Best Powers

• "In 1925, this man and Umberto Nobile—" Roald Amundsen -- Guy Tabachnick
• "His Meditations on—" Rene Descartes -- Guy Tabachnick
• "On June 22, 1941—" Operation Barbarossa -- Eli Markham-Cantor (not technically a power, as it was the lead-in to a bonus, but the other team was greatly put off nonetheless)
• "In 1892, a man bought a ticket to New Orleans—" Homer Plessy -- Guy Tabachnick
• "His 'neckties' consisted of railroad tracks twisted around trees—" W. T. Sherman -- Tony Cheng
• "The first of these was Thespis—" Savoy Operas -- Tony Cheng
• "This band formed in 1998 in University College London—" Coldplay -- Tony Cheng (This is exceptionally notable because Tony is notoriously bad at pop culture.)
• "This chemical compound—" Hydroxyl -- York Chen

Worst Powers

• "Kings of England. Battles, from Marathon—" I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General -- Tony Cheng (a buzzer race, in which Tony had the advantage because for some reason or other Guy was not holding his buzzer at that moment. Resulted in an exchange of profane words)
• "At blah blah lines, it was Shakespeare's shortest play—" The Comedy of Errors -- Guy Tabachnick (also a buzzer race, and also resulted in an exchange of profane words)
• "In this book, Emmanuel Goldstein—" 1984 -- Tony Cheng ("You know you're playing A-level when...")
• "This man's operas Tannhäuser—" Richard Wagner -- Guy Tabachnick (this was, sadly, the last tossup of the round, and gave Hunter the victory in its closest win ever)
• "Other songs blah blah blah named after a picture of a duck on wheels—" Rick Roll -- Lily Chen
• "[Bob] wants to calculate the volume of a pyramid with height 6 and one side of its base 4—" 24 --Paul Moschetti (Extremely lucky, as the other measure, necessary to find the volume,  was not given.) 

Worst Negs/Guesses

• "... name this country known for its bobsledding team blah blah blah capital at Kingston blah blah blah reggae music." Cuba for Jamaica -- Tony Cheng
• "... first president of the United States." John Washington for George Washington -- Eli Markham-Cantor
• "He has three eyes—" Polyphemos (king of the Cyclops) for Shiva -- Eli Markham-Cantor
• "Its name comes from the Latin for 'to flow'—" fluoride for fluorine -- Eli Markham-Cantor
• "Blah blah blah it served as the capital of the Taiping Rebellion—" Anhui for Nanjing -- Eli Markham-Cantor (resulted in angry, profane words from Tony, who was on the same team and got locked out.)
• "... tapered obelisk monument dedicated to the first president of the United States." Mt. Rushmore for Washington Monument -- some other team
• "Turtles were removed in the 1997 edition due to conservationist complaints, but squirrels had been removed in the 1960s blah blah blah—" The Golden Record (the thing they sent out to space for extraterrestrial life that contains animal sounds and important works of music and stuff) for The Joy Of Cooking -- Tony Cheng
• "Blah blah blah Jupiter—" The Rite of Spring for The Planets -- Paul Moschetti
• "There was a moratorium between [year] and [year] on this activity, performed using a cocktail." Bartending for Lethal injection -- Lily Chen (on a bonus)
• "This man blah blah blah banned communism." Mao for Suharto -- Matthew Gurevitch
  
• "Blah blah blah islands blah blah fjords—" pancreas for Norway -- Matthew Gurevitch
• "... “filioque” clause of the Nicene Creed is often regarded—" Extinction of the dinosaurs for Great Schism -- Dou
• "... fatal accidents involving this company's floor mats." Nintendo for Toyota -- David
• "This man blah blah blah outlaw blah blah bank robber blah blah Civil War..." Jesse Jackson for Jesse James -- Zihan Zheng

Lexicon

• 27 (n.): the answer to every computational math problem.
• Aral Sea (n.): An inland sea in central Asia. A topic that Tony will always power.
• barge (v./n.): to forcefully slam your body, or just your general presence, onto another person or persons, (an) object(s), or a scene.
• buzzer check (n.): the act of buzzing in as a method of testing the functionality of a buzzer. By convention, one must say "buzzer check" as one is doing it (much like chess players who say "adjust"). Has the best effect when done five words or so into the tossup.
• buzzer slam (v.): to slam the buzzer down on the table, as its name suggests, in celebration of getting a tossup correct. Performed by Louis Cholden-Brown on almost every correct tossup as well as every neg, often accompanied by a "raise da roof".
• Ethan Frome (n./v.): a novel by Edith Wharton. A bonus will come up every so often asking one to name these Wharton novels. Many people don't know about The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth, so they just say Ethan Frome for all three. When used as a verb, it is roughly equivalent to "swinging a dead cat," or guessing the same thing for all three parts of the bonus hoping that at least one will be right.
• fifteeeeeeeeeen! (interj.): said mockingly when someone powers a tossup on a clue that should not be in power.
• Finland (n.): a mythical country on the Scandinavian peninsula. Also an overused topic that was the answer to two consecutive questions at a tournament, even though members of the team swear that it was referred to as an island the second time. (As it were, the problem to this has been solved: a question was about Finland, and then the next tossup was about Madagascar. However, the reader, in his ineptitude, read the first line of the Madagascar tossup, which included the mention of an island, then went back to the second line and onwards of the Finland tossup, which had been powered by us before that the first time around.)
• Kepler (v.): to buzz in several nanoseconds after the tossup has ended with an absurd guess, thus locking out a teammate who had the correct answer. Named after an instance in practice where Louis Cholden-Brown, having heard about a family of scientists that included a member named Johann, buzzed in with the absurdly wrong guess of Kepler, thus beating Tony Cheng, who had the correct of Bernoulli, to the buzzer. He then proceeded to shift the onus onto Tony by claiming that he had, in fact, waited several seconds before buzzing. A packet later, as other team members berated him for it, Louis then commented that Guy Tabachnick should have buzzed in, despite the fact that he had been reading at the time.
• linguistics (n.): The scientific study of language. A topic that Guy thinks he will always power, but never seems to appear often enough.
• microbarge (v.): to barge someone imperceptibly slowly (see barge)
• pointsoar (v.): to gain an abnormally high number of individual tossup points in a particular match, or to place oneself on a team with significantly less skilled teammates in order to boost one's individual PPG. Coined when David Xu misheard the term "points whore."
• rock bonus (n.): a bonus about rocks/geology that Zihan is expected to 30 (but rarely does), due to his large collection of miscellaneous rocks and chunks of concrete.
• Schneerson (n.): A really obscure/pointless tossup answer that no one will get. Coined after Matthew Gurevitch tried to write a tossup about Rabbi Schneerson for Prison Bowl '08.
• Shut up, York! (interj.): said in response to any spoonerism, bad pun, or any other form of under-appreciated humor.
• Tecumesh (interj.): a mispronunciation of "Tecumseh", said mockingly when a player (usually Zihan) mispronounces a common word. Often accompanied by "Jakrata", "Profokiev", etc.