Tag Archives: term of art

Term of Art: Aporia

Posted on December 13, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Aporia: An aporia is a puzzling condition or situation. The rhetorical application of aporia is to pretend to an inability or confess to an actual inability to resolve a problem or answer a question. One might say of a political figure whom one was attacking, ‘I don’t know what he lost first, his ability to tell the truth from a lie or his ability to behave morally.’ The device is often used when the question is being begged. A homely version of it is the often-heard comment ‘How can people be so stupid’ uttered when something the speaker disapproves of has just happened.”

Excerpted from: Trail, George Y. Rhetorical Terms and Concepts: A Contemporary Glossary. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2000.

Term of Art: Qualia

Posted on December 13, 2019 | Leave a comment

“qualia n. pl. A philosophical term for sensory experiences that have distinctive subjective qualities but lack any meaning or external reference to the objects or events that cause them, such as the painfulness of pinpricks or the redness of red roses. The term is virtually synonymous with sense data. See also sense data, inverted qualia, phi movement, sensation, sensibalia. quale sing.

[From Latin qualis of what kind]

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Historical Term: Calvinism

Posted on December 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Calvinism: Branch of Protestantism founded on the teaching of the French reformer Jean Chauvin (1509-64), known as Calvin from the Latin form of his name. Calvin gave the first systematic justification of Protestantism in Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) and thus became the intellectual leader of the Reformation. Calvinism is marked by its dogma of predestination, the belief that God has unalterably destined some souls to salvation and others to eternal damnation. Its harsh, logical beliefs inspired English Puritans, French Huguenots and some of the Dutch in their fight against the domination of Catholic Spain. The sect has been established in the Reformed or Presbyterian churches of France, Holland, and Scotland; Calvinist rule was also ruthlessly enforced under Calvin himself in Geneva by the Consistorium. The Calvinist beliefs that labor is a command of God and material success a mark of his favor—contradicting the medieval ideas of the virtue of poverty and the evil of usury—may have contributed to the rise of capitalism.”

Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.

Term of Art: Rites of Passage

Posted on December 9, 2019 | Leave a comment

“rites of passage: The rituals associated with a change of status, for example from youth to adulthood, and from unmarried to married state. In his classic study by the same name, Arnold van Gennep distinguished rites of separation, rites of segregation, and rites of integration. Rituals associated with a change in status were identified as having these three stages. Between each there are clear symbolic demarcations.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Term of Art: Indo-Aryan

Posted on December 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Indo-Aryan: Branch, within Indo-European, of Indo-Iranian: first attested by texts in Vedic (Sanskrit) dating from the 2nd millenium BC, and by transcriptions from the first. Also called ‘Indic.’

The modern Indo-Aryan languages are indigenous to most of the north and centre of the Indian subcontinent, with outliers in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and the Maldives. Hindi-Urdu and Bengali are by far the largest; of the remainder, Marathi, in the south of the main area, Gujarati in the south-west, Sindhi to the west, Punjabi in the north-west, Assamese in the east, Oriya in the south-east, and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka all have a current literary standard and are linked to major political units. Others, such as Bhojpuri or Maithili, also have speakers in the tens of millions.

Across the main area, separate languages have arisen largely by divisions within a geographical continuum. Hence internal branches are not definitively established.”

Excerpted from: Marshall, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Term of Art: Indo-European

Posted on December 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Indo-European: Family of languages including, at historically its major limit, most of those spoken in Europe and, at its eastern limit, the major languages of all but the southern part of the Indian subcontinent. Usually divided into eleven main branches: in the order in which they are first attested, Anatolian (now extinct), Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic (represented by the modern Romance languages), Celtic, Germanic (which includes English), Armenian, Tocharian (extinct), Slavic (Slavonic), Baltic (represented by Latvian and Lithuanian), and Albanian. Groupings larger than these are problematic to varying degrees: the safest hypothesis is that of a common Balt-Slavonic.

The comparative method has its origin in the intensive study of Indo-European, especially in the German-speaking universities, from the early 19th century. The size and complexity of the family, in comparison with many others that can be established with the same certainty, reflects in part the early date at which the forms in several branches can be compared.”

Excerpted from: Marshall, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Archaic Period

Posted on December 4, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Archaic Period: A term used to describe an early stage in the development of civilization. Specifically, in Egypt it covers the first two dynasties, c 3200-2800 BC, in which the country was unified and came to its first flowering of culture. In Greece it describes the rise of civilization from c 750 BC to the Persian invasion in 480 BC. As used by Americanists, the term refers to a stage of development rather than a chronological period. It is characterized by a hunting and gathering way of life in a post-Pleistocene environment similar to that of the present. Under special circumstances there may be settled life, pottery, and even agriculture as long as this is subsidiary to the collection of wild foods. The term was coined for certain cultures of the woodlands of eastern North America dating from c 8000-1000 BC, but usage has been extended (sometimes uncritically) to all sorts of unrelated cultures which show a similar level of development but may be of widely varying dates.

Excerpted from: Bray, Warwick, and David Trump. The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Muckraking

Posted on December 4, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Muckraking (noun): The searching out or exposure, as by a writer or newspaper, or wrongdoing committed by prominent individuals or institutions, especially of political corruption or scandal; sensational revelatory journalism. Adjective: muckraking; noun: muckrake, muckraker; verb: muckrake.

‘Having failed in her basement, I thought to have her here, in the loft of the parish hall, where a leaky old skylight made vivid the woody forms of miniature creches and lifesize mangers, wise kings’ crowns and shepherd’s crooks, Victorian alter furniture and great padded Bibles no longer thumped by the virile muckraking parsons of the first Roosevelt’s reign, plywood palm trees, and temples of gilded cardboard.’

John Updike, A Month of Sundays”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

Hubris

Posted on December 4, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Hubris: (Greek “wanton insolence”) This shortcoming or defect in the Greek tragic hero leads him to ignore the warnings of the gods and to transgress their laws and commands. Eventually hubris brings about downfall and nemesis (q.v.), as in the case of Creon in Sophocles’s Antigone and Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy. See HAMARTIA; TRAGEDY.”

Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Historical Terms: Cabal

Posted on December 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

“cabal: The name given to the ministry which took power in England in 1667 (when Charles II dismissed his chancellor, Clarendon), taken from the initials of its members: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. The term is also used to mean any close-knit group of persons, particularly those involved in intrigue.”

Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.

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