What does Oticrature mean?

This little neologism game started when I was thinking of a name for this blog. I came up with some good ideas, some bad ideas and, let’s say, “cheesy” ideas, which you can transfer to the “bad ideas” section, but I say it is worse than that – that’s why I am not, by any chance, publishing it here. Anyway, I wanted the name to be clear and synthetic, but at the same time I thought I should have the words “Literature” and “Semiotics” on it, as we are going to be discussing the first one pretty much all the time and the second one will be our theory of analysis. The results weren’t even close to what I expected, they were too long, too confusing, too much of everything but what I wanted. At some point, I froze, then my husband looked at me with some concern, and, with a face of disguise to him – “Yes, everything is fine. I’m ok, don’t worry” –, he got my phone, looked at the combinations I wrote in my notes, and created the name. In less than 10 minutes.

What happened is that he actually looked at all the words and combinations I made and simply tried to create a unique word with its own potential meaning. He did a few tries, we discussed about it and finally decided that the neologism Oticrature was interesting for few reasons. Le me go into more details about the process:

The two words I wanted to combine: Semiotics + Literature.

Two of X ideas we came up with:

1. Semioticrature

Why not? Because this blog is not actually about semiotics, which word is in evidence in “Semioticrature” more than the word “Literature”, the real subject for discussion. Semiotics is the material or tool we will be using in order to understand and analyze the literary work in study. We will go through the definitions of semiotics in our first post, but, for now, in a few words, semiotics is the theory of signs, the study of Signifier and Signified. Signifier is the sign (which can be a street sign like “STOP”, an image, a poem, a word, a music, a movie, anything that carries a meaning, a signification) and Signifier is the meaning that the Signifier carries. The literary works that we will be discussing are the signs in analysis (the Signifiers), and we will use semiotics to understand their “Signified”, their meaning. Besides all this considerations, the name Semioticrature was too long and not attractive.

2. Oticrature

Why so? First of all, we have to have in mind that Oticrature is a neologism, right? It is a new word my husband and I created in order to express what this blog is about. Google, Tweeter and all these “weird” names are all neologism, but, in this scenario we are discussing, the difference is that we actually fragmented words, got two fragments and combined them in order to have a new name. From semiotics, we kept -otic; from Literature, -rature. In the same way, in the process of creating a new word, you can give whatever meaning you want to it. Oticrature, then, is the process of analyzing literature using semiotics theories and combining different possibilities of interpretation through different points of view, which are from all of us who will be discussing literary work and expressing our thoughts about it.

Yes, I know it is funny the fact that I didn’t came up with the name by myself after so many tries, specially because sometimes it is important for me to concentrate and just “dive” into my territory of creation on my own, but I like to say it was a very interesting experience working as a team with my husband. He is more like a visual expert and could see the potentialities that those two words had and simply combined them in a very nice and attractive way. Besides that, Oticrature’s purpose is to work as a team. I’ll bring theories and my personal thoughts; you will agree or disagree with me, as well as bring your own thoughts. So, welcome aboard!