A posteriori

SYNCHRONIC: A synchronic study is one that provides an overview of a subject at a particular moment in time, as opposed to a diachronic study, which traces changes from one time period to the next across many years or centuries. For example, in linguistics, etymology is a diachronic study--one concerned with where words came from in the past and how their meanings have changed from century to century. Saussurian linguistics, on the other hand, studies language synchronically as a functioning system of signs existing at the present moment without studying developmental changes across time.

SYNESTHESIA: An alternative spelling of synaesthesia, above.

SYNOPTIC GOSPELS: The three first gospels (Matthew Mark, Luke), which share several textual similarities. Biblical scholars think they might be adaptations from a single lost source known as the Q-Text. This contrasts with the fourth gospel, John, which does not share these traits. Thus, Matthew, Mark and Luke are synoptic, but John is non-synoptic.

SYNTAGMATIC CHANGE: Any change in language resulting from the influence of nearby sounds or words. Examples include linguistic assimilation and dissimilation.

SYNTAX (from Greek syntaxis): As David Smith puts it, "the orderly arrangement of words into sentences to express ideas," i.e., the standard word order and sentence structure of a language, as opposed to diction (the actual choice of words) or content (the meaning of individual words). Standard English syntax prefers a Subject-Verb-Object pattern, but poets may tweak syntax to achieve rhetorical or poetic effects. Intentionally disrupting word order for a poetic effect is called anastrophe. Syntax is often distinguished from morphology and grammar. Note that syntax is what allows us to produce sequential grammatical units such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. See also analytic language and synthetic language.

SYNTHETIC (also called a declined language): Not to be confused with an artificial or made-up language like Esperanto or Tolkien's Elvish, a synthetic language is one in which word order is irrelevant for determining meaning. Instead of using word order (i.e., Subject-Verb-Object or some similar pattern), a synthetic language uses special endings attached to the ends of nouns. These patterned endings, called declensions, indicate what noun in the sentence is a subject, what noun is a direct or indirect object, and so on, generally establishing the relationship between different parts of speech. Synthetic languages allow a great degree of poetic freedom in word order. Examples of synthetic languages include Latin, German, koine Greek, Welsh, and Anglo-Saxon. The opposite type of language is an analytic language such as Modern English, Spanish, or French. See also artificial language, anastrophe and periodic sentence. Click here for more information.

SYZYGY: (from Greek "yoke"): In classical prosody, syzygy describes the combination of any two feet into another single metrical unit. It is often used interchangeably with the more precise term dipody, which refers more specifically to the metrical substitution of two normal feet, usually iambs or trochees, under a more powerful beat, so that a "galloping" or "rolling" rhythm results. See meter, rhythm, dipody.

TABOO (also spelled tabu): (1) In anthropology, a taboo is a socially prohibited activity. For instance, in classical Greek culture, it was forbidden for a murderer or menstruating woman to enter the sacred space of a temple or the central agora of a city beyond a temenos boundary lest that action spread contagious miasma. (2) A linguistic taboo is a social prohibition that forbids mentioning a word or subject. Commonly, various cultures might have taboos against mentioning bodily fluids, defecation, certain sexual activities, or certain religious terms. These terms often suffer linguistic pejoration and become "curse-words." For instance, in Britain, the adjective bloody is considered taboo or impolite to speak aloud as a curse word because of its older religious connotations as a medieval curse about the blood of Christ's wounds. In American English, words describing specific sexual activities or bodily functions usually are taboo for polite conversation, and so on.

TABULA RASA (Latin, "erased tablet"): The term used in Enlightenment philosophy for the idea that humanity is born completely innocent, without any initial predispositions, attitudes, or beliefs. Accordingly, no natural state of humanity exists, but instead, humanity is infinitely malleable. The newborn child is thus a "blank slate" on which experiences and education will write his or her future personality and beliefs. The idea is influential in the philosophical writings of Locke, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft, but it also influences literary fiction such as Frankenstein, in which the monster's account of his experiences after his initial creation characterize him as an innocent tabula rasa.

TACTILE IMAGERY: Verbal description that evokes the sense of touch. See imagery.

TAG: "Tags" are catch-phrases or character traits that a fiction writer uses repeatedly with a character. For instance, both the phrase, "Elementary my dear Watson," and the "smoking-pipe-with-deer-hunter-hat" ensemble of Sherlock Holmes, are two "tags" Sir Arthur Conan Doyle uses repeatedly as distinguishing marks for that character. In the old Doc Savage adventurer thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s, the phrase, "The Man of Bronze" was a verbal tag to describe the protagonist, while the author used a sword hidden in a cane as the object-tag for his dapper lawyer side-kick. Meanwhile, the author used ape-like visage as a descriptive tag for "Monk," the stunted chemist who was a part of his crime-busting team. Tags thus can be either phrases or words or they can be imagery and description or perhaps simple objects and wardrobe--overall, a very versital term.

TAIL-RHYME (translated from French rime couée, or Latin rhythmus caudatus, also called caudate rhyme): A unit of verse in which a short line, followed by a longer line or section of longer lines, rhymes with a preceding short line. The number of possible variants following this scheme are too many to list here. Famous examples can be found in Chaucer's "Sir Thopas" and Drayton's "Ballad of Agincourt." The following example of tail-rhyme comes from P. B. Shelley's "To Night":

Swiftly walk o'er the western wave,

Spirit of Night!

Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,--

Swift be thy flight!

TANKA: A genre of Japanese poetry similar to the haiku. A tanka consists of thirty-one syllables arranged in five lines. The lines contain five / seven / five / seven / seven syllables. Also known as the waka or uta, it originated in the 600s CE, and it is regarded as the classic, ancient Japanese poetic form. It has had little influence on Western poetry, though Amy Lowell and Adelaide Crapsey have imitated it. Contrast it with the much more influential haiku.

TELEMACHIA: The first four books of The Odyssey are together called the Telemachia because they focus on the problems Telemachus faces while waiting for his father Odysseus to return home.

TELESTICH: A poem in which the last letters of successive lines form a word, phrase, or consecutive letters of the alphabet. Compare with abecedarian poem and acrostic.

TEL QUEL SCHOOL: A school of French intellectuals associated with Philippe Seller's review Tel Quel. Sample members include Julia Kristeva, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Jacques Derrida.

TEMENOS (from Greek "to cut"): In Classical Greek culture, the temenos is a sacred area marked off as holy ground. On this special plot of land, we might find temples dedicated to a particular god, sanctuaries, holy groves, the race-course for Pythian or Olympic games, the agora in the center of each city, and the Acropolis. Stones called temenos markers would indicate the boundary, and it would be taboo for any ritually unclean person to cross this line lest they risk creating or spreading miasma.

TEMPO: The pace or speed of speech and also the degree to which individual sounds are fully articulated or blurred together. The faster the tempo, the more likely sounds will blur or elide.

TEMPORAL: In grammatical and linguistic discussion, something relating to the element of time. See further discussion under clause.

TEMPTATION MOTIF: A motif in which one of the protagonist's primary struggles is the conflict between his or her sense of (1) personal honor and ethics and (2) his or her personal desires, ambitions, or wickedness. Biblical examples include the fall of mankind in Genesis, David and Bathsheba, and Satan's three temptations of Christ. This motif is central to a variety of patristic, medieval and Renaissance works, including the Confessions, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Paradise Lost, and The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Stories that involve a temptation motif frequently focus on internal conflict or psychological drama in addition to any external plot lines. In medieval theology, the temptation motif was often divided into three categories: concupiscentia carnis (physical temptations of the flesh such as gluttony, drunkenness, and illicit sexuality), concupiscentia oculora ("temptation of the eyes" i.e., mental temptations for imagined material possessions, power or wealth) and superbia vitae (pride concerning life--the desire humans have to be more than what God created humans to be.) Perhaps the most dramatic example is the Faustian bargain, a temptation motif in which an individual sells his or her soul to the devil.

TENDENTIAL: In grammar, tendential refers to action that has been attempted but remains incomplete--especially interrupted action. This situation is only of minor concern in English grammar, but it is important in Greek and other languages.

TENOR: In common usage, tenor refers to the course of thought, meaning or emotion in anything written or spoken. Among rhetoricians, however, the word tenor more specifically refers to the subject of a metaphor. For instance, if a writer claimed, "Mrs. Higgins is a witch," the tenor of the metaphor witch is Mrs. Higgins. When Shakespeare claims that "all the world's a stage," the entire world is the tenor for the metaphor of a stage. See metaphor.

TENSE VOWEL: Any vowel made with the tongue muscles relatively more tense than in a lax vowel. These tense vowels tend to be less central and pronounced higher in the oral cavity than lax vowels. Examples include the vowels [i], [e], [u], and [o].

TENSION: (1) In common usage, tension refers to a sense of heightened involvement, uncertainty, and interest an audience experiences as the climax of the action approaches. (2) In the school of literary theory called "New Criticism" in the 1930s and later, the word tension refers more specifically to the quality of balanced opposites that can provide form and unity to a literary work of diverse components. This sort of tension exists between the literal and metaphorical meanings of a work, between what is written and what the text implies, between the serious and the ironic, between contradictions in the text that the reader must resolve without authorial discussion, or any equilibrium resulting from the harmony of opposite tendencies.

TESTAMENT: An agreement or covenant, especially in the sense of a will being a "last will and testament" or in the sense of the two major portions of the Bible being a covenant between God and humanity. In literature, the term is often used in the sense of "affirmation," such as Robert Bridges' The Testament of Beauty, which affirms the wisdom of the artistic spirit.

TERCET: A three-line unit or stanza of poetry. It typically rhymes in an AAA or ABA pattern. If the tercet forms a stanza by itself, it is often called a triplet.

TERMINISTIC SCREEN: Kenneth Burke's term for the way a word or label alters the way we categorize, analyze, and perceive the object about which we talk. Compare with Whorf's Hypothesis.

TERRIBLE SONNETS: In spite of the label, this phrase does not refer to poorly written sonnets. Gerard Manley Hopkins used the term "terrible sonnets" to designate several of his later religious poems, in which he feels isolated from God. In this poems, his sense of individuality leads Hopkins to confront his solipsism--and react with despair ("the dark night of the soul," as described by St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order). The terrible sonnets contrast starkly with Hopkins' earlier religious poetry, which focus on the ecstatic joy of being in God's presence or God's creation. Sample terrible sonnets include Hopkins' "Carrion Comfort," "No Worst, There Is None," "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day," and "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord."

TERZA RIMA (Italian, "third rhyme"): A three-line stanza form with interlocking rhymes that move from one stanza to the next. The typical pattern is ABA, BCB, CDC, DED, and so on. Dante chose terza rima's tripartite structure as the basic poetic unit of his trilogy, The Divine Comedy. An English example is found in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." Here are two sample stanzas:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

TETRAGRAMMATON: The four Hebrew consonant letters corresponding to yhwh (or in German transliteration, jhvh). The oldest Hebrew writers referred to God in a variety of ways: El (God), Elohim (God, but in a plural form as was common in other Ugaritic and Semitic traditions), or by a personal name containing the letters yhwh, usually rendered as Yahweh in modern transcription. Over time, given certain Kabbalistic and mystical leanings, Hebrew scribes began to add extra semantic weight to this combination of written letters. It is as if the holiness of God spilled over into the inky strokes signifying the Divine on parchment. Scribes and priests treated the tetragrammaton as spiritually charged by its use in prayers, curses, and blessings. Divine help, after all, is triggered by invocation or calling upon the name of a deity. The tetragrammaton often became personified--almost like a separate entity from its referent. Thus, the Deuteronomic writers customarily referred to the Temple in Jerusalem as the place where Yahweh's "name" dwelled rather than (or in addition to) being the residence of Yahweh himself (Gabel and Wheeler 269).

The original Hebrew writing system did not have letters indicating vowel sounds. The scribes only wrote down consonant letters and relied upon memory and context to supply the appropriate vowels. However, the tetragrammaton Yahweh was different from other Hebrew terms because it underwent a linguistic taboo. It could be written down, but it became forbidden to say the name aloud. (Gabon and Wheeler note there is "no real evidence that this originally had been the case," with only anachronistic additions to the Leviticus text in Leviticus 24:10-16 being used to justify the taboo a posteriori.) Shortly after the Babylonian Exile, however, the divine name was considered too sacred to pronounce and strict rules prevented its use, even though before this time the ordinary believer used God's name as a matter of course. The convention then became that, when reading the scriptures aloud, the reader would substitute a neutral title, adonai ("my Lord") wherever the tetragrammaton yhwh appeared. After the custom of using diacritical markings to indicate vowels appeared in Hebrew scribal practice, the scribe would continue to use the consonant letters, but would instead place the diacritical vowel markings for adonai above the consonants, reminding the reader to substitute adonai for the tetragrammaton. (This substitution sounds a bit confusing in English, but the markings are distinctive and quickly discernable in Hebrew). The Greek kurios and Latin dominus appear as translated equivalents to adonai, but many modern English Bibles indicate the tetragrammaton by writing LORD in all capital letters but with slightly smaller typefont, which imitates the special status of the yhwh in the original Hebrew. This distinction, however, only applies to the Hebrew Bible, not the New Testament. Note that Jehovah is an incorrect rendering of yhwh first popularized in the Renaissance by King James translators unfamiliar with this unique Hebrew convention.

TETRALOGY: (1) In a general sense, a collection of four narratives that are contiguous and continuous in chronology. Just as three books that tell a continuous story constitute a trilogy, four books that tell a continuous narrative are a tetralogy. (2) A set of four plays that constitute a long historical cycle, written in approximately the same half of Shakespeare's career. Scholars refer to Shakespeare as writing a "First Tetralogy" (containing Richard III and Henry VI,