Friday, February 4, 2011

When searching agreeable person, I came across Lexipedia: http://www.lexipedia.com/english/agreeable Look on the left and find under relationships fuzzynyms.

I was actually looking for this quote: My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me. Benjamin Disraeli British politician (1804-1881)

Qualifiers/intensifiers are words like very, too, so, quite, rather.
Qualifiers are function parts of speech. They do not add inflectional morphemes, and they do not have synonyms. Their sole purpose is to "qualify" or "intensify" an adjective or an adverb. Qualifiers / intensifiers modify adjectives or adverbs, telling to what degree. http://www.towson.edu/ows/qualifiers.htm

A paraprosdokian (from Greek "παρα-", meaning "beyond" and "προσδοκία", meaning "expectation") is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists. Some paraprosdokians not only change the meaning of an early phrase, but they also play on the double meaning of a particular word, creating a syllepsis. See examples at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraprosdokian

Syllepsis, also known as semantic zeugma, is a particular type of zeugma in which the clauses disagree in either meaning or grammar. The governing word may change meaning with respect to the other words it modifies. This creates a semantic incongruity that is often humorous. Alternatively, a syllepsis may contain a governing word or phrase that does not agree grammatically with one or more of its distributed terms. This is an intentional construction in which rules of grammar are bent for stylistic effect. See examples at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllepsis#Syllepsis

I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.
Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'

The ROOT-WORD TUDE is the suffix which means STATE OF & CONDITION OF. A few examples are attitude, aptitude, latitude, longitude, fortitude, pulchritude, lassitude, gratitude, multitude, solitude.
http://www.english-for-students.com/tude.html
You have probably seen poems or posters making use of some of these words.

The dream of creating a visual music comparable to auditory music found its fulfillment in animated abstract films by artists such as Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye and Norman McLaren; but long before them, many people built instruments, usually called "color organs," that would display modulated colored light in some kind of fluid fashion comparable to music. Ancient Greek philosophers, like Aristotle and Pythagoras, speculated that there must be a correlation between the musical scale and the rainbow spectrum of hues. That idea fascinated several Renaissance artists including Leonardo da Vinci (who produced elaborate spectacles for court festivals), Athanasius Kircher (the popularizer of the "Laterna Magica" projection apparatus) and Archimboldo who (in addition to his eerie optical-illusion portraits composed of hundreds of small symbolic objects) produced entertainments for the Holy Roman Emperors in Prague. Two rival color-organ artists vied for American and international audiences during the 1920s. Danish-born Thomas Wilfred came to America as a singer of early music, and got involved with a group of Theosophists who wanted to build a color organ to demonstrate spiritual principles. Wilfred called his color organ the Clavilux, and named the artform of color-music projections "Lumia." He stressed polymorphous, fluid streams of color slowly metamorphosing. He established an Art Institute of Light in New York, and toured giving Lumia concerts in the United States and Europe (at the famous Art Déco exhibition in Paris). He also built "lumia boxes," self-contained units that looked rather like television sets, which could play for days or months without repeating the same imagery. Mary Hallock Greenewalt had studied piano with the illustrious Theodore Leschetizky and had a concert career, including recordings of Chopin for Columbia Records. Her desire to control the ambience in a concert hall for sensitive music like Chopin's led her to experiment with light modulation. She invented the rheostat in order to make smooth fade-ups and fade-outs of light, and the liquid-mercury switch, both of which have become standard electric tools. When other people (including Thomas Wilfred) began infringing on her patents by using adaptations of the rheostat and mercury switch, she tried to sue, but a judge ruled that these electric mechanisms were too complex to have been invented by a woman, and denied her case. She continued to perform on her color-organ, the Sarabet, for which she created a special notation that recorded the intensity and deployment of various colors during any given musical composition. See much more at: http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.1/articles/moritz2.1.html

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