A posteriori

OBJECTIVE FORM: A form of pronouns used as the objects of prepositions and verbs. Examples include the pronouns him, her, and them. Modern English uses a single objective form to mark what originally had been two grammatical cases--the accusative and the dative.

OBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW: See discussion under point of view.

OBLIQUE FORM: The various forms or cases of any word in a declined language except the nominative form or nominative case. The term "oblique" to describe this comes from medieval grammar exercises, where a young monk would list all the declensions of a Latin word at an oblique angle except for the nominative form. Thus, these forms became known as "oblique forms."

OCCASIONAL POEM: A poem written or recited to commemorate a specific event such as a wedding, an anniversary, a military victory or failure, a funeral, a holiday, or other notable date. It may be light or serious. Notable examples are Milton's "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont," Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland," Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" and Yeats's "Easter 1916." Some of Chaucer's poetry was occasional verse. He probably wrote "The Book of the Duchess" either within a few months of the death of John of Gaunt's wife (traditionally dated as 12 September 1369), or he may possibly have written it for one of the later annual commemorative services Gaunt held to honor the anniversary of her death. Chaucer may have written "The Parliament of Fowls" for Valentine's Day in 1380 as a light-hearted recital to mark the negotiations concerning the marriage of Richard II to Princess Anne of Bohemia.

OCTAVE: Not to be confused with octavo, below, an octave is the first part of an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet; an octave is a set of eight lines that rhyme according to the pattern ABBAABBA. See sonnet, below.

OCTAVO: Not to be confused with octave, above, octavo is a term from the early production of paper and vellum in the medieval period. When a single, large uncut sheet is folded once and attached to create two leaves, or four pages, and then bound together, the resulting text is called a folio. If the folio is in turn folded in half once more and cut, the resulting size of page is called a quarto. If the quarto is in turn folded in half and cut once more, the result is an octavo. Thus, an octavo is a book made of sheets of material folded three times, to create eight leaves, or sixteen pages, each about 4 inches wide and 5 inches high, to make a tiny book. On a single sheet, the page visible on the right-hand side of an open book or the "top" side of such a page is called the recto side (Latin for "right"), and the reverse or "bottom" side of such a page (the page visible on the left-hand side of an open book) is called the verso side. Only one of Shakespeare's Renaissance plays, Richard Duke of York (better known as Henry VI, Part 3) was published in octavo format, but many medieval psalters and books of hours appear in octavo manuscripts. Compare octavo with folio and quarto (below).

ODE: A long, often elaborate stanzaic poem of varying line lengths and sometimes intricate rhyme schemes dealing with a serious subject matter and treating it reverently. The ode is usually much longer than the song or lyric, but usually not as long as the epic poem. Conventionally, many odes are written or dedicated to a specific subject. For instance, "Ode to the West Wind" is about the winds that bring change of season in England. Keats has a clever inversion of this convention in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which his choice of the preposition on implies the poem actually exists in the artwork on the urn itself, rather than as a separate piece of literary art in his poetry. Classical odes are often divided by tone, with Pindaric odes being heroic and ecstatic and Horatian odes being cool, detached, and balanced with criticism. Andrew Marvell's "Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" is an example of a Horatian ode.

OED: The standard abbreviation among scholars for The Oxford English Dictionary, a huge twenty+ volume set that functions as an historical dictionary--generally considered the most authoritative and scholarly dictionary of English available. See Oxford English Dictionary.

OEDIPAL COMPLEX: The late Victorian and early twentieth-century psychologist Freud argued that male children, jealous of sharing their mother's attention with a father-figure, would come to possess a subconscious incestuous desire to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers. They would in a sense desire to usurp the father's place in the household. In most healthy adults, this urge would be repressed and channeled into other pursuits, but echoes of the hidden desire would linger in the psyche. Freud coined the phrase from the myth of Oedipus, the doomed Greek hero. In Oedipus's infancy, prophets predicted that he would kill his own father and marry his mother. Every effort made to thwart the prophecy, however, ended up bringing it about. The events are recounted most masterfully in Sophocles's play, Oedipus Rex. Oedipus's crimes--though he was unknowing--brought about a dreadful a curse on his family, and violence lingered to haunt the family in future generations, as recounted in plays like Antigonê. Several famous characters in myth and literature seem to haunted by a similar jealousy comparable to the phenomenon Freud describes. For instance, Greek mythology is littered with younger deities that usurp their father's position and castrate the elder god after assuming power, such as the way Zeus overthrows Chronos. Concerning the play Hamlet, diverse psychoanalytical critics have commented on Hamlet's rage at his Gertrude's sexual romps and Hamlet's tormented desire to murder his uncle/father-figure Claudius. See Freudian criticism and wish fulfillment.

OFF GLIDE: In linguistics, the second-half of a diphthong sound.

OFF RHYME: In poetry, another term for inexact rhyme.

OGAM (also spelled ogham, pronounced either OH-yeem or AG-em): The term comes from Old Irish, "Oghma," probably an eponym of Oghma the Irish god of invention. It refers to a form of symbolic Celtic markings common in the 5th and 6th centuries in which a communicant would scratch or notch a series of marks on the edge of a stone or on a stick to indicate letters. The number and direction of the scratches or notches indicated the specific sound to form a word, and together they constituted an entire writing system. Ogam markings are commonly found on Irish standing stones, tombs, and boundary markers, and the alphabet the Irish used consisted of 20 letters, though slightly different systems existed in Wales and in Europe. Click here for a handout on ogam markings.

OGHAM: See discussion under ogam, above.

O. HENRY ENDING: Also called a trick ending or a surprise ending, this term refers to a totally unexpected and unprepared-for turn of events, one which alters the action in a narrative. O. Henry endings usually do not work well with foreshadowing, but particularly clever artists may craft their narratives so that the foreshadowing exists in retrospect.The term comes from the short stories of O. Henry (a pen name for William Sidney Porter), which typically involve such a conclusion. Note that an O. Henry ending is usually a positive term of praise for the author's cleverness. This is the opposite sentiment from a deus ex machina ending, in which the unexpected or unprepared-for ending strikes the audience as artificial, arbitrary, or unartful.

OLD COMEDY: The Athenian comedies dating to 400-499 BCE, featuring invective, satire, ribald humor, and song and dance. See further discussion under stock character.

OLD ENGLISH: Also known as Anglo-Saxon, Old English is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. It is a Germanic language that was introduced to the British Isles by tribes such as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in a series of invasions in the fifth century. Poems such as Beowulf are samples of Old English. Old English was common in England from about 449 AD up to about 1100 AD. The Norman Conquest in 1066 introduced a new ruling class of Normans who spoke French, and the influx of French vocabulary altered Old English, eventually resulting in Middle English. See Middle English and Modern English. To see computerized lettering and words transcribed from an Old English document, click here. To avoid irritating your teacher, do not confuse Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. This diagram will help you contrast them.