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29 April 2005: I find over and over again that I never master anything with ease but seem automatically to do just about everything mistakenly, at first. Being a self-justifier, I have come to think that may be a virtue, since it teaches me where not to go as well as where to go--and sometimes allows me to discover a new where to go. I think algebra may have been an exception, the solving of simple equations I think I mastered almost immediately for some reason. Among the things that slow me down are my need to name everything before taking on any genuine questions. Which brings me to today's subject, my term, "texteme." I now ordain that it means any textual element or combination of textual elements smaller than a syllable but larger than a single letter. I was previously trying to make it a poetics term by using it only for textemes separated from words, which they'd be only in poems--or Joycean prose. But it's easy enough to call the latter "floating textemes," and I find I need a term for combinations of letters or the like inside words.
Now, I want another new term--or old one I don't know--for "textual element." I should think there must be one. I want it for letters, numerals, punctuation marks, hyphens, parenthesis marks, etc. I don't think of hyphens and parenthesis marks as punctuation marks. Are they considered such?
"Texton?" "Textron?" "Grapheme" isn't it, is it?
Another new set of terms I'm using in my Cummings piece are "case-reversal," for making a letter upper-case in a context where lower-case would be expected, or the opposite, and "miscapitalization" and "decapitalization" for the two kinds of case-reversal possible. Cummings, of course, did this a lot, and may be the inventor of its poetic exploitation.
He also used one part of speech for another a great deal. That's a langpo (language-poetry) device other poets have been making use of for centuries or more, but he, I suspect, made more use of than anyone else--certainly in English-speaking poetry. There has to be a term for it, but I don't know it.
Then, there's lexicalization of punctuation and like elements--that is, of alexical textrons. Or should I call them "paralexemes?" Anyway, I'm still fuzzy about such things. I'm thinking of the way Cummings, and others (such as comic strip makers), may take a question mark, for instance, and give it a lexical meaning such as "hunh?" or "what?" instead of leaving it to pre-lexically indicate how something is to be said only.
It looks likely that I will bury poor EE in neologies, but I think that better than wasting space with long clear explanations. The superfluous terms will dissolve away more more readily than needed terms will come into being if not for wacks like me (and, yes, I had a word for such missing terms, but I can't remember it).
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