APOPHASIS
Lying in my bed last night, I remembered this word, or rather the idea of this word.
I left myself a note to find in the morning: “defining something by what it is not?”
This morning, a bit of searching found it for me. Wikipedia explains: “Apophasis was originally and more broadly a method of logical reasoning or argument by denial—a way of describing what something is by explaining what it is not, or a process-of-elimination way of talking about something by talking about what it is not.”
They go on to talk about apophatic theology, which is caught up in defining God by describing what God is not. It’s a pretty cool concept.
Further down in the article is the thing I was doing yesterday, which made me think of the word itself—this is apparently called paralipsis. It’s a rhetorical device where the speaker, which is to say me!, describes something by talking about how it won’t be described. “I won’t write to you about politics, because I don’t want to bore you, and I won’t tell you about how scared I am about the political landscape, and I won’t talk at all about…”
I don’t know that I actually care that much about the word itself. It’s more the concept that I like.
