at various entries in this glossary. Ring Lardner, a nationally famous writer, was a native of Niles. A scrap of his writing, and indications of how he is commemorated, can be found at this GF entry. Niles is part of the loosely defined region known as Michiana, but that entry doesn't say much about Niles itself. Until Indiana adopted DST, Michiana was split through the middle by a kind of time zone boundary, and that's how Niles gets a mention at that entry. Pokagon was a nineteenth-century Indian chief in the area. There's some local color from the Depression era at the entry for ``Shave and a haircut, two bits.'' Southwestern Michigan College has a campus in Niles, and that's what this SMC entry is about.

Niles is also the name of a township in Cook County, Illinois, comprising northwest suburbs of Chicago. It's not known definitely how it got its name, but it was established in 1850, the year after the Niles Register finally ceased publication. The Village of Niles gets its name from the township; it's scrunched into the southwest corner of the township. (``Village'' was descriptive when Niles was incorporated in 1899 and it had a population of 500. The population was estimated at almost 29,000 in 2007. The village of Skokie (population 63,348 in the 2000 census) was incorporated as Niles Centre in 1888. The center of the township does in fact lie within it. The spelling was changed to Niles Center around 1910, and in 1940, to avoid confusion with the Village of Niles, it was renamed the Village of Skokie.

There is a Town of Niles in Cayuga County, New York (pop. 1,208 in the 2000 census). It was carved out of the Town of Sempronius (founded 1799).

There's a Niles Canyon in the San Francisco Bay area of California. There was a town of Niles in that canyon. I suppose the name dates from around the time of the gold rush of 1849, or not long after, so it was probably named after Hezekiah Niles or his Weekly or both as well. Another possibility is that it was named after one of the eastern Nileses by someone who came from there. The town of Niles eventually joined the towns of Centerville, Irvington, Mission San Jose, and Warm Springs to form the city of Fremont, and each of these is still an identifiable district of Fremont. Here's a link to the Niles district of Fremont, California.

NILIE
National Initiative for Leadership and Institutional Effectiveness. ``In the 21st century, the successful institutions of higher education will be those that are learning new ways of communicating with and motivating faculty, staff, administration and students.'' Whoa, NILIE! And here I thought it would be the ones with the best football programs. ``By conducting research on leadership and institutional effectiveness using specialized surveys, NILIE assists institutions in developing strategies that improve student success through collaborative leadership.''

NIM
National Institute of Metrology. There's one in China, so-called in English.

NIM
Nuclear Instrumentation Module (an electronic instr. standard).

NIMA
National Infomercial Marketing Association. ``In August, 1990, nine industry leaders formed the National Infomercial Marketing Association, an organization whose objective was to ensure that all infomercials met the very highest standards of excellence and credibility'' ... wait for it ...``attainable.''

``[O]fficially changed its name in May 1994 to NIMA International.'' Also now represents television shopping companies and short-form direct response marketers. Oh joy.

``To eliminate confusion, NIMA International would prefer to be referred to as, `the association that represents the worldwide electronic retailing industry.' Please do not refer to NIMA as the National Infomercial Marketing Association.'' You could call them vermin, if only that weren't unfairly insulting to rats.

NIMBY
Not In My Back Yard. This acronym is not likely to appear on signs carried by protesters at the town council meeting, despite the admirable degree of compression. The term is used, instead, as the name of a situation or an attitude. The situation is that certain necessary or desired facilities (dumps for nuclear and other waste, community-based homes for the slow, low-income housing) are inconvenient or unwelcome no matter where they are sited. (The ultimate logical conclusion of seriously avoiding the NIMBY situation is BANANA.) The attitude is ``I don't care where you put it, so long as it's [NIMBY]!'' Depending on how you view the merits or reasonableness of the objection, the acronym is either sympathetic or pejorative. (It's usually a pejorative noun.)

Nim Chimpsky
A play on the name Noam Chomsky; a chimp who was taught a human sign language. To what degree he learned, or could have learned, is the subject of controversy. Chomsky has also been a subject of controversy.

Noam Chomsky's nonpolitical thoughts are less controversial. Widely though not universally accepted is his position that the ability to use language is uniquely human, with the proviso that true language has an indefinitely productive grammar: a user can apply linguistic rules to express new thoughts with old words. (New to him, her, or it, at least.) Chomsky is a philosopher, so he shuns experiment and reasons from what he supposes he might find if, God or Whatever forbid, he ever tried an experiment. Others are not so constrained.

The first modern tests to determine whether a non-human animal could learn to produce a human language were conducted with chimps and spoken languages. (Produce, that is, as a communication of the ideas the language is intended to communicate, and not as parroted speech.) In the 1930's, W.N. and L.A. Kellogg raised a baby chimpanzee named Gua together with their own infant son Donald. The project began when Gua was 7 or 8 months old and lasted 9 months; Gua never learned to speak because they tried to teach her English instead of Purtuguese. Okay, joke, but still she never learned to speak. In the 1950s, Keith and Cathy Hayes adopted a female chimp, Viki, and tried to teach her to speak. After three years, she was able to speak three words: mama, papa, and cup. She never learned to say her own name, but that was probably because of the irregular spelling. She also had a heavy whispery accent. Planet of the Apes, this wasn't.

These experiments were not considered successes. Since primate vocal apparatus is substantially less versatile than human, however, it was plausible that the failure of those experiments did not reflect any cognitive deficiency in primates, but just physical impediment. In 1966, R. Allen Gardner and Beatrice Gardner at University of Nevada, Reno, began the first experiment to teach a primate a non-vocal human language. Their Washoe project (named after Washoe County, Nev.), was intended to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimpanzee they named Washoe. Washoe learned over a hundred signs, used them individually in semantically appropriate ways, and apparently even taught a number of them to an infant she adopted. She has been less reliably credited with more sophisticated achievements, but the question remained whether she ever grasped any elements of grammar. She used words together that might be interpreted as compounds (water and bird for swan; I don't know that the bird wasn't near water) and collocations that might be regarded as sentences except that there was apparently no consistent syntactic pattern to the collocations. A subsequent project of Francine Patterson, begun in 1972, taught a female gorilla named Koko to sign hundreds of ASL signs and to understand words of spoken English. She apparently notices rhyme in English and has constructed a number of what seem to be compound nouns.

In order to address more sharply the grammatical question raised by the earlier primate-ASL studies, Herbert S. Terrace began the Nim project. The subject of the study, Nim Chimpsky, was born in 1973 and raised and socialized like a human infant. Nim appeared to learn American Sign Language, and by age four had mastered a 125-sign vocabulary. In the end, however, Terrace was not convinced that Nim had really mastered language. After analyzing more than 20,000 different combinations of signs produced by Nim (this study was far more intensively videotaped than the earlier ones), he concluded that Nim signed mainly to obtain particular rewards and that most of his signed combinations were unoriginal imitations of those uttered by his human teachers, rather than original sentences demonstrating a constructive understanding of ASL's grammar. Terrace wrote an article on the experiment for Psychology Today in 1979: ``How Nim Chimpsky Changed My Mind.''

In the appositely named movie Bananas, Woody Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a nebbish upon whom ill-conceived consumer products are tested. His parents wanted him to become a surgeon like his dad. In one scene, he visits his parents in the operating theater (mom is an OR nurse), and they try on the spot to involve him in the family business. Parents, natural and adoptive, often see their children with eyes blinded by love and hope. Read this ``chat'' with Koko and see what you think.

NIMH
National Institute of Mental Health (Administration: Rockville, MD; Research Facilities in Bethesda, MD and St. Elizabeth's in DC). Conveniently located, if you see what I mean.

There's a Gopher directory as well as a homepage.

NiMo
NIagara-MOhawk. Electric power utility in western New York.

NiMoV
NIckel-MOlybdenum-VAnadium. A popular strong material for generator rotors.

nimporta
One day, after I hung up the phone, my office mate Nobu asked for the meaning of a word I had been using repeatedly. I didn't recognize it in his pronunciation, despite the fact that Japanese and Spanish phonemes are not very different. He wrote out the headword above in romaji. ``Oh,'' I said, ``you mean no importa'' [`it doesn't matter']. Cf. tsuh cay, sin embargo.

NIMT
National Institute of Metrology (Thailand). It's striking how much more compact the Engliosh pages are. Oh -- different information!

NIN
Nine Inch Nails. A nihilistic indie rock band whose site has banners advertising health insurance.

The group name is normally abbreviated with the second en inverted, so the initialism is not just a palindrome but reflection-symmetric. If they didn't mess with the second en, it would be rotation-symmetric (C2 symmetry) instead. There's only an unofficial site yet, but you could try one of the newsgroups: (alt.music.nin) (alt.music.nin.creative) (alt.music.nin.d) (rec.music.industrial).

By the time you read this, their official site may finally be up. Or maybe it's come down already and I missed it.

A backward capital en looks like the Cyrillic letter normally transliterated I. Korn, a metallic punk band out of Southern California, also writes its name KORN with a backwards ar. I have just one link to say about this: ABBA.

A backward-facing ar looks like the Cyrillic letter normally transliterated ia or ya. Toys'R'Us does the same thing as KORN with its ar. Maybe you want to go to SeaRs. (Sounds like ``See youse'' if you've got the accent.)

NINDS
National (US) Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke.

nines
Used to indicate purity. E.g., ``five nines'' means 99.999% pure. (I.e., 0.001% = 10 ppm impurities.) Only slightly less common are expressions like ``three nines seven,'' meaning 99.97% pure.

NINJA
No Income, No Job or Assets. Disqualifications for any sane mortgage; conditions for an initially interest-only loan, with negative amortization and an initial teaser rate. No longer available, I hope.

Niño, El
The (Christ) Child. Name for a meteorological phenomenon that involves higher water surface temperatures in the Pacific. The phenomenon is persistent on year time-scales, and the change from normal to El Niño conditions first becomes noticeable very roughly around Christmas, by fishermen off the coast of Peru, who gave it its name.

NIO
National Intelligence Officer.

NIOSH
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

NIP
Neuroleptic-Induced Parkinsonism.

NIP
Numismatic Indexes Project. Frank Chlebana offers an alternate search form.

NIPC
National Infrastructure Protection Center. You have to question the competence of an organization without the sense to define an index.html page. Aww, shucks -- it's just the FBI, no wonder. So they moved from the old URL and didn't leave a forwarding link. Good move. Cover your tracks.

``Established in February 1998, the NIPC's mission is to serve as the U.S. government's focal point for threat assessment, warning, investigation, and response for threats or attacks against our critical infrastructures. These infrastructures, which include telecommunications, energy, banking and finance, water systems, government operations, and emergency services, are the foundation upon which our industrialized society is based.''

NIPDWR
National (US) Interim Primary Drinking Water Regulation.

NIPER
National Institute for Petroleum and Energy Research. A DoE facility run by BDM-Oklahoma. Partly privatized in 1996.

NIR
Near-IR.

Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech, on NIR absorption spectroscopy.

NIR
Network Information Retrieval.

NIR
NI Railways. ``Rail services in Northern Ireland.''

NIRA
An act of 1933 that allowed companies, subject to government approval, to join in industrial councils which were allowed to do the things that were illegal under antitrust law (set prices, control production). The act required all members to allow unionization of and engage in collective bargaining with their employees. The law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935, as being in violation of the Interstate Commerce clause.

NI Railways
Northern Ireland Railways. Also ``NIR.''

``Northern Ireland Railways was founded in 1968 to operate the railway services of the former Ulster Transport Authority, which in turn had taken over the three private railways (Great Northern Railway, Northern Counties Railway and Co. Down Railway) in Northern Ireland between 1948 and 1957.''

NIRI
National Investor Relations Institute.

NIRSA
National Intramural Recreation Sports Association.

NIS
Netherlands Info Services BV. Dutch news (ANP) in English, but most of the website is accessible by subscription only.

NIS
Network Information {Service | System}.

NIS
New Israeli Shekel. The current (2004) currency of Israel. One hundred agorot equal one shekel. The NIS went into circulation in September 1985, replacing the shekel that had been in circulation from 1980. Before 1980, the national currency was called the lira (pound).

The old shekel suffered through a hyperinflation that reduced its value against the US dollar by a factor of 250 over the six years it was in circulation. One NIS was an exchange for 1000 old shekels.

Nisei
Second-generation Japanese-American. Pronounced approximately ``knee say.'' Singular and plural forms of the noun coincide, because Japanese does not inflect nouns for number. See first-generation entry for some complicating thoughts.

NISO
National (US) Information Standards Organization.

NISOD
National (US) Institute for (college and university) Staff and Organizational Development.

NISS
National Information Services and Systems in the UK. They serve a list of professional bodies in the UK.

NISS
National Institute of Statistical Sciences. ``NISS was established in 1991 by the national statistics societies and the Research Triangle universities [in North Carolina] and organizations, with the mission to identify, catalyze and foster high-impact, cross- disciplinary research involving the statistical sciences.''

NIST
National Institute of Standards and Technology. Used to be NBS. A part of the DOC. Also try this page.

NIT
National Invitational Tournament. This tournament used to be in direct head-to-head competition with the NCAA basketball tournament, trying to get participation by many of the same schools, in the same way that different post-season college bowl games used to compete for the same football teams (before the devising of that brilliant solution known as the BCS). Now the NIT just goes after the teams that didn't get a bracket in the NCAA tournament. There's also a WNIT, although that works somewhat differently.

nitle
Not In The Latest Explorator. The Explorator is a weekly internet bulletin consisting of web links to archaeological news. It usually comes out on Sunday morning. In compiling each edition, David Meadows often comes across items that are not appropriate to Explorator but which nevertheless fall within the very broad range of topics considered appropriate for the classics list (an electronic mailing list for the discussion of classical antiquity and anything else that participants have the audacity to pretend is related to classical antiquity). When he published Explorator, David Meadows often also posted those links to those items separately, to the classics list. (I think that practice pretty much ended during the shot-put blow-up in October 2003. He wants you to read his rogueclassicism blog instead.) The subject heads used to begin with the words ``Not in the latest Explorator'' but this has been abbreviated to ``nitle'' since May or June 2003, around the same time that Meadows stopped using the a.a.h.i.h.l.n.o.o. abbreviation.

Nitox
SiO2 layer underlying nitride layer in ROx process. Rôle in LOCOS is to mask Si during removal of nitride. Vide stress relief oxide.

nitride
Usually refers to silicon nitride.

nitrogen-fixing
There's a center devoted to this stuff, even though I was sure the Stammtisch had resolved all questions on the topic last Friday.

NITS
Network-Independent Transport Service.

NIU
Network Interface Unit.

NIU
Northern Illinois University. There is no Northern I[^s]* University, where I[^s]* is Idaho, Indiana, or Iowa. But for the last, see UNI. Cf. SIU.

NIV
New International Version (of the bible).

NIV
No Intelligence Value. Of no use to spooks.

NIWC
Northern Ireland Women's Coalition. A political party organized a couple of months before the June 1996 vote for representative delegates to all-party peace talks. The term coalition was chosen by the party to emphasize (sorry: emphasise) that it is neither political nor a party.

After all, Aristotle said only that Man is a political animal. (What a beast! Emphasis added; italics, and English for that matter, were more than a millennium away.) Or did he? This is a common translation, but it is clear in context that he meant that man is a social animal. Same problem with his `Poetics.'

NIXSW
Normal Incidence X-ray Standing Wave (surface science technique). See XSW.

NI-1
National ISDN-1.

NI-2
National ISDN-2.

N.J., NJ
New Jersey. USPS abbreviation uses no periods. The ``Garden State.''

Probably the thing that first-time visitors to New Jersey find most surprising is that it is uninhabitable. This is especially surprising when you consider that it's the most densely populated state of the US, but in fact, that's one of the reasons. New Jersey is actually populated by human guinea pigs who are exposed to every available chemical pollutant. It's not a coincidence that two of New Jersey's biggest industries are chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Another reason that New Jersey is uninhabitable is the road system. It's illegal for roads anywhere in the state to be straight for a distance exceeding half a mile. And although the state has an approximately convex shape, the shortest distance between two points in it is usually by a path out to New York or Pennsylvania, around, and back in again.

New Jersey is not a community property state, but for real estate property it sort of works like one.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for New Jersey. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state, including -- ohmigod! -- my home town has a home page. And another! And yet another. This is spooky (and not just because Charles Addams was born and raised in Westfield). When you leave your hometown you want it to remain constant, preserving old folkways -- churning butter by hand, hand-cranking the car, dial phones, rubbing sticks together to start the fire for dinner, that sort of thing.

(There's now an ``official homepage.'') Even my old Boy Scout Troop has a web presence! What is the world coming to?

A much more comprehensive list of towns, libraries and counties is served by New Jersey Communities OnLine.

The latest color scheme for automobile licence plates in New Jersey has a background that starts out white at the bottom and shades smoothly to yellow at the top. This represents smog. (Ohio has white plates shading to reddish browns at the bottom. This represents rust or rich earth and, on recent nonfarm vehicles, makes it easier to distinguish them from Ontario plates for people who can't remember which name is longer.)

In Spanish, New Jersey is normally called Nueva Jersey, where the first word (meaning `new') has its usual Spanish pronunciation. The second word is pronounced neither in English nor according to Spanish rules applied to the English spelling. Instead, it is pronounced in a Spanish approximation of the English. In my dialect of Spanish, for example, which has a zh sound (for ll and most y), ``Jersey'' is pronounced as if it were spelled ``Llersi.'' In other words, not a single consonant or vowel is the same. (The first vowel in Spanish is more open than in the American pronunciation and also has no r coloring. It sounds even further from the British vowel. The r is articulated differently, the s is unvoiced, and the i is more clipped.)

This naturalized pronunciation is used even by Spanish-speakers who are perfectly fluent in English. And that is very natural, but possibly not as some may imagine. An English-speaker who gratuitously pronounces naturalized French words or place names in French sends a signal (possibly not the one intended). Pronouncing France as ``Frrrawnce'' may send the signal that one knows French, and may be received as a signal that one is a pretentious twit. Pronouncing Paris as ``Paree'' is (or was, a mere 80 years ago) an affectionate affectation, a suggestion of fond memories. I don't think that the Spanish pronunciation of Jersey as described in the previous paragraph has much to do with these social phenomena, because for Spanish-speakers, English and the English-speaking lands have never had the kind of intellectual cachet or romantic associations that French and France, respectively, have had for English-speakers. (Granted, the US today has prestige in certain things, but it's not the kind of prestige that rubs off on anyone who happens to speak English.) The reason one uses a Spanish pronunciation of Jersey is either (a) one can't produce an English pronunciation or, (b) more interestingly, it is more comfortable not to switch phonemic systems.

The letter j in Spanish is pronounced like the English h, so one might expect a naturalized spelling to develop. One has: Nueva Yersey. (This spelling implies a final diphthong. For comparison, a common and fairly faithful naturalized Spanish spelling of English okay is okey.) But Yersey seems (from ghits) to be about a hundred times less common than Jersey, and I haven't seen it in major references. Even the English Channel island Jersey and the clothing material jersey have their English spelling in Spanish. In Portuguese, New Jersey is ``Nova Jersey.''

I can see a couple of reasons why Jersey was assigned a feminine gender in both Portuguese and Spanish. Morphology does not offer a firm guide, but I suppose that a final /i/ sound in a toponym suggests the standard feminine -ia ending. (For comparison, Italy is Italia in Spanish, and Turkey is Turquía.) Moreover, the Latin name of the largest English Channel island is Caesarea, which is feminine. (Jersey is widely supposed to be a corruption of this, but there is an alternative etymology I can't find right now, which has the advantage of explaining the -sey in Jersey and Guernsey as a common Germanic or Celtic morpheme. The Latin name of Guernsey is Samia.) For a more problematic case, see NY.

NJAPA
New Jersey Chapter of the American Planning Association.

NJATA
New Jersey Art Therapy Association.

NJB
New Jerusalem Bible. Published in 1985, a revision of the first English-language ``Jerusalem Bible'' (TJB) of 1966. The English-language Jerusalem Bibles followed earlier French versions (1956, rev. 1973), and were in part simply retranslations from the French (though these were ``checked carefully'' against the Hebrew and Greek, of course). These are all Roman Catholic Bibles and include the Apocrypha. The prose is accessibly flat-footed. Like most translations still, it is intended to be read not primarily as literature but as doctrinal nonfiction, and to this end the NJB contains some interpretive notes. The NJB incorporates some formatting innovations over TJB: a single column of text and poetic passages lineated as verse; bold section headings. The 1956 French basis, popularly known as La Bible de Jérusalem, was prepared by the Dominican Biblical School in Jerusalem. I doubted that it had anything to do with Jerusalem; now I shall burn in Hell for eternity.

NJC
National Journalism Center. They're in favor of ``objective journalism,'' as everyone is. Sponsored as they are by Young America's Foundation, their notion of ``objective'' coincides with the MSM's notion of ``nutty right-wing.'' NJC has an amusing little graphic with a small rogues gallery captioned ``NOT NJC Grads.'' The pictures are of Peter Arnett (whose journalism career ended badly at CNN in 1998, and then re-ended badly at NBC in 2003), Stephen Glass (whose journalism career ended badly at The New Republic), Jayson Blair (whose journalism career ended badly at the New York Times), and Dan Rather (whose newsanchor career ended on rather a sour note at CBS).

On its website, NJC has a practice of indicating in bylines the time that a reporter participated in NJC's internship program (I think that's it), the way colleges tag graduates in their alumni newsletters (e.g., ``Greg Myre (NJC spring '83)''). In an archive of articles with no other date information, this can be disorienting.

NJC
Not Just Cows. A ``guide to internet resources in agriculture.'' Very different from TUCOWS.

[column]

NJCA
New Jersey Classical Association.

The NJCA sponsors an e-mail list ``to offer New Jersey classics teachers a forum to discuss and share news about classics, school programs, questions and ideas.'' Subscribe by sending a blank email to <NJCA-subscribe@topica.com>.

The NJCA Fall meeting in 1997 was on November 8, at the Newark Museum. John Bodel of Rutgers gave the keynote address, ``Putting Roman Artisans in Perspective,'' and Susan Auth, Curator of the Classical Collection, gave an introduction to the collection. I suppose. That was the agenda anyway.

The Fall meeting in 1999 was Saturday, October 30. It was held at the High Technology High School in Lincroft -- appropriately enough, since its focus was on the use of computers and the internet.

Research demonstrates that girls named ``Virginia'' are at increased risk of becoming high-school Latin teachers active in their state classical associations. There is no need to panic -- most girls with this name grow up to lead normal, fulfilling lives. Watch out for early warning signs, however, such as going by the nickname ``Ginny.''

NJCAA
National Junior College Athletic Association.

NJCD
National Jewish Council for the Disabled. Seems to be sponsored by NCSY.

[column]

NJCL
National Junior Classical League. A group for high school students of Ancient Greek, Latin and anything else to do with classical antiquity. Main entry at JCL.

NJCRAC
National (US) Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council.

NJHS
National Junior Honor Society. Sort of a junior varsity to the National Honor Society (NHS, q.v.).

There's really no place you can insert the word junior in National Honor Society and have it mean what it's supposed to mean and nothing else.

NJLSA
National Jewish Law Students Association. Founded in 1983.

NJO
New Jersey Online.

NJPAC
New Jersey Performing Arts Center. In Newark. You can probably guess whether that's the Newark in New Jersey or the one in Delaware from the pronunciation. (The one in Delaware uses an ay sound rather than a shwa in the second syllable, and the word has correspondingly more even stress.)

NJPS
National Jewish Population Surveys.

NJPS
New Jersey Paleontological Society. ``[F]ormed in 1991 for the educational and scientific pursuit of Paleontology and related Earth Sciences.''

NJPS
New JPS (version). A Jewish Bible translation (into English) published in 1988 by the Jewish Publication Society. Cf. JPSV.

NJSEA
New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority. It ``was created by the New Jersey legislature in 1971 and is the governing body which oversees the operations of Continental Airlines Arena, Giants Stadium [more at the striKe entry], Meadowlands Racetrack,'' the final resting place of Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa (unmarked), ``Monmouth Park Racetrack in Oceanport, N.J., Atlantic City Convention Center, Historic Boardwalk Hall and the Wildwoods Convention Center.''

Continental Airlines Arena used to be called Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands, after Governor Brendan Byrne, who aggressively promoted New Jersey tourism and pushed the construction of the Meadowlands complex. The arena was financed by bond issues. The budgetary achievement for which Brendan Byrne was better known was getting New Jersey an income tax. I remember a lot of grumbling when Meadowlands Arena, already completed, was renamed for Byrne. When Continental paid to put its own name on it, it was a largely unresented bit of sports meretriciousness.

Some readers will be surprised that New Jersey managed without an income tax until the early 1970's. Most states did without an income tax until the nineteen-sixties. One of the big federal-government ideas of the 1960's was Revenue Sharing. The idea was that state revenues, based principally on sales taxes, were regressive or at least not progressive. Also, due to the regressive base and other causes, state revenue dipped more sharply in a recession, while state expenditures, more heavily weighted to social services and transfers, increased more at the same time. Finally, since states must balance their budgets (on paper, anyway), they have a harder time than the federal government to square the decreased revenue and increased expenditure. Revenue Sharing was direct federal funding of state expenditures, intended to address all these problems.

NJT
New Jersey Transit. To judge by ghits, if you see ``NJT'' it is rather more likely to refer to New Jersey Transit than to the New Jersey Turnpike. However, many misguided people (possibly a majority) abbreviate the New Jersey Turnpike by NJT rather than NJTP.

New Jersey Transit is an operator of commuter trains mostly connecting the New Jersey suburbs and New York City. (A lot of the lines stop in Hoboken; from there you take a PATH train or ferry into the city.) They also have a line connecting Philadelphia with Atlantic City. I'll play it safe and not characterize further -- here's a route map as of May 6, 2002. You can get between Philadelphia and New York by transferring between SEPTA and NJT in Trenton. (I doubt you'd be wanting to stay in Trenton. If you want to stretch your legs, get off at Princeton Junction and take the spur to beautiful Princeton. That spur figures briefly in the Rebecca Goldsmith book mentioned at the trivial entry.)

NJTA
New Jersey Turnpike Authority. A New Jersey government agency that operates the New Jersey Turnpike (NJTP) and the Garden State Parkway (GSPW).

NJTP
Neighborhood Junior Tennis Program. ``[A] non-profit organization located in Sylmar, California. Founded in 1992 by six childhood friends, NJTP provides low-cost group and private lessons to children in our neighborhood.''

NJTP
New Jersey TurnPike. The NJTP and the Garden State Parkway (GSPW) are operated by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority (NJTA).

The NJTP logo consists of lettering and a polygonal frame in white against a green background. Large letters T and P appear in the middle, offset but overlapping, with smaller letters N and J positioned as bookends, and TURNPIKE in tiny caps running between the N and J, across the middle of the TP. Something like this, though the large TP is thicker:

                              PPPPPPPP
                        TTTTTTPTT     P
                            T P       P
                            T PPPPPPPP
                            T P              J
               N    N  T U R N P I K E       J
               NN   N       T P              J
               N N  N       T P         J    J
               N  N N       T            JJJJ
               N   NN                    

It suggests NTPJ, probably abbreviating the word Nturnpikej. Whoever designed this apparently didn't understand how logos should work. He must have wondered why IBM didn't use the more symmetric BIM. To give the devil his due, however, the logo does suggest the general northeast-southwest direction of the Turnpike's main line, through the diagonal offset of the large letters TP and the conforming shape of the frame (an irregular hexagon with opposite sides parallel, made by cutting the upper left and lower right corners of a rectangle). Also, the letters are crowded together and haven't moved in at least forty years, which is a fair description of rush hour traffic. Okay, maybe that's not a good thing. But it does at least strongly suggest that the officially preferred abbreviation is NJTP (which helps avoid confusion with NJ Transit).

P. Simon and A. Garfunkel have described research (counting the cars on the NJTP), and reported a surprising finding: ``They've all come to look for America.'' Maps are available at rest areas (called service areas), which are named after famous unknowns.

(That used to say ``...after obscure luminaries.'' It was a better oxymoron if one attended the original literal senses of the words, but morons like you, dear reader, just didn't ``get it.'' We had no choice but to abase the vocabularary. After all, we wouldn't want to do anything to make anyone feel inadequate.)

NJTPA
New Jersey TurnPike Authority. Reasonable but unofficial abbreviation; use NJTA.

NJTPA
North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority. (The Turnpike Authority is the NJTA. Why can't you people follow instructions!?)

NJVMA
New Jersey Veterinary Medical Association. See also AVMA.

NK
Natural Killer. Evocative name of an indiscriminate (well, okay: ``nonspecific'') lymphocyte.

NK
Not Known. I suppose it's not surprising this acronym isn't more widely used. If patterns hold, those more likely to need it are less likely to know it.

NKDA
No Known Drug Allergies. Notice the crucial qualifier.

NKF
National Kidney Foundation.

NKJV
New King James Version. The inspired beauty of the KJV language, but with modern spellings and verb conjugations.

NKU
Northern Kentucky University.

NKVD
Narodny Komitet Vnutrennih Del. USSR `People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs.'

.nl
(Domain name extension for) Netherlands. This means low-lands (you know -- nether, low?) but English ``Low Countries'' and the corresponding French Pays Bas refers to Belgium (.be) and Luxembourg (.lu) as well.

Country code 31 for direct-dial phone calls.

In 1839, Thomas Hood wrote that ``Holland...lies so low they're only saved by being dammed.'' I also quote the incorrigible punster at a Boyle.

NL
National Laboratory.

``Welcome to my National Laborratorrry,'' says Uncle Frankensam. ``I have crreated a beautiful monsterr!''

NL
National League (of baseball). The ``National League of Professional Base Ball [sic] Clubs'' was formed in New York on February 1, 1876. The older of the two component leagues of North American Major League Baseball (MLB). The one that still does not use the designated hitter.

NL
Natural Language. When people explicitly specify natural language, they're often about the business of NLP.

NL
NeuroLeptic.

NL
New Line. See LF.

NL
Postal abbreviation for the Canadian (.ca) province of Newfoundland and Labrador. For a bit of history, see the entry for the earlier postal abbreviation NF (official to Oct. 21, 2002; usable at least for six months afterwards).

The capital of Newfoundland and Labrador is St. John's; it's the only provincial or state capital in all of the Americas with an apostrophe in its name. (FWIW, the province of New Brunswick has a Saint John County which consists essentially of the port city Saint John and a few miles of coast on either side.)

NLA
Norfolk Landscape Archaeology. A Gressenhall-based organization that records and maps finds in Norfolk (a county in England). The NLA's staff includes 20 archaeologists. More archaeological objects are found in Norfolk than any other county in Britain; in 2004 there were over 27,000. All members of the reserves are required to maintain a metal detector in good working condition and ready for immediate use. One sentence in this paragraph is false.

This is probably the ideal entry at which to point out that the UK spelling of artifacts is artefacts.

NLB
National (UK) Library for the Blind.

NLBMDA
National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association. It was formed in 1916 in Chicago as the National Retail Lumber Dealers Association.

NLC
National Learning Corporation. ``You've come to the right place to search for your test preparation books.'' (To tell you the truth, I hadn't realized that I'd misplaced them.)

Many study guides and cram courses are available for the well-known admissions tests and professional licensing exams, but NLC seems to be the organization that helps one prepare for civil service exams. For example, I have before me C-1727 of its Career Examination Series (CES): Assistant Supervisor (Elevators and Escalators) Passbook. (Plastic bound -- lies flat for study ease!)

They also have supervisor and foreman volumes for elevators and escalators. It's no wonder they claim their passbooks (R) are ``Preferred By More Test Takers.''

I got my copy of Assistant Supervisor (Elevators and Escalators) Passbook (copyright 1991) off the discount table at Borders. It had been reduced from $29.95 to $15.00 to $1. This time they skipped the 75%-off stage. I also picked up a bunch of decade-old conference proceedings from Springer-Verlag for a buck apiece. I couldn't resist, Springers are usually very dear. Soon you'll be reading entries like BIER, which I found on page 566 of Computer Aided Systems Theory -- EUROCAST '91 : A Selection of Papers from the Second International Workshop on Computer Aided Systems Theory, Krems, Austria, April 1991 Proceedings, F. Pichler and R. Moreno Díaz (Eds.), published as volume 585 of Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series (originally $111.95, now priced to move at $1). I'm not putting this down -- half the publications in my CV are older than this.

One thing the Springers and the NLC's have in common is that they didn't require a lot of effort on the part of the publishing house. The NLC thing looks like fuzzy photocopies of typed pages, with bold sans-serif headings applied separately (the tape backing shows through). The Springer volumes were prepared by the contributors, each set of notes in its own font. Springer has some really excellent professional books in mathematics and physics, but their business in conference proceedings is pure slumming.

I also picked up How To Run For Public Office And Win : A Step By Step Guide. It started out at a price intermediate between the NLC and the big Springer volumes -- $54.95 -- but at a buck it was clearly the worst deal. It's the thinnest of the three (ca. 85 pp., about a third the page count of the Elevators volume and a tenth that of the EUROCAST '91 volume). It has the best font, and pictures, but the grammar is not all there. It's not as technically sophisticated as the book for Assistant supervisors (Elevators and Escalators) either. On page 79, the candidate learns that being drunk at a public gathering with reporters is definitely a bad idea. Still, perhaps the authors know their readership.

You'd figure that there ought to be a ``Running for Public Office for Dummies'' book, but a search at Amazon.com yields only

Books Search Results: we were unable to find exact matches for your search for "Dummies public office".


Close matches for this search: Would you like to search again?

I notice that NLC's database search brings up links to Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, but not to Borders.

It may be that for partial matches, Barnes and Noble has a better algorithm than Amazon.com (or worse, depending on what you seek). A search on ``Dummies Public Office'' there turned up books on Public Relations, Public Speaking, and Successful Presentations in the for-Dummies series, and a similar search yielded a nice assortment from the Complete Idiot's Guide and Pocket Idiot's Guide series.

JACKPOT! Additional out-of-print titles yields biographies of FDR and Woodrow Wilson.

Borders was mentioned in an article I read in CHE recently (July 20, 2001 issue). It turns out that 2000-2001 was a cruddy year for university presses. The fiscal year ended in June, and hard numbers are either unavailable or embarrassed secrets, but nobody met sales targets and most presses lost money. In recent years Borders had boosted UP distribution by carrying a lot of their titles, but no more. I'll be keeping an eye on those bargain tables.

NLC
National Library of Canada. French: Bibiothèque nationale du Canada.

NLCS, N.L.C.S.
National League (NL) Championship Series. Used to be best-of-five, back when each league of Major League Baseball (MLB) consisted of two divisions (NL East and NL West in this case). Then, it was played between the two division winners (the teams with the best regular-season records in their respective divisions). The winner of the series, the NL champion team, would go on to meet the AL champion in the World Series.

After an expansion and a reorganization in 1995, there are three divisions, and the NL champion is determined in an NL playoff series that consists of two rounds: the NL Division Series (NLDS), best-of-five, followed by the NLCS, best-of-seven.

The American League champion is chosen the same way (ALDS, ALCS).

If you need a review, all of the preceding information is repeated with slightly different wording at the LCS entry.

NLDS, N.L.D.S.
National League Division Series. The first round of the NL playoff series of Major League Baseball (MLB), explained in the NLCS entry above. Four teams are paired in best-of-five series to determine which two teams go to the NLCS.

The teams that meet in the NLDS are the winners of the three divisions (East, Central, West) and one wildcard team. The division champion is the team with the best W-L record in its division. (The division championship is called the penant, and competition for this, heating up toward the end of the regular season, is called the penant race.) All regular-season games count equally in determining the division champion, whether the games are against an intra-division rival, a team outside the division but in the same league, or in another division. (For a long time before the reorganization into 3+3 divisions, there were no interleague games during the regular season apart from the All-Star game.) The wildcard is the team with the best record among the remaining teams -- i.e., the second-place team with the best record.

If, at the end of the regular season, two teams are tied for first place in a division or two second-place teams (possibly in the same division) have identical records, then a single play-off game to determine the division champion or league wildcard. I don't know what happens when three or more teams are tied this way. We've come pretty close to having three or more potential wildcards since the 1995 reorganization.

[In (American) football, there are fewer games and schedules are much more rigid, so ties are broken by formulas, in which games count differently depending on whether they were played against opponents in or out of the division, etc.]

Home field advantage in the division series and the championship series are both determined by the same rules:

  1. The wildcard team never has home-field advantage.
  2. Priority among division champions is determined on the basis of regular-season won-lost record.

[column]

NLE
National (US) Latin Exam. Sponsored by the American Classical League (ACL) and the Junior Classical League (JCL). Primarily for high school students in the US and Canada. Not a requirement for admission to anyplace I've heard of, just an academic competition. There are other exams sponsored by the same organizations, in Classical Greek (NGE) and mythology.

(The URL has varied a bit; make sure you're using the correct one. It moved to <http://nle.aclclassics.org> on April 22, 2002.)

NLE
National Library of Education.

NLEA
Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990. Requires all packaged foods to carry labels with nutrition information. There are a fair number of exceptions, and the FDA has authority to make exceptions and additions, even on a regional basis. You could read a summary of the act, part of the extensive legislative information resources here.

NLF
National Labor Federation. Also abbreviated NATLFED. Not what you'd expect: Followers of the late Eugenio (`Gino') Perente-Ramos (b. Gerald William Doeden; d. 1995, age 59), who are estimated to number in the hundreds, sometimes call themselves the Provisional Communist Party or the National Labor Federation. As you might imagine, they're not affiliated with anyone I am aware of.

Their indoctrination scheme involves cutting people off from their friends and family and

forcing them to fill out unending amounts of completely meaningless paperwork!

I know I'd crack. They also collect illegal firearms.

Source: NYTimes p. A1, 1996.11.13 Here's an article from a few days later. Part of an unsympathetic trove.

NLHEP
National Lung Health Education Program. A Denver-based nonprofit.

NLJ
National Law Journal.

NLKT, N.L.K.T.
Native-Language Kid Talk. One strategy for the FLES classroom.

NLM
National Library of Medicine, part of NIH. Also searchable from Achoo.

NLMA
National Lumber Manufacturers' Association. I see evidence that they were in existence in 1915 and 1964, and various times in between. I haven't figured out what happened to them, but I know they didn't become the NLBMDA.

NLO
Next-to-Leading Order. The second nonvanishing order of contributions to some calculated quantity. Preceded by LO (more discussion there) and followed by NNLO.

NLO
NonLinear Optics. Here there's a listing of nonlinear indices of refraction.

NLP
Natural-Language Processing. That is, unnatural language processing. The NLP term is usually expanded without the hyphen, because semantic details like negation will be dealt with during a later phase of research. A brief online history is available. See ``Progress in the Application of Natural Language Processing to Information Retrieval Tasks,'' The Computer Journal, 35, #3, pp. 268-277 (1992).

An Annotated list of resources on statistical natural language processing and corpus-based computational linguistics is served by Christopher Manning.

NLPA
National Livestock Producers Association.

NLPA
Newfoundland and Labrador Publishers' Association.

NLPID
Network Level Protocol ID.

NLQ
Near Letter Quality. Back around 1985, dot-matrix printers were the affordable option for hardcopy output from personal personal computers. (The business alternative for printing on letter-size paper was daisy-wheel printers. Laser and ink-jet printers were futurama.) If I remember correctly, eight-dot matrices (8 dot positions per line, covering the range from the bottom of the descenders to the top of the risers) had been standard, and 23-dot matrices were coming out. The latter could give you ``NLQ'' at low speed.

NLR
Nationaal Lucht- en Ruimtevaartlaboratorium. Dutch: `National Air- and Space-travel laboratory' (official English: ``National Aerospace Laboratory NLR'').

NLR
Noise Level Reduction. I think that's a good thing. A good thing. Can't you hear me? I SAID IT'S A GOOD THING.

NLRA
National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935 after the NIRA was found unconstitutional. Established the NLRB. Major amendments were the Taft-Hartley Act [which is more or less chapter seven of title 29 (Labor) of the US Code (29 USC 7)]. the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959) [chapter eleven of the same title (29 USC 11)]. The Taft-Hartley Act is officially the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, and the Landrum-Griffin Act is the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959. The Taft-Hartley Act is described in this glossary at the closed shop entry.

Originally, in keeping with the intentions of the Democratic Congress and President (FDR) that brought it into being, the NLRA did not allow public-sector unions to bargain collectively for their employees. In 1962, President Kennedy's (JFK's) executive order 10988 extended this privilege to postal workers and some smaller categories of federal employees.

NLRB
National Labor Relations Board. Agency that administers the NLRA.

NLRG
Narrow-Line Radio Galaxy. See RG.

NLS
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (Part of the US Library of Congress.)

NLS
Network License Server. For site-licensed software.

NLT
Not Later Than. Frequently interposed between ``RSVP'' and a date.

[column]

NLTRW
National (US) Latin Teacher Recruitment Week. Sponsored by the ACL with some participation by the APA. The first one: March 3-7, 2003.

``Throughout North America there is a serious need for Latin Teachers. Each year, for lack of teachers, existing programs are cancelled, thriving programs are told they cannot expand, and schools that want to add Latin are unable to do so.''

NLU
Northeast Louisiana University.

nm
NanoMeter. According to international standards, this word should normally be in lower case, sentence-initial capitalization aside.

Ten angstroms.

NM
See next entry.

n-m, N-M
Neiman Marcus. I learned this in a chat room, as I was dying of boredom. N-M itself uses ``NM.''

If Neiman were pronunced according to English spelling, uh, rules, the first syllable would be pronounced like the English words nay and neigh instead of like knee. (In German it's like English nigh.)

A search on the words pronunciation and pronounced at the n-m website only produced the information that Nambé, which ``creates simple, elegant designs in metal, porcelain, and crystal'' that are not inexpensive, was ``[c]hristened for a tiny New Mexican [next entry] village near Sante Fe, where the company was founded in 1951, is ``pronounced nom-BAY.''

N.M., NM
New Mexico. USPS abbreviation.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for New Mexico. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.

New Mexico is a community property state.

The westernmost ``New'' state.

NM
Noise Margin. A measure of the noise tolerance of a logic gate. Usually a voltage noise margin is meant, but for some kinds of logic (e.g., I²L) a current noise margin is more appropriate.

NMA
National Medical Association.

NMA
National Mining Association.

NMA
Network Management and Administration. Say, man.

NMA
Network Monitoring and Analysis. Say, mon.

NMAB
National Materials Advisory Board. It is clear from their under-construction homepage that this is an organization which holds meetings. Part of the NAS.

NMAI
National Museum of the American Indian. Part of the Smithsonian Institution.

NMAM
NIOSH Manual of Analytical Methods.

NMBS
Nationale Maatschappij der Belgische Spoorwegena. Flemish name of Belgian National Railway. French name is Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Belges (SNCB).

NMC
New Muon Collaboration.

NMCA
National Muscle Car Association. A drag-racing association. Vide goracing.com, VROOM.

NMD
National Missile Defense. A surface-launched ABM system proposal kicking around the US government since the mid-90's.

NMD
NeuroMotor Disease.

NMD
Nuclear Medicine Department at UB.

NMDA
N-Methyl-D-Aspartate.

NMEN
National Materials Exchange Network. Network communication resource to enable the recycling of industrial materials and waste by putting in contact the people for whom a material is poison with those for whom it is meat. Won an NII award.

NMF
Norges Musikkorps Forbund. Well, they've got a ``hjelp'' page, but not an English one. It looks like the name means `Norwegian Marching Band Association.' According to this page served by NBTA Europe, NMF is the NBTA Norway.

NMFS
National Marine Fisheries Services. A division of NOAA.

NMH
Noise Margin (NM) -- High.

NMHA
National Mental Health Association.

NMHAG
National Mental Health Association of Georgia.

NMHU
New Mexico Highlands University.

NMI
National {Measurement|Metrology} Institute.

NMI
(Australian) National Measurement Institute. NMI (not ``the NMI,'' apparently) was established on July 1, 2004, formed from the National Measurement Laboratory (NML), the National Standards Commission (NSC) and the Australian Government Analytical Laboratories (AGAL), and continues their work.

nmi
Nautical MIle[s]. Defined to be exactly 1.852 kilometers.

The most convenient universal property of ``1.852'' that I can think of is that 8, 5, and 2 are lined up on decimal keypads. Hmmm. Maybe there's more. The meter was originally defined to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the meridian through Paris. In other words, the length of the quadrant through Paris. (Some people thought it would make sense to measure longitude away from this meridian; I can't imagine what they might have had against a zero meridian through London.) There was a big scientific project to determine this distance, although they didn't actually go to the North Pole or the equator. If no one had measured the exact distance to the pole, I guess we'd never have learned the speed of light, so this must have been an important project. Let's suppose that the measurement was accurate, and that the earth is spherical to a good approximation. In that case, the 10,000 km is the distance corresponding to 90 angular degrees of lattitude, 90° of longitude measured at the equator, or 90° measured along any great circle on Earth's surface. That would mean that 59.9952 nmi would correspond to one degree, or about one nautical mile to one minute of angle. Come think of it, one nautical mile per minute of angle was the original definition.

Since one inch is defined (now) to be 2.54 cm, an ordinary (i.e., a universal American) mile is 1.609344 km, so 1 nmi = 1.1507794 mi., approximately.

If you came to this entry as part of the ``Meter Definition History Tour Package,'' I'm afraid I have some bad news. Combs with suspiciously sharp teeth were found in the carry-on baggage of tourists at the next few entries, so as a precaution the tour will proceed directly to the current definition, described at the entry for c, the speed of light.

NML
(Australian) National Measurement Laboratory. Some time before 1983, when CSIRO was created, NML became an entity within its Division of Physics, at Sydney. On July 1, 2004, its staff, facilities, and functions were incorporated into NMI when that was established. At least until the transition is complete, the old website is useful.

NML
Network Management Layer.

NML
Noise Margin (NM) -- Low.

NMM
(UK) National Maritime Museum.

NMM
National Motorsports Marketing.

NMMI
New Mexico Military Institute. ``Founded in 1891, NMMI is a co-educational, residential, college preparatory high school and two-year junior college in a military setting, located in Roswell, New Mexico.''

Roswell, eh? Hmmm. Military? Mmm.

NMOP
National Mail-Order Pharmacy.

[Image: N MOSFET schematic cross section]

nMOS, NMOS
N-channel MOSFET, and any of the logic families based on it (which differ primarily in the nature of load in the gates--depletion nMOS transistor, enhancement nMOS, or resistor). ROM is most simply implemented in nMOS logic (see next entry, nMOS ROM).

Pronounce it carefully (``EN moss''), it about rhymes with MNOS.

nMOS ROM
The two main types of ROM based on nMOS are NOR and NAND. NAND is denser, but for a given set of design rules its access time is longer and grows more rapidly with the number of rows. NOR is less dense but has shorter access times. NOR memory can be programmed much later in fabrication, as described at the PMP entry.

In both memory types, each row (or ``word line'') is a conducting strip serving as a common gate for all the transistors in that row -- one per column, or bit line (vide BL). In NOR memory, all memory locations -- all transistors -- of a bit line are connected in parallel, like the drive of an nMOS NOR gate. In NAND memory, all transistors of a BL are connected in series.

NMP
Network Management Protocol.

NMR
NATO Military Representative (to SHAPE).

NMR
Neonatal Mortality Rate. The number of neonatal (first 28 days of life) deaths per thousand livebirths.

NMR
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Typically, this refers to the absorption resonance of spin-split nuclear energy levels. Note that, since the gyromagnetic ratio is inversely proportional to particle mass, at any given magnetic field the nuclear/nucleon magnetic moment is on the order of a thousand times smaller than the atomic/electronic resonance frequencies. Thus, with EPR resonance at microwave frequencies, NMR is at radio frequencies.

NMR became the basis of an important new medical imaging technology in the 1980's. However, the word nuclear seems to have spooked a number of people, because what was originally called ``NMR imaging `` became ``MRI.'' (Then again, see preceding NMR item.)

Here was some instructional material from Virginia Tech.

The University of Florida offers the electronic journal Magnetic Resonance, which it apparently also calls its NMR Information Server. They also serve some reference links. UCB also serves a page of links.

There's a newsgroup.

Here's some more.

Here's a historical bit served by Varian.

There's even an NMR acronyms library.

NMR
There's a Van Halen song from 1983, appearing on their 1984 album, with a refrain that sounds like ``NMR'' (nonrhotic British accent) or ``enema.'' It's hard to tell accents in song. For personal reasons, I prefer to think it sounds like NMR. It's ``Panama.'' For related considerations, see the mondegreen entry: deconstruction.

Actually, the band sang it with accent on the final syllable (actually a long high note), so it sounded more like the pronunciation of the name Panamá in Spanish.

NMRT
New Members Round Table (of the ALA). This is your first round table, huh? Well, there are others, like SRRT.

NMS
National Medal of Science. According to the American Society for Engineering Education [ASEE], ``...established by Congress in 1959 as a Presidential award, has recognized 362 of America's leading scientists and engineers. The evaluation criteria is based on the total impact an individual's work has had on the present state of physical, chemical, biological, mathematical, engineering, behavioral or social sciences.''

Dang! If I had known about this desirable award, I would have worked at least 40% harder to find a cure for cancer!

NMS
Network Management { System | Station }.

NMS
Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome.

NMT
National Medal of Technology. According to the American Society for Engineering Education [ASEE], ``...established by Congress in 1980 as part of the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Act as a Presidential award, has recognized 108 individuals and eight companies whose accomplishments have generated jobs and created a better standard of living. Their accomplishments best embody technological innovation and support the advancement of global U.S. competitiveness.''

NMT
Ny MediaTeknik. Swedish for New Media Technology, probably. But wait...

[Phone icon]

NMT
Nordic Mobile Telephone. This site gives one company's not disinterested description. A standard developed by Nordic Post and Telephone Administrations. Less efficient than GSM but provides wider coverage for sparsely populated areas like, uh, Sweden!

NMTIA
New Mission Terrace Improvement Association. Mission Terrace is a neighborhood located in south central San Francisco. NMTIA is a volunteer organization dedicated to local issues.

NMVMA
New Mexico Veterinary Medical Association. See also AVMA.

NMVT
Network Management Vector Transport. Management protocol for SNA-based (IBM) network management systems.

nn
A unix program for browsing newsgroups.

NN
Nearest Neighbor.

NN
Network Node.

NN
Neural Net[work]. A network of nonlinear nodes patterned to mimic features of biological neural systems. Back in the 1980's and even to this day, for all I know, unimaginative researchers would churn out neural net papers by the bushel, each one a slight perturbation of a thought different from the next. A guy I knew who got his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering had a long list of conference publications from this sort of industry. Normally one would be proud and happy to have many publications before the doctorate, but he actually omitted a number of his papers because he found them embarrassing and expected that they would be looked askance by prospective employers. Of course, there were also a few worthwhile papers in the field. One NN paper that I haven't read is ``Use of neural networks to predict roasting time and weight loss for beef joints,'' Food Service Technology, vol. 1, #1, pp. 53-59 (2001).

NN
Nucleon-Nucleon (interaction).

NNE
Vide compass directions.

NNELL
National Network for Early Language Learning.

NNEPA
Northern New England Philosophical Association. Founded in 1974.

NNFB
Nonlinear Negative FeedBack. I said STOP!!! (Cf. IUBAC.)

NNFF
National NeuroFibromatosis Foundation, Inc.

NNI
Network-to-Network Interface.

NN/LM, NNLM
National Network of Libraries of Medicine.

UB's Health Sciences Library (HSL) (q.v.) is a member.

NNLO
Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order. The third nonvanishing order of contributions to some calculated quantity. Preceded by LO (more discussion there) and NNLO.

NNN
Next-Nearest Neighbor.

nnortgage
Mortgage, spelled so as to defeat spam filters. More at the REFINANCE YOUR VIAGRA entry.

NNPC
Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Sure, it's real. A lot more real than the money you will realize helping a conman team to launder NNPC secret funds.

NNPT
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Usually written NPT.

NNR
(USENET) Network News Reader for IBM CMS.

NNRTI, nNRTI
Non-Nucleoside Reverse-Transcriptase Inhibitors.

NNS
Non-Native Speaker (of English or some other language).

NNT
Number Needed to Treat. The number of people who have to take a treatment in order for one person to benefit directly. (A treatment, for the purposes of this definition, is understood very generally: receiving a vaccination, following a particular diet, and following a particular drug regimen all qualify as treatments.) The specific term abbreviated by NNT has apparently been promoted by epidemiologists since 1988.

The idea is that many preventive treatments (see above) are prescribed for healthy people who aren't likely to suffer the malady being ``prevented.'' In this case, it was conventional to distinguish absolute and relative risk reduction. If p0 is the risk without the treatment (that is, the probability of contracting the disease or what have you, over a specified period of time, yadda, yadda, yadda), and p1 is the risk with the treatment (taken over a specified period and/or in a specified dose, yadcetera), then p0 - p1 is the absolute reduction in risk, and this quantity divided by p0 is the relative reduction in risk.

[One of the more important yaddas is that in a properly designed clinical study of a drug's effectiveness, p0 is determined for a control group that receives a placebo, and whether a study participant is in the control group or in the group receiving the test drug is determined randomly. I think that maybe what you can buy at organic-food stores is the placebo diet: same unappetizing flavor, but none of the putative health benefit.]

The relative reduction in risk is always larger than the absolute; it seems more impressive and so is supposed to be favored by pharmaceutical companies in their public advertisements and promotional literature. If p0 is quite small, then the absolute risk is smaller, but the relative risk reduction can sound pretty good. For example, if a drug reduces the risk from 0.02% to 0.01%, then the absolute risk reduction is 0.01%, but the relative risk reduction is 50%. As the absolute risk gets small, the value of taking the drug decreases while the relative risk reduction may remain impressive. Apparently, the absolute/relative distinction was too often glossed-over. The NNT was defined to avoid that. It is the reciprocal of the absolute risk reduction, something like the odds of having a benefit from the drug. In the example presented, the NNT is 10,000. In other words, one needs to treat 10,000 in order for one treated person to benefit. In ordinary terms, the odds of benefitting are 9999 to 1. This is something a physician can explain to any patient.

NNTP
Network News Transfer Protocol.

NNW
Vide compass directions and North by Northwest.

No
Chemical element abbreviation for Nobelium, At. No. 102, a transuranide element and perhaps the most blatant bid for a Nobel prize in the history of chemistry. As it turned out, the researchers who claimed to have found element 102 in 1957, on the basis of a ten-minute half life, and who gave it this name, had not found it (it soon became clear that no 102 isotope had such a half-life). The next year it was really discovered at Berkeley by A. Ghiorso, T. Sikkeland, J. R. Walton (not the same Walton as the Cockroft-Walton Walton), and G. T. Seaborg. When the dust finally settled in 1967, the Berkeley group graciously recommended that the name originally given be kept.

Learn less interesting stuff like density, chemistry and all that rot at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

NO, N.O.
Normally Open. Switch and relay designation. Cf. N.C..

Whaddya mean, ``normally open''??!!!

.no
(Domain name code for) Norway. They somehow manage to have two national languages; vide bokmål (s.v. bok).

Used to be a member of EFTA; like Iceland it has stayed out of the EU.

Here's the Norway page of an X.500 directory.

NO
Not Our[s]. Publishers' abbreviation: Not Our publication. Gives a whole old meaning to the old feminist line, ``Which part of no don't you understand?''

There's a Laurel-and-Hardy movie where Ollie rhetorically asks Stan Laurel (the generally sheepish one) if he knows how to spell ``not.'' Stan spells it out in response: ``en, oh, ott.''

In Italy, the Laurel-and-Hardy movies were long-ago dubbed using bad accents (i.e., the accents of Anglophones with poor ability to pronounce Italian). Even today, the Anglophone accent in Italian is known as lorelenardi.

No!
Which part of ``no'' don't you understand?

(The definition was once a tone-setting feminist slogan.)

NOAA
US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. [Inauspiciously, perhaps, this is pronounced ``Noah.'']

How's the weather on the sun, aside from hot? Find out here.

NOAEL
No Observed Adverse Effect Level. Sounds like the level corresponding to the dose labeled MTD.

NOAH
New York Online Access to Health, is available in Spanish as well as English, so you can read it twice, like road signs in New Brunswick, Canada.

NOAO
(US) National Optical Astronomy Observatories.

NOB
Nederlands Omroepproduktie Bedrijf. `Dutch Broadcast Production Company.' See NOS.

Nobel Prize in Literature
According to Nobel secretary Horace Engdahl, quoted in October 2000, consideration for the prize has ``no geographical or political concerns.''

Oh.

noble
``Noble'' is a qualifier applied to two groups of elements that compound little, or less than one would expect: the noble gases and the noble metals.

noble gas
An element with no partially-filled shells. To be precise: here a shell is all of the electronic states with a given principal quantum number n. The nth shell has 2n2 states, and the noble-gas element in the pth period has all shells filled up to that with n = p, so the noble-gas element of the pth period has atomic number Z = p(p+1)(2p+1)/3. The known ones, with stable or long-lived isotopes, are
  1. He (helium)
  2. Ne (neon)
  3. Ar (argon)
  4. Kr (krypton)
  5. Xe (xenon)
  6. Rn (radon)

They (mostly Xe) do form a small number of not-very-stable compounds, as well as some plain unstable compounds called excimers. Another way that noble-gas atoms can be bound chemically is in endohedral fullerenes -- fullerenes with nonbonded chemical species inside. The common notation for a Xe inside the standard 60-carbon fullerene is Xe@C60 (and it's a tight fit; He@C60 rattles around).

The closed electronic structure makes atoms of these elements chemically very unreactive -- hence the adjective ``noble''. They are also commonly called ``inert gases'' and ``rare gases,'' but these terms are better thought of as descriptions than names. The term ``inert gas'' can be ambiguous because it (and ``inert atmosphere'') are sometimes applied to non-oxidizing gases or to gases that are nonreactive in a particular situation (including nitrogen, carbon dioxide and even hydrogen, depending on context). The term ``rare gas'' is of questionable accuracy: helium, the lightest noble gas, is the second-most common element (at least of normal matter) in the universe, even if it is relatively rare on earth. Argon is 1% of the atmosphere by volume.

Another consequence of the spherically symmetric and ``rigid'' electronic structure is that their mutual van der Waals interactions are weak, so they have very low boiling and melting points (hence ``gases'').

[In fact, 4He does not even have a solid phase at ordinary pressure for any temperature. It undergoes a transition from a normal liquid state to a superfluid phase at 4.3 K. The superfluid phase is a sort of macroscopic equivalent of an atomic ground state: just as quantum mechanically, an atom in its ground state cannot lose energy even though it has positive kinetic energy, so the superfluid fraction of helium-4 does not lose energy by fluid friction. Yes, that's oversimplifying things a bit. For reassuringly normal behavior, raise the pressure to 26 atmospheres, and helium-4 solidifies just below 1 K.]

The noble gases are the group of elements in the rightmost column of standard periodic tables: group 8A in the sensible CAS group numbering traditionally used in the US and 18 in the stupid IUPAC compromise group numbering adopted in 1985.

noble metal
The noble metals are a variable group, paradigmatically including gold, that resist oxidation in air at high temperatures, and resist dissolution (also an oxidation) by strong acids.

Resistance to oxidation arises from multiple causes, but these can be broadly classed as thermodynamic and kinematic. Thermodynamics determines whether the oxidation is energetically favorable, kinematics determines how fast a thermodynamically favored oxidation will occur. Many metals, including gold and such non-noble metals as the pure metal aluminum and the alloys called stainless steels, form a thin but dense layer of oxide that prevents further oxidation. Hence oxidation of the bulk is prevented under conditions where it might be thermodynamically favorable.

Kinematic factors can depend dramatically on the oxidants and nonmonotonically on their densities, so they're a bit tricky to quantify. If you want a simple guide to just how noble an element is, thermodynamics is a better bet. In particular, I recommend the reduction potential, since I have a list of reduction potentials of common metals handy:

Reduction Half-Reaction Standard Reduction Potential (volts)
Au+(aq) + e- --> Au(s) +1.83
Pt2+(aq) + 2e- --> Pt(s) +1.19
Ir3+(aq) + 3e- --> Ir(s) +1.16
Pd2+(aq) + 2e- --> Pd(s) +0.99
Hg+(aq) + e- --> Hg(s) +0.80
Ru2+(aq) + 2e- --> Ru(s) +0.8
Ag+(aq) + e- --> Ag(s) +0.80
Rh3+(aq) + 3e- --> Rh(s) +0.76
Cu+(aq) + e- --> Cu(s) +0.52
Bi3+(aq) + 3e- --> Bi(s) +0.32
2H+(aq) + 2e- --> H2(g) +0.00
Pb2+(aq) + 2e- --> Pb(s) -0.13
Sn2+(aq) + 2e- --> Sn(s) -0.14

(Many of the metals listed have other oxidation states; I have given the reduction potentials for half-reaction from the lowest positive oxidation number.) Positive reduction potentials essentially correspond to oxidizing agents rather than reducing agents. Metals with positive reduction potentials do not react with ordinary acids to yield hydrogen gas. (Sulfuric acid is another story -- it's not just a strong acid but also an oxidizing agent.) Generally, more positive reduction potentials mean higher resistance to oxidation. Hence, a reasonable definition of noble metals might be those with reduction potentials above a particular value.

A better-defined group of elements including gold is its column of elements in the periodic table, sometimes called the ``coinage metal.''

no-brainer
A choice in which the decision is obvious, and the obvious decision is sometimes correct.

NOBTS
New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. ``New Orleans Seminary'' for short. In Louisiana.

NoC, NOC
Network On Chip.

NOC
Network Operations Center.

noch
An old Scottish form of nought.

NOCH
National Organization of Catechists among Hispanics. ``Catechists''? Is that anything like ecdysiasts? Feline ecdysiasts? ``NOCH has been a leader in the Catholic religious formation for Hispanics in the United States since 1986. In the light of the Gospel and the teachings of the Catholic Church, NOCH is committed to the catechetical ministry for Spanish speakers of all ages.'' Hmmm... ecclesiasts, then. Sounds close enough.

noche
Spanish: `night.'

``Good night'' in Spanish is buenas noches, literally `good nights.' I have no idea why. ``Good d