retcon
v.— «In the useful and fast-spreading parlance of comic book fans, Dijkstra has boldly “retconned” most of 20th century American art history. That is, he’s given it a new “retroactive continuity,” rewritten it so that a discarded early movement suddenly becomes the consummation of everything that came before and a martyr to just about everything after.» —“How representational work was overshadowed by abstract art” by David Kipen San Francisco Chronicle Aug. 10, 2003. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...