Seeing the face of Jesus in burnt toast, or a man in the moon is called pareidolia, an instance of the more general term apophenia, the finding of meaningful connections in meaningless, random data. Todays word makes fun of all that, as I see it, in the making of a parody religion: Discordianism.

Discordianism /dis-kor'di-*n-ism/ ,proper noun

The veneration of Eris, also known as Discordia; widely popular among hackers. Discordianism was popularised by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's novel "Illuminatus!" as a sort of self-subverting Dada-Zen for Westerners - it should on no account be taken seriously but is far more serious than most jokes. Consider, for example, the Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf, from "Principia Discordia": "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing What he Reads." Discordianism is usually connected with an elaborate conspiracy theory/joke involving millennia-long warfare between the anarcho-surrealist partisans of Eris and a malevolent, authoritarian secret society called the Illuminati.

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2007 Denis Howe

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Discordianism is a modern, chaos-centered religion founded circa 1958–1959 by Malaclypse the Younger with the publication of its principal text, the Principia Discordia. It is widely regarded as a parody religion, and has been called "Zen for roundeyes", based on similarities with absurdist interpretations of the Rinzai school. Discordianism recognizes chaos, discord, and dissent as valid and desirable qualities, in contrast with most religions, which idealize harmony and order. Discordianism is largely composed of whimsical and absurd ideas, though many adherents claim there is a deeper meaning to their flippant attitude. Eris, the Greek mythological goddess of discord, has also become the matron deity of the religion Discordianism.
It is difficult to estimate the number of followers and correctly identify Discordian groups. The anarchist ethic that pervades Discordianism is reflected in an encouragement to form schisms and cabals. Additionally, few adherents hold Discordianism as their only or primary faith. Instead, Erisians tend to adopt Discordianism as a complement to other faiths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism check there for more.


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The Principia Discordia The Discordian "Bible." Very nice!

A Sermon on Ethics and Love from the Principia Discordia. kool

A silly little song improvised just now for the WOD. To be sung to a Tony Bennett tune the title and words of which have escaped from memory:

The catenaries of your gloomy frowns
Are really turning me so upside down.
If you'd wear a little smile,
Even if for just a while
My very heavy soul would lose --- five hundred pounds.

cat·e·nar·y [KAT-n-er-ee; especially Brit. kuh-TEE-nuh-ree] n. pl. cat·e·nar·ies

1.The curve formed by a perfectly flexible, uniformly dense, and inextensible cable suspended from its endpoints. It is identical to the graph of a hyperbolic cosine.
2.Something having the general shape of this curve.

cat'e·nar'y adj.

1788, from L. catenanus, from catena "chain"

maybe that tony bennett song is 'the shadow of your smile' ?

macaronic (mak-uh-RON-ik), adj.

1. of language, Latin words, mixed with non-Latin words, or with fake Latin.
2. made of a mixture of languages

noun
1. macaronic language, plural macaronics

macaronic from Mod.L. macaronicus (coined 1517 by Teofilo Folengo), from It. dial. maccarone (see macaroni), in allusion to the mixture of words in the verse: "quoddam pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum." – The American Heritage Dictionary


macaroni ,1599, from southern It. dialect maccaroni (It. maccheroni), pl. of *maccarone, possibly from maccare “bruise, batter, crush,” of unknown origin, or from late Gk. makaria “food made from barley.” Used after c.1764 to mean “fop, dandy” (the “Yankee Doodle” reference) because it was an exotic dish at a time when certain young men who had traveled the continent were affecting Fr. and It. fashions and accents. There is said to have been a Macaroni Club in Britain, which was the immediate source of the term. – Online Etymology Dictionary

MACARONICS, a species of burlesque poetry, in which words from a modern vernacular, with Latin endings, are introduced into Latin verse, so as to produce a ridiculous effect. Sometimes Greek is used instead of Latin. Tisi degli Odassi issued a Carmen macaronicum de Patavinis in 1490. The real founder of the practice, however, was Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544), whose mockheroic Liber Macaronices appeared in 1517. Folengo (q.v.) was a Benedictine monk, who escaped from his monastery and wandered through Italy, living a dissolute life, and supporting himself by his absurd verses, which he described as an attempt to produce in literature something like macaroni, a gross, rude and rustic mixture of flour, cheese and butter. …
….Folengo is frequently quoted and still more frequently copied by Rabelais. The earlier editions of his Opus macaronicum are now extremely rare. The often reprinted edition of 1530 exhibits the text as revised by the author after he had begun to amend his life.- Classic Encyclopedia based on the 1911 Britannica

Now, here for your reading pleasure is an English-Latin macaronic.

Malum Opus

Prope ripam fluvii solus
A senex silently sat;
Super capitum ecce his wig,
Et wig super, ecce his hat.
Blew Zephyrus alte, acerbus,
Dum elderly gentleman sat;
Et a capite took up quite torve
Et in rivum projecit his hat.
Tunc soft maledixit the old man,
Tunc stooped from the bank where he sat
Et cum scipio poked in the water,
Conatus servare his hat.
Blew Zephyrus alte, acerbus,
The moment it saw him at that;
Et whisked his novum scratch wig,
In flumen, along with his hat.
Ab imo pectore damnavit
In coeruleus eye dolor sat;
Tunc despairingly threw in his cane
Nare cum his wig and his hat.

L'envoi

Contra bonos mores, don't swear,
It is wicked, you know (verbum sat.),
Si this tale habet no other moral,
Mehercle! You're gratus to that!
—J.A. Morgan

“Of course, some of it isn't in English, which is part of what's neat about it: there should be macaronic or multilingual verse by and about U.S. Latinos, verse dense enough to work on the page rather than only in performance, and Herrera-- among others--- is inventing it.” – Stephen Burt http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/12/sonnets_busyness_influence_and.html

HANS BREITMANN'S BARTY.

HANS BREITMANN gife a barty;
Dey had biano-blayin',
I felled in lofe mit a Merican frau,
Her name vas Madilda Yane.
She hat haar as prown ash a pretzel,
Her eyes vas himmel-plue,
Und vhen dey looket indo mine,
Dey shplit mine heart in dwo.

Hans Breitmann gife a barty,
I vent dere you'll pe pound;
I valtzet mit Matilda Yane,
Und vent shpinnen' round und round.
De pootiest Fraulein in de house,
She vayed 'pout dwo hoondred pound,
Und efery dime she gife a shoomp
She make de vindows sound.
- two stanzas from The Breitmann Ballads by Charles G. Leland. There is much more at http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/poetry/TheBreitmannBallads/chap3.html

hauteur \haw-TUR; (h)oh-\, noun:

Haughty manner, spirit, or bearing; haughtiness; arrogance.

My silence, I hoped, would be taken as expressive of the hauteur of a man who was above it all -- a man with a mission, in fact, a mission authorized from somewhere on high.
-- Jeffrey Tayler, Facing the Congo

Sheikhs and presidents have often heard little about the royal family's follies, and don't object to the hauteur and self-importance that remain its inextinguishable traits.
-- Hugo Young, "Blair and the Queen", The Guardian, April 10, 2001

That self-deprecation and lack of hauteur are typical of the earthy style that enables Powell to get close to his troops in a way that many top brass never do.
-- "Colin Powell: The master planner of Desert Shield is ready for its ultimate test", People, December 31, 1990

Hauteur is from the French, from haut, "high," from Latin altus, "high." It is thus related to altitude.

Dictionary.com

Thomas Pynchon would love this. Have you ever read any of his books, such as V., Gravity's Rainbow or The Crying of Lot 49? The last named book proposes a series of seemingly incredible interconnections between several bizarre revelations that confront the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas.

Like V., the novel contains a wealth of references to science and technology and to obscure historical events, and both books dwell upon the detritus of American society and culture.

Based on what I've seen you post, I believe you'd be likely to really enjoy his books.

Regards,
"John 3: 17"

Yes, Pynchon, sounds an interesting writer for me to check out! Thanks



Conrad when he made up the word used Greek, didn't he? I haven't found it in any dictionaries.

Yes, that word was made up of two Greek words, the prepostion, Apo, meaning "from" or "out of", and, I believe, the verb, phano, to appear; so it means, "from appearances."

Read Pynchon's shorter work (less than 100 pages) Lot 49, first, then go to V. Both V. and Granvity's Rainbow are quite long but really well worth it. Some of his books require great perseverance but are some of the most important fiction of the 20th Century. They can be horrifying and funny at the same time, similar to Kafka in that way.

It's interesting that I just saw this sentence in the Wikipedia connecting Pynchon with apophenia: "Postmodern novelists and film-makers have reflected on apophenia-related phenomena, such as paranoid narrativization or fuzzy plotting (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols", Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 ..."

Be prepared for one wild and crazy ride.

Regards,
"John 3: 17"

Copasetic (kō′pə set′ik), adjective
also spelled copacetic, copesetic or - less commonly - kopasetic

very satisfactory or acceptable.

Some say it is a slang word and some say its not. It is rarely used anywhere other than in North America. It was often used in communications between the astronauts and Mission Control of the Apollo Program in the 1960s.

Etymology -wikipedia
The earliest known usage given in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Irving Bacheller 1919 biography of Abraham Lincoln:

1919 I. BACHELLER Man for Ages iv. 69 ‘As to looks I'd call him, as ye might say, real copasetic.’ Mrs. Lukins expressed this opinion solemnly... Its last word stood for nothing more than an indefinite depth of meaning.
There are many theories to the origin of copasetic

"It is widely accepted that it originated from some form of American slang. This conclusion stems from the slow introduction of the word into the written language mainly through use in periodicals and in character dialog in 20th century novels. Copasetic may have originated from African American slang in the late 19th century. It was used by African Americans in the American South (most notably by Bill "Bojangles" Robinson) and by jazz musicians in Harlem in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

One theory claims the origins are from the Creole French dialect of Louisiana, specifically from the French word coupersètique (meaning "able to be coped with"; from French couper, to cut)."