humble

adj 1: low or inferior in station or quality; "a humble cottage";

"a lowly parish priest"; "a modest man of the people";

"small beginnings" [syn: {low}, {lowly}, {modest}, {small}]

2: marked by meekness or modesty; not arrogant or prideful; "a

humble apology"; "essentially humble...and self-effacing,

he achieved the highest formal honors and distinctions"-

B.K.Malinowski [ant: {proud}]

3: used of unskilled work (especially domestic work) [syn: {menial},

{lowly}]

4: of low birth or station (`base' is archaic in this sense);

"baseborn wretches with dirty faces"; "of humble (or

lowly) birth" [syn: {base}, {baseborn}, {lowly}]

v 1: cause to be unpretentious; "This exeprience will humble him"

2: lower in esteem; hurt the pride of [syn: {humiliate}, {mortify},

{chagrin}, {abase}]

mumble

1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to

enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often

prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to

get into a long discussion. "Don't you think that we could

improve LISP performance by using a hybrid reference-count

transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and

there are some extra cache bits for the {microcode} to use?"

"Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it."

2. Yet another {metasyntactic variable}, like {foo}.

3. Sometimes used in "public" contexts on-line as a

placefiller for things one is barred from giving details

about. For example, a poster with pre-released hardware in

his machine might say "Yup, my machine now has an extra 16M of

memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for Mumbleco."

4. A conversational wild card used to designate something one

doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be

{glark}ed from context. Compare {blurgle}.

5. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further

discussion would be fruitless.

(1997-03-27)