Posts Tagged ‘neologisms’
Entry 440 — Support for My Hyperneologization
Saturday, May 7th, 2011
.
I came across it by chance:
APODIZATION* literally means “removing the foot”. It is the
technical term for changing the shape of a mathematical function, an
electrical signal, an optical transmission or a mechanical structure.
An example of apodization is the use of the Hann window in the Fast
Fourier transform analyzer to smooth the discontinuities at the
beginning and end of the sampled time record.
Now, then, is this a pompous, unpronounceable, superfluous term? It was once a coinage, you know. Why not “foot-removal?” I suspect because whoever coined it wanted it quickly to narrow the mind into mathematics, i.e., a particular system or discipline–which I also want most of my terms though not “Wilshberia” to do. I know: there’s a difference between a certified subject like mathematics and the theoretical psychology I try to link my terms to. I understandably (I should think) don’t consider that relevant. Why should someone be discouraged from systematic naming of terms to fit interactingly into a theory he’s creating just because he’s a crank.
I think one reason for my lack of recognition is that the sort of people who might be in sympathy with my hyperneologization are not generally the sort of people with an interest in poetics. As I’ve often declared, I may well be too much of an abstract thinker to be a poet and too much of an intuitive thinker to be a scientist. You’d think that would help me with both groups but it does the opposite. About the only “real” mathematician who appreciates my mathematical poems is JoAnne Growney.
The other day, after my “anthrocentricity’ and “verosophy” had been subjected to the usual reactionary jibes, I asked why “egocentricity” was an acceptable word for “self-centeredness,” but “anthrocentricity” not an acceptable word for “people-centeredness.” Needless to say, no one answered me.
Far too many many academics are so locked into their received understandings that they are blind to how those understandings might be revised or extended in ways that require the coinage of new terms.
Entry 410 — Miscellaneous Thoughts, No. 14
Monday, March 28th, 2011
It seems to be I ought to give all my random or miscellaneous thoughts entries the same name, and number them, so I’m going to do that from now on. This is number 14, because–after going through my previous such posts–my guess is that thirteen of them consisted of genuinely miscellaneous thoughts.
First, an e.mail of mine to the National Book Critic Circle that I’m a member of:
Not sure where to send this, so it’s to you:
Several times I’ve gone to the NBCC blog and wanted to comment on something there only to find I wasn’t allowed to, as just now, when I visited the entry about the Iranian-American poet’s book. I’m curious why you bar comments to certain texts. It seems rather against the idea of criticism and open debate that an organization like ours should favor.
As one who devotes probably too much time to Internet discussions, I’m well aware of the negatives of unmoderated comment threads, but (being pretty immoderate) I’m on the side of open discussions, anyway. One suggestion would be to close comments that got too extreme, but having an external free-for-all place to go to continue the discussion. And/or maybe a limit on number of posts to a given thread by one person. 3 to 5? That might force each of the person’s posts to be better thought-out.
Since I’m imposing on you already, I may as well tell you that I thought the interview I wasn’t allowed to comment on was interesting. I merely wanted to express a hope that the series highlight a few micro-presses, which university presses and the small presses winning NBCC awards never are, although in your introduction to the series you lump all of these together. The small press (which includes the university presses) publishes the same sort of poetry (which, as a poet, is all I really know about–but which, as a long-time poetry critic, I feel I know a lot about) the “major” presses publish; ditto many micro-presses, at least some of the time, but micro-presses, so far as I’m aware, are the only presses that publish what I call “otherstream” poetry (almost, since a few times a decade a maverick professor will get a university press to publish it).
Next a reply to something Geof said the other day at his blog:
I’ve always thought, “the only reader that must matter to the poet is the poet,” but have long believed that part of what gives pleasure to me as a poet is my vicarious enjoyment of the pleasure I believe others will get from my poem.” In fact, I think perhaps I could not make poems without a belief that somewhere someone will enjoy it.
Later clarification: “To clarify what I said, I consider the only engagent of a poem of mine who counts is me, but that my me includes the selves of all whom I hope will visit my poem.”
Finally, my opinion of a text in one of Emerson’s journals, Napoleon’s name with it re-spelled one line below it in Greek letters, than re-spelled line by line under that, each line losing the first letter of the previous line:
I think it’s a trivial word game. So trivial that I’m close to defining a new classification of verbal expression: “frivoliture,” for verbal works that don’t attempt to advocate proper behavior, express beauty or state truth, but are for fun only. Crossword puzzles. Pat, pit, put, pot, pet. Acrostics. Yes, some works called concrete poems.
Entry 68 — Verosofactuality
Friday, January 8th, 2010
Some of my most boring and infuriatingly frustrating arguments over the yearshave been over what poetry is, mainly with those who refuse to accept any definition of it. The worst are the Philistines who find it impossible to accept anything as a poem that they don’t like. Having gotten into another such argument this week with a Shakespeare Authorship Wack who won’t let me define poems objectively as little lineated verbal constructions intended to give aesthetic pleasure (to give the quickest, simplest definition) because then I would be able to call myself a maker of poems and thus more likely to know what went on in Shakespeare’s head when he made a poem than the wack, who is not a poet. For him a poem is something indefinably wonderful made out of words that only a few persons are capable of making–Shakespeare and perhaps one or two others (He mentions Donne and Milton, but really believes only one poet ever existed, Oxford, the author of Shakespeares Sonnets and other works), but no one later than Milton, and most certainly not I.
What can I say? Nothing.
Stewing about it after vacating the argument, I came up with my solution for any difficult intellectual problem: a coinage. This one was, “verosofact.” I do agree with the subjectivists that nothing is 100% objectively true, but don’t care. That’s because, for me, there exist what I’ve just dubbed, “verosofacts,” which are close enough to being 100% objectively true to be taken as 100% objectively true. True beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, there are degrees of verosofactuality–as I believe I discussed in this blog of mine recently: scientific verosofactuality is closer to absolute certainty that historical verosofactuality, but the latter is still close enough to absolute certainty to be considered true beyond reasonable doubt. Like the verosofact that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems attributed to him.
My coinage comes from my earlier coinage, “verosophy,” of the search for significant truths that science, history, philosophy and like endeavors are. A verosofact is a verosophical absolute truth.
I don’t see how one can make any effort to find any even semi-consequential truth about existence without granting the eixstence of verosofacts. I think almost everyone, for instance, accepts cause and effect as an absolute, although many do so only unconsciously. Ditto the laws of logic. And that there is a difference between material reality (for me, a verosofact) and other kinds of hypothesized realities, none of them capable of being verosofacts though not necessarily non-facts.
Sciences is not uncertain, only not absolutely certain, only verosofactual. Well, a mixture of verosofactuality and uncertainty not yet classified as either verosofactual or contrafactual.
The ultimate verosofacts, the existence of material reality, and the validity of logic and cause and effect, are givens–the axioms that make verosophy possible.
Am I a child writing for infants? Maybe. I do believe everything I’ve said extremely simple and obvious. It’s difficult to achieve such final simplicity, though.