Saturday, September 29, 2007

Valence

Oh, and I feel like I've recently experienced a sort of state-change with regards to my appreciation for or attention to sound, in my own poetry and others', and just in language generally. I think it's due to the prosody class. So I'm happy about that. It's like another electron bumping something up to the next valence level. Or something. Because god I don't know shit about chemistry but I was trying to use that metaphor with someone last night and they didn't know what I was talking about, so at least I know about valence levels. "Level" is probably not the right word here. Nor is "about," at it implies a bit more of a grasp than I have. "Of," maybe.

And apparently there are cool other meanings of valence, like in linguistics and psychology.

OMG, that's where "ambivalence" comes from! Holy shit, I never realized that.

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