Various Words I like
A sampling from a list I made the other day and some brief notes on each item
Perihelion—the point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid or comet at which it is closest to the sun. Peri: near. Helios: Greek god of the sun (also known a Titan. All-seeing, invoked in oaths, thus a legal connotation. Fixture in ancient magic. Emperor Julian made Helios the central deity during the rival of archaic Roman religious practices in 4th century AD). The word ‘periphelion’ and its opposite, aphelion, coined by Johannes Kepler. Kepler’s second law: a planet moves fastest at perihelion, slowest at aphelion. Earth is 91,402,640 miles from the sun during it perihelion.
Stethoscopy—the process of using a stethoscope to examine something. The stethoscope was invented by French doctor Rene Laennec from by rolling up a paper tube and using it as a sound funnel. Stethos: chest. Skopein: to view or see.
Parataxis—literary technique of using simple sentences without conjunctions, also refers to poetic function of placing two images alongside one another without clear connection. Para: beside. Táxis: arrangement. Term introduced by Friedrich Thiersch in his book Greek Grammar (1831). Adorno essay: “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry”—Hölderlin’s “paratactic revolt against synthesis”—rejection of the transhistorical unity that poetic language strives toward—movement from subjectivity to objectivity—language and poetry is historically mediated, language and meaning and the relationship to nature that poetry expressed is locked or stratified by history (socially mediated).
Aevum—in Scholastic theology, the temporal plane experienced by angels and saints, situated between the eternity (emptied of time itself) of God and the temporal reality experienced by material beings. Implication (in Scotus?) that temporal experiences happen in the Aevum with absolute simultaneity, everything at once. “A single event in angelic duration could be coincident with the whole of our time” (cited in von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, p. 383). Proto-Indo-European root: h₂óyu, meaning “lifetime”, becoming Proto-Italic aiwom, meaning “age”, becoming Old Latin aivom, meaning age/time/lifetime.
Elision—omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase. Commonly found in poetic verse. “Suppression of a vowel”. Latin: elisionem, “a striking out”. Related Latin: elidere, forcing out—becoming French, elider, a legal term meaning “do away with” (annul).
Caesura—break or pause in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begins. Poetic function and element in musical notation. From Latin: caesurae, “cutting”. Utilized by Deleuze (lectures on Kant, Difference and Repetition) to denote a historical transformation in the experience of time. “Novelty of Sophocles” (Deleuze on Hölderlin on Sophocles/tragedy of Oedipus) is that beginning and end of his tragedies do not ‘rhyme’—an explusion of cyclical time. Caesura designating/distributing a before and after, time becoming a straight line (Hamlet: “time is out of joint”). “Time is no longer subordinated to something which happens in it, on the contrary it’s everything else which is subordinated to time. God himself is no longer anything but empty time. Man is no longer anything but a caesura in time.” (Deleuze lecture: Kant, Synthesis and Time, March 21 1978).
Acacia—genus of around 1200 species of plants native to Africa, South America and Oceania. Name borrowed from Greek akakia, meaning “not wickedness”, “a term used in antiquity to describe a preparation extracted from Vachellia nilotica”. Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium describing the use of akakia to describe a cylindrical pouch of purple silk, carried by Byzantine emperors, that held a small handful of dust to symbolize the mortality of man. The acacia plant is also heavily prominent in the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff, said to have been the chief architect of Solomon’s temple. Abiff is murdered by three figures for refusing to divulge the secrets of the temple’s construction, and his shallow burial grave marked by a sprig of acacia.
Diegetic—in terms of fictional events presented in narrative, it signals elements that are experienced both the characters and the audience/viewer alike. Example: diegetic music, music that is heard by characters, in contrast to the score or soundtrack that is reserved for the audience. From Ancient Greek: diḗgēsis, “narration/narrative”. Contrasted by Aristotle with memesis.
Effulgence—a brilliant radiance, a shining forth. Latin root: ex-, “out of/from”, fulgere, “to shine”. Reminds me of Hegel’s discussion of die Erscheinung, appearance: the inner nature of a thing shines forth in its outer manifestation. “It is the actual revelation of the essence of a thing.”
Skeuomorph/skiamorph—a derivative object that retains ornamental cues or attributes or elements from structures that were necessary in the original—acts as a bridge between the old and the unfamiliarity of the new. Greek skeuos: container or tool, morphḗ: shape. Skeuomorph as example of constraints imposed by cultural sedimentation and mediation: see the persistence of icons of outmoded icons to help navigate through computer systems (save icon as floppy disk, recycle bin, etc).
Precession—gradualistic change in the orientation of a rotating body (like a planet). The earth’s axis slowly wobbles, triggering changes in the position of constellation in the sky and slow alterations in the intensity of the seasons—precession of the equinoxes, axial precession. Earth’s precession discovered by Greek astronomer Hipparchus, drawing heavily on Babylonian astronomy. Due to precession the very pole star—the star viewed directly overhead from the north—will change. The current pole star is Polaris, located in Ursa Minor (the little bear); Stobaeus called Polaris ἀειφανής, “ever-shining”. The ever-shining nature of Polaris will dim itself on its long transit through the 26,000 year precessional cycle; it will, in a little over two thousand years, find its inevitable replacement in the star Errai, located in the constellation of Cepheus. Precession from Latin praecissionem, “coming before”, derived from praecedere, “to go before”.
Ecliptic—the orbital plane of the earth around the sun over the course of a year. This causes the sun to appear, to the observer locked to the earth’s surface, as moving against the backdrop of fixed stars. Chapter XVIII of Blood Meridian: “When they road out of the Yuma camp it was in the dark of early morning. Cancer, Virgo, Leo raced the ecliptic down the southern night and to the north of the constellation of Cassiopeia burned like a witch’s signature on the black face of the firmament”. Obliquity of the ecliptic—a staggering combination of words—angle between earth’s equator and the ecliptical path—giving rise to the seasons and their passage. Ecliptic comes from the Greek ekleipein, “to fail to appear”, related to ekliptikos, “of an eclipse”. Medieval Latin ecliptica, “the circle in the sky followed by the Sun”.
Concrescence—the growing together of parts originally separate—a process of convergence. Used most commonly in biology but I prefer to think of it as a “tightening gyre”, which is both an equivalence and terminology I’m stealing from Terence McKenna. The concrescence is McKenna’s version of the eschaton: the teleological attractor at the end of time, the vanishing of the universe as we know it into a “tightly bound plenum, the monad”. Apocalypse as Concrescence. From the Latin concrescentia, “condensing”.
Katabasis—a journey to the underworld, particularly those found in Greek mythology and in Christian theological history. Distinct from Nekyia, a vision of the underworld, in that Katabasis involves a physical passage. Von Balthasar presents Christ’s ‘twofold Katabasis’: first, the emptying of his divine nature to become human, followed by the descent into hell, both taken together as a continuous process. From κατὰ, “down”, βαίνω, “go”. Contrast with anabasis, the ascent—Greek ana, “up”.
Apophenia—the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things, the ur-condition of persisting within an irreversible network of networks organized around the pure overproduction of information. Apophenia as the basis of popular paranoia (ubiquity of conspiracy theory), Nazi neurologist Klaus Conrad deployed the term to describe the beginning stages of schizophrenia. Conrad and other clinicians concerned with apophenia neglect to ask: what if the volleys of coincidence are super-saturated with meaning after all? German Apophänie—apo, “away, detached”, Phänie, “appearance, manifestation”.
Diachronic—concerning the way something—like language—transforms and evolves across time. Modern time as diachronic time, pre-modern time as synchronic time (synchronic: how something exists at a specific point in time). Dia, “through”, Kronos, “time”.
Aporia—a conundrum, a puzzle, an “irresoluble impasse”. The state of aporia signaling an insufficiency in thought—confrontation with the paradox, maybe—the incomplete movement of the mental faculties relative to the object or thing in question. Many Platonic dialogues reaching their terminus in positions of aporia, not to draw the individual down into such an immovable and frigid space, but to transmute that ending into a beginning, the launch of the ascending spirals of dialectical engagement and confrontation. Greek: a-, “without”, poros, “passage”.
Parousia—often used to the describe the Second Coming of Christ but, more subtly, is about the eventual “full presence of the Messiah”. The time of Parousia contrasted, or comes at the end of, ho nyn kairos, “the time of now”—infinite waiting or anticipation, the state of persistence in the desert of ceaseless deferment. The unexpected arrival of Parousia, or even its immanence bored into every moment of this time, is exactly what Benjamin was describing in the final sentence of his Theses on the Philosophy of History—the “future” not as “homogeneous, empty time”—“every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (“Strait gate” in Matthew 7:14: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”). Greek: para-, “alongside, side”, ousia, “essence”.
Interregnum—discontinuity or gap, particularly between successive politic or social orders. Traditionally used to describe the period last from the death of a monarch to the inauguration of the next reign, but today finds its application in periods of extreme unrest, collapse, civil war, state failure. I like to think of the interregnum in the more generalized sense, maybe even to fold the word back across the ho nyn kairos, the “time of now” (see above). Latin: inter-, “between”, regnum, “reign”.
Fermata—symbol of a musical notation indicating that a note should be prolonged beyond its normal or ordinary duration. While the fermata symbol found its first concrete usage in the fifteenth century, it may have found its origins in early Greek and Roman grammar and rhetorical guides for the act of declamation. Symbols were utilized to signal the appropriate degrees of vocal intonation but meaning of these symbols and their applications wandered in and out from history and geography, finding new uses and invested with different meanings. Italian: fermare, “to stop”.
Do you like the band The Acacia Strain?