Lexical Compendium

To glaze is to excessively praise or flatter someone, often in an over-the-top, cringe, or sarcastic manner. The implication is often that the recipient was unworthy of such praise. This slang word was popularized in online spaces like TikTok.

I first heard it when Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) had the following Tweet exchange:

@sama:
we updated GPT-4o today! improved both intelligence and personality.

@StockLizardKing:
It’s been feeling very yes-man like lately

Would like to see that change in future updates

@sama:
yeah it glazes too much

will fix

Gormless is a word used mostly in Britain to mean dumb or lacking intelligence. ^[1]

There's this phenomenon called lost positive or orphaned negative in which a free word drops out of common usage while the derived adjective remains. Gormless comes from the word gorm, which isn't really used anymore but means "understanding." This comes from the Old Norse gamur, meaning care or heed. ^[2]

Emily Brontë put it in Wuthering Heights (1847): "Did I ever look so stupid: so gormless as Joseph calls it?" ^[3] From there it spread; while gorm mostly didn't. ^[4]

I didn't really know this word until I heard it on an episode of Rob Words.^[5]

This archaic word was used to describe someone who was discontent, i.e. someone who grumbles a lot. The origins of the word are in 17th century English politics.

I heard the word in an episode of the podcast The Allusionist.

Habeas corpus is a Latin phrase meaning "you shall have the body."

It is a legal principle that safeguards individual freedom by protecting against unlawful or indefinite imprisonment and it has its origins many hundreds of years ago in England. The Magna Carta in 1215 established that no one -- not even the king -- is above the law. In the 13th century and for the next few hundred years, common law court practices involved issuing writs to check unlawful imprisonment. These started with Habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, meaning you have the body to submit [before the court]. Over time, this evolved into a powerful legal tool, eventually codified in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679.

In the U.S., the right to habeas corpus is enshrined in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9), which states that it may only be suspended "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." As it was centuries ago, it remains a key check on arbitrary power by government leaders. . I’ll be honest -- if you’d asked me to define habeas corpus or explain the Magna Carta, I probably would’ve stumbled through it. I knew the term appeared in the Constitution, but I couldn’t have told you exactly what it meant.

Then came the news cycle in late May 2025.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, bungled answers on Tuesday about habeas corpus, incorrectly asserting that the legal right of people to challenge their detention by the government was actually the president’s “constitutional right” to deport people.

-- Gold, Michael. "Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People" The New York Times, 20 May 2025

Heather Cox Richardson also covered this in the 20 May 2025 Letters From an American.

I'm guessing I wasn’t the only one suddenly revisiting high school civics after that performance.

Edit: Habeas corpus was in the news again in October 2025 as Donald Trump seemingly didn't know what (or who?) it was.

A seat, carriage, or covered platform placed on the back of an elephant (or camel) for carrying passengers. Historically, howdahs were often elaborately decorated and used by royalty, hunters, or soldiers. ^[2]

I learned this word while camping. A friend casually asked, "What's the thing called that sits on top of an elephant so you can ride it?" Another friend immediately replied: “Howdah.”

I was impressed -- not only because I had never heard the word, but because he retrieved such an obscure and wonderfully specific term without hesitation

Howdah comes from the Hindi haudā, ultimately derived from an Arabic word for a litter carried by a camel.

And what is a litter? It is a portable bed or enclosed seat used to carry a person, typically borne by people or animals. The word ultimately comes from the Latin lectus, meaning “bed” or “couch.”

For a while now, I've been searching for a term that captures human-made creativity -- as opposed to something created by an LLM. Occasionally I see the word organic used in this context. ^[6] It works, but it feels a little off. Organic implies something that happens naturally, often without human involvement.

Here I'd like to proffer humanic: a word meaning pertaining to or originating from human agency or creativity, particularly in contrast to work produced by AI. An appropriate antonym in this context might be synthetic. So: humanic and synthetic. I like the symmetry.

The word humanic isn't actually new. Historically, it referred to the study of human nature.^[7] But let's reclaim it to also denote cultural artifacts made by humans in a world where if feels like we're just moments away from being saturated with purely synthetic content. Maybe others will organically come upon this usage. I'll use this space to record any sightings.

The word humanic is not necessarily anti-AI, it is descriptive of origin, not ideology. We may need another word to convey sentiment and preference.

Example:

"Oh, I love the theater. It's so refreshing to see content that is entirely humanic."

Note: Anthropic might have also been a good choice, but this, ironically, is already the name of a popular LLM.^[8]

Other contenders: anthrogenic, anthropogenic

Updates:

• In Nov 2025 YouTuber/filmmaker Thomas Flight published a thought-provoking piece on art versus artifice ^[9]
• In Nov 2025, a song made by AI topped Billboard's "Country Digital Song Sales" chart ^[1]
• In Feb 2026, an AI bot tried to submit a PR, got rejected, and wrote a blog in retaliation. ^[4]
• A May 2026 article in The Atlantic ^[3] contained a link to an interesting pre-print paper ^[5] suggesting that using LLMs has impacted human speach in terms of the words we use.
• A July 2026 article in The SF Gate ^[2] described how a restaurant's food images were ridiculed for being generated by AI.
• Update September 2026: I heard about "ghost creators" on Taylor Lorenz's Power User. ^[10] Semafor's Max Tani describes a crop of YouTube channels that look like independent political commentators, but are actually paid actors reading formulaic, AI-generated scripts. ^[11]

Infinocchiare is an Italian word which means to cheat or swindle someone.

The term has interesting origins. The root of the word comes from the term finocchio which means fennel in English. In the Middle Ages, fennel was used as a masking spice. Wine merchants would serve customers fennel before offering them wine, in order to hide defects. In the same way, butchers began to put it in their salami as an alternative to pepper in order to cover up the taste of not very good meat.

Though not for the same reasons, this tradition persists today. When we were in Tuscany, Italy, we discovered finocchiona salami and I became intrigued with this word.

In Italian, the phrase Non farti infinocchiare means Don't be fooled but it translates precisely in English to Don't get fenneled.

An inkhorn term is one that is pretentious or overly ornate (often words from Latin or Greek).

An "inkhorn" was how ink was carried by scholars and clerks in the 1500s. The metaphor suggests that such words come from the scholar’s desk rather than natural speech.

Ironically, some words which historically were derided as inkhorn terms are now rather mundane and commonplace... including the word mundane.

Example:

Sally loved to flaunt her giant vocabulary, peppering every conversation with inkhorn terms that left her friends reaching for a dictionary.

1. A period when normal government is suspended, especially between successive reigns or regimes.
2. An interval or pause between two periods of office or other things.

As in:

...the interregnum between the discovery of radioactivity and its detailed understanding.

or:

You are a weak monarch in a dangerous interregnum.

The latter comes from a line of dialog from the character Gerri in the television series "Succession"

Intransigent means refusing to change one's views or to compromise.

It is usually used for a person or position that has become rigid or obstinate, especially in a dispute or negotiation. The word has a slightly political flavor to my ear, perhaps because it so often appears in descriptions of deadlocked governments, labor fights, or ideological standoffs.

Example:

The talks collapsed because both sides remained intransigent.