LeviathOfNoesia wrote:Insincere apologies my dear saintly Archbishop of Translybury. I adore your thought of Emelphantsdur being something other than cryptic neologism. Though you have answered my initial question, i must ask something of a glass art.
grounded to the future is what this of?
Well, well LeviathOfNoesia, thank you for your reply, you are a deepsea giant of language it would seem. My first thought was that Emelphantsdur was either a patchwork fabric elephant on a stiff backboard or a plain hardboiled elephant (it's the dur at the end you see). I say this because a smidgeon of memory has been stirred, I am now sure that I heard the expression Emelphant as a child, indeed that is maybe the way in which I used to enunciate Elephant when I was small. My grandfather (on my mother's side) lived in a quite disturbing dwelling, in that it was a cluttered asylum of numerous trophy's of the British Empire which also encompassed the taxidermist's art, including a hard boiled hollowed out elephants foot as an umbrella/walking stick stand in the entrance hall. The item was hideously lifelike and frequently gave me nightmares, because I always tried to imagine what it was like to have one's foot sawn off and hollowed out. Added to which, when we visited my grandfather, who lived 240 miles (386 kms) away, I was always consigned to sleep on cushions on the lounge floor with the sinister elephant's foot standing permanent guard immediately outside the door, thus maintaining it as a constant presence in my already vivid imagination and too young to drink to forget.
My grandfather was born around 1877 and I assume that he'd been out in British East Africa probably with the army, he was certainly not an aristocrat residing in the Happy Valley of the type described in Baroness Karen von Blixen-Fineckebut's book
Out of Africa, but that said he did live in a substantial detached house in a leafy suburb of Croydon and had a Belgian housekeeper called Colette. I am not convinced that he was one off those appallingly brutal big Victorian big game hunters at the turn of the nineteenth century featured in Von Blixen's book, she was married to at least one big game hunter and was the well publicised lover of another. However, neither could I be sure that he'd not been an avid slaughtere of the Big Five in the company of aristocrats, he was supposedly a top marksman with a rifle, he was taken ill shortly thereafter and ended his days in a nursing home in Coombe Hill and so I never got to quiz him as an interested a teenager before he died. Although, I was always suspicious based on the snippets gleaned from my mother, and hunters were responsible for wiping out elephants in much of East Africa by the 1930s, I suppose I was a born again animal conservationist even at 5 years old! At least I'd like to believe that he bought the bloody thing from a local market as a ready made example of indigenous arts & crafts in blissful souvenir ignorance, rather than visualise him as some Dirty Harry Callahan blasting his way indiscriminately through herds of these maginficient creatures now in such short supply.
Anyway enough of that, Neologism is of course a definitive four-way street and given the prefix of cryptic forms an ever closing association with crosswords at least in my mind! But I've loved the word for many a moon. Totally originated in France 1790-1800; French neologisme and thus it wormed its way into the English language following in the foosteps of a plethora of predecessors.
1. A new word, meaning, usage, or phrase.
2. The introduction or use of new words or new senses of existing words.
3. A new doctrine, especially a new interpretation of sacred writings.
4. Employed in Psychiatry, then it is a new word, often consisting of a combination of other words, that is understood only by the speaker: occurring most often in the speech of schizophrenics.
In answer to what I think is your question LeviathOfNoesia my old sprudel, the history of art as it unfolds behind the glass certainly grounds us for the future, works of art are life milestones of the greatest kind, that is if art fully depicts the terrible mistakes we made as a humans or do I mean that we made in the race to become humans and we deign to take note?
Yours Redbeck