Words, cats, the usual

[pameladean]

I crammed in two hundred words later Tuesday afternoon, and then cleaned up the kitchen. I hadn't expected there to be much to do, since nobody is really cooking, but there was a stealthy accumulation of spills and objects from the preparation of many snacklike meals, not to mention the usual fallout from the fact that nobody but me can tell for sure what state the dishwasher is in, and even if they could the system for putting upstairs dishes somewhere until they can be taken upstairs has broken down.

I only cussed out the kitchen once, however. I was greatly looking forward to cooking with Eric.

He arrived very promptly, and suffered me to take him around the yard and show him the tiny ferny shoots of common yarrow, the three-inch-tall, mutating from red to green leaves of the biggest clump of Appeldoorn tulips, the minute triangular tops of new iris leaves, the miniature pine-tree sprouts of winter aconite, the sparse blades of grass in the brown and gray lawn. He admired the rose hips on the white rose of York, and eventually decided to make an early attack on a sapling in the foundation of the house that he beat back last year.

Lydy was home, but didn't come out to say hello; it later turned out that she was taking a nap. Chumley and Fester mostly stayed with her, though Chumley, now seemingly quite recovered, did come lumbering out to look inquisitive.

We made seitan with five peppers, a recipe adapted from David's Five Peppers Pork. It's amazingly simple and fast, like many of his recipes, and quite tasty even with seitan. It was actually four peppers, because I didn't have any fresh hot peppers. We substituted sesame oil with chili, and that worked extremely well. I steamed some broccoli and some sugar snap peas as side dishes, and we still had the marvellous chewy brown rice from the Chinese grocery. It seems to exist midway between short- and long-grain versions, and is really delicious.

Dinner was very pleasant, even though we could not but talk of the war from time to time. David said something that made Lydy and me agree that he was impossible, but I am sorry to say I can't recall what it was. When I kept a journal in high school I got to the point where I could remember whole conversations verbatim, but I am not recovering this skill very well.

Eric went home on his bicycle to start his reading; I went upstairs and packed and gave Raphael a back rub. R was much absorbed in work and not inclined to conversation, so I ran downstairs to get the 9:19 bus, only to be arrested by a telephone call from Eric. "I've encountered the same word twice this week," he said, "and it's not in my dictionary." I went back upstairs and looked it up in the OED. I had actually never heard it before, which is fairly unusual. There are words for which I can't give a good definition and words I am wrong about the meaning of, but very rarely do I encounter one I simply have never heard of. Aporia. Wow.

We found it very useful over the next few days, too; it applies to many situations.

Eric was trying to simultaneously read the book he is assigned to report on in a few weeks and the essays that would be discussed in his seminar the following day. I read Chloe Cheshire until I was done, and then continued my reread of Dorothea Brande's book on becoming a writer.

Eric has a lot of difficulties pressing on him, and we talked about those a little. It's hard to be able to do nothing except extend a sympathetic ear.

Pamela

Comments

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

So what does Aporia mean?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I went back upstairs and looked it up in the OED. I had actually never heard it before, which is fairly unusual. There are words for which I can't give a good definition and words I am wrong about the meaning of, but very rarely do I encounter one I simply have never heard of. Aporia. Wow.

So what does it mean ?

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

\A*po"ri*a\, n.; pl. Aporias. [L., doubt, Gr. ?, fr. ? without passage, at a loss; 'a priv. + ? passage.] (Rhet.) A figure in which the speaker professes to be at a loss what course to pursue, where to begin to end, what to say, etc. Also, An insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text's meanings.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

*looks it up*

Wow. That is a lovely and most useful word. Thanks!

[pameladean]

Sometimes you people scare me. I composed two journal entries back to back, and by the time I had got Live Journal to post the second one -- a process admittedly complicated by the hallucinations of a downstream server, or something -- not only had two people read the first one and asked the meaning of "aporia," but a third person had looked it up. Thank you. I think. No, really, thank you.

Pamela

[telynor.livejournal.com]

It's a good journal. I like reading good journals.
*smile*

[mudandflame.livejournal.com]

You've never read Arthur Quinn's Figures of Speech, then? You should, it's fun.

(from the index)

Aporia. Talking about not being able to talk about: "I can't tell you how often aporia is used." 36

And on that page, after the paragraph on aporia:

Beyond aporia is simple silence. The refusal to speak at all. Where all words are omitted in order to express contentment, or contempt, or catatonia. Praecisio is a figure for which it is understandably difficult to find many examples. John Cage has actually presented a composition for the piano during which no sound is to be made. Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General of the United States, once successfully defended a group of demonstrators by resting his case before he ever opened it; the prosecution, his silence seemed to be saying, had presented nothing that merited a reply.

[pameladean]

No, I haven't! Clearly a deficiency in my education. I did try to find my copy of Abrams, I can't even recall the title, but it's a list of rhetorical figures, but it's gone missing.

Quinn sounds much juicier, though. Abrams is pretty cut and dried.

I note in passing that Ramsey Clark is the person who has written up a set of articles of impeachment for our current acting president. I think I might like him.

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms. (Of which I need a more recent edition ... *sigh*)

Reading this post was weird, because I knew I had once known the word, "aporia," and although I couldn't remember what it meant, I still remembered how to pronounce it. Now I know what it means again, and perhaps I will remember that for longer than five seconds. Or perhaps it's doomed to be the balancing trope for the one I know the meaning of but can never remember the word for: describing in detail what it is you AREN'T saying. Cicero is a master of this one: "If I were going to talk about Cataline's personality, I could tell you how he mugs little old ladies and makes obscene phone calls and molests farm animals, but such vulgar tactics are beneath me, so I won't say anything of the sort, despite having the incriminating photographs right here in front of me." I love that trope, and I know there's a word for it, but the word itself remains tantalizingly out of my grasp.

[pameladean]

Yes, that one. It's mostly blue. I wonder where the heck it is.

I can't recall the name of your trope either. I can't find it in Quinn, though I have not read the entire thing through just yet.

Pamela

[eub.livejournal.com]

Apophasis?

(Espy draws the distinction this way: "Unlike apophasis and paralepsis, aporia, rather than disclaiming intention of describing an adversary's faults, complains how hard it is to choose among such abundance.")

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I'm in a group right now that's doing _Wheelock's Latin Reader_ and in the footnotes there it's called "praeteritio" (literally, "passing over"). "I will now leave out what has been said to me in many places: the forum of Syracuse, which the conquering general Marcellus kept pure from slaughter, the governor Verres made to overflow with innocent Sicilian blood; the gates of Syracuse, which were held closed against us Romans and Carthaginians both, thrown open to Cilician pirates. I pass over the force used against the freemen, the mothers of families raped, which things are not done to captured cities, neither to hateful enemies nor allowed in the license of armies nor the custom of war nor the rights of victory; I leave out,
I say, all these things that this villain brought about for three years."

[papersky.livejournal.com]

There's nobody like Cicero. He does the whole festival of Bona Dea by saying he's not going to talk about it, but Caesar did divorce his wife as a result, and it would be crass to mention that P. Clodius dressed up in women's clothes and climbed through a window, and as for profaning the ceremonies, he'll leave that to the priests to deplore...

I miss Cicero. I wish he'd get a LJ.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Willard Espy's The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary figures each figure as a beast, some charmingly illustrated. Aporia is a donkey, who feigns indecision between two piles of grain in order to stress just how much grain he has.

[pameladean]

Oh, very nice. I've got some Espy, but not that one.

Pamela

Lovely!

[delicarose.livejournal.com]

How would you turn it into an adjective? aporiatic? I looked it up on Dictionary.com (http://www.dictionary.com). I'm too hooked on that site and on Bartleby's for fast lookups.

Re: Lovely!

[pameladean]

The OED says "aporetic," though for that one the meaning has shifted away from the rhetorical device and into a more general sense of "inclined to doubt, full of objections."

Pamela

Re: Lovely!

[delicarose.livejournal.com]

Thank you!!

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

What is the point of writing a paragraph about a rare word, hearing about it, and looking it up, without actually posting a definition of said word? Did you expect us all to call you about it, too?

At least someone had the decency to define it in a comment....

B

[pameladean]

You'll be far less puzzled if you give up the interesting notion that I plan these entries out. They are entirely free-form. I had, in fact, felt the OED definition lacked something and then messed up the process of cutting and pasting a clearer definition from another source. I figured I'd do it later on. But it wasn't necessary. I love word geeks.

Pamela

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. This is all first drafted; I know. Mine are, too.

When I read it I heard that "I know something you don't know" attitude that fans like to do so well.

B