I am far from sure that the semantics of opposites are a universal conception, ubiquitous across most languages—maybe big and little or long and short are passable everywhere but dog and cat or cat and mouse or even good and evil are not acceptable answers elsewhere. Maybe there is not always a real and handy word to express the idea of an opposite, though the concept is understood.
Doubleplusungood, or Penelope weaving and unweaving as she waits for Odysseus to return. There are too very fancy kinds of operative opposites, like hyperbole and its countermand litotes, exaggeration and understatement—though the same terms are not employed in the study of conics. Recently, I came across another pairing that I liked, although I am not sure quite satisfies the definition: phobia and soteria (φοβός και σωτηρία, the root of salvation). This is taken not only in the sense of the duality between fear and calm, but rather with the difference between almost clinical morbidity and paralysis and relief and the saving-grace called deliverance, being not afraid in proportion with the disproportionate aversion that the phobia represents. Not everyone has an unsalvageable disliking of specifically spiders and snakes nor generally of crowds or the great outdoors, but I think there would be in a clinical definition, should psychology care for what’s right and not just what’s wrong, of soteria complementary gradations of relief and unfear.
Saturday 29 September 2012
word-association or antonymy
catagories: 🇬🇷, 🧠, language, philosophy, Star Wars
encounter at farpoint
One of my favourite bloggers, Bob Canada, presents a very thoughtful and well- constructed anniversary tribute to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered on 29 September 1987, exactly twenty-five years ago today. It is hard to believe it has been that long ago and does make it seem like something’s a-miss with the whole space-time continuum.
buddhist “iron man” found by nazis is from outer space
In the 1938, an archaeological expedition was sent from Nazi Germany to Tibet as part of Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe programme, a project that sought to validate Germany’s hegemony through cultural and historic research of what was considered Aryan and some very creative and convenient revisions.
Friday 28 September 2012
post-meridian or l’isola del tesoro
Here is a brilliant graphic for the Treasure Island music festival held in the bay of San Francisco, on the artificial island of the same name built to host the World's Fair and Golden Gate Exposition and was used later as a naval station and numerous times as a film-set. The over turned ship is of course a visual reference to the Pirates of the Caribbean saga. I find that series infinitely watchable, especially for its rather convoluted storylines, and that particular maneuver to escape the Doldrums and the prior marooning of the captain on a deserted isle where he was made to face splintering alter-egos reminds me a lot of the Umberto Eco of the long, complex reminisces woven for the shipwrecked and stranded nobleman from The Island of the Day Before (L'isola del giorno prima). The ill-fated expedition was seeking out the Prime Meridian and anchoring skies, in an astronomical sense, and the forsaken character, alone with his memories, believes the archipelago straddles the International Date Line, with neighbouring shores just out reach in yesterday and tomorrow.
Thursday 27 September 2012
discontiguous
A few weeks ago, during the run up to municipal elections, I noticed this billboard—for what turned out to be a study proposing that Bavaria could manage for itself independent of the rest of Germany, posted on a concrete column at the intersection that tends to host political posters, though not exclusively.
catagories: 🇩🇪, 🇪🇺, 🇬🇧, economic policy, revolution