A posteriori

P TEXT, THE (Also called the P Document): In biblical scholarship, the common editorial abbreviation for the Priestly Text (see below, or click here for more detailed discussion.).

PAEAN: Among the earliest Greeks, the word paean signifies "a dance and hymn with a specific rhythm which is endued with an absolving in healing power" (Burkett 44). In later usage, any song of praise to a deity is called a paean.

PALATAL: In linguistics, any sound involving the hard palate--especially the tongue touching or moving toward the hard palate.

PALATAL DIPTHONGIZATION: A sound change in which either the ash or the /e/ sound in Old English words became a diphthong when preceded by palatal consonants. For instance, Modern English cheese comes from Old English ciese, wich is a cognate of Latin caseus. Scholars can tell the word in Old English must have been adopted after the time of palatal diphthongization--otherwise it would have a simple /e/ sound rather than the diphthong. Thus, palatal dipthongization is useful for philologists who wish to date a borrowed word in Old English.

PALATALIZATION: In linguistics, the process of making a sound more palatal--i.e., moving the blade of the tongue closer to the hard palate.

PALATOVELAR: In linguistics, a sound that is either palatal or velar.

PALINDROME: A word, sentence, or verse that reads the same way backward or foreward. Certain words in English naturally function as palindromes: for instance, civic, rotor, race car, radar, level and so on. However, when individuals seek to combine several words at once, the result becomes a sort of perverse art. Here are some longer English examples culled from J. A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory:

• 
  Madam, I'm Adam.
  
• 
  Sir, I'm Iris.
  
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  Able was I ere I saw Elba. (attributed apocryphally to Napoleon, who was exiled on Elba, though in historical fact he apparently spoke no English!)
  
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  A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!
  
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  Sex at noon taxes.
  
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  "Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel." (anonymous 18th-century gravestone)
  
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  Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts!
  
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  "Deliver desserts," demanded Nemesis--emended, named, stressed, reviled.
  
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  T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: "Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet." (W. H. Auden)
  
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  Stop Syrian! I start at rats in airy spots!
  

The tradition goes back a long ways. Cuddon notes several, including a Greek palindrome inscribed on a vial of holy water in Saint Sophia's church in Constantinople that translates as "Wash not only my face, but also my sins." A Latin example is the palindrome, "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" which means "We [moths] fly in circles by night and we will be consumed in fire." Probably the most excessive use of palindromes is the 1802 collection by Ambrose Pamperis, in which Pamperis writes 416 palindromic verses celebrating Catherine the Great's military campaigns (See Cuddon 673-74).

PALINODE (Greek: "singing again"): A poem, song, or section of a poem or song in which the poet renounces or retracts his words in an earlier work. Usually this is meant to apologize or counterbalance earlier material.

The first recorded use of the palinode is a lyric written by the Greek author Stesichorus (7th century BCE), in which he retracts his earlier statement claiming that the Trojan War was entirely Helen's fault. Ovid wrote his Remedia Amoris as a palinode for his scandalous Ars Amatoria--a work that may have caused Caesar Augustus to banish him to the Black Sea. As a theme, the palinode is especially common in religious poetry and love poetry. The use of the palinode became conventional in patristic and medieval writings--as evidenced in Augustine, Bede, Giraldus Cambrensis, Jean de Meun, Sir Lewis Clifford, and others.

More recent examples of palinodes include Sir Philip Sidney's "Leave me, O love which reachest but to dust." Here, his palinode renounces the poetry of sexual love for that of divine grace. Likewise, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women includes a palinode in which the author "takes back" what he said about unfaithful women like Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde. At the end of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer goes so far as to write a retraction for all his secular literature. See also retraction.

PANDECT (Grk. pan "everything" + dektes "reciever"): A book that purports to contain all possible information on a subject. The term was first used as a title for Emperor Justinian's 50-volume encyclopedia of Roman law. Cf. summa.

PANEGYRIC: A speech or poem designed to praise another person or group. In ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric, it was one branch of public speaking, with established rules and conventions found in the works of Menander and Hermogenes. Famous examples include Pliny's eulogy on Emperor Trajan and Isocrates' oration on the Olympic games of 380.

PANGLOSSIAN (Grk. pan "everything" + Lat. glossare "to explain or comment upon"): The word is an eponym based on the fictional Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's satire, Candide. Dr. Pangloss is a naively optimistic pedant who upholds the doctrine that "all is for the best," and that "we live in the best of all possible worlds," claiming that a benevolent deity creates all things for positive purposes, and if we could only decipher cause/effect accurately, we would see this. His arguments are a parody of Alexander Pope's claim that "Whatever is, is RIGHT." Voltaire uses Pangloss as a straw-man in Candide, and Voltaire tries to show through the more inane Panglossian arguments that, in fact, the world is a highly flawed place and it does not live up to its ideal possibilities.

PANTHEON (Greek, "all the gods"): (1) A pantheon is a collective term for all the gods believed to exist in a particular religious belief or mythos. Thus, we can talk of the Hittite pantheon, the Greek pantheon, etc. (2) The Pantheon is a great temple in Rome dedicated to all the Olympian gods, not to be confused with the Parthenon, the great temple dedicatd to the virgin goddess Athena, which is situated on top of the Acropolis in Athens.

PANTOUM: A variant spelling of pantun (see below).

PANTUN: A verse form from Malaysia. The pantun is a poem of no specific length, composed of quatrains using internal assonance. The rhymes are interlinked much like terza rima in the sense that the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the following stanza. In the last quatrain, the first line of the poem appears again as the last, and the third line as the second, forming a "circle" for closure. (Alternatively, the poet may end the work with a simple couplet). Ernest Fouinet introduced the genre to French literature in the 1800s. Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and Leconte de Lisle later also experimented with it in French verse. Although rare in English poetry, Austin Dobson used it in his work, In Town.

PAPAL INDULGENCE: See discussion under pardoner.

PARABASIS: TBA.

PARABLE (Greek: "throwing beside" or "placing beside"): A story or short narrative designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, psychological reality, or general truth. Rather than using abstract discussion, a parable always teaches by comparison with real or literal occurrences--especially "homey" everyday occurrences a wide number of people can relate to. Well-known examples of parables include those found in the synoptic Gospels, such as "The Prodigal Son" and "The Good Samaritan." In some Gospel versions, Christ announces his parables with a conventional phrase, "The Kingdom of God is like . . . ." Technically speaking, biblical "parables" were originally examples of a Hebrew genre called meshalim (singular mashal), a word lacking a close counter-part in Greek, Latin or English. Meshalim in Hebrew refer to "mysterious speech," i.e., spiritual riddles or enigmas the speaker couches in story-form. Thus, in Matthew 13:11 and Mark 4:11-12, Christ states that he speaks in parables so that outsiders will not be able to understand his teachings. It is only late in the Greek New Testament that these meshalim are conflated with parables or allegorical readings designed for ease of understanding.

Non-religious works can be parables as well. For example, Melville's Billy Budd demonstrates that absolute good--such as the impressionable, naive young sailor--may not co-exist with absolute evil--the villain Claggart. Cf. fable, allegory, and symbolism, or click here for a PDF handout discussing the differences between these terms.

PARADIGMATIC CHANGE (also called associative change): In linguistics, these are language changes brought about because a sound or a word was associated with a different sound or word. Algeo provides the following example:

. . . The side of a ship on which it was laden (that is loaded) was called the ladeboard, but its opposite, starboard, influenced a change in pronunication to larboard. Then, because larboard was likely to be confused with starboard because of their similarity of sound, it was generally replaced by port. (11)

PARADOX (also called oxymoron): Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions, such as noting that "without laws, we can have no freedom." Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous paradox: "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32). Richard Rolle uses an almost continuous string of paradoxes in his Middle English work, "Love is Love That Lasts For Aye." Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" notes "And all men kill the thing they love." The taoist master Lao-Tzu makes extraordinary use of paradox in the Tao-te Ching in his discussion of "the Way."

PARAGRAM: A sub-type of pun involving similarities in sound. See examples and discussion under pun.

PARALANGUAGE: The non-verbal features that accompany speech and help convey meaning. For example, facial expression, gesticulation, body stance, and tone can help convey additional meaning to the spoken word; these are all examples of communication through paralanguage.

PARALLELISM: When the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. For instance, "King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable." The previous sentence has parallel structure in use of adjectives. However, the following sentence does not use parallelism: "King Alfred tried to make clear laws that had precision and were equitable."

If the writer uses two parallel structures, the result is isocolon parallelism: "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."

If there are three structures, it is tricolon parallelism: "That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Or, as one student wrote, "Her purpose was to impress the ignorant, to perplex the dubious, and to startle the complacent." Shakespeare used this device to good effect in Richard II when King Richard laments his unfortunate position:

I'll give my jewels for a set of beads,

My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,

My gay apparel for an almsman's gown,

My figured goblets for a dish of wood . . . . (3.3.170-73)

PARANOMASIA: The technical Greek term for what English-speakers commonly refer to as a "pun." See extended discussion under pun, below.

 

PARAPHRASE: A brief restatement in one's own words of all or part of a literary or critical work, as opposed to quotation, in which one reproduces all or part of a literary or critical work word-for-word, exactly.

 

PARARHYME: Wilfred Owen's term for a slant rhyme. An example appears in his poem, "Strange Meeting," in which Owen rhymes words like years / yours and tigress / progress.

PARATAXIS: Rhetorically juxtaposing two or more clauses or prepositions together in strings or with few or no connecting conjunctions or without indicating their relationship to each other in terms of co-ordination or subordination; i.e. a loose association of clauses as opposed to hypotaxis. A common form of parataxis is asyndeton, in which expected conjunctions fail to appear for artistic reasons. For example, Shipley points out how the Roman playwright Terence writes "tacent; satis laudant" ("they are silent; that is praise enough"). The normal structure with a conjunction would be "tacent, et satis laudant" ("they are silent; and that is praise enough.") See Shipley 422-23 for this discussion and a comparison among Greek and Latin and English writers. Paratactic style is typically short and simple--like Hemingway's writing.

PARATEXT (also French peritext): In Gérard Genette's work, Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation, Genette introduces the idea of "paratext," i.e., anything external to the text itself that influences the way we read a text. These "paratexts" can be almost infinite in number, but they might include a list of other works the author has published on the front cover of a book, the gender of the author as indicated by his or her name, reviews written about the book, and editorial commentary about the work. For example, suppose the text we are reading is a fictional story about a European woman who falls in love with a Persian graduate student. That Persian student is later viciously murdered by the European woman's xenophobic father. If we see the author's name is "Susan Jones" we might interpret the text differently than if we saw the author's name was "Achmed bin Jaffah," for instance. If the same author wrote a number of murder mysteries, we might be especially prone to read this new text as influenced by that early genre work, or even expect the current text to be (rightly or wrongly) yet another murder mystery. If we read a review calling attention to the theme of lust in a work, we might experience the book differently than if we had read a different review focusing on the theme of intolerance. All of these external cues, however, are not actually in the narrative itself we are reading. Thus, they are paratextual. A New Critic from the 1930s would probably argue that all paratexts are irrelevant to determining the meaning of literary art, and the paratextual should be ignored accordingly. Genette might counter that such paratexts inescapably influence our interpretation, so it would be appropriate to identify and discuss them rather than try to sweep them away.

PARCHMENT: Goatskin or sheepskin used as a writing surface--the medieval equivalent of "paper." A technical distinction is usually made between parchment and vellum, which is made from the hide of young calves. As Michelle P. Brown notes in Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, the process for creating vellum or parchment is quite complicated:

To produce parchment or vellum, the animal skins were defleshed in a bath of lime, stretched on a frame, and scraped with a lunular knife while damp. they could then be treated with pumice, whitened with a substance such as chalk, and cut to size. Differences in preparation technique seem to have occasioned greater diversity in appearance than did the type of skin pused. Parchment supplanted papyrus as the most popular writing support material in the fourth century, although it was known earlier. Parchment was itself largely replaced by paper in the sixteenth century (with the rise of printing) but remained in use for certain high-grade books. (95)

PARDONER: An individual licensed by the medieval church to sell papal indulgences (i.e., "pardons"), official documents excusing the recipient from certain acts of penitence and alleviating the sinner's punishment while in purgatory. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines an indulgence as "the extra-sacramental remission of the temporal punishment due" to a sinner. Protestant students might wish to peruse the Catholic Encyclopedia's discussion of indulgences to avoid common misconceptions and distortions. The practice of selling these pardons as a means of fund-raising for the church or as a means of rewarding those who offered the church some service rose in prominence after the council of Clermont in 1095. There, Pope Urban II announced sweeping indulgences would be given to any individuals willing to go on Crusade. By the fourteenth century, the practice had developed extensively, and pardoners were lay officials authorized by the pope to sell indulgences in exchange for financial donations. Ecclesiastical abuses become commonplace problems. These abuses included unauthorized sales, the sale of forged pardons, extortion, and deliberate misrepresentation of the scope of an indulgence (i.e., treating the indulgence as a "get-out-of-hell-free" card). Chaucer's Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales represents the worst excesses of pardoners during this period.

PARDONS: Another term for papal indulgences. See discussion under pardoner.

PARODOS: In Greek tragedy, the ceremonial entrance of the chorus. Usually the chorus at this time chants a lyric relating to the main theme of the play.

PARODY (Greek: "beside, subsidiary, or mock song"): A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. The humorist achieves parody by exaggerating certain traits common to the work, much as a caricaturist creates a humorous depiction of a person by magnifying and calling attention to the person's most noticeable features. The term parody is often used synonymously with the more general term spoof, which makes fun of the general traits of a genre rather than one particular work or author. Often the subject-matter of a parody is comically inappropriate, such as using the elaborate, formal diction of an epic to describe something trivial like washing socks or cleaning a dusty attic.

Aristotle attributes the first Greek parody to Hegemon of Thasos in The Poetics, though other writings credit the playwright Hipponax with the first creation of theatrical parody. Aristophanes makes use of parody in The Frogs (in which he mocks the style of Euripides and Aeschylus). Plato also caricatures the style of various writers in the Symposium. In the Middle Ages, the first well-known English parody is Chaucer's "Sir Thopas," and Chaucer is himself the basis of parodies written by Alexander Pope and W. W. Skeat. Cervantes creates a parody of medieval romance in Don Quixote. Rabelais creates parodies of similar material in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Erasmus parodies medieval scholastic writings in Moriae Encomium. In Shamela (1741), Henry Fielding makes a parody of Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela by turning the virtuous serving girl into a spirited and sexually ambitious character who merely uses coyness and false chasteness as a tool for snagging a husband. In Joseph Andews (1742), Henry Fielding again parodies Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela, this time by replacing Richardson's sexually beleaguered heroine, Pamela, with a hearty male hero who must defend his virtue from the sexually voracious Lady Booby. In the Romantic period, Southey, Wordsworth, Browning, and Swinburne were the victims of far too many parodies in far too many works to list here. See also mock epic, satire, and spoof.

PAROLE (French, "speech"): In Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of semiology, parole is the use of language--i.e., manifestations of actual speech and writing. Parole contrasts with langue, the invisible underlying system of language that makes parole possible.

PART (Latin partum, "a piece"): An actor's role in a play, the character the actor portrays or pretends to be. The term comes from Renaissance drama. Since it was too expensive in Shakespeare's day to print playbooks for every single actor involved in a play, penny-pinching acting companies would only give each actor a roll of paper called a "part"; the part would list the dialogue for one character and all the cues belonging to that character (Greenblatt 1140). The term role, synonymous with "part," is similarly derived from such rolls of paper (ibidem).

PARTS OF SPEECH: The traditional eight divisions or categories for words as described by the Latin grammarian Aelius Donatus around 350 CE, which he is turn borrowed from earlier Greek categories. In English, these are slightly modified: