A place to collect additions to lexicon(s), as they cross my path and provoke "hmmm... what's that all about?" and maybe eventually a gloss for each ... historical, demographic, sociocultural, geographical...
But for now, here's a List of my encounterments in the last few weeks, words and phrases that have salience, and so provide savor and flavor in the moment. Most are not new to me, though the thoughts their appearance inspires may be. Some belong among MY Keywords:
unseemly
wabi-sabi
Bros (as in 'Techbros' and 'Broligarchs')
NPC ('non-playing character')
-ware (nod to Rudy Rucker)
Agency (see Doc Searls)
Tar Baby
Algorithm, and 'algorithm distortion'
Cyber and Cyber-
reprehensible
recrudescence ("...the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve")
affordance
macramé
The Bully Pulpit
sin vergüenza ('without shame', but deeper)
pinkwashing (and -washing more generally); 'cause marketing'
-bot
lacuna
mashup
parasociality vortex ...see also Parasocial Relationships: Imaginary Friends of the Social Network Age Arvid Kahl 26v22
hunkering
hold my beer
"...kinks in that slinky"
cishet men
manchild / manbaby
flooding the zone
fantods
YCMTSU
chaos monkey
manosphere alphas
polycrisis
tendentious
enabling
amIright?
barn-burner
monetized/monetised
woke
culture wars
contestatory AI
explication
parse
problematize
avatar
vielschreiberei 'writing to excess'
Mo[u]ldy Fig and see also On and off the bus oookblog 7ix17
metastatic nationalism
louche
jive ... jive turkey ... jive-ass
dis track
You know what I'm sayin'?
signifying monkey
signification
bandied about
D'oh
topolect
squabble up
externalities, externalize
hilaribad
swasticar [Tesla]
rhetoric
knock yourself out
parlance
symbionts
sock puppet
weaponize
genre
tmesis [abso-fucking-lutely]
disingenuous
bugaboo
denote
hella
derp
AFAICT ...as far as I can tell...
KFTF ...keeping found things found...
folksonomy
kickstarter
FWIW
verisimilitude
serendipity [of course...]
your mom [insult and disdain]
slack, slacker
-core (add amialivecore)
doomscrolling
so cringe (see 13viii25)
launder
muggles
clickbait
enshittification
zoombombing
inerrant
couth, couthless, uncouth
portentous
exochoronym
feck and feckless
hipcrime
neoterise
vibe coding
agentic AI
PJ 'private jet'
salience
'a Thing'
cryptojacking (and crypto generally)
Ponzi scheme
qwerty and qwertyfication
vehicle of providence
latent space
retroactive continuity, retcon
doublespeak
anticipatory compliance
creativity
intellectual property
brand franchise
multimodasl content, and 'content'
vibe coding
thinning the herd
normie
Chad
pseudoepigraphically attributed
Singularity
growlery
phrasal vernacular viz. 'flooding the zone'
Sovereign Individual
sectioned
chiasmus
truthiness (October 2005)
po faced
misophonia
metafiction "a genre of fiction that comments on its own artifice"
Terminus (Roman god of boundaries, of limits)
adiaphora 'matters indifferent', inessentials, neither required nor forbidden
hashtag (proposed 2007, OED 2014)
doted on
rendition
shock and aweSh
performative contradiction
Shawinigan Handshake
montweazel
truffle out
"everything's computer"
backronym (viz. DOGE)
hiraeth (Welsh)
Product Market Fit (PMF)
yassify
memristor
festaiuolo
staffage
inherent fakeitude
palter
prosuming content
ressentiment
dead shark shuffle
pronoiac meme-broker
hypermobile dromomaniac
Gesamtkunstwerk
étonnez-moi! ('Astound me!')
sandbaggingIn the current lexicon of the A.I.-safety community, it is "sandbagging": pretending to be aligned with human purposes until it figures out what its own purposes might possibly be...
(there are more to be added from the yellow pads, probably many in lexgather.html, but on 17vii25 It occurred to me to look at the noteworthy words and phrases I've noted since early June and list those that want to be included. Here they are: bellwethers seen/heard, begging for glosses and explanations and ...unpacking signification)
Keir Starmer described as "a besuited void"
manufactroversy
indexicality (which ==> the Peirce/semiotics rabbit hole)
Agnotology (a-gnosis)
antimemetics (see 13iv)
group chat
satrap/satrapy
surveillance pricing (Cory Doctorow 24vi)
nimbus (26vi)
assistive technologies (via Warren Ellis)
interpolate
hyperobjects
apotheosis
normalize
uncanny
con
valence 16vii
alignment 17vii (see Language Log)
"a mass attentional event" (viz the Epstein brouhaha)
leaderboard
overtourism (see Craig Mod)
influencer and 'influencer marlketing'
algorithmic pandering
interactome, connectome, and other -ome words
hedonic tone ('emotional affect' and 'feliciphic calculus' [Jeremy Bentham]
aperçuadded 19vii25:
chillaxing
coffee badging
manifolds
doublespeak
retcon 'retroactive continuity'
ekphrastic
exposiomic/exposome
sanewashing
trolling
enforced omnipresence
IRL 'In Real Life'
atavistic integrity
non-discursive means
AI acronyms: LLM. GPT. LMM etc
agenbite of inwit
agentic recursion
involution
RSI 'recursive self improvement'
polytropos 'many twists and turns'
Imagination
autopoietic. 'poiesis' = making
qualia
proem
bellwether
portentous
reactive data binding
hüzün (Turkish) 'melancholy' Wikipedia: cites Pamuk: ...it has come to denote a sense of failure in life, lack of initiative and to retreat into oneself, symptoms quite similar to melancholia
Alignment 18vii25
Weltanschauung 11viii25
performative
fecosystem (Doc Searls 14viii25)habitus (Giles Crouch How Is Social Media Really Changing Humanity?)
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ 16x25
catachresis
Catachresis WikipediaCatachresis (rhetoric) Thoughtco.com
Catachresis literary devices.net
Catchresis etymonline.com
Catachresis and the amusing, aweful and artificial cathedral Stan Carey
Catachresis OED
Understanding Catachresis: The Art of Mastering Classical Rhetoric for Effective Communication rephrasely.com
Catachresis in Early Surrealist Poetry: Robert Desnos' "Ideal Maîtresse" Artur B Evans Romantic Review (1988)
Catachresis artandpopularculture.com
Crossing categorical boundaries with words, because there otherwise would be no suitable word.
The sustainers of a chair being referred to as legs.Replacing an expected word with another, half rhyming word, with an entirely different meaning from what one would expect (cf malapropism, Spoonerism).
I'm ravished! for "I'm ravenous!" or for "I'm famished!" "They build a horse" instead of they build a house.The strained use of an already existing word or phrase.
"Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon's purse" — Shakespeare, Timon of AthensThe replacement of a word with a more ambiguous synonym.
Saying job-seeker instead of "unemployed"Surrealism & Politics Ara H Merjian Art in America (2022)
...The Surrealists were drawn to the suggestive power of objects displaced from their original context and set into new, allusive frameworks, whether in the cityscapes of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico or the "painted collages" of Max Ernst. Physical dislodgment, which the Surrealists sometimes called dépaysement (literally: uncountrying, displacement from home), bespoke a potential disruption of meaning, and hence also of social and political ramifications. If the impulsions of automatic writing and painting eluded ideological pragmatism, the visual consequence of incongruity (of catachresis, parapraxia, and their various cognates) held some promise in the domain of a political aesthetics.The Best Metaphors and Similes The HyperTexts.com
...Catachresis is the use of words in inappropriate or unconventional ways. Another definition of catachresis is "an exaggerated comparison for rhetorical effect." Here's an example of good catachresis, from Francis Bacon: "A man that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green." Two lovely examples of catachresis can be found in the highly unconventional poetry of e. e. cummings: "the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses / nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands."Toward a Rhetoric of Spatial Form: Some Implications of Frank's Theory Lynda D. Mcneil Comparative Literature Studies (1980) JSTOR
architectonics
Architectonics Wikipediaarchitectonic OED
Architectonics and Style Russell Greer (pdf)
...As Bakhtin suggests, architectonic unity implies a greater sense of the whole than merely the whole of the topic. It implies an understanding of the writer's personal relation to the topic under consideration. Just as architects consider mass and the forces of gravity that push and pull on a building, architectonics as a metaphor implies the invisible social forces, primarily in language, that surround and define us. These forces push and pull us, and we are attracted to them or repelled away from them. We become defined by what we like and don't like (as any teenager knows). As individuals living in the world and as writers, we take a stand about what we like and what we don't like, arranging the items of the world in our own minds and creating our own identity by our relation to those items. In the process, we construct a personal understanding of the relationship of parts to the whole. These wholes are another word for meaning.agentic
AI Overview:The keyword "agentic" refers to the ability to act independently and achieve outcomes through self-directed action, or possessing "agency". In artificial intelligence (AI), agentic systems can autonomously set goals, plan, and execute multi-step tasks without constant human intervention.Agentic AI vs. generative AI Unlike generative AI, which is designed to produce content based on prompts, agentic AI is proactive and focused on taking action to achieve a goal. Agentic AI systems often use large language models (LLMs)—the core of generative AI—as a component for reasoning and planning.
Analogy: A generative AI chatbot can answer your question about a product. An agentic AI, on the other hand, could process that query, search for the product across different retailers in real time, apply a coupon, and make the purchase on your behalf.
Agency (psychology) Wikipedia
Agency Albert Bandura
Social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective A Bandura Annual Review of Psychology (2001)
personal agency sciencedirect.com
Agency Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
25 Agentic AI Terms Every Business User Needs To Know Lisa Lee at salesforce.com
27xii25 (this page needs better tending and a pathway to easier augmentation)
stuff21ix26
Realizing that I hadn't updated or added to this collection in 2026, I started to flip through the almost-20 yellow pads of 2026 (thusfar...) in search of additions. Some are new encounters, some are salient words and phrases whose signification seems worthy of summary, and a few are reminders to self to consider further. The first 3 yellow pads take me to mid-February:
nerd-adjacent 3i26
semantic model 7i26
connectome
ontology/epistemology/phenomenology 8i26
clickbait 10i26
bragchain
incoming 10i26
commentariat
both-sidesing
exascale (billion billion operations per second)
prediction markets 13i26
rulescuck, 'cuck' as insult
botnet 18i26
outrage cycles
the Discourse 18i26
-maxxing
nimious (excessive, beyond measure) 23i26
rizz ==> charisma
alignment/misalignment 27i26
embuggerance
slop, flailing slopulism, slopaganda era 29i26
surrealpolitik 1ii26
workflow 5ii26
clicktatorship 5ii26
'compute' as countable noun
performative 8ii26 "intended to signal status, either real or desired" (Warren Ellis)
nutpicking
raw dog 12ii26
agalmia
lambent
metacognotion <==thinking about one's own thinking
modulation
qualia
gladsome 26ii26
enactivism 17iii26
maxxing/mogging 20iii26
alignment 23iii26
entanglement
polycrisis
Overton Window
normalization
ostension <==behavior signaling intention to communicate something
Wisdom 25v26
sapience 25v26
Reckoning 27v26
holobionts 29v26
epiphanies and apotheoses: to be open to/expect 29v26
sublime 31v26
electromagnetic spectrum 3vi26
magnetosphere 3vi26
figment 6vi26
earmarks 9vi26
usurocracy 10vi26 <=='rent-taking'
manifold (Eric Wolf pg3) 13vi26, 4viii26,19viii26
logistics 14vi26
debitage
discourse 3vii26
agent, agentic 3vii26, 9vii26
condescension 6vii26
semantic cartography 11vii26
normative vs. idiographyc 11vii26
quodlibet 12vii26
concupiscent 13vii26
latent space 13vii26, 9ix26
theory 15vii26
dickovers 21vii26
polysemy 21vii26
supply chain 25vii26
fab as lexeme 25vii26
anthropocene 29vii26
systemicity 7viii26
ensorcelment 12viii26
pragmatic 16viii26 pragma==> 'deed'
'nihilist' vs 'anarchic' 16viii26
quiddity 19viii26
entelechy 31viii26 'vital force within'
wishcast 12ix26
perceptron 17ix26(to be continued)