%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| From aeon, an article aged over seven years: Oh, a new word, eh? Cool, cool. This is an essay first published in 2017, so surely that word's been spread to the farthest reaches of the travel community by now, right? One thing I’ve noticed over the years of bringing my students to Ireland – my homeland – is that they pay rapt attention to the little things. This heightened and delighted attention to the ordinary, which manifests in someone new to a place, does not seem to have a name. So I have given it one: allokataplixis (from the Greek allo meaning ‘other’, and katapliktiko meaning ‘wonder’). I'm not really mocking. I've invented dozens of words that never caught on (and one that did in ways I could never have anticipated). Okay, but I'm also mocking, a little, because there's no fucking way a word like allokataplixis would ever go viral, except maybe if it were the name of a new penis-enlarging drug. Even then, we'd shorten it to allo, which could get confusing. For the past five years, I have travelled around Ireland each summer with a bunch of allokataplixic American kids. And there it is: the adjective form. Marvellous to them also is the slight smell of salt in the air when you arrive in Dublin, the raucousness of seagulls crying overhead... [loads of poetic imagery] ...the sun setting on the Atlantic viewed from the beaches of the west, the melancholy slopes in County Kerry that were abandoned during the famine. Well, yeah. What's ordinary to locals is often fresh and exciting to visitors. It's not just Dublin (never been, but want to go), but almost any place you're not used to. Like how millions of New Yorkers pass by the Empire State Building without admiring its art-deco grandeur. This is why some of us travel: to find the beauty in the mundane, to see it with new eyes and, maybe, pass along some of that newness to those jaded by familiarity with it. Yet over the years that I’ve been bringing students to Ireland I’ve observed that their thirst for fresh experience is contagious. It oftentimes brings out the best in people. A tourist generally has an eye for the things that, through repetitive familiarity, have become almost invisible to the resident. It can also bring out the worst in people. One does not need, however, to be an outsider or a tourist to be allokataplixic. Is it not the task of most writers to awaken us from the dull, the flat and the average sentiments that can dominate our lives? Many of the Irish writers that my students read before travelling have a knack for noticing the marvellous in the everyday, and of making the quotidian seem wholly other and amazing. Just in case you were wondering if this had anything to do with writing. I don't take issue with the general ideas in the article (there's even a foray into the fractal, which is always like candy to me). It's just... that word. You'd think we could come up with something better, something with fewer syllables, something less pretentious than an obscure phrase from Ancient Greek. You'd think so, but I'm stumped. |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
