Lexical Compendium

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.

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. ^[1] 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.^[2] 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.^[3]

Other contenders: anthrogenic, anthropogenic

Updates:

• In Nov 2025 YouTuber/filmmaker Thomas Flight published a thought-provoking piece on art versus artifice ^[4]
• In Nov 2025, a song made by AI topped Billboard's "Country Digital Song Sales" chart ^[5]
• In Feb 2026, an AI bot tried to submit a PR, got rejected, and wrote a blog in retaliation. ^[6]

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"

"Jawboning" is a political technique in which statements are made by persons of authority in order how to influence public perception or behavior without making formal policy changes.

Kayfabe is the convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic. The word is used primarily in the world of wrestling, but it is also used more generally to just mean a fake presentation. I heard the word being used in the context of politics to describe President Trump and lying.

The exact etymology of the word is uncertain, but there are theories that it is slang (perhaps somewhat Pig Latin-ized) for "be fake." ^[2]

A leitmotif is a recurring theme, idea, or motif that runs through a work, often associated with a particular character, concept, or situation. The term originates from German Leitmotiv, meaning "leading motif" and was used to describe Wagner's characteristic association of a melody to a character.

I was introduced to this term while watching Music by John Williams. In the documentary, George Lucas describes how he wanted John to create a theme for each of the characters in Star Wars.

Do you have the habit of expressing a positive statement by negating its opposite (or vice-versa)? For example, saying something is "Not bad" when you mean that it's good?

This is called a litotes (pronounced LIE-tuh-teez). The word comes from the Greek lítotēs, meaning simplicity. Litotes can be used to soften something, i.e. saying "I'm not bad at this" seems less boastful than saying "I'm pretty good at this." It can also be used for humorous effect, for example saying "I don't hate it!" instead of saying that you like something.

A metonymy is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is substituted with another closely associated with it. For example, in the sentence "Hey, who are all the suits?" the word suit is a metonymy for "business people."

The word comes from the Greek metōnymía, meaning "a change of name."

I heard the word in an episode of PBS' Otherwords.