The voiceless glottal transition, commonly called a "fricative", is a type of sound used in some spoken languages which patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant phonologically, but often lacks the usual phonetic characteristics of a consonant. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is h. Although has been described as a voiceless vowel, because in many languages it lacks the place and manner of articulation of a prototypical consonant, it also lacks the height and backness of a prototypical vowel: [ a...

Latin spelling or orthography refers to the spelling of Latin words written in the scripts of all historical phases of Latin from Old Latin to the present. They all use some phase of the same alphabet even though conventional spellings may vary from phase to phase. The Roman alphabet, or Latin alphabet, was adapted from the Old Italic alphabet to represent the phonemes of the Latin language. The Old Italic alphabet had in turn been borrowed from the Greek alphabet, itself adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. A given phoneme may well be represented by different letters in different peri...

The Invisible Pink Unicorn (IPU) is the goddess of a parody religion used to satirize theistic beliefs, taking the form of a unicorn that is paradoxically both invisible and pink. She is a rhetorical illustration used by atheists and other religious skeptics as a contemporary version of Russell's teapot, sometimes mentioned in conjunction with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The IPU is used to argue that supernatural beliefs are arbitrary by, for example, replacing the word God in any theistic statement with Invisible Pink Unicorn. The mutually exclusive attributes of pinkness and invisibi...

is a series of Japanese manga and light novel series by Ichirō Sakaki with illustrations by Yō Fujishiro, published by Fujimi Shobo and since 2000 has run for ten volumes. It currently has sold over half a million copies In 2007 a three episode original video animation based on the light novel was produced by Feel Anime Studios. The OVA series has been licensed for English language translation and DVD release in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom by Manga Entertainment. A film version was aired on the Sci-Fi Channel as part of their Ani-Monday programming block on Oc...

A straitjacket is a garment shaped like a jacket with overlong sleeves and is typically used to restrain a person who may otherwise cause harm to themselves or others. Once the arms are inserted into the straitjacket's sleeves, they are then crossed across the chest. The end of the sleeves are then tied to the back of the wearer, ensuring that the arms are kept close to the chest with as little movement as possible. Although straitjacket is the most common spelling, strait-jacket is also frequently used, and in Scotland strait-waistcoat, which is generally deemed archaic. Straitjacke...