A few good words (and terms) I’ve run across recently:

• Pareidolia – taking a vague pattern and seeing something clearly in it – pattern recognition gone awry. Think of Mother Theresa’s image on a piece of toast. The word is courtesy of Victor the Talking Budgie via the Kircher Society web site. Paredolia’s polar opposite (antonym just doesn’t seem to fit this context) is a phenomenon I’ve heard described as native vision – the ability of a local to see something that someone who wasn’t intimately familiar with the environment would miss. Hmmm… think I need to watch Dersu Uzala again.
• Prolix – windbag-ish. I’ve read through this word many times, assuming I understood it’s meaning from context. I finally looked it up – huge sigh of relief – I didn’t have my head lodged.

Jollie (1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c) incorporated many aspects of the osteology of the group in his work, but as Olson (1985:108) pointed out, the work is “prolix and idiosyncratic” and it is “a labor of love” to extract information from it. The Lost World of the Moa, Worthy and Holdaway

• Nutpicking – the practice of attempting to discredit a blog by grabbing the craziest comments you can find and claiming that they are representative. A vice that seems to be particularly prevalent among ‘traditional’ journalists.
• Friedman Unit (abbr. FU) – 6 months.