Attack of the Killer Lepidoptera

Quote:  "Butterfly Effect." Name given to chaos theory by MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s.

Figure of Speech:  metalepsis (met ah LEP sis), the figure of remote cause.

A butterfly flapping its wings in South America can change the weather in Central Park -- a phenomenon called "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," or the Butterfly Effect.  It's also an Ashton Kusher movie and the idea behind "Jurassic Park."

But it's not an original idea.  Ancient rhetoricians made it a figure of speech: metalepsis (Greek for "substitution," unhelpfully).  Anything credited with a remote outcome counts as a metalepsis -- say, blaming Congressional Democrats for the war in Iraq.

Snappy Answer:  "In politics, it's called the Neocon Effect."

Comments

[reader]

why is there no "unsubscribe" option for your daily email subscription?

[Figaro]

Because it's an automatic page created by the blog server. Anyone who wants to unsubscribe can just send me an email. This is a decidedly amateur-run site, with no artificial ingredients. Everything from scratch.

Figaro

[loblollyboy]

Another expression of a consequence cascade is in a novel written in the late 1930's/early 1940's called 'Storm', by George R. Stewart, the best book ever about weather for a lay readership, for my money. And, yes, it is a novel, not nonfic. In it, and he treats the idea as if it had been around for a long time already, he states that someone sneezing in northwestern China can result in heavy snow falling in New York City. Incidentally, for music/weather trivia junkies, it's from this book that the lyricist for the Broadway musical 'Paint Your Wagon' got the idea to "....call the wind Maria" with a long 'I'.