Tag: Definition

Four-quadrant Movie

1st quadrant
male
under 25
2nd quadrant
female
under 25
3rd quadrant
male
over 25
4th quadrant
female
over 25

In the Hollywood movie industry, a four-quadrant movie is one which appeals to all four major demographic “quadrants” of the moviegoing audience: both male and female, and both over- and under-25s. Films are generally aimed at at least two such quadrants, and most tent-pole films are four-quadrant movies. A film’s budget is often correlated to the number of quadrants the film is expected to reach, and movies are rarely produced if not focused on at least two quadrants.

Although four-quadrant movies are generally family-friendly, this is not a requirement. Some other genres meeting this may be romantic (such as Titanic and Meet the Parents) or horror films (The Exorcist), or be crowd-pleasing in nature, such as high-profile action films or adaptations of popular novels. Four-quadrant movies often have both adult and child protagonists. They are often built on a “high-concept” premise with well-delineated heroes and villains, with emotion, action and danger present in the story.

Wikipedia

Drunk Mouth, defined by Grace Slick

There is no number for my offence in the vehicle code, I don’t think. Drunk Mouth is what I call it.

Another time I was driving my Aston Martin about 125 miles an hour over Waldo Grade. I didn’t bother to check the oil gauge. So, down at the bottom of a hill, on the Richardson Bridge, smoke and flames started coming out of the engine. Someone in a Volkswagon pulled over and said, “Do you want me to get the highway patrol for you?” I said, “Yes, please.” So he went and got the highway patrol. This cop weighs 205 pounds and has his thumbs hooked in his belt, which has a potbelly over it. I just didn’t like the looks of him. He said, “O.K., what’s going on here?” Remember, there are flames coming out of my car. I said, “What the fuck does it look like is going on? I’m having a goddamn party at four A.M. with fucking flames coming out of my car.” That’s the way I’m talking to him. “Down to the Civic Center, you drunk,” he says. Drunk Mouth, again.

Grace Slick, quoted in The Courage to Change: Personal Conversations about Alcoholism

Sonder / Copenhagen


All those people in their cozy little apartments from CozyPlaces

via reddit

sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Shibboleth – Definition, Example of

A shibboleth is any custom or tradition, particularly a speech pattern, that distinguishes one group of people (an ingroup) from others (outgroups). Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation or keeping out perceived threats.

via Wikipedia

The general name for this type of thing is “Shibboleth,” after a city whose name was used that way in the Bible. Shibboleths are interesting to learn about, partly because it’s deep-cover spycraft, and partly because they words used are always whackadoodle nonsense.

In WWII, the Dutch would identify German spies by how they pronounced “Scheveningen,” a district in the Hague. The Germans pronounced the first syllable as something like the English word “chef,” while the Dutch version has a guttural “skhef” sound.

via reddit

Tsundoku

There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person. German has the word Backpfeifengesicht, which roughly means a face that is badly in need of a fist. And then there’s the Japanese word tsundoku, which perfectly describes the state of my apartment. It means buying books and letting them pile up unread.

via Open Culture

20180804_140218

des·ul·to·ry \ ˈde-səl-ˌtȯr-ē , -zəl- ; di-ˈsəl-t(ə-)rē , -ˈzəl- \

Desultory notes, as in:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/desultory
Definition of desultory
1 : marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose

    a dragged-out ordeal of … desultory shopping —Herman Wouk

2 : not connected with the main subject desultory comments
3 : disappointing in progress, performance, or quality a desultory fifth place finish a desultory wine

Not as in:
Wikipedia
Desultory was part of the first wave of Swedish death metal bands, alongside Entombed, Dismember, and others. Into Eternity, their Metal Blade debut following a lesser-known EP release, is standard for the genre, energetic and forceful, straddling the line between the more brutal American death style and the melodic Gothenburg variety.

Technology Bigot

TECHNOLOGY BIGOT –
noun
tech·nol·o·gy big·ot \ tek-ˈnä-lə-jē bi-gət \

Definition of TECHNOLOGY BIGOT
An individual who believes that their particular approach to a technical problem is the only one.

Example of TECHNOLOGY BIGOT in a sentence
“I get it, you like Oracle databases. But do you ever ask yourself if you’re just another TECHNOLOGY BIGOT?”

Anamnesis

In philosophy, anamnesis (/ˌænæmˈniːsɪs/; Ancient Greek: ἀνάμνησις) is a concept in Plato’s epistemological and psychological theory that he develops in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo, and alludes to in his Phaedrus.

It is the idea that humans possess knowledge from past incarnations and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge within us.

via Wikipedia

MacGuffin

The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term “MacGuffin” and the technique with his 1935 film The 39 Steps, an early example of the concept.[6][7] Hitchcock explained the term “MacGuffin” in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University in New York:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin’. The first one asks, ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.
Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Hitchcock explained the term “MacGuffin” using the same story.[8][9]
Hitchcock also said, “The MacGuffin is the thing that the spies are after but the audience don’t care.”[10]

wikipedia