22 April 2004. I should change my entry header. It's comic how far I've veered from keeping my entries "Notes on Poetry." I'm no longer sure what my blog's subject is. (Aside from ME.) One of its primary subjects is words, though. One word--another Grummaniacal neology--is its subject today. I just now made it up. It's my three hundred and somethingth attempt to find a single word meaning receiver of a work of art. My last, "infocipient," is okay, in my view, but too general. Here's the new word: "benecipient." Actually, I would define this as "receiver of something he considers beneficial," so the correct term for "receiver of an artwork" would be "arts benecipient." But in speaking of one who experiences a visual poem, for instance, I could use "benecipient" and be confident no one knowing the term would be confused. I would not expect anyone not knowing the term to be confused, either, but I could be over-optimistic there.

I realize that in suggesting the term could be used to represent any experiencer or any artwork, I am suggesting that all artworks are beneficial, which is clearly nonsensical. But I would point to "goods" as being not necessarily "good," and let the inaccuracy slide on the grounds that I can't think of a better term, and that it's a nice-sounding term (the heck with those for whom no terms not compounded of two unreduced standard English words can sound nice).

Note: I just checked my Latin pocket-dictionary on the chance I might find a Latin word for "beauty" that I could replace the "bene" in my neology with, and found to my surprise that "forma" is one; "pulchritudo," which I already knew was the only other one in the dictionary. It's too associated in English with female beauty to work in my term. "Forma" wouldn't work, at all, either, since too associated with formality, rigidity, lack of imagination. . . .