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6 July 2005: The topic is terminology, again. It's Geof Huth's fault. Yesterday, he posted the following (A-1) poem of his, "What We Sea," at his blog:
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In the process, I remembered "texteme," my term for any single 'atomic' textual element/symbol such as a letter, numeral, punctuation mark." I wondered what the graphic equivalent of a texteme would be--a heart, for example, which can be considered a symbol but not truly textual. A smilie face. These could be examples of "glyphs" (as the OED defines them, but not I) but I thought of them as being units of glyphs--although, just as the textemes "I" and "a" are also words, a few of them could also be glyphs. In any case, I came up with "depictneme" for the graphic or visual printed equivalent of a texteme, and "depictseme" for the graphic or visual printed equivalent of a word.
Naturally, I couldn't stop there. My aesthetics/linguistics glossary now also contains "audioneme" (musical equivalent of a texteme), "mathneme," "choreoneme"--and, because all the rest were "nemes," "texneme." Because of the addition of "mathneme," "texneme" no longer covers numerals and mathematical symbols. I didn't feel the need for addition "seme" terms. I may need "scineme" eventually, but think mathneme, depictneme or texneme should cover such things as astronomical symbols (like the ones for Venus and Mars), chemical notation, and so forth.
One result of all this is that I could call pluraesthetic poetry "polynemic poetry." I'm not going to.
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