Etymology

constant escape

winter withered, warm
hex (v.)

1830, American English, from Pennsylvania German hexe "to practice witchcraft," from German hexen "to hex," related to Hexe "witch," from Middle High German hecse, hexse, from Old High German hagazussa (see hag). Noun meaning "magic spell" is first recorded 1909; earlier it meant "a witch" (1856).

Interesting to compare to today's use of hag in a secular way, sort of meaning an elderly woman who is on some fringe of the distribution, the center of which being normative?

What would the standard be for elderly men on the fringe? Surely more privileged/favored, but is there any occult connotation attached to the common perception of such fellows?
 

catalog

Well-known member
readin this really good short novel at the moment, it's very 'dissensus', almost ridiculously so, and there's a good bit where he says the word 'exist' is from 'ex sistere', literally 'outside'. reality, what exists, is outside us.

and the opposite root word is 'insist' ie 'in sistere'. to insist is to yearn to be real, but it's a non real thing
 

catalog

Well-known member
it's called 'friday, or the other island', by a guy called michel tournier. i heard about it from the urbanomic podcast. it's like a retelling/parody of robinson crusoe, but puts a lot of theory/philiosophy in. it's like french ballard maybe, but no motorways. very funny. i think tournier was a mate of deleuze's, it sort of feels like a send up of a lot of continental philosophy. he starts to imagine the island as another being and constantly bounces between being 'good' and dutiful, hard working and total anarchy. very amusing bit where he talks about walking on all fours and how natural it seems, letting your shit drop out, then he starts rubbing himself in his shit.

he gets sexually frustrated so starts shagging trees, inspired by seeing how insects pollinate flowers. and then he starts shagging the earth generally, eanking all over the ground and loads of mandrake plants sprout up, in an area he christens the pink combe...

i should pull some quotes out cos it's so hilarious and very issensus, but it's long OOP so only got a physical copy. i think the urbanomic lad is gonna reprint it with some essays or something.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
readin this really good short novel at the moment, it's very 'dissensus', almost ridiculously so, and there's a good bit where he says the word 'exist' is from 'ex sistere', literally 'outside'. reality, what exists, is outside us.

and the opposite root word is 'insist' ie 'in sistere'. to insist is to yearn to be real, but it's a non real thing
Thats some good etymology.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah, cause you insist upon some opinion/belief that has yet to be realized. It "exists" only in the potential, but has yet to exist without quotes.
 

catalog

Well-known member
yeah, that's it. i should find the actual quote cos it's quite good, but i think you've got it. i just found that pairing so odd: existence is versus insistence. how fucking mad. you would never ever put them two together in a million years, as being the binary oppositions of one another
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Dude that is why I jumped on this thread. Imagine overhauling your vocabulary based on that kind of revelation. I think etymology could be one of the keys to intuitively navigating a variety of jargon-heavy fields, many of which are taught without so much as touching the etymology.

One example of a similar case of two words you may never think to put together is cognize and recognize. To process for a first time, like blazing a trail, breaking ground; and to process a second time, being able to identify something that belongs in that place. Or you cognize some abstract category, and then you recognize some concrete thing because it falls into that category.
 

version

Well-known member
Pretty incredible how seamlessly we can move through something as complex as language. All that information just stored there in your head.
 

catalog

Well-known member
yeah thats a good one. i think obviously words change meaning all the time, come to mean different things all the time, but it;s fun/interesting to look at the actual roots.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah almost like it becomes more complex because you don't need a perfect understanding of it to use it. And so aa bunch of speakers each with a differently imperfect understanding, and hence speaking slightly different renditions of the same language. And then you separate one group from another for long enough and bam, a new branch, a new language.
 

version

Well-known member
It's amazing how elaborate things can appear once you actually take a good look at them. Imagine if you were to transcribe every sound you made during a conversation, not just the actual words, but every pause, every change of tone, every "uh". What felt like a sloppy exchange of words would quickly spiral into something overwhelming.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah like we tend to move at higher and higher orders, and lower and lower resolutions. Packaging crisper bits into blurrier blocks and trading with the latter instead of the former. Something profound and even more primal than the human cognition there, it seems.
 

version

Well-known member
You ever tried writing down a conversation as you overhear it? Looks completely bizarre as text.
 

catalog

Well-known member
It's amazing how elaborate things can appear once you actually take a good look at them. Imagine if you were to transcribe every sound you made during a conversation, not just the actual words, but every pause, every change of tone, every "uh". What felt like a sloppy exchange of words would quickly spiral into something overwhelming.
isnt this how timbaland composes his tunes?
 
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