Spot the Frippet: something imaginal.

 Despite appearances, something imaginal isn't usually imaginary.

It's true that imaginal can mean to do with an image, and images are in some ways not entirely real, but usually imaginal means to do with an imago.

An imago is the adult form of an insect - one that's emerged from an earlier, often very different form.

Butterflies are an obvious and well-known example, but an adolescent dragonfly looks a bit like this:

photo by Totodu74

and an adolescent ladybird looks a little like this:

photo by Michael Palmer

and every transformation into an imago is as close to miraculous as anything I expect to see:

photo by Charles J Sharp, https://www.sharpphotography.co.uk/

photo by Jon Sullivan

One last kind of imago is imaginary to some extent: it's the idealised image held by a child when it thinks of one of its parents; an image which sometimes doesn't fade even with adulthood.

Mostly, though, these imaginal images are as transient as, well, butterflies.

photo by KimonBerlin

Spot the Frippet: something imaginal. The word imāgō is the Latin for likeness. 

Which is strange, because it's rather the point that it isn't.