palimpsest
2
9.9
- noun
- /ˈpælɪmpsɛst/
- Specialized
- The ancient manuscript was a palimpsest, revealing traces of earlier texts beneath newer writings.
- a palimpsest of this kind
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Watch on YouTubeA landscape is a palimpsest of how people have lived on it, the violence they've done to it, the things they've asked it to produce.
- A landscape is a palimpsest of how people have lived on it, the violence they've done to it, the things they've asked it to produce.
Examples
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The palimpsest also reveals the material and spatial dimensions of collective traumatic memory.
Academic text (2008) -
In this sense, every garden is a palimpsest, design over design, season after season.
Academic text (2007) -
How do we interpret the palimpsest of encounters, each one with its own audience, script, and performance?
Academic text (2006) -
As in a palimpsest, the original text never quite disappears.
Academic text (2007) -
A crossed letter resembled a palimpsest, with script running left to right and also bottom to top.
Academic text (2017) -
Critics have not failed to describe the experience of Kentridge's work in terms of the palimpsest.
Academic text (2000) -
The result resembles a palimpsest, a text in which some residue of a prior text is identified.
Academic text (2000) -
A landscape is a palimpsest of how people have lived on it, the violence they've done to it, the things they've asked it to produce.
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We've been studying a 500-year-old palimpsest.
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Increasingly, the mind is figured as a palimpsest, full of faint-but-tenacious experiential data.
Academic text (2017)
Surface Forms
Etymology
Palimpsest comes from the Greek term palimpsestos, made of palin 'again' (the same palin you see in palindrome) and psēstos 'to scrape', so it literally meant 'scraped again'. Originally it named a piece of writing that was scraped so new text could be put on it, and today it describes anything that shows older layers still visible under newer ones, like a book page, a city, or a digital file.