Help interpret a word from a dream

[Zork]

1 hour ago, Taomeow said:

 

In poetry, a dactyl is a three-syllable metrical pattern in which a stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed syllables. The word “poetry” itself, e.g., is an example of a dactyl, with the stress falling on the “Po,” followed by the unstressed syllables “e” and “try”: PO-e-try.

 

Dactyls were used to compose Greek epic poetry -- e.g. Iliad and Odyssey.

 

"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending..."

 

And, yes, it is "like a finger" in a sense, but I don't think many people would know in what sense.  In most senses that make any sense to anyone interested in poetry, however, The Odyssey is not a collection of fingerprints.    

I forgot about that. It has been a while. Anyway in that case the "retrodactyl" would be the "anapaest"

[liminal_luke]

a fantasy story

 

A woman intuits that something went terribly wrong with humanity thousands of years ago and she wants to set things right.  So she makes herself powerful and expansive and gathers together alchemical energies from the far corners of the universe and far back in time.  The energetics involved are impossibly huge but somehow she manages to condense them on her person in such a way that nobody notices the transformation.  Perhaps the energies go into an amulet in her purse or into a piece of jewelry she wears.  Perhaps they are integrated into her body but in a hidden way.  She is disguised.  Walking around living a perfectly normal life while carrying around the seeds of worldly transformation.  Nobody knows.  That part is important, the hiddenness.  Perhaps she has conjured up a retrodactyl to help in an aspect of this process.  Perhaps she has herself become, in some sense, a retrodactyl.  She continues to live out her ordinary life waiting for the right moment to put the energetic elements she has gathered to some beneficial use.

[ilumairen]

16 hours ago, liminal_luke said:

OK, I´ll take another flying leap backwards and just throw out some associations.

 

My sense of you, Taomeow, is that you are someone who is deeply concerned with all things retro.  And I don´t mean retro as in the sixties.  I mean retro as in pre-civilization.  Retro as in dinosaur days.  Witness your Sumeria thread, for instance.  You are someone who is unusually in touch with the energetic echo of humanity as it existed before the dubious benefits of "civiliation."  Perhaps you are homesick for that precivilized world, a world where retrodactyls roamed the planet.

 

So I´m wondering if the retro in retrodactyl has anything to do with the idea of returning or recapturing what was pristine and uncorrupted about that time.    

 

 

The wrist and hand as "brush" which our esteemed TM posted of a rather long time ago?

[Taomeow]

7 hours ago, Zork said:

I forgot about that. It has been a while. Anyway in that case the "retrodactyl" would be the "anapaest"

 

Not in America.  Most people here would also place an additional stress on the first syllable, which would make "retrodactyl" a trochee.   

 

I don't like those first-syllable stresses indiscriminately placed on all words longer than three syllables here...  but it is what it is.

Edited December 31, 2019 by Taomeow

[Nintendao]

On 12/30/2019 at 1:34 PM, Taomeow said:

retrodactyl

This word recently came to mind with regards to a certain hand position for example pulse breathing, where the fingers curl inwards so the fingertips contact the laogong area, and the thumb slightly back with its tip on the proximal knuckle of index finger. I just thought it sounded appropriate.