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Late bloomer
Late bloomer: a person whose abilities, achievements, or offending emerge later than peers'. Covers US late-blooming college graduates (~20% after age 30), late-onset offenders (~13% of RYDS), and pubertal timing effects.
Lateral coital position
Lateral coital position: a side-lying, face-to-face intercourse posture formalized by Masters and Johnson as the final phase of orgasmic-dysfunction therapy; also called the side-by-side position and favored in pain-related position guidance.
Lateral thinking
Lateral thinking, coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, is a problem-solving approach that changes concepts and perceptions rather than deepening existing patterns (vertical thinking), related to divergent thinking and taught through formal techniques.
Latin Americans
Latin Americans: inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean, about 588 million people (2013), over 80 percent urban, largely Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking, with high inequality, one in four on US$6.85/day (2023), and heavy emigration to the United States.
Latine
Latine (lah-TEE-nay) is a gender-neutral alternative to Latino and Latina, formed with the Spanish -e suffix, first recorded in 2017, used in U.S. academia and Latin America, and known to only 18% of U.S. Hispanics, unlike Latinx.
Latino (demonym)
Latino is a U.S. demonym for people of Latin American origin or descent, paired with Hispanic in the federal "Hispanic or Latino" category since 1997; it includes Brazil but not Spain, and most prefer "Hispanic".
Latinx
Latinx is a gender-neutral alternative to Latino/Latina for people of Latin American descent, coined from latino/latina plus x (first known use 2007). Awareness among U.S. Hispanics reached 47% in 2023, but only 4% use it and 81% prefer Hispanic or Latino.
Latte Line
The latte line is Sydney's informal socioeconomic boundary separating the affluent north-east from the less affluent south-west, running roughly from Sydney Airport past Parramatta; variants include the Red Rooster Line and Quinoa Curtain.
Latter Day Church of Christ
Latter Day Church of Christ, also called the Kingston Group, Kingston Clan, Davis County Cooperative Society, or the Order: a Mormon fundamentalist polygamous sect founded in 1935 in Bountiful, Utah, by Charles Elden Kingston, unaffiliated with the LDS Church and led by Paul Elden Kingston.
Latvians
Latvians (latvieši) are the Baltic-speaking people of Latvia, formed from the Curonian, Semigalian, Selonian, and Latgalian tribes; 63.8% of Latvia's 1.845 million residents in 2026, speaking Latvian, one of two surviving Baltic languages.
Laughter
Laughter: rhythmic social vocalization shared with great apes for about 15 million years, signaling harmless intentions via reward, affiliation, and dominance functions, driven by dual cingulo-temporal and motor-opercular brain systems.
Laura Loomer
Laura Loomer (born 1993, Tucson) is an American far-right activist and conspiracy theorist, informal Trump adviser, twice failed congressional candidate, deplatformed across major platforms, and, after a July 2026 Kyiv trip, a converted Ukraine advocate.
Lauren Drain
Lauren Drain (born 1985, Tampa, Florida) is an American registered nurse and author of Banished (2013), a New York Times bestselling memoir of her years in the Westboro Baptist Church and her 2007 excommunication.
Lauren Southern
Lauren Southern, Canadian far-right and alt-right YouTube commentator, Rebel News and Tenet Media contributor; made Farmlands (2018) and Borderless (2019), denied UK entry 2018, later published 2025 memoir This Is Not Real Life.
Laurie David
Laurie David, American environmental activist and producer of An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Fed Up (2014), also known for The Biggest Little Farm, the Detroit Project, and climate books.
Lavender marriage
A lavender marriage is a marriage of convenience, typically between two LGBTQ+ people of opposite sexes, contracted to hide their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Law of Jante
Law of Jante (Janteloven): Scandinavian social norm of ten rules from Aksel Sandemose's 1933 novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor, warning against thinking oneself special; distinct from tall poppy syndrome as a proactive norm.
Law of the instrument
Law of the instrument, also Maslow's hammer or golden hammer: a cognitive bias of over-relying on a familiar tool. Named by Abraham Kaplan in 1964; famous hammer phrasing from Maslow's 1966 The Psychology of Science.
Law of triviality
Parkinson's law of triviality, also called bikeshedding or the bike-shed effect, is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 satirical observation that committees spend discussion time in inverse proportion to the money involved, approving a reactor in minutes and arguing over a bike shed.
Laxmi Narayan Tripathi (लक्ष्मी नारायण त्रिपाठी)
Laxmi Narayan Tripathi (लक्ष्मी नारायण त्रिपाठी) is an Indian transgender activist, Bharatanatyam dancer, author, and Kinnar Akhara acharya mahamandaleshwar; first transgender Asia-Pacific UN representative (2008) and NALSA third-gender petitioner.
Laz people
The Laz people are a Kartvelian ethnic group of the eastern Black Sea coast in northeastern Turkey (Rize, Artvin) and southwestern Georgia, speaking Laz, a South Caucasian language closely related to Mingrelian, historically tied to Lazica and Islamized under Ottoman rule.
Leaders of the Ku Klux Klan
Leaders of the Ku Klux Klan across three eras: Forrest's 1865 Reconstruction Klan, Simmons's 1915 revival and Evans's 1920s empire, Shelton's United Klans, Duke's rebranding, and today's rival factions.
League of Koreans in Japan
The League of Koreans in Japan, known as Choryŏn or Chōren, was the main organization of Korean residents in occupied Japan, founded in October 1945.
Leakena In
Leakena In (អ៊ិន លក្ខិណា), born 2002 in Phnom Penh, is a Cambodian model, actress, and beauty queen: Miss Cosmo Cambodia 2024 (Top 10), appointed Miss World Cambodia 2026, and the Witch in the 2025 horror film The Reborn.
Lean In
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is Sheryl Sandberg's 2013 Knopf bestseller, co-written with Nell Scovell, urging women to overcome internal barriers at work; it spawned LeanIn.org, Lean In Circles, and major structural-feminist criticism.
Learned helplessness
Learned helplessness, coined by Overmier and Seligman in 1967 with Maier, is the passivity after uncontrollable aversive events; the 2016 neuroscience revision holds helplessness is unlearned and control is what is learned.
Learning
Learning: the relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge resulting from experience (behavioral learning). Covers classical, operant, and observational conditioning, the cognitive revolution's marginalization of behaviorism, and retrieval practice and spacing effects.
Leatherman (vagabond)
The Leatherman, also known as the Old Leather Man, was an unidentified vagabond who walked a 365-mile loop through Connecticut and New York from about 1857 until his death in 1889.
Lebanese diaspora
Lebanese diaspora (mughtarib, al-intishar): Lebanese-born migrants and their descendants abroad, estimated 885,000 first-generation (2014) and 4–13 million of descent, concentrated in Brazil, the US, the Gulf, and Australia, with waves since the 1870s.
Lebanese Druze
The Lebanese Druze are an 11th-century esoteric religious community of roughly 215,000 people, about 5 percent of Lebanon, concentrated in the Chouf and Mount Lebanon, historically defined by the 1860 war with the Maronites and led politically by the Jumblatt family.