Poem: "Realia"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This is from the April 7, 2015 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by LJ user Marina_bonomi.  You can read more about realia online.


"Realia"


Realia is the realm of things
which are real but not true
or true but not real.

In education it moves
the practical into the abstract,
with items from real life
used for education.

In library science it concerns
three-dimensional objects
from the outside world
which do not fit neatly into
the categories of printed material.

In translation it relates
to concepts which can be explained
but are not explicitly encoded
outside their source culture.

Reality is analog,
language is digital,
and realia is the term
for things that fall through
the crack between them.

Comments

[redsixwing]

Ooh. Borrowing this term and concept - the word itself neatly fills a gap I've been struggling with.

Thank you!

You're welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm glad I could help.

[technoshaman]

So the *communities* within the World Inside the Crystal is realia?

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

That would make sense.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Reality is analog,
language is digital,

Oooh. Don't know why, but that line gave me pleased shivers.

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

That's good to hear.

Linguistics as a science has long acknowledged that words are categories we make up to describe the world, and people don't always draw the lines in the same places. The analog/digital comparison is something I came up with a while back, and have since seen elsewhere, so it's probably polygenetic.

Learning different languages is kind of like counting in different bases, the core concepts are the same but the organization is a bit different.

Re: Thank you!

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

I remember I used that idea at one point - once I learned a bit about signalling. And, of course, realized that words can't capture everything, just like a digital sampling can't perfectly capture an analog wave.

"Analog is the limit as info hits infinity" just popped into my brain.
(NB: Nothing to do with your poem - that idea just popped into my head as a new thought that may or may not be of any use or interest to anyone :-). But at first, I was thinking of the infinite information needed to *perfectly* hold an analog wave, and then, the infinite information needed to explain that wave, if it was the sound of an aria, that spoke of some noble ideal, and then the further layers of infinity needed to explain why that ideal stirred the emotions to the point that an aria was a good way to express it....)

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Huh. I wonder if that's why the sound quality on cell phones is so abysmal, using digital instead of analog. It always sounds to me like they're leaving out a lot of the sound and/or picking up extraneous background noise in a way that's difficult to filter out. And the speakerphone mode is even worse, that one actively hurts my ears in addition to being almost unintelligible.

Re: Thank you!

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

The digital mapping could certainly do that - if you've ever learned (or seen an explanation of) Reimann integration, it's the same sort of thing. You're taking a curvy sound wave and approximating it with rectangles (essentially).

With the speakerphone, there can be two things going on: noise cancellation, and the analog-to-digital mapping. And, of course, you can have the two interfering with each other.

CDs try to be "perfect" by having double the frequency that the ordinary human ear can hear, and it's pretty good, but I hear-tell a lot of audiophiles say that they can hear a clear difference.

[marina-bonomi.livejournal.com]

+1

The last stanza makes the poem, Elisabeth. :)

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it worked for you. I was trying to find the unifying feature of the word, that defined its semantic territory as a whole, around the smaller definitions. It's one of those words about things there aren't words for. :D

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Reality is analog,
language is digital,
and realia is the term
for things that fall through
the crack between them.

Yeah! That last stanza, esp. clause₃... somehow it's not literal, but it's very true, and I don't know how.

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

That's the beauty of words for things that don't have their own words. Poetry is about putting jello in a basket so you can nail it to the wall. :D

Re: Yay!

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Ooh! May I add that last sentence to my quote file? And if so, how would you like to be attributed?

Re: Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Yes. Attribute by my given name, please.

But that's actually a paraphrase. The original was "Science fiction poetry is the fine art of putting jello in a bowl so you can rivet it to the bulkhead." I wrote an article on that topic once that was entitled "Riveting Jello to the Bulkhead."