Notation: Targeting And Grappling

I've run into a bit of a technical roadblock while transcribing the rank 2 sparing techniques. I need to convey the following: "Execute a left monkey grab, grabbing and holding the attacker's right wrist". To do this I need notation for at least two separate concepts, grappling and targeting, which need to be deployed in tandem to solve this particular problem.

Let's return to the concept of targeting. Awhile ago I speculated that NASA's scheme for division of the body into regions could, with a little modification, serve as the basis for targeting notation. Accepting that as given for the moment lets think about how we might integrate such specifications into the system under development.

Recall that the generic notation for a strike is simply "<symbol>", and that this symbol can be decorated with a directional arrow to indicate the angle of attack. In the techniques I've transcribed so far the arrow is usually omitted, implying that the default angle (i.e. forward) should be used. It seems to me that there is also an implicit target; if someone tells me to "reverse punch" I know the general area for which I should be aiming.

What we need is a mechanism to specify the target in case its non-standard or not implicit in the strike.It seems logical to me to terminate the directional arrow with another symbol denoting the target. So, for example, if I wanted to specify a horizontal sidehand to the jaw I might write that as

<jaw symbol>
↑
HSH

Does this make sense, and will it work well in the overall scheme? There's an intuitive appeal to this layout; it says "execute this strike, in this direction, terminating as this target". One minor concern is that it might be hard to read; there's the potential that it might parse as "execute this strike in this direction, and execute this other strike as well". The target symbols will need to be chosen such that they aren't easily mistaken for strikes.

On the whole I think this will work, which brings us to the concept of grappling in general. When I think of grappling I think of bringing surfaces into contact for some period of time. If we go with a targeting system based on NASA's body regions we'll have a suitable vocabulary of surfaces, which means we just need to figure out how to indicate a "grab".

How about this?

<grapple symbol>-<target>

I've stolen the '-' from chemistry notation to indicate a bond. does that make sense? We don't use it anywhere else, it's not another arrow, and it visually joins the defender and attacker together.

What about duration? Grapples, by definition, persist over time; we need some way to specify how long the grapple is held. I like a simple line heading up the page:

	|
	|
<grapple symbol>-<target>

Adopting this notation we can easily what's going on with the rest of the body while the grapple is held. It also helps remind the performer that the grappling hand is occupied. So, referring back to our motivating example, suppose I want to record the sequence "left monkey grab to the right wrist, right forward sweep, right reverse punch, let go". I'd write down the following:

       |		RP
       |		FS
MG-<right wrist>

Alright, so far so good. Time to turn our attention to targeting symbols. The abstract criteria for targeting symbols are as follows:

• Compact
• Simple to remember
• Easily distinguished from strikes

So, how to proceed from here? The NASA model divides the body into regions and planes/joints; as we discussed previously each region/joint has one or more surfaces:

• Bottom
• Front
• Inner
• Outer
• Rear
• Top

Abstractly, a target is just a combination of region/joint and surface, with the additional simplification that many regions of the body has "left" and "right" flavors. In keeping with the use of letters for strike symbols I recommend that we do the same for targets, in which case I submit the following grammar for evaluation:

[L|R]<B|F|I|O|R|T><region designator>

Like the strike symbols I'm going to leave the region designators undefined; different systems may want to use their own region designations.

We still need some way to separate strike and target symbols. I suggest that we use parentheses for this reason since they've evocative of a circle which is, in turn, evocative of a target. Returning once again to our motivating example, and designating "W" as the designator for the wrist, we get

       |	RP
       |	FS
MG-(RFW)

Whaddaya think?