I'm back

Twelve days in Greece is… a long time. I’ll have some posts about things and thoughts that occurred to me there as I settle back into the routine, but first I can blog about an actual Greek word that I encountered in my continued reading of John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

εἴδωλον

“Look at this shiny thing I made,” says your brain. “Now you make it pretty!”

In his explanation of the derivation of his term dolonia, Koenig defines eidōlon as “a phantom image of an ideal form,” which is pretty darn close to our own shinyperfect concept, in which the brain has a interesting but unfinished idea which it then hands off to our conscious self to finish… imperfectly and with a great deal of struggle.

I thought about doing what Koenig does in Obscure Sorrows and combine it with όνειρο, óneiro, or dream, to create an actual term meaning something like phantom-dream, but none of my combinations rolled off the tongue. Eidoneiro? Eidoloneiro? Oneidolon? Let’s go with that one: oneidolon, the frustrating image you have of a Thing That Is Not that you need to make which remains elusively imperfect.

At any rate, you neuroscientists out there researching Creativitronics now have a term that will probably grant you more respect among your fellow creativitronicians than shinyperfection. Maybe.

More later.