Two Phrases We Should Use More

Given how much we love to build abstractions from reality, and how much we later tend to confuse those abstractions with reality, it seems like we should use these two concepts from N. Katherine Hayles a lot more often:

Platonic Backhand

Hayles's term for the tendency to judge reality according to abstractions that were derived from it--i.e., the tendency to imagine that abstract forms of the real somehow preceded the real. From this perspective, reality appears like a collection of ideal forms that has gone noisy or static-y from the unfortunate, but essentially meaningless, clutter of individual circumstance.

Taken to an extreme, this habit leads to a worldview that prevents people from seeking new explanations for phenomena or data that don't fit pre-existing theoretical models of the world, because by definition anything that does not adhere to the model is just noise.

Platonic Forehand

This is a newer and less common problem, but an interesting one nonetheless. The Platonic Forehand is Hayles's term for the mistaken belief that any simplified model that can generate "noisy" results can be considered an accurate or realistic model: since reality is full of a bunch of noise, dirt, and static we don't understand, an abstract model that can also generate similar things we can't understand must be doing the same kind of work as the world, generating an equivalent world of its own.

Both moves are essentially idealistic--that is, they privilege abstractions over the irreducible complexity of the world itself. The former denigrates any complexity that doesn't fit the abstraction as not worth acknowledging; the latter sees that complexity, but deals with it by assuming that the only difference between its ideal world and the real world is some incomprehensible messiness, so that adding that messiness to its ideal thereby approximates "the real."

(That second one seems analogous to at least some of what goes on in certain kinds of gritty realism--the addition of "grit" to an abstract model of the world's workings essentially creates an acceptably "realistic" portrayal of the world.)

Now go forth, and accuse others of these nicely named errors!

Vocablog: umbrageous

umbrageous, adj.

Of a thing, shady; of a person, easily offended.

(Found in Charlotte Brontë's Villette.)

Usage example: I walked through umbrageous alleys, dodging umbrageous men.

Vocablog: megrim, megrims

megrim, megrims, n.

In the singular (megrim), a bad headache or migraine; in the plural (megrims), depression or melancholy.

(Found in George Eliot's Middlemarch.)

Usage example: Recent news about the trade deficit has given many economists the megrims. I don't have a head for numbers, though, so trying to understand it all gives me a megrim.

Other useful forms: megrimical, adj.; megrimish, adj.

Vocablog: tumulous

tumulous, adj.

Heaped up; mound-like.

(Found in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.)

Usage example: She waited so long to clean her dishes that tumulous towers of teacups spread across the kitchen.

Vocablog: flagitious

flagitious, adj.

Wicked; drawn to evil or criminal behavior.

(Found in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.)

Usage example: You didn't accidentally lose my iPod--you stole it, you flagitious dog.

Vocablog: velleity

velleity, n.

A will or desire that is never acted upon; an idle wish.

(Found in the Kaufman translation of Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals.)

Usage example: He talked about becoming a famous chef, but he never once entered a kitchen--it was less a goal than a velleity.

Vocablog: peculation

peculation, n.

Taking money that is being held in trust for another; embezzlement.

(Found in Anthony Trollope's The Warden.)

Usage Example: Everyone thought Bernie Madoff was engaged in financial speculation, but not peculation.

Vocablog (An Explanation)

Studying literature, especially older literature, often means coming across words you aren't familiar with. I jot these words just inside the covers of the books I'm reading, and all-too-often forget to look them up later--which has led to a massive backlog of interesting words whose meanings I don't know.

One regular feature of Nifty Rictus will be a Vocablog--a chance to look back over these words and find out what they mean. There are plenty of "Word of the Day" Internet modules out there, but in my experience they tend to generate words that are either too basic ("deluge") or too esoteric ("zooxanthellae")--you get the sense that people are pulling the words from dictionaries and science textbooks, not from actual usage. The Vocablog will try to steer a happy medium between these two extremes, focusing on unusual words that are usable by virtue of having actually been used at some point in the not-so-distant past.