Dictionary Highlights: Day 64

desorb - to remove an absorbate or adsorbate from (an absorbent or adsorbent).

despiteful - spiteful

Spiteful and despiteful mean the same thing?

destool - to remove (a West African ruler) from office.

I just thought it meant to take a laxative

destrier - a war-horse; charger.

detritivore - an organism that uses organic waste as a food source, as certain insects.

diabolo - a game in which a toplike object is spun, thrown, and caught by or balanced on and whirled along a string the ends of which are fastened to the ends of two sticks that are manipulated by hand.

Dictionary Highlights: Day 63

dendrophagous - feeding on the wood of trees, as certain insects.

dent corn - a variety of field corn, Zea mays indentata, having yellow or white kernels that become indented as they ripen.

depth psychology - any approach to psychology that postulates and studies personality from the standpoint of dynamic and unconscious motivation.

deratization - extermination of rats, esp. aboard a merchant vessel.

derma - beef or fowl intestine used as a casing in preparing certain savory dishes, esp. kishke.

Now they spoiled kishke for me. And I thought that was such good stuff

desmid - any single-celled freshwater algae of the family Desmidiaceae, characterized by a division of the body into mirror-image halves joined by a bridge containing the nucleus, and having a spiny or bristly exterior: sometimes forming into colonies or branching filaments.

Dictionary Highlights: Day 62

deformed bar - a rod for reinforcing concrete, having surface irregularities, as transverse ridges, to improve the bond

Using a deformed bar to keep concrete from becoming deformed

dehisce - to burst open, as capsules of plants; gape.

dekko - (British slang) a look or glance

Take a dekko at Mr. Gekko.

Delhi belly - diarrhea experienced by travelers in a foreign country, who are not accustomed to the local food and water.

Not to be confused with Deli belly

demimetope - the space between the end of a Doric frieze and the first triglyph.

I feel like this is from some weird sci-fi geek site

demisemiquaver - a thirty-second note.

Only you musicians out there would know the obscure names for these notes.

de Moivre's theorem - the theorem that a complex number raised to a given positive integral power is equal to the modulus of the number raised to the power and multiplied by the amplitude times the given power.

Well, DUH!

dendrology - the branch of botany dealing with trees and shrubs.

For this experiment, I'll need. . .another shrubbery!

Dictionary Highlights: Day 61

decollate snail - a cone-shaped, burrowing snail, Rumina decollata, that feeds on common brown garden snails.

I wonder if it has a taste for escargot?

deconstruction - a philosophical and critical movement, starting in the 1960s and esp. applied to the study of literature, that questions all traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality and emphasizes that a text has no stable reference or identification because words essentially only refer to other words and therefore a reader must approach a text by eliminating any metaphysical or ethnocentric assumptions through an active role of defining meaning, sometimes by a reliance on new word construction, etymology, puns, and other word play.

Not quite the same meaning as disassembly

deep fat - hot fat used for deep-frying food.

As opposed to shallow fat?

defender of the bond - an official appointed in each diocese to uphold marriages of disputed validity.

defensive medicine - the practice by a physician of ordering many tests or consultations as a means of self-protection against charges of malpractice in the event of an unfavorable outcome of treatment.

definitive host - the host in or on which a parasite spends the sexual stage of its life cycle.

Normal parties have a host. Frat parties have a definitive host

Dictionary Highlights: Day 60

Dawson Creek - a village in NE British Columbia, Canada, at the SE terminus of the Alaska Highway.

A little cold of a climate for James Van Der Beek

dayan - a judge in a Jewish religious court or a person knowledgeable in Talmudic law whose advice on religious questions is often sought by rabbis.

Biblical Judges usurped by Rabbinic overlords

daymare - a distressing experience, similar to a bad dream, occurring while one is awake.

dead-man's float - a prone floating position, used esp. by beginning swimmers, with face downward, legs extended backward, and arms stretched forward.

Why is it the early survival swimming techniques are the ones with your face underwater

Dictionary Highlights: Day 59

dactyl - Prosody . a foot of three syllables, one long followed by two short in quantitative meter, or one stressed followed by two unstressed in accentual meter, as in gently and humanly. 

Dago - a person of Italian or sometimes spanish origin or descent.

. . . as the Dagoes buy

dagoba -  a dome-shaped memorial alleged to contain relics of Buddha or a Buddhist saint; stupa; chaitya.

and you thought the Star Wars names were picked arbitrarily


Dam - ( Carl Peter ) Henrik  (ˈhɛnrəɡ). 1895--1976, Danish biochemist who discovered vitamin K (1934): Nobel prize for physiology or medicine 1943

and a Dam fine job he did


D and C - a surgical method for the removal of diseased tissue or an early embryo from the lining of the uterus by means of scraping.

D&D - Dungeons and Dragons
 
The uncaring Goth kid played some D&D while his mom was having a D and C

dangleberry - blueberry

not to be confused with dingleberry

darn - to mend, as torn clothing, with rows of stitches, sometimes by crossing and interweaving rows to span a gap.

darn this torn coat! 

Stephen Jay Gould and NOMA

Stephen Jay Gould is famous for his concept of NOMA, stating that religion and science cover non-overlapping subjects. While this may sound appealing, the devil is in the details. To quote Gould:

The first commandment for all version of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magestiria by claiming that God driectly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science."

In other words, science gets to impose metaphysical naturalim on all matters of fact, while religion gets dominion over only matters of feeling.

This is "separate but equal" of the Apartheid variety.