A posteriori

INVECTIVE: Speech or writing that attacks, insults, or denounces a person, topic, or institution, usually involving negative emotional language.

INVENTIO (plural, inventiones from Latin invenire, "to come upon, to discover", cf. Modern English "invention"): in classical rhetoric, inventiones were techniques for brainstorming, for "finding" material to talk about in a speech or to write about in a composition. Click here for more information.

INVERSION: Another term for anastrophe.

INVOCATION OF THE MUSE: A prayer or address made to the one of the nine muses of Greco-Roman mythology, in which the poet asks for the inspiration, skill, knowledge, or appropriate mood to create a poem worthy of his subject-matter. The invocation of the muse traditionally begins Greco-Roman epics and elegies. See also muses.

IRISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE: See discussion under Celtic Revival.

IRONY: Cicero referred to irony as "saying one thing and meaning another." Irony comes in many forms. Verbal irony (also called sarcasm) is a trope in which a speaker makes a statement in which its actual meaning differs sharply from the meaning that the words ostensibly express. Often this sort of irony is plainly sarcastic in the eyes of the reader, but the characters listening in the story may not realize the speaker's sarcasm as quickly as the readers do. Dramatic irony (the most important type for literature) involves a situation in a narrative in which the reader knows something about present or future circumstances that the character does not know. In that situation, the character acts in a way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate to the actual circumstances, or the character expects the opposite of what the reader knows that fate holds in store, or the character anticipates a particular outcome that unfolds itself in an unintentional way. Probably the most famous example of dramatic irony is the situation facing Oedipus in the play Oedipus Rex. Situational irony (also called cosmic irony) is a trope in which accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked. However, both the victim and the audience are simultaneously aware of the situation in situational irony. Probably the most famous example of situational irony is Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, in which Swift "recommends" that English landlords take up the habit of eating Irish babies as a food staple. See also Socratic irony.

IRREGULAR VERB: A verb that doesn't follow common verb patterns. For instance, think/thought and be/am/was. Most irregular English verbs today are the remains of the old Anglo-Saxon strong verbs.

ISOCOLON: See discussion under parallelism.

ISOGLOSS: When linguists create maps showing where dialects are spoken, the isoglosses would be the boundary lines they draw. These isoglosses chart where a particular linguistic feature appears or does not appear. For instance, the use of the second person plural "y'all" might be mapped in the American south, and the second person plural "youse" might be mapped around the Bronx and New Jersey. These dialect boundaries would be different isoglosses on the map.

ISOLATING LANGUAGE: In now obsolete language studies, linguists used the label "isolating" to refer to a language with words that tend not to vary--i.e., one in which each idea tends to be expressed by a single monosyllabic word and compounding is rare or nonexistent. European scholars in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century often held up Chinese as a sample isolating language and classified it as a "primitive" or "undeveloped language," but further study indicated that Mandarin Chinese was actually quite ancient, and in fact, originally had been much more polysyllabic. This discovery demolished the simplistic model of agglutinative linguistic development current in older centuries.

ITALIAN SONNET: Another term for a Petrarchan sonnet. See discussion under sonnet.

ITALIC: The branch of Indo-European languages giving rise to Latin and Romance languages like Spanish, French, and Italian. Italic is not to be confused with italic font or italics. (See immediately below.)

ITALICS: A style of printing in which the tops of letters and punctuation marks gently slope to the right. Italics are often used by typesetters to indicate greater emphasis for a word or phrase. Other typesetters use italics to differentiate between various types of material. Foreign phrases such as Latin, French, and Spanish expressions are often placed in italic fonts to differentiate them from the rest of the sentence in English. Linguists and grammarians also use italics to indicate that a word or term is being discussed as a word per se. Finally, it is conventional to italicize or underline the titles of various long literary and major artistic works. You can click here for extended discussion of these conventions. Note that in handwritten documents in which italics are not clearly visible, it is preferable to indicate the italics by underlining the word. Many editors and publishers also call for underlining in any document presented for publication, and the typesetters ultimately will convert the underlined words to italics in the final published version. This policy does lead to complications with HTML text, in which an underlined word or phrase normally indicates a hyperlink rather than a title. Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515 CE) invented the italic typeface.

ITALO-CELTIC: Together, the Italic and Celtic branches of Indo-European are called Italo-Celtic; the two groups share many general linguistic traits but are still too different to be considered a single branch.

IVORY TOWER: A derogatory term for a place, situation, or philosophical outlook that ignores or overlooks practical, worldly affairs. A French literary critic named Sainte-Beuve coined the phrase, and the term has become popular in American vernacular as well. Poets, artists, scholars, teachers, and other intellectuals are often accused of "living in an ivory tower"--i.e., hiding from the real world or putting all their effort into impractical ideals. The term presupposes that art and thinking are irrelevant in the real world and that such foci are unhelpful in achieving real happiness, understanding, or social change.

J TEXT, THE (Also called the J Document or the Yahwist Text): In biblical studies, this abbreviation refers to the Yahwist Text in the Hebrew Bible. Click here for more detailed discussion.

JACOBEAN: During the reign of King James I, i.e., between the years 1603-1625. (Jacobus is the Latin form of James, hence Jacobean). Shakespeare wrote his later works in the Jacobean period. This period is often contrasted with the Elizabethan period.

JARGON: Potentially confusing words and phrases used in an occupation, trade, or field of study. We might speak of medical jargon, sports jargon, pedagogic jargon, police jargon, or military jargon, for instance.

JEST-BOOK: Any collection of jokes or satirical anecdotes, but especially those jokebooks produced in England, Germany, and elsewhere in the 1500s and 1600s. The earliest English example is A Hundred Merry Tales (c. 1526), but The Gests of Skoggan (ca. 1565) is more famous. The contents are typically ribald and involve stereotypical depictions of various races and occupations who are the victims of practical jokes. Compare with facetiae and fabliau.

JIG (possibly from Old French giguer, "to dance, to kick, to gambol"): In Renaissance drama, a jig was a song-and-dance performance by a clown and/or other actors at the conclusion of a play. The dances were often extremely bawdy, which lead to the 1612 English banning of "public jigs" under Puritan influences.

JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY: The term refers to the theories of the Swiss psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Jung was a student of Freud, but he rejected Freud's ideas of infantile sexuality (i.e., the Oedipal Complex, wish fulfillment, thanatos, etc.) and he held that Freud's psychoanalytic process was too simple, too concrete, and too focused on the individual child's development rather than the collective development of cultures as a whole. Working with the insights from anthropological studies like J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890-1915), Jung developed an alternative concept called the collective unconscious, a shared collection of transcultural images and symbols known as archetypes that would resonate powerfully within the human psyche. The study of how Jungian psychology relates to literature is called archetypal criticism. Note that the is pronounced like a /y/ in Jung's name. For more information, see archetype.

JUSTIFICATION, THEOLOGICAL: TBA

JUSTIFICATION, TYPOGRAPHIC: In printing and typing, the placement of letters and spacing so that the end or beginning of each line is perfectly aligned with one or more margins on that page. A "left-justified margin" (like on this webpage) has the text on the left-hand side aligned perfectly with the left margin and a "ragged right" on the right-hand margin, where a varying amount of blank space finishes each line. A "right-justified margin" is the opposite. It has the text on the right-hand-side aligned perfectly with the right margin and a "ragged left" on the left-hand-side where a varying amount of blank space appears before each line. A "perfectly or fully justified text" has both the left- and right- hand edges of the text perfectly aligned with the margins. This arrangement becomes possible only by slightly altering the spacing betwen every word and every letter in the line or by making minute adjustments in the font size from line to line.

A. C. Baugh suggests that one factor (among many) leading to so much variety in Renaissance spelling was the nature of the printing press. Because early printers liked to perfectly align their pages, they would take advantage of various spellings, double-letters, and optional letters to adjust each line's length.

NB: Students using MLA format should remember that MLA format requires your papers to be written with a left-justified margin--not a fully justified margin on both sides. You can adjust this in Microsoft Word's settings. Your teacher will be annoyed if you use fully justified text, because this will alter the spacing between words in every single line and this makes it much harder to determine correct spacing in your typography.

JUVENALIAN SATIRE: See discussion under satire.

JUVENILE: Publishers use the term juvenile or children's literature to designate books suitable for children, though Joseph Shipley reminds us these are "not necessarily childish books" (345). Typically the main character is either a child or a character with which a child can identify, the themes are aimed at children (and often didactic in nature), and the vocabulary or sentence structure is simple enough for young readers to grasp readily. Samples include Rudyard Kipling's Kim, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, and R. L. Stevenson's Robinson Crusoe.

JUVENILIA (Latin: "things from youth"): Not to be confused with Juvenalian satire or juvenile literature, above, juvenilia refers to works a famous author or poet wrote while still a child or teenager. These works are typically marked by immaturity in thought and subject-matter as well as a lack of fully developed style, but they serve as interesting contrasts with the adult writings of that creator or illustrations of the writer's development. Examples include Lord Byron's Hours of Idleness (written at perhaps age eighteen or nineteen), Alexander Pope's Pastorals (written at age sixteen), and Dryden's "Upon the Death of Lord Hastings" (written at age eighteen).

JUXTAPOSITION: The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development. See also antithesis, bathos, foil, mirror passage, and mirror scene.

KAIDAN: Traditional Japanese ghost stories, especially folktales from the Edo period.

KANJI: A set of Japanese ideographs. The Japanese derived them from the older Chinese ideographs.

KATHARSIS: An alternative spelling of catharsis (see above).

Kennings are less common in Modern English than in earlier centuries, but some common modern examples include "beer-goggles" (to describe the way one's judgment of appearances becomes hazy while intoxicated) and "surfing the web" (which mixes the imagery of skillful motion through large amounts of liquid, amorphous material with the imagery of an interconnected net linked by strands or cables), "rug-rats" (to describe children), "tramp-stamps" (to describe trashy tattoos), or "bible-thumpers" (to describe loud preachers or intolerant Christians). See also compounding and neologism.

KENTISH: The Old English dialect spoken in Kent.

KHOISAN: A family of non-Indo-European languages spoken in the southwestern regions of Africa.

KIGO: A traditional "season-word" in Japanese haiku. The kigo must appear within a haiku's text or be strongly implied by imagery. These words place the haiku within a specific month or season, establishing an atmosphere for the poem while maintaining brevity. Japanese books of poetry are usually divided according to season, with the five Japanese seasons being Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and New Year's added as the fifth season to Europe's traditional four. The kigo can be an actual reference to the name of the season or a month, or it can be a traditional connotative word: cicadas, fireflies, flies, frogs, and mosquitoes are common kigo for summer haiku, as are billowing clouds, summer storms, burning sunshine, fans, midday naps, parasols, and planters' songs. Fall kigo include references to the moon, falling leaves, scarecrows, the call of crickets, chrysanthemums, and allusions to the cold weather, lengthening nights, graveside visits, charcoal kilns, medicinal roots, gourds, persimmons, apples, and vines. Winter kigo include imagery of snow, bowl-beating rituals or begging, allusions to failing strength, charcoal fires, banked fires, socks drying, the old calendar, mochi (festive rice-cakes) and mochi sellers. Spring kigo include cherry blossoms, and so on. The following haiku by Bashó illustrates the kigo:

Kare eda ni
Karasu no tomari keri
Aki no kure
[On a leafless bough
A crow is perched--
The autumn dusk.]

See haiku for further discussion.

KILTARTANESE: Lady Augusta Gregory's term for English with Gaelic syntax--i.e., the dialect of English spoken in Kiltartan, a townland close to her home at Coole Park. Lady Gregory chose to use this dialect and its distinctive Gaelic features for her translations of Old Irish tales in Gods and Fighting Men.

KINESICS: In linguistics, the analysis of how body movements can communicate meaning.

KLEOS (Greek, "What others hear about you"): Renown, honor, glory, and fair reputation achieved through great deeds--especially battle but to a lesser extent in Olympic games, poetry contests, and literature. The Greeks thought of kleos as something transferred from a father to a son, and the son would inherit the duty for carrying on and building upon the "glory" of the father. In Greek literature, kleos becomes a predominant concern of epic heroes like Achilles, who must choose between achieving kleos but dying in battle, or having a long and happy life but having his name fade after a few generations. See also fame/shame culture.

KNIGHT: A military aristocrat in medieval Europe and England who swore service as a vassal to a liege lord in exchange for control over land. The term comes from the Old English word cniht, meaning young man or servant-boy. The process of becoming a knight was a long one, and small boys would begin their training as a page at court, serving food or drink to their elders, running messages and errands. They would be expected during this period to learn the niceties of polite society and respect for their elders. The next phase of training was serving as squire to another knight. The squire would be expected to polish and clean his knight's armor and weapons, care for and feed the horses, and wait upon his master during jousts or military service. He would also learn the finer points of fighting and riding. The final stage of knighthood was a semi-religious ceremony that varied in its details from one geographic area to another. In the late medieval period, the position of knight often became hereditary, and the title Sir, Ser, or Don was indicative of this rank. Associated with knighthood in the later Middle Ages were cultural phenomena such as feudalism, the cult of chivalry and courtly love.

KOINE (Grk, "Common"): (1) Common or lower-class Greek as it was spoken throughout the Mediterranean regions during the Hellenistic period up through the last days of the Roman Empire. The Greek New Testament, for instance, was written in Koine Greek as opposed to the literary language of Classical Greek. (2) Figuratively, any widely distributed variety of a language--i.e., a lingua franca.

KOTHORNI: See buskins.

KOTTABOS: A rowdy Greek drinking game. After draining the wine in a kylix, the drinker would stick a finger through one of the handles and rapidly spin the kylix around. He would then suddenly stop its motion, and the dregs of the wine would shoot forth from the bottom of the kylix. We aren't exactly sure what the rules were for the game, but apparently the competitors tried to aim the dregs so they would land in a large flattish bowl or else hit a specific target in the room. Amongst the competitors who successfully hit the target, the one with the best spatter of rays in the splash pattern would be declared the winner, with six-pointed stars being worth more than five-pointed stars, and so on, (i.e., the messier the impact, the more points it was worth). We can imagine the contest was a fairly wet one, and that often the ceiling, the walls, and furniture (or even other competitors) would end up spattered with the lees. In late-night dinners as depicted in Plato's Symposium, kottabos would have been one of the primary entertainments.

LAI (plural lais, also spelled lay): A short narrative or lyrical poem, usually in octosyllabic couplets, intended to be sung. Helen Cooper called the genre the "mini-Romance" since the typical theme and content deals with courtly love and the other concerns of medieval romance. Unlike the medieval romance, however, the lais are not designed in an episodic manner, i.e., they are not meant to be told in a series of short tales that can be combined and stacked in a single sequential narrative. The main traits individual lais have in common with each other is a particular geographic origin and self-identification as being a lai. Geographically, they are based on older Celtic legends imported to northwestern France by the Bretons. The oldest narrative lais, usually referred to as the contes or les lais de Marie de France, were composed by an Anglo-Norman woman named Marie. (In spite of her common scholarly epithet, she appears to have lived in England.) Her exact identity is a matter of much scholarly discussion. The oldest Old French lais outside of Provençal were written by Gautier de Dargiès (early 1200s). The term "Breton lay" was applied to English poems in the 1300s that were set in Brittany and were similar to those of Marie de France. A dozen or so examples of the Breton lays survive in English, the best known examples being Sir Orfeo, Havelok the Dane, Sir Launfal, and Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale" and "Wife of Bath's Tale." In the last 400 years, poets have used the term lay more generally as a loose term for any historical ballad or any narrative poem focusing on adventure and the supernatural. See also Bretons, romance, and courtly love.

LAISSE: A stanzaic verse paragraph. The Song of Roland, for instance, in written in a series of such units.

LAMENT: A formulaic expression of grief or sorrow for the loss of a person, position, or culture. It is typically non-narrative. Examples include The Lamentations of Jeremiah, David's Lament for Saul and Jonathan, the 1563 Complaint of Buckingham by Sackville, and more loosely the Anglo-Saxon poems, the Wife's Lament and Deor. Contrast with dirge.

LAMPOON: A coarse or crude satire ridiculing the appearance or character of another person.

LANGUAGE: A particular system of signs used by members of a group to communicate with each other. These signs can be verbal sounds, sign language gestures, or written markings like letters.

LANGUE (French, "language"): In Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of semiology, de Sauusure makes a distinction between parole and langue. Parole is the use of language--i.e., manifestations of actual speech and writing. Parole contrasts with langue, the invisible underlying system of language that makes parole possible.

LARYNGEAL: (1) Concerning the larynx. (2) A theoretical sound that probably existed in Proto-Indo-European, but which survived later only in Hittite.

LATE MODERN ENGLISH: English as spoken from about the year 1800 to the present.

LATERAL: Any sound made with the air blowing out of the oral cavity on either or both sides of the tongue.

LATINO/LATINA WRITING: Twentieth-and twenty-first-century writing and poetry by Hispanic immigrants or their children. Most scholars use the term Latino to refer to literature written in English with short sections or phrases in Spanish, though a few critics use the term exclusively in reference to original Spanish writings from the New World that are later translated into English (such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez's works.). More precisely, Latino writing is often subdivided further into nationalities, such as Chicano/Chicana (for Mexican-Americans) or Cubano/Cubana (for Cuban-Americans), and so on. Following the grammatical conventions for gender in Spanish, these words take an -o suffix in reference to male authors and an -a suffix in reference to female authors. Cf. Chicano Literature.

LAWS OF HOSPITALITY: Called xenia in Greek, the term refers to the custom in classical Greece and other ancient cultures that, if a traveler comes to a town, he can ask any person there 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.

LAX VOWEL: In linguistics, a vowel made with mostly relaxed tongue muscles [i], [e], [u], and [o], in contrast to the tense vowels like [I], [U], etc.

LEARNED WORD (Note how the word learned is pronounced as two syllables in this phrase): A word--often technical in nature--used primarily in bookish contexts such as scientific or scholarly discussion rather than in everyday life. For instance, "x-ray crystallography" is a learned word, while "crystal" is a conversational word.

LEGEND: TBA

LEIT-MOTIF (also spelled leitmotiv): From the German term for "lead motif," a leit-motif originally was coined by Hans von Wolzuegen to designate a musical theme associated with a particular object, character, or emotion. For instance, the ominous music in Jaws plays whenever the shark is approaching. That particular score is the leit-motif for the shark. Other examples are found in musical compositions such as "Peter and the Wolf" and many Wagnerian operas. In literature, critics have adapted the term leit-motif to refer to an object, animal, phrase, or other thing loosely associated with a character, a setting, or event. For instance, the color green is a leit-motif associated with Sir Bercilak in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, thus the appearance of the Green Chapel and a green girdle should cause the reader to recall and connect these places and items with the Green Knight. In Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, the moon is a leit-motif associated with the fairy court, and it appears again in the stage scenery and stage discussion of Bottom's play about Pyramis and Thisbe. The leit-motif is not necessarily a symbol (though it can be). Rather, it is a recurring device loosely linked with a character, setting, or event. It gives the audience a "heads-up" by calling attention to itself and suggesting that its appearance is somehow connected with its appearance in other parts of the narrative. Contrast with theme and motif, below.

LENAIA: An Athenian religious festival occurring shortly after the Dionysia. While the Dionysia focused on tragedies, with only short interludes of comedy, in the Lenaia, comedies were performed as the main entertainment. Contrast with Dionysia. See comedy.

LENGTH: Duration of a vowel sound. Vowels can be long or short in English writing--which often uses a single symbol to represent two or more sounds. Examples include the vowels represented by in fate (long) and fat (short). See lengthening below.

LENGTHENING: The change of a short vowel sound into a long one. Vowels can be long or short in English writing--which often uses a single symbol to represent two or more sounds. Examples include the vowels represented by in fate (long) and fat (short).

MIDDLE ENGLISH: The version of English spoken after the Norman Conquest from 1066 but before 1450 or so. Before the Norman Conquest, the common version of English was Old English or Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic language that is difficult to read without specialized training. An influx of Norman French and Latin vocabulary after the Normans conquered England resulted in rapid changes in spoken English. Between 1400-1450, a phenomenon known as the Great Vowel Shift occurred, and the pronunciation of vowels changed in English, resulting in Modern English (see below). To avoid irritating your teacher, do not confuse Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. This diagram will help you contrast them.

MIDDLE PASSAGE: The sea-voyage from Africa to the West Indies and/or the Americas commonly used by slave-traders. It plays a prominent part in slave-narratives and abolitionist literature, including works such as Aphra Behn's Oronooko and Olaudah Equiano's autobiography.

MILES GLORIOSUS: The braggart soldier, a stock character in classical Roman drama. The braggart soldier is cowardly but boasts of his past deeds, and he becomes involved in sexual catastrophes, bullying, and thievery. (The miles gloriosus is frequently of low morals. Shakespeare's Falstaff has been compared to the miles gloriosus in classical literature.)

MILTONIC IMAGERY: Imagery made famous by Milton's poetry--especially Paradise Lost. Examples include the dark angels or twisted demons laboring at Pandemonium's construction deep below the earth in fiery shadow, especially when such imagery is taken in contrast with the pastoral tranquility of Eden or the pearly mansions of heaven afloat in glowing clouds. Likewise, the motif of the rejected, fallen, rebellious seraphim struggling against the Almighty's white lightning remains a haunting image in Milton's poetry. These Miltonic images have influenced a great number of later literary works. In H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, Wells used Miltonic imagery in the Morlocks and Eloi, where (it initially appears) the troglodytic Morlocks labor in darkness under the earth and the child-like Eloi play in the blissful garden above. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein steals Miltonic imagery by casting the monster as both an innocent Adam figure and simultaneously a rebellious Satan figure who rejects his maker as flawed and morally inferior. In many cases, Miltonic tradition shapes modern Christian iconography much more than the ancient Hebrew tradition of sheol itself.

MIMESIS: Mimesis is usually translated as "imitation" or "representation," though the concept is much more complex than that and doesn't translate easily into English. It is an imitation or representation of something else rather than an attempt to literally duplicate the original. For instance, Aristotle in The Poetics defined tragedy as "the imitation [mimesis] of an action." In his sense, both poetry and drama are attempts to take an instance of human action and represent or re-present its essence while translating it into a new "medium" of material. For example, a play about World War II is an attempt to take the essence of an actual, complex historical event involving millions of people and thousands of square miles over several years and recreate that event in a simplified representation involving a few dozen people in a few thousand square feet over a few hours. The play would be a mimesis of that historic event using stage props, lighting, and individual actors to convey the sense of what World War II was to the audience. In the same way, the process of mimesis might involve creating a film about World War II (translating the event into images projected onto a flat screen or monitor using chemical images on a strip of photosynthetic film), or writing a poem about World War II would constitute an attempt at distilling that meaning into syllables, stress, verse, and diction. Picasso might attempt to embody warfare as a montage of destruction--his painting Guernica is the result. The degree to which each form of art accurately embodies the essence of its subject determines (for many classical theorists of art) the degree of its success.

Additionally, mimesis may involve ecphrasis--the act of translating art from one type of media into another. A classical musician or composer might be entranced by an earlier bit of folkloric art, the legend of William Tell. He attempts to imitate or represent the stirring emotions of that story by creating a stirring song that has the same effect; thus, the famous "The William Tell Overture" results. A story has been translated into a musical score. It is also possible to attempt mimesis of one medium into the same medium. For instance, American musician Aaron Copland was inspired by the simplicity of Quaker music, so he attempted to re-create that music mimetically in "Appalachian Spring," much like he earlier attempted to mimetically capture the American spirit in "Fanfare for the Common Man."

In literature, ecphrasis is likewise used to describe the way literature describes or mimics other media (other bits of art, architecture, music and so on). For instance, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is largely Keats' poetic attempt to capture the eternal and changeless nature of visual art depicted on an excavated piece of pottery. Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" involves an elaborate architectural recreation of three pagan temples, and the artwork on the walls of those temples, as well as the verbal construction of an entire coliseum to enclose a knightly combat. These are both ecphrases seeking to turn one type of non-verbal art into verbal art through mimetic principles.

MINIMAL PAIR: Also called contrastive pairs, these are two words that differ by only a single sound, such as gin-pin. Linguists commonly use minimal pairs for illustrating subtle sound differences.

MINNE: The German term for fin amour, i.e., courtly love.

MINNESÄNGER: Any German minstril who writes poems and songs about courtly love in the medieval period. He is usually considered the German equivalent of the French troubadour.

MINUSCULE: A small or lowercase letter, in contrast with majuscule, a large or capital letter. The invention of minuscule allowed for faster, more compact writing in scriptoria.

MIRACLE OF THE VIRGIN: A vita or a miracle play that dramatizes some aspect of humanity activity, and ends with the miraculous intervention of the Blessed Virgin. See discussion under miracle play (below), and vita.

MIRACLE PLAY: Not to be confused with medieval morality plays, a miracle play is a medieval drama depicting either biblical stories, the miracle(s) performed by a saint, or the martyrdom of a saint in Christian traditions. (Some critics prefer the third definition and reject the first two.) Miracle plays were usually presented in a cycle, such as dramas dealing with the Virgin Mary, the fall of man, and so on. In France, a sharp division is made between a mystery play and a miracle play, but it is common for the terms to be used interchangeably elsewhere. Few examples of miracle plays survive in English, but in France, there remains a famous cycle of Les Miracles de Notre Dame, forty-two plays belonging to the second half of the 1300s written in octosyllabic couplets. An example of a modern miracle play is the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck's Sister Beatrice. The general emphasis in a miracle play is to astonish and inspire the viewer with a sense of wonder at the numinous. An entire subgenre of miracles of the virgin also exist. Contrast with morality play and mystery play.

MIRROR PASSAGE: A section of a story that might not contribute directly to the plot (i.e., it contains characters divorced from the main narrative, and the events it deals with do not further the action) but which does reflect the basic concerns of the work in terms of theme, action, or symbolism or which seems to echo another scene, image, or situation. For instance, the Miller's story in The Canterbury Tales creates a love triangle to mock and mirror the love triangle in the Knight's earlier narrative, or the way Aeneas's attempt to hug Creüsa's ghost thrice mirrors his attempt to embrace the ghost of his father Anchises in The Aeneid, or the inversion of words and tears that distinguishes Aeneas and Dido's two farewells--the first at Carthage and the second in the Underworld. See also mirror scene.

MIRROR SCENE: A scene in a play or novel that does not contribute directly to the plot (i.e., it contains characters divorced from the main narrative, and the events it deals with do not further the action,) but which does mirror the basic concerns of the play or narrative in terms of theme, action, or symbolism. For instance, the scene with the gardeners in Richard II relates symbolically to the fact that Richard, as king, is not tending his own little Eden, the isle of Britain. The scene with Christopher Sly in the opening of The Taming of the Shrew does not relate directly to Petruchio's wooing of Kate, but it does establish the theme of how appearance might not match reality. See also mirror passage.

MLA: The acronym for the Modern Language Association. English students primarily know the MLA as the publisher of the MLA guidelines for research papers, the standard format used in American college English classes. Founded in 1883, this organization is a professional guild of sorts for professors and instructors of a variety of subjects: foreign languages, linguistics, composition, technical writing, philology, rhetoric, and literature. Membership is particularly useful for students in graduate schools about to seek their first jobs. (Membership allows them access to the JIL, the Job Information Listings.) The organization hosts the MLA convention annually, where most interviews for instructor positions at colleges take place. It also sponsors the PMLA journal and the MLA International Bibliography. You can learn more at the MLA website.

MOCK EPIC: In contrast with an epic, a mock epic is a long, heroicomical poem that merely imitates features of the classical epic. The poet often takes an elevated style of language, but incongruously applies that language to mundane or ridiculous objects and situations. The mock epic focuses frequently on the exploits of an antihero whose activities illustrate the stupidity of the class or group he represents. Various other attributes common to the classical epic, such as the invocation of the muse or the intervention of the gods, or the long catalogs of characters, appear in the mock epic as well, only to be spoofed. For instance, Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock gives in hyperbolic language a lengthy account of how a 17th century lord cuts a lady's hair in order to steal a lock of it as a keepsake, leading to all sorts of social backlash when the woman is unhappy with her new hairdo. Lord Byron's Don Juan gives a lengthy list of the sexual conquests and catastrophes associated with a precocious young lord, Don Juan. Both are fine examples of the mock epic. In some ways, the mock epic is the opposite of a travesty. See also spoof, satire.

MOCK SERMON: A medieval genre commonly known as "une sermon joyeux" or "une sermon jolie," the conventions are that a non-clerical figure will present a humorous lecture on a non-religious topic (sexuality and food being two common choices) using all the tropes and conventions of a normal homily--such as the introduction and explication of a Biblical passage, allusions to various intellectual figures, a series of exempla to prove the speaker's point, and a concluding invocation of prayer. Some critics have read Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue" as a mock sermon concerning a woman's place in marriage, for instance. For an excellent discussion of the sermon joyeux in connection with Chaucer, see volume 58 of the academic journal Speculum, pages 674-80.

MODERN ENGLISH: The English language as spoken between about 1450 and the modern day. The language you are speaking now and the language Shakespeare spoke are both considered examples of Modern English. Modern English is distinct from Middle English (spoken c. 1100 to 1400) in that vowels are pronounced differently after the Great Vowel Shift (1400-1450). Both Middle English and Modern English are distinct from Old English in that Old English and Middle English had numerous letters (such as the letters ash, thorn, and eth) and some sounds (such as yogh) that were used much more commonly. Old English also used elaborate declensions that have mostly fallen out of use in Modern English. To avoid irritating your teacher, do not confuse Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. This diagram will help you contrast them. A good rule of thumb is that, (a) if you can read it easily, it's probably modern English, (b) if you can read it with some difficulty, but there are many words "misspelled" and an occasional strange letter, it's probably Middle English, and (c) if you can't read it all, and it looks like a foreign language with letters you don't recognize, you are probably looking at Old English. See Middle English and Old English.

MODERNISM: A vague, amorphous term referring to the art, poetry, literature, architecture, and philosophy of Europe and America in the early twentieth-century. Scholars do not agree exactly when Modernism began--most suggest after World War I, but some suggest it started as early as the late nineteenth century in France. Likewise, some assert Modernism ended with World War II or the bombing of Nagasaki, to be replaced with Postmodernism, or that modernism lasted until the 1960s, when post-structural linguistics dethroned it. Others suggest that the division between modernism and postmodernism is false, and that postmodernism is merely the continuing process of Modernism. Under the general umbrella of Modernism, we find several art movements such as surrealism, formalism, and various avante-garde French movements. Professor Frank Kermode further divides modernism into paleo-modernism (1914-1920) and neo-modernism (1920-1942). However, these divisions are hardly agreed upon by historians and critics. In general, modernism is an early twentieth-century artistic marked by the following characteristics: (1) the desire to break away from established traditions, (2) a quest to find fresh ways to view man's position or function in the universe, (3) experiments in form and style, particularly with fragmentation--as opposed to the "organic" theories of literary unity appearing in the Romantic and Victorian periods, and (4) a lingering concern with metaliterature. Cf. postmodernism. To see where modernism fits into a chronological listing of the major literary periods, click here for a pdf handout.

MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION: See MLA.

MOIRA: Fate or the three fates in Greek mythology. Contrast with wyrd.

MONODY: Any elegy or dirge represented as the utterance of a single speaker. Compare with dramatic monologue.

MONOGENESIS: The theory that, if two similar stories, words, or images appear in two different geographic regions or languages, they are actually related to each other rather than appearing independently. Either one was the original source, and the others adopted it later, or all the surviving examples come from an older (possibly lost) source. Contrast with polygenesis.

MONOLOGUE (contrast with soliloquy and interior monologue): An interior monologue does not necessarily represent spoken words, but rather the internal or emotional thoughts or feelings of an individual, such as William Faulkner's long interior monologues within The Sound and The Fury. Monologue can also be used to refer to a character speaking aloud to himself, or narrating an account to an audience with no other character on stage. Cf. dramatic monologue.

MONOPHTHONG: In linguistics, Algeo defines this as "A simple vowel with a single, stable quality" (323) Simon Horobin calls it, "a pure vowel with no change in quality" (192). Contrast with diphthong. See also monophthongization.

MONOPHTHONGIZATION: The tendency of diphthongs to turn into simple vowels over time, or the actual process by which diphthongs turn into such vowels. Contrast with diphthongization.

MONORHYME: A poem or section of a poem in which all the lines have the same end rhyme. The rhyming pattern would thus look like this: AAAA AAAA, AAA AAA, or AA AA AA AA, etc. It is a common rhyme scheme in Latin, Italian, Arabic, Welsh, and Slav poetry, especially in the Slav poetry of the oral-formulaic tradition. Because of the fact that English nouns are not declined and our adjectives do not have gender consistently indicated by particular endings, it is much harder to make effective poetic use of monorhyme in the English poetry. However, Shakespeare makes frequent use of it is a bit of doggerel in his plays. For instance, in The Merchant of Venice, we find the following section in monorhyme:

ARAGON: The fire seven times tried this;
Seven times tried that judgment is
That did never choose amiss
Some there be that shadows kiss
There be fools alive iwis,
Silvered o'er, and so was this.
Take what wife you will to bed
I will ever be your head.
So be gone; you are sped. (2.9.62-71)

MONOSYLLABIC: Having only one syllable.

MOOD (from Anglo-Saxon, mod "heart" or "spirit"): (1) In literature, a feeling, emotional state, or disposition of mind--especially the predominating atmosphere or tone of a literary work. Most pieces of literature have a prevailing mood, but shifts in this prevailing mood may function as a counterpoint, provide comic relief, or echo the changing events in the plot. The term mood is often used synonymously with atmosphere and ambiance. Students and critics who wish to discuss mood in their essays should be able to point to specific diction, description, setting, and characterization to illustrate what sets the mood. (2) In grammar, an aspect of verbs. Click here for more information on grammatical mood.

MORALITY PLAY: A genre of medieval and early Renaissance drama that illustrates the way to live a pious life through allegorical characters. The characters tend to be personified abstractions of vices and virtues. For instance, characters named Mercy and Conscience might work together to stop Shame and Lust from stealing Mr. Poorman's most valuable possession, a box of gold labeled Salvation. Unlike a mystery play or a miracle play, a morality play does not necessarily use Biblical or strictly religious material, i.e., the morality play usually does not contain specific characters found in the Bible, such as saints or the disciples or Old Testament figures. Unlike the miracle play, which depicts astonishing and moving miraculous events believed to have occurred literally to specific historical figures in specific settings, the morality play takes place internally and psychologically in every human being. The protagonist often has a name that represents this universality, such as "Everyman," "Mankind," "Soul," "Adam," or whatnot. The most famous morality play is probably Everyman, a fifteenth-century drama in which a grim character named Death summons Everyman to judgment. On his way to meet Death, Everyman discovers that all his old buddies are abandoning him except one. His friend Good Deeds is the only one that will accompany him to meet Death, while Beauty, Fellowship, Kindred, Knowledge, and Strength fall by the wayside on his journey. Other famous examples include The Castle of Perseverance and Mankind. Contrast with mystery play and miracle play.

MORPHEME: Linguistically, the smallest collection of sounds or letters in a spoken or written word that has semiotic importance or significance--a unit of meaning that cannot be divided into tinier units of meaning. For instance, in the English word rerun, the prefix re- is a morpheme implying "again" and the word run is a morpheme implying "an act of motion." If we try to cut the prefix re- into smaller collections of sounds (/r/ and /I/ phonetically), these sounds no longer have meaning attached to them, and they are no longer morphemes. Likewise, the morpheme run cannot be further subdivided into meaningful morphemes. Note that morphemes can be either free or bound. Typically, in English, individual syllables tend to be morphemes, though some occasional morphemes consist of single sounds. Contrast with grapheme and phoneme.

MORPHOLOGY: The part of a language concerned with the structure of morphemes and how these morphemes combine. Linguists use this term in contrast with syntax.

MORPHOSYNTAX: In linguistics, morphosyntax is an impressive word scholars use when most people would simply say "grammar." It is the study of how parts of a sentence relate to each other.

MOTIF: A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formula, which appears frequently in works of literature. For instance, the "loathly lady" who turns out to be a beautiful princess is a common motif in folklore, and the man fatally bewitched by a fairy lady is a common folkloric motif appearing in Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci." In medieval Latin lyrics, the "Ubi sunt?" [where are . . .?] motif is common, in which a speaker mourns the lost past by repeatedly asking, what happened to the good-old days? ("Where are the snows of yesteryear?" asks Francois Villon.) The motif of the "beheading game" is common in Celtic myth, and so on. Frequently, critics use the word motif interchangeably with theme and leit-motif. See also folkloric motif.

MULTICULTURAL NOVEL: As Robert Harris defines the term in his glossary, a multicultural novel is

A novel written by a member of or about a cultural minority group, giving insight into non-Western or non-dominant cultural experiences and values, either in the United States or abroad. Examples:

MULTICULTURALISM: In literature, multiculturalism is the belief that literary studies should include writings, poetry, folklore, and plays from a number of different cultures rather than focus on Western European civilization alone. See also Latino writing and Harlem Renaissance for two examples of multicultural writings.

MUSES, THE NINE: The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne who had the power to inspire artists, poets, singers, and writers. They are listed below along with their spheres of influence:

• 
  Calliope (epic poetry)
  
• 
  Clio (history)
  
• 
  Euterpe (lyric poetry)
  
• 
  Melpomene (tragedy)
  
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  Terpsichore (choral dance)
  
• 
  Erato (love poetry)
  
• 
  Polyhymnia (hymns and sacred poems)
  
• 
  Urania (astronomy)
  
• 
  Thalia (comedy)
  

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES: In medieval and Renaissance Europe, many scholars believed in a beautiful song created by the movement of the heavenly bodies (sun, moon, and planets). The music of spheres supposedly was infinitely beautiful, but humans were unable to hear it, either (a) because of their sinful separation from God, or (b) because they were so used to its presence, their minds automatically filtered it out as background noise.

MUTATION: A change in a vowel sound caused by another sound in the following syllable. In Old English and in Celtic languages like Irish Gaelic and Welsh, the type of mutation called i-mutation was especially common. Another common type is the eclipsis mutation, a mutation in which a basic consonant sound is "eclipsed" or replaced by a stronger sound in a preceding word. For a chart of the most common Irish mutations as examples, click here.

MYSTERY CULT: Unlike the official "public cults" dedicated to the Olympian gods in ancient Greece and Rome, a number of religious practices involved chthonic deities (like Demeter) and imported foreign gods (Ishtar, Osiris, Mithras, etc.). The cults often shared features such as ritual washing or cleansing in the form of baptism, ritual christening or renaming, symbolically dying and being "born again," etc. Possibly some may have offered the hope of an afterlife through metempsychosis (unlike standard Greek and Roman belief which emphasized a gloomy stay in the underworld). Others--in the case of Dionysian worshippers--ritually "slew" the god and ate him or drank his blood symbolically in the form of wine. Regardless of specific varying details, these mystery cults shared a common element of secrecy--a distinction between the uninitiated outsider and the initiated cult member. The cult rituals were held to be so sacred that it was blasphemous to reveal them to outsiders, even to speak of them, describe them, or write them down in any way. The rites were often held in inaccessible areas far from the local city--on mountain-tops or sea-shores or in catacombs. Some, like the mystery cult of Demeter, were open to any prospective members regardless of race, gender, or nationality as long as they spoke sufficient Greek to participate in the rituals. Others were open to certain professions, such as the cult of Mithras which only allowed soldiers to join after an initial baptism in bull's blood. Others were restricted by family (such as local versions of the Lykian wolf cult) or partly restricted by gender (such as the maenads of Dionysus).

MYSTERY CYCLE: A collection of mystery plays in a single manuscript meant to be performed sequentially. See discusion under mystery play, below.

MYSTERY NOVEL: A novel focused on suspense and solving a mystery--especially a murder, theft, kidnapping, or some other crime. The protagonist faces inexplicable events, threats, assaults, and unknown forces or antagonists. Conventionally, the hero is a keenly observant individual (such as Sherlock Holmes) and the police are depicted as incompetent or incapable of solving the crime by themselves. Many of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Agatha Christie are mystery novels. Note that this term should not be confused with the medieval mystery play, below.

MYSTERY PLAY: A religious play performed outdoors in the medieval period that enacts an event from the Bible, such as the story of Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, the crucifixion, and so on. Although the origins are uncertain, Mary Marshall and other early scholars like E. K. Chambers (author of The Medieval Stage, 1903) suggested that the plays developed out of the Latin liturgy of the church, in particular out of the Quem Quaeritis trope of Easter Day festivals. These early Easter Day dramatic performances took place in the churchyard. Later, these plays gradually became secular and used vernacular languages rather than Latin, and they gradually moved out of the churchyard and ecclesiastical control, becoming outdoor performances controlled by the craftsmen in each city, according to this theory. Other scholars such as V. A. Kolve refute this idea, however.

In any case, we do know that these religious plays were staged and performed by secular audiences. Typically, the various guilds in each city (such as the Carpenters' Guild, the Butchers' Guild, and so on) would sponsor and perform one play during the Corpus Christi festival, competing with each other for the most elaborate performance. Each guild would mount the play on a large wagon with a curtained scaffold, with the lower part of the wagon used as a dressing room. Between forty and fifty of these wagons (one for each guild) would move from spot to spot in the city, so that spectators could watch several performances in a single day. The plays often involved elaborate representations of heaven and hell, mechanical devices to create "special effects," and lavish costuming. The dramatizations became increasingly elaborate, and they show signs of developing psychological realism. The use of mystery in the name may originate in either the idea of spiritual mysteries, which were the focus of each play, or it may result from the Latin word misterium (a guild). The mystery plays were an important precursor to the miracle plays and morality plays (see above) in medieval drama, and they set the stage for the flowering of Renaissance drama that was to come with Shakespeare. Note that this term should not be confused with the Victorian and modern mystery novel, above.

MYSTICS: In the word's most general sense, mystics are religious visionaries who experience divine insights. In medieval scholarship, the term "mystics" or "mystic writers" is often used as a collective term for a group of late fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century eremites in England who wrote mystical works in Middle English and Latin. These include the anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote The Book of Showings; the illiterate mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated her autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe to two scribes; Richard Rolle, the author of "Love is Love that Lasts for Aye"; and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. On the continent, other famous mystics include Saint Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, and Saint Francis of Assissi. The mystic writers are marked by the use of vivid (and sometimes confusing) imagery, intense emotional pathos (in the case of Margery Kempe), paradox (in the case of Richard Rolle), and an intense desire to verbalize what is largely a nonverbal experience (in the case of nearly every mystic). Mystics--regardless of religious background--are often marked by an experience in which they perceive the universe as a unity or in which they feel a sense of being one with the divine. We see signs of this tendency in Julian of Norwich's vision of Christ's blood, which transforms into raindrops falling from the side of a roof and then in turn transforms into the scales on a herring, as if God's physical form were embodied in the entire universe.

In a more general sense, the author of the book of Revelation in the Bible (commonly attributed to John of Patmos), and the poetry of William Blake are said to be visionary or mystical in nature, though scholars usually do not place them in the same category as the medieval mystics. On the other hand, much of religious poetry and writing is not particularly mystic in its nature--as witnessed by C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters or the poetry of Milton and Gerard Manley Hopkins, all three of which are profoundly religious, but which do not necessarily represent a struggle to verbalize an intense religious vision in the same manner as a mystic writer.

MYTH: While common English usage often equates "myth" with "falsehood," scholars use the term slightly differently. A myth is a traditional tale of deep cultural significance to a people in terms of etiology, eschatology, ritual practice, or models of appropriate and inappropriate behavior. The myth often (but not always) deals with gods, supernatural beings, or ancestral heroes. The culture creating or retelling the myth may or may not believe that the myth refers to literal or factual events, but it values the mythic narrative regardless of its historical authenticity for its (conscious or unconscious) insights into the human condition. See also folklore, legend, mythography, mythos, and mythology.

MYTHOGRAPHY: The commentary, writings, and interpretations added to myths. Medieval writers, such as the four anonymous scribes collectively called the "Vatican Mythographers," would take Greek and Roman myths and write elaborate Christianized allegories to explain the meaning of the text. Another example of medieval mythography is the Ovid moralisée, a retelling of Ovid's Metamorphoses in which French scribes interpret the legends as Christological commentary on the New Testament.

MYTHOLOGY: A system of stories about the gods, often explicitly religious in nature, that possibly were once believed to be true by a specific cultural group, but may no longer be believed as literally true by their descendents. Like religions everywhere, mythology often provided etiological and eschatological narratives (see above) to help explain why the world works the way it does, to provide a rationale for customs and observances, to establish set rituals for sacred ceremonies, and to predict what happens to individuals after death. If the protagonist is a normal human rather than a supernatural being, the traditional story is usually called a legend rather than a myth. If the story concerns supernatural beings who are not deities, but rather spirits, ghosts, fairies, and other creatures, it is usually called a folktale or fairy tale rather than a myth (see folklore, below). Samples of myths appear in the writings of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid.

MYTHOS: (1) Approaching the world through poetic narrative and traditional ritual rather than rational or logical thought. (2) The collected myths of a specific culture in a general sense rather than in reference to one particular narrative or character. For instance, we might refer specifically to the myth of Hercules fighting the Hydra, the myth of Kali drinking demons' blood, or the myth of the giant Ullikummis, but we would more generally say these tales belong to the Greek mythos, the Hindu mythos, or the Hittite mythos, respectively. Cf. mythology.

N-PLURAL: The plural form of a few modern English weak nouns derives from the n-stem declension or n-plural of Anglo-Saxon (Old English). Examples include the masculine Old English oxa (which gives us the modern singular ox and the plural oxen), and the feminine word tunge (which gives us the modern word tongue). In the case of tongue, however, the plural form tungen has been superseded by the pattern of a-stem words.

N-STEM: A declension of Old English nouns. This stem was common in Old English, though its declension pattern was still less common than the a-stems. It is marked by an /n/ in many forms.

NAM-SHUB: (1) An incantation, chant, poem, or speech thought to have magical power in Sumerian texts. The most famous example is the nam-shub of Enki, in which Enki creates a nam-shub that causes others to lose the ability to speak, and which may be a source for the later Hebrew legend of the Tower of Babel. In the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson uses the nam-shub as a dangerous meme (i.e., an idea or pattern of thought that "replicates" by being passed along from one thinker to another). He re-interprets the Sumerian myth of Enki by imagining that the Chomskyian deep structure of the brain can be reprogrammed with different capacities for language, i.e., that humans once shared a common and innate agglutinative language, but lacked individual consciousness. A priest or scribe named Enki creates a nam-shub that re-writes the linguistic wiring of those who read it in cuneiform (or hear it spoken aloud), causing them to lose the ability to understand language. This fictional nam-shub creates in the victim the capacity for individual, conscious language, but also destroys the individual's access to universal language.

NARRATION, NARRATIVE: Narration is the act of telling a sequence of events, often in chronological order. Alternatively, the term refers to any story, whether in prose or verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do. A narrative is likewise the story or account itself. Some narrations are reportorial and historical, such as biographies, autobiographies, news stories, and historical accounts. In narrative fiction common to literature, the narrative is usually creative and imaginative rather than strictly factual, as evidenced in fairy tales, legends, novels, novelettes, short stories, and so on. However, the fact that a fictional narrative is an imaginary construct does not necessarily mean it isn't concerned with imparting some sort of truth to the reader, as evidenced in exempla, fables, anecdotes, and other sorts of narrative. The narrative can begin ab ovo (from the start and work its way to the conclusion), or it can begin in medias res (in the middle of the action, then recount earlier events by the character's dialogue, memories, or flashbacks). See exemplum and fable.

NARRATOR: The "voice" that speaks or tells a story. Some stories are written in a first-person point of view, in which the narrator's voice is that of the point-of-view character. For instance, in The Adventures of Huck Finn, the narrator's voice is the voice of the main character, Huck Finn. It is clear that the historical author, Mark Twain, is creating a fictional voice to be the narrator and tell the story--complete with incorrect grammar, colloquialisms, and youthful perspective. In other stories, such as those told in the third-person point of view, scholars use the term narrator to describe the authorial voice set forth, the voice "telling the story to us." For instance, Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist presents a narrative in which the storyteller stands outside the action described. He is not a character who interacts with other characters in terms of plot. However, this fictionalized storyteller occasionally intrudes upon the story to offer commentary to the reader, make suggestions, or render a judgment about what takes place in the tale. It is tempting to equate the words and sentiments of such a narrator with the opinions of the historical author himself. However, it is often more useful to separate this authorial voice from the voice of the historical author. For further discussion, see authorial voice, unreliable narrator, and point of view.

NARRATOR, UNRELIABLE: An unreliable narrator is a storyteller who "misses the point" of the events or things he describes in a story, who plainly misinterprets the motives or actions of characters, or who fails to see the connections between events in the story. The author herself, of course, must plainly understand the connections, because she presents the material to the readers in such a way that readers can see what the narrator overlooks. This device is sometimes used for purposes of irony or humor. See discussion under authorial voice.

NARROW TRANSCRIPTION: In linguistics, phonetic transcription that shows minute details, i.e., highly accurate transcription. The opposite term, broad transcription, implies quickly made or comparative transcriptions designed primarily to illustrate general pronunciation. Most dictionaries use some form of broad transcription.

NASAL: In linguistics, any sound that involves movement of air through the nose.

NATIVE LANGUAGE: The first language or the preferred language of any particular speaker.

NATURAL GENDER: The assignment of nouns to grammatical categories based on the gender or lack of gender in the signified object or creature. This term contrasts with grammatical gender, in which the designations are more or less arbitrary and do not correspond closely with any gender in the signified object or creature.

NATURALISM: A literary movement seeking to depict life as accurately as possible, without artificial distortions of emotion, idealism, and literary convention. The school of thought is a product of post-Darwinian biology in the nineteenth century. It asserts that human beings exist entirely in the order of nature. Human beings do not have souls or any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond the biological realm of nature, and any such attempts to engage in a religious or spiritual world are acts of self-delusion and wish-fulfillment. Humanity is thus a higher order animal whose character and behavior are, as M. H. Abrams summarizes, entirely determined by two kinds of forces, hereditary and environment. The individual's compulsive instincts toward sexuality, hunger, and accumulation of goods are inherited via genetic compulsion and the social and economic forces surrounding his or her upbringing.

Naturalistic writers--including Zola, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser--try to present their subjects with scientific objectivity. They often choose characters based on strong animal drives who are "victims both of glandular secretions within and of sociological pressures without" (Abrams 175). Typically, naturalist writers avoid explicit emotional commentary in favor of medical frankness about bodily functions and biological activities that would be almost unmentionable during earlier literary movements like transcendentalism, Romanticism, and mainstream Victorian literature. The end of the naturalistic novel is usually unpleasant or unhappy, perhaps even "tragic," though not in the cathartic sense Aristotle, Sophocles, or Elizabethan writers would have understood by the term tragedy. Naturalists emphasize the smallness of humanity in the universe; they remind readers of the immensity, power, and cruelty of the natural world, which does not care whether humanity lives or dies. Examples of this include Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat," which pits a crew of shipwrecked survivors in a raft against starvation, dehydration, and sharks in the middle of the ocean, and Jack London's "To Build a Fire," which reveals the inability of a Californian transplant to survive outside of his "natural" environment as he freezes to death in the Alaskan wilderness.

Naturalism is a precursor to realism that partially overlaps with it. Realism, this subsequent literary movement, also emphasizes depicting life as accurately as possible without distortion.

NEAR RHYME: Another term for inexact rhyme or slant rhyme.

NEBULA AWARD: An annual award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Association (SFFWA) for the best science fiction or fantasy work published during the previous two years. The categories include novel, novella, novelette, short story, and script. Notable winners include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Connie Willis, Theodore Sturgeon, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Ursula LeGuin. As of 2007, the author to win the most Nebula Awards was Joe Haldeman (four total), including one for his noteworthy allegory of Vietnam veterans' disillusionment, The Forever War. Typically, the Nebula carries no cash award, but editors and scholars consider it more prestigious than the similar Hugo Award.

NEOCLASSIC: An adjective referring to the Enlightenment. See Enlightenment for further discussion, or click here for a PDF handout that places the Neoclassic period in chronological order with other intellectual movements.

NEOCLASSICISM: The movement toward classical architecture, literature, drama, and design that took place during the Restoration and Enlightenment. See Enlightenment for further discussion about its influence in literature.

NEOCLASSIC COUPLET: See discussion under heroic couplet.

NEO-LATIN: Latin forms or words (especially scientific ones) invented after the medieval period, as opposed to classical or medieval Latin as a naturally occurring language.

NEOLOGISM: A made-up word that is not a part of normal, everyday vocabulary. Often Shakespeare invented new words in his place for artistic reasons. For instance, "I hold her as a thing enskied." The word enskied implies that the girl should be placed in the heavens. Other Shakespearean examples include climature (a mix between climate and temperature) and abyssm (a blend between abyss and chasm), and compounded verbs like outface or un-king. Contrast with kenning. Occasionally, the neologism is so useful it becomes a part of common usage, such as the word new-fangled that Chaucer invented in the 1300s. A neologism may be considered either a rhetorical scheme or a rhetorical trope, depending upon whose scholarly definition the reader trusts. See compounding, infixation, epenthesis, proparalepsis, and prosthesis.

NEPHILIM (probably derived from Hebrew napal, "to fall"): In ancient Hebrew tradition, the Nephilim (singular Naphil) were a race of giants referred to in Genesis 6:4 ("Now giants were upon the earth in those days") and in Numbers 13:33 ("We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.") In Genesis, they are called the children of the sons of God and human women, and they are referred to as "heroes of old" and "men of renown." The text of Numbers describes them as a race of giants that once inhabited Canaan, so these Nephilim were thought to live at the time of Moses, which contrasts with the Genesis text in which the deluge exterminates the entire race of Nephilim. Biblical scholars think that the clash between the two texts is the result of a dual oral tradition--though at least one Hebrew legend describes a Naphil surviving the Biblical deluge by virtue of being so tall his head remained above the water. The Nephilim seem to be related to the Rephaim (Numbers 13:33 and Deuteronomy 2:11). In later times, medieval tradition often much more closely linked the "sons of God" appearing in Genesis and Job and the race of Anak mentioned in Numbers. Cf. Rephaim.

NEW COMEDY: The Greek comedy the developed circa 300 BCE, stressing romantic entanglements, wit, and unexpected twists of plot.

NEW ENGLAND SHORT O: In linguistics, this term refers to "the lax vowel used by some New Englanders in road and home corresponding to tense [o] in standard English" (Algeo 324).

NIGER-KORDEFANIAN: A group of languages spoken in the southern part of Africa. This family of languages apparantly has no relation to those in the Indo-European family.

NILO-SAHARAN: A group of languages spoken in the central sections of Africa. This family of languages apparantly has no relation to those in the Indo-European family.

NOBLE SAVAGE: Typically, the depiction of Amerindians, indigenous African tribesmen, and Australian bushmen results in two sharply opposing stereotypes as follows: (1) When "civilized" races dwell in close proximity to these "savages," they may feel threatened--sometimes with good reason--if the tribe is cannibalistic, warlike, or competes for local resources. In such situations, literature almost always depicts the race as inferior to the civilized race and dangerously superstitious, violent, lazy, or irrational. An example would be the depiction of Indians in Hawthorne's stories--satanic skulkers on the outskirts of good Puritan homes. (2) If the writer is only passing through an area rather than competing for resources, or if the writer lives some safe distance away, the second and opposing tendency is for him or her to romanticize the alien culture, accenting its positives and projecting his or her cultural desires on the other. This second stereotype, a literary motif, depicts exotic, primitive, or uncivilized races and characters as being innately good, dignified, and noble, living harmoniously with nature. They are thought to be uncorrupted by the morally weakening and physically debilitating effects of decadent society. The motif goes back as far as the Christian tales of Adam and Eve--the idea that innocent living in lush wilderness is equivalent to existing in a state of Edenic goodness. Montaigne develops the idea in his essay Of Cannibals, as does Aphra Behn in Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (c. 1688). However, it is in the time of the Enlightenment that the Noble Savage truly becomes a center of attention. Rousseau writes in Emile (1762), "Everything is well when it comes fresh from the hands of God," but he adds, "everything degenerates in the hands of Man." The idea was also popular in Chateaubriand's work, in Dryden's Conquest of Granada, and especially in the writings of the Romantic poets. We see early hints of it in Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man (Epistle I, lines 99-112), but Pope remains contemptuous of the native's "untutored mind," even as he admires tha native's state of contentment with nature.

NOM DE GUERRE (French, "name of war"): Another term for a nom de plume or a pen name. See nom de plume or pen name.

NOM DE PLUME (French, "name of the pen"): Another term for a pen name. The word indicates a fictitious name that a writer employs to conceal his or her identity. For example, Samuel Clemens used the nom de plume "Mark Twain." William Sydney Porter wrote his short stories under the nom de plume of "O. Henry." Mary Ann Cross used the name "George Eliot" to hide that she was a female writer, just as science-fiction writer Alice Bradley Sheldon used the nom de plume "James Tiptree, Junior." Francois-Marie Arouet used "Voltaire." Ben Franklin used a variety of literary aliases, and so on. One caveat: although the phrase "nom de plume" is French, the French do not use this particular phrase to describe a literary pseudonym. What we call a nom de plume, the French would call a nom de guerre.

NOMINATIVE: See case.

NON-DISTINCTIVE: In linguistics, any two sounds (often quite similar) that are not capable of signaling a difference in meaning. For instance, in Chinese, the letter t can be aspirated or unaspirated. This slight difference in sound can create two entirely different words. The Greeks also had the same sound distinction, and represented this by using both the letter theta and tau. However, in Roman Latin and modern English, the difference in aspiration is ignored, and both sounds are represented by a single letter. Since the two sounds are non-distinctive, creating two different letters for each one is unnecessary in Latin and English.

NON-FINITE FORM: In grammar, this category of verbs includes the infinitive and participle forms. Basically, a non-finite form is any form of a verb that doesn't indicate person, number, or tense.

NON-RHOTIC: In linguistics, any dialect lacking an /r/. Some dialects of English are non-rhotic. Others only pronounced the /r/ before a vowel sound.

NORMAN: An inhabitant of Normandy, a region along the northern coast of France. The word Norman comes from a cognate for "northmen," for the Norman aristocracy of the region originally descended from Danish (i.e. Viking) settlers who took over the French region in the ninth and tenth centuries. Charles the Simple, the somewhat incompetent king of France, was unable to eject these invaders from the region, so in 912 CE he signed a treaty with Rollo, the leader of the Danes in Normandy. This treaty made Rollo a vassal Duke. After a few centuries, these Viking Normans lost their Norse language and "went native" by adapting the French tongue, French dress, French custom, and French law. However, on the continent, Norman French gradually became considered "bad French" in contrast with the "sophisticated" Parisian French. This factor might have been one catalyst in how the Anglo-Normans gradually abandoned French after they conquered the British isles. In terms of English's linguistic development, Norman French profoundly influenced our language after the Norman Invasion of 1066.

NORMAN CONQUEST: Loosely, another term for the Norman Invasion, though technically some historians prefer to differentiate between the "Norman Invasion" and the "Norman Conquest" by limiting the scope of the invasion to the initial year 1066 when the Normans landed in England and using the term "Norman Conquest" to refer to the twenty-one year period over that in which Duke William expanded and solidified his control over all England. In this class, we will use the two terms synonymously. See Norman Invasion, below.

NORMAN INVASION: Not to be confused with D-Day during World War II, medieval historians use this title for a much earlier invasion in 1066. Duke William of Normandy's conquest of England from 1066-1087 had profound impact on English by importing Norman-French vocabulary into Anglo-Saxon, bringing about the formation of Middle English. See also Battle of Hastings and Norman.

NORMANDY: The region along the northern coast of France. See Norman for more information.

NORTHERN DIALECT: A dialect of American English stretching through the northernmost sections of the United States.

NORTH GERMANIC: The sub-branch of the Germanic languages that contains Swedish and Old Norse.

NORTH MIDLAND DIALECT: A dialect of American English spoke in a strip of land just south of the Northern Dialect. This should not be confused with the Midlands dialect of English spoken in Britain.

NORTHUMBRIAN: The Old English dialect spoken in the kingdom of Northumbria (i.e., north of the Umber river).

NOSTOS: The theme or motif of the homecoming--a return to one's family, community, or geographic origins after a long time away. Traditionally, this Greek designation refers specifically to Odysseus's return to Ithaca after two decades of wandering, but the motif appears in many other myths, folktales, and literary works. Steven Marion's novel Hollow Ground, for instance, deals with a return to Appalachia after the collapse of the coal-mining industry.

NOSTRATIC: A hypothetical superfamily of languages that might embrace other large family language groups--including Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, possibly Afroasiatic, and other family groups. Its existence is highly contested, however, since its origins would go back beyond the 5,000 BCE marker--long before written records existed to help corroborate that nostratic ever really existed.

NOVEL: In its broadest sense, a novel is any extended fictional prose narrative focusing on a few primary characters but often involving scores of secondary characters. The fact that it is in prose helps distinguish it from other lengthy works like epics. We might arbitrarily set the length at 50,000 words or more as a dividing point with the novella and the short story. The English novel is primarily thought of as a product of the eighteenth-century, though many earlier narratives in classical Greek such as Heliodorus's Aethiopica and Daphnis and Chloë (attributed to Longus) easily fulfill the normal requirements of the genre, as the scholar Edmund Gosse has pointed out. Likewise, the Japanese Tale of the Genji and collected writings of Murasaki Shikibu from 1004 CE would clearly qualify as well by our definition--though most Western scholars treat these works as separate from the novel genre because historically they do not play a direct part or direct influence in the evolution of the popular English novel genre today.

NOVELLA: An extended fictional prose narrative that is longer than a short story, but not quite as long as a novel. We might arbitrarily assign an approximate length of 20,000-50,000 words. Early prototypes include the Decameron of Boccaccio, the Cento Novelle Antiche, and the Heptameron of Marguerite of Valois. English examples include Henry James's Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Note that some scholars in previous generations distinguished between what they called the novella (short stories in Italian, French, and German that served as later influences on English prose) and the novelette (English extended prose narratives longer than a short story but not quite as long as a novel.) Today, most American critics use the two terms interchangeably.

NOVEL OF MANNERS: A novel that describes in detail the customs, behaviors, habits, and expectations of a certain social group at a specific time and place. Usually these conventions shape the behavior of the main characters, and sometimes even stifle or repress them. Often the novel of manners is satiric, and it always realistic in depiction. Examples include Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and various works by Edith Wharton.

NOVEL OF SENSIBILITY: See sentimental novel.

NOVELETTE: See discussion under novella.

NOWELL CODEX: The common scholarly nickname for the medieval manuscript that contains Beowulf. The official designation for this manuscript is Cotton Vitellius A.xv. You can click here to see the first page of Beowulf as it appears in the Nowell Codex. Cf. manuscript.

NUMEROLOGY: Number symbolism, especially the idea that certain numbers have sacred meanings. Classical Hebrew writers, following the lead of other Mesopotamian cultures, often embody certain numbers with sacred meanings--such as three, seven, twelve, forty, etc., an idea that develops more fully under the medieval kabalah. Many medieval authors such as Dante use poetic structure to convey theological ideas, such as Dante's use of terza rima in collected groups of thirty-three stanzas per canto in The Divine Comedy, or the Pearl Poet's elaborate numerological symbolism in Pearl. The standard reference book is Vincent Hopper's Medieval Number Symbolism. Click here for more information.

OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE: Click here for a pdf handout explaining this term.

The American Painter Washington Allston first used the term "objective correlative" about 1840, but T. S. Eliot

made it famous and revived it in an influential essay on Hamlet in the year 1919. Eliot writes:

If writers or poets or playwrights want to create an emotional reaction in the audience, they must find a combination

of images, objects, or description evoking the appropriate emotion. The source of the emotional reaction isn't in one

particular object, one particular image, or one particular word. Instead, the emotion originates in the combination of

these phenomena when they appear together.

For an example, consider the following scene in a hypothetical film. As the audience watches the movie, the scene

shows a dozen different people all dressed in black, holding umbrellas. The setting is a cemetery filled with cracked

gray headstones. The sky is darkening, and droplets of rain slide off the faces of stone angels like teardrops. A lone

widow raises her veil and as she takes off her wedding ring and sets it on the gravestone. Faint sobbing is audible

somewhere behind her in the crowd of mourners. As the widow starts to turn away, a break appears in the clouds.

From this gap in the gray sky, a single shaft of sunlight descends and falls down on a green spot near the grave,

where a single yellow marigold is blossoming. The rain droplets glitter like gold on the petals of the flower. Then

the scene ends, and the actor's names begin to scroll across the screen at the end of the movie.

Suppose I asked the viewers, "What was your emotional reaction after watching this scene?" Most (perhaps all) of

the watchers would say, "At first, the scene starts out really sad, but I felt new hope for the widow in spite of her

grief." Why do we all react the same way emotionally? The director provided no voiceover explaining that there's

still hope for the woman. No character actually states this. The scene never even directly states the widow herself

was sad at the beginning. So what specifically evoked the emotional reaction? If we look at the passage, we can't

identify any single object or word or thing that by itself would necessarily evokes hope. Sunlight could evoke pretty

much any positive emotion. A marigold by itself is pretty, but when we see one, we don't normally feel surges of

optimism. In the scene described above, our emotional reaction seems to originate not in one word or image or

phrase, but in the combination of all these things together, like a sort of emotional algebra. The objective correlative

is that formula for creating a specific emotional reaction merely by the presence of certain words, objects, or items

juxtaposed with each other.

The sum is greater than the parts, so to speak. In this case, "black clothes + umbrellas + cracked gray headstones +

darkening sky + rain droplets + faces of stone angels + veil + wedding ring + faint sobbing + turning away" is an

artistic formula that equates with a complex sense of sadness. When that complex sense of sadness is combined with

"turning away + break in clouds + single yellow marigold blossoming + shaft of sunlight + green spot of grass +

glittering raindrops + petals," the new ingredients now create a new emotional flavor: hope. Good artists intuitively

sense this symbolic or rhetorical potential.

T. S. Eliot suggests that, if a play or poem or narrative succeeds and inspires the right emotion, the creator has found

just the right objective correlative. If a particular scene seems heavy-handed, or it leaves the audience without an

emotional reaction, or it invokes the wrong emotion from the one appropriate for the scene, that particular objective

correlative doesn't work. For extended literary discussion, see Eliseo Vivas' "The Objective Correlative of T. S.

Eliot," reprinted in Critiques and Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert W. Stallman (1949).

OBJECTIVE FORM: A form of pronouns used as the objects of prepositions and verbs. Examples include the pronouns him, her, and them. Modern English uses a single objective form to mark what originally had been two grammatical cases--the accusative and the dative.

OBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW: See discussion under point of view.

OBLIQUE FORM: The various forms or cases of any word in a declined language except the nominative form or nominative case. The term "oblique" to describe this comes from medieval grammar exercises, where a young monk would list all the declensions of a Latin word at an oblique angle except for the nominative form. Thus, these forms became known as "oblique forms."

OCCASIONAL POEM: A poem written or recited to commemorate a specific event such as a wedding, an anniversary, a military victory or failure, a funeral, a holiday, or other notable date. It may be light or serious. Notable examples are Milton's "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont," Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland," Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" and Yeats's "Easter 1916." Some of Chaucer's poetry was occasional verse. He probably wrote "The Book of the Duchess" either within a few months of the death of John of Gaunt's wife (traditionally dated as 12 September 1369), or he may possibly have written it for one of the later annual commemorative services Gaunt held to honor the anniversary of her death. Chaucer may have written "The Parliament of Fowls" for Valentine's Day in 1380 as a light-hearted recital to mark the negotiations concerning the marriage of Richard II to Princess Anne of Bohemia.

OCTAVE: Not to be confused with octavo, below, an octave is the first part of an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet; an octave is a set of eight lines that rhyme according to the pattern ABBAABBA. See sonnet, below.

OCTAVO: Not to be confused with octave, above, octavo is a term from the early production of paper and vellum in the medieval period. When a single, large uncut sheet is folded once and attached to create two leaves, or four pages, and then bound together, the resulting text is called a folio. If the folio is in turn folded in half once more and cut, the resulting size of page is called a quarto. If the quarto is in turn folded in half and cut once more, the result is an octavo. Thus, an octavo is a book made of sheets of material folded three times, to create eight leaves, or sixteen pages, each about 4 inches wide and 5 inches high, to make a tiny book. On a single sheet, the page visible on the right-hand side of an open book or the "top" side of such a page is called the recto side (Latin for "right"), and the reverse or "bottom" side of such a page (the page visible on the left-hand side of an open book) is called the verso side. Only one of Shakespeare's Renaissance plays, Richard Duke of York (better known as Henry VI, Part 3) was published in octavo format, but many medieval psalters and books of hours appear in octavo manuscripts. Compare octavo with folio and quarto (below).

ODE: A long, often elaborate stanzaic poem of varying line lengths and sometimes intricate rhyme schemes dealing with a serious subject matter and treating it reverently. The ode is usually much longer than the song or lyric, but usually not as long as the epic poem. Conventionally, many odes are written or dedicated to a specific subject. For instance, "Ode to the West Wind" is about the winds that bring change of season in England. Keats has a clever inversion of this convention in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which his choice of the preposition on implies the poem actually exists in the artwork on the urn itself, rather than as a separate piece of literary art in his poetry. Classical odes are often divided by tone, with Pindaric odes being heroic and ecstatic and Horatian odes being cool, detached, and balanced with criticism. Andrew Marvell's "Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" is an example of a Horatian ode.

OED: The standard abbreviation among scholars for The Oxford English Dictionary, a huge twenty+ volume set that functions as an historical dictionary--generally considered the most authoritative and scholarly dictionary of English available. See Oxford English Dictionary.

OEDIPAL COMPLEX: The late Victorian and early twentieth-century psychologist Freud argued that male children, jealous of sharing their mother's attention with a father-figure, would come to possess a subconscious incestuous desire to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers. They would in a sense desire to usurp the father's place in the household. In most healthy adults, this urge would be repressed and channeled into other pursuits, but echoes of the hidden desire would linger in the psyche. Freud coined the phrase from the myth of Oedipus, the doomed Greek hero. In Oedipus's infancy, prophets predicted that he would kill his own father and marry his mother. Every effort made to thwart the prophecy, however, ended up bringing it about. The events are recounted most masterfully in Sophocles's play, Oedipus Rex. Oedipus's crimes--though he was unknowing--brought about a dreadful a curse on his family, and violence lingered to haunt the family in future generations, as recounted in plays like Antigonê. Several famous characters in myth and literature seem to haunted by a similar jealousy comparable to the phenomenon Freud describes. For instance, Greek mythology is littered with younger deities that usurp their father's position and castrate the elder god after assuming power, such as the way Zeus overthrows Chronos. Concerning the play Hamlet, diverse psychoanalytical critics have commented on Hamlet's rage at his Gertrude's sexual romps and Hamlet's tormented desire to murder his uncle/father-figure Claudius. See Freudian criticism and wish fulfillment.

OFF GLIDE: In linguistics, the second-half of a diphthong sound.

OFF RHYME: In poetry, another term for inexact rhyme.

OGAM (also spelled ogham, pronounced either OH-yeem or AG-em): The term comes from Old Irish, "Oghma," probably an eponym of Oghma the Irish god of invention. It refers to a form of symbolic Celtic markings common in the 5th and 6th centuries in which a communicant would scratch or notch a series of marks on the edge of a stone or on a stick to indicate letters. The number and direction of the scratches or notches indicated the specific sound to form a word, and together they constituted an entire writing system. Ogam markings are commonly found on Irish standing stones, tombs, and boundary markers, and the alphabet the Irish used consisted of 20 letters, though slightly different systems existed in Wales and in Europe. Click here for a handout on ogam markings.

OGHAM: See discussion under ogam, above.

O. HENRY ENDING: Also called a trick ending or a surprise ending, this term refers to a totally unexpected and unprepared-for turn of events, one which alters the action in a narrative. O. Henry endings usually do not work well with foreshadowing, but particularly clever artists may craft their narratives so that the foreshadowing exists in retrospect.The term comes from the short stories of O. Henry (a pen name for William Sidney Porter), which typically involve such a conclusion. Note that an O. Henry ending is usually a positive term of praise for the author's cleverness. This is the opposite sentiment from a deus ex machina ending, in which the unexpected or unprepared-for ending strikes the audience as artificial, arbitrary, or unartful.

OLD COMEDY: The Athenian comedies dating to 400-499 BCE, featuring invective, satire, ribald humor, and song and dance. See further discussion under stock character.

OLD ENGLISH: Also known as Anglo-Saxon, Old English is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. It is a Germanic language that was introduced to the British Isles by tribes such as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in a series of invasions in the fifth century. Poems such as Beowulf are samples of Old English. Old English was common in England from about 449 AD up to about 1100 AD. The Norman Conquest in 1066 introduced a new ruling class of Normans who spoke French, and the influx of French vocabulary altered Old English, eventually resulting in Middle English. See Middle English and Modern English. To see computerized lettering and words transcribed from an Old English document, click here. To avoid irritating your teacher, do not confuse Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. This diagram will help you contrast them.

OLLAMH: An ancient Irish storyteller. The ollamh profession flourished between the sixth and fifteenth centuries. They were required professionally to know 350 stories to hold the rank. The Welsh equivalent is a cyfarwydd.

OMEN: A miraculous sign, a natural disaster, or a disturbance in nature that reveals the will of the gods in the arena of politics or social behavior or predicts a coming change in human history. Greek culture held that if the gods were upset, they might visit the lands with monsters, ghosts, floods, storms, and grotesque miracles to reveal their displeasure. Comets might appear in the heavens--or phantom armies might fight in the clouds. For instance, in the Odyssey, Book 12, lines 55-60, Odysseus's starving sailors slaughter and eat the holy cattle on the Isle of Hélios. They then see a dire portent, when the dead cows animate like zombies while in the midst of being cooked:

And soon the gods sent portents:

After the heroic age of Homer, earth tremors and similar disruptions also could lead governmental debate to a standstill in Athens--a fact causing some discomfort since Greece has always been a tectonically active area.

The Romans likewise shared this belief that strange meteorological and biological behavior indicated the displeasure of the heavens. During the days of the Roman Republic, in the year 60 BCE, a great storm uprooted trees, destroyed houses, and sank ships in the Tiber. Cicero argued these disasters showed the gods were upset with Julius Caesar's proposed legislative changes. Likewise, if a vote passed in the Roman senate, and lightning was seen to flash in the sky, the Senate would often repeal whatever legislaton they just passed. (The Roman politician Bibulus was notorious for trying to overturn legislation this way; each time a law passed he did not favor, he would claim to see a flash of lightning on the horizon--even if the sky was blue and cloudless.) Likewise, one of the more important government officials in Rome was the pullarius, the guardian of the sacred roosters that would pluck out messages in grain for priests to interpret.

This superstition about omens did not die out with the end of pagan belief. Medieval Christians could point to the ten plagues of Egypt as a biblical incident in which natural disturbances were linked to divine activity and historic change, so they readily incorporated these Greco-Roman ideas in the doctrine of the Chain of Being. The idea was still prevalent in Shakespeare's day, so Shakespeare accompanies the murder of King Duncan in Macbeth with an eclipse, fierce storms, and a bizarre outbreak of cannibalism in which the horses in the royal stables eat each other alive. In the same way, in the play Hamlet, the appearance of the ghost at Elsinore and the comet in the sky convinces the scholarly Horatio that some great disturbance of the state is at hand.

ONOMASTIC: Related to names. For instance, a character's name might contain an onomastic symbol--if that character is named Faith (as in "Young Goodman Brown") or Lucy Westenra (which means "the light of the west") in Bram Stoker's Dracula, or Pandarus (which means "all-giving" and puns on "pander") in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Toponyms are also of interest to onomastic studies.

ONOMATOPOEIA: The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect. For instance, buzz, click, rattle, and grunt make sounds akin to the noise they represent. A higher level of onomatopoeia is the use of imitative sounds throughout a sentence to create an auditory effect. For instance, Tennyson writes in The Princess about "The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees." All the /m/ and /z/ sounds ultimately create that whispering, murmuring effect Tennyson describes. In similar ways, poets delight in choosing sounds that match their subject-matter, such as using many clicking k's and c's when describing a rapier duel (to imitate the clack of metal on metal), or using many /s/ sounds when describing a serpent, and so on. Robert Browning liked squishy sounds when describing squishy phenomena, and scratchy sounds when describing the auditory effect of lighting a match, such as in his poem "Meeting at Night": "As I gain the cove with pushing prow, / And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. / a tap at the pane, the quick sharp, scratch / and blue spurt of a lighted match." The technique is ancient, and we can find a particularly cunning example in Virgil's Latin, in which he combines /d/ and /t/ sounds along with galloping rhythm to mimic in words the sound of horses he describes: "Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum. . . ." Onomatopoeia appears in all languages, and it is a common optional effect in various genres such as the Japanese haiku.

ONEIROMANCY: The belief that dreams could predict the future, or the act of predicting the future by analyzing dreams. Elements of oneiromantic belief may have influenced the genre of medieval dream visions, especially Biblical passages regarding divine premonitions appearing in the form of dreams. Likewise, in Renaissance literature such as Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare readily adapted oneiromantic beliefs into the dreams of his characters to create foreshadowing.

OPEN-AIR THEATER: An amphitheater, especially the unroofed public playhouses in the suburbs of London. Shakespeare's Globe and the Rose are two examples.

OPEN POETIC FORM: A poem of variable length, one which can consist of as many lines as the poet wishes to write. Every poem written in open poetic form, therefore, is unique. Open poetic form contrasts with closed poetic form, in which the specific subgenre of poetry requires a predetermined number of stanzas, lines, feet, or other components. For instance, a sonnet is a closed poetic form, in which the poem can be no more or no less than fourteen lines long, with ten syllables in each line. Open poetic form is not to be confused with free verse poetry. Free verse poetry is a subtype of open poetry, but it is not constrained by any conventions at all regarding meter or rhyme. For example, Alfred Noyes, "The Highwayman" is in open poetic form. Although "The Highwayman" has a set structure for rhyme and meter, the number of stanzas necessary to tell the poem is not predetermined by a required length, as is the case in a limerick or a sonnet. However, Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" is written in open poetic form and it is also written in free verse form. Whitman's lines vary in length, and the meter varies from passage to passage, and any rhymes appear haphazardly rather than as part of a predetermined pattern required by a genre's constraints.

OPEN SYLLABLE: Any syllable ending in a vowel, like the word tree.

OPEN SYSTEM: A system that can be adjusted for new functions or purposes, and hence produce new and unpredicted results. Human language is an example of an open system. To a lesser extent, so is XML code (extensible markup language), such as the HTML that makes this webpage.

ORAL FORMULAIC: Having traits associated with works intended to be spoken aloud before an audience of listeners. Examples of oral formulaic traits are (1) repetition of words or passages, (2) use of epithets after or before a character's name, (3) mnemonic devices to help the speaker with recitation, (4) subdivision into sections suitable for recital during a single evening, (5) summaries of previous material in each section to help a listening audience keep track of complicated plot, and (6) episodic structure that allows the speaker to "ad lib" sections if he or she forgets a passage. Critics such as Miltman Parry have argued that literature such as Beowulf, the Tain, and Homer's Odyssey show signs of oral formulaic structure, which suggests the poems may have existed for centuries as recited materials (oral transmission) before being written down as a text.

ORAL TRANSMISSION: The spreading or passing on of material by word of mouth. Before the development of writing and the rise of literacy, oral transmission and memorization was the most common means by which narrative and poetic art could spread through a culture. See ballad, bard, epic, folklore, oral-formulaic, etc.

ORCHESTRA (Greek "dancing place"): (1) In modern theaters, the ground-floor area on the first floor where the audience sits to watch the play; (2) in classical Greek theaters, a central circle where the chorus performed

ORDER OF THE GARTER: An elite order of knights first founded around 1347-1348 by King Edward III. The Knights of the Garter traditionally wore as their emblem a lady's garter around one leg. According to one legend, this emblem and the order's motto came about when King Edward kneeled down to pick up a garter that had fallen from Joan of Kent's leg, much to her embarrassment. King Edward supposedly placed it on his own leg (or in some versions of the legend, placed it back on her leg), and turned to admonish the courtiers who were snickering. He said in French "Honi soit qui mal y pense" ("Shame to him who thinks evil of it," or, more popularly, "Evil to him who evil thinks.") This became the motto of his elite knights. Some scholars dismiss this legend as folklore, and instead suggest that the garter might symbolize the homage paid by knights to ladies; others suggest that the circular nature of the garter is an allusion to King Arthur's round table; King Edward had attempted to revive the Arthurian legends in association with his own court, and the round table played a prominent part in the Arthurian myth. The Knights of the Garter (KG) exist to this day in England, and meet every year at Windsor Castle. Click here for more information and some photos from recent induction ceremonies. Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor is set at Windsor during one of these annual inductions, and it may have first been performed for Elizabeth when the Lord Chamberlain (Shakespeare's immediate boss) was being inducted into the Order of the Garter. The text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight concludes with the order's motto at the end of the tale.

ORGANIC -E: An that is pronounced and serves a purpose in distinguishing declensions. In Old and Middle English, this was pronounced--often as a lightly stressed syllable. By the end of the Middle English period, the -e at the end of many words was merely a scribal -e.

ORGANIC UNITY: An idea common to Romantic poetry and influential up through the time of the New Critics in the twentieth century, the theory of organic unity suggests all elements of a good literary work are interdependent upon each other to create an emotional or intellectual whole. If any one part of the art is removed--whether it is a character, an action, a speech, a description, or authorial observation--the entire work diminishes in potency as a result. The idea also suggests that the growth or development of a piece of good literature--from its beginning to its end--occurs naturally according to an understandable sequence. That sequence may be chronological, logical, or otherwise step-by-step in some productive manner. See also unity.

ORIGINAL SIN: A theological doctrine arguing that all humans at the moment of conception inherit collective responsibility and guilt for the sins of Adam and Eve along with an innate tendency towards evil. The idea is largely inspired by Romans 5:12, which reads, "Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men." Most modern interpreters consider the "one man" to be Adam, and thus Adam's actions caused innate sinfulness and the cycle of death-and-life to enter the world. The term "original sin" (Latin, peccatum origine) does not appear in the Bible, however. Tertullian coined the phrase in the second century, and Saint Augustine popularized it and elaborated upon it in his theological writings. Many modern Christians think of original sin as the consequence of Adam eating the fruit in the Garden of Eden. For Saint Augustine and Tertullian, however, when they first developed the doctrine, the source of original sin in later generations was not that Adam and Eve ate the fruit, but that he and Eve engaged in sex later while in a state of sin. It was this secondary sinful act, argued Augustine, that passed along the taint of original sin to subsequent generations, rendering humanity incapable of achieving salvation without divine grace.

Original sin as a theological component of soteriology has had a profound effect on both medieval Catholicism and modern Protestant Christianity. Responses to it include on one extreme from the Calvinist doctrine of "infant damnation" with its the related Calvinist model of humanity's "total depravity"; this theology embraces the doctrine fully. On the opposite extreme, Pelagian heresies rejected original sin altogether, holding that each human is only accountable for his or her own actions rather than inheriting sin from one's ancestors. The modern doctrine of "Prevenient Grace" in Methodism is in many ways a watered-down version of medieval Pelagianism.

ORPHAN: In printing, an orphan is a single short line beginning a paragraph but separated from all the other lines in that paragraph by a page break, thus appearing by itself at the bottom of the previous page or column. Orphans 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 widow.

ORTHOGRAPHY: (1) The linguistic term for a writing system that represents the sounds or words of a particular languages by making visible marks on some surface (Algeo 325). (2) A systematic method of spelling.

O-STEM: A class of Old English nouns with feminine gender.

OSTRANENIE: See defamiliarization.

OTHER WORLD, THE: A motif in folklore and mythology in which an alternative world exists in conjunction with the physical world. This world is typically occupied by mysterious or unknowable beings that resemble humanity but who are alien in their motivations and concerns, often toying or playing with mortals for their own amusement in one moment, or showering them with gifts and benefits the next. In Old Irish myths, for instance, a tall and frightening race of Elves (the Sidh, pronounced like the modern English word "she") lived underneath the hills. A similar race, the Alfar, appear in Norse mythology. In some myths, the race is divided into good and evil races, the Blessed or Unblessed Courts, or the "Light-Elves" and "Dark-Elves" (liosalfar and svartalfar), but in most accounts the elvish races are merely capricious and unpredictable in their behavior.

Anthropological studies note how primitive societies often consider liminal (in-between) times and places to be dangerous or magically charged, and this holds true for the Other World motif. Journey back and forth between the human world and the realms of Faerie might be achieved at liminal times. Examples of such times might be Beltain or Samhain, the two holidays marking the transition from winter to summer and vice-versa, or at sunset and sunrise, a liminal time between day and night, or at noon or midnight. At such moments of flux, gates into fairyland might open in hillsides or in lake ways. Likewise, liminal spaces might provide permanent entrance into the Other World, transitional places that were neither one location or another. Suspect places or areas include Ymp-trees (which are artificially grafted blends of two tree species), doorways (which are neither indoors nor outdoors), sea-shores (which are neither sea nor land), fords for running water (which are neither rock nor river), boundary markers, gates, crossroads, graveyards, gibbets, and the north side of churches. Finally, unusual geological or architectural features were thought to be dangerous spots where ruptures might manifest into the other world, including barrow-mounds (cf. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), standing stones, unusually large or twisted trees, and fairy-rings (circular growths of mushrooms).

Often folklore involves fairy visitations to the human world, such as the late medieval belief in "trooping fairies" who would ride on hunts or parades through the forest. Other examples are the collective changeling legends, in which elves would kidnap human children and leave behind one of their sickly or elderly elves in the crib disguised via illusion. (In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, one of the quarrels between King Oberon and Titania is the question about who has ownership over a kidnapped human child.) The other world was often depicted as mirroring the human world in its organization. (Thus, in Chinese mythology, the Celestial Hierarchy had a court with court-officials exactly identical to court of the Tang dynasty, and in medieval romances, the other world might have a feudal government complete with castles, laborers, nobles and knights to match that of Europe.)

Often the otherworldly inhabitants only mimic the outward semblance of humanity, but their actual motivations may be nonsensical or contradictory (witness Through the Looking Glass, more commonly known as Alice in Wonderland).

If the supernatural region is inhabited by the souls of the dead, scholars typically call it the underworld rather than the Other World, though in actual mythology, the distinction is often blurred, such as in the Middle English Sir Orfeo, where the fairylands are inhabited by the mangled corpses of the dead. See also Descent into the Underworld.

OUTLAW: An individual determined by a council vote to be an outlaw at a thing or an althing was considered outside the normal bounds of kinship relations in Iceland. He was considered outside the law (hence the term), and anyone who met him would be allowed to kill him or rob him without repercussions from the rest of the Viking community. Since the medieval government of Iceland did not have an official bureaucracy of police, sherrifs, or gendarmerie, much less a national army to enforce its law, the declaration of outlaw status was a common punishment. It allowed an entire community to take the law in its own hands, in its own time. Many of the major heroes in Icelandic sagas are outlaws or become outlaws over the course of the saga.

OUTRIDE: See discussion under sprung rhythm.

OUTSIDE SPEAKER: The "speaker" of a poem or story presented in third-person point of view, i.e., the imaginary voice that speaks of other characters in the third person (as he / she / they) without ever revealing the speaker's own identity or relationship to the narrative.

OV LANGUAGE (pronounced "oh-vee"): A language that tends to place the grammatical object before the verb in a sentence. Japanese is an example of an OV language. Contrast with VO languages.

OVERGENERALIZATION: In linguistics, the introduction of a nonstandard or previously non-existent spelling or verb form when a speaker or writer makes an analogy to a regular spelling or a regular verb. For instance, a child who says "I *broked it" has created a new verb form (*broked) by an analogy to how regular verbs form. He has overgeneralized rather than learned the irregular past participle broken and the irregular past tense broke. Cf. hypercorrection and linguistic analogy.

OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY: This fat, twelve+ volume work functions as an historical dictionary of English. It is generally considered the most authoritative and scholarly dictionary of English available--with nearly 300,000 word entries in its most recent form. Scholars refer to it lovingly as the OED. The project arose out of meetings of the Philological Society of London in 1857, and in January of 1858, the society passed a resolution to begin the OED's creation. The task was to record every word that could be found in English from around 1000 CE and to exhibit its history: i.e, where the word first appeared in surviving writings, and how its spelling, meaning, and form changed across the years. This would be illustrated by quoting example texts using the word in each decade. Herbert Coleridge functioned as the first editor, but medievalist F. J. Furnivall oversaw much of the initial work. The OED's first installment ("A") came out in 1884, and the complete first edition came out piecemeal over time. In 1933, a supplementary volume followed the complete set. A newer four volume supplement came out piecemeal between 1972 and 1986--and an amalgamated second edition in 1989. Oxford University Press is currently working on an exciting third edition.

OXYMORON (plural oxymora, also called paradox): Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Simple or joking examples include such oxymora as jumbo shrimp, sophisticated rednecks, and military intelligence. The richest literary oxymora seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions. These oxymora are sometimes called paradoxes. For instance, "without laws, we can have no freedom." Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous oxymoron: "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32). Richard Rolle uses an almost continuous string of oxymora in his Middle English work, "Love is Love That Lasts For Aye." Click here for more examples of oxymora.

PAEAN: Among the earliest Greeks, the word paean signifies "a dance and hymn with a specific rhythm which is endued with an absolving in healing power" (Burkett 44). In later usage, any song of praise to a deity is called a paean.

PALATAL: In linguistics, any sound involving the hard palate--especially the tongue touching or moving toward the hard palate.

PALATAL DIPTHONGIZATION: A sound change in which either the ash or the /e/ sound in Old English words became a diphthong when preceded by palatal consonants. For instance, Modern English cheese comes from Old English ciese, wich is a cognate of Latin caseus. Scholars can tell the word in Old English must have been adopted after the time of palatal diphthongization--otherwise it would have a simple /e/ sound rather than the diphthong. Thus, palatal dipthongization is useful for philologists who wish to date a borrowed word in Old English.

PALATALIZATION: In linguistics, the process of making a sound more palatal--i.e., moving the blade of the tongue closer to the hard palate.

PALATOVELAR: In linguistics, a sound that is either palatal or velar.

PALINDROME: A word, sentence, or verse that reads the same way backward or foreward. Certain words in English naturally function as palindromes: for instance, civic, rotor, race car, radar, level and so on. However, when individuals seek to combine several words at once, the result becomes a sort of perverse art. Here are some longer English examples culled from J. A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory:

• 
  Madam, I'm Adam.
  
• 
  Sir, I'm Iris.
  
• 
  Able was I ere I saw Elba. (attributed apocryphally to Napoleon, who was exiled on Elba, though in historical fact he apparently spoke no English!)
  
• 
  A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!
  
• 
  Sex at noon taxes.
  
• 
  "Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel." (anonymous 18th-century gravestone)
  
• 
  Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts!
  
• 
  "Deliver desserts," demanded Nemesis--emended, named, stressed, reviled.
  
• 
  T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: "Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet." (W. H. Auden)
  
• 
  Stop Syrian! I start at rats in airy spots!
  

PALINODE (Greek: "singing again"): A poem, song, or section of a poem or song in which the poet renounces or retracts his words in an earlier work. Usually this is meant to apologize or counterbalance earlier material.

The first recorded use of the palinode is a lyric written by the Greek author Stesichorus (7th century BCE), in which he retracts his earlier statement claiming that the Trojan War was entirely Helen's fault. Ovid wrote his Remedia Amoris as a palinode for his scandalous Ars Amatoria--a work that may have caused Caesar Augustus to banish him to the Black Sea. As a theme, the palinode is especially common in religious poetry and love poetry. The use of the palinode became conventional in patristic and medieval writings--as evidenced in Augustine, Bede, Giraldus Cambrensis, Jean de Meun, Sir Lewis Clifford, and others.

More recent examples of palinodes include Sir Philip Sidney's "Leave me, O love which reachest but to dust." Here, his palinode renounces the poetry of sexual love for that of divine grace. Likewise, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women includes a palinode in which the author "takes back" what he said about unfaithful women like Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde. At the end of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer goes so far as to write a retraction for all his secular literature. See also retraction.

PANDECT (Grk. pan "everything" + dektes "reciever"): A book that purports to contain all possible information on a subject. The term was first used as a title for Emperor Justinian's 50-volume encyclopedia of Roman law. Cf. summa.

PANEGYRIC: A speech or poem designed to praise another person or group. In ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric, it was one branch of public speaking, with established rules and conventions found in the works of Menander and Hermogenes. Famous examples include Pliny's eulogy on Emperor Trajan and Isocrates' oration on the Olympic games of 380.

PANGLOSSIAN (Grk. pan "everything" + Lat. glossare "to explain or comment upon"): The word is an eponym based on the fictional Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's satire, Candide. Dr. Pangloss is a naively optimistic pedant who upholds the doctrine that "all is for the best," and that "we live in the best of all possible worlds," claiming that a benevolent deity creates all things for positive purposes, and if we could only decipher cause/effect accurately, we would see this. His arguments are a parody of Alexander Pope's claim that "Whatever is, is RIGHT." Voltaire uses Pangloss as a straw-man in Candide, and Voltaire tries to show through the more inane Panglossian arguments that, in fact, the world is a highly flawed place and it does not live up to its ideal possibilities.

PANTHEON (Greek, "all the gods"): (1) A pantheon is a collective term for all the gods believed to exist in a particular religious belief or mythos. Thus, we can talk of the Hittite pantheon, the Greek pantheon, etc. (2) The Pantheon is a great temple in Rome dedicated to all the Olympian gods, not to be confused with the Parthenon, the great temple dedicatd to the virgin goddess Athena, which is situated on top of the Acropolis in Athens.

PAPAL INDULGENCE: See discussion under pardoner.

PARABLE (Greek: "throwing beside" or "placing beside"): A story or short narrative designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, psychological reality, or general truth. Rather than using abstract discussion, a parable always teaches by comparison with real or literal occurrences--especially "homey" everyday occurrences a wide number of people can relate to. Well-known examples of parables include those found in the synoptic Gospels, such as "The Prodigal Son" and "The Good Samaritan." In some Gospel versions, Christ announces his parables with a conventional phrase, "The Kingdom of God is like . . . ." Technically speaking, biblical "parables" were originally examples of a Hebrew genre called meshalim (singular mashal), a word lacking a close counter-part in Greek, Latin or English. Meshalim in Hebrew refer to "mysterious speech," i.e., spiritual riddles or enigmas the speaker couches in story-form. Thus, in Matthew 13:11 and Mark 4:11-12, Christ states that he speaks in parables so that outsiders will not be able to understand his teachings. It is only late in the Greek New Testament that these meshalim are conflated with parables or allegorical readings designed for ease of understanding.

Non-religious works can be parables as well. For example, Melville's Billy Budd demonstrates that absolute good--such as the impressionable, naive young sailor--may not co-exist with absolute evil--the villain Claggart. Cf. fable, allegory, and symbolism, or click here for a PDF handout discussing the differences between these terms.

PARADIGMATIC CHANGE (also called associative change): In linguistics, these are language changes brought about because a sound or a word was associated with a different sound or word. Algeo provides the following example:

. . . The side of a ship on which it was laden (that is loaded) was called the ladeboard, but its opposite, starboard, influenced a change in pronunication to larboard. Then, because larboard was likely to be confused with starboard because of their similarity of sound, it was generally replaced by port. (11)

PARADOX (also called oxymoron): Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions, such as noting that "without laws, we can have no freedom." Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous paradox: "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32). Richard Rolle uses an almost continuous string of paradoxes in his Middle English work, "Love is Love That Lasts For Aye." Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" notes "And all men kill the thing they love." The taoist master Lao-Tzu makes extraordinary use of paradox in the Tao-te Ching in his discussion of "the Way."

PARAGRAM: A sub-type of pun involving similarities in sound. See examples and discussion under pun.

PARALANGUAGE: The non-verbal features that accompany speech and help convey meaning. For example, facial expression, gesticulation, body stance, and tone can help convey additional meaning to the spoken word; these are all examples of communication through paralanguage.

PARALLELISM: When the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. For instance, "King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable." The previous sentence has parallel structure in use of adjectives. However, the following sentence does not use parallelism: "King Alfred tried to make clear laws that had precision and were equitable."

If the writer uses two parallel structures, the result is isocolon parallelism: "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."

If there are three structures, it is tricolon parallelism: "That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Or, as one student wrote, "Her purpose was to impress the ignorant, to perplex the dubious, and to startle the complacent." Shakespeare used this device to good effect in Richard II when King Richard laments his unfortunate position:

I'll give my jewels for a set of beads,

My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,

My gay apparel for an almsman's gown,

My figured goblets for a dish of wood . . . . (3.3.170-73)

PARANOMASIA: The technical Greek term for what English-speakers commonly refer to as a "pun." See extended discussion under pun, below.

PARAPHRASE: A brief restatement in one's own words of all or part of a literary or critical work, as opposed to quotation, in which one reproduces all or part of a literary or critical work word-for-word, exactly.

PARARHYME: Wilfred Owen's term for a slant rhyme. An example appears in his poem, "Strange Meeting," in which Owen rhymes words like years / yours and tigress / progress.

PARATAXIS: Rhetorically juxtaposing two or more clauses or prepositions together in strings or with few or no connecting conjunctions or without indicating their relationship to each other in terms of co-ordination or subordination; i.e. a loose association of clauses as opposed to hypotaxis. A common form of parataxis is asyndeton, in which expected conjunctions fail to appear for artistic reasons. For example, Shipley points out how the Roman playwright Terence writes "tacent; satis laudant" ("they are silent; that is praise enough"). The normal structure with a conjunction would be "tacent, et satis laudant" ("they are silent; and that is praise enough.") See Shipley 422-23 for this discussion and a comparison among Greek and Latin and English writers. Paratactic style is typically short and simple--like Hemingway's writing.

PARATEXT (also French peritext): In Gérard Genette's work, Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation, Genette introduces the idea of "paratext," i.e., anything external to the text itself that influences the way we read a text. These "paratexts" can be almost infinite in number, but they might include a list of other works the author has published on the front cover of a book, the gender of the author as indicated by his or her name, reviews written about the book, and editorial commentary about the work. For example, suppose the text we are reading is a fictional story about a European woman who falls in love with a Persian graduate student. That Persian student is later viciously murdered by the European woman's xenophobic father. If we see the author's name is "Susan Jones" we might interpret the text differently than if we saw the author's name was "Achmed bin Jaffah," for instance. If the same author wrote a number of murder mysteries, we might be especially prone to read this new text as influenced by that early genre work, or even expect the current text to be (rightly or wrongly) yet another murder mystery. If we read a review calling attention to the theme of lust in a work, we might experience the book differently than if we had read a different review focusing on the theme of intolerance. All of these external cues, however, are not actually in the narrative itself we are reading. Thus, they are paratextual. A New Critic from the 1930s would probably argue that all paratexts are irrelevant to determining the meaning of literary art, and the paratextual should be ignored accordingly. Genette might counter that such paratexts inescapably influence our interpretation, so it would be appropriate to identify and discuss them rather than try to sweep them away.

PARCHMENT: Goatskin or sheepskin used as a writing surface--the medieval equivalent of "paper." A technical distinction is usually made between parchment and vellum, which is made from the hide of young calves. 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 pused. 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)

PARDONER: An individual licensed by the medieval church to sell papal indulgences (i.e., "pardons"), official documents excusing the recipient from certain acts of penitence and alleviating the sinner's punishment while in purgatory. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines an indulgence as "the extra-sacramental remission of the temporal punishment due" to a sinner. Protestant students might wish to peruse the Catholic Encyclopedia's discussion of indulgences to avoid common misconceptions and distortions. The practice of selling these pardons as a means of fund-raising for the church or as a means of rewarding those who offered the church some service rose in prominence after the council of Clermont in 1095. There, Pope Urban II announced sweeping indulgences would be given to any individuals willing to go on Crusade. By the fourteenth century, the practice had developed extensively, and pardoners were lay officials authorized by the pope to sell indulgences in exchange for financial donations. Ecclesiastical abuses become commonplace problems. These abuses included unauthorized sales, the sale of forged pardons, extortion, and deliberate misrepresentation of the scope of an indulgence (i.e., treating the indulgence as a "get-out-of-hell-free" card). Chaucer's Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales represents the worst excesses of pardoners during this period.

PARDONS: Another term for papal indulgences. See discussion under pardoner.

PARODOS: In Greek tragedy, the ceremonial entrance of the chorus. Usually the chorus at this time chants a lyric relating to the main theme of the play.

PARODY (Greek: "beside, subsidiary, or mock song"): A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. The humorist achieves parody by exaggerating certain traits common to the work, much as a caricaturist creates a humorous depiction of a person by magnifying and calling attention to the person's most noticeable features. The term parody is often used synonymously with the more general term spoof, which makes fun of the general traits of a genre rather than one particular work or author. Often the subject-matter of a parody is comically inappropriate, such as using the elaborate, formal diction of an epic to describe something trivial like washing socks or cleaning a dusty attic.

Aristotle attributes the first Greek parody to Hegemon of Thasos in The Poetics, though other writings credit the playwright Hipponax with the first creation of theatrical parody. Aristophanes makes use of parody in The Frogs (in which he mocks the style of Euripides and Aeschylus). Plato also caricatures the style of various writers in the Symposium. In the Middle Ages, the first well-known English parody is Chaucer's "Sir Thopas," and Chaucer is himself the basis of parodies written by Alexander Pope and W. W. Skeat. Cervantes creates a parody of medieval romance in Don Quixote. Rabelais creates parodies of similar material in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Erasmus parodies medieval scholastic writings in Moriae Encomium. In Shamela (1741), Henry Fielding makes a parody of Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela by turning the virtuous serving girl into a spirited and sexually ambitious character who merely uses coyness and false chasteness as a tool for snagging a husband. In Joseph Andews (1742), Henry Fielding again parodies Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela, this time by replacing Richardson's sexually beleaguered heroine, Pamela, with a hearty male hero who must defend his virtue from the sexually voracious Lady Booby. In the Romantic period, Southey, Wordsworth, Browning, and Swinburne were the victims of far too many parodies in far too many works to list here. See also mock epic, satire, and spoof.

PAROLE (French, "speech"): In Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of semiology, parole is the use of language--i.e., manifestations of actual speech and writing. Parole contrasts with langue, the invisible underlying system of language that makes parole possible.