I’m listing this under “Adventure” as well as other, perhaps better expected categories because the Learning of Useful Words & Phrases should be considered adventurous—that is, profitable, if at times exceedingly dangerous.
Following up on an earlier post regarding paratext, I’d like to further explore some other uses of para. (That’s my motherfuckin affix.)
Being a humble and yet oh-so-trill Greek word for “beside” or “near,” or sometimes “past,” “beyond,” or “contrary,” or, in my head, “to/on the side of”—para gives us such high-profile hits as parable and paranormal. Yet we’d be remiss, Gentle Reader, not to give serious props to some of these words’ stranger kin.
Parabasis (”going to the side,” Gr.), for example, is the part in a Greek comedy when the actors exit and the chorus sings to the audience directly, often about some topic unrelated to the play. I think of this word sometimes when I’m sitting, waiting, bored, perhaps watching a distant television, and suddenly an engaging feature about rabid prairie dogs comes on. I feel as if the world is speaking to me directly, telling me a joke to keep me entertained.
(Damn the actors. The shadows falling across the set come alive. The man in the fourth row texting venom becomes the playwright.)
Parataxis (”arranging side by side,” Gr.), meanwhile, is a literary term, meaning the use of short, simple sentences, without conjunctions, the opposite of hypotaxis. Beckett rocked hella parataxis. Small children also tend to rock hella parataxis. See Spot cavort.
Often the links between paratactic sentences and fragments—the negative spaces—provide as much to chew on as the words themselves. As with all minimal techniques, crafting elite parataxis is all about knowing what not to say.
On the same minimal tip, we have—perhaps not from my Greek affix—páramo (”wasteland,” Sp.), a high-altitude, uh, wasteland, between the upper forest and the snow line, featuring a variety of glacier-formed lakes and bogs and stands of gnarled trees and grassy plains dotted, here and there, with shaggy donkeys.
Descriptions of the páramo can be as vivid as the wild terrain itself, a changeling land belonging neither to the lifeless, tundral realm of the high peaks, which we cannot but pass through warily, nor to the city or the farm, nor even to the superabundant jungle, which—however full of plants and lakes and predators and pitfalls and features, in general—takes one familiar form, where the páramo changes as it’s traversed, a chimera.
All this fancy talk brings to mind parament or parement (”to prepare,” Lat.), which is a word for rich, elegant hangings, robes, altar cloths, furniture, and other ornaments, usually connected to powerful people or places, especially religious and political potentates.
But, purple, hypotactic descriptions aside, where on the páramo would you find parament? Perhaps in a parador (”inn,” Sp., a place to stop), a lavish hotel housed in a castle or abbey.
The appearance of a sumptuously-furnished parador on the bleak páramo would represent, in a highly metaphorical way, a parabiosis, or a natural or artificial union of the parts of two organisms—a transplant, the creation of a chimera…
Still stranger are chimerae of the sign: Take paragoge (”addition to a word,” Gr.), or the addition of letters or syllables to the ends of words, often to round out a loanword in a new language. (”Computer” in English must end in a vowel in Japanese and so becomes “konpyuuta;” “note” becomes “nouto;” &c.)
And then there are those para-concepts whose to-the-sideness (signal perpendicularity) leaves me on a mental páramo, wading across chill fens of ground rosette and tussock, looking everywhere for the hint of a burro trail… These chimerae, like the word “parachor“—a “scientific quantity” whose definition I don’t understand (P = γ1/4 * M / d)—are at the very side of language.
Clearly, these paras are not not-language; they are not gibberish. But because I cannot grasp them (maybe they are too abstract, as in the math formula, or—for someone who has no examples handy—too alien, as with linguistics terms like “paragoge”), these para-paras are not allowed into my common pool of words; they are not, for me, what language is; they are extra building blocks, unused Legos strewn outside my ill multicolored castle.
The whole notion of side-ness has perhaps been under-explored. For most of us, uncommon words such as the paras I’ve handpicked for this essay are to the side of language. They are not even ornament (parament), but something else, available but invisible—or visible but un-see-able, like shimmering figures in dreams who dissolve when turned toward.
The question is not, then, of what words we know or have never ever heard of, but of how many words—how many signs and concepts, in toto—have we encountered but never fully or even partially deciphered?
I must have heard every word in Spanish by now, and yet I know few (horse terms from cowboy fiction, curses, religious phrases); I have forgotten German, and yet I must have known, and thus must still know, in a sideways way, its forms and sounds and agglutinations; I know Japanese imperfectly, and yet I can recognize it; it is at once alien and familiar, a chimera, a double-thing. It is not a concept, like love or God, that can be theorized about ad infinitum: It exists; I could re-learn or better learn it, all of it (until I became a paragon). But I do not.
I meanwhile learn words like “paragoge,” a demonstrably useless term. (No one else in my life outside some professor probably has ever heard of it, so I can’t use it; it’s a non-part of my life.) Japanese would be useful; I have Japanese friends. But it remains to the side, there but not there.
There but not—parapresent, nearby, beyond, framing by absence. What we don’t know is so much greater than what we know, or what we can ever know. We are the excitations of only a few ideas, almost (just almost) randomly jumbled together and set a-drifting, like the tumbleweeds on the limitless dusty avenue of the Divine.
