09:40, Wednesday 26 Feb., 2003 Link

Two words:

• Valorization: "Act or process of attempting to give an arbitrary market value or price to a commodity by governmental interference, as by maintaining a purchasing fund, making loans to producers to enable them to hold their products, etc".
• Retronym: "A word or phrase created because an existing term that was once used alone needs to be distinguished from a term referring to a new development, as acoustic guitar in contrast to electric guitar or analog watch in contrast to digital watch" [thanks Andrew].

Words as memebullets. Somebody who understands an idea well enough to collapse it into a word which will open up in a similar way in your own head. That's okay for the above words. But some words aren't tightly clustered concepts. They're smeared out over your entire worldview. That is, as Andrew said [in conversation] last night, it isn't enough just to hear and understand the words "paradigm shift". You have the idea first, you notice a commonality, you identify something, and then when you hear the word it fits into a pre-existing gap. Then you really understand it.