W o t W: diegetic (S)

The Word for this Week is:

diegetic

I had a long struggle trying to remember this adjective and use it properly in a conversation last night. Diegesis is a fascinating concept in our era where musical soundtracks are standard because we have little to no conception of television or film without music cues. The ubiquity of music cues has left us finding it shocking when they are absent, when there is no audio or musical track. Buffy the Vampire Slayer used this very effectively in "Hush" and "The Body". It was once used well in a Wikipedia article about The Wire--which brilliantly illustrated the narrative style of the programme and the interplay of diegetic /non-diegetic music, but alas in various iterations of the page that bit was cut and I could not find it again.

Tarantino used the diegetic/non-diegetic dichotomy wonderfully in Kill Bill: Vol. I. In the opening scene Elle Driver whistles what then would go on to be soundtrack music.

I am very fond of this succinct definition:

Diegesis
The denotative material of film narrative, it includes, according to Christian Metz, not only the narration itself, but also the fictional space and time dimension implied by the narrative. (I found it here.)

W o t W: Lugubrious (P, S)

The Word for this Week is

Lugubrious

...Is an excellent word because it sounds like it means. It is like emotional onomatopoeia; especially if you draw out the vowels. I came across it in Richard Dawkins' newest book, The Greatest Show on Earth (p190) in the following quote describing a colleague W. D. Hamilton:

"he had a lugubrious manner reminiscent of A. A. Milne's Eeyore (not the deplorable Walt Disney version, of course)." When stung by a wasp "knowing what a great entomologist he was, his companion said, 'Bill, do you know the name of that wasp?' 'Yes,' Bill murmured gloomily in his most Eeyoreish voice. 'As a matter of fact it's named after me.'"

Lugubrious is meaningful and phonetically pleasing. Use it sparingly to avoid sounding pretentious like me, but oh do use it.

W o t W: Milkomeda (S)

The Word of the Week is:

"Milkomeda", as coined by TJ Cox and Abraham Loeb.

It is (of course it is!) a delicious portmanteau of Milky Way (our home galaxy here on Heresy) and the Andromeda galaxy which is rapidly careening into us at breakneck spead. Eventually Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way and after some settling period, some casual dating on the galactic scene, they will merge into one ugly ass merged galaxy, hence "Milkomeda." As Phil Plait the brilliant Bad Astronomer says: "I suppose Andromeway sounded too much like the name of some sort pf pharmaceutical." I think it would sound more like a less harsh version of mace by which members of the male gender can be repelled ("Andro-away", no?).

Thank-you.

W o t W: Grue (S,P)

The Word of the Week is:

"Grue" a linguistic term used to replace colour words in languages that do not distinguish between green and blue.

See for reference the discussion of colour in linguistics. A good survey is here at the Font of all Wisdom and Knowledge.

This entry gets a nod for semantic (it is a purely semantic construct; not really even a proper word) and the phonetic. And it is a portmanteau. O how we love the portmanteaus!

Thank-you.

W o t W: 猪头 Zhu tou "Pig head" (S,P)

The Word of the Week is:

"豬頭" (traditional characters; 猪头 simplified characters; in pinyin: Zhūtóu; in English "Pig head") in Mandarin is a commonly used insult.

Although not an expletive per se it does have a similar sense to the usage of the English word "bastard" which is frequently used between friends but is not remotely appropriate with non-intimates or one's employer.

My dearest friend, Hung Pei-hsin, referred to me almost exclusively as 大豬頭, or Big Pig Head.

For more fun with Mandarin expletives and slang go here for a list of transliterated and translated Mandarin expletives. I also tried here (Insultmonger/Swearsaurus) but the link seems to be dead. However, I also highly recommend the English Wikipedia page here or here for 中文 (Zhōngwén) (the Chinese language article). (Nous adorons aussi les sacres québécois d'ici, bien sûr! En anglais d'ici.)

(There's also this blog post which ends with a good list with the simplified characters and translations and (with a scroll over) transliterations into pinyin...but the context of the list is a rather puerile absolutist Free Speech RAWKS! screed. Just scroll down or don't bother with it. More expressions, although not necessarily expletives are listed here on a webpage detailing the Chinese used in the film Serenity and the programme Firefly. Kinda fun, but with nerdiness and citations.)

謝謝 (谢谢)