frap verb (fraps, frapping, frapped) [ with obj. ] Nautical: bind (something) tightly. an attempt to frap the ship by passing cables under the hull. ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘strike, beat’, now only dialect): from Old French fraper ‘to bind, strike’, of unknown origin. The current sense dates from the mid 16th century.
anther noun, Botany: the part of a stamen that contains the pollen. ORIGIN early 18th cent.: from French anthère or modern Latin anthera, from Greek anthēra ‘flowery’, from anthos ‘flower’.
panspermia noun [ mass noun ]: the theory that life on the earth originated from microorganisms or chemical precursors of life present in outer space and able to initiate life on reaching a suitable environment. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek, from panspermos ‘containing all kinds of seed’. [Is this what the Chinese had in mind when they planted something on the dark side of the moon? It died.)
conflate verb [ with obj. ]: combine (two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, etc.) into one: the urban crisis conflates a number of different economic, political, and social issues. DERIVATIVES: conflation .ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘fuse or melt down metal’): from Latin conflat- ‘kindled, fused’, from the verb conflare, from con- ‘together’ + flare ‘to blow’. [You see this one a lot now. Fancy.]
boffin nounBrit. informal: a person engaged in scientific or technical research: the boffins at the Telecommunications Research Establishment. • a person with knowledge or a skill considered to be complex or arcane: a computer boffin. DERIVATIVES boffiny adjective ORIGIN Second World War: of unknown origin. [I would love to be boffiny.]
hiragana noun [ mass noun ]: the more cursive form of kana (syllabic writing) used in Japanese, primarily used for function words and inflections. Compare with katakana. ORIGIN Japanese, ‘plain kana’. [I distinclty remember looking this one up before but I haven’t had any occasion to use it. It’s such a nice one.]
aposiopesis noun (pl.aposiopeses [ mass noun ] Rhetoric: the device of suddenly breaking off in speech. in coping with the unsaid and unsayable, oral history is impelled towards aposiopesis. DERIVATIVES aposiopetic adjective ORIGIN late 16th cent.: via Latin from Greek aposiōpēsis, from aposiōpan ‘be silent’.
There. Quit while I’m ahead. I started this entry three times and inadvertently deleted what I had written three times.
Ah well, there’s more where those came from.
Back to my screenplay.