Ave, Charles!

How can I not mention a Liminality post that so frequently mentions me and an email I'd written to Charles? Charles writes on the topic of anemoia—"nostalgia for a time you've never known." One point Charles makes, though, is that time is inevitably linked to place. This is a point that Lorianne constantly makes over at her own blog. As Charles writes:

Before I follow this line of thinking any further, I want to head off any criticism that I am twisting the definition of anemoia. After all, the original definition in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows specifically mentions a time, not a place. I would argue, however, that time is meaningless without place. For example, when Kevin said that the bubblegum flavor reminded him of the 1950s, he meant 1950s America, not 1950s Korea (which was not the happiest of places to be, for obvious reasons). Also, the concept of nostalgia, which the definition of anemoia references, is originally about place rather than time—it is a combination of Greek roots that essentially means “homesickness.” So I think I am justified in talking about the possibility of anemoia for a place that has never existed.

Go give Charles's essay a read.

UPDATE: an interesting grammar point popped into my head as I read Charles's concluding paragraph. I saw this sentence:

The thing we feel nostalgia for may be something we’ve never known, it may not have existed in the form we long for, and it may never even have existed at all.

Part of me immediately said, "No, you need a semicolon where that first comma is." But then I looked more closely at the structure of the sentence, and my internal grammar Rolodex brought up the idea of the tricolon. A tricolon, far from being some monster's weirdly 3-vented intestine, is a set of three structurally similar clauses or phrases. Think: I came, I saw, I conquered—the classic example of a tricolon. Or think: of the people, by the people, for the people. Note that Charles's sentence has that structure: The thing may... it may... it may... Viewed this way, the three clauses are list items separated by commas. A tricolon is one of those rare cases where you can use commas—without coordinating conjunctions—to separate independent clauses without fear of violating the usual comma rules for clauses. In fact, any time a clause is an item in a list of clauses, you're safe if you use only commas even if you're not following a tricolon structure.

I have all these questions running through my mind: what if my wife leaves me, what if my teen daughter starts to hate me, what if I can't pay the bills, what if our pets die while my kids are too young to understand what death really is? (four list items)

Greg's dad always had sage advice to give. Falling down means getting right back up, your real friends are the ones who are actually there for you, the love of your family is the most important thing in the world, a problem you see is a problem you try to solve, and it's always nobler to run toward the danger. (five list items)

This is the sort of thing you have to think about when proofreading. One of my guiding principles, as a proofreader, is to try to respect the author's intention as much as possible. In this case, I avoided dinging Charles by seeing that he had gone for the tricolon (which admittedly sounds like some sort of human-on-alien prison-rape scenario). You might ask why I'm reading my friend's essay the way a proofreader would. I wouldn't if this were a faculty I could turn off. That's why I'm constantly annoyed by the typo-ridden memes I slap up.

UPDATE 2: I've been talking about tricolons since at least 2015. Here—see all the mentions of the term on my blog.