The Night Witches ready for a raid, 1944 (photo via Vanity Fair).

Welcome to Word Buzz Wednesday, in which we round up our favorite buzzworthy words of the week. The latest: badass female pilots; another strange word from Justice Scalia; and basketball players, extra-large.

featherbowling

“Featherbowling was born from that medieval family of games that endure in no small part because they can be played with a beverage in the shooter’s free hand.”

Chris Koentges, “Believe in Featherbowling,” ESPN, Jun 19, 2015

Featherbowling — or trabollen in Dutch — originated in Flanders, Belgium, and is similar to curling. ESPN describes it as bocce except instead of balls “you roll discs that have been slightly weighted to rotate unevenly across the earth, exposing the shooter’s secret divine grace.”

Night Witches

“By the end of the war, the Night Witches had flown somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 bombing raids, delivering around 23,000 tons of munitions right to Nazi’s.”

Eric Grundhauser, “The Little-Known Story of the Night Witches, an All-Female Force in WWII,” Vanity Fair, June 25, 2015

This month marks the 73rd anniversary of the establishment of the Night Witches, a Soviet “all-female squadron of bomber pilots who ran thousands of daring bombing raids with little more than wooden planes and the cover of night.”

The squadron was started by the “Russian Amelia Earhart,” Colonel Marina Raskova, who “lobbied to finds ways for women to take a more active role in the war.” In early fall 1941, Raskova’s efforts paid off: Joseph Stalin himself ordered that she set up a trio of all-women air squads, including one team of night bombers.

To stay hidden, the pilots would kill their engines when they neared their targets, “making a light ‘whooshing’ sound.” Soon German soldiers began calling them Nachthexen, or “Night Witches,” and even thought the women had been given special pills that “gave them the night vision of a cat.”

parbunkells

“But despite the initial plea from the artist who created an online page for the word and asked others not to use it anywhere else on the Internet, ‘parbunkells,’ which means ‘coming together through the binding of two ropes,’ immediately popped up all over cyberspace.”

Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, “‘Parbunkells’ Conquers the Internet Against Artist’s Wishes,” DNAInfo, June 26, 2015

Julia Weist, a Brooklyn artist (natch), posted this rare 17th-century word on a billboard, which made a lot of people on the internet realize they don’t know everything. Weist unearthed the word in a 1627 publication housed in the New York Public Library’s Rare Book Division.

(H/t: Mededitor)

putsch

“He called the decision a ‘judicial Putsch’ and ‘a threat to democracy’, in which the majority discovered a right to marriage that all the US legal minds before them had overlooked.”

Anthony Zurcher, “Gay marriage: It’s a ‘judicial Putsch’ warns dissenting Scalia,” BBC, June 26, 2015

A putsch is similar to a coup, or “a sudden attempt by a group to overthrow a government.” The word putsch comes from the German Putsch, “revolt, riot,” or literally, “a sudden blow, push, thrust, shock,” which is imitative in origin.

super-big

“So often, super-bigs, as players like Meng and Sing are called, get overworked. Their feet, still growing, can’t handle the stress of carrying such large bodies up and down a court. They break down.”

Les Carpenter, “Satnam Singh: an NBA history-maker, and a new type of super-big,” The Guardian, June 26, 2015

Super-big is basketball slang for an enormous player — one who’s often over seven feet tall.

Welcome to Word Buzz Wednesday, in which we round up our favorite buzzworthy words of the week. The latest: a totes adorabilis octopus; Brotox for brow’s feet; a self-healing jellyfish.

adorabilis

“‘One of the thoughts I had was making it ‘Opisthoteuthis adorabilis’ because they are just—yeah, they’re really cute,’ she says in the video by Science Friday.”

Gwynn Guilford, “This tiny octopus is so cute, scientists want to name it ‘adorabilis,’” Quartz, June 17, 2015

Looking like something out of Finding Nemo, this tiny pink octopus dwells in the deep sea and is part of the family nicknamed “flapjack” octopodes, so-called because they travel by “flapping a fringe of webbing” between their arms as they hover above the seafloor.

In case you were wondering, octopodes, not octopi, is the proper plural of octopus. The suffix -i as the plural of -us is Latin while the word octopus comes from the Greek oktopous, “eight-footed.”

Brotox

“While women still supply most of the demand for cosmetic drugs, Allergan is betting that by marketing to men, it can squeeze more growth out of well-known drugs such as Botox and create new markets with treatments like Kythera’s Kybella, for double chins. Call it the ‘Brotox’ strategy.”

Ryan Sachetta and Cynthia Koons, “Worried About Wrinkles, Guys? Allergan Bets You’ll Want ‘Brotox’,” Bloomberg, June 17, 2015

Brotox, a blend of bro and Botox, is just one in a long line of products “repackaged” for men, including broga, brogurt, murse, and meggings.

Fridgehenge

“Pranksters behind the mysterious ‘Fridgehenge’ have been revealed.”

Jon Livesey, “‘Fridgehenge’ pranksters mark summer solstice with homage to Stonehenge – made out of white goods,” The Mirror, June 22, 2015

Fridgehenge refers to several refrigerators arranged like the stones of Stonehenge.

Thousands of people descend on Stonehenge every summer solstice to celebrate the longest day of the year around the mysterious stones that might have been used in religious rites “by early Britons 4,000 years ago.”

Fridgehenge shouldn’t be confused with Manhattanhenge, the twice-yearly lining up of the sunset with Manhattan’s street grid

Holocene Extinction

“You’ve probably heard about the Holocene Extinction by now, or the catchier, media-friendly Sixth Extinction.”

Dan Seitz, “What Is the Holocene Extinction? An Explainer,” Uproxx, June 22, 2015

In this latest mass extinction (the last one occurred 66 million years ago and was the one that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs), animals are going extinct “more than a hundred times faster than the average background rate.” Because of human activity, the number of species that should have gone extinct over 11,400 years have disappeared in just one hundred.

Holocene refers to an epoch that began 10,000 years ago and continues today. The word ultimately comes from the Greek holos, “whole.”

symmetrization

“Because jellyfish often suffer from injuries—sometimes inflicted by unsuccessful predators—symmetrization is an important method to heal themselves.”

Carrie Arnold, “The Surprising Way Jellyfish Put Themselves Back Together,” National Geographic, June 15, 2015

Symmetrization is a newly discovered phenomenon which refers to when an organism, post-injury, rearranges itself so that it’s symmetrical, like a jellyfish that has lost two of its eight legs and repositions its other legs so that they are “once again evenly spaced.”

[Photo via Flickr: “Jellyfish 1,” CC BY 2.0 by L. Church]

Welcome to Word Buzz Wednesday, in which we round up our favorite buzzworthy words of the week. The latest: watch out Tiger Mom; divine camping; and another generational acronym.

Bourbon virus

“US health authorities have just confirmed a second case of Bourbon virus, a rare illness doctors believe to be spread by ticks.”

Gwynn Guilford, “This rare bourbon that’s spreading across the US isn’t as tasty as it sounds,” Quartz, June 1, 2015

Relax, Jim Bean enthusiasts: the Bourbon virus has nothing to do with the drink. It’s named for where it was first reported in 2014, Bourbon County, Kansas. Symptoms include fever, acute muscle and joint pain, diarrhea, and a rash.

Cat Dad

“While Cat Dad may not be as well known as Tiger Mother, he’s actually been around nearly as long.”

“Tiger Mum or Cat Dad? Claws out over parenting styles,” BBC, May 28, 2015

Unlike the strict and ferocious Tiger Mother, the Cat Dad takes a softer approach to parenting, “preferring to be emotionally sensitive, gentle and relaxed about rules and discipline, in the belief that it will make their offspring self-sufficient and independent.” The name comes from a popular Chinese television show, Tiger Mom Cat Dad.

A real-life Cat Dad was a father from Shanghai who debated Amy Chua, author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and despite having a very different approach to parenting, like Chua had a daughter accepted to Harvard.

Another parenting variation is the Wolf Dad who is even stricter than the Tiger Mother.

champing

“We’ve had such a positive response to our ‘champing’ breaks that we’ve decided to expand them to two more churches for the 2015 ‘champing’ season.”

Emma Mills, “Churches the new Airbnb as ‘champing’ proves popular,” The Telegraph, June 9, 2015

Champing is camping in churches, and plays on glamping, glamorous camping, or “roughing it” in fancy, comfortable tents.

hijra

“Bangladesh’s government is planning to recruit hijras, who have been officially recognized as a separate gender in Bangladesh since 2013, as traffic police in an attempt to rehabilitate and offer them new employment.”

Pantha Rahman Reza, “Bangladesh wants ‘third gender’ to serve as traffic police,” Public Radio International, May 31, 2015

Some male-to-female transgender Bangladeshis have adopted the feminine gender identity hijra, although the term may be considered derogatory in other languages.

yuccie

“Not all yuccies follow such a direct path. There are plenty of 20-somethings who take a few steps down the road of traditional employment despite the growing suspicion that their unique intellect deserves more professional fulfillment.”

David Infante, “The hipster is dead, and you might not like who comes next,” Mashable, June 9, 2015

Yuccie, a play on yuppie, stands for Young Urban Creatives, “a slice of Generation Y, borne [sic] of suburban comfort, indoctrinated with the transcendent power of education, and infected by the conviction that not only do [they] deserve to pursue our dreams, [they] should profit from them.”

[Photo via Flickr: “Der Kitten office assistant,” CC BY 2.0 by snaxor]