funicity
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Coined by Viktor Weisskopf from the name of Ireneo Funes, a character who lost his ability to forget, in Jorge Luis Borges' short story Funes the Memorious (Funes el memorioso, 1942). See -ic, -ity.
Noun
[edit]funicity (uncountable)
- (physics) An inbuilt quality of materials that permanently “remember” their original time and place of creation.
- 1995, David Hawkins, “The Grand Laws of Scale”, in Thinking Physics for Teaching:
- For some quark, perhaps, the measure of its funicity is zero.
- The reflection of an object's own history in its current form.
- 1985, D Preziosi, That obscure object of desire: The art of art history:
- In this grey and lugubrious "history," form is all, and any work of art incorporates traces of its (own) funicity.
- 2011, Takeshi Ogura, Dynamic Aspects Of Natural Products Chemistry, →ISBN, page 30:
- Our ability to read historical change and transformation in the funicity of things - the very bedrock of our socialization - is a socio-semiotic skill we begin to acquire in infancy, and is refined throughout our lives.