Lars Eighner's Homepage Writers' Workshop Glossary: P

P

pa`thet·ic `fal·la·cy /p@TEtIk 'f&l@si/ noun

[John Ruskin, 1856] (figures) attribution of human emotions to the natural environment, or human actions, intentions, desires, and motivations ascribed to natural forces or phenomena. For example: the weeping sky; menacing darkness · "Save him, save him!" cried Wendy, looking with horror at the cruel sea far below. —James M. Barrie · as if they saw the friendly hills of Cumberland in the dim and threatening sky. —Wilkie Collins.

`pa,tois /'p&,twA/ noun

a provencial dialect, a dialect consider uneducated, sometimes used to refer to a secret language of criminals. See: jargon.

to such scenes, the little man in the road ventured to reply. He purred in a soft Spanish patois accompanied by gestures that provided a perfect pantomime. Due to his eloquent motions towards beloved parish. For a while his spirit had found itself at home there as a pastor of peasants. His assumed patois itself was touching. His homely dialogues were compounded of a wise pathos, 'Alas,' said the girl in Alsatian patois, 'she has gone for a visit with her brother, the hussar.' of the shops of Catalans and the boutiques of Creoles along the Rue Ste. Anne, listening to the soft patois, the click of billiards behind closed shutters, to the low hum of cafés that in the summer Anthony Adverse —Hervey Allen · He called the porter; there were rapid instructions in an unintelligible patois. Collected Stories —F. Scott Fizgerald · varying their course—meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify. Collected Stories —H. P. Lovecraft · touched on a sore point, and she let out such a stream of fiery patois that Emil fled from the kitchen and mounted his mare. O Pioneers! —Willa Cather · —It's on the march, says the citizen. To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their patois. Ulysses —James Joyce · Plashed through my friend's narration / Her rustic patois of the hills / Lost in my free-translation. The Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier —John Greenleaf Whittier

`pi·ca /'paIk@/ noun

1 : (printing) A measure equal to 12 points or approximately 1/6th of an inch, used in layout.
2 : (MS)(often capitalized) The larger of two common faces used by old typewriters. Pica was a nonproportional, serif font. Courier largely replaced Pica in popularity before the end of the typewriter era, but Courier 12 preserved the "pica spacing" of 10 characters per inch. See: Why is Courier 10 the same as Courier 12 point?
3 : adjective of the spacing of letters in a line, 10 characters per inch.

`pitch /'pItS/ noun

(MS) characters per inch. Old typewriters usually were either "10-pitch" (with 10 characters per inch, also known as pica) or "12-pitch" (with 12 characters per inch, also known as elite). Near the end of the typewriter era, some electronic typewriters allowed the pitch to be changed and included other pitches such as 15-pitch. A few word processors use pitch as a synonym for characters per inch. Expressions such as "Courier 10" mean 10-point Courier in some word processors, but mean 10-pitch Courier in others, which is not the same thing. Pitch is not an appropriate measure for proportional faces (in which characters have various widths).

`point /pOint/ noun

(printing) A measure equal to about 1/72nd of an inch used for type. When type sizes are given in points, the measure is of the height of the characters, not of width. It so happens that in some faces characters in the 12-point font averages 10 points in width. Because monitors and video cards vary, the measurement of screen fonts and distances in points is metaphoric and bears no reliable relationship to physical distances.

po`lice ,pro`ce·dur·al /p@'lis ,pr@'sidZRl-/ noun

(genre) A mystery subgenre which follows the investigation of a crime from the point of view of a professional law enforcement officer. As the name suggests, many police procedures for investigation are portrayed including securing the crime scene, gathering physical evidence, canvassing the witnesses and suspects, and interrogating suspects. Often aspects of the officer's personal life, department policy and politics, and the requirements of the legal system are included, usually as complicating factors. Usually the officer is not an expert of any kind and must wait for and rely upon expert analysis of forensic evidence. Crimes may or may not be especially heinous and gory and scenes of violence in which officers or bystanders are seriously injured or killed may be included. Many television series are more or less police procedurals including Homicide: Life on the Streets, the Law parts of Law & Order and CSI, although the latter involves some evidence-analysis machines which are, so far, pure science fiction. Although police procedurals are supposed to be realistic, some contain much gallows humor and plot cliches such as mismatched partners or fish-out-of-water (detective transfered from another place or department).

`pot,boil·er /'pAt,bOilR/ noun

(publishing) A work written to keep a pot boiling on the stove, or in other words, to make money regardless of literary value.

`pref·ace /'prEfIs/ noun

(book) A preface is introductory material by the author of the book. A preface is presumptuous in most works of fiction, although occasionally a "preface" occurs in a novel as part of the fiction. In story collections, publishers may wish a brief passage to strike the keynote of the collection, and this may or may not be styled "preface" in the finished book. Compare: introduction.

pro`por·tion·al /pR'poUrS@nl-/ adjective

(printing) of a typeface, having the quality that some characters require more horizontal space than others. In a proportional font, typically, a capital M or W take more horizontal space than a lowercase l. If the following lines are of different lengths, you are viewing this in a proportional font:
WWWWWWWWWW
iiiiiiiiii
Proportional fonts are often considered more attractive and are used in most books, newspapers, and magazines.

`puz·zle `mys·ter·y /'p@zl- 'mIstRi/ or /'p@zl- 'mIstri/ noun

(genre) Puzzle stories are not so much a subgenre in themselves, but are a type of story which sometimes occurs in many mystery genres. The best known kind of puzzle story is the locked room mystery, in which the victim is murdered in a room that is locked from the inside. In a puzzle story, all the clues necessary for the solution of the crime are available to the reader and the reader does not require any special knowledge but only sharp powers of deduction to solve the crime. Some readers may think that all mysteries must be puzzle stories, but in truth puzzles stories are really rather rare. Although cozies present puzzles more often than they occur in other subgenres, usually the apparent puzzle does require some special knowledge that the detective has but the reader does not or cheats in some other way. The reason puzzle stories are rare should be obvious: if readers have a fair chance to solve the mystery, some -- or perhaps many or most -- of them will. An author has to have great confidence in his powers of misdirection to undertake a puzzle story. Often puzzle stories are more "How dunnit?" than "Who dunnit?" for the likely culprit is often obvious and the problem is that there seems to be no plausible way he could have committed the crime, as in locked-room mysteries when if you take the premises at face value, it is impossible for a murder to have occurred at all.