I don't have a specific topic to talk about this week so I thought I'd share two interesting things I learnt this week.
1) Hypallage
The first is a figure of speech in English called hypallage. I'm a nerd for figures-of-speech, literary devices etc., and am that annoying friend who'd interject mid-sentence to add important observations such as "Hey, that was an unexpected alliteration" or "Surely you mean figuratively and not literally" and "Nice usage of hyperbole there when you said I was the most annoying friend you've ever had haha right, guys?...Guys?..."
Hypallage (pronounced hi-pal-uh-jee) comes from the Greek word hypallagē and can be translated to "interchange" or "exchange". It's defined as
A figure of speech in which the syntactic relationship between two terms is interchanged, or—more frequently—a modifier is syntactically linked to an item other than the one that it modifies semantically. The latter type of hypallage, typically resulting in the implied personification of an inanimate or abstract noun, is also called a transferred epithet.
In the first case, any time there is a reversal of an expected relation between two words, or a mixing of the order in which words should correspond with each other, a hypallage can be said to have occurred. For example "her beauty's face" instead of "her face's beauty", or "the fire spread the wind" instead of "the wind spread the fire". Basically, a change in phrase from a more logical to a less logical relationship.
The second instance of a hypallage is similar to the transferred epithet, in which an adjective used to describe one thing is transferred to another. For example: "an unhappy marriage". The marriage itself cannot be said to be unhappy, but the people in it are. Or "I lit a thoughtful cigarette", signifies lighting a cigarette when you happen to be deep in thought but it is you who is thoughtful and not the cigarette.
The usual response I get when I talk about figures-of-speech irl is a groan followed by protests of "I didn't sign up for this". One thing I can be sure about by sharing this in a newsletter, however, is that I won't receive that particular response because you literally (and not figuratively) signed up for this. (Feel free to reply to this if you do have other complaints, however.)
2) Sorites Paradox
I first came across this paradox while reading Atomic Habits a few months ago. It's a great paradox that got me thinking then and one that I still don't have a definitive answer to. To quote from the book:
There is an ancient Greek parable known as the Sorites Paradox, which talks about the effect one small action can have when repeated enough times. One formulation of the paradox goes as follows: Can one coin make a person rich? If you give a person a pile of ten coins, you wouldn’t claim that he or she is rich. But what if you add another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him or her so.
A common thought experiment for this paradox is to imagine removing a grain of sand from a heap of sand. Removing a single grain does not turn it into a non-heap, but do this enough times and you're sure to be left with only a few grains of sand at the end. So at what point can the heap be said to be a non-heap?
It is therefore, by this logic, impossible to define a point of transition between two opposite ends of a continuum. How many followers do you need to have on Instagram to say that you have lots of followers? Is 1000 followers a lot? Is 999 then not a lot of followers? After ruminating over this question for weeks I decided that numbers are meaningless and ordered multiple cheesecakes because there's no such thing as too little or too much.
Those were the two new things I learned this week, and I'll leave you with this quote from the movie/book Cloud Atlas that the Sorites Paradox reminded me of:
Haskell Moore: No matter what you do it will never amount to anything more than a single drop in a limitless ocean.
Adam Ewing: What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?
Links of the Week:
I Do Not Want to Write Today: A Comic: A new comic essay by the wonderful Shing Yin Khor whose brilliant writing is matched by their beautiful art
Why I Run Parking-Lot Laps: A funny comic essay about running extra laps in the parking lot to get your mileage to a round number
Ramadan Haiku: Sahar Romani decided to write a haiku for every day of Ramadan and it's a wonderful window into the life of a person and their rituals, and the things they find important
Love the colours and overall vibe of this piece
This cool almost-an-optical-illusion ball juggling video
Posts of the Week:
I was inspired by the Ramadan Haiku project and decided to try writing my own daily haikus. Here's the first one I made
I created a Guides section to categorize the posters I created. You can check it out under Guides on my profile
Have a great week!
Raef