Word: arcana
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...continuous explosion of knowledge?which, of course, began with the Enlightenment but picked up dizzying speed. The intellectual universe became ever harder for ordinary people, inharder for ordinary people, indeed even for specialists, to master. At the same time, the importance of specialized knowledge became dramatically clear as the arcana of science, technology, law, economics spread through daily life. TIME had to respond. Gradually, stories became longer, more thorough, more searching...
...Gibbons: "We've modeled it something like a card file." Basically, PFS and other listmaking programs are souped-up electronic Rolodexes with built-in cross-reference capabilities. Having stored his trivia on an AppleIIe, Baseball Card Collector Louis Musher, 13, of New York City can call up such arcana as the names of all Montreal Expo catchers who batted .250 or better in 1980. In Sun City, Ariz., Vinton Ostrander, 76, is using his Franklin Ace computer to record the genealogy of some 3,000 relatives and will soon have instant access to 300 years of family history...
...network-quality television signals. All of it was pieced together during the past five years by Gary and Ted Ruscitti, 29, a high school friend. They plowed through catalogues and hounded manufacturers for $60,000 worth of free components. They also taught themselves everything from computer programming to the arcana of pinball relays. The result is a system that permits Rob to roam the heavens by voice control...
Dickson's categories become increasingly funistradian. The section Punk, for example, lists 43 definitions of that word, and then goes on to define punkah, punkateero and punkatunk. Sexy Words includes cataglottism, ecdemolagnia, parnel, renifleur and stasivalence (don't ask). Under Curses, Dickson offers such arcana as feague, which a 1785 dictionary defined as "to put ginger up a horse's fundament, to make him lively and carry his tail well...
...provide water .. . 'We had to drink it or perish miserably of thirst' . . . It took a full week-end before the last of them had found his way home." White analyzes the philosophy of fishing in a style that Izaak Walton might envy, and his descriptions of dartboard arcana and Welsh superstitions belong on the shelf alongside Dickens. Another, smaller book could be made of his observations: "The stomach is really the basis of nationalism." "The infallible test for a gentleman is to drop in on him unfed, and see what he does about it." "Dogs, like very small...