Kappe R Singers DsearchE Nieur Good a Quintett e Good Nieur osearchd Looking r Looking esearchrsearchh Quintett s Good a Singers Looking o Looking d Goodlookingstrippedsingers o Babe s Stripped a Good c Kappe n Good e Looking r Good h Good searcho Babe kng searchisearche Quintett rc Good p Looking Nsearcheursearchd Nieur rsearche Looking esearchisearchssearcha Singers cnakedkoreangirlse Looking Q Goodlookingstrippedsingers i Looking t Looking t Singers s Quintett e Looking rh Looking L Good o Singers i Stripped g search searchu Goodlookingstrippedsingers nsearche Good tsearchs Singers TIsearchK: A sub-category of the "bed-trick," this is a folk motif in which the position of a cradle in a dark room leads one character to climb into bed with the wrong sexual partner. It appears prominently in Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." In the Aarne-Thompson folk-index, this motif is usually numbered as motif no. 1363.

CREOLE: A native language combining the traits of multiple languages, i.e., an advanced and fully developed pidgin. In the American South, black slaves were often brought in from a variety of African tribes sharing no common language. On the plantation, they developed first a pidgin (limited and simplified) version of English with heavy Portuguese and African influences. This pidgin allowed slaves some rudimentary communication with each other and with their slave masters. In time, they lost their original African languages and the mixed speech became the native tongue of their children--a creole. Contrast with pidgin.

CRESCENDO: Another term for rhetorical climax. See climax, rhetorical, above.

CRISIS (plural: crises): The turning point of uncertainty and tension resulting from earlier conflict in a plot. At the moment of crisis in a story, it is unclear if the protagonist will succeed or fail in his struggle. The crisis usually leads to or overlaps with the climax of a story, though some critics use the two terms synonymously. See climax, literary, above.

CRITICAL READING: Careful analysis of an essay's structure and logic in order to determine the validity of an argument. Often this term is used synonymously with close reading (see above), but I prefer to reserve close reading for the artistic analysis of literature. Click here for more information about critical reading. Cf. close reading.

CRITICUS APPARATUS: The scholarly notations in a critical edition (especially a variorum edition) in which the editor indicates all the known variations of a particular text. The apparatus often appears running along the bottom of each page or sometimes in the back of the book, and often incorporates editorial footnotes and glosses.

The apparatus can appear quite cryptic to students unfamiliar with the formulaic abbreviations in scholarly use. For instance, below is an illustrative notation from A. V. C. Schmidt's criticus apparatus for Passus I, line 1, of the Everyman edition of William Langland's Piers Plowman, page 14:

"Collation WHmCrGYOC2CLMHRF. RUBRIC Passus primus de visione W&r (pr] Secundus F; de v.] de petri le ploughman BR; om O); om GC2."

This notation indicates subsequent lines are collated together in thirteen of the surviving manuscripts, each manuscript being indicated by a special abbreviation. Furthermore, the opening line in manuscripts "W" and "r" has a Latin title written in red ink ("rubricated") as indicated, but another manuscript "F" has labeled it as "secundus" rather than "primus," while the "B" and "R" manuscripts label it in a combination of French and Latin, and so on. A good criticus apparatus helps document all this diversity by gathering it together, line-by-line, for convenient comparison at a glance, but the editor presumes the reader knows the dense, standardized abbreviations involved in this notation.

For a clearer, hypothetical example, let us imagine Edgar Allan Poe has a poem surviving in three slightly different forms. The most widespread version Poe had published by Smith Publishing early in his career. Ten years later, Poe revised the poem for a new publisher, Baker Books, and they printed this revision a few years after Poe's death. Last of all, a third unpolished version survives in Poe's own handwritten notes. Scholars discover this last manuscript version squirreled away in the Morgan Library in 2010.

Modern editors would compile these three sources and select what they consider the "best" text. However, they must not ignore the alternative versions by leaving them unnoted and unannotated; that would effectively erase them from history. Accordingly, the editors might add a criticus apparatus. Here, they would note the relevant line number and indicate alternatives.

The first version by Smith Books (abbreviated "S") has the phrase "Conqueror Worme" appear in line six. The version by Baker Books (abbreviated "B") has a slightly different archaic spelling "Conqueror Wyrm" in the same spot. Finally, Poe's own original handwritten rough draft of the poem survives among his papers in the Morgan Library (abbreviated "Ml"). This manuscript uses the abbreviation "Conqu. Wm." scrawled in that line.

Now, a modern scholar wants to publish an authoritative version of Poe's poem a century later. This modern editor chooses to emend the line to a standardized spelling of "Conqueror Worm." The criticus apparatus at the bottom of the page might consist of a footnote such as this:

6 Conqeror Worm] S: Conqueror Worme; B: Conqueror Wyrm, Ml: Conqu. Wm.

The "6" indicates line six as the section with variant readings. The words before the bracket ] show the editor considers the preceding version the "best text" for a modern reader--or at least the version the editor has chosen for his edition. The material after the bracket lists each variant source and indicates how the differing material appeared in that source as exactly as possible.

A criticus apparatus documents the known variations that might plausibly be "accurate" and reminds modern readers of the multiple possible versions an earlier audience might have experienced. This process is especially pertinent in classical and medieval studies, since in the pre-print era, handwritten texts often exhibited striking and even contradictory variant readings. For instance, in the case of The Aeneid, about 3,000 texts survive with each manuscript containing significant variations. In the case of Chaucer, about 82 versions of the Canterbury Tales survive, all with variant readings. In the case of Shakespeare, striking differences appear in the F (folio) and Q1, Q2, Q3 (first, second, and third quarto) versions of his plays, and so on.

CROSSED-D: Another term for the capital letter edh or eth used in Anglo-Saxon orthography.

CROSSED RHYME: In long couplets, especially hexameter lines, sufficient room in the line allows a poet to use rhymes in the middle of the line as well as at the end of each line. Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" illustrates its use:

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

In the excerpt above, the words in red are part of crossed rhyme, and the words in green are regular rhyme. Crossed rhyme is also called interlaced rhyme. Contrast with internal rhyme and leonine rhyme.

CTHULHU MYTHOS (also spelled Cthulu and Kutulu, pronounced various ways): Strongly influential in pulp science fiction and early twentieth-century horror stories, the Cthulhu mythos revolves around a pantheon of malign alien beings worshipped as gods by half-breed cultists. These aliens were invented and popularized by pulp fiction horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The name Cthulhu Copyright Dr. L. Kip Wheeler 1998-2012. Permission is granted for non-profit, educational, and student reproduction. Last updated March 30, 2012. Contact: kwheeler@cn.edu Please e-mail corrections, suggestions, or comments to help me improve this site. Click here for credits, thanks, and additional copyright information. ps g Good Looking Stripped Singers Stripped co o Good Looking Stripped Singers m Looking v v Strip Pics