I dreamed a new word. "Zydedoche." I encountered it while walking down Bourbon Street with some folks, and none of us knew what it meant. I asked someone to look it up online, and I don't think it was coincidence that it was an acquaintance of mine whose last name is Zadoyko, or that a zydeco band was parading past as we tried to discus it, so that I couldn't hear what anyone was telling me.
I finally got to a place where I could look at the online definition myself, and the "definition" was a charming paragraph that began "Four to one nuns polled from the nun pool say..." and went on to tell me that zydedoche was a form of religious architectural embellishment. But there were no details or pictures, so it didn't really make sense. Also, I kept forgetting to click the sound file to learn how it was pronounced.
Finally, after a little more research, I learned that, while now applied to pretty much any intricate and arcane, obviously religious iconography, including the squiggly golden glyphs painted on the back of giant, purple scarabs in ancient Sumeria, the term zydedoche most accurately referred to a type of tile or block found in many old gothic churches. The term came from the Greek for "double x" or "split x", and rows of different ornamental tiles or stone blocks were always framed with a particular block that featured what looked like two X's, one on top of the other but slightly offset, then split vertically down the middle, with the halves pulled across each other and moved to opposite ends of a rectangle with rounded edges.
Other blocks that the zydedoche framed would be carved with cloud-like curlicues or dramatic chevrons, but always in the upper left, and often in all corners of the panel, you'd find the split x blocks. They were mostly found in Catholic churches now, but it was obvious to scholars that they were a symbol borrowed from older, pagan shrines. Sometimes, the stones were actually taken from older temples and used in church walls, and the motif just became popular and was copied by cathedral masons for centuries.
I was staying with some friends and none of us could sleep. One because she was pregnant, and the baby was keeping her up, another because she was worried about her job, and me, because I just could NOT figure out how to pronounce "zydedoche". I kept trying to go to an online dictionary and find a sound file, but I kept getting distracted by new details of the definition, and I never did click on any pronunciation guides, before I woke up.
I like to think that it was not "ZY-duh-dohsh" or "ZY-dohsh", as I thought in my dream, but "zy-DED-oh-kee," like "synecdoche," which is a real word. Look it up!
No comments:
Post a Comment