Category: Prompt Challenge

filiopietistic: n. Of or relating to an often excessive veneration of ancestors or tradition.

As I’ve contemplated what to do with this week’s word, I’ve also been reading, on one of the letterpress discussion boards I subscribe to, a lively discussion about whether anyone cares about the history of printing, letterpress and bookwork, or is the revival of letterpress printing only about stamping greeting card designs into thick paper.
Initially I thought “filiopietistic” seemed a rather negative word. But in the context of the discussion on the letterpress list, understanding where we’re come from can be awfully helpful and instructive. So for this week I decided to revisit a project I started last summer but couldn’t get any momentum going to finish.
Soon after I got my large letterpress, I bought a full set of 12 point Bembo roman, thinking I would have lots of occasions to hand-set type. Well, I’ve had almost none, using photopolymer instead. And to a large extent I’ve used my press for my artwork, rather than bookwork.
After carefully moving the type (in its type case) from California to New Mexico, I promised myself I’d write a short story, use my Bembo to hand-set the type and make a small edition of chapbooks. I finally got around to starting the story last summer, but didn’t get very far with it. So in response to this week’s word, I finished up my story and laid out the book in InDesign. That’s only the beginning, actually starting to set the type is the next hurdle!
The next word: exoteric, adj; Suitable for or communicated to the general public; Popular; simple; commonplace.

neoterism: noun. an innovation in language, as a new word, term, or expression.

This week’s prompt challenge word is pretty similar in feel to the word from last week. As I read the usage examples, I thought I’d concentrate on words or concepts that caused a big change in society, or that had a noticeable before and after. The NY Times had a quite startling interactive feature after the tsunami in Japan — they showed before and after photos side-by-side. There is a bar in the middle you drag — go all the way to the right to see the before, all the way to the left to see the tsunami destruction.

Not wanting to get too complicated, I remembered a mechanical paper structure sometimes called “dissolving views.” Below is an example held by the Smithsonian Libraries. The idea is that a contrasting image is revealed when a tab is pulled. (There’s a nice PDF about a pop-up exhibition at the Smithsonian that included the book below).

I found instructions for a version with 2 panels in David Carter’s book Elements Of Pop Up: A Pop Up Book For Aspiring Paper Engineers. On-line the blog Altered Ego has a dissolving card template that seemed promising.
My idea was to find contrasting images for half a dozen words. But time ran out, and I was only able to make a model using each temple for one word.
The one below uses the technique from Carter’s book.

This one uses this template. It’s a fiddly thing to make, has many more cuts than the first version and requires quite a bit more precision. But it captures my intent more than the version above.

(About the photos I used: The woman washing is from here. The man doing laundry is from by Andrew Olney \ Getty Images.)

Next word: filiopietistic: noun. Of or relating to an often excessive veneration of ancestors or tradition.

slimsy, adj. flimsy; frail. a blend of slim and flimsy.

I knew immediately what to do with this week’s prompt challenge word. Slimsy is a portmanteau, a word formed by combining two other words (many examples here). Since I’d been thinking about mix and match books that create new creatures by blending the parts of others, I thought it would be the perfect structure. After a bit of research (see this post from the other day), I also knew that a week really wasn’t enough time to do much more than a rough model.
After trying out a few ideas, I settled on drawing some people and animals, and then giving each one three attributes (for a bear, for instance: clumsy, rough, grumpy). When a new creature is created by flipping pages in the book, it mixes not only head, torso and legs, but it also has 3 new descriptors.
As I set about photographing the resulting book, it seemed awfully slimsy, both in heft and quality. So maybe I can say it’s a success!

This one is a combination of bear, ballerina and snake.

This is a combination of snake, dog and bratty little boy.

Next word: neoterism: noun. an innovation in language, as a new word, term, or expression.

heterotelic, adj. Having the purpose of its existence apart from itself
Here it is only the second of my weekly prompt challenges and I got a word that isn’t visual and its definition is, to say the least, opaque! The usage examples that dictionary.com gave didn’t shed much light on the meaning and a Google search wasn’t much help either. I eventually found the dictionary of difficult words which had this definition: adj. not autotelic. Then, from Wikipedia:

A thing which is autotelic is described as “having a purpose in and not apart from itself”. It is a broad term that can be applied to missionaries, scientists, systems, and so forth…. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes people who are internally driven, and as such may exhibit a sense of purpose and curiosity as autotelic. This determination is an exclusive difference from being externally driven, where things such as comfort, money, power, or fame are the motivating force.

My friend Lisa came to my rescue and we had a long conversation over lunch, puzzling out both words and the examples I had found. After more research, it seems that heterotelic/autotelic always go together, much like yin and yang. And while they are opposites, one is neither all good or all bad. Heterotelic is about external forces or pressures, autotelic is the internal ones. One looks outward, one looks inward. And as I thought about what sort of visual representation I would make, I kept coming back to the idea of balance between opposites. I found this quote from Euripides:

The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us.

That balance is often hard to achieve, and my response to this week’s word is to express the struggle for balance with an animation encapsulated in a flipbook. Here’s a video of what I came up with:

[youtube fV2QrfdxZqU]

The word for this week is, happily, less obscure: perspicacious, adj; Having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning.