Is there a word for that little triangle-shaped dent in your upper lip?

"Philtrum". I am probably the ninth person to write this.

Patrick has a little triangle shaped dent in his upper lip? It's probably cause he's so tall he keeps snagging it on the Empire State Building as he walks about town.

Scott H. @ 1

I'm not sure about the dent just in the lip, but the dent that starts in the lip and continues up to the nose is called the "philtrum."

The end-thread that hangs out of a skein of yarn -- the one that's the starting-point for winding the whole thing up -- is called a clew.

I am also the exact height to snag belt loops and, more annoyingly, the side pockets of my jeans on strike plates. I have actually torn belt loops off. I have also bent strike plates. I no longer have any strike plates on the interior doors in my house because I would rather the door rattles than I tear more of my pants or hurt myself when it yanks me so hard I fall down. (Also we were repainting so I had to take them of anyway and just didn't bother putting them back on. Useless things.)

I perpetually don't know what the word for things is. Is there a word for that? When you know what something's called but can't think of the word? There should be a word for it. I was using "aphasia" for a while but I know that means something else. (And I kept forgetting that word too.)

The center part of a sewing needle, between the eye and the point, is the shank.

I remember a few from my obsessive readings of The Book Of Lists when I was about 13. There were a few more but those come quickly to mind:

The hard part on the end of a shoelace is the aglet.
The metal frame that holds a lampshade is a harp.
The indentation at the bottom of a wine bottle is a punt.

I think that maybe philtrum was on that list too.

Oh, yes, Patrick, I hear you on the belt-loop thing. Interestingly, at my parents' house in Cornwall, which dates back to the 1700s, I never have the problem because the strike plates are lower down. You might have luck hammering the strike plates backwards, depending on how thick or ornamental they are.

I've got a "what's that thing called" for you: I can never recall what the name is for that lump on the back of the skull we all have. Wikipedia seems to tell me that it's the occipital bone, but the old Grey's Gray's Anatomy (curse you, Shonda Rhimes...) pictures aren't particularly helpful.

I remember also being surprised several years ago when encountering the word "snib", which turns out to be the little button on a Yale lock that one uses to lock it open ("leaving it on the snib") or closed.

Some may also find it useful to know the word "perineum" exists. I'll leave the (likely NSFW) research to the curious.

Bridget said: I perpetually don't know what the word for things is. Is there a word for that?

If there isn't, may I propose omnisia? It works for me.

Back to doors:

Doors in public buildings often have a small rubber thingy mounted on the wall next to them so the doorknob doesn't scuff up the wall. Does anyone know the name of that? (You might call it a doorstop, but to my mind a doorstop is something else).

I once ran across armscye on a list of "names for things you didn't know had names." I didn't realize until then that it was an uncommon word.

Armscye (for those that don't sew) is the name of the armhole part of the body of a garment.

cisko, #8, they had aglet on there, too. I couldn't find the link until you posted aiglet. Using "arm hole" and aiglet in my search terms, I find it. Ta da! It is annoying that it is missing definitions for several items, but if you google armsaye, you'll find several lists like this.

When you hit shift and go across the top of the keyboard, you get the...

Tilde; exclamation point; commercial at; number sign; dollar sign; percent sign; caret; ampersand; asterisk; (Parentheses); underscore; plus sign; broken bar (pipe, if it isn't broken.)

I hate it when people get them wrong.

So in those prison movies when they talk about shanking someone they are going to do repairs on their clothing for them. That's nice. It always sounded so ominous before.

Bridget @6: I don't know the name for your affliction, but I can tell you that it's probably genetic and only passed down the feminine line. At least, it's so in my family. My father tears his hair out every time we ask him to do something, because the sentence is full of "the thingie" in the "you know what I mean." My mother can reach poetic heights of incoherence along those lines.

One of the many odd little things I found about in my teenage reading about the Wars of the Roses and Elizabeth I (including the art of the eras, and the history of costume) was that the little protective ends put over the ends of the cords used for 'lacing' and holding together all those glorious slashed layers were called aguillettes. Back then they might be carved horn or ivory, or decorated, enamelled or jewelled precious metal. Nowadays this has devolved down to the little cover at the end of shoelaces, which has shrunk[en] down to being called an aglet or aiglet.

Another big vocabulary-builder <ahem> was working on house renovations some twenty years ago. There are so many different bits of a building we either don't see (inside walls or roofs, under floors, etc) or are not aware of usually. After all this time out of practice I can't right now think of any except noggins & purlins, which you wouldn't usually see.

I suppose all you crafty & outdoor camping people know about those most useful round things called grommets, too.

There's a lot of others things associated with sewing and costume. Godet & plastron, frex, are of limited use, being fairly uncommon, but it's probably fairly important to know which is your placket (the supporting part around a slitlike opening) and which your pocket, even tho' they're sometimes the same.

A stack of hay bales (usually 64 if we're talking alfalfa in 100lb three-string bales) is called a squeeze. i.e., "I want to buy a squeeze of hay."

-- Leva

Emma @ 15: many gay men, myself included, do this. I call it "speaking girl". Part of speaking girl also includes that thing some women do in conversation where they continue a train of thought from earlier.

Is there a term for this "thing we don't know there's a word for"?

The dot over a lower-case i or j is called a tittle. I wish that the bar that crossed a lower-case t were called a tattle.

Scott H @ 1... Is there a word for that little triangle-shaped dent in your upper lip?

That reminds me of my favorite scene in Key Largo. You know the movie's plot. The war is over, and Bogart goes to Key Largo to talk to the family of a soldier who'd died while under his command. And he tells the man's father about all the things that they'd talked about. One of them is how, when the soldier had been a very young child, his father had explained to him what the dent on his lip was: when he was born, he knew all the secrets of the world, but an angel had put its finger on his lip so that he couldn't tell the secrets. After that, Bogart and Bacall leave the room, leaving the old man so that he can grieve alone.

A rectangular cross-section groove, across one piece of wood, into which you slot another piece of wood (say shelves into the vertical side of a bookcase) is a dado.

In a reversal of name brand appropriation of the "Kleenex" and "Xerox" sort, I spent most of my adolescence not knowing that little yellow stickies were actually Post-Its.

Google gives lots of plural nouns for cats, but (as I type impeded by a fluffy tail) my favorite is a "nuisance".

The bubbles in antique, handblown glass are occlusions.

The # is an octothorpe, I have been told. From a Xanth novel, I remember that the cross on a t is a jot-- I think it was two characters named Jot and Tittle. The stem of a leaf is a petiole; this is what you eat when you eat celery.
I'm pretty good with science vocabulary, but that's just being able to say 'thingy' in Latin.

I can never hear "philtrum" without this bit of Willard Espy doggerel running through my head:

I have a little philtrum
Wherein my spilltrum flows
When I am feeling illtrum
And runny at the nose.

The bits of detail on very large spaceships in the cinema are called nurnies. Another plural of nurny is greebles. Greeble is also the verb that means to add detail.

The visible beams of light that shine down from water's surface are called caustics.

The process for adding the logo to television programming is called DSK or downstream key. (Logos or inconceivably annoying advertisements that take up more and more of the screen real estate, and more and more of our attention.*)

* I predicted years ago that commercials would start to play during shows. So far it's only for other shows on the same network. And so far no one is talking over the audio track of the show we are ostensibly watching. Those things will change.

two things to never get wrong in your fiction: guns and horses. And the topic of horses has a lot of terms to get wrong:

foal: baby horse, either gender
weanling: horse, under 1 year, that has been weaned from its mother.
dam: the mother of a horse
sire: the father of a horse

colt: male horse under 4 years old
stallion: male horse over 4 years, not castrated
gelding: castrated male horse

filly: female horse under 4 years old
mare: female horse over 4 years old

Cisko @ 8 -
I remember a few from my obsessive readings of The Book Of Lists when I was about 13. There were a few more but those come quickly to mind:

The hard part on the end of a shoelace is the aglet.
Their true purpose is sinister!

And a rabbet or rebate joint is a dado cut into the end of a piece of lumber, so that the cut is L-shaped. Cory Doctorow, if you're listening, I suggest "I, Rabbet" as a title to follow "I, Rarebit".

Emma @15: I was asking because it's an affliction my boyfriend suffers from. My father used to do it too. He would more often do it with our names; there were four of us kids and he'd usually just run through the first syllables of all our names before settling on one, which was usually the wrong one.
I don't recall any of my female relatives being particularly prone to it. Except perhaps my grandmothers, but not before either of them was about 80. My mother occasionally gestures vaguely and says "You know what I mean!" but not as often as my father.

folk@18: It's considered "speaking girl" to not know the names for things? How strange. I know sometimes, as a female, I feel that speaking too technically will make people think I'm a complete nerdy weirdo, so I'll deliberately avoid using the most technical term for an item, but I don't often give into that impulse now that I'm, well, old enough not to care anymore.

What I was referring to was when you know the word perfectly well, and you intend to use the proper word, but when you go to use the word, it's just not there.

There *must* be a word for that.

Wow, this thread would be a great source of character names with which to annoy Teresa.

A yearling sheep is a hogget.

As long as we're doing animal terms, one of my favorites is "puggle", a baby monotreme (echidna or platypus).

A baby kangaroo or wallaby is a joey.

A female kangaroo is a doe, flyer, or jill.

A marsupial's pouch is called a marsupium.

Diatryma @ 22

but that's just being able to say 'thingy' in Latin.

On a slight tangent, because it's an abstract concept rather than a "thing", ontology is, quite literally, the study of "thingyness". But to confuse matters, it comes from Greek.

Emma @ 15: "If two men are working in the kitchen together, one will say to the other 'put this bowl inside the larger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' If a woman and man are working together, the woman will say 'put this in that one over there'. There is hence a phatic hiatus." -- McPhee, in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength.

Male goat: buck
Neutered male goat: wether
Baby male goat: buckling

Female goat: doe
Baby female goat: doeling

Sterile female goat (caused by sharing the same placenta as a buckling): freemartin

Note that "billy" and "nanny" are not generally used by people who actually raise goats.

Bridget Kelly @ 28

There *must* be a word for that.

There is, but I've forgotten it.*

* Well, somebody had to! And Serge is probably still asleep.

Serge @ 19

Oops, sorry, just read back and found you there. Have some more coffee, you're being far too literal. Go meta, young man!

The specific form of aphasia where one is unable to remember a particular desired word at the time one wants to use it seems to be "anomic aphasia."

It appears that, technically, aphasia is only a valid diagnosis when the problem is caused by a brain injury (including disease processes like tumors), so everyday forgetfulness probably doesn't count.

Bridget @ 28: I call it migraine-damage, although Aphasia seems to fit too.

My mother, who suffered regularly from the things, is a fount of alternate words for objects. 'The hot fridge' and 'spoon with holes in' for instance.

Now that I get the things relatively regularly (for a chap, anyway) I've been in the same state of being able to recognise that something is an object and that it has a name, but that the name is temporarily (thankfully!) missing. For some reason, John Cusack is one of the first things to go missing. It's... Not much fun.

The crescent shaped area at the base of finger and toenails is the lunule. A word that is really, really hard to work into a sentence.

I learned, having had it used against me in a Scrabble game by an aunt by marriage, that a holder into which one places a handle-less coffee cup is called a zarf.

I looked it up and lo and behold, she was not merely attempting to snow me in the interest of her triple word score. It was right there in the OSPD.

So technically, I think this means that those cardboard finger-protector sleeve thingums that all the coffee shops have are zarfs. Though I believe most call them "cup-sleeves."

Bruce Cohen @ 36... Have some more coffee, you're being far too literal.

Does Folger's Instant (but cheap) Crap count as coffee? Anyway, my apologies for the off-topic post.

Not totally off-topic, since Greg London brought up horses earlier... Did you know that the French word for stallion is étalon, which can also mean standard?

My favourite "the word was there a minute ago" was declaring to the office that I felt as though I'd been sat on by a zou[0]. Come to think on it, that's a pretty good description of my current condition, as well.

[0] That'd be 'elephant'... just not in english.

Fragano @ 39... The crescent shaped area at the base of finger and toenails is the lunule.

Which is thus called because it is shaped like a moon crescent, and did you known that the French word for moon is lune?

For obscure word-hunting, you can never go wrong with what you call various animal groups.

My favorites: a shrewdness of apes, a smack of jellyfish, an exaltation of larks, an ambush of tigers, and of course a murder of crows.

My absolute favorite: a surfeit of skunks. Indeed!

If you have a shower with a circular handle control, the metal fitting into the wall is the 'escutcheon'. So if you have a blot on yours, that's where it goes....

My son asked me to restring his shoes yesterday and I told him "Well, that's a problem, because you've got no aglets."

"I didn't know what they were, so I cut them off."

"Well, now you know."

The spiral-shaped threads that arise from a drill-bit in metal: swarf.

The opening at the wrist of a long glove: the musketeer.

The roughened iron or steel plate against which a flint is struck to make a spark: frizzen.

I think the crossbar of a t is a jot; on this I might be wrong.

The outward step at the base of a wall is a berm.

We need more than a word! We need protection. The patent-pending Clip-on (or velcro-fastened?) Belt Loop Anti-Strike-Plate Device. Or maybe a Pesky Strike Plate Bumper. No need to employ your Eye-Shank-Point device on belt loops ever again!

Bridget Kelly @ 28

Also called anomia. As there are more specific terms like averbia and colour anomia for people who can't remember verbs and colour words, respectively, anomia is often used to refer only to people who have trouble with common and proper nouns.

This happens to me a dozen times a day, usually at the least opportune times, either because I'm doing something important or I'm with family or friends who will make fun of me for ages. (I still haven't lived down the time I asked someone how to say "man" in French so I could finish some paper on Sartre.)

#48 -- maybe little cow-catcher-shaped clipons for your beltloops? Could be very decorative, especially if you added braid and fringe....

The crescent shaped area at the base of finger and toenails is the lunule. A word that is really, really hard to work into a sentence.

IIRC, one sign of anaemia is that your lunules become imperceptible - because the rest of the nail bed is so pale that there's no detectable colour change.
Weirdly, "lunule" was exactly the word I was going to cite as an example of "things you didn't know there was a name for".

"Rostrum" - not only a speaker's place, but also a beak - because the Greeks used to saw the prows, or beaks, off captured galleys and fix them to the speaker's stand as trophies.

wolfa @ 49... I still haven't lived down the time I asked someone how to say "man" in French

Why?

# 15, Emma -

My mother has the affliction quite strongly. She once asked me to go to the .... (vague gesture) and look in the .... and get me her....

The funny part was, I managed it. (Context is everything!)

#18, folk on LJ and #22, Diatryma - I seem to have heard "every little tittle and jot" as a phrase. It makes a lot more sense now.

#24, Nangleator - My husband worked at a TV station for a while, and apparently those logos that appear during a program are called "bugs." Apt, especially the newer ones that make noise. Argh.

I'm in the middle of NaNoWriMo and was looking for the name of a person who fixes wagons. Couldn't think of it. But, I found a handy website called VisuWords that provides a graphical "mind map" approach to words and related words and so was able to find the word I was looking for: wainwright.

Hmm. There are also common everyday objects for which the nomenclature is widely varied and nonstandard.

For example, those elastic loops used to tie back hair? I've seen and heard any number of terms for them, none used ubiquitously. Hair elastics, hair frobs, scrunchies, ponytailers....

Also, those white ostensibly-temporary concrete barriers that show up on roadways, particularly during construction. I grew up calling those "Jersey walls," although here on the other coast nobody's ever heard that term. They best we can seem to manage here is "concrete barriers" -- a name both cumbersome and boring.

From that week I was an injection mold machine operator... The little hair of plastic hanging from the center of the bottom of a cup? It's sprue. The raised point itself is also called the sprue.

Plainly, they need a new obscure word for one of those things.

And of course the T-shaped thing on one of two doors, french or otherwise, that close a single opening is an astragal.

I'm surprised everyone here didn't already know about rabbets, figuring so prominently as they do in the film version of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. But even now I had to check to make sure that I knew what a lally column was (wikipedia has it wrong, of course).

#38 John Hawkes-Reed -

For me, it is Tim Curry, every time. And saying, "You know, he was in Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Muppet Treasure Island. And that fantasy movie where he was unrecognizable under the makeup," doesn't help people know who I'm talking about.

I was going to say that the info that flashes up on TV that tells you who someone is ("concerned citizen", "Democratic strategist", "heretical mime") is a chyron. However, Wikipedia claims it's a "lower third", but called a chyron in North America because Chryon Corporation is the Xerox of this particular field.

What I find interesting are the things that have a word in one culture, but are generic in another. The two Canadian/American examples I know of are:
* "tuke" - in America, a "knit cap" or "hat"
* "grader" - in America, a big yellow construction vehicle.

The grader issue might be simply that Canadians are more familiar with the type of vehicle than most Americans. Probably a snow removal thing.

Diatryma@#22, `octothorp[e]' is a fairly recent, fairly silly coinage predominant in the telecommunications biz for what is otherwise universally known as the hash sign (Commonwealth) and number sign (US only?).

Bridget @ 28 re: "speaking girl": I was more referring to the tendency to use "thingy", as in "pass me the thingy and I'll put it in the thingy", as a subject or object even when the name of the thingy itself is known.

re: name-switching: my dear late grandmother used to have an awful time calling us grandchildren by the right first name (and only six of us in total!). She did the same with her sons-in-law, and as we grandchildren have grown she's started confusing us with our fathers and uncles too.

re: the momentary lack of ability to recall a specific word: the opposite of logorrhea, I suspect. (Logostipation?)

Joel @ 33: Interestingly, "this one" and "that one" in Chinese (Mandarin, at least, and I assume the other dialects) are reversed: "this one", zhei ge is closer to me, and "that one", nei ge is nearer to you. "nei ge" is also the Chinese word for "um", and can be pronounced confusingly close to an unpleasant racial epithet.

Nix @ 60, # is normally a "pound sign" in the USA (which is, of course, £ in the UK; I've also heard # called "square" in the telecom context here in Blighty).

R.M.Koske @ 58... Tim Curry, every time. And saying, "You know, he was in Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Muppet Treasure Island. And that fantasy movie where he was unrecognizable under the makeup"

That would be Legend, starring Tom Cruise. And there was a zombie unicorn somewhere in there.

Serge, because it was following 17 years of instruction in French, as well as living in a place where I used it regularly, and saw that specific word on bathroom doors daily? Also because this friend enjoys making fun of me.

Janet @31: According to Australian Fauna (who knows how authoritative this is), it's a common misconception that a baby platypus is a puggle - they say there is no official name but suggest 'platypup'.

It shocked me to the lunules to realize I had forgotten the French word for "man".

What was mortifying was not having forgotten, but the fact that when my friend said, "Homme", I grew impatient, and said, "Well, spit it out!" I'll never live it down.

When they started to have sound effects on those damn lower-margin ads is when I ceased to have television in the house. If it's not on YouTube or Google Video, I don't need to see it. Not to mention I watched two movies in a row on USA and realized that every "unnecessary" scene had been deleted to make more time for commercials -- resulting in good movies being coverted into Cliff-Notes versions of themselves via the removal of everything which made them worth watching.

When you can't even rely on television to uphold its traditional cultural standards, you know you've reached the point in your life when you need to go off the grid and learn to play the banjo. Yes, folks, I've become a true curmudgeon.

#6 (and a bunch of numbers after that)

It's called a paraphasic error - there's several different types of paraphasic errors, some involve not remembering names (anomia) others involve substituting similar words. I tried to find a decent website that talked about the different forms of paraphasic errors but failed miserably in my attempt.

When you can't find the word at all and talk yourself around to what you mean, that's called circumlocution

The dot over the "i" is the jot, from the Greek letter iota.

And the little flap of flesh that attaches your tongue to the floor of your mouth is the oral frenum (or frenulum).

Found that last one out from a Theodore Sturgeon story, A Way of Thinking, by the way.

theophylact @ 68, unless my memory is faulty and there's a Wikipedia conspiracy, the tittle is the dot over i and j and the jot is the cross through a t.

@69, a frenulum/frenum is any such fold that attaches one part of the body to another in the same way. There's one attaching the each lip to its respective gum as well. And, without wanting to make naughty references twice in the comment to the same post, we all have one below the belt, whether we're homo sapiens model XX with full internal bits or model XY with the nifty extendable hose.

Apologies if everyone already knows these.

The thing that hangs down at the back of your mouth is your uvula.
The little cartilage triangle on the other side of the ear canal from your ear is your tragus.
If you should (Ghods forbid) get your eye poked out, the goo running down your cheek is called vitreous humor.

I thought everyone knew this, but I've had a few people thank me for pointing it out to them:
Dirty money is money that can be traced back to a crime. Clean money can't be. Money laundering is so called because it's the process by which dirty money becomes clean.

For fans of this topic, I would direct you to "The Meaning of Liff" and its sequel.

As to the noisy, distracting commercials on top of programming, I imagine it's an effort to get us to buy the whole freaking season of that show on DVD. In the future, television shows will become 42-minute-long commercials for the DVD box sets which feature the shows sans (most of) the advertising.

I hate runaway capitalism. I just haven't figured out what to replace it with yet. I also haven't figured out how to keep the wealthy people from murdering me if I do figure out a better system.

#6
Noun Deficiency Syndrome

#9: doesn't everyone know what a snib is? A very ordinary word in the UK.

#11: I don't know if there's a special word (other than doorstop) for the rubber things on walls that doors knock into, but rubber things that act as buffers between hard things (such as the ones on the bottom of your walking stick or laptop) are ferrules.

And # is sometimes called 'square' in the UK but is much more often called 'hash'.

Nix at 60, after you said that, I did a bit of cursory googling and now know more about the history of a symbol I never use than I needed to. Which is to say, many thanks. I am engeekened.

Lunules are on the proximal/hand-side of the fingernail, right? Looking at my fingernails, I can find paler parts just at the base of the nail, but only on my thumbs and maybe my middle fingers if I'm lenient.

The difference between larva and juvenile, as I understand it: a larva is something like a caterpillar or a pluteus, which does not look anything like the adult. A juvenile is like a puppy or a child, which is an immature adult lookalike.

Nangleator@73, isn't that end result why the WGA is striking? ;)

Folk @18: I know, I have a friend who does it too, but not too often as the females get on his case something fierce!

Bridget @28:that's funny! Maybe it runs in families and it's either sex affected but not both? My mother does the same thing with names, by the way; my sister and I wait until the long string of names is over and the last one named is the one mom actually wants.

Joel @33: around my house that sounds about right!

R.M. Koske @53: Well, my dad can too, for my mom. But when I, who am usually fairly precise, fall prey to the "cosa" syndrome, he has the heebies.

Victoria @74: I like it!

#63, Serge

Thank you. Normally I can call the title of that one to mind, but apparently Tim Curry's effect is spreading. (And pointing out that Tim Curry is so made up in one of my three examples was funnier than using Google..)

folk on LJ@9: The lump at the base of your skull is called the occipital bun. It's a feature that we as a species are losing. (And it's a hell of a lot smaller on those of us what has 'em than it was among, say, the Neanderthals.)

The vocabulary game, FreeRice, tops out at level fifty. (You'll know you're there when you start to see repeats.) That's mostly medieval farming terms and common medical terms. I disagree with some of their answers.

I think Patrick and I are the same height--my striker-beltloop conflicts disappeared when I stopped using the successive-approximations method of navigating doorways. Though Sansabelt would work as well (once one has reached the get-those-damn-kids-off-my-lawn stage of life).

A person who divines fortunes and the future by reading the entails of animals is called a "haruspex." They practise "haruspication."

You might to check out the Archive of Endangered Words for a mighty fine collection.

http://www.13d.org/esofword/esof.cfm?type=new

# is normally a "pound sign" in the USA (which is, of course, £ in the UK; I've also heard # called "square" in the telecom context here in Blighty).

Is it actually a pound sign in the US? I've never seen Americans use anything but "lb" for pounds (or "£" of course), as far as I can remember.

Solution to the problem in the OP: PNH should switch to wearing trousers with braces. (All right, "suspenders". But that sounds very odd to British ears.) Or, alternatively, platform boots, raising his belt loops out of the strike plate strike zone.

#59
What you call "grader", I call a "road grader." But then, I grew up in rural America with dirt and gravel roads.

Oops: Try this link instead:

http://www.13d.org/esofword/esof.cfm?type=main

This list puts you on the moderated list of words.

(The other list I gave you is the one for those submitted; it contains a bunch of junk. So sorry!)

paul, 57
But even now I had to check to make sure that I knew what a lally column was (wikipedia has it wrong, of course).
Odd. The wikipedia meaning is consistent with the usage on blueprints* from 1961.

*whiteprints, actually

Alison Scott, 75 #11: I don't know if there's a special word (other than doorstop) for the rubber things on walls that doors knock into, but rubber things that act as buffers between hard things (such as the ones on the bottom of your walking stick or laptop) are ferrules.
I thought ferrule referred to the bit of metal that holds something on, like the bit that holds an eraser onto a pencil?

ajay, 84,
Is it actually a pound sign in the US? I've never seen Americans use anything but "lb" for pounds (or "£" of course), as far as I can remember.
In commercial contexts it is. E.g. "hand me a ream of the the 24# white, please." (Pronounced "twenty -four pound white", referring to a specific weight of paper.) Sometimes seen in agricultural markets, or recipes.**

**when did receipt turn into recipe? And when did "in to" turn into "into?"

Ajay @ 84, Thinking about it as a person manufactured in NY of 100% British parts, the usual context for # meaning pound is on telephone keypads. I wasn't sure of the historical reasoning for the # being called the pound sign in the USA, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Apparently:

In some regions of the United States and Canada, the symbol is traditionally called the pound sign, but in others, the number sign. This derives from a series of abbreviations for pound, which is a unit of weight. At first "lb." was used; however, printers later designed a font containing a special symbol of an "lb" with a line through the ascenders so that the lowercase letter "l" would not be mistaken for the number "1". Unicode character U+2114 (℔) is called the "LB Bar Symbol," and it is a cursive development of this symbol. Ultimately, there was the reduction to a combination of two horizontal strokes (cf. skewed "=") and two forward-slash-like strokes (cf. "//"). In this respect, names like fence or square — as well as the representation of the sign containing two vertical strokes (rather than slanted ones), as on many keyboards — are misleading.
Its traditional commercial use in the U.S. was such that when it followed a number, it was to be read as "pounds," as in 5# of sugar, and when it preceded a number, it was to be read as 'number', as in #2 pencil. Thus the same character in a printer's type case had two uses.

Diatryma@22:
The # is an octothorpe, I have been told. From a Xanth novel, I remember that the cross on a t is a jot-- I think it was two characters named Jot and Tittle.

You read the same book as me! The one where spaceships are being described as various symbol-shapes? This makes this thread the perfect one to ask a question about something that I've been trying to remember since I was 12: the book had a word for the infinity symbol that wasn't just infinity symbol, but every site I looked up, last time I checked, just had "infinity symbol". Anyone know the name?

folk at 62 and Nix @ 60,
"# is normally a "pound sign" in the USA"
and you've no idea how confusing it is to write code as an emigrant in the USA: all your life you've called a hash a hash, suddenly your peers are talking about 'pound signs' that look nothing like a pound sign.. remapping takes time.

as far as I could tell, the only reason a # is called a 'pound sign' is because on the US keyboard, the # appears where the English pound sign appears on English (and Empire) keyboards. But Wikipedia says it was actually used as a pound indicator (weight), as in 5# is 5 pounds of good red wheat. Too sensible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

#78
Thank you. I got it from a friend.

My mother never uses the "thingy" replacement, she just swaps words around or uses MSL (Mom Sign Language, aka gesticulation.) More than once she's said "put the dirty dishes in the microwave/washing machine/deep freezer/etc"

Peter@65: According to Australian Fauna (who knows how authoritative this is), it's a common misconception that a baby platypus is a puggle - they say there is no official name but suggest 'platypup'.

I have an LJ aquaintance who rehabs orphan platypuses, and he uses puggle, as does the zoo he works with, so that's good enough for me.

#9 folk on LJ, #80 Andrew Willett

Technically speaking, that bump is the external occipital protuberance. But occipital bun works too.

Yay, my physanth degree comes in handy!

If you're having trouble knowing the proper names of things, your best plan is to get yourself a 2-3 year old child. When my son Ben was that age, he took to picking up random objects and informing us of their names in very teacherly tones. For example, waiting in line at the grocery store, he presented me with one of those rubber divider sticks you put down on the conveyor belt to separate your groceries from your neighbor's, and announced: "This is a wong-wong. It's for when you're paying." Having no information to the contrary, I assume he was right, so I've used that word ever since.

Which brings me to Malthus #11: Doors in public buildings often have a small rubber thingy mounted on the wall next to them so the doorknob doesn't scuff up the wall. Does anyone know the name of that?

According to my son Ben, this device is called a wobber. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's no school today, so he's set up a first-grade classroom in our living room and given me an arithmetic assignment to do.

...and now that I think about it, it's not platypusus, it's enchidnas he raises. So strike that.

James @ 81: "The vocabulary game, FreeRice, tops out at level fifty. (You'll know you're there when you start to see repeats.) That's mostly medieval farming terms and common medical terms. I disagree with some of their answers."

I have a problem with the frequent use of French and the equivalent as "advanced"; I speak French and have a bit of a vocabulary in a handful of other languages, so those terms are pretty easy for me, and not really commonly used by English-speakers otherwise. And sometimes I think they split the hair of meaning oddly enough that the "right" answer is just as valid as second place.

I have a rather strong touch of verbal paraphrasia, so I'm always saying desk instead of pen or banana instead of bag. It falls under anomia also, which appears to be a pretty big bucket.

38, 58, I went an entire decade, much of which I spent watching Star Trek twice a day with my future husband and his Trekker buddies, never being able to remember William Shatner's name when I needed it.

It was a bother, no doubt.

(And for all the tons of hay I've moved in my life, I've never once heard any amount of it called a squeeze).

I needed to use grommets for something recently, so I bought a grommeting kit, and it contains a tapered brass object which is to be inserted into the center of the grommet and pounded on the other end with a hammer, to fasten the two parts of the grommet together (there's a little anvil under it, of course).

I am utterly shameless in calling the tapered brass thing a wallace.

Bridget 28: It's sometimes called the "tip of the tongue phenomenon," especially if you had the word in your head, or thought you did, until you tried to say it.

Janet 37: Hmm, I have aphasic episodes during a migraine, and my neurologist didn't argue with me when I called them that. I wonder what they do call such a transitory effect?

Matt 46: Tell him, right now, what his genitals are, and what they're for!!!!

Nix 60: Or "sharp."

folk 61: My great-grandmother used to call her youngest daughter "Nita-Babe-Oh, the devil! Ruth!"

Not sure what you mean by your Chinese example. That seems like the deixis of 'this' and 'that' that I'm used to.

'Deixis' is my contribution to the "words for things you didn't know there were words for" game we seem to be playing. And yes, there was a "Journal of Irreproducible Results" paper called "Deixis in the Lesbian Dialects."

tavella 89: Lemniscate.

Free Rice does some funky things to definitions. After a certain point, though, I take a lot more words to define something than they are probably willing to put on the page. Sometimes they get unnecessarily fine, too; 'argufy' could be 'rebut' or 'dispute', but since I don't know the context, I always guess.

#24 Nangleator,

Technically all light focused through a dielectric material is a caustic. The term describes the spots where the light is focused, not the beams.

Some more words for stuff:

In California, the bumpy dots on highways and roads are Bott's Dots.

There are kind of too many names for road surfaces (based on their construction) to list all, but the common surfaces are tarmac, asphalt concrete and macadam. It would take a lot of space to explain each, and Wikipedia has good entries on them.

Product packaging that consists of a cardboard back with a clear plastic bulge inside which the product is visible is called a blister pack.

The point at which a liquid touches a solid (such as the raised area on the surface of water where a straw penetrates it, or at the edges of a cup, or around a rock) is called the meniscus.

As mentioned above, the flap of skin connecting lip, tongue and parts south is a frenulum. However, the thin 'seam' on the southern bits (of both persuasions) is called the raphe. The word describes the seam between any body parts.

The ability to know where your body is in space -- to have a sense of when you might be near another object because you have a kind of 3d map in your head -- is called proprioception.

The first time I saw # used was when doing crafts as a kid that called for a particular size of tin can. I always assumed it was representing pounds rather than numbers, but that turns out to be incorrect. A #10 can is "twenty-five servings totaling 13 cups with an estimated weight of 103½ ounces (size of a roughly 3 pound coffee can)," per Wikipedia.

Also, note that # and ♯ are not the same. The first is pound or number, the second is the musical symbol for sharp. Microsoft may want you to call it "C Sharp" but they write it C#, so it's really "C Pound" even if that doesn't sound nearly as cool.

midori #87: I was going to mention the pencil usage as well; a ferrule is also the thing that holds two pieces of plastic piping together.

The two pertinent meanings from the OED: Ferrule, n.
1. A ring or cap of metal put round the end of a stick, tube, etc. to strengthen it, or prevent splitting and wearing.
2. A ring or band, usually either giving additional strength or holding the parts of anything together.

Apparently the etymology can be traced back to the latin for bracelet.

shadowsong 101: How did you HTML those two symbols differently?

# is for the unit of weight, not currency.

According to Wikipedia, it derives from the abbreviation "lb." Printers put an additional slash through the L so it wouldn't be mistaken for a numeric 1 -- and it morphed from there.

Bridget Kelly #6: We've always called forgetting the word you need right now "the noun disease," because it's usually nouns.

Octothorpe is # on a touchtone phone, other uses have other names.
The xiphoid process is a small sword-like piece of bone inferior to the sternum. You can palpate it by running your fingers up along the bottom of the costal arch. We want to avoid breaking this while performing CPR skills.
Leda and the swan were engaged in miscygnation.
Wether is a castrated goat or sheep. Bellwether is the one that the flock follows. I giggle when I hear about someone or something being a bellwether — we're being led by a castrato.
Escutcheon is a plate around a keyhole or other opening, not just plumbing.
Frass is insect excrement or debris (I learned this during a major Gypsy Moth infestation).
The small strip of wood between the top and bottom sections of a double-hung window is a parting strip. The strips separating the lites (panes) are muntins.
Nomenclature is (of course) the special words we use to describe things in general. Gnomenclature is when we are describing part of a sundial.

And here I was all these years thinking # was the pound sign, since that's what all those robot receptionists tell me to pound over and over again before hanging up on me without routing my call where I wanted it to go.

Silly me.

John -- Escutcheon also refers to the space between a goat's back legs. For a dairy animal, a wide escutcheon is very desirable -- there's more room for an udder.

Nangleator @56: if you've never come across the word "sprue" until you met some in a factory, you've just outed yourself as someone who's never hung around with a bunch of scale model kit builders. I suspect that I'm not the only one around here who could wax lyrical on sprue and its function and after-factory uses. :-)

(I've still got the Liberator kit from Comet Miniatures, unbuilt, waiting for me to Do Something about it...)

Oniomania.

Passion for buying things.

I'm surprised at the allegations that women more often don't know the names for things, or more often elide them and refer to them with indirections.

Because my experience is the opposite, and I suspect that the difference is entirely situational.

The strong half of a sword (generally from its midpoint to its hilt) is the forte, and that's pronounced "fort."

The weak half (generally from its midpoint to its tip) is the foible.

This isn't especially obscure, but I love the term for the thin sheet of material affixed across the back of many desks: the modesty panel.

Bill (96):
I have a rather strong touch of verbal paraphrasia, so I'm always saying desk instead of pen or banana instead of bag. It falls under anomia also, which appears to be a pretty big bucket.
I just coined metonymia to describe that particular problem.

'Sprue' (actually 'ciliac sprue') is also the name of a disorder in which gluten causes the intestinal cilia to weaken and break off, causing the victim to slowly starve no matter how much they eat. If the patient ceases to eat gluten, the cilia grow back and s/he recovers.

My friend Steve has that. The priests give him a special rice cracker at communion. He says "Hey, if I ever need to lose ten pounds, all I have to do is eat one donut!" He does not need to lose ten pounds. He's a carpenter, and not eating anything with gluten in it keeps your diet fairly restricted!

#11, #75, #87
The thing that gets put on the wall to stop a door knob from making dents is called a "bumper."
A "stop" is the strip that is nailed to the "cheek" (door jamb). The stop stops the door's latch and bolt from swinging past the catch (aka: the hole in the strike plate).

A ferrule is a metal sleeve, tube or collar. It provides protection (the bottom of a cane) or access (to pipes and cable loops) and is generally fitted or held in places with screws.

Another tangent: my husband is unclear on the distinction between "this" and "that;" more damaging to our ability to work together, he refuses to accept "that thing" and a precise finger-point (is there a word for that, I wonder?) as adequate description, even if "that" is just barely beyond the pointing finger's touch, or, conversely, the only movable object in an otherwise empty forty-acre parking lot.

Rob 112: This isn't especially obscure, but I love the term for the thin sheet of material affixed across the back of many desks: the modesty panel.

That's funny, I call that the front of the desk! I guess I think of desks that have one as being a classroom thing...and of course the part of the teacher's desk that was toward me was the front, not the back.

Again, this is a phenomenon of deixis.

Hey, does anyone know if originally only desks for women had those modesty panels?

Victoria @91: the MSL works well if your Mom has a great sense of direction. My mother's best friend, bless her directionless heart, motions to the wrong side of anything about 90% of the time. So, she says turn left, waves to the right. The problem is that 10% correct; you end up having to ask for confirmation every time, just in case.

Greg @25: Except in racing, where males over the age of 4 who are still racing (and hence, not doing breeding duty), are just called "horses". There are also ridglings, who only have one descended testicle. Also, castrated males are never called colts (again, in racing anyway) and are only referred to as geldings no matter their age.

R. M. Koske @53: somebody, I think on rec.arts.tv.mst3k, coined the term "obnoxicon" for those logos in the corner of the TV screen. I like it.

Bob @112: the thin sheet of material affixed across the back of many desks

I call it "the @#*%ing thing that keeps me from being able to get at the network jacks or the outlets", since the desks around here are generally against walls.

I have snagged more sweaters on strike plates than I care to think about. Also skin.

Callifornication: beautifying suburbia by the addition of golden arches and similar architectural embellishments.

JESR 116: Tell him the difference between 'this' and 'that' is one of deixis, and tell him to go look it the hell up!

As for the other, does he have a neurological disorder, or is he just a PITA on principle?*

*That would be the PITA principle. *ducks*

Xopher @ 103: I copied and pasted from Wikipedia because I was too lazy to look up the alt code. Upon further examination, I'm glad I was lazy. The unicode value for ♯ is "U+266F", the HTML code is "&#9839;" - but the alt code (which I've seen given as both "alt-226F" and "alt-9839") doesn't work. You can't use letters in alt codes, as far as I know, and "alt-9839" gives me "o". I suppose I could have used the HTML, but ctrl-v is much easier.

John 120: I thought that meant having sex outdoors in October.

Rob @ #112 -- Yes, the strong point of sword is the forte -- that's why the primary pronunciation of the word meaning "one's strong suit" is "fort."

Saying "for-tay" is also acceptable, but it's the secondary pronunciation.

I find that it's always profitable to say "fort" and have a wordinista correct you -- place a bet ($5) and consult the dictionary.

MacMansions: large houses in a dog's breakfast of architectural styles unified only by ridiculous grandiosity, built on small city lots; see Miami, Florida.

Jen Roth @119, Why would a male horse that's being used for racing not be used for breeding? I can certainly see why pregnancy would affect a mare's racing abilities, but I can't quite see how a stallion doing stud duties would be unable to also run around a track now and then. (Unless I'm really misunderstanding how much that action affects a horse's stamina for a while.)

The name for the passage way that links the outside of a stadium to the inside of a stadium is called a "vomitory."

Emma @ 118

That's similar to the "the other left!" principle, also sometimes called "your left or my left?". It isn't restricted to people with a bad sense of direction, though.

Fade 126: Jen will probably give a knowledgeable answer, but I hope to get in with a wild guess or two before she does! 1. It's the other way around; the strains of racing leave a stallion too tired to...too tired. 2. It's just one of the crazy rules they have: you can't put a horse out to stud without retiring it first.

Greg, #25: Don't get me started on horse anatomy! I was horse-crazy as a kid, and learned the proper jargon for a lot of horse-related stuff at about age 6. As a result, I sometimes forget that other people don't necessarily know terms like "withers" (the base of a horse's neck, just in front of the saddle) and "pastern" (the short bone just above the hoof). Or the difference between a bridle and a hackamore (the latter has no bit), or that "bay" refers specifically to a brown horse whose points (mane, tail, and sometimes hooves) are darker than its body -- the same body color absent the dark poin