Re: Bomb Incubators

Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Fri, 3 Dec 1999 11:47:24 -0800 (PST)


I'm not a real doofus, but I play one at a national laboratory writes:

> I don't understand the referent here. A hapax legomenon, meaning 'once
> spoken', the bane and prize of interpreters, is a word found but once, and thus
> has no other examples, helpful or otherwise. Which makes for a great number of
> words to explain the single occurrence.

In recent (very recent actually) times it has come to mean a term
which gives very few (ideally one) hit on an exhaustive search engine
(such as AltaVista).

For instance "hapax legomenon" doesn't qualify, because
http://www.alltheweb.com/cgi-bin/search?query=%22hapax+legomenon%22
gives 223 hits, whereas "LLM-105" would, since giving only five:
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q=LLM-105&search=Search&r=&kl=XX&stype=&pg=aq&text=yes&d0=&d1=

So, if you want to have your stuff found without knowing where it is,
use a neologism (which hopefully doesn't catch on) as marker, and let
the site be indexed by a search engine.