Inconceivable!
Oct.20, 2008, filed under Miscellany
Has anyone else noticed how often Terry Pratchett uses the word actinic? Being a mite poorly and on-call I’ve spent most of the last few days reading, without much of a head for the complexities of Bester, so I’ve returned to Pratchett and have read nearly every single one of the books of his we own. He uses actinic a lot. An awful lot.
But actinic means:
Of, relating to, resulting from, or showing actinism.
And actinism is:
The intrinsic property in radiation that produces photochemical activity.
And I can’t quite make that sit with the context in which he uses it, where it gives the impression of being a colour rather than a radiative property. “Actinic fire” would be, um, fire that burns. Wow. That’s kind of what fire does. Actinism is the property that allows film photography, for instance. I’m not sure that’s particuarly descriptive of something coming out of a rocket-propelled swamp dragon’s bum.
It’s odd. It reminds me of once being on this critical writing list and a writer there described a man as dangling “prostrate” from the hand of a giant. I tried to explain to him what prostrate meant, the etymology of the word, and how it couldn’t mean “dangling”, and he was having none of it. Which is a shame, because if you do understand what the word means, then the phrase “a nation prostrated by plague” takes on several layers of informative meaning.
So what does Pratchett mean by “actinic”? I can’t quite work it out and he uses it so much I’d really like to know.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
