{"id":12474,"date":"2009-10-21T01:49:49","date_gmt":"2009-10-21T08:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2009\/10\/21\/axis-mundi.html"},"modified":"2009-10-21T01:49:49","modified_gmt":"2009-10-21T08:49:49","slug":"axis-mundi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2009\/10\/21\/axis-mundi\/","title":{"rendered":"axis mundi"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The other day, I read a submission that included the phrase \"Axis Mundi.\" There were a lot of other unfamiliar phrases in the story, so I figured it was just something the author had made up.<\/p>\n<p>Tonight, I encountered the phrase again, in a different story by a different author.<\/p>\n<p>I Googled it, and found the relevant <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Axis_mundi\">Wikipedia entry<\/a>, so now I know what it refers to. (Though that entry appears to contain a great deal of original research and a certain amount of wacky speculation and overinterpretation. Skyscrapers are designed to evoke the axis mundi? Really?)<\/p>\n<p>But I'm nonetheless a little surprised, and intrigued.<\/p>\n<p>Because the term didn't appear at all in any submission we received until early 2005, after four and a half years of submissions. It popped up again in late 2005, then in mid-2006, then in late 2007. Four instances in three years. Didn't appear at all in any submissions in 2008.<\/p>\n<p>But so far in 2009, we've received five stories that use the phrase, by four different authors.<\/p>\n<p>In other words: in the past nine months, this phrase has turned up in more stories than in the entire previous eight and a half years&mdash;the lifetime of the magazine.<\/p>\n<p>So now I'm wondering about the term. Has it recently entered the mass public consciousness, perhaps via the design firm or the band that use the name? Or is this just a coincidence?<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day, I read a submission that included the phrase &#8220;Axis Mundi.&#8221; There were a lot of other unfamiliar phrases in the story, so I figured it was just&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-to-me-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}