A posteriori

SOFT SCIENCE FICTION: See discussion under science fiction.

SOLAR MYTH: Alvin Boyd Kuhn and Max Müller were philologists who attempted to explain the origin of a number of myths and religious practices by linking them to the animistic worship of various celestial phenomena including meteorological events (weather gods), sky gods (e.g. Ouranos), and astronomical bodies (stars, planets, moon, and most especially the sun). The name "Solar Deity" refers to such a god generally, and "Solar Myth" is thus the term most often linked with this school of thought. Scholars in the "Solar Myth" school tend to trace multiple deities or heroes (even in a single narrative) back to primitive sun worship and identify analogues in various legends of sun gods. Some medievalists like Roger S. Loomis have gone so far as to trace various Arthurian characters back to Celtic Solar Deities. The theory fell into disfavor in late twentieth-century scholarship partly because of its reductive "one-size-fits-all" approach to mythology, and partly because some of the claims of Kuhn and Müller have been demonstrably proven false. For instance, while Solar Myth theorists first argued that various tribal deities and heros in Homer and in Hindu mythology were later incarnations of early sun deities, later archeological or philological evidence showed some of these local gods were real historical figures who were later elevated to godhood in the belief of future generations. An example of this was Alfred Lyall's demonstration that the names of certain Rajasthan deities could be linked to historical Rajput clan leaders who lived only a century or two before their "apotheosis" into mythology.

SOLECISM (from the Greek city Soloi): The area around the city of Soloi in ancient Cilicia had a population who spoke a nonstandard form of Attic Greek. Accordingly, the dominant Athenians tended to make fun of them, parody them in plays, beat them up for lunch money, etc. The term soloikos thus came to connote grammatical mistakes, blunders in declension, errors in diction, and whatnot. This gives rise to our equivalent modern English term, solecism. David Smith notes solecisms can be helpful. In the original koine Greek, the New Testament book of Revelation has a large number of solecisms, a fact quite annoying to Saint Augustine, but which has been very useful to modern biblical scholars seeking to distinguish John of Patmos (the author of Revelation) from earlier church fathers like the disciple John (who lived too early and spoke a different dialect).

SOLILOQUY: A monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions. The soliloquy often provides necessary but otherwise inaccessible information to the audience. The dramatic convention is that whatever a character says in a soliloquy to the audience must be true, or at least true in the eyes of the character speaking (i.e., the character may tell lies to mislead other characters in the play, but whatever he states in a soliloquy is a true reflection of what the speaker believes or feels). The soliloquy was rare in Classical drama, but Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights used it extensively, especially for their villains. Well-known examples include speeches by the title characters of Macbeth, Richard III, and Hamlet and also Iago in Othello. (Contrast with an aside.) Unlike the aside, a soliloquy is not usually indicated by specific stage directions.

SONG: A lyric poem with a number of repeating stanzas (called refrains), written to be set to music in either vocal performance or with accompaniment of musical instruments. See dawn song and lyric, above and stanza, below.

SONNET: A lyric poem of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, with rhymes arranged according to certain definite patterns. It usually expresses a single, complete idea or thought with a reversal, twist, or change of direction in the concluding lines. There are three common forms: