Complex Numbers

Well-Defined

Write about some of the words that were introduced in the year you were born according to Merriam-Webster dictionary by referring to the website below:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler

Hey, a sneaky way to get us to admit our ages!

Fortunately, anyone who can do math has already figured mine out because of my constant harping about Apollo 11. So I'll just select a few entries that catch my eye.

adaptive optics: a telescopic system that improves image resolution by compensating for distortions caused by atmospheric turbulence

One night in 2017, my friend and I were sitting on his lanai in Kihei, Maui, gazing at the night sky, when a strange red-orange light appeared over Haleakala. It moved around in ways impossible for any sort of conventional aircraft. We'd been drinking, of course, so naturally, our first thought was ALIENS!

I was joking. He was not. I pointed out that the telescope probably used adaptive optics, and what we saw was the guidance laser.

The problem with ground-based telescopes, no matter how high a mountain you perch them on, is that there's always some atmosphere between the telescope and the vast reaches of vacuum in outer space. As the turbulence consists of air of slightly varying density, this has the effect of bouncing the star, or whatever, around in the image. This is inimical to the point of a telescope, which is not, as most people think, to magnify; the point is to gather light. Long exposures are your friend. Anyway, so what you do is you point a laser at the sky and use it and a computer to make very slight perturbations in the 'scope's reflecting mirror. This stabilizes the image somewhat, although it's still not as clear as a space telescope (Hubble, e.g.) But at the time, there weren't space telescopes.

The following year, I hung out with a professional astronomer for a week, and he confirmed that not only did Haleakala's telescope use adaptive optics, but it was the first one to do so. He also told me that the way the laser works is that it is just the right energy to excite the sodium ions that persist in a thin layer in the upper atmosphere, with the resulting photons being in the exact color I saw on Maui.

So, no aliens. Just the usual humdrum human ingenuity and SCIENCE, BITCHES.

lithium niobate: a crystalline material LiNbO₃ whose physical properties change in response to pressure or the presence of an electric field and which is used in fiber optics and as a synthetic gemstone

I have no personal connection to this, but I just wanted to take the opportunity to point out that padding your dictionary by incorporating terms from chemistry is cheating.

meth: methamphetamine

Except when it becomes a household word.

ngwee: a monetary subunit of the kwacha

Thanks, dictionary! That helps so much!

...(Zambia)

Oh, okay. That helps marginally more.

second world: Communist nations regarded in the latter part of the 20th century as a political and economic bloc

I'm just including this because we like to talk about the "third world," and this is a reminder that there was considered to be a "second world" at one time as well. The division was: first world - democracies; second world - pinko commies; third world - everyone else. That didn't start out as a pejorative. Language changes.

zit: a small, red, swollen spot on the skin : pimple

And this is on my list because I thought the word was newer than that; I didn't hear it until I started getting them.


An aside about dictionaries in general: I've seen some people use dictionary definitions in arguments as if that settles things. It doesn't; it only marks you as a pedant. Dictionary definitions are, by nature, concise, generally free of nuance or context. As I mentioned above, language changes, and dictionary definitions take a while to catch up.

In short, dictionaries are not prescriptive; they're descriptive. They're not the ultimate authority on the use of language. We are. Especially "we" writers. Now, it's never right to mix up their, there, and they're; but meanings do sometimes morph, or even fall out of favor, like in the "second world" example above.

Another fun thing I realized about dictionaries: they're infinitely recursive. Self-referential. They define words in terms of other words. Like, okay, when you're a kid, your parents or teachers probably showed you a picture of, I dunno, a sheep, and told you that it's a "sheep." (It's not; it's a drawing or photo of a sheep, but what makes humans interesting is the ability to nest metaphors.) That's non-recursive. But a dictionary would be like, "Sheep: (noun) 1. A medium-sized fluffy mammal with the intellectual capacity of a boulder, whose only redeeming quality is wool." To understand the definition, you'd have to understand "a," "medium," "size," "fluffy," etc. If you don't, you have to look them up in the dictionary, and behold, you find more words you have to look up.

You have to enter a dictionary with some knowledge from outside the dictionary.

Doesn't really mean anything, but I just think it's cool to contemplate.