This week’s theme
There’s a word for it

This week’s words
heightism
theophoric
ekphrasis
diegetic
yesterweek

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(dy-uh-JET-ik)

MEANING:

adjective: Happening inside a story.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek diegesis (narrative). Earliest documented use: 1970.

NOTES:

In a movie or a play when a character turns on the television and the news comes on, it’s diegetic -- it’s happening inside the story. Contrast that with a narrator doing a voice-over -- “It’s 1941. WWII is raging” -- that’s audible only to the viewers and thus non-diegetic.

The term is usually used with sounds. A character performing a song in a nightclub in the story is diegetic, while a character in a musical singing a song that tells the turmoils of her heart is non-diegetic -- people don’t live their lives as a musical -- they don’t break out into song at random times to describe the ups and downs of their lives.

The term can be used for things besides the sound too. For example, a caption in a film is non-diegetic because it’s not happening inside the story -- it’s only visible to the viewers.

USAGE:

“Each pop song begins as a tinny diegetic insert (on a radio or gramophone) before flowering into a booming soundtrack accompaniment.”
Adrian Martin; December Boys; Sight and Sound (London, UK); Nov 2007.

“Much of the book is pure chronicle, told in a diegetic prose.”
Marcel Theroux; No One Prayed Over Their Graves by Khaled Khalifa; The Guardian (London, UK); Jul 26, 2023.

“That’s why I loved Moultrie’s dance staging for ‘Fat Ham’, in which characters discovered their truth through what you might call diegetic movement. They were actually dancing in the story, while lip-syncing to karaoke at a party.”
Jesse Green, et al; Choreographers Shape New Shows; The New York Times; May 14, 2023.

See more usage examples of diegetic in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: