This keeps happening. I serendipitously [i.e., by a surprising/unsought/unanticipated route or conjunction] discover a term or concept that efficiently labels something I've been doing or saying for a long time. Such nexus events connect me to a discourse I hadn't recognized or heeded, and allow me to recognize what I do as "a kind of a..." I'm pretty sure this happens to everybody, but I at least haven't paid much heed to it before now. For example...
When I first encountered the term 'blog' (sometime during my Fall 2002 sabbatical, long after I should [as an information professional...] have been aware of the phenomenon/practise/community-of-discourse), I realized that my long-running practise of keeping log files was essentially the same activity, though it wasn't until this month that I began to explore blogging software (due to various institutional limitations yadda yadda) --and tehre are still facets of the blogosphere (like RSS) that I'm pretty hazy about. But I'm gradually putting more of it together, and pennies continue to drop. And now I see that bloggery is of a piece with journal keeping and Ann Berthoff's dialectical notebooks.
Similarly with two terms I started to explore only a couple of weeks ago, as the fortuitous result of a class exercise: chronotope and architectonic. These two provide a handy shorthand for the 4-space notions I've been working with for 35+ years, and the all-connects-to-all model that I find most pleasing and heuristic.
Posted by oook at March 26, 2004 10:52 AM