In the Wiki I read that
Julian "Huxley's use of language was
highly skilled, and when no word seemed to suit he invented one: Clade (1957);
Cline
(1938)*;Grade (1959);Morph (1942)..."
I remembered a
discussion about "supine" and "cline" in our List, perhaps in TT, most
probably in ADA.
I tried to find
"cline" in the Archives, but with no success. Perhaps the word had
been related to an incline or a declivity, not really
"cline"?
In relation to "supine versus prone" ( quite
unrelated to "cline") there were several entries in Dec. 2004, one in
particular worth bring up once more:
Mike Stauss: "A friend recently made the
offhand comment that Vladimir Nabokov, though a master of the English language,
never observed the difference between "supine" and "prostrate". He didn't have
any examples to cite. Any responses from the list to this
charge?"
B.Boyd: Nonsense. As if someone who a) had an
English vocabulary wider than any other novelist but Joyce's b) had a particular
fascination for the accurate rendition of gesture and posture, and their local
cultural and individual variants, and c) had a lifelong concern for the precise
description of physiological particularities, arising from, among other things,
his passion for Lepidoptera, would make this mistake. From the LOLITA
SCREENPLAY, p. 41: HUMBERT So you are Lolita. LOLITA Yes,
that's me. Turns from sea-star supine to seal prone."
Two magnificent
metaphors and a fine defamiliarizing description of a commonplace action in nine
syllables. Tom Stoppard called "(picnic, lightning)" the greatest parenthesis in
literature. This must rank as one of the greatest stage directions in
drama."
There were two sentences
using "cline" in ADA ( following Huxley's coinage?)
I haven't yet
checked B.Boyd's notes on Ada: perhaps some interested party might come in
and help. In my opinion a space for conjectures on VN's
use is still open:
1."But what about the rare radiance on those adored
lips? Bright derision can easily grade, through a cline of glee, into a
look of rapture (page 322, The Library of America):
2.Man, in that sense, will never die,
because there may never be a taxonomical point in his evolutionary progress that
could be determined as the last stage of man in the cline turning him
into Neohomo, or some horrible, throbbing slime. (Texture of Time,ch
4,page 428, TLOA)
In the first sentence the use of "cline" doesn't
seem to follow Huxley's definition, even metaphorically - considering the
context of the geography of a face and gradual changes of feature...
And yet, on-line dic brings a promising example of its usage in
patsy: "Music ranges from patsy cline to Pink with everything else inbetween..."[<a
href="www.yourdictionary.com/examples/cline">cline</a>
]
In the second example VN might have been
indicating a "gene cline".
....................................................
* - In biology, a cline is a gradual change of
phenotype (trait, character or feature) in a species over a geographical area,
often as a result of environmental heterogeneity. Typically, a well-marked cline
does not allow for a delineation of subspecies, as it is then impossible, by
definition, to draw any further clear dividing lines between populations. In the
scientific study of human genetic variation, a gene cline can be rigorously
defined, being readily submissible to straightforward, quantitative metrics;
this has apparently not been so of the evidently more subjective concept of
"race".