ex•plen•ish n. [ɛkˈsplɛnɪʃ]
[expend + replenish.]
To fill a glass to the brim with the exact remainder of a beverage container.
Once you realize you’re on the verge of explenishment, it’s like walking a tightrope or guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar: you’ve got to rely on your instincts to tell you whether all that juice will truly fit in that little glass.
in•no•vi•sion n. [ɪnəˈvɪʒən]
[innovation + vision.]
A moment of genius characterized by a materialized light bulb above one’s head.
in•no•va•sion n. [ɪnəˈveɪʒən]
[innovation + invasion.]
Forceful imposition of an ideology upon a newly conquered people.
After General Schwartzenmuscle’s innovision of world domination, he launched relentless campaigns of innovasive subservience that won him large patches of earth while simultaneously precluding the rebellious thoughts of their inhabitants.
mis•know•ledge n. [mɪsˈnɑlədʒ]
[mis 'wrong' + knowledge.]
Erroneous information innocently misconstrued into the juvenile brain, which is borne into adulthood with all sincerity and no knowledge of its falsity.
Somewhere in my juvenile linguistic development I learned the word storm door, which, due to a lack of contextual specificity, I guessed was the thicker of the two doors adorning the front of our house. But I had good reason: a storm door sounds thick, like something you’d bolt shut in during a hurricane. And because the word screen door was always floating around, too, I thought it might be the counterpart to a storm door. After all, one’s thick and one’s flimsy—and the flimsy one usually had a screen. Only recently did I learn that my definition of storm door was misknowledge.
vel•o•ci•rain n. [vəˈlɑsɪren]
[velocity + rain.]
Rain that becomes more aggressive the faster you drive.
“How is velocirain possible?” thought Melanie. “When I drive faster, I hit more rain drops—that’s a given—but aren’t I avoiding more rain drops too?” Unfortunately, the officer didn’t believe that Melanie’s speed shifts were an experiment in physics, and he cited her for erratic driving.
leaf•burst n. [ˈlifbərst]
[leaf + cloudburst 'a sudden, violent rainstorm']
A sudden and delightful barrage of autumn leaves, esp. when driving.
Few minor phenomena are more sublime than petrichor—the smell of rain on the earth after a dry spell—and those abruptly colorful leafbursts on long stretches of autumn road.
spon•tom•e•i•ty n. [spɑntəˈmeɪti]
[spontaneity 'the quality of being spontaneous' + tome 'book.']
1. The action of opening a book to the desired page by chance.
Fred was the class nerd, and it didn’t help his reputation to announce his occasional spontomeity to uninterested classmates.
2. Finding sage advice on a page opened to at random.
Fred, realizing that Biff and Cliff didn’t give an expletive about rare spontomeity, sulked in the library, where, cracking open the next book he saw, was hit with more spontomeity: “It is often the case,” he read, “that the number-crunchers and chemistry clubbers of high school often go on to become the most successful people in the world.”
Phil•o•si•rap•tor n. [fɪˈlɑsɪræptər]
[philosophy + raptor.]
A small geniusaruid dinosaur of the late Cranian period believed to have possessed appreciable intellectual prowess.
The freshly unearthed Philosiraptor superiorus skeleton provides paleontologists with the necessary evidence to confirm their postulations of the dinosaur’s incredible brainpower. The skull capacity is of significant proportions to the creature’s relatively small frame, suggesting that it spent most of its time debating the morals of hunting rather than actually hunting. It should come as no surprise that only one complete skeleton has been discovered, as the species is assumed only to have lived for a brief period before being wiped out by actual carnivores.
A salient fissure in an expanse of prose that leads the eyes astray.
If you cannot see either rift, look at the middle of the image and scroll the page up and down slowly. Then the fissure will be indelible.
Here is a massive prose rift in Falstaff’s monologue in 1 Henry IV:
The following text, from the short story “A Game of Billiards” by Alphonse Daudet, illustrates a paragraph whose bottom-left corner is about to secede from the page:
[asphalt 'pavement' + Moses 'that dude who parted the sea in Exodus']
A sudden parting of traffic that occurs when two or more cars immediately in front of you merge into the lanes next to yours, esp. when, by your standards, they are going entirely too slow, and would you please move your ass out of my lane now.
“F—king sea of traffic. Move it, Mrs. Butterworth,” Fred murmured as he downed the last drops of his coffee. He was about to light up another Parliament when, to his amazement, the bastards in front of him did an asphalt moses, and a beam of light shot through a rift in the storm clouds to illuminate the true path to Best Buy.
Most of the English-speaking world is taught at a very young age that time is linear. The veracity of such a statement is of no importance: time is an invented concept, after all. We’re free to think about it however we please as long as we can utilize that perspective to some advantage. The Hopi, Native Americans of Arizona, as well as hundreds of other cultures, perceive time as a cycle. Some cultures base time on moon phases and still others use a series of ecological events as a natural calendar, in which the blooming of certain flowers or the mating of certain animals serves as a harbinger for a new “month” or season. Besides this, there are hundreds more time-reckoning systems and variations on those systems.¹
A linear progression of time.
Our linear system is simply one way to think about the progression of time. It is no better or worse than any other system because it suits our needs: we think about time in chunks. Years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds are all significant, and are therefore named. Hunter-gatherers have moon-phase or ecological calendars because they depend on agriculture and hunting for sustenance. Our calendar is dissimilar because we as a 9 to 5 society have no practical concern for moon phases or edible lily blossoms.
Personally, I see individual months as linear (if not as the winding passage of several weeks as depicted on a typical calendar). But this is how I perceive a whole year:
I perceive a cyclical year in which each month carries positional as well as color information.
During any given month, I am on the corresponding slice of the circle that makes up our year. I have illustrated the rough boundaries of each month and its neighbors. Each month has a color that gives it some sort of personality. The colors are more culturally inculcated than anything else, i.e. they are not the product of synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon in which sensory inputs are confused (read the Wikipedia article if you have time). January, March, and December, for instance, are characterized by cold weather, and thus are colored cyan in my scheme. February is pink presumably because of Valentine’s Day; April is pink because of flowers; May is green because of the proliferation of life; June, July, and August have “hot” colors; September is always blue (I cannot explain this); October is orange to signify the changing of the leaves, which have fully decayed in brown November. I almost never think of a month without also linking it to its color.
The way I view months in a year always follows the above pattern, which is not to scale because the boundaries I have drawn are not always as salient in my mind. Beginning with January, the “start” of the wheel, I progress through February and March without moving too far. In April and May, I begin moving to the right, then with the advent of the summer months I move upwards towards the apex, September. In the illustration, the later months appear farther away than the winter months. However, I am always “in” the current month: picture yourself standing on a colored slice, and you’ll get the idea. In August, for instance (which for me is the longest month of the year), I’m actually “in” that top-right section, but the circle still maintains the position you see above.
After September, there is an interesting change: not only does the wheel turn 180º, but it also takes on more of a three-dimensional perspective for the “home stretch” into early winter. At the end of December, the wheel rotates back and January is once again at the bottom.
The borders of the months are not always radii of the circle. January, for example, has a more “rigid” border corresponding the end of one year and the start of the next. February and March also have vertical borders, I suppose because the winter months move more slowly for me than do the fall ones (hence the wide slices of fall and the thin slices of winter). When spring comes, things really start to change, which sets this wheel in motion. The summer stretch is similar to winter, but to less of an extent: it is the almost vertical passage through the right side of the wheel. Perhaps because October is my favorite (and birth) month, it sets off the radical perspective change you see in the last row of the diagram.
When I talk about months outside the current one, they also fall somewhere on the wheel, but I do not “stand” in the same position.
Different months yield different perspectives.
The above drawing shows how I see February in September and vice versa. It is interesting to note that while I normally perceive September at the apex, it is at the bottom when I think about February. All months do not work the same way: summer and fall are on lateral poles.
If you have a moment to leave a comment, I’d love to know how you think about months (and time in general). Thanks for reading!
¹If you’re interested, check out When Languages Die by K. David Harrison, 2005.
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