by neufer » Sun Dec 12, 2010 7:21 pm
Lang wrote:Chris Peterson wrote:
Amongst its other
meanings, "crescendo" does indeed mean "climax". APOD captions are intended to be fun to read, and often make use of slightly poetic word usage. Literature would be very boring indeed if authors always observed the advice to use the shortest of available words for a given meaning!
IMO, "crescendo" is precisely the word to use here, conveying as it does both the rise in activity as well as the peak (much better than "climax"). And as anybody who has ever observed a meteor storm is likely to agree, describing it in terms associated with music is very suitable.
'Crescendo' means 'growing', like it or not. In other words, the 'climax' meaning is an insidious error that is becoming more and more prevalent. And 'crescendo', in its correct meaning, is not the right word at all. The phrase was 'came to an impressive crescendo'. The rise in activity is expressed by the 'came to'. The only word that could possibly be used there is 'climax'. And Merriam-Webster has always been guilty of trying to legitimise errors.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Kerst and Krehbiel — Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as revealed 1773
- One can see the reeling and trembling, one can see the heaving breast which is illustrated by a CRESCENDO;
one hears the lispings and sighs expressed by the muted violins with flute in unison.
Honoré de Balzac — Eugenie Grandet. 1824
- From time to time the young the heiress glanced furtively at her cousin, and
the banker's wife easily detected a CRESCENDO of surprise and curiosity in her mind.
David Lindsay —
A Voyage to Arcturus. 1824
- The music rose to CRESCENDO.
Robert Louis Stevenson — St Ives. 1872
- From Dunstable I rolled away into a CRESCENDO of similar impressions.
Jack London — Jerry of the Islands. 1896
- With a quick jerk, cataleptically, his nose pointed to the zenith, his mouth opened, and a flood of sound poured forth, running swiftly upward in CRESCENDO and slowly falling as it died away.
Stewart Edward White — The Land of Footprints. 1909
- With a sudden CRESCENDO the music stopped.
-------------------------------------------------
G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936). The Man Who Was Thursday. 1908.
Chapter V. The Feast of Fear
Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a
CRESCENDO of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme’s eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men.
-------------------------------------------------
F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise. 1920.
BOOK ONE The Romantic Egotist : CHAPTER 2 Spires and Gargoyles
It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to Amory's head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind....
- So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life stirred as it went by.... As the still ocean paths before the shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across the air....
A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a yellow moon—then silence, where CRESCENDO laughter fades ... the car swung out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows where the distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into blue....
They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke: "You Princeton boys?"
-------------------------------------------------
Art "Saturday (going by the name of Bull)" Neuendorffer
[quote="Lang"][quote="Chris Peterson"]
Amongst its other [url=http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crescendo]meanings[/url], "crescendo" does indeed mean "climax". APOD captions are intended to be fun to read, and often make use of slightly poetic word usage. Literature would be very boring indeed if authors always observed the advice to use the shortest of available words for a given meaning!
IMO, "crescendo" is precisely the word to use here, conveying as it does both the rise in activity as well as the peak (much better than "climax"). And as anybody who has ever observed a meteor storm is likely to agree, describing it in terms associated with music is very suitable.[/quote]
'Crescendo' means 'growing', like it or not. In other words, the 'climax' meaning is an insidious error that is becoming more and more prevalent. And 'crescendo', in its correct meaning, is not the right word at all. The phrase was 'came to an impressive crescendo'. The rise in activity is expressed by the 'came to'. The only word that could possibly be used there is 'climax'. And Merriam-Webster has always been guilty of trying to legitimise errors.[/quote]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GazlqD4mLvw[/youtube][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0vHpeUO5mw[/youtube]
Kerst and Krehbiel — Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as revealed 1773
[list]One can see the reeling and trembling, one can see the heaving breast which is illustrated by a [color=#FF00FF][b]CRESCENDO[/b][/color];
one hears the lispings and sighs expressed by the muted violins with flute in unison.[/list]
Honoré de Balzac — Eugenie Grandet. 1824
[list]From time to time the young the heiress glanced furtively at her cousin, and
the banker's wife easily detected a [color=#FF00FF][b]CRESCENDO[/b][/color] of surprise and curiosity in her mind.[/list]
David Lindsay — [b][url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Voyage_to_Arcturus]A Voyage to Arcturus.[/url][/b] 1824
[list]The music rose to [color=#FF00FF][b]CRESCENDO[/b][/color].[/list]
Robert Louis Stevenson — St Ives. 1872
[list]From Dunstable I rolled away into a [color=#FF00FF][b]CRESCENDO[/b][/color] of similar impressions.[/list]
Jack London — Jerry of the Islands. 1896
[list]With a quick jerk, cataleptically, his nose pointed to the zenith, his mouth opened, and a flood of sound poured forth, running swiftly upward in [color=#FF00FF][b]CRESCENDO[/b][/color] and slowly falling as it died away.[/list]
Stewart Edward White — The Land of Footprints. 1909
[list]With a sudden [color=#FF00FF][b]CRESCENDO[/b][/color] the music stopped.[/list]-------------------------------------------------
G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936). The Man Who Was Thursday. 1908.
Chapter V. The Feast of Fear
Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a [color=#FF00FF][b]CRESCENDO[/b][/color] of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme’s eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men.
-------------------------------------------------
F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise. 1920.
BOOK ONE The Romantic Egotist : CHAPTER 2 Spires and Gargoyles
It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to Amory's head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind....
[list][i][color=#0000FF] So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life stirred as it went by.... As the still ocean paths before the shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across the air....
A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a yellow moon—then silence, where [/color][color=#FF00FF][b]CRESCENDO[/b][/color] [color=#0000FF] laughter fades ... the car swung out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows where the distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into blue....[/color][/i][/list]
They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke: "You Princeton boys?"
-------------------------------------------------
Art "Saturday (going by the name of Bull)" Neuendorffer