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aorist - definition and example

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If we posit that our "phatic functions" are useful for telling stories, then it is worthwhile to note this little tidbit on greek grammar:
The aorist and the imperfect are the standard tenses for telling a story. The ordinary distinction between them is between an action considered as a single undivided event and the action as a continuous event. Thus, for example, a process as a whole can be described in the imperfect, while the individual steps in that process will be aorist. [...] The other chief narrative use of the aorist is to express events before the time of the story. -Wikipedia
[Cyrus] was playing in this village... in the road with others of his age. The boys while playing chose to be their king this one.... Then he assigned some of them to the building of houses, some to be his bodyguard, one doubtless to be the King's Eye; to another he gave the right of bringing him messages;.... [Here the imperfect ἔπαιζε "was playing" is the whole process of the game (which continues past these extracts); the aorists the individual steps.] Now when the boy was ten years old, the truth about him was revealed ( ἐξέφηνέ ) in some such way as this... -Herodotus (quoted at ibid.)
It seems that there is a function in the story that holds everything together, as one story.  This is similar to the sociopetal force that we discussed earlier on.  The French dudes often write about a "master-signifier" and maybe the "imperfect" function does something similar; defining a space in which the different terms of the story, the "aorist" elements, are able to relate to each other.  ("This ideological point de capiton or master-signifier is not some underlying unity but only the difference between elements, only what its various mentions have in common: the signifier itself as pure difference." - lacan.com)

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