Prompt Challenge: Neoterism

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.

Japanese Tsunami before and after

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).

Dissolving Views

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.

Prompt Challenge: Neoterism

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.

Prompt Challenge: Neoterism

(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.

Wisława Szymborska

Wisława SzymborskaYesterday Polish poet Wisława Szymborska died (you can read the obituary here). I bought my first letterpress to print several of her poems and last night I re-read some of her poetry. (I think the best translation into English is this one.)
My current favorite is A Word on Statistics, which starts out

Out of every hundred people,

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Read the entire poem here.

Guy Laramee’s Carved Books

Guy Laramee has 2 series of books carved into landscapes and structures, The Great Wall and Biblios.

He says

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

Guy Laramee, The Great Wall
Guy Laramee’s “The Great Wall”

[First seen on boing boing]

Prompt Challenge: Slimsy

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.
Slimsy

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

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