Monday, 9 January 2012

Heterotelic

Word of the Day for Monday, January 9, 2012

heterotelic \het-er-uh-TEL-ik\, adjective:
Having the purpose of its existence or occurrence apart from itself.

You're of heteroteleic value, that means you were invoked for an extraneous purpose alone, the outcome of which won't even be known to me until I'm back with my physical body in the physical world…
-- William Cook, Love in the Time of Flowers

Therefore, what has been proposed above as a means of redirecting the development of postmodernity toward more livable, human dimensions is a heterotelic narrative transitivity—an active reimmersion of narrative in the social—which contrasts sharply with the autotelic concern for their own procedures and the hermetic intransitivity of modernist self-consciousness and late modernist self-reflexivity.
-- Joseph Francese, Narrating Postmodern Time and Space

Heterotelic is directly derived from the Greek roots héteros meaning "other", tele- meaning "distant", and the suffix -ic which denotes an adjective, as in metallic and athletic.

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