google says dradow is some kid who thinks he's a shadow dragon.

November 5, 2006 8:00 PM

A friend of mine told me a few years ago about "dradows". These are half-dream-half-shadows; the image you have of something before you actually see it (e.g. the picture you get of a house based on a textual description). Can someone point me to references about this idea?

Google is failing me absolutely. Wikipedia has no entry. Thus, I'm pretty sure this is made up. But the concept of a dradow is so perfectly awesome that I have slowly developed a need over the last few years to read some literature surrounding it.

posted by negative1 to writing & language (7 comments total)

I've never come across the term he used, but what your friend is describing is called 'prototype semantics.'
posted by ChasFile at 8:38 PM on November 5, 2006

prototype semantics is the right term. I am reading a book on sacred imaged in Catholicism and one of the chapters is about how minstrels and monks would travel with only a description of a church in their heads. The day following an encounter, people would come to them with stories of marvelous dreams of the far-away church or castle where the traveler came from.
posted by parmanparman at 9:07 PM on November 5, 2006

Yay! I'm glad that there are smart people in the world. But wow, that Wikipedia article is intensely dry.

I am somewhat sad that 'dradow' is made up...the word is so raw, and describes (though non-scientifically) everything described in the wikipedia.

I'll write to Stephen Colbert and see if I can get him to coin it.
posted by negative1 at 9:41 PM on November 5, 2006

Negative1, if you makes you feel any better, I fully intend to start using "dradows" as often as possible. Why say Prototype Semantics when you can say Dradows? It's like saying Chickpea and wasting a chance to say Garbanzo...

Now that you have an answer you seem to be satisfied with, may I piggyback?

Is there a term for the imaginary settings for books in our imagination? Or is this just an example of prototype semantics?

For example, the other day I was reading a 19th century novel and I realized that, underneath all the gilt furniture and luxurious drapery, the room I was imagining was my high school biology classroom. In fact, most of the "soundstages" of my mind are from my youth. Does this phenomenon have a name of its own?
posted by Ian A.T. at 3:34 AM on November 6, 2006

Ian A.T., I don't have an answer to your question, but I have a hunch that the phenomenon you mentioned has something to do with our greater abilitiy to discern and control our thoughts as we grow older.

When we are young, our brains are so sponge-like, and any environment which we find ourself occupying for hours and hours is bound to imprint itself heavily on us. As we get older and imagination becomes more reliant on our mind and less on our surrondings, our mind doesn't grip onto our newer settings as firmly-- it doesn't need to, because it's more capable of designing original ones (or composites whose elemental origins are more heavily veiled).

Have nothing to back this up other than my own ponderings, and I'm curious to see whether anyone has more to say.
posted by hermitosis at 7:39 AM on November 6, 2006

Ian A.T. -- what you describe is basically what I think of when I think 'dradow'. Whenever a friend describes their house before I see it, it becomes, at its core, a house from my childhood. Maybe with a new fancy TV, or (without) a swimming pool out back, but definitely from when I was a kid.

Feel free to piggyback. In fact, this thread is the first mention of the word anywhere on the internet, from what I can find. We are officially on the frontier of linguistics. Congrats!
posted by negative1 at 8:06 PM on November 6, 2006

Sorry I never responded to your phone call about this, negative1... the term was invented by my friend Jimmy Uresk. I've definitely found that once I had a word for the concept, it was far easier to mentally "save" the preconceptions I have of places and things.
posted by lauranesson at 6:12 PM on December 22, 2006