Something different

[larryhammer]

Needing a distraction, a meme picked up from a couple places.

Pick an interest from my interest list that you either:

A) Don't know anything about
Or
B) Know something about but can't understand why I would dig it.

and I will explain to the best of my ability.

---L.

Comments

[jankenstein.livejournal.com]

Considering we have more than just a few common interests, I have no idea what "Zeguma" means without looking it up ;-)

[larryhammer]

It's term from rhetoric, a figure when one word applies to two other words simultaneously, as in "You held your breath and the door for me." Often this is done in such a way as the one word is used in different senses with either the of the two, as in "fix the problem, not the blame." When one of the two senses is literal and the other metaphoric, you can get nicely powerful effects; "Rend your heart, and not your garments" is the only example I can think of at the moment, and that's not the best. In Greek, zeugma meant yoke.

I'm very fond of this figure in itself, but as an interest, it's shorthand for my growing interest in rhetoric, especially in fiction and poetry. A poem or a story has to convince to be effective, after all, and rhetoric is the study of effective language.

---L.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Since zeugma sounds vaguely obscene, I'll ask about mythopoesis (provided I've spelled and/or remembered that right).

[larryhammer]

Literally, the making of myth. When a story resonates with the same quality that a myth does, of feeling iconic and received, even when it is old, the author has performed mythopoesis.

I have seen it. I don't know how it is done.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I want to know why you're interested in assonance but not consonance.

[larryhammer]

Because I reflexively pay more attention to my vowels and consonants at the beginnings of syllables than to my consonants at the ends of syllables. Which is one reason why it took me till my mid-30s to learn how to rhyme.

I use assonance as a stand-in for alliteration, rhyme, and consonance — and for that matter, meter — to avoid cluttering my interest list.

---L.

[randimason.livejournal.com]

Chiasmus (http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=chiasmus), please?

[larryhammer]

Another rhetorical figure, one in which ideas, grammatical structures, or even sounds are repeated in reverse order, making an A B B A pattern. When you stack that in two lines and connect the As and Bs, thus:

A  B
 \/
 /\
B  A

you get an X, or the Greek letter chi. As a (rather heavyhanded) example, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Another figure I'm very fond of, especially for patterning sounds: "The family rules were reinforced by customs."

---L.

[jankenstein.livejournal.com]

I am *extremely* leary of anything that refers to ABBA ;-)

[larryhammer]

Yeah, well. We could call it a B A A B structure.

---L.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Nominal aphasia?

[larryhammer]

The inability to name common objects. The loss of nouns, in other words. It comes in a range, go all the way up to being unable to name anything concrete. The more extreme forms are signs of neurological damage, and are associated with lessions in a very specific part of the brain. I get it very mildly when I'm tired. Nouns are the first thing to go, when I'm tired.

---L.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I've had that for a long time. I started taking Prozac when I was 26, and not long afterwards I noticed that I had significant trouble remembering nouns. I mentioned it the next time I visited my doctor, and he said, "That's dysnomia. It's a side effect." Now that I'm in my forties, everyone else has started having the same problem, so I don't stand out. :-)

[jankenstein.livejournal.com]

"Thingie".

[larryhammer]

"No, not that one. The other thingie. To the left. The other left."

---L.

[maryosmanski.livejournal.com]

Transfer orbits?

[larryhammer]

Hey, Mary.

A transfer orbit is any orbit designed to transfer you between two other orbits, with travel in free-fall between initial and braking acceleration. For example, this shows a transfer orbit between Earth and Mars. One class T.O.s of special interest are called Hohmann transfer orbits, important because they are the lowest energy (i.e., least fuel) solutions; these require the start and destination to be in certain relative positions, thus creating the launch windows you sometimes hear about.

Here's a widget that lets you find the nearest Hohmann launch window to a given date for transferring between any two planets (the next one to Mars is July 2005, arriving Mar 2006). Here's one for calculating how much velocity you need to add or subtract to transfer between two circular orbits (around what is not stated, but it seems to be the Earth). I can go on in great gorey detail, but I'll stop now.

Like many of my stated interests, it's a specific that stands in for a larger field — in this case, astrodynamics and space physics in general.

---L.

[maryosmanski.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Larry. I knew about launch windows and trying to use the most energy-efficient route to Mars, but I never knew there was a name for the whole process. I suspect I've heard it and the term has just never stuck in my brain.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

mythopoesis, comedia del arte, and zeugma

[larryhammer]

For mythopoesis and zeugma, see the first couple replies. Comedia del arte (also commedia dell'arte) is a style of Italian theater from the late rennaissance. Performances started with stock characters and a very simple premise, around which the troup would improvise all the dialog and plot. A good vehicle for local satire, in other words.

Stock characters, btw, means exactly that — they never changed. The best known of them was the main hero, Harlequin, but there was also his love interest, Columbina, her rich and miserly Father, the Boastful Soldier (later named Scaramouche), the quack doctor, and so on. Comedia del arte connects not just to Punch & Judy (the hunchback, Pulcinella, was the ancester of Punch) and pantomime, but modern slapstick (Harlequin used a stick called just that) and cartoon shorts.

And, of course, I always admire the ability to improvise either story or comedy, and this is both.

---L.