I love words. Long words. Short words. One syllable words are fine but so are multiple syllable words. Words carry meaning. ‘Cat’ represents – (re-presents – makes present again) a feline mammal. You can have ‘cat’ in a sentence without having a cat in the room. Words produce sound when spoken out loud. They produce silent sound when thought in your head. I can hear these words as I write without speaking. Words can flow or jangle, lull or excite, state a fact or question an opinion. Some words like drill bore. A double entendre. Words have history. Words have DNA. Words have parents and siblings. Words have descendants. Two unfamiliar words appear in my poem Adam and Eve Imagine What’s Next. They are ‘prelapsarian’ and ‘postlapsarian’. The prefixes ‘pre’ and ‘post’ give a sense of time sequence, before something and after something. The suffix ‘ian’ tells us that this something is a fixed and steady and not given to change. [i.e, egalitarian, utilitarian, libertarian, proletarian, antiquarian] There are more words ending in ‘ian’. Between the prefix and the suffix there is the core word, the part that does the heavy lifting. The core in this case is ‘lapse’ from Latin for failing or falling. We know about lapses. They are not beneficial. There are lapses of memory. Lapses in judgement. Lapses in moral character. In this case the ‘lapse’ is the raging curiosity of primordial humanity. Curiosity killed the cat and according to the narrative in Genesis chapter 3 it didn’t do humankind any good either. The Bible and frequently the daily news portrays us humans as badly flawed. You might say failed. You might say fallen. So these two multiple syllable nouns take us to the mythic origins of humankind both before and after the proverbial fall. They are theological words referring to our human innocence in the beginning and our lost of innocence ever since.
Now that we have those lapses in our contemporary popular vocabulary resolved, you can play with the poem yourself.
Questions:
Why are the words subsequent and consequent used?
What is the difference between the two meanings?
Why might Adam’s imagination be more pessimistic
after the fall than Eve’s might be before?