825-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Asynartesia My squib about this and other obscure or invented Greek and Latin derivatives, particularly in an extract from R A Lafferty, provoked the detailed responses I was rather expecting.

Candida Frith-Macdonald defended him against my gentle criticism: “Just read him aloud. There will always be enough in there to know roughly what the more obscure words mean, and beyond that it’s done for fun, for the musicality of it, not for crossword puzzling. I think he would have spent a good deal of his life listening to mass in Latin, before the 1960s, and knew the magic of a tumbling stream of beautiful syllables even when you couldn’t make out, much less understand, the individual words. For all his dryness and rigour in some areas, I always think his language is that of a slightly tipsy storyteller in full flight in the back room of the world’s oddest pub, including some words that aren’t quite as they should be.”

Terry Walsh noted about asynartesia, the ostensible object of my comments, “You are quite right about the metrical meaning and your straightforward explanation is laudable. An analogy might be the deliberate dissonance of the music of 20th century composers, such as Stockhausen.” He also provided explanations of several of the words Lafferty used: “I am not sure that he means graffiti, in the sense in which we use the word today. Ektyposis suggests working on pictures in relief; zographia simply means drawing or painting from life. As for oscenite, I suspect Lafferty has made it up; an oscen in Latin is a bird that prophesies by its call, such as a raven or an owl. However, any derivative would start oscin-. On the other hand, the word is supposed (wrongly, I think) to derive from the root obscen-, which I will leave to your imagination. As you do, I give up on motfi, presumably a typo for motifi, but the word should be motivi, Italian for ‘designs’.”

Giles Watson commented on two others, “For Cicero, a schediasma was a literary caprice; the Greeks seem to have used the masculine schediasmos to refer to offhand actions, speech and writing. Chromatisma is the colour equivalent of a schediasma so a chromatisma and schediasma would be a daub and a scribbling.”

Bessy Yannisi added, “Being Greek, I would humbly like to offer the following clarification. Asynartesia is an ancient and modern Greek word, used in everyday contemporary speech, deriving from the privative prefix a- and the word synartisi which means relation, connection, cohesion (and a mathematical function). Therefore asynartesia means incoherence. Its plural form is asynartesies which translates as ‘ramblings’. Also, chromatisma is colouring and schediasma is a drawing, an outline, a design.

I suggested that Lafferty’s Ochsenscheiber might be a misprint for the German Ochsenschreiber. Several readers spotted that in the form Ochsenschreiben, it could be a literal translation of Greek boustrophedon but I didn’t think this was the intended sense. Andrew Wiese noted the word exists in German: “Ochsenschreiber is, like so many compound German words, incredibly literal. It was at one time the title of an official who recorded the sale of oxen, thus rendering transactions legally binding.”

De-extinction Several readers pointed out that, strictly speaking, it’s not possible to de-extinct the California condor, since it is not yet extinct, though despite a captive breeding programme it remains endangered.