One-Letter Words, a Dictionary Read Online Free
Author: Craig Conley
Tags: General, Social Science, Reference, Popular Culture
makes a character tick.
In the following passage from the novel The Arabian Nightmare, author Robert Irwin imagines what it’s like in the deepest part of the mind, the part that we have inherited from‚ our most distant ancestors and that links us to them.
[One] became aware, albeit always dimly, of something small at the centre of the brain beyond reach of thought or memory, quite beyond conscious seizing—the primal matter of consciousness perhaps. One glimpsed from a great distance an area, brilliantly lit by internal flashes of lightning, in which tiny little men flickered and ran carrying letters, emblems and numbers amid blocks of flashing rods and colours. It was beyond meaning.
This deepest part of the mind exists far beneath the thinking part of our brain, beyond words and concepts. It is aptly described as a turbulent world of flashing lights and colors, where little people run around transporting individual letters, numbers, and other symbols—the building blocks of consciousness. The following quotation from Milorad Pavic’s novel Dictionary of the Khazars has some marked similarities to the previous passage:
The Khazars saw letters in people’s dreams, and in them they looked for primordial man, for Adam Cadmon…. They believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that each of these letters constitutes part of Adam Cadmon’s body on earth, and that these letters converge in people’s dreams and come to life in Adam’s body.
Here, too, the author believes part of our brain links us to our ancient ancestors. In this case, it goes all the way back to Adam, the archetype of the first human. Letters of the alphabet appear in this passage, also. They are the stuff that dreams are made of. They also symbolize the very building blocks of our existence.
Science fiction authors like Pat Cadigan ( Mindplayers ) and Greg Bear foresee the day when scientists will be able to enter into a person’s mindscape via high-tech tools. In Bear’s novel Queen of Angels, psychologists step into the mind of a murderer and find a mental city on whose sidewalks misshapen letters are scribbled and on whose walls posters of “everchanging, meaningless letters” are plastered.
Until the future that Bear describes arrives, we must be content to imagine the hills and valleys that make up the landscape of the mind. But we aren’t without a guide. The letters of the alphabet are our passport and our road map. The authors quoted above seem to suggest that the alphabet spells out the answers to all of life’s questions. We must simply find the right combinations.
A IN PRINT AND PROVERB
1. (phrase) A per se means “ a by itself makes the word a. ”
2. (phrase) Not to know A from B means to be ignorant.
“How are your brains?”
“I know A from B and two plus two,” I answered him. “That’ll do. The rest you can learn.” —Karen Cushman, Matilda Bone
3. (phrase) Not to know A from a windmill, a popular expression until the nineteenth century, means to be ignorant.
[Mid-fifteenth-century poet Frian Daw Topias’s] characterization of himself as…not knowing an “a” from a windmill or a “b” from a bull’s foot seems to go beyond the conventional modesty topos of other writers. —James Dean, Six Ecclesiastical Satires
4. (in literature) A, black hairy corset of dazzling flies/Who boom around cruel stenches,/Gulfs of darkness —Arthur Rimbaud, “Vowels”
5. (in literature) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter concerns a woman condemned to wear an A (for the crime of adultery) embroidered on her breast. Any woman wearing such a letter was shunned by society. Here’s what Hawthorne writes in the first chapter: “On the breast of her gown, in red cloth, surrounded with elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. ” The description makes it seem beautiful—doesn’t that make the
In the following passage from the novel The Arabian Nightmare, author Robert Irwin imagines what it’s like in the deepest part of the mind, the part that we have inherited from‚ our most distant ancestors and that links us to them.
[One] became aware, albeit always dimly, of something small at the centre of the brain beyond reach of thought or memory, quite beyond conscious seizing—the primal matter of consciousness perhaps. One glimpsed from a great distance an area, brilliantly lit by internal flashes of lightning, in which tiny little men flickered and ran carrying letters, emblems and numbers amid blocks of flashing rods and colours. It was beyond meaning.
This deepest part of the mind exists far beneath the thinking part of our brain, beyond words and concepts. It is aptly described as a turbulent world of flashing lights and colors, where little people run around transporting individual letters, numbers, and other symbols—the building blocks of consciousness. The following quotation from Milorad Pavic’s novel Dictionary of the Khazars has some marked similarities to the previous passage:
The Khazars saw letters in people’s dreams, and in them they looked for primordial man, for Adam Cadmon…. They believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that each of these letters constitutes part of Adam Cadmon’s body on earth, and that these letters converge in people’s dreams and come to life in Adam’s body.
Here, too, the author believes part of our brain links us to our ancient ancestors. In this case, it goes all the way back to Adam, the archetype of the first human. Letters of the alphabet appear in this passage, also. They are the stuff that dreams are made of. They also symbolize the very building blocks of our existence.
Science fiction authors like Pat Cadigan ( Mindplayers ) and Greg Bear foresee the day when scientists will be able to enter into a person’s mindscape via high-tech tools. In Bear’s novel Queen of Angels, psychologists step into the mind of a murderer and find a mental city on whose sidewalks misshapen letters are scribbled and on whose walls posters of “everchanging, meaningless letters” are plastered.
Until the future that Bear describes arrives, we must be content to imagine the hills and valleys that make up the landscape of the mind. But we aren’t without a guide. The letters of the alphabet are our passport and our road map. The authors quoted above seem to suggest that the alphabet spells out the answers to all of life’s questions. We must simply find the right combinations.
A IN PRINT AND PROVERB
1. (phrase) A per se means “ a by itself makes the word a. ”
2. (phrase) Not to know A from B means to be ignorant.
“How are your brains?”
“I know A from B and two plus two,” I answered him. “That’ll do. The rest you can learn.” —Karen Cushman, Matilda Bone
3. (phrase) Not to know A from a windmill, a popular expression until the nineteenth century, means to be ignorant.
[Mid-fifteenth-century poet Frian Daw Topias’s] characterization of himself as…not knowing an “a” from a windmill or a “b” from a bull’s foot seems to go beyond the conventional modesty topos of other writers. —James Dean, Six Ecclesiastical Satires
4. (in literature) A, black hairy corset of dazzling flies/Who boom around cruel stenches,/Gulfs of darkness —Arthur Rimbaud, “Vowels”
5. (in literature) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter concerns a woman condemned to wear an A (for the crime of adultery) embroidered on her breast. Any woman wearing such a letter was shunned by society. Here’s what Hawthorne writes in the first chapter: “On the breast of her gown, in red cloth, surrounded with elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. ” The description makes it seem beautiful—doesn’t that make the
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