Palimpsest

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Dr. Goodword
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Palimpsest

Postby Dr. Goodword » Thu Sep 18, 2014 10:27 pm

• palimpsest •[goodword]
Pronunciation: pæ-lim(p)-sest • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. A document written on a sheet or paper or parchment that has been used before, the earlier writing either scraped off though perhaps still partially visible. 2. Anything with more than one layer or aspect beneath its surface, anything multilayered.

Notes: The British and Americans cannot agree on the pronunciation of this word. In Britain it is pronounced [pah-lim(p)-sest] while the Yanks pronounce it [-lim(p)-sest]. It is difficult to hear the second [p] because it is so similar to the [m]—pronounce them yourself and notice how both are bilabial, involving both lips. The adjective is palimpsestic [pæ-lim(p)-ses-tik].

In Play: Today's good word effortlessly settles into the description of any work of art: "The Little Prince is much more than a children's story; it is a palimpsest of the author's affairs, stormy marriage, and perhaps even a covert suicide note." Places or people whose history shows through a modern façade beg for it: "New York is a palimpsest of all the cultures that passed through Ellis Island in by-gone years."

Word History: Today's good word goes back through Latin palimpsestus to Greek palimpsestos "scraped again". This compound contains palin "again" + psen "to rub or scrape." Greek palin derives from Proto-Indo-European kwel-/kwol "turn", the same root underlying Latin collum "neck" and English collar. Psen is akin to Sanskrit psati "eat" and Russian pisat' "write", both specialized types of scraping. (It doesn't take much effort to scrape together an expression of our gratitude to our distinguished friend, Lyn Laboriel, for alerting us to the beauty and depth of today's Good Word.)

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George Kovac

Re: Palimpsest

Postby George Kovac » Fri Sep 19, 2014 10:03 am

Thank you Lyn Laboriel and Dr. Goodword for reminding us of this delightful, evocative word.

More so than most metaphors, palimpsest raises powerful concrete images in my mind: cuneiform tablets overwritten; the carved inscription on Trajan's arch obviously re-chiseled by a later generation to suit Hadrian's agenda; precious medieval vellum scraped just clean enough to admit the thoughts of a subsequent author.

Here are three very different examples of the power and beauty of this word in a modern context:

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

“June 26th marks the tenth anniversary of the reading of the human genome—the 3-billion-letter-long message that promises self-knowledge to humanity. Each letter is a pair of chemical bases that has accumulated over the 3.8 billion years that life has existed on Earth.Viewed that way—the addition to the message of slightly less than a base-pair a year—the evolution of something as complex as a human being is not such an incredible journey. But it is still an amazing one. Some of it is lost, as the DNA palimpsest has been erased and re-written.” The Economist “Turning-point: The human-genome project” June 17, 2010.

“The nature of digital journalism makes correcting an error online so instantaneous that one is sorely tempted to pretend the error never happened. The palimpsest of 0's and 1's gets erased; authority and righteousness are restored. Dan Neil, Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2011 “A Showroom of Regrets: What I Got Wrong in 2011”

George Kovac

Re: Palimpsest

Postby George Kovac » Fri Sep 19, 2014 10:23 am

In my prior post, I neglected to include another recent use of "palimpsest," which extends the metaphor as far back in time as it is possible to do so.

On March 17, 2014, astrophysicists at the BICEP2 site in Antarctica released their findings, amidst all the billions-year-old cosmic signals detected by their equipment, of evidence of the existence of gravitational waves in the trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the "Big Bang." Here is how one newspaper described the significance of those findings:

"The gravity-wave signals that BICEP2 has found--slight fluctuations in the intensity of the cosmic microwave background, an all-pervading bath of radiation that preserves some features of the very early universe--are but a faded palimpsest. They have been overwritten time and again by other signals, and these have had to be scraped away to make the gravitational waves visible." The Economist, “The Quest to Understand Reality Takes A Giant Leap Backward” March 21, 2014

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Slava
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Re: Palimpsest

Postby Slava » Fri Sep 19, 2014 7:30 pm

Really great quotes you came up with, George. Thank you for your work on this one. They really help make the word come alive in our modern world. I think my favorite was the one from The Economist. I look forward to more of your research.
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Re: Palimpsest

Postby Perry Lassiter » Sat Sep 20, 2014 1:53 pm

My personal experience in reading archaelogy and mysteries dealing with art involves literal rather than metaphorical meanings. In study of ancient documents often enough scholars xray parchments to discover writing beneath, and not merely in cuneiform. Likewise in the world of art, it was a common practice to paint over an earlier work with a wash, and then create a new picture on top.
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