Using Sontag's On Photography for a paper about Weegee's Naked City, came across the word quiddity:
The photographer’s ardor for a subject has no essential relation to its content or value, that which makes a subject classifiable. It is, above all, an affirmation of the subjects thereness, its rightness (the rightness of a look on a face, of the arrangement of a group of objects), which is the equivalent of the collector’s standard of genuineness; its quiddity – whatever qualities make it unique (77).
Sometimes words are great because they are onomatopoeitic.
Sometimes words are great because they sound like nonsense but convey a definition you've been looking to signify with one word for quite sometime.
Quiddity, for me, goes into the latter category.
Oh language, you're so terribly, terribly flawed, and yet...
2 comments:
I do indeed realize that quiddity employs the latin root quid, meaning what, as in quid pro quo, so I am sure that might allow some/most of you to disagree with my assertion that it "sounds like nonsense." I guess I'm just trying to point out the shear ability to glean the meaning of a word like moist (or splat) from its sound and a word like quiddity. Also will concede that most onomatopoeias describe a quality to be perceived by the senses.
Clearly, I'm fucking procrastinating about this paper.
i also appreciate the creation of "thereness" as a word. too bad you had a paper to write...
a sadisfying post, if i do say so myself
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