From a New York Times weblog last night—
The Reconstruction of Rome
By ROBERT BEASER
The New York Times , Nov. 27, 2012, 9:00 PM
Logic Pro software enables us to layer complex
technolike tracks and simulate meta, sampled orchestras—
fake orchestras that have on more than one occasion
fooled a jury of the most discriminating composers
into thinking it was the real thing. …
Several decades of cultural relativism has helped to
hasten the decline of the dominance of Western canon….
This next generation is becoming adept at taking small
bits of information, unformed, and assembling it
into larger asynchronous maps, of nonlinear order.
IT from BITS*
These failures of number agreement—
orchestras… it, decades… has, bits… it —
suggest a look at synesis.
Synesis is a traditional grammatical/rhetorical term
derived from Greek σύνεσις (originally meaning "unification,
meeting, sense, conscience, insight, realization, mind, reason").
A constructio kata synesin (or constructio ad sensum in Latin)
means a grammatical construction in which a word takes
the gender or number not of the word with which it should
regularly agree, but of some other word implied in that word.
It is effectively an agreement of words with the sense,
instead of the morphosyntactic form. Example:
"If the band are popular, they will play next month." —Wikipedia
The conclusion of Wikipedia's synesis article is of particular interest:
See also…. Elohim , a Hebrew word whose number varies.
* A nod to the late John Archibald Wheeler.