An Onomastician at Work
A trip to Australia is always good for stirring up a little thinking differently for someone from the northern hemisphere. Wonderful that birds sing (and sometimes schreech!) in new ways; that plants have unpredictable blooms (though roses seem to be roses); and that my sense of season is mildly challenged as I fly home in clothes a little too warm for Sydney.
A while ago, Aase Beaulieu put the term onomastics on Facebook. I didn’t know what it was and needed to look it up. One of its definitions is:
“the science or study of the origins and forms of words especially as used in a specialized field”.
I seem to do that a lot—I make up words—and the origin is the need to describe something specialized—because the word I need to describe something just doesn’t exist. Lately I have been playing with different ways to convey the notion that observation when teaching the Alexander Technique is a multi-sensory event rather than a visual event. I haven’t quite settled on a word—omniservation? Receiving an omnisensory message? Living in an omniverse?
And perhaps the change in wording, or the search for wording, accomplishes something similar to traveling to a different world—for a moment, it turns an idea other way round so that you can see it anew.
A trip to Australia is always good for stirring up a little thinking differently for someone from the northern hemisphere. Wonderful that birds sing (and sometimes schreech!) in new ways; that plants have unpredictable blooms (though roses seem to be roses); and that my sense of season is mildly challenged as I fly home in clothes a little too warm for Sydney.
A while ago, Aase Beaulieu put the term onomastics on Facebook. I didn’t know what it was and needed to look it up. One of its definitions is:
“the science or study of the origins and forms of words especially as used in a specialized field”.
I seem to do that a lot—I make up words—and the origin is the need to describe something specialized—because the word I need to describe something just doesn’t exist. Lately I have been playing with different ways to convey the notion that observation when teaching the Alexander Technique is a multi-sensory event rather than a visual event. I haven’t quite settled on a word—omniservation? Receiving an omnisensory message? Living in an omniverse?
And perhaps the change in wording, or the search for wording, accomplishes something similar to traveling to a different world—for a moment, it turns an idea other way round so that you can see it anew.
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