THIRD-PERSON POINT OF VIEW

THREE ESTATES: See feudalism. Or click here for expanded historical discussion of feudalism.

THREE FOLD DEATH: See threefold death.

THREE DRAMATIC UNITIES: See unities, the three.

THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS: See Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

THREE UNITIES: See unities, the three.

THREEFOLD DEATH: According to Dan Wiley's entry in Duffy's Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia, threefold death is a motif of the early Irish aideda in which a victim is killed by three different means in rapid succession, often wounding, drowning, and burning. Examples of this motif can also be found in literature of folklore of Wales, France, and Estonia. The widespread nature of the motif makes some scholars think it began in a hypothetical Indo-European tri-functional sacrifice in which human victims were offered to a triad of divinities. Two of the best examples are found in Aided Diarnmata meic Cerbaill (The Death of Diarmait mac Cerbaill) and Aided Muirchertaig meic Erca (The Death of Muirchertach mac Erca). The tales are typically set in the early Christian period between 500 and 699 CE. The narrative pattern typically is (a) a crime is committed against the church, (b) it is prophesied the offender will die a threefold death, (c) such a death does occur. See Duffy 10-11.

THRENODY: Another term for a dirge.

THRUST STAGE: Another term for an apron stage.

TILDE: A diacritic marking usd in languages like Spanish and Portugeuse. It looks like this: ~, and the tilde appears over another letter.

TIRING-HOUSE: An enclosed area in an Elizabethan theater where the actors awaited their cue to go on stage, changed their costumes, and stored stage props. The term is an abbreviation of "attiring house" or "attiring room." This structure was located at the back of the stage and opened out onto the stage from two or more doors in the frons scenae.

TMESIS: Intentionally breaking a word into two parts for emphasis. Goldwyn once wrote, "I have but two words to say to your request: Im Possible." In the movie True Lies, one character states, "I have two words to describe that idea. In Sane." Milton writes, "Which way soever man refer to it." The poet W. H. Auden makes emotionally laden use of tmesis in "Two Songs for Hedli Anderson," where he stretches out the word forever by writing: "I thought that love would last For Ever. I was wrong." In English, this rhetorical scheme is fairly rare, since only the compounds of "ever" readily lend themselves to it, but it is much more common in Greek and Latin. An exception to this generalization is the American poet e. e. cummings (the lack of capitalization in his name is a rhetorical affectation). Critics note that cummings makes particularly potent use of tmesis in poems like "she being Brand / -new", in which words like "brand-new" and "O. K" are artificially divided across separate lines of text to create an unusual, broken reading experience. Particularly clever poets may use a sort of infixation to insert other words of phrases between the two parts that have been split apart. For instance, a southerner might say, "I live in West--by God--Virginia, thank you very much!" Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, writes the phrase, "how dearly ever parted" (III.iii), when we would expect to find the phrase written as "however dearly parted" in normal grammatical usage. Tmesis is an example of a rhetorical scheme.

TOCHARIAN: A branch of the Indo-European family of languages--now extinct. Unusually, Tocharian was geographically located in central Asia, far away from most other Indo-European languages.

TOKEN: Nathaniel Hawthorne's term for a private symbol. He also refers to private symbols as emblems. Examples include the blasted trees and brown-grass in "The Hollow of the Three Hills" or the walking stick carried by the old man and the pink ribbon belonging to Faith in "Young Goodman Brown."

TONE: The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood. By looking carefully at the choices an author makes (in characters, incidents, setting; in the work's stylistic choices and diction, etc.), careful readers often can isolate the tone of a work and sometimes infer from it the underlying attitudes that control and color the story or poem as a whole. The tone might be formal or informal, playful, ironic, optimistic, pessimistic, or sensual. To illustrate the difference, two different novelists might write stories about capitalism. Author #1 creates a tale in which an impoverished but hard-working young lad pulls himself out of the slums when he applies himself to his education, and he becomes a wealthy, contented middle-class citizen who leaves his past behind him, never looking back at that awful human cesspool from which he rose. Author #2 creates a tale in which a dirty street-rat skulks his way out of the slums by abandoning his family and going off to college, and he greedily hoards his money in a gated community and ignores the suffering of his former "equals," whom he leaves behind in his selfish desire to get ahead. Note that both author #1 and author #2 basically present the same plotline. While the first author's writing creates a tale of optimism and hope, the second author shapes the same tale into a story of bitterness and cynicism. The difference is in their respective tones--the way they convey their attitudes about particular characters and subject-matter. Note that in poetry, tone is often called voice.

TOPONYM: A place-name, such as "Detroit" or "Transylvania," or "Rooster Rock." Toponyms are fascinating on a linguistic level. Often their etymology reveals an etiological narrative from local mythology or folklore (such as Arthurian legends for how some regions of Wales were named) or historical evidence concerning linguistic migrations. For instance, in the northern parts of England and the East Midlands, towns with name-endings such as "-by" or "-thorp" are all places named by the Danish Vikings, who invaded and settled in those parts around 800 CE. On the opposite shore, in southeastern parts of England, towns with name-endings such as "-chester" or "-caster" were once Roman military bases (from Latin castrum, a fort), and they were built before 410 CE. Toponyms tend to be linguistically conservative, so the name may not change even after new invaders or settlers take over the area. Hence, in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico, aboriginal words and phrases still survive in place names like Milwaukee, Alaska, Oklahoma, the Willamette river, Saskatchewan, Ottawa, Acapulco, Tenochtitlan, Oaxaca, and thousands more.

TORY (from Irish toraidhe, "outlaw, fugitive"; plural: Tories): As Marshall tells us, the name Tory was originally an insulting nickname given to supporters of James, Duke of York (James II) as heir to the throne in the 1680s. The original idea was that his supporters were all tax-bandits who did not fully support popular Protestant movements in England. Eventually, during the time of Swift, Addison, Steele, and Johnson in the 1700s, the terms Tory and Whig became the names of the two major political factions in England. Tories were associated with the Established Chuch of England (the Anglican Church) and conservative country gentry, and the Whigs were associated with religious dissenters (Quakers, anabaptists, Puritans, etc.) and the rising bourgeois class of industrialists wanting political change. In modern British politics, the term Tory remains informally attached to the Conservative party, but the word Whig has fallen out of political use for the Liberal Party. See also Whig (Marshall 11-12).

TOTAL DEPRAVITY: A doctrine associated with John Calvin's doctrine of Infant Damnation and Saint Augustine's and Saint Tertullian's doctrine of Original Sin. Total depravity argues that, because of Adam's fall from Grace, every person is born innately evil, and, in fact, is incapable of truly doing anything moral or good at all without the merciful, direct intervention of God. Questions surrounding total depravity form a key part of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," in which the protagonist, convinced that all humanity is inherently depraved, falls into despair and suspicion of his society. Total depravity contrasts with the Transcendental and Romantic notion that children in nature are born innocent and only later grow corrupt through exposure to "unnatural" and artificial surroundings provided by decadent and hypocritical civilization.

TOTEMISM (from Ojibwe odoodem): In its most specific sense, the term applies to the religious practices of the Native American Ojibiwa tribe, i.e., a religious belief in which a family or a clan would be watched over assisted by a totem-spirit. Emile Durkheim popularized the concept as a focus of anthropological study in the early twentieth century. Today, anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion apply the term generally to such beliefs among Native American tribes and find analogues in Western and Eastern Europe, Africa, Australia and the Arctic Circle.

Like shamanism, totemism sees the spirit-world as being filled with spirits that take the form of natural phenomena (especially animals, astrological or meteorological phenomena, or geographic features of the land). These spirits are personified and often treated as family members (i.e., "Brother Owl" or "Grandfather Moon") or as ancient ancestral spirits who founded the clan or tribe (for instance, one clan might claim to be descended from the Great Sea Turtle, another clan from the First Jaguar, etc.) Often the tribe has a shaman responsible for contact with the totem-spirit, and the tribe may go through elaborate hunting ceremonies to apologize for hunting their "mascot" or may develop complex taboos regarding the animal. Some scholars of mythology believe long-forgotten totemism explains otherwise inexplicable rituals and myths in classical religion. For instance, consider Athena's association with owls or the local Artemis ceremonies in which young girls would dress up as bears and dance. These may point to prehistoric times in which Athena was an owl totem or Artemis was the spirit of the great she-bear, long before these goddesses were anthropomophosized. The connotations and rituals linger even when the original meaning is forgotten. Similar background may explain the association of the Roman god Mars with wolves and woodpeckers, or the Egyptian god Thoth with the ibis, and so on.

TRACE: In literary criticism, Jacques Derrida uses the term trace to describe the remnant of all non-present meanings, sounds, or written markings on the page--especially in the sense that features are identifiable only by the absence of other features.

TRACT (from Latin, tractare, "to handle, to treat, to pull"): A brief pamphlet or leaflet dealing with a political or religious argument.

TRADITION: The beliefs, attitudes, tendencies, and ways of representing the world through art: traits widely shared by writers over a span of time, including common subject-matter, conventions, and genres.

TRAGEDY: A serious play in which the chief character, by some peculiarity of psychology, passes through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragedy. He writes in his Poetics (c. 350 BCE): "Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; . . . through pity [eleos] and fear [phobos] effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions" (Book 6.2). Traditionally, a tragedy is divided into five acts. The first act introduces the characters in a state of happiness, or at the height of their power, influence, or fame. The second act typically introduces a problem or dilemma, which reaches a point of crisis in the third act, but which can still be successfully averted. In the fourth act, the main characters fail to avert or avoid the impending crisis or catastrophe, and this disaster occurs. The fifth act traditionally reveals the grim consequences of that failure. See also hamartia, hubris, anagnorisis, peripeteia, and catharsis. Click the following links to download a handout discussing medieval tragedy, some general thoughts about tragedy, or a comparison of comedy and tragedy.

TRAGIC FLAW: Another term for the tragic hero's hamartia. See discussion under hamartia and tragedy.

TRAGICOMEDY: A experimental literary work--either a play or prose piece of fiction--containing elements common to both comedies and tragedies. The genre is marked by characters of both high and low degree, even though classical drama required upper-class characters for tragedy and lower-class characters for comedy. Tragicomedies were of some interest in the Renaissance, but some modern dramas might be considered examples as well. Typically, the early stages of the play resembled those of a tragedy, but an abrupt reversal of circumstance prevent the tragedy.

TRANSCENDENTALISM (Latin trans + ascendere, "to climb beyond"): Transcendentalism is an American philosophical, religious, and literary movement roughly equivalent to the Romantic movement in England (see Romanticism). The transcendentalist philosophy is not systematic or sharply defined, but it generally stresses individual intuition and conscience, and it holds that nature reveals the whole of God's moral law. It suggests that ultimate truth can be discovered by a human's inmost feelings. It argues for morality guided by personal conscience rather than religious dogma or the laws of a society. Human nature in this philosophy is basically good if humans are allowed to pursue their normal desires in a natural and wholesome environment, an idea that contrasts sharply with Calvinist doctrines like total depravity. Transcendentalism also suggests the presence of an "Over-Soul," the Emersonian sense that humanity collectively has a defining spirit.

The American transcendental movement begins around 1836 and continues up until the late 1850s, starting shortly after the Romantic period ends in England. The Civil War in the 1860s caused such cultural disjuncture that the event ended the transcendental movement in America. Much of the movement's ideas grow out of the German Immanuel Kant's philosophy (1724-1804) and Goethe in Germany, or the writings of Carlyle and Coleridge in England. Later writers advanced transcendental thinking further. In New England, Emerson and Thoreau were the two most famous transcendentalists. Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden best express the ideas. These two believed in living close to nature, accepted the value of manual labor, and favored self-reliance. Other transcendentalist writers include Bronson Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, however, later grew disillusioned with transcendentalism, and wrote a skeptical work (The Blithedale Romance of 1852) in which he critiques his experiences while living at a communal farm operated according to transcendentalist principles.

Transcendental philosophy has had a profound effect on the American psyche, including the idea of independent, do-it-yourself self-reliance, the rejection of conformity, and a deep love of nature, much as the Romantic period influenced England. Traces of its voice--albeit somewhat muted--appear in the counter-cultural rhetoric of the 1960s and in ecological writings of the late twentieth-century. In the Christian religious tradition, the transcendentalist philosophy was a powerful influence on the growth of the modern Unitarian Church. To see how transcendentalism fits in with other literary movements and time-periods, click here to download a PDF handout that places the literary periods in chronological order.

TRANSFER OF MEANING: A change in meaning--often poetic in origin--in which a word's referent alters by a figure of speech such as a synecdoche, a metaphor, or a metonym. For instance, consider the phrase, "all hands on deck." Here, the normal referent for "hands" would be a body part located on the end of the human arm. However, by synecdoche, the referent for "hands" becomes "sailors" more generally.

TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR: An influential theory of grammar associated with the linguist Noam Chomsky. This theory, also known as generative grammar, or transformational-generative grammar (and abbreviated T-G), tries to explain the ability of a speaker to create and understand the sentences in a native language--especially the ability to recognize and create sentences that the listener or speaker could never have heard before. It attempts to answer the question of how an apparently infinite variety in meaning and communication can be generated from finite vocabulary and finite grammatical forms.

TRANSITIVE: This term refers to a verb or a verbal phrase that contains or can take a direct object, which contrasts with an intransitive verb, i.e., one that cannot take a direct object. For example, hit is a transitive verb: Joey hit the wall. In this example, hit can take a direct object like wall or target or even brother if Joey hit his brother. Some transitive verbs are so strongly transitive they do not make sense without a direct object. For instance, "Joey repaired the sink." Here, the verb repaired sounds strange if we leave out the object and write, "Joey repaired." This example contrasts with intransitive verbs, i.e., verbs which need not (or in many cases cannot) take an object. For example, Joey chuckled. Here, chuckled needs no direct object. In English, transitive verbs belong to active voice verbs, but in some languages (like Greek) they can belong to any voice--active, passive, middle, or aorist.

TRANSITUS MUNDI: The theme of life's ephemeral or transient nature, especially when that thematic exploration ends by suggesting humanity should reject the world or turn its attention away from mundane life and retreat to spiritual contemplation of the next life. The term comes from the Latin phrase, Sic transit gloria mundi. ["Thus the glory of the world passes away"]. Note that if the theme of life's ephemeral or transient nature leads to a suggestion that one should embrace life more fiercely and take advantage of its pleasures before death ends the opportunity, the theme is usually referred to as a carpe diem theme instead. See also ubi sunt.

TRANSLATIO (Latin, derived from the verb translatere, "to carry across"): The medieval idea of what modern individuals might mistakenly call "translation." Translatio is the act of taking an older text in a different language and creating a new work that embodies the same ideas in a new language. Unlike modern translation, in which a translator often tries to convey each sentence, word, and phrase as literally and accurately as possible, the medieval idea of translatio was to take the gist of the original work's ideas and to convey them loosely in a new form. Examples include King Alfred's early and Chaucer's later "translations" of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Chaucer's loose "translations" (i.e., new versions) of the Troy myth in Troilus and Criseyde, which in turn was adapted from earlier medieval Italian authors, or his abbreviated version of the French poem, Roman de la Rose. Medieval translators felt little compunction about keeping the same sequence of events, settings, or characters in their translations. The important element to be conveyed was the feeling and philosophy behind the original work.

TRANSLATION: The act of conveying the meaning of words in one language by attempting to say the same thing in another language, as opposed to paraphrasing, summarizing, and transliteration.

TRANSLITERATION: The representation of the symbols appearing in one language's writing system by those of another language's writing system. For instance, Anglo-Saxon had a letter called eth (∂), which does not exist in Modern English. To transliterate this letter, we use the digraph

TRAVEL LITERATURE: Writings that describe either the author's journey to a distant and alien place, or writings which discuss the customs, habits, and wildlife of a distant place. The oldest surviving travel literature is an account from 1300 BCE, an anonymous record of Egyptian naval voyages called The Journeying of the Master of the Captains of Egypt. Herodotus' Histories recount his travels in Egypt, Africa, and elsewhere in the late 400s BCE. In China, we find accounts of travels to India by a certain Fa-Hian (c. 400 CE) and Shuman Hwui-Li's travels to the farthest Eastern reaches of the Chinese Empire. Roman travel literature includes writings by Gaius Solinus (c. 250 CE).

Medieval travel writers include Marco Polo (c. 1254-1324 CE), who traveled from Italy to China, and the Arabian traveler, Ibn Battutah (1304-78 CE), who spent twenty-eight years traveling through Spain, South Russia, India, Africa, Egypt, and other locations. In roughly the same time period, Friar Jordanus of Sérac traveled to Armenia and India and recounted the stories he heard there of the Far East.

European travel writings reached their peak in the Renaissance, when the discovery of the Western hemisphere and increasingly accurate maps and navigational tools led explorers to ever-more-distant discoveries. Many, like the Spanish explorer Francisco de Alvarez (c. 1465-1541), set out in search of the fantastic places described in medieval legend, such as the fabled Kingdom of Prester John in the east; others searched for the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola in the west. In these cases, medieval travel writing served as a spur toward European expansion and colonization. Shakespeare's The Tempest shows signs of influence from this genre, as does Othello's description of his adventures abroad in Othello. Other examples of travel literature are of historical significance for the U.S.A., such as The Journals of Lewis and Clark, recounting their early expedition across America.

TRAVESTY (Latin trans + vestis, "switched clothing"): Debasement of a serious subject or serious literary work either accidentally or through intentional satire--especially through treating a dignified topic in a silly or inappropriate manner. For instance, Boileau describes one travesty of Virgil's Aeneid by stating, "Dido and Aeneas are made to speak like fishwives and ruffians." In many cases, the author of intentional travesties uses a mock-serious tone and is deliberately heavy-handed in his treatment.

TRAWS FANTACH (Welsh, "toothless"): A derogatory adjective in Welsh poetic criticism for a poetic line contains a single scheme, trope, or poetic correspondence with another line. This lack of complexity is considered a sign of inferior poetry.

TREATY OF WEDMORE: The agreement signed by King Alfred the Great and the Viking leader Guthrum in 878. This divided England into spheres of influence, with Alfred's kingdom of Essex safe from further Viking attacks, and it established an area of Viking control (the Danelaw) north of London and east of Chester. As part of the agreement, the invading Danes agreed to convert to Christianity.

TRENCH POETRY: Poetry and songs written by both common soldiers and professional poets focusing on the disillusionment, suffering, and ethical dismay these individuals felt at their involvement in World War I. The poetry is often bitter in tone. Often the poetic voice of the speaker mimics the voice, style, and speech of an ordinary soldier. Sometimes the poet presents the poem's speaker in the persona of a soldier, even if the poet himself was not one. Much of this "trench poetry" was published in trench newsletters. The well-known trench poets of the period include Sassoon and Owens. Owens' "Dulce Et Decorum Est" is one famous example of trench poetry.

TRIAD: A collection of three ideas, concepts, or deities loosely connected--as opposed to a pure trinity in which the three concepts are much more closely linked or equivalent to each other. The oldest known triad comes from the Sumerian scholastic period (circa 2400-2200 BCE). Here, the gods of heaven, earth, and water (Anu, Enlil, and Enki) would form a common group of three linked together in religious poetry and ritual (Hopper 6), as was the case with the Babylonian triad of air deities, Sin, Shamash, and Raman who ruled the moon, sun, and storms (Hopper 20). The former Babylonian triad later altered to focus on Anu, Baal, and Ea in following centuries--a formula reminiscent of the three divine brothers Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon in Greek mythology (Hopper 7). The three Greek fates (Klotho the spinner, Lachesis the measurer, and Atropos the cutter) are a triad matched by the three Germanic Norns (Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld). Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma are the Hindu triad representing destruction, preservation, and creation. Often triads revolve around the idea of the "celestial family"--such as the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, and Horus or it may consist consist of three brothers--such as the cyclopean smiths who assist Hephaestus: Brontos, Sterope, and Argus.

Note that the idea of a triad is distinct from the idea of a trinity, in which three divine persons are thought to be in some way equivalent or identical to each other--as is the case in the Christian trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) or the Egyptian solar trinity (Horus, Ra, and Atun--the sun gods associated with the morning, noonday, and setting sun). The first Christian missionaries to Ireland were greatly aided by the fact that Irish mythology already contained an idea of trinity in the form of three-headed or three-personed gods, as MacCulloch notes in The Religion of the Ancient Celts (34, qtd. in Hopper 203).

In a looser sense, any grouping of three is a triad--including groupings such as these:

• 
  past-present-future
  
• 
  earth-sea-sky
  
• 
  heart-mind-body
  
• 
  beginning-middle-end
  
• 
  father-mother-child
  
• 
  heaven, earth, hell (or heaven, hell, and purgatory)
  
• 
  childhood, adulthood, and old age
  
• 
  the world, the flesh, the devil
  
• 
  the three steps of Vishnu in Hindu mythology.
  
• 
  faith, hope, and love
  

TRIAL BY COMBAT: A means of resolving disputes between knights in which both agree to meet at an agreed-upon time and place and fight with agreed-upon weapons. The knight who was in the right and honest in his words would be the one to win the day, since in popular medieval theology, it was thought that God would favor the just. In actual point of fact, the late medieval church condemned trial by combat as barbaric, though records of it persist through the early 1300s. The habit of gentlemanly duels, which continued through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Early Romantic period, along with the Western American practice of the gun-fight, are vague remnants of this earlier practice among knights. Shakespeare uses this ritual in the opening scenes of Richard II. See lists, chivalry, trial by ordeal, and feudalism. Contrast with trial by ordeal.

TRIAL BY ORDEAL: Click here for more information.

TRIBRACH: In Greek poetry, a three-syllable foot in which each foot is unstressed or short--rarely used in English poetry.

TRICK ENDING: Another term for an O. Henry ending.

TRICOLON: The repetition of a parallel grammatical construction three times for rhetorical effect. See discussion under parallelism.

TRIGRAPH: A combination of three symbols or letters to indicate a single sound phonetically. For instance, the in witch represents a single sound phonetically, but English speakers use three letters together to represent that sound. See also digraph.

TRILOGY: A group of three literary works that together compose a larger narrative. Early types of trilogy resulted from the common practice of Athenian playwrights, who would submit tragedies as groups of three plays for performance in the Dionysia. Examples include the Oresteia of Aeschylus and Sophocles' trilogy of Oedipus Rex, Antigonê, and Oedipus at Colona. Contrast with tetralogy and sequel.

TRIMETER: A line consisting of three metrical feet. This short line is most common in English nursery rhymes, lullabies, and children's songs. We do find examples of it in poems like the opening lines of William Blake's "The Lamb":

Little Lamb, who made thee?

TRINITY: A grouping or relationship of three divine persons thought in some way to be equivalent or identical to each other--as is the case in the Christian trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) or the Egyptian solar trinity (Horus, Ra, and Atun--the sun-gods associated with the morning, noonday, and setting sun). The first Christian missionaries to Ireland were greatly aided by the fact that Irish mythology already contained an idea of trinity in the form of three-headed or three-personed gods, as MacCulloch notes in The Religion of the Ancient Celts (34, referenced. in Hopper 203). Contrast with a triad, a group of three loosely connected with each other in mythology, philosophy, or poetry.

In patristic and medieval literature, a number of theological treatises survive pertaining to the trinity--the most influential probably being Saint Augustine's De Trinitate. Many heretical groups originated in disputes concerning the nature of the trinity (see heresy for more information). The concept of trinity strongly influences Dante's Divine Comedy. To mimic the nature of a threefold deity, Dante writes his poem in terza rima (with sets of three interlocking rhymes); he divides the work into three sections (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso); finally, he subdivides each section into 33 cantos. Even Satan himself in the work appears as a three-headed, six-winged monster that mimics the tripartite structure of the Godhead. Such numerology is typical of many medieval writings.

TRIOLET (French, "little trio"): A stanza of eight lines using only two rhymes, with the first line repeating three times. Here is an example by Thomas Hardy:

How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
Have the slow years not brought to view
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Nor memory shaped old times anew,
Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee?

TRIPLE RHYME: A trisyllabic rhyme involving three separate syllables to create the rhyme in each word. For instance, grinding cares is a triple rhyme with winding stairs. Fearfully is a triple rhyme with tearfully. Triple rhymes are not unusual in some Italian poetry, but single and double rhymes are much more common in English. However, triple rhymes and polysyllabic rhymes are frequently employed for humorous effect in English literature. Lord Byron uses polysyllabic rhyme for humorous effect when he writes an apostrophe to the husbands of pedantic women: "But--Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual! / Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?" Ogden Nash likewise uses forced rhyme in order to produce the effect of surrendering to a difficult bit of verse when he writes, "Farewell, farewell, you old rhinocerous, / I'll stare at something less prepocerous."

TRIPLET: A tercet that forms a complete stanza by itself.

TRISTICH (Greek, "three lines"): Another term for a tercet.

TRITAGONIST: In the earliest Greek dramas, the play consisted of a single actor standing on stage speaking and singing to the chorus. Later, a second actor (called the deuteragonist) was added by literary innovators, and later a third actor (called the tritagonist). In modern literary discussions, we use the term tritagonist to refer to any tertiary character who aids the protagonist (the main character or hero), but who does not serve as a deuteragonist (a constant side-kick or companion). For example, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn is the protagonist, the slave Jim is the deuteragonist, and Tom Sawyer is the tritagonist. See protagonist, antagonist, and deuteragonist.

TRIVIUM: The study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which in medieval education formed the basis of a bachelor's degree, as opposed to the quadrivium of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music, which formed the basis of a master's degree.

TROCHAIC METER: Poetry in which each foot consists primarily of trochees (poetic feet consisting of a heavy stress followed by a light stress). See extended discussion under trochee and meter.

TROCHAIC RHYME: Another word for double rhyme in which the final rhyming word consists of a heavy stress followed by a light stress.

TROCHEE: A two-syllable unit or foot of poetry consisting of a heavy stress followed by a light stress. Many words in English naturally form trochees, including happy, hammer, Pittsburgh, nugget, double, incest, injure, roses, hippie, Bubba, "beat it," clever, dental, dinner, shatter, pitcher, Cleveland, chosen, planet, chorus, widow, bladder, cuddle, slacker, and so on. A line of poetry written in successive trochees is said to be written in trochaic meter. See extended discussion under meter. Click here to download a PDF handout that contrasts iambs with other types of poetic feet.

TROPE: Trope has two meanings: (1) a rhetorical device or figure of speech involving shifts in the meaning of words--click on the tropes link for examples, (2) a short dialogue inserted into the church mass during the early Middle Ages as a sort of mini-drama.

TROPOLOGICAL: Not to be confused with either typology or the rhetorical device of the trope, the term tropological refers to the interpretation of literature in which the interpreter focuses on the ethical lesson presented in the text, i.e., "the moral of the story." See more discussion under fourfold interpretation.

TROUBADOUR (Provençal "finder, inventor"): A medieval love poet of southern France between 1100-1350 who wrote and sang about the theme of fin amour (courtly love). Troubadours were noteworthy for their creativity and experimentation in metrical forms. They wrote in langue d'oc, and they profoundly influenced Dante, Petrarch, and the development of the love lyric in Europe. The term troubadour is sometimes used interchangeably with trouvère. Cf. trouvère, below.

TROUBLES, THE: A period of social unrest in Northern Ireland during the 1970s that profoundly influenced Irish poetry and writings. See for an example Seamus Heaney's "Casualty."

TROUVÈRE (Old French, "finder, inventor"): A medieval poet of northern France, especially Picardy, who wrote and sang in lang d'oïl and composed chasons de gestes (songs about the adventures of knights) and romans bretons as well. The term trouvère is sometimes used interchangeably with troubadour. Cf. troubadour, above.

TRUE RHYME: Another term for perfect rhyme or exact rhyme. See exact rhyme.

TSMESIS: See tmesis.

TUDOR: A reference to the period in England during which the ruling monarchs came from the Tudor family (1485-1603). Tudor was the name of a Welshman, Owen Tudor, born in the 1400s. His line became the ruling dynasty when his son Henry Tudor ended the War of the Roses by killing Richard III in 1485. The last ruling Tudor monarch was Henry Tudor's granddaughter, queen Elizabeth I, who died in 1603. After Elizabeth, the House of Stuart claimed the throne when Elizabeth's cousin James I of England (also known as James VI of Scotland) inherited her power. The Tudor period is largely synonymous with the early Renaissance in England. See Renaissance, above.

TUDOR INTERLUDE: Short tragedies, comedies, or history plays performed by either professional acting troupes or by students during the early sixteenth century.

TURN: Also called a volta, a turn is a sudden change in thought, direction, or emotion at the conclusion of the sonnet. This invisible turn is followed by a couplet called a gemel (in English sonnets) or a sestet (in Italian sonnets).

TWIST ENDING: Another term for an O. Henry ending.

TYNGED: A magical taboo or restriction placed on a hero in Welsh literature; the Welsh equivalent to the Irish geasa. One example from The Mabinogion would be how Culwch's mother places a "destiny" on him so that he can have sex with no woman except Olwen, the daughter of the Giant-king Ysbaddaden.

TYPE: An earlier figure, event, or symbol in the Old Testament thought to prefigure a coming antitype (corresponding figure, event, or symbol) in the New Testament. See discussion under typology. The term should not be confused with Jung's idea of an archetype.

TYPE CHARACTER: A literary character with traits commonly associated with a particular class of people.

TYPOGRAPHICAL JUSTIFICATION: See justification, typographical.

TYPOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION: In linguistics, this schema is a "grouping of languages based on structural similarities and differences rather than genetic relations" (Algeo 332). Do not confuse this linguistic term with typology and typological criticism.

TYPOLOGICAL CRITICISM: A type of literary analysis of medieval or patristic texts in which critics read characters, objects, or events according to established interpretations of similar characters, objects, or events in biblical literature. See discussion under typology. Do not confuse this term with typological classification in linguistics.

TYPOLOGY: A mode of biblical interpretation introduced by Saint Paul and developed by Patristic writers as a means of reconciling the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) and the New Testament. Saint Augustine expressed the general principle in De Doctrina Christiana, in which he writes, "In the Old Testament, the New Testament is concealed; in the New Testament, the Old Testament is revealed." The theory is contested by Hebrew scholars, but in patristic and medieval Latin writings, it was accepted widely by Christians eager to reconcile their faith with Hebrew antiquity. In typological theory, key persons, events, and symbols in the Old Testament are viewed as "figures" or "figurations" (Latin figurae) that predict a matching figure in the New Testament. These figurae were seen as historically real in and of themselves, but also they served as "prefigurations" of similar persons, events, and symbols in the New Testament. The Old Testament figures were known as types and the New Testament figures were known as antitypes. Here are a few examples of such types and antitypes as identified by patristic and medieval writers:

More recent religious poets--such as Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Milton, and William Blake have also used typological symbolism in their poetry. Twentieth-century Christian writers such as C. S. Lewis successfully employ typological models in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Great Divorce.

TYRONIAN NOTA: While modern English authors use an ampersand (&) as an abbreviation for the word and, medieval writers would use a tyronian nota to represent the Latin word et (modern English and). The nota looks a bit like the modern arabic number "7" (&).

TZ'U: A Chinese genre of poetry invented during the T'ang period. It was akin to a song libretto with a tonal pattern similar to the lu-shih, but with irregular meter. This term should not be confused with -tzu, an honorific suffix meaning "master" or "teacher" in names like the military philosopher Sun-Tzu, or Lao-Tzu, the taoist author of the Tao-te Ching.

UBI SUNT MOTIF (Latin, "Where are....?"): A literary motif dealing with the transience of life. The name comes from a longer Latin phrase, "Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?" [Where are those who were before us?], a phrase that begins several medieval poems in Latin. The phrase evokes the transience of life, youth, beauty, and human endeavor. It is a particularly common motif in the ballades. A particularly memorable example comes from medieval French, where Francois Villon repeatedly asks in "The Ballade of Dead Ladies," "Ou sont les nieges d'antan?" ["Where are the snows of yesteryear?"]. Many Anglo-Saxon poems such as "The Ruin" and "The Wanderer" also deal with this theme. Although the motif is similar to the Roman carpe diem motif in its emphasis on transitory existence, the medieval ubi sunt motif usually does not call on the reader to embrace this world's pleasures before the end comes, but instead grimly or sorrowfully urges the reader to prepare spiritually for the afterlife.

ULTIMATE SOURCE: In linguistics, the earliest known or most ancient etymon for a particular word, as opposed to a direct source, the most recent source for a word.

UMLAUT: (1) Jacob Grimm's term for the process of assimilating a vowel to another sound in the following syllable. This process is also called mutation. This process is responsible for many unusual plurals in Germanic languages like English--such as man-men, foot-feet, and so on. (2) The diacritical marking also called a dieresis. Click here for more information on this diacritical marking.

UNDERSTATEMENT: See litotes and meiosis under tropes.

UNDERWORLD: The land of the dead--often depicted as beneath the surface of the earth in a variety of religious literatures. See Descent Into the Underworld.

UNINFLECTED GENITIVE: A genitive that has no case ending to signal its function. A number of such uninflected genitives appeared in Early Modern English--especially for nouns that originally were feminine in Anglo-Saxon grammar or nouns ending in -s or preceding another word beginning with s-. Thus, we might find "for conscience sake" and "for God sake" in Shakespearean plays.

UNINFLECTED PLURAL: A plural word identical to its singular form. For instance, "I saw one deer yesterday, but last week I saw five deer." Here, the word deer is identical whether it is singular or plural. Other examples include sheep, swine, folk, and (in Middle English) horse and kind, which did not develop the plural form horses and kinds until the 1600s through linguistic hypercorrection.

UNITIES, THREE (also known as the "three dramatic unities"): In the 1500s and 1600s, critics of drama expanded Aristotle's ideas in the Poetics to create the rule of the "three unities." A good play, according to this doctrine, must have three traits. The first is unity of action (realistic events following a single plotline and a limited number of characters encompassed by a sense of verisimilitude). The second is unity of time, meaning that the events should be limited to the two or three hours it takes to view the play, or at most to a single day of twelve or twenty-four hours compressed into those two or three hours. Skipping ahead in time over the course of several days or years was considered undesirable, because the audience was thought to be incapable of suspending disbelief regarding the passage of time. The third is unity of space, meaning the play must take place in a single setting or location. It is notable that Shakespeare often broke the three unities in his plays, which may explain why these rules later were never as dominant in England as they were in French and Italian Neoclassical drama. French playwrights like Moliére conformed to the model much more strictly in Love is the Doctor and Tartuffe.

UNIT SET: A series of lowered or raised platforms on stage, often connected by various stairs and exits, which form the various locations for all of a play's scenes. A unit set enables the scene to change rapidly--without intermissions or the drawing of the curtain in order to place new sets.

UNITY: The sense that all the elements in a piece of writing fit together to create a harmonious effect.

UNIVERSAL SYMBOL: Another term for an archetype.

UNMARKED WORD: See discussion under marked word.

UNRELEASED STOP: In linguistics, a stop sound without explosion (i.e., a puff of air) in the place where articulated stoppage would normally take place. For instance, this appears in some New York dialects. Here, when speaking the [t] in a word like outcome, a New Yorker might pronounce the first part of the [t], but rather than releasing the stop as a puff of air after the [t], the speaker might move directly into the /k/ sound that begins the syllable come.

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR: An imaginary storyteller or character who describes what he witnesses accurately, but misinterpets those events because of faulty perception, personal bias, or limited understanding. Often the writer or poet creating such an unreliable narrator leaves clues so that readers will perceive the unreliablity and question the interpretations offered. Examples of unreliable narrators arguably include "Geoffrey the pilgrim" in the Canterbury Tales, the character of Forest Gump in the movie of the same name, and possibly Wilson in "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber." See discussion under authorial voice.

UNROUNDED VOWEL: See spread vowel.

UNROUNDING: The process of changing from a rounded vowel to a spread vowel. For instance, in the vowel u, Chaucer would have pronounced the letter as in the word full. By the 1500s, that sound changed to become the sound found in cut, sun, and but. That change is called unrounding. Contrast with the Great Vowel Shift.

UNSTRESSED: Lightly stressed as opposed to heavily stressed--i.e., a syllable that has little prominence when spoken aloud. Click here for more information in a PDF handout.

URAL-ALTAIC: A hypothetical language family thought to include Uralic and Altaic.

URALIC: A non-Indo-European language family including Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic.

UR-TEXT: A hypothetical "best" version of a lost literary text based on correlating later manuscripts and examining the differences between them. An Ur-text is not an actual physical manuscript we can examine or see in a museum, but rather an imaginary reconstruction of one that must have existed at some past point in time based on available evidence. This reconstruction cannot be absolutely certain, but it is a useful thought experiment for helping editors decide between textual variants when creating an edition of a literary work.

Later manuscripts and printed texts often exist in literary families, with later versions adapted from earlier ones. Scribal corruption, printing errata, authorial revision, and deliberate bowdlerization or alteration by later editors can result in textual variants (slightly differing versions of the same basic text). It isn't always clear which of these versions is most accurate.

When a modern editor wants to print her own edition, she will have to decide which version(s) she will use. Likewise, modern scholars who want an authoritative copy for historical and comparative purposes must determine which alterations are clear errors and which ones represent authorial intention. In some cases, textual critics can determine that one copy is most authoritative and use it as the basis of a critical edition. They may be able to examine an author's original typed copy in the case of a recent author like Hemingway or Toni Morrison, for instance. Far more often, however, the matter is muddled. Perhaps, as is the case with some works by Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, and Emily Dickinson, a poem exists in several slightly different versions in the author's own hand, or it exists in versions printed by different publishing houses that have minor alterations in diction, punctuation, and so on. Do those differences indicate that the author or poet changed her mind, and we should trust the more recent version as authoritative? Or does the older version, the first one that the public saw, count as the most important one, and are the later changes made by meddling editors? What about when we can't tell which one she wrote first and we can't ask the author because she has died?

This confusion is sharpened keenly in classical, medieval and Renaissance works. Finding "authorial intention" is difficult when, as in the case of certain Shakespearean plays, the first editions were printed in 1623, years after Shakespeare's actual death in 1616. It is even more challenging in the case of anonymous medieval authors when we aren't certain who they were and when they lived exactly. In the case of classical works like the Iliad or the Odyssey, the poem exists in literally thousands of different manuscripts--all copied down centuries after the heyday of Heroic Age Greece, and all varying slightly from each other in small passages. These are so removed from the original author, it may be pointless to use "authorial intention" as the guide to the best text.

In fashioning an Ur-text, the textual critic begins with the somewhat controversial assumption that "there is no original text," i.e., that not a single one of the surviving manuscripts represents the lost original one accurately and entirely. He then attempts to establish "families" of manuscripts by finding which ones have the same or similar readings in the same passages. If he can date the manuscripts by paleographic evidence, he can then arrange them into a stemma (plural stemmata), or family tree, with individual branches having the same textual reading for specific lines. In conjunction with other evidence, this often allows the scholar to pinpoint where and when one manuscript tradition branches off from another. For instance, we can speak of the Ellesmere family of manuscripts and the Hengwrt family of manuscripts in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Each family has within its members similar alterations, interpretations, errors, and editorial choices as those found in the Ellesmere and Hengwrt, which appear to be the oldest and least corrupt representatives of that group. Later copyists or scribes in the family reproduced the alterations, interpretations, errors, and editorial choices of earlier copyists or scribes in the same manuscript family. Determining this lineage allows modern scholars to identify and dismiss changes that were later added and confirm material that must have existed in older versions of the text. By placing the different families side by side and travelling up the family tree, the scholar can often gain fairly good insights into what the lost original might have looked like before it "mutated" into different stemma, much like modern geneticists seek to reconstruct divergence in species by identifying when and where specific mutations occurred in DNA.

Probably the most famous Ur-texts include the "Q-text," which in Biblical scholarship is thought to be a single source that about 40-70 years after Christ's death branched into the three synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (while the non-synoptic gospel of John developed from an independent manuscript family), and the "Ur-Hamlet," an earlier draft of Shakespeare's Hamlet that must have preceded the corrupt bad quartos of the play.

USAGE: The choice among grammatical, syntactic, or semantic options when the idea that one or the other option is correct or preferred to the other. Usage changes and language changes over time.

UTA: Another term for the Japanese genre of poetry also called a waka or tanka. See discussion under tanka.

UTO-AZTECAN: A non-Indo-European language family found in Central America and the western sections of North America.

UTOPIA: An imaginary place or government in which political and social perfection has been reached in the material world as opposed to some spiritual afterlife as discussed in the Christian Bible or the Elysian fields of The Odyssey. The citizens of such utopias are typically universally clean, virtuous, healthy, and happy, or at least those who are criminals are always captured and appropriately punished. A utopian society is one that has cured all social ills. See discussion under Utopian literature, below. Contrast with dystopia.

UTOPIAN LITERATURE: The term utopia comes from a Greek pun. In Greek, eu + topos ("good" + "place") and ou + topos ("no" + "place") sound very similar. Thus, utopia at once suggests a perfect society and an impossible one. Utopian literature is a term for any writing that presents the reader with (or explores the idea of) a perfect society in the physical world, as opposed to a perfect society existing in an afterlife.The first literary utopia was probably Plato's ideal commonwealth in the Republic, circa 400 BCE, in which a group of debating philosophers seeking to define justice end up as a mental exercise creating a hypothetical perfect polis, or self-governing city of about 8,000 citizens. In this imaginary society, philosophers are the rulers, goods and women are communally owned, slavery is taken for granted, and children are bred eugenically. Artists, actors, and poets are largely exiled. Ramn Llull's utopia in Blanquerna (c.1280) continued the tradition, but had little literary impact. Sir Thomas More's Utopia solidified the genre in 1516 and his name for the imaginary kingdom became the term used in reference to the genre more generally. Later versions include Andreae's Christianopolis, Campanella's City of the Sun, Bacon's New Atlantis, Samuel Gott's New Jerusalem, Winstanley's The Law of Freedom in a Platform, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, William Morris's News from Nowhere, Theodor Hertzka's Freeland, H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (my personal favorite), and more recent editions like Ecotopia.

Common features of the genre include elaborate multil-lingual puns or anagrams in the names of characters or in the geographic features of the imaginary landscape, native guides that show the way through the land to a narrator who is an outsider or stranger to the utopian society, and extensive criticism about contemporary political, social, economic, or ethical problems. A common misconception is that Utopian models are meant to be actual blueprints for a better way of life. In actual fact, the point of such literature is to help the reader better understand the problems, paradoxes, or faults found in existing political institutions rather than suggest a specific design for perfect politics.

VALORIZATION: In literary criticism, the privileging of one key aspect of a literary text or one particular process as the focus of literary analysis. New Critics, for instance, valorize the text itself, the words on the page as an independent literary artifact and de-emphasize biographical details about the author's life. Freudian critics valorize the unconscious mind. Textual critics valorize the process of editing and creating a "best text" of a literary work. Deconstructionists valorize language as a free-floating collection of signs, etc.

VARIABLE SYLLABLE: A syllable which can be either long or short, stressed or unstressed, depending upon context.

VARIORUM: A variorum edition is any published version of an author's work that contains notes and comments by a number of scholars and critics. The term is a shortened version of the Latin phrase cum notis variorum ("with the notes of various people"). The New Variorum Shakespeare is possibly the best known variorium edition in English.

VEGETATIONSDÄMON (Ger. "Plant-spirit"): A deity or spirit in mythology or in animism that represents (or is directly equivalent to) the vitality of domestic crops and/or native vegetation. This spirit would (in enacted ritual, in sacrifice, or in mythological narratives) grow and mature as the crops would grow and mature, but when the crops would be harvested, or when the seasons would change with autumn, the vegetationsdämon would either wither in death or would be struck down and killed in the harvest. Depending upon the mythic version, either the vegetationsdämon would be replaced by a new spirit with the new season, or the dead spirit would spontaneously resurrect and appear in the new season in young and vital form again. Analogues to this belief can be seen in Celtic "sacred kings," "Jack-in-the-Green" carvings, and the mystery cults of Demeter and Bacchus in ancient Greece. In the late nineteenth-century, German folklorists like Wilhelm Mannhardt studied Baltic myths and used studies of the vegetationsdämon to explain the origin of many cross-cultural myths in which a god dies and rises again. Later, British scholars like Sir James Frazer expanded upon Mannhardt's ideas and popularized them in The Golden Bough. Their work has since been criticized as a "one-size-fits-all" approach to myth (most recently and especially by Swiss scholars like Walter Burkert who focus on primitive hunting rituals as a source for myth). Likewise, the idea of a "seasonal dying god" makes much more sense in Northern Europe (with its fall and winter seasons) than it does in tropical locales like South America or balmy Mediterranean regions like Greece and Italy, where warm weather lasts year-round. In spite of those criticisms, Mannhardt and Frazer have been profoundly influential in mythological studies and on early twentieth-century poets and occultists.

VEHICLE: A means of conveyance or transport. In literature, vehicle extends to mean the method by which an author accomplishes her purpose. Thus, one might say, "Swift uses the vehicle of satire to express his ideas," or that "Darwin employs the vehicle of clear diction to best communicate a scientific theory."

VELAR: In linguistics, any velar sound involves the soft palate or velum--especially when the tongue touches against the soft palate.

VELLUM: The skin of a young calf used as a writing surface--the medieval equivalent of "paper." A technical distinction is usually made between vellum and parchment; the latter is made from goatskin or sheepskin. Uterine vellum--the skin of stillborn or very young calves, is characterized by small size and particularly fine, white appearance. As Michelle P. Brown notes in Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, the process for creating vellum or parchment is quite complicated:

To produce parchment or vellum, the animal skins were defleshed in a bath of lime, stretched on a frame, and scraped with a lunular knife while damp. they could then be treated with pumice, whitened with a substance such as chalk, and cut to size. Differences in preparation technique seem to have occasioned greater diversity in appearance than did the type of skin used. Parchment supplanted papyrus as the most popular writing support material in the fourth century, although it was known earlier. Parchment was itself largely replaced by paper in the sixteenth century (with the rise of printing) but remained in use for certain high-grade books. (95)

VENODOTIAN CODE: See Dosbarth Gwynedd.

VERB: A word that "does" the subject's action in a sentence or shows a state of being or equation. For instance, "He sang to her." The word sang is the verb. Typically verbs can appear in various tenses (like past, present, or future), in various aspects (complete or not complete), in different voices (such as active, passive, or aorist) and in different moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, jussive, conditional). Many languages use one form of a verb for singular subjects and a different form for plural subjects.

VERBAL IRONY: See discussion under irony, above.

VERBAL NOUN: A noun that comes from a verb. For instance, peregrination comes from the verb peregrinate, and the gerund running comes from the present participle of the verb run. Contrast this with the noun timber, which does not come from a verb.

VERBAL PARADOX: See paradox and oxymoron.

VERCELLI MANUSCRIPT: An important manuscript of Old English religious poems and sermons--probably written in the late tenth-century. The name comes from Vercelli monastery in northern Italy, where the lost manuscript was rediscovered. This manuscript includes one of only two copies of the poem, "The Dream of the Rood." The other surviving copy of this poem is a set of partial excerpts from the work that appears carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross near Dumfries in southern Scotland.

VERISIMILITUDE: The sense that what one reads is "real," or at least realistic and believable. For instance, the reader possesses a sense of verisimilitude when reading a story in which a character cuts his finger, and the finger bleeds. If the character's cut finger had produced sparks of fire rather than blood, the story would not possess verisimilitude. Note that even fantasy novels and science fiction stories that discuss impossible events can have verisimilitude if the reader is able to read them with suspended disbelief. Cf. Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

VERNACULAR (from Latin vernaculus "native, indigenous"): The everyday or common language of a geographic area or the native language of commoners in a country as opposed to a prestigious dead language maintained artificially in schools or in literary texts. Latin, for instance, has not been a vernacular language for about 1250 years. Sanskrit has not been a vernacular language in India for more than 2000 years. However, Latin in medieval Europe and Sanskrit in ancient India were considered much more suitable for art, scholarship, poetry, and religious texts than the common tongue of everyday people even though (or perhaps because) only a small percentage of the learned could read the older languages.

Usually, a race or culture writes in its native tongue during the early days of its civilization. For instance, the Chinese Wên Li was a vernacular language at the time of Confucius, and it would have been easily understood by most Chinese people in that dialectical area. Likewise, Saint Jerome translated the koine Greek of the New Testament into the "vulgate" or common Latin familiar to Roman citizens. As time goes by, and the early writings take on special cultural prestige, these older writings tend to be preserved and taught even after the original language changes or dies out completely. Often the classical languages are no longer understandable by common citizens--but these dead languages would still be used in the courts, in government documents, in poetry, and in scripture.

In the early medieval period, only Latin writings had much prestige. The medieval church was disturbed by attempts to translate the Bible into common languages like English, German, Italian, or French. In England, for example, Wycliffites and Lollards would be burnt at the stake for making illegal translations of the Bible into "base" languages less worthy than Saint Jerome's Latin. For this reason, little English literature survives between 1066 and 1300. The major literary works in Britain between 1066 and 1300 are primarily in Latin (and to a smaller extent, French).

Dante was one of the first major literary figures to break this stifling tradition by choosing to write his masterpiece The Divine Comedy in vernacular Italian rather than classical Latin. In England, he was followed by Geoffrey Chaucer, who chose to write The Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Creseida, The Canterbury Tales and other early works in English. This contrasts sharply with Gower, Froissart, Machaut, and other writers at the English court who wrote most of their work in Latin or French. Dante, Chaucer, and others in the fourteenth century made it acceptable to write in the vernacular tongues rather than classical languages, and readers of this webpage can thank them accordingly that they aren't reading the HTML code in Latin. Cf. Black Vernacular.

VERNER'S LAW: In linguistics, a codicil or addition to Grimm's Law that helps explain some exceptions to Grimm's Law of the First Sound Shift. The law was proposed by Karl Verner in 1875, and it states that early Germanic voiceless fricatives became voiced when (1) the Indo-European stress was not on the immediately preceding syllable, and (2) the word appears in a voiced environment (See Algeo, pages 81-82).

VERS: Not to be confused with verse, below, a vers is a song in Old Provencal almost indistinguishable from the chanson, but vers is the older term.

VERSE: There are three general meanings for verse (1) a line of metrical writing, (2) a stanza, or (3) any composition written in meter (i.e., poetry generally). Remember that rhyme is not the identifying mark of poetry, but rather meter.

VERSE PARAGRAPH: A division of poetry indicated normally by adding an extra line-space above and below the section to set it off from other parts of the poem. Unlike a stanza, in which the division of poetry corresponds to repeated elements of rhyme or other poetic structure, and in which each stanza must be identical in length and form to that of other stanzas, verse paragraphs end and begin according to divisions of sense and subject-matter. They are much like prose paragraphs in an essay, in which each paragraph deals with a single topic or idea, and a new paragraph division indicates that a new topic or idea is to be explored. Like paragraphs in a prose essay (and unlike stanzas), verse paragraphs can vary in length within an individual poetic work. Milton's Paradise Lost is an example of a poem written in verse paragraphs. Contrast with stanza.

VERSIFICATION: Literally, the making of verse, the term is often used as another name for prosody. This refers to the technical and practical aspect of making poems as opposed to purely theoretical and aesthetic poetic concerns.

VERSO: See discussion under quarto or examine this chart.

VICTORIAN PERIOD: The period of British literature in the late nineteenth century. The date of the period is often given as 1837-1901--the years Queen Victoria ruled the expanding British Empire. Alternatively, the date is given as 1832-1901, according to the passage of the first labor reform bill in the 1832 English Parliament. The Victorian Period of literature is characterized by excellent novelists, essayists, poets, and philosophers, but only a few dramatists.

The positive characteristics, attitudes, and qualities of the Victorian Period often suggest a belief in social progress, a conservative attitude about sexual mores and respectability, values of middle-class industriousness and hard work, and a strong sense of gentlemanly honor and feminine virtue. The negative characteristics of the Victorian Period include complacency, hypocrisy, smugness, and simplistic moral earnestness. When applied to literature, the word Victorian often implies humorlessness, unquestioning belief or orthodoxy and authority in matters of politics and religion, prudishness, and condemnation of those who defy social and moral convention. These dual qualities originate in Britain's self-satisfaction and economic growth during the nineteenth century. The country's increased national wealth, its scientific and industrial advances, the growing power of its navy, and its relentless expansion in overseas colonies all contributed to the period's zeitgeist. Some of the prominent British writers include Cardinal Newman, Benjamin Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Swinburne, Samuel Butler, Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, George Eliot, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Lewis Caroll, William Morris, Wilkie Collins, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Lord Acton, Samuel Butler, and Louis Stevenson. Cf. didactic literature. Click here to download a list of the major periods of literary history.

VIGNETTE (French, "little vine"): A short composition showing considerable skill, especially such a composition designed with little or no plot or larger narrative structure. Often vignettes are descriptive or evocative in their nature. An example would be the brief narratives appearing in Sandra Cisneros's short-stories. More loosely, vignettes might be descriptive passages within a larger work, such as Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens," or Faulkner's descriptions of horses and landscapes in The Hamlet. The term vignette ("little vine") originally comes from a decorative device appearing on a title page or at the beginnings and ends of chapters. Conventionally, nineteenth-century printers depicted small looping vines here loosely reminiscent of the vinework in medieval manuscripts.

VIKING (Old Norse vikingr, "pirate," perhaps related to vik, a navigable creek, bay, or inlet to the sea, or perhaps related to an Old English word wic, meaning "encampment"): Technically, in its most exclusive sense, a viking is a pirate, any individual that goes i-viking ("plundering") regardless of the buccaneer's ethnicity. Historically, Irishmen, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Bretons, and Slavs all joined in viking raids at various points, and chroniclers called them all vikings during their attacks. In its most common usage, the word viking applies to the pale-skinned North Germanic tribes between the years 550 CE and 1052 CE who inhabited modern Scandinavia (i.e., Denmark, Sweden, and Norway). These tribes eventually settled in Iceland and the Faroese islands and they conquered or raided large portions of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Normandy. The resulting ethnographic mixtures are often called Viking cultures (with a capital V- to indicate the scholar is referring to the larger race rather than pirates alone). The Old Norse and North Germanic languages that the Viking cultures spoke developed into modern Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.The first mention of these tribes is in the writings of the Gothic historian Jordanes (c. 550 CE), who records their location. From archeological evidence, we know Viking forts built at Eketorp and Ismantorp date back at least a century earlier than Jordanes' records. Contact between the rest of Europe and the Viking-held lands was sporadic for centuries, involving occasional trade, small raids, or largely failed attempts to convert the Vikings. Such examples include Willibrord's first Christian mission sent to Scandinavia, (c. 725 CE) along with Archbishop Ebo of Rheims' missionary trip to Denmark in 823 CE.

However, the Vikings ultimately did burst onto the European stage in a shocking way when bands of them attacked Portland (c. 789), and then followed up by attacking the defenseless monastery of Lindisfarne (793). The idea of armed pagans cutting down pacifist Christian monks, looting churches, destroying illuminated bibles to claim the gold decoration, and carting off engemmed reliquaries and other holy paraphernalia as loot completely horrified Christian contemporaries, who grew to fear Vikings with an almost religious dread. The Vikings, astonished at how rich the monasteries were, and how helpless the "foolish" Christian monks were, returned in ever larger bands that would sail up creeks and inlets to strike unpredictable targets far inland in Britain and Europe. After killing defenders and burning defenses, they would frequently enslave monks, children, and women to take back north with them.

A sign of European helplessness is visible in the Viking practice of winter-seotling, or establishing a base camp in invaded territory during the winter rather than sailing home to Scandinavia with the ill-garnered gains. (It's a sign of some weakness when a band of burglars can break into a victim's house and steal her belongings; it's a sign of much greater helplessness if the band of burglars repeatedly decides to set up tents in the victim's living room and to stay there rather than go to the trouble of returning home between robberies.) In 839-840, the Viking invaders winter-seotled in Ireland for the first time. In 842, they winter-seotled in Francia [France]. In 850, they began winter-seotling in England. It would be tedious to list all the major raids, but ultimately Danish Vikings invaded and settled permanently in Dublin and large parts of northern England. The regions controlled by Danish Vikings in England (including London at one point in history, but most focused around Northumberland and York) became known as the Danelaw. The Danish presence had a profound influence on English, introducing many Old Norse vocabulary words into common English use, and even more importantly, leading to a loss of grammatical inflections in Anglo-Saxon.

The Viking raids left a particularly deep imprint in medieval English literature. "The Battle of Maldon," for instance, recounts the historical last-stand of an aging Anglo-Saxon regional governor and his untrained levy of troops against a Viking incursion in 991. Archbishop Wulfstan of York eloquently captured England's despair in his "Sermon of the Wolf to the English People," written in response to Svein Forkbeard's victory over the Anglo-Saxons in 1014.

See also related terms under althing, berserker, danegeld, saga, and thing.

VILLANELLE: A genre of poetry consisting of nineteen lines--five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The form requires that whole lines be repeated in a specific order, and that only two rhyming sounds occur in the course of the poem. A number of English poets, including Oscar Wilde, W. E. Henley, and W. H. Auden have experimented with it. Here is an example of an opening stanza to one poem by W. E. Henley:

A dainty thing's the Villanelle,
Sly, musical, a jewel in rhyme.
It serves its purpose passing well.
A double-clappered silver bell,
That must be made to clink in chime,
A dainty thing's the Villanelle.
And if you wish to flute a spell,
Or ask a meeting 'neath the lime,
It serves its purpose passing well.

Probably the most famous English villanelle is Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

VINEWORK (also known as vinery): Another term for filigree work in medieval manuscripts. Scott describes this common type of decoration in the following manner: "Delicate, conventional designs, usually in gold, on a flat coloured surface, in overall patterns of curling vines, branches, and sprigs and/or leaves; used as a background to miniatures and initials and on band borders and miniature frames" (Scott 371).

VIRELAY: An old French term for a short poem consisting of (A) short lines using two rhymes and (B) two opening lines that recur intermittently. A second form of the virelay consists of stanzas made up of shorter and longer lines, the lines of each kind rhyming within one stanza and with the rhymes of the shorter lines rhyming with the longer ones of the preceding stanza. The form never became popular in English because of the difficulties with the set rhyming of English words and the potential for monotony, but Chaucer apparently wrote many virelays in his youth.

VIRGULE: (1) In poetry, a forward-slash mark ( / ) used in scansion to mark the boundaries of poetic lines (i.e. line breaks) or alternatively, they may be used to indicate the boundaries of poetic feet. See foot, meter, and scansion. (2) In linguistics, the same mark surrounds a phonetic transcription to indicate the enclosed material represents phonemes rather than graphemes.

VISIO: The Latin name for the medieval genre of the dream vision. See dream vision.

VISIONARY: Visionary writing has the qualities of prophecy--perhaps it is apocalyptic in imagery, or it may be predictive in its insights, or it may contain a core of moral truth. Many of the Romantic poets (especially Blake) have been labeled visionary. Note that in its literary sense, visionary writing need not be religious in nature, though it frequently is. Contrast with the terms mystic and dream vision.

VISUAL IMAGERY: Imagery that invokes colors, shapes, or things that can be seen. See discussion under imagery.

VISUAL POETRY: See concrete poetry.

VITA (Latin, "a life," plural and genitive form, vitae): The word vita has two common meanings in English scholarship. First, for medievalists, a vita is a medieval literary genre, one commonly called "a saint's life" or a "hagiography." The saint's life is a narrative focusing on the miraculous occurrences associated with saints (famous holy individuals especially martyrs and apostles). The genre was extraordinarily popular in past centuries. Of the surviving medieval narratives about the lives of medieval men and women, 90% are vitae. The conventions of the genre often include (1) a dramatic conversion to Christianity or to an eremitical/monastic life, (2) a sequence of miracles to confound pagans or evil authority-figures, (3) divine intervention in the plot-line, (4) the threat or actual experience of horrible mutilation, torture, or martyrdom, and (5) a continuation of miracles associated with the saint's relics after the saint's death, often accompanied by the material incorruptability of the dead body and the supernatural gustatory imagery of roses. It is interesting to note that, to my knowledge, the vita is one of the few literary genres in which a deus ex machina ending is not only expected, but actually forms a significant contribution to the common themes of the genre. See deus ex machina, genre, and relic.

In its second, more modern sense, a vita or curriculum vitae is a summary of a scholar's work, publications, teaching, and education--a sort of extended resume. In academic jargon, this sort of document is a "c.v." For an example of my own curriculum vitae, click here.

VOCABULARY: The stock of available words in (1) a given language or (2) a given speaker of that language.

VOCALIZATION: In linguistics, the change from a consonant sound to a vowel sound.

VOCATIVE: In a synthetic or declined language, a grammatical case used to invoke or call to another person.

VOGUE WORD: A word that appears in fashionable use or in pop culture. Often these vogue words and vogue expressions have a short shelf life and fall from English use within a few years' time. For example, the exclamation "snap!" as an interjection of excitement among American teenagers is probably a current vogue word, just as the phrase "big mook" was a vogue word from the late 1920s and early 1930s.

VOICE: See speaker, poetic.

VO LANGUAGE (pronounced "Vee-Oh"): A language that tends to place the verb before the grammatical object in a sentence. Modern English is a VO language. Contrast with an OV language.

VOLITIVE: A verb form that expresses a wish, command, or the speaker's will. In many languages, an identical verb form is used for both the intentive (which expresses intention) and the volitive.In English verbs, the future tense is often used as a volitive future. For example, English uses the same verb form (will) to express both the future tense ("It will rain tomorrow") and a future volitive or intentive ("By heaven, I will finish the assignment tomorrow"). In the first example, the rain itself has no volition, so the sentence merely expresses a future event. In the second example, the speaker is actually expressing his desired course of action, not necessarily making a prediction. This ambiguity can lead to translation problems when English speakers look at writings in other languages. For instance, David P. Smith notes in 1 Corinthians 14:15, the Greek translation is "I will pray" and "I will sing." In Greek, the verbs express or emphasize a desire to do these activities in the future as opposed to an indication of future reality. In English, the distinction is not necessarily clear.

VOLKERWANDERUNG (German: "folk-wandering"): Also called the Germanic migrations, this term refers to the mass migration of Germanic tribes westward across Europe between 375 CE and 750 CE. This demographic movement pushed the Vandals, Ostrogoths, and Goths into the boundaries of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, speeding its dissolution. The same movement also pushed the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes across the channel into Celtic Britain, where they in turn dislocated the native Celtic population by driving them into Cornwall, Wales and Scotland in the western and northern parts of Britain and even into Brittany in northeastern France. These Anglo-Saxon tribes formed the basis of the English people and their tongue became known as Old English. The late stages of the Volkerwanderung involved northern Germanic Viking tribes from Norway, Scandinavia, and Denmark pillaging the British isles and much of Britain.

VOLTA: Also called a turn, a volta is a sudden change in thought, direction, or emotion near the conclusion of a sonnet. This invisible volta is then followed by a couplet or gemel (in English sonnets) or a sestet (in Italian sonnets). Typically, the first section of the sonnet states a premise, asks a question, or suggests a theme. The concluding lines after the volta resolve the problem by suggesting an answer, offering a conclusion, or shifting the thematic concerns in a new direction.

VULGAR LATIN: The uneducated Latin used in everyday speech in the Roman Empire, as opposed to the more refined Classical Latin used in literature and governmental address.

VULGATE, THE: Saint Jerome's Latin anthologized compilation and translation of the Bible, prepared in the fourth century CE and used as the authorized version in Roman Catholic liturgical services up until Vatican II. The term vulgate as an adjective also refers loosely to any commonly recognized or accepted version of a work, so we might half-jokingly call The Riverside Chaucer "the vulgate Chaucer," or whatnot.

WAKA: A Japanese genre of poetry closely related to the tanka, consisting of alternate five- and seven-syllable lines. The primary difference seems to be that the word waka dates back to the sixth century BCE, while the more familiar terms tanka and uta date back to an eighth-century CE poetry anthology, the Manyoshu. See tanka.

WANDERJAHR (German, "Wander-Year"): A period in a character's life during which she is absent from her normal routine, engaged in thought, travel, and a quest for novel experiences or insight.

WAR OF THE ROSES: A civil war in England that lasted from 1455-1487 between the families descended from Edward III and the families descended from Henry IV. The event forms the background of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays and strongly influenced Sir Thomas Malory's depiction of King Arthur in Le Morte Darthur as he wrote in 1469-1470. Click here for more discussion.

WEAK DECLENSION: In linguistics, a Germanic/Teutonic noun or adjective that changes little from one declension to another. The consonant [n] is prominent in this declension.

WEAK ENDING: In poetry, another term for a feminine ending, in which the last syllable of a metrical line is unstressed. See discussion under meter.

WEAK VERB: In linguistics, a Germanic verb whose principle parts require the addition of a dental suffix--i.e., typically a /d/ or a /t/. Contrast with a strong verb, one whose linguistic principal parts were formed by ablaut of the stem vowel, Examples of a strong verb surviving in modern English would be the verb swim, with forms like swim, swam, swum, as opposed to a weak verb like indicate, indicated, or have indicated.

WEDGE: A diacritical mark used in some Eastern European countries. It indicates a sound like the digraph in checkers.

WEIGHT: The quality created in a syllable of verse in which that syllable both (a) has heavy stress and (b) has a long vowel that stretches out the duration of time necessary to pronounce that syllable. For instance, consider this line by Tennyson:

God-gifted organ voice of England.

As Babette Deutsch points out, in this line of nine syllables, we have five syllables with heavy stress, and in each case, the vowel is a "long" vowel (193). See quantitative and qualitative meter.

WELL-MADE PLAY (French, "la piece bien faite"): A form of French theater developed in the 1800s. Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou popularized it. The well-made play involves secrets and timely arrivals of surprise characters and sudden twists in plot introduced by external threats. In modern critical parlance, the term is considered pejorative and it refers to any overly neat and precisely constructed play, especially one that uses artificial authorial interventions to cause problems for the characters. Well-made plays continued to be popular through the 1950s. A recent example is Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap from 1952. Ibsen's A Doll's House also exhibits traits of the well-made play.

WELTANSCHAUUNG (German, "manner of looking at the world"): The philosophy of an individual, an artist, or a group of like-minded individuals, especially the philosophy concerning one's relationship to civilization. Cf. Weltansicht, below.

WELTANSICHT (German, "world-sight"):The general attitude toward life and reality an individual or character demonstrates. Cf. Weltanschauung, above.

WELTSCHMERZ (German "world-woe"): According to Shipley's Dictionary of World Literature (623), Jean Paul (1763-1825) coined this German phrase to refer to the sentimental pessimism one feels--the sorrow, disillusionment, and discontent one accepts as a part of existence--especially when comingled with egotism, arrogant pride, and cynicism. This attitude is especially prevalent in certain post-Napoleonic German and Italian existential writers including Musset, Leopardi, Platen, and Heine--but it also typifies some English poets/poems such as the poetic speaker in Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Shipley 632).

WÊN and WU: The two main classes of traditional Chinese drama: civil (wên) and martial (wu). The "script" of these plays is more like a roughly outlined scenario than an actual dramatic text as westerners understand drama. The plays include dialogue in prose and verse, dancing, mime, operatic singing, and acrobatics. Conventionally, the action takes place on a square stage. The subject-matter deals with traditional legends and historical events. The narrative points to a moral, and their setting seems to be a timeless amalgamation of various Chinese periods blended together.

Various props are conventionally simple and may represent various other objects. For instance, a table may represent a wall, an altar, a hill, a judicial bench, or a bridge. To represent wind, characters on the edge of the stage will flap four black flags vigorously. A cap marked with red cloth represents a decapitated head, and so on. Likewise, there are symbol gestures for actors. For example, holding a sleeve up near one's eyes denotes weeping.

Musical accompaniment is done with instruments similar to a Western fiddle, but the orchestra (which also stands on the stage) uses brass percussion instruments. Both actors and singers use falsetto voices, though comedic actors render their lines in basso tones.

There are four types of character in Chinese drama: shêng (general male characters), tan (general female characters), hua-lien (strong vigorous male characters with faces painted like masks), and ch'ou (comedians). Costumes for each role are lavish, adapted from the styles of T'ang, Sung, Yüan, and Ming dynasties. Conventionally, emperors wear red on stage, government officials wear yellow, and so on. The make-up for various characters denotes their personality: yellow face-paint indicates guile; black indicates integrity and honesty; white indicates treachery and deceit; red shows loyalty and courage, and green indicates a character is a demon, brigand, or outlaw. Blue or red beards indicate a creature is a supernatural being, and the length of a character's beard indicates the character's relative status and prestige.

Wên and Wu conventions have had a powerful influence on later forms of Chinese drama. Contrast with No plays and karagöz puppet-theater.

WERGELD: An alternative spelling for wergild. See wergild, below.

WERGILD (Anglo-Saxon, lit. "man-gold," also spelled wergeld): The legal system of many Germanic tribes, including the Anglo-Saxons. This tradition allowed an individual and his family to make amends for a crime by paying a fine known as wergild to the family of another man whom he had injured or killed. The price varied depending upon the nature of the injury and the status of the injured man. Surviving laws of Wihtfrid (8th century CE) show how elaborate the wergild system had become by the ninth century. Wihtfrid included a varying price in silver for each tooth knocked out during a fight. If an individual could not or would not pay the wergild, the injured family was considered within its traditional rights to kill a member of the culprit's family of similar rank and status. This process often led to extended blood-feuds lasting several generations. The concerns of wergild appear prominently in Anglo-Saxon poems such as Beowulf, in which the supernatural predations of the monsters are figured in the legalistic language associated with this practice. See also peace-weaver. NB: Wergild should not be confused with Danegeld, the practice of paying extortive Vikings to go away without attacking.

WEST GERMANIC: A sub-branch of the Germanic family of languages including Dutch, English, and German, in contrast with the North Germanic sub-branch (including Old Norse, Norwegian, and Icelandic) and the East Germanic sub-branch (which included the now extinct language of Gothic).

WEST SAXON: The Old English dialect spoken in Wessex.

WESTERN: A literary and cinematic genre marked by numerous conventions. The usual setting is a short main street in a dust-blown frontier village of the American west during the 1800s. Traditionally, the protagonists wear white hats and the antagonists wear black hats. Conventional characters include Mexican bandits, stereotypical Plains Indians bedecked in feathered headresses, a town drunkard, a local madame who assists the protagonist, and so on. Often, the thematic concern is a struggle between law and lawlessness, between communal health and chaotic individualism. Historical accuracy usually comes second place to action, and the dramatic climax often takes the form of a dual or gunfight at high noon. "Spaghetti westerns" are a cinematic subgenre of the western film consisting of those films overseen by Italian directors and filmed completely or partly in Italy--including a large number of Clint Eastwood westerns from the 1960s and 1970s. Recent writers of westerns include Louis Lamour, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, A. B. Guthrie, Conrad Richter, and H. L. Davis.

WHIG: In Questions of English, Marshall notes the term Whig originally was an insulting nickname for Scottish Presbyterian rebels, but after 1680 it became a label for the political faction in England that opposed James, Duke of York (James II) as an heir to the throne because of his Roman Catholicism. Eventually, during the time of Swift, Addison, Steele, and Johnson in the 1700s, the terms Tory and Whig became the names of the two major political factions in England. Tories were associated with the Established Chuch of England (the Anglican Church) and conservative country gentry, but the Whigs were associated with religious dissenters (Quakers, anabaptists, Puritans, etc.) and the rising bourgeois class of industrialists wanting political change. In modern British politics, the term Tory today remains informally attached to the Conservative party, but the word Whig has fallen out of political use for the Liberal Party (Marshall 11-12). See also Tory

WHORF'S HYPOTHESIS: A proposal that language affects how its speakers perceive and react to the world--and that the limitations of language thus become the limitations of human thought. Although first set forward by amateur linguist Benjamin Whorf (i.e., a fire engineer writing in an M.I.T. alumni magazine) and inspired by a false understanding of Inuit (Eskimo) language, this hypothesis has been remarkably influential in cognitive psychology and linguistics. In fiction like George Orwell's 1984, government control of language allows the party to expunge thoughtcrime (illegal ideas) in its dystopian monopoly of intellect. This idea is based largely on Whorf's Hypothesis.

WIDOW: In printing, a widow is a single short line ending a paragraph but separated from the earlier lines in that paragraph by a page break, thus appearing by itself at the top of the next page or column. Widows traditionally should be avoided in printing and in college essays. Luckily for students, writers can avoid such a faux pas by turning on "widow/orphan control" on their word processors. The trick in Microsoft Word is to click on the "format" option and then select "paragraph." Then select "line and page breaks" to find the appropriate option. Contrast with orphan.

WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: Temporarily and willingly setting aside our beliefs about reality in order to enjoy the make-believe of a play, a poem, film, or a story. Perfectly intelligent readers can enjoy tall-tales about Pecos Bill roping a whirlwind, or vampires invading a small town in Maine, or frightening alternative histories in which Hitler wins World War II, without being "gullible" or "childish." To do so, however, the audience members must set aside their sense of "what's real" for the duration of the play, or the movie, or the book.

Samuel Coleridge coined the English phrase in Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria to describe the way a reader is implicitly "asked" to set aside his notions of reality and accept the dramatic conventions of the theater and stage or other fictional work. Coleridge writes:

. . . My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith (quoted in Cuddon, page 1044).

Coleridge may have been inspired by the French phrase, "cette belle suspension d'esprit de law sceptique" from François de La Mothe le Vayer, or by Ben Jonson's writing where Jonson notes, "To many things a man should owe but a temporary belief, and suspension of his own judgment." Cf. verisimilitude.

WINCHESTER MANUSCRIPT: A handwritten book or manuscript by two scribes containing the text of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Librarian Walter Oakeshott discovered the text in 1934. It had been locked in a safe in the Warden's lodgings of Winchester College. The scholar Lotte Hellinga later demonstrated that the manuscript had been kept in William Caxton's print-shop at the same time that he was working on his 1485 printed edition of Le Morte D'Arthur. The Winchester MS provides additional autobiographical information about Malory. It has different divisions and decorations than the Caxton print, and literally thousands of variant readings. The best facsimile is N. R. Ker's The Winchester Malory: A Facsimile, as published by Oxford University Press in conjunction with the Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1976).

WISH FULFILLMENT: In psychoanalytic criticism, wish fulfillment refers to something in literature that satisfies the conscious or subconscious desires of either the creator or the reader of a work. A writer of action adventure stories, for instance, might imagine a male protagonist who is stronger, tougher, younger, and smarter than himself. This protagonist lives a sophisticated life of international intrigue; he woos exotic women and foils evil plots, doing all the things the writer himself cannot do. Readers sharing similar conscious or unconscious fantasies may be attracted to such stories to fulfill their own desires vicariously. Nearly all popular literature has some element of wish fulfillment in it. This phenomenon usually begins with children's literature and fairy tales ("and they lived happily ever after"). Some juvenile fantasy novels offer beautiful and exotic landscapes where the lines between good and evil are always clear and distinct, and where magic allows the characters to participate in or control awesome events. Crime novels may present readers with characters who live outside the constrictions of law and morality in a way the reader cannot. Harlequin romance novels or similar bodice-rippers promise whirlwind romance and steamy sex without unpleasant physical consequences or imperfect enjoyment. Western novels offer unspoiled naturalistic landscapes and lawless terrain far away from the pollution, litter, and legislative restrictions of the modern world.

Aside from popular entertainment, the same element of wish fulfillment can appear in more serious literary works as well. Utopian literature fulfills our desires for a perfect society, even as it critiques the failures of real government. An atheistic critic might argue that religious narratives are another example of wish fulfillment, pointing out that stories of eternal life in paradise for the good fulfills humanity's desire to avoid death, that tales of angels or benevolent spirits fulfill our desires to be loved, protected, and watched over, that descriptions of hell or apocalypse fulfill our desires for all criminals and wrong-doers to be punished and the imperfections of the world wiped away.

Wish fulfillment is not limited to positive desires. Freud speaks of thanatos (the death wish), a subconscious desire to reject life and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The Oedipal complex is a subconscious desire to murder or destroy a father-figure and incestuously take his sexual role with the mother. Through psychological projection, viewers may sublimate destructive desires by placing it on the characters in a tragedy, "enjoying" a healthy orgy of grief and catharsis. Readers may also project their own subconscious impulses toward hateful or forbidden behavior onto the villain, marveling at the antagonist's imaginary crimes and paradoxically reveling in the bad guy's eventual punishment at a safe distance.

Note that clever writers might create characters and imagine these characters with sufficient psychological detail to suggest elements of fictional wish fulfillment in them, as if an imaginary person had psychological depth of her own. For instance, Chaucer creates the fictional Wife of Bath, an aging pilgrim seeking her sixth husband while on pilgrimage. The Wife tells a tale to the other pilgrims. Her narrative includes a fairy tale hag who embodies the desires of the Wife herself. This hag wins the love of a handsome young knight, gains dominance over him in the marriage, and through his love and submission, magically transforms herself into a young woman again. These desires might correspond to the fantasies of the Wife of Bath herself as a fictional storyteller. See also escapist literature.

WIT: In modern vernacular, the word wit refers to elements in a literary work designed to make the audience laugh or feel amused, i.e., the term is used synonymously with humor. In seventeenth-century usage, the term wit much more broadly denotes originality, ingenuity, and mental acuity--especially in the sense of using paradoxes, making clever verbal expressions, and coining concise or deft phrases. As Alexander Pope put it, "True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."

"WITHIN": In the stage directions for Shakespeare's plays, a "noise within" indicates offstage sound effects such as shouts, drums, and trumpets. These noises were produced typically in the tiring-house.

WORLD ENGLISH: English as used worldwide or internationally and the common features of this international English.

WOUND-RAIN: Also called blood-rain, this is a supernatural motif common in Old Norse sagas in which a rain of blood--sometimes boiling--falls on a ship or field, or, alternatively, an unattended and clean weapon spontaneously begins to drip blood. This motif serves as foreshadowing of coming violence. Old Icelandic literature probably borrowed the motif from Irish sources (see Robert Cook's notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Njal's Saga, page 321).

WRENCHED ACCENT: As Babette Deutsch phrases it, wrenched accent is "The triumph of metrical stress over word accent when the two conflict" (195). Normally, a word like body typically has a strong stress on the first syllable and a weaker stress on the second syllable. However, the overwhelming pattern of surrounding meter can come into conflict with this natural stress pattern and even overwhelm it, as is the case in the last line of this stanza by Rossetti:

"And many's the good gift, Lord Sands,
You've promised oft to me;
But the gift of yours I keep today,
Is the babe in my body." (qtd. in Deutsch 195)

WYNN (or wyn): A letter shape used in writing Middle English. Click here to see an example.

WYRD: Often translated as "fate," wyrd is an Anglo-Saxon term that embodies the concept of inevitability in Old English poetry. Unlike destiny, in which one imagines looking forward into the future to see the outcome of one's life, wyrd appears to be linked to the past. As an example illustrating this difference, a male speaker might claim, "It is my destiny to eat too many hamburgers, develop high cholesterol, and die of a heart attack in Pittsburgh at age fifty-three." The speaker is predicting what will inevitably happen to him, what is fated to occur sometime in the future. On the other hand, one might claim, "It is my wyrd to be born as a Caucasian child to impoverished parents who neglected to feed me properly, so that my health is always bad." In the first case, the speaker describing destiny implies that the future is set, and therefore the outcome of his life is beyond his control. In the second case, the speaker describing wyrd implies that the past is unchangeable, and therefore the current circumstances in which he finds himself are beyond his alteration. In Anglo-Saxon narratives, heroic speakers like Beowulf describe themselves as being "fated" (i.e., having a wyrd) that requires them to act in a certain way. It is Beowulf's wyrd to help King Hrothgar, not because some abstract destiny wills it so, but because in the past, Hrothgar helped Beowulf's father, and it is Beowulf's duty to return that favor. The exact circumstances are beyond Beowulf's control, but Beowulf can choose how he reacts to that "fate." This idea contrasts with the Greek idea of moira.

Although wyrd dies out in Middle English and Early Modern usage, some scholarly speculation has posited that the three "weird" sisters in Macbeth may actually be the three "wyrd" sisters, thus the three fates in an archetypal form.

XANADUISM: Academic research that focuses on the sources behind imaginative works of literature and fantasy. John Livingstone Lowes, in his publication The Road to Xanadu (1927), inspired the name, which in turn goes back to Coleridge's visionary poem "Kubla Khan" (i.e., "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree . . ."). More recently, the term has been used in a pejorative sense to describe scholarship involving dubious scrutiny of amorphous, difficult-to-prove sources, especially simplistic studies lacking any redeeming theoretical perspectives.

XENIA: The Greek term for the Laws of Hospitality. The custom in classical Greece and other ancient cultures that, if a traveler comes to a strange town, he can ask for food, shelter, and gifts to help him on his journey. In Greek tradition, the host was considered responsible for his guest's comfort and safety, and a breach of those laws of hospitality was thought to anger Zeus (Roman Jupiter), the king of the gods.

XENOPHANIC: This adjective refers to itinerant poets who make use of satire and witticism. The term comes from the Greek name Xenophanes, the wandering Ionian poet of classical Greece circa 550 BCE.

YAHOO: A coarse, filthy, smelly, bestial, barbaric, bipedal creature only vaguely resembling a human. Jonathan Swift coined the term in Gulliver's Travels, applying it to a race of humanoid brutes in contrast with the civilized race of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms. The term has since become a popular allusion. Mark Twain and other writers use it to refer to bumpkins, louts, or yokels. One wonders what the internet search engine Yahoo thus implies about its users. The term yahoo has also become a popular outcry or exclamation when a speaker is engaged in something boisterous.

YALE SCHOOL: A group of critics at Yale University who are known primarily for deconstructionist interpretations--the group includes Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom.

YARD (Old English geard, closely related to OE eard, "earth"): In theater architecture during the Renaissance, the yard is the central area open to the area in theaters such as the Globe. Groundlings typically stood in this spot, unlike the more prodigal audience members who paid extra for a seat in the balconies. Admission in the yard in public theaters cost a penny in Shakespeare's day.

YARN (Old English gearn): An informal name for a long, rambling story--especially one dealing with adventure or tall-tales. The genre typically involves a strong narrative presence and colloquial or idiomatic English. The tone is realistic, but the content is typically fantastic or hyperbolic.Cf. the Chinese p'ing hua and the Russian skaz.

YAHWIST TEXT (aka J Text): In biblical studies, this textual tradition contrasts with the E Text and the P Text appearing in Genesis and other parts of the Torah. As for the abbreviation "J," in German transliteration of Hebrew, the letter "J" is used for "Y." Thus, scholars today refer to the "J Text" or the Yahwist Text when they discuss a textual tradition referring to God as Yahweh or Yahweh Elohim but which never refers to God as Elohim alone.

The J Text was once thought to have been written about 999-800 BCE, but more recent scholarship suggests it should be dated after the period of exile (597, 587/586 BCE). It is written in a dialect we associated with the city of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah, the more southerly of the tribal nations. This contrasts with the E Text, in which the material is associated linguistically with the region of Ephraim and which probably dates between 799-700 BCE. These two textual traditions of the E Text and the J text probably existed independently of each other for some time, but the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed toward the end of the eighth century. The priests of Judah seem to have incorporated the E Text into their J Text tradition after that. This resulted in occasional duplications and repetition of detail in the Pentateuch; often the same tale would be told twice, once with a northern orientation and once with a southern perspective. We can see the same phenomenon in the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles. The resulting blend, complete with more recent additions such as late foreign loanwords, late religious rituals like the Sabbath, and imagery borrowed from Mesopotamian poetry and religions, is called the "P Text" or the Priestly Document. If students are reading a study Bible like the Anchor Bible series, the editors helpfully mark which sections come from the E Text, the J Text, and the P Text. A sample of material that comes from the J Text includes the material in Genesis 1:1-2:3, which probably was actually written much later than the subsequent material in Genesis 2:4 and afterward. Click here for a more detailed discussion.

YEARBOOK: An annually published book or journal, especially one containing information or statistics about that year in particular. Examples include college yearbooks and encyclopedia yearbooks. Some scholarly journals produce separately issued yearbooks with annotated bibliographies or summaries of scholarly publications for the past year within a specific field, such as The Year's Work in Anglo-Saxon Studies.

YEOMAN (Middle English yeman, probably a contraction of "young man"): In early Middle English, the term referred to freemen or freeholders, lower-class peasants who had obtained their freedom from serfdom, and as members of the new bourgeoisie were thus free to join guilds, purchase lands, or work as day laborers for hire. The term later came to mean in particular an attendant servant or lesser official who serves in a royal or noble household for paid wages rather than feudal obligations. The yeoman in the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales appears to be such a servant hired to aid the Knight.

YOGH: A letter shape used in writing Middle English and some Anglo-Saxon texts. It resembled a letter "three" often partially set below the line. In some handwriting, the screen would flatten the top of the letter into a horizontal line. Here is an example of an uppercase and lowercase yogh with the more common curved top:

YO-HE-HO THEORY: In linguistics, the idea that language first began as a way to facilitate cooperative labor. Contrast with the bow-wow theory and the ding-dong theory.

YONIC (from Sanskrit yoni, "vagina"): A yonic symbol is a sexualized representation of femininity and reproductive power--particularly through some object vaguely reminiscent of the vagina. Common yonic symbols include cups, cauldrons, chalices, goblets, wells, caves, tunnels, circles, hoops, pots, and other containers. An example would be found in Shakespeare's sonnet 154, where we read of how a virgin takes the torch of love and stops the flame of "hot desire" when "This brand, she quenched in a cool well by, / which from Love's fire took heat perpetual." Contrast with a phallic symbol.

YOUNG MAN SONNETS: The first seventeen sonnets in the Shakespearean collection published in 1609. These sonnets break the normal sonnet conventions in that the implied situation is not a poetic speaker wooing a cold and distant female as the implied audience. Instead, the speaker is addressing a handsome young man and trying to convince him he should settle down and have children. Sonnets 18-26 may also be considered a part of this series, though these poems focus much more on the destructive aspects of time. Contrast with the "dark lady sonnets."

YUËH-FU (Chinese "music bureau"): A form of Chinese poetry in mixed meter and short lines, with a five-word line being most common. The number of stanzas was likewise variable. The conventions of the genre include a monologue or dialogue presented in dramatic form revolving around some misfortune. The name comes from the music bureaus that were a fixture of Chinese decoration. These bureaus contained sheets of popular songs and ballad-type lyrics. Cf. ballad.

ZANI (Italian, "clown"): A stock character in the commedia dell'arte, the zani was a buffoonish servant, a jester, a butt of jokes, i.e., what twentieth-century entertainment would call a "stooge." The modern English word zany comes from this Italian term.

ZEITGEIST (German "Time-ghost" or "Spirit of the Age"): The preferences, fashions, and trends that characterize the intangible essence of a specific historical period.

ZENO'S PARADOX: The name comes from Zeno of Elea (born c. 495-480 BCE). Zeno proposed four paradoxes in order to challenge accepted notions of space and time as defined in various philosophical circles. The term "Zeno's Paradox" is usually applied to the paradox of the arrow or the paradox of Hercules and the tortoise, but the other two paradoxes are often lumped under the same designation. To illustrate a sample paradox, Zeno asks the audience to imagine the great athlete Achilles engaged in a race with a tortoise. The tortoise is given a head start of twelve feet or so in front of Achilles, and the race-track is a hundred yards long. When the race begins, Achilles begins charging ahead with a speed much faster than the tortoise's crawl. However, to reach the half-way point between his starting position and the tortoise's position, Achilles must spend half of his time reaching the midway point before he has covered half the distance. Then again, before Achilles can ever travel a quarter of the distance to the tortoise (the half-way point to the half-way point), he must spend half of his time covering that distance. Then again, according to traditional definitions of space and time, he must spend half his time traveling to reach the half-way point to that half-way distance, and so on, ad infinitum. No matter how fast Achilles runs, by the normal definitions of spatial and temporal distance, Achilles will never be able to catch up with the turtle because an endless series of "half-way" points must be crossed first. In fact, any movement at all should be impossible because Achilles must cross an endless number of "halfway" points before any motion can take place at all, each movement taking an infinitely smaller slice of time to do. Zeno's paradoxes perplexed mathematicians and logicians for millennia. It wasn't until Cantor developed the theory of infinite sets that the paradoxes could be fully resolved--but that idea only came about in the 1860s and 1870s. In literature, postmodern writers such as Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and postmodern films like Run Lola Run all use allusions to Zeno's Paradox to convey ideas about the absurdity of time and distance.

ZEUGMA (Greek "yoking" or "bonding"): Artfully using a single verb to refer to two different objects grammatically, or artfully using an adjective to refer to two separate nouns, even though the adjective would logically only be appropriate for one of the two. For instance, in Shakespeare's Henry V, Fluellen cries, "Kill the boys and the luggage." (The verb kill normally wouldn't be applied to luggage.) If the resulting grammatical construction changes the verb's initial meaning, the zeugma is sometimes called syllepsis. Examples of these syllepses abound--particulary in seventeenth-century literature:

"If we don't hang together, we shall hang separately!" (Ben Franklin).

Zeugma is also known as synezeugmenon. Some rhetoricians subdivide zeugma according to the location of the verb that functions as the shared connector, referring to a zeugma as a prozeugma or protozeugma if the connector comes before the various subsequent components (as illustrated in the last example listed above). They refer to the figure as a mesozeugma if the connector appears in the middle of a phrase. For example, "And now a bubble burst, and now a world" (Lanham 99). Rhetoricians refer to the figure as a hypozeugma if the connector appears at the end. An example of a hypozeugma would be "Hours, days, weeks, months, and years do pass away" (Sherry, quoted in Lanham 88).

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