Word: arcana
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Simmons (Powdered Eggs, Wrinkles) uses the broad strokes of Restoration comedy to distance the new book from his former employer. Surnames of staff members on the influential weekly Belles Lettres derive from the nomenclature of publishing and typography. Among the arcana: Jonathan Margin, Virginia Wrappers, Claire Tippin, Lou Bodoni, Xavier Deckle, Ellie Bellyband and Sylvia Topstain...
...hear many baseball writers tell it, Bill James is the national pastime's absentminded professor, a slightly bewildered numbers-crunching cult figure who rattles on about such arcana as the Brock6 system, Pythagorean projections and the devil's theory of park effects. The reason is that they find it hard to believe a bearded pseudo-academic, squirreled away with pad and pencil in Kansas, could possibly know more about the game than veteran beat writers, who & regularly trade locker-room gibes with Reggie and Pete and get to provide ringside coverage of Billy Martin's bouts with marshmallow salesmen...
Writers, etymologists and other devotees of verbal arcana have never been given a richer browsing ground. But while they are discovering that a blind tiger is a place to buy and drink moonshine, or that there are 176 names for dust balls under the bed, they are also bound to be awed by the dictionary's staggering scholarship. Virtually every entry is meticulously catalogued for its geographic roots, first recorded usage, evolution of meaning and the most subtle shading of sound. Pronunciation Editor James Hartman particularly prizes manniporchia, a northern Maryland word for the DTs. The dictionary's investigators traced...
Such questions are usually the arcana of traders and government specialists. But now they are at the center of the hottest, and most complicated, political fight of the year. The arguments, though often phrased in economic jargon, involve gut issues: prices and jobs. The battle has been joined not only by Washington and Wall Street but by the major industrial powers as well. At stake is nothing less than continued prosperity and friendly relations between the trading nations...
When the Soviet concert agency Goskontsert, probably fearing her defection, canceled her scheduled tours of Italy and the Netherlands, Davidovich decided that she would have to join Dmitry. Together with her mother and sister, she painstakingly gathered the required emigration documents, including such arcana as the funeral certificate of her grandfather; within six months all three were granted permission to leave...