Thursday, October 22, 2009

Imbrications and Concatenations





Words to unpack, they seem to have floated to the top of the alphabet soup lately. Imbricated objects overlap, concatenated ones form links in a chain. Concatenations drive computer content, units of which imbricate as the interests of various individuals overlap to become a digital tangle like tatting that tethers me here to this machine. Cats linked tail to head would be the hyperliteral interpretation of concatenation, or maybe it's a nation abundant in cats. As for imbrications, I think of acorn caps and acanthus columns, or this coral growing in a salt water tank at the locksmith's office down Prospect.

*tweaked this, thanks for the kind critique,KL

3 comments:

Robin Morrison said...

Took me a minute then I remembered first discovering 'imbricate' from Nabokov, whose command of the English lexicon is surpassed only by Cormac McCarthy, at least in my ken.

You are trolling deep old waters in my verbophilia.

It rolls nicely off the tongue, too, unlike concatenate which sounds like obnoxious drunk directions to a cabbie.

gagnimon: French term for excessive underwear, now mostly used to indicate when someone is being so subtle they are 'under the top'.

amarilla said...

How is it possible for you to be this hilarious? Reveal your secret!

Robin Morrison said...

I choose audiences easily amused...

woola: any word, like woola, that looks too deliciously and transcendantly meaningful to be chained to a definition.

Woola! What the woola is that! I pity the woola!