Concept
Idiomclining
Setting immobilized language back into motion, within an idiom
Ask AI about Idiomclining“And dedicating oneself to setting relatively immobilized “pieces” of language back into motion seems a good way of thinking about operating within an idiom. You will always be mistaken in doing so, precisely because you’ll be violating some convention or expectation, but you also can’t go wrong because you present a opportunity for an adjusted response on the part of others—it’s a more semiotic way of speaking about stopping and thinking before doing as itself a kind of doing. So, “idiomclining” instead of “critical thinking” or other bureaucratized categories designed for mass test taking.”
From the Archive
“I would like to call this kind of research “clining,” drawing upon an essay on something I called “upclining” I wrote quite a few years ago in an effort to engage with processes of “grammaticization” in language, i.e., the tendency of expressions to transition from semantic to grammatical functions.”
“But the notion of “cline,” or gradual, imperceptible shifts from one state to another, which is preserved in “incline” and “decline” (but not “upcline,” which is therefore necessarily a neologism—or, for that matter, other ways things might “cline”) fits the thinking in terms of ever more discernable and discrete thresholds I’m trying to encourage here, and “upcline” seems a way of “resisting” the more passive “incline” and catastrophic “decline.””
“The most important measure I have taken in this regard is centering the concept of idiom as the condition of all discourse: the protection offered by “idiom” is that it ensures that we don’t forget that any measure is an idiom, a naming, a labeling, a designation that depends on those who can look at that thing and say “this is the same,” thereby iterating the fundamental gesture of language and that, by the same token (tokens are themselves idioms) so is every target.”
“What you want to do, then, is make your idiom both more idiomatic and more transferable—you want to be able to speak with the person you are speaking with so that you are speaking only to them, on the very topic that drew you into that exchange, in such a way as to make that topic the center of a scene that places only the two of you on it, while at the same time in such a way that either you or your interlocutor might speak with anyone and everyone about that newly created “topic” so as to generate new idioms in each new exchange.”
“Maybe one could make a pastiche of stereotypical replies, as another way of idiomclining.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Idiomclining is Bouvard’s name for a kind of semiotic research: "setting relatively immobilized ‘pieces’ of language back into motion" within an idiom. He builds the word from "cline" (as in incline and decline, and his earlier coinage "upcline") and from idiom, which he treats as the condition of all discourse.
To idiomcline is to be deliberately, productively mistaken — violating a convention or expectation so as to open an opportunity for an adjusted response — and thereby to make one’s idiom at once more idiomatic and more transferable. He offers it in place of bureaucratized, test-friendly categories like "critical thinking."
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“And these new practices, ultimately, are the generation of idioms. As new differences emerge within and among signs, and as these differences in turn get taken up as the resource out of which new signs are elaborated, the threshold of meaning is continually lowered: we notice more differences, which also means we notice more desires and resentments,…”
“An idiom is this articulation of group membership, the sharing of a sacred center, and its anthropological “surplus,” or awareness that the signs designating that center might be otherwise and in fact are otherwise, having their equivalents in every other group. The preservation of an idiom, moreover, depends upon sharpening the differences between…”
“The approach I prefer is to create little ripples in language by constructing idioms out of the rules of grammar and language use itself. The anyown advances its rights by pressing such idioms and transforming the way anyone can talk about things. An idiom is created by identifying, within one form or medium, the constituent element of a lower form of…”
“One is speaking in layers of the paradoxicality of ritual, of exchanges with the center, of intelligence gathered through interference or noted disruptions in either of the above, all of which have infinitely various forms. Idioms can only be known by participating in them, which means simultaneously speaking in the discourse of a rite, the language of…”
“The metalanguage of literacy is the most basic source of reified concepts, concepts of “mind” (itself a reified concept) and human exchanges more generally—the most basic, along with money, so there must be a convergence between the two. The disciplines—whether economics, psychiatry, management or sociology—all rely upon nominalized concepts traceable to…”
“So, in discussing the issue of idioms we are in a way discussing the question of an enduring style, style that is enduring because transportable and variable, given to parody as much as reverential citing. The maintenance of linguistic presence in perpetuity is singular succession and the scene is the same borne linguistically, and eventually as currency,…”
“The previous paragraph serves as a reminder that the Natural Semantic Primes can never be far from our minds when designing idioms. For originary hypothesizing, or center study, they simply replace philosophy, providing the originary meaning of the words out of which all other meanings can be produced. We can use the boundaries between the words as sources…”
“Treating an idiom is the other of a theoretical metalanguage—for one thing, it’s done differently each time, and the treatment has to be extending to the terms of one’s own inquiry. An “idiom,” of course, is a singular use of language, meaningful in its particular and always changing uses—speaking in terms of idioms, speaking in idioms finally lets…”
“And dedicating oneself to setting relatively immobilized “pieces” of language back into motion seems a good way of thinking about operating within an idiom. You will always be mistaken in doing so, precisely because you’ll be violating some convention or expectation, but you also can’t go wrong because you present a opportunity for an adjusted response on…”
“I have worked with the notion of “idiom” rather than “theory” or “knowledge” because I want to defer the possibility of any metalanguage that is not convertible into the language it describes along with the scenes upon which that form of language is enacted. Center study could be seen as a kind of metalanguage, converting all discourses into mimesis and…”
Key Texts
Where the term is defined.
Uses the coinage in practice.