And it's the origin of the word "fax."
The very first time I sent a fax, I made a photocopy first to be sure I retained the original. Yeah, I learned something new that day....
Well-observed! Also, shades of Walter Benjamin's influential 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
You know, the one in which Benjamin coins a new meaning for the word
aura: a quality integral to an artwork that cannot be communicated through mechanical reproduction techniques—such as photography.
Original artwork vs. facsimile, reproduction, copy
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In unrelated word news, I just stumbled on this one:
anaphora (n.) = repetition of a word or expression at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses especially for rhetorical or poetic effect. (Lincoln's "we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground" is an example of
anaphora.)
I ran into the word
anaphora in a discussion by Stanley Fish of Martin Luther King's rhetorical style in "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." I'm sure y'all are familiar with that text, since it always gets alluded to on King's birthday, which wasn't long ago.
Stanley Fish writes:
King is replying to the question (sometimes asked by his colleagues in the movement) “Why don’t you wait a while and hold back on the sit-ins and marches?” The answer is at once withheld and given. It is formally withheld by the succession of “when” clauses (the technical name is anaphora), that offer themselves as preliminary to the direct assertion but are the direct assertion; each “when” clause is presented as a piece of the answer, but is in itself fully sufficient as an answer. “Here is the reason we can’t wait,” each says, but if that isn’t enough, here is another and another.
