Adam And His Profligate Ways

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Today’s word is from an article Adam Curry read on his abbreviated Daily Source Code. The article, by Felicity Lawrence, is a wake up call for the western world’s food consumers. “The way we eat is not just ecologically unsustainable but also morally and even biologically unsustainable.”

The word is profligate. Let’s listen.

Profligate, it an adjective that, in this context, means recklessly wasteful, wildly extravagant. It can also be used a as a noun to describe a profligate person.

Adam, thank you for reading this editorial to us. I think you and Felicity draw attention to a very serious problem. Everyone should read this article or listen to Adam’s podcast.

The Article: This food racket just can’t go on

[I can no longer find the podcast online. But you might be able to find it by searching for DSC20041202.mp3. It was posted on December 02, 2004. –Scott]

Lascivious Biddies- Exciting Sexual Desire & a comment from Bordeaux

Today’s word, lascivious, was inspired by the Lascivious Biddies. Actually you get two words today, lascivious and biddies.

First off the Lascivious Biddies are four talented women who perform some very entertaining cabaret style tunes. They have been featured in Adam Curry’s DSC several times. Good music.

On to the words:

Lascivious is an adjective – Inspiring or exciting sexual desire or lust. Often lewd or salacious lust.

Biddies is a noun meaning a hen or in general a bird.

Judging by their luscious sound I think the Lascivious Biddies are appropriately named.

Disambiguation

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I first heard this word while working on an e-commerce web site at AT&T Broadband. It was used to described elements of a page or process that were designed to to help the user better understand what they were buying or configuring as well as helping then understand where they were in the ordering process.

According to Wiktionary.com disambiguation is a noun meaning the the removal of ambiguity. A few good synonyms are clarification, explanaiton, illumination.

I was reminded of this useful term of art while browsing wikipedia.org. Wikipedia uses disambiguate pages to help users find just what they are looking for. A search for quicksilver will display a nice example of one of these pages. Essentially these disambiguation pages list all the contexts this entry fits in. In the case of quicksilver Wikipedia lists Quicksilver the clothing brand, Quicksilver the software, Quicksilver as the archaic name for the chemical element mercury and several more entries for quicksilver.

If you haven’t taken a look at wikipedia.org you need to check it out today. It is an incredible open source style encyclopedia with almost 400,000 entries. It is the first best place to go for encyclopedic research.