Thothmuffin
Don't get any crumbs on the scale of judgement.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Another Installment of "Words I've Never Heard"
My archival studies reading today brings you, dear readers, another installment of "Words I've Never Heard!" Today's word of the day is: thigmotropic.
In context:
"the archivist-historian relationship is a thigmotropic one. Archivists do historical work of sorts and historians do archival work of sorts."
Brothman, "Orders of Value: Probing [!] the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice", Archivaria 33 (Summer 1991), p.86
From Internet gleanings (The American Heritage Dictionaries), it appears that "thigmotropism" refers to "The turning or bending response of an organism upon direct contact with a solid surface or object. Also called stereotropism." I grok this as what happens when a tree encounters a fence post and proceeds to grow around it, or, if you like, the mythical phenomenon of the kitten in a jar. Very well.
So wtf is Brothman talking about? Is the archivist the organism, and the historian the object? Or the other way around? Or can there be a such thing as mutual thigmotropism, whereby two organisms act as objects for each other? In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
More importantly, wouldn't it have been clearer and more accurate to say "The shape of the archival profession affects the shape of the historical profession, and vice versa"? Or just delete the first sentence all together, and rely on the second sentence to make the point, though in an unhelpfully imprecise way?
On a side note: this is why skimming reading is so difficult for me. If authors would be considerate enough to confine themselves primarily to one- or two-syllable words, things would go much faster. I'm just glad I only have to read a reaction paper to Brothman's article, and not the whole thing, although who knows how many deliciously unnecessary new words he could teach me?
In context:
"the archivist-historian relationship is a thigmotropic one. Archivists do historical work of sorts and historians do archival work of sorts."
Brothman, "Orders of Value: Probing [!] the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice", Archivaria 33 (Summer 1991), p.86
From Internet gleanings (The American Heritage Dictionaries), it appears that "thigmotropism" refers to "The turning or bending response of an organism upon direct contact with a solid surface or object. Also called stereotropism." I grok this as what happens when a tree encounters a fence post and proceeds to grow around it, or, if you like, the mythical phenomenon of the kitten in a jar. Very well.
So wtf is Brothman talking about? Is the archivist the organism, and the historian the object? Or the other way around? Or can there be a such thing as mutual thigmotropism, whereby two organisms act as objects for each other? In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
More importantly, wouldn't it have been clearer and more accurate to say "The shape of the archival profession affects the shape of the historical profession, and vice versa"? Or just delete the first sentence all together, and rely on the second sentence to make the point, though in an unhelpfully imprecise way?
On a side note: this is why skimming reading is so difficult for me. If authors would be considerate enough to confine themselves primarily to one- or two-syllable words, things would go much faster. I'm just glad I only have to read a reaction paper to Brothman's article, and not the whole thing, although who knows how many deliciously unnecessary new words he could teach me?
