Cutting it Short

It is generally true that algebra in its development in individual countries passed successively through three stages: the rhetorical, the syncopated, and the symbolic. - Tobias Dantzig

The first time I remember hearing the word "syncopated" was in Ken Burn's documentary on Jazz. It seems to have a specialized meaning in music, which is to modify rhythm by stressing or accenting a weak beat. In Burn's movie, Wynton Marsalis uses it in his running commentary to describe the musical flights of various great jazz artist.

So when I came across the word in Tobias Dantzig's book Number, I was intrigued that the word seemed to have a more fundamental meaning with broader implications for abstraction and meaning -- and therefore possibly for writing and art.

In his book, which traces the origins and evolution of numbers and mathematics, Dantzig demonstrates a progression from oral mathematics that uses only words (such as "the sum is independent of the order of the terms") to symbolic algebra in which graphical symbols represent concepts previously conveyed by the words (a + b = b + a).

Syncopation is the process of abbreviation by which the words become symbols. Certain words that are used regularly are gradually shortened until they have no obvious connection with the original word.

Webster's tells us that the word syncope dates to 1550, and comes from the Greek synkopē, which literally means cutting short from synkoptein to cut short. It is the loss of one or more sounds or letters in the interior of a word.

Dantzig offers the history of the symbols + and - as examples of words become algebraic signs.

In medieval Europe the latter was long denoted by the full word minus, then by the first letter m duly superscribed. Eventually the letter itself was dropped, leaving the superscript only. The sign plus passed through a similar metamorphosis.

Here seems to be the key trait of syncope: abbreviation. It is the process by which a sign for something becomes abbreviated.

In this way, it seems to be subclass of metonymy, which Webster's tells us "is a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated."

This certainly seems to hold in the broadest sense that metonymy consists of using a derivative sign to represent an original object or concept. The "sails crossed the ocean," being a classic example of this kind of derivation (i.e., the sails are derived from the ship.)

When we see a sign on the side of the road with a simple graphic of ship on it and find a marina at the next exit, its the end result of the process of syncopation.

Punny brainteaser #2

The latest offering, of modest difficulty, from Luis, the cafe clerk:

Pablo has two coins that add up to 15 cents. But one of them is not a nickle.

How is that possible?



One dime, one nickle.

Aristotle's Poetics and plot

I've started Aristotle's Poetics, the Penguin Classics version. I'm only into the intro by Malcolm Heath, but it's already fascinating. The first thing that caught my attention in a big way was Heath's discussion of the primacy that Aristotle assigns to plot -- as contrasted with character. The argument at its most basic goes something like this: even if we know nothing about the character, we can imagine what a normal person would do in a given situation; thus a story, at it's simplest, can do without a complex character, but not without a series of connected actions (i.e., plot). "Do" here is key, as Aristotle sees action as the core of a story.

The most interesting part is Heath's caution that Aristotle's discussions of plot focus on the underlying sequence of events in a story. "The reader," he writes, "should be careful not to forget the level of abstraction at which Aristotle is working throughout the chapters on plot: he is not concerned here with the construction of the verbal artefacts (his spelling) which are tragedies, but with the design of the patterns of events which underlie them."

He makes the distinction again here: "Aristotle is often quoted as if he had said that a play has a beginning, a middle and an end. This is wrong. It is the plot, the underlying sequence of actions, that has this structure."

I've come across this distinction before -- most recently reading Gerrard Genette -- is important, because the "artefact" often mixes up the time, beginning at the end of a story then flashing back to the beginning then coming back to the end again. In some cases, the story focuses only on the moment of crisis in a story.

I'm thinking of Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. The couple has spent quite a while together and Hemingway's account could have begun before they met, showed them meeting, the discovery that the woman is pregnant, and the scene on the train platform where they heatedly discuss her getting an abortion. But Hemingway only shows the scene on the platform -- though he very cleverly alludes to the larger story with these two lines: "He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights."

You are what you analogize

A stanza from Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was display on the home page of Poet.org this morning.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

The poem reminds me of William Carlos Williams' Red Wheel Barrow and Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica, in that it seems to be a meta-poem, a poem about writing poems, about the nature of art.

The entry for Stevens on the site placed him between the English Romantics and the French Symbolists -- between, and I'm interpolating here, "inflection" and "innuendo." Which got me onto Symbolism (so attracted to abstraction, the French). The Poetry Portal says the Symbolists "rejected the pastoral tradition, and took their themes and images from city life, emphasizing its bleak, hallucinatory and/or illicit aspects."

This is, of course, only one characteristic of the Symbolist movement. But it got me thinking about the imagery and analogies (not to mention forms and techniques) writers use change over time.

Homer derived most of his imagery from nature. The exception to Homers nature-based imagery may be the scene in the Iliad in which Hephaestus makes armor for Achilles; his animated forges and girls made of metal are VERY unnatural, the stuff of science fiction. These rare technology-based images aside, Homer was grounded in nature. How many Homeric similes in the Iliad depict a lion ravaging a sheep while quaking shepherds watch? His audience were farmers themselves and intimately acquainted with nature, so those analogies were accessible to them.

It makes sense then that people living in cities would write for other people living in cities by using urban imagery. Suburbanite that I am, I'm wondering how to work Starbucks and rush-hour traffic into my writing.

Punny brainteaser of the day

This from Luis, the cashier at the cafe down the hall from my office:

A terrible plane crash occurred over the Atlantic one morning in January. Every single person on board dies.

Two survived. Why?


They were married.

Bows and slippers

A parallel between the Odyssey and Cinderella: Odysseus' bow and the glass slipper. Both are symbols that appear at the story's climax, the point where the characters triumph, finally abandoning disguises and fulfilling their destiny. Cinderella changes from scullery maid to princess; Odysseus changes from haggard beggar to king.

In both stories, the item in question is a personal belonging of the protagonist, something from the past, from a period when they were their true selves, that has since been lost to them. Cinderella's slipper comes from her night as a princess at the ball. Odysseus' bow was one he used for hunting before he sailed off to fight the Trojans.

These archetypal symbols play a number of important roles. They build anticipation -- the reader waits for the moment when the totem of the character's true self is returned. They serve as an corporeal signs of inner truths.

They play on irony: the people who claim to be the real princesses (the stepsisters) and kings (the suiters), who chide the true hero and heroine for being impostors and lowlifes, are themselves the true impostors and lowlifes. The reader disdains the impostors for their hypocrisy and their lack of a sense of propriety. Injustices are set right when Odysseus strings the bow, when Cinderella fits the slipper.

These items represent the core imbalance of the situation -- which a broad way of thinking of complications in narrative. At the climax, we discover that balance will be restored, the complication resolved.

Try to ignore this billboard

When I was in journalism school at the University of Maryland, I took a feature writing class from Gene Roberts, the legendary editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and recent Pulitzer Prize winner. A piece of advice he offered that I always remember: Hook readers by introducing mystery in the first sentence.

I've come to interpret that as meaning: Raise a question in the reader's mind in the first sentence.

Driving along Route 95 through Philadelphia yesterday I passed the billboard picture above. I'm guessing Gene would approve.