Naming

An expansion invented after the fact to fit letters that already existed as a word or acronym.

The hypothesis that visible disorder invites serious crime, and the long dispute over whether the evidence supports it.

The number of people who would have to leave before a project stalls.

Deciding when a cached value has stopped being correct — famously one of the hard problems.

Imitating the visible form of a practice while the mechanism that made it work is absent.

The convention that a conspicuously introduced story element must pay off later.

Do not remove something whose purpose you cannot explain.

Prose inside source code, useful only when it records a constraint the code cannot state.

Coordinated action toward a shared goal, and the free-rider problem that makes it hard.

Fraud that obtains trust first, so the victim hands over the money themselves.

A lightweight convention giving commit messages a machine-readable type and scope.

The observation that posting a wrong answer online gets a faster correction than asking a question.

A shared vocabulary of tokens, primitives, and rules that makes independent work converge.

A substitution that reanalyzes a phrase into a different but still-plausible meaning.

A recurring character reduced, across a long run, to a single exaggerated trait.

Words reshaped to resemble familiar parts, and the false origin stories that reshaping invites.

A metadata block at the top of a text document, separated from the body by delimiters.

A noun classification system that forces agreement across a sentence and correlates only loosely with meaning.

How information is organized, labeled, and navigated so people can find what they need.

A pedestrian offense whose 1920s American origins are widely read as an effort to shift blame for road deaths onto pedestrians.

Professional wrestling's maintained fiction that staged events are real.

Information modeled as entities and the typed relationships between them.

Juxtaposed shots produce a meaning that exists in neither shot alone.

The time spent debating an item is inversely proportional to its actual stakes.

Making a system countable and administrable, at the cost of the local knowledge that made it work.

Folding, slitting and sealing a letter so the sheet becomes its own tamper-evident envelope.

The hypothesis that language shapes thought, and the evidence that has narrowed it considerably.

Friction between what a game's mechanics reward and what its story claims to value.

An object that motivates a plot while remaining substantively irrelevant to it.

A blend of two idioms into a third, and the family of errors that reveals how fixed phrases are stored.

A plain-text formatting syntax designed to be readable as written, now the default for technical writing.

a placeholder identifier chosen to carry no meaning of its own.

A macroeconomic account holding that a currency issuer is constrained by real resources and inflation rather than by revenue.

A wrapper type with a way to lift a value in and a way to chain functions that return more wrappers.

A threat to social values amplified by media past any proportion to actual harm.

Defending a modest claim while trading on a bolder one made under the same name.

A good whose value to each user grows as more people use it.

The range of political positions treated as acceptable to hold at a given moment.

Outcomes shaped by the sequence of past choices rather than by present merit.

Writing so that the intended reader can find, understand, and use the information the first time.

A causal explanation that was inferred rather than tested, and reads as more rigorous for being specific.

without a clear signal of intent, sincere extremism and parody of it are indistinguishable.

Categories are organized as graded resemblance to a best example rather than defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.

Tenants collectively withholding rent to force negotiation with a landlord or policymaker.

Most of what is called taste is smell arriving at the receptors from the back of the mouth.

Explaining a problem aloud, in full detail, to a listener who cannot help — and finding the fault while explaining it.

A pronunciation or usage that reveals group membership, historically used as a test with lethal stakes.

A controlled vocabulary for classifying things, and the choice between hierarchy, facets, and free tagging.

The future cost of a present shortcut, metaphorically accruing interest.

A constrained set of type sizes and their paired line heights and spacing.

An unconditional cash payment to every member of a population, and its contested design and evidence.

A collection of interlinked pages that anyone with access can edit, named for the Hawaiian word for quick.

A note-taking method built on small single-idea notes linked to one another.