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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
This is not an eggcorn, but a rather striking malapropism, given its setting in the premier journal of science, Nature. I wasn’t able to find the abstract for this one – I hope if you visit it you will see the abstract.
Research article title
Synchronicity of Antarctic temperatures and local solar insolation on orbital timescales
The word they were looking for was clearly synchrony, since there is no hint of spooky meaning-rich coincidences springing from the global unconscious.
Last edited by David Bird (2011-03-09 19:05:13)
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My dictionary gives “synchronicity” as a synonym for “synchrony” (in the sense of things arising at the same time), so the quote is not a malapropism, and the reputation of Nature remains unblemished (by that, anyway). (Hey, how can we do italics in this program? I couldn’t figure out how to italicize “Nature”)
Even if that weren’t the case, one could probably make a case for “synchronicity” being correct here, as it really only means an acausal connecting principle. So if the article suggests that two things are arising simultaneously without one causing the other (such as if they’re both results of some other thing), “synchronicity” would probably work.
What confuses the issue is the New Agers’ misuse of the term “synchronicity” to imply something spooky like omens or messages from the spirit world or whatever. This woowoo meaning is a relatively recent addition, not, I think, implied by Jung’s original, (in)famous article on the subject.
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(Hey, how can we do italics in this program? I couldn’t figure out how to italicize “Natureâ€)
Hi, Dixon. There are two ways. You can either put an underlining on either side of the word, or you can put two question marks on either side of the word. The result will look the same in either case, but in the latter case the italics will be tagged (in a way that’s probably not visible to anyone but Chris) as referring to the the name of a text.
Also, when you’re logged in, you’ll see a “Textile” tab at the bottom left corner of the Quick Post dialogue box. Clicking on that will take you to a brief overview of the basic functions in Textile (our software here) with links to more advanced techniques.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2011-03-10 13:04:57)
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Dixon, what dictionary is that? Given that the word was coined by Jung with a specific meaning in mind, it’s odd that a dictionary would have banalized it to mere synonymity with a word it was meant to be distinct from.
There are ho-hum “acausal connecting principles” and then there is synchronicity, which was explicitly defined to be “meaningful coincidence”, that occurred through mechanisms for which we currently have no explanation. You can go all New Age on this, or you can go all Skeptic on it, the fact remains that Jung had a specific phenomenon in mind that wasn’t mere synchrony.
Edit: Oops, Google books give instances of “synchronicity” going back to the 19th century.
Last edited by burred (2011-03-10 18:13:56)
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Hey, pat, thanks for the helpful info re: italics, etc.
burred wrote:
Dixon, what dictionary is that?
The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd edition.
Given that the word was coined by Jung with a specific meaning in mind…
As you’ve realized, the word predates Jung, but he’s the one I referred to because he’s the main popularizer of the concept and because I’m ignorant of the pre-Jung usages of the term.
...it’s odd that a dictionary would have banalized it to mere synonymity with a word it was meant to be distinct from.
burred, I didn’t say that the definition I cited was the only definition given for “synchronicity” in my dictionary; I only mentioned the one definition that was relevant to the point I was making (i.e., that using “synchronicity” as synonymous with “synchrony” is accepted usage). For the record, the only other definition given for “synchronicity” in my dictionary is “The simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection”.
There are ho-hum “acausal connecting principles” and then there is synchronicity, which was explicitly defined to be “meaningful coincidence”, that occurred through mechanisms for which we currently have no explanation. You can go all New Age on this, or you can go all Skeptic on it, the fact remains that Jung had a specific phenomenon in mind that wasn’t mere synchrony.
Well, apart from the fact that “synchronicity” is in fact, among other things, a synonym for “synchrony”, you are right; the other meaning of synchronicity, Jung’s meaning(s), is not mere synchrony. It’s been many years since I read Jung’s article “Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle”, and it was so abstruse and vague that it was hard to understand (in fact, due to many complaints about the article’s indecipherability, Jung appended a brief synopsis that was only a little clearer, LOL!). My memory may be off, but I don’t think the implications of Jung’s teaching on synchronicity at that time were quite as woowoo as they later became; his theory did evolve quite a bit over the years.
The best explanation of synchronicity I ever saw was by the late, great explainer Alan Watts—I think it was in his book The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Coming from the monistic assumption that in some sense everything is one and we are all parts of the One, Watts suggested that the separateness of people, things and events is, in a sense, an illusion caused by our cognitive and perceptive limitations. He said that our perception of events as being separate, unconnected, is like seeing a cat walk along the other side of a fence or wall with a crack or gap in it. First you see just the cat’s nose, then its eye, then ear, then shoulders, midriff, hind legs, etc. If you didn’t know that a cat was one unified organism, you might think the nose caused the eye, which then caused the ear, which then caused the shoulders, etc. That interpretation would be linear causation, while the understanding that the eye, ear, etc, are related as parts of a bigger structure, which only looks like linear causation due to our perceptive limitations, is a synchronicitous interpretation. FWIW, I don’t think this is quite the same as the idea of “meaningful coincidence” in the sense that either Jung or the New Agers mean it, nor is that kind of “omen” sense implied in my dictionary’s definition of “synchronicity”.
Sorry for blabbing at length :^D
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