What does 'Mona Lisa' even mean?

[00:00:00]What does Mona Lisa actually mean?

[00:00:02]>> What does an artist do with a donkey?

[00:00:05]>> And who is the dada in daism?

[00:00:08]>> Learn why canvases are named after drugs, what's bizarre about Baroque, and which artistic movements have insulting names on this fine art themed episode of Words Unraveled.

[00:00:28]Welcome to another Words Unraveled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel Rob Words.

[00:00:33]>> And I'm Jessa Ferris, author of etmology books, including useless etmology. And today we're getting artsy fartsy on Words Unraveled.

[00:00:40]>> Yeah, certainly arty. Hopefully not too farty, but who knows what'll happen.

[00:00:44]We're here for a long time. Uh Jess, >> we're talking about art. We're talking about methods. We're talking about uh artists. We're talking about schools.

[00:00:55]>> Supplies.

[00:00:56]>> Supplies. talk about all of that. But we need to start with the word art itself.

[00:01:01]Just three little letters. Where does it come from?

[00:01:04]>> Yeah. I mean, it's meant art for a long time. The the old French word was basically art. The Latin word was basically artm or ours. But we also see that we see Rs in the names of many treatises on a variety of topics including sciences and such because art was also a word for practical skills or businesses or crafts and uh it's originally from a root meaning to fit together the ideas of assembling things artisal type activities and uh funny enough it's related to the Latin word arma meaning weapons for a similar reason.

[00:01:45]>> Oh, >> because one must have skill to use them.

[00:01:49]>> Something I find interesting is so the art at the start of artificial is from art, right? It's the idea of creation of something. But I also find quite interesting is here in Germany the word for artificial is const and the word for art is kst. So you've had exactly the same journey from the word for art to the word of artifice. And therefore artificial intelligence in German is called kika intelligence which I think is kind of it's kind of cool that >> artificial wasn't a a bad thing originally. We kind of have a a negative connotation or a porative connotation on it. But artificium in Latin for example was a word for a work of art or a skill or a theory or a system.

[00:02:32]>> Yeah. An artifice is something created well created actually. Yeah, exactly.

[00:02:38]You can just stop the sentence there.

[00:02:39]You know, something that has been fashioned with skill.

[00:02:42]>> Great. Where do we go with art? I mean, we can break. We're basically talking about painting types of art here, aren't we? Maybe a bit of modern art, bit of architecture thrown thrown in there.

[00:02:54]Should we start with some schools of art?

[00:02:56]>> We could do that certainly. This is our blank canvas.

[00:03:00]>> Oh. Oh, no. But you should you got to start there then. You got to start with canvas.

[00:03:04]>> Well, you start with canvas then.

[00:03:05]>> Yeah. Yeah, of course we have cuz it's one of the more surprising ethmologies.

[00:03:10]I'd say >> it absolutely is. It's it it entered English in the 14th century. A lot of these came from French. You will find that French is the source of many of these words. Though you have another language family that you'll talk about as well. Put a pin in that. Uh but the word canvas literally means made of hemp because it was made of hemp or flax which means it's related to which word?

[00:03:33]>> Cannabis.

[00:03:34]>> Cannabis.

[00:03:36]>> Yeah. It just means a cloth, right? It's a cloth. It's a cloth made of hemp which is what a canvas is. You know, >> there was also a type of canvas called cotton duck. Like a like the quack-quack duck or duck canvas which was tightly woven. A particularly tightly woven type of canvas. And the word duck comes from it's a Dutch word. Oh yeah, there's that other language family. But again, we'll get some more.

[00:03:59]>> But the the predecessor to duct tape was a non-adhesive strip of cotton duck cloth that was called duct tape after the same word. And then the name was transferred to this plasticcoated adhesive tape in World War II. And now duck is a brand of duct tape. You have this chain of command which goes from duct tape back then to duct tape and then apparently back to duck tape.

[00:04:27]Although actually I don't think the duct tape thing necessarily has to be in there cuz it does just get called duct tape by a lot of people as well as duct tape. So actually calling it duct tape ever >> is is kind of >> a folk ethmology. It should it should never have been called duct tape at all.

[00:04:47]Uh so when people say actually it's duct tape, not duct tape, they are not more correct than those.

[00:04:52]>> No, it's true.

[00:04:53]>> It's duct tape. There's an understanding of why that that is because you might use it to tape up a duct presumably.

[00:04:59]>> Yeah. Yeah. Presum.

[00:05:02]>> On canvas though, you can politic you canvas politically.

[00:05:05]So you can canvas opinion. And these are the same this is the same word.

[00:05:08]>> You can cannabis opinion.

[00:05:11]>> Yes. You're basically cannabising opinion.

[00:05:13]You are hemping opinion. Well, actually the idea is that it invokes is the idea of gathering things in a sort of cloth sort of a cloth bag. So gathering opinions in a cloth bag, you know.

[00:05:23]>> Oh, that's awesome.

[00:05:24]>> Shaking them up. But the difference is that that form of canvasing, political canvas, has two s's at the end, but it is the same word. It's just we've chosen that the way we're going to differentiate between political canvasing and a canvas upon which you write is or paint is that we're going to spell that one with two S's.

[00:05:44]>> Before canvas was a more popular medium for painters. Most people were painting on pieces of wood that were coated with lots of layers of gesso. And gesso is also coated used on canvas as well. But you know why in particular?

[00:05:59]>> Gesso sounds like a cleaning product that you've invented. It does. We can talk about that one in a second. It is not a brand name. Um >> but um but do you know why we started using canvas? Why it became so popular?

[00:06:13]>> No.

[00:06:14]>> Because there was a lot of canvas in Venice.

[00:06:18]>> Ah >> and that's where a lot of the artists live lived.

[00:06:22]>> Yeah. Venetians are going to come up a lot in this because I an interesting thing about Elgreco the Greek actually a Venetian really grew up in Cree which was part of the Venetian Empire at the time did a lot of his work in Italy and Spain calling him actually I suppose it makes sense that you'll be referred to as the foreigner if you were always working somewhere else but actually not an awful lot of time spent in Greece but you know signing things with Greek script. So that's that's probably why >> I thought I could explain gesso, >> which is just very briefly. It is a white preparatory coating. It It's from It's an Italian word that we just borrowed, but it means chalk or plaster, and it comes from the Latin word gypsum, also meaning plaster, from the Greek, I think, yepos, meaning chalk or plaster.

[00:07:21]So, this isn't that big of a mystery, but traditional gesso was used starting in the 13th century, and it's made of it was originally made of animal glue, usually rabbit skin, combined with chalk or gypsum and a white pigment, or it's like a glue made of rabbit skin, but then it's brushed in lots of layers and then sanded smooth. And it was originally hard and brittle, so it worked really well on medieval panels, which don't bend like canvas. And then it was ad updated in its composition for uh for painting on canvas.

[00:07:54]>> Yeah. Cuz you do see on antique shows they've got this this sort of wooden style of well it's not you call it a canvas but it is not canvas. You can't call it a canvas. I mean you sort of can obviously but you do if you do so you're doing it doing it figuratively. and you would put your canvas on an easel, which is a name with a very surprising origin because it's from the Dutch for donkey.

[00:08:22]>> So, an easel with a canvas upon it is a donkey carrying marijuana effectively.

[00:08:28]>> Oh man, that's amazing.

[00:08:31]>> Yeah, the Dutch easel is donkey. Much like, you know, I dry my clothes on a clothes horse. It's a donkey. is just a thing that carries a thing. It's not not too difficult. But we've alluded already to the fact that we get a lot of Dutch words for art um in the English language, including words like easel, including uh sketch, which is basically just a Dutch word. It's quite an interesting sort of chain that you can follow with the word sketch. So you got skits in in Dutch, which comes from skitso, which is Italian. that in turn is supposed to come from an unattested Latin word which is skeddios which means a raft right but that's not really what we're getting at what we're getting at is the Greek skeddios which means something that is temporary or made off hand so that is where we get the Italian idea of a of a sketch being a skit so you know something that is rough offhand and temporary and then yeah the Dutch word means that and then the English word means that as well The words etch and sketch both come from Dutch. They're not related, but they do both come from Dutch because an etch is from the Dutch eten, which means to cause to be eaten.

[00:09:49]It's really interesting. So that would mean it is related to the word eat. So etch and eat are related. And it's because when you etch something, you eat, you basically eat away at the surface of whatever you're etching it into. Um, that's kind of fun. But the one that I think is the most interesting Dutch word in English in terms of the the artistic world is landscape which I I think we might have talked about before. It means landship. Ship as in championship, relationship, you know this suffix that we have friendship. Exactly. Uh and land being well the land or or more the sort of countryside I think is a is a more of an implication of the the Dutch word. And I've got a really entertaining um book that was written in6007 called the art of drawing with the pen by a guy called Henry Peach. And in it he basically introduces us to the word landscape. And he spells it landscape.

[00:10:47]So l a n dt.

[00:10:48]>> So you can see the ship better.

[00:10:50]>> S k i p. Yeah. You can really you can really see that it's a foreign word. And he actually says landscape is a Dutch word and it is as much as we should say in English landship or expressing of the land by hills, woods, castles, seas, valleys, ruins, hanging rocks, cities, towns, etc. But what I find really interesting about this is the fact that you could even without your camera go to the top of a hill and admire the landscape and not be talking about art at all. You're not talking about a painting, but what you are doing is figuratively invoking the idea of the painting. You're not say so a landscape painting is not a painting of a landscape, right?

[00:11:27]>> Necessarily the landscape you see before you, you are figuratively referring to as a painting.

[00:11:34]>> A painting because that came first. Oh, I love it.

[00:11:36]>> Yeah, it's so good.

[00:11:37]>> You could you could I can't remember the name for this, but you know where you have like a fragment of a word that you then sort of take off and then you apply it to other ones.

[00:11:45]>> It's called rebracketing.

[00:11:47]>> Is it still rebracking even if it's like correctly bracketed? Because ship is the >> Oh, yeah. you know, you've got a point >> because normally it's when you take when you take it like the wrong chunk of a word, you know, that isn't >> Oh, yeah, you're right.

[00:11:59]>> But it might be it genuinely might be a type of rebracketing, but but se-scape, for example, or hellscape is whatever that is called. It's the taking of the that Dutch skip from the end of land and then applying it to to other things because we don't take secape literally from zcape as I guess it would be in in Dutch. Excuse my pronunciation. Anyway, >> that's kind of cool. So, it says the Dutch were incredibly influential 17th century artists. The Dutch East India Company and other Dutch interests abroad are bringing back an awful lot of Welsh wealth. So, you've got a growing middle class who could afford to buy art. And before that time, art is mainly being commissioned by churches and for religious reasons. But people want to decorate their houses with it. So you all of a sudden get this boom in the production of art and the Dutch are leading the way and they become really the sort of driving force of of that of of of painting.

[00:13:00]>> This is the 17th century the the Dutch golden age right with like Rembrandt and Vermeier.

[00:13:05]>> Those are the big names. Rembrandt's got a funny name. We do well though. We call him Bren Brand by his first name cuz his surname is is Van Rein as in of the river Rin, >> which we do the opposite for many artists.

[00:13:18]>> We do. We like if we call Da Vinci Da Vinci, which we're not supposed to do.

[00:13:22]We're supposed to call him Leonardo, but it just feels non-specific, doesn't it?

[00:13:25]You can't call someone of Da Vinci.

[00:13:27]You've got to say who they are of of Vinci. But uh Rembrandt has another name that I've never come across before. So his full name is Rembrandt Harmonzorn Van Rein. I've definitely pronounced that wrongly. Apologies, but it means son of Harmon. It's a patronymic. So you can get patronic Dutch names, which is again something I hadn't I hadn't actually realized. Uh yeah, when we call him Rembrandt, we just calling him by his first name >> from the same century but a little earlier. We have Kavajio whose first name is Michelangelo.

[00:13:59]That one was already taken. Oh, while we're on names, uh, Picasso, full name Pablo Ruiz Picasso. You know, this Spanish thing of taking two surnames, one from your father, one from your mother. So, we could have been referring to him as Ruiz, his dad's name, but instead he decided to go by his mom's surname, more famously. I think one of the reasons that people often are surprised to find that Picasso is a 20th century artist is because he is known monomously like these older masters.

[00:14:31]>> We do know him as Pablo Picasso. Yeah, people know his name is Pablo, don't they? It's like like you do that you just do that with artists anyway. Like we call Darly Darly. We know his name Salvador. But >> do we? Yeah, I guess we do. You're right. It's it's just quicker to say it's a Van Hawk than it's a Vincent Van Hawk. That's me trying to say Van Gooff properly. Something like that. But you can't call it Well, can you call him Van Hawk if that means he's from?

[00:14:56]>> We just need to call him a Vincent.

[00:14:57]>> Vincent.

[00:14:58]>> And I think maybe maybe they do do that in arty farty world. Maybe they do just call him Vincent.

[00:15:03]>> That's odd because if you did that now, you could end up with someone who's just the artist. Fred >> Jess the artist. Be more specific. Rob arts instead of Rob words worms.

[00:15:15]>> I've done some arts. Uh yeah, but that's my little um Dutch segue where I'm sure I've upset all kinds of Dutch people with my dreadful pronunciations, but my overall point is one of uh respect for the 17th century Dutch artists because um we're still using their words today.

[00:15:32]>> Uh well, they were they were Baroque artists and if if it ain't Baroque, don't fix it. Hey, >> hey, >> tell us about Baroque or Barack.

[00:15:40]>> So, this is the this is the style of architecture from 1600 to 1750. It's about drama and movement and grandeur and emotional intensity. And the French word means irregular or bizarre. And it's thought to be originally from a Portuguese word meaning an irregular pearl. And we'll get to a related word in just a minute, but it was originally used poratively by later critics. Like Baroque period artists did not call themselves Baroque period artists. It was later used by critics who thought the style was overly complicated and bizarre and excessively ornate. The idea was that the church wanted emotionally powerful imagery that could inspire faith and awe. And so this the style has a lot of contrast of light and shadow and ornamentation and dynamic dynamic movements and theatrical effects like Kavajio for example was really big on on dramatic lighting called tennibism I believe is how you pronounce it where the figures kind of emerge from a deep darkness or a very dark background. This is also called Kiara Skiro which is the artistic use of of strong contrasts between dark and light that that create volume and depth and dark is it? Yeah, >> which is really cool. But but the Greeks were already using that kind of thing as well.

[00:17:04]>> Baroque is directly related to the word veruka.

[00:17:08]>> What? Oh, that makes >> they both go back to the same Latin root. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it does make perfect sense. Do you know how B and V are basically the we learned this when we were learning about Spanish, right?

[00:17:18]How the Spanish pronounced B and V the same. Well, you can trace bar back to a Latin word that began with a VV and also gave us verooa as well. And it makes perfect sense. The idea of something sort of warty and lumpy and irregular.

[00:17:33]Voila.

[00:17:34]>> That's fantastic.

[00:17:36]>> But we should mention RCOO though, shouldn't we? While we're you can't mention Barack without mentioning RCOO.

[00:17:41]Raaka is actually a form of Barack. It's like a late Barack.

[00:17:46]>> It is lighter and more playful than Baroque and it's more decorative and it was more for like inside your parlor. It means shell work or rock work. So we've got our pearls, our irregular pearls and then our our rock work. And the the critics referred to RCOO as anything frivolous or excessively ornate. And it's it's I'd say the the more emblematic context in which you see this is like during the reign of uh Louis the 15th and then from then on and it's all this like grandeur and drama and florals and romantic scenes and pastels and frolicking courtship.

[00:18:26]Uh and it's from um this French word rockey, right? And it's probably just sort of a fun repetition of the sort of the C sound that turns it into RCOO. I mean, it seems like this. It seems like, oh, that's a very European word, but it's quite hard to pin down where in Europe it's from. Well, that's because it's kind of concocted.

[00:18:51]>> Since we're moving chronologically, we should talk about impressionism next and then the movements that came out of it.

[00:18:58]>> Yes. So mentioned how impressionism was named after people who didn't like it.

[00:19:04]And it's true that it seems like the word impressionist which came across came about before impressionism appears to have been coined in a really nasty review of a load of impressionist paintings including a load of Monet paintings. And it's actually thought that impressionism comes from the title of a specific Monet painting which was sole Leon which means you know impression of the sunrise. And if you look at it it's a very sort of murky image but the point of impressionism is that you are giving the impression of the image without like precisely drawing it. I don't think I don't know if I'm putting that across correctly, but you're using sort of big strokes and points and stuff rather than trying to accurately, you know, it's like doing a low res image of something, right? You got you get the impression of it. That's literally it. This is what they're saying when they say this is our impression of the sun rising. It's not.

[00:20:01]And if you look at Monet's work and lots of artists, lots of impressionist artists, you'll see what what I'm talking about. It's that they're not trying to paint every little detail.

[00:20:10]They're trying to represent what they see or what's in their heads.

[00:20:13]>> A common feature of them is visible brush strokes and brighter colors and sort of everyday subjects that are created in a more for that era modern way.

[00:20:25]>> The sort of coining comes in this review by a guy called Louie Lur in 1874. Well, I don't we don't know for certain, I guess, if he's come up with this word, but he's used it to say, um, to indulge his insanity, and out of fear of irritating him, I looked for what was tolerable among the impressionist pictures, and I acknowledged without too much difficulty that the bread, grapes, and chair of Breakfast by Msure Monet were good bits of painting. So, this is him at the end of a scathing review of all kinds of paintings. He just go, I don't like any of this. This is horrible. He just said, "Well, I think the grapes were quite nice in that mono one." But he refers to the people that did all these paintings he doesn't like as impressionists.

[00:21:09]>> All of the artistic movements, the progression of them always feels like the the next generation being like, "Well, we're bored of this now. Let's try something else."

[00:21:18]>> Yeah. Yeah. But tell us about some of the movements that come out of impressionism.

[00:21:24]>> So, expressionism is a reaction to impressionism.

[00:21:28]The expressionists thought that impressionism was too concerned with external experiences. So they wanted to express inner experience instead. So they used these distorted forms and exaggerated colors. And instead of realistic perspective, they started uh leaning into psychological intensity and ecstasy and spiritual yearning and alienation. There's a there's a a good example, an early expressionist painting is the scream. The movement is is distorted and and it makes you feel a certain way and and expresses what the what the artist and the character in it is feeling. Then after World War II, we get this new generation of artists that push the emphasis on subjective emotional experience further to abstract expressionism. The term was popularized in like the 1940s give or take. So in the aftermath of World War II, we get influences from earlier versions like abstraction, cubism, surrealism, which we'll get to in just a second, and expressionism. One of the more iconic artists associated with abstract expressionism would be Jackson Pollock, for example, the the drip paintings and and splatters and such. and then Rothco and things like this. It uses more abstract, which is, you know, the word that's in the name to express spontaneous, uncensored actions that are intended to to be as much about the process as the ultimate artwork at the end through bypassing conscious control of your creativity.

[00:23:05]>> I learned some things there.

[00:23:07]>> Yes.

[00:23:10]>> I never had any art history lessons.

[00:23:12]You've had one or two, right? But uh I'm completely ignorant with all of this. I mean, I basically had to learn all of this for the sake of this episode. I'm good on what the how the words work out, but the actual understanding of the the philosophies behind it, uh it's all very new to me.

[00:23:27]>> I am by no means an expert, but my sister is. She is a fine artist who has had works displayed in museums and in >> on my t-shirt, by the way, available in our store, the Star Sailor. Sorry, it's sweaty. We've had 41 degrees Celsius here in Berlin.

[00:23:43]>> That's awful.

[00:23:44]>> Hot stuff over here in Berlin. Uh, but I, you know, it's it's handling the sweat very well. Uh, highly recommend one of Jess's sister's designs. Oh, I can I talk about Daisy? Let's talk about Dism.

[00:23:58]>> Yes, let's talk about Daism.

[00:24:00]>> Dism emerges during the First World War in Europe. First World War is very miserable. It's a stupid war. Didn't need to happen. domino effect results in this enormous conflict. Uh, and people are just sick of of what that says about the world and daism comes out of it.

[00:24:20]It's all really flamboyant. It's all really um it's bonkers. I mean, I was watching a video. It's from 1917. Uh, it's guy called uh Ugo Bal, who is yeah, one of the the founders of Daism. Uh, a club in Switzerland called Cabaret Voltater. It's also the name of a sort of publication because there it's kind of a satirical club. And I was watching this video and it's him dressed in what looks like a giant toothpaste tube just shouting shouting and then he gets dragged off.

[00:25:03]>> That tells you what you need to know about Daism. deliberately provocative, deliberately confusing. Perhaps the most famous dardist work is Marcel Duchon's uh fountain, you know, which is just a urinal with >> I didn't know that's how I didn't know that's how that that was how you pronounce that word.

[00:25:26]>> Oh, urinal. Yeah, we do say urinal.

[00:25:28]Yeah, >> I don't know. It's weird. It is weird.

[00:25:32]>> Do you say urinary?

[00:25:34]>> Urinary. Yeah. Yeah, >> but yeah, but you know that that's not how that that's not how a language works. You know, you know that the emphases shift depending on what comes after it. No one says you're anymore.

[00:25:45]Everyone says you're in now, >> but I swear growing up I'm nostalgic for when people used to pronounce it, but no one does anymore. But uh we do still say you do we do still say your rhino.

[00:25:55]>> Nostalgic for the earlier pronunciation of P.

[00:26:02]>> Those were the days. Those are the days.

[00:26:06]Panda pop. Cheap panda pop and urinal urine. Urine.

[00:26:13]Shut up. Love it.

[00:26:15]>> This conversation has has has a hot jazz.

[00:26:22]>> I'm so hot. Anyway, this is not fair.

[00:26:25]>> It was a It was an avantgard twist into daism and the absurdity of it. Right.

[00:26:32]And he s and actually the name written on it is a mut >> mut. Mhm.

[00:26:37]>> A Yeah. But I'm pronouncing it like that because the German word for poverty is arm.

[00:26:43]>> Oh, I see.

[00:26:43]>> Which I think it's a very >> It's a pun.

[00:26:46]>> It's it's a pun. There's a lot of German stuff going on. Like Ugo Bal, who I mentioned earlier, spelled Hugo Ball.

[00:26:52]Looks like he could be an Englishman, but he's not. He's a He's a German. And yeah, this is going on in Switzerland.

[00:26:58]Duchamp also had a an female alter ego, right? I didn't know that.

[00:27:03]>> Rose salavi, which is a a pun on the phrase aerosi, which is sex is life.

[00:27:09]>> Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. That's like sort of drag culture is basically punning names for your female alter ego.

[00:27:21]But Daism, the name of it isn't we're not 100% sure why they >> Yeah. There like three or four. Yeah.

[00:27:28]>> Theories about it >> could just be that it's a childish noise um for something that's deliberately sort of quite uh reductive. Yeah, I think it's probably better to call it that. And then there's other otherwise there's this story that Ugo Bal and a guy called uh Richard Hulbec. So Ricard perhaps sorry I don't know. One day they're just just they're coming up with a name. So they flick through a French dictionary and it falls open at the headword da which just happens to be the French word for a hobby horse but doesn't really matter that that's what it is. They just like the syllables and so they call it daism.

[00:28:09]>> It is entwined a bit with surrealism though surrealism is quite a bit older. Right.

[00:28:17]And here was my my favorite revelation from researching this episode that the adjective surreal which means you know dreamlike or bizarre or strangely unreal did not give us the name of the movement. Surreal is a back formation of surrealism.

[00:28:35]So surrealism and surrealist were coined in the in around 1917 and then we didn't get surreal as an adjective until the 1930s. So if you describe something as surreal, you're saying that it is like it is something created by a surrealist.

[00:28:50]>> Yes. Exactly.

[00:28:52]>> Not that a surrealist is creating surreal things. So where where does surrealism come from then?

[00:28:58]>> Realism was around the 18th century. So we this this overlaps with some of the movements movements that we've talked about. It was a rejection of the idealization of like romanticism in favor of more ordinary life. And it's not just visual arts too. realism is also in literature and such too. And the the realismo movement in France in France was followed some of the revolutions and it talked about like the growing interest in social conditions and political change and ordinary people. And then 70 some odd years later surrealism was coined by Guom Apollo who talked about the idea of this this movement that was beyond realism. And that's where we got things like art that defies conventional logic and reason and and sort of mocks the like failure of social institutions through absurdity.

[00:29:54]>> So it's the the French preposition sir for on top of. So it's like on top of reality >> but it's yeah it's above or beyond in this context. Super realism.

[00:30:13]I wanted to talk about the fact that uh we have artistic techniques that have fancy French names but the things they mean in French are really lame like like collage which just means gluing.

[00:30:28]>> Pap mâe which just means chewed paper literally chewed paper. Decoupage which just means cutouts. And um actually a more interesting one though is silhouette. It's only interesting because we don't know where the word comes from but we do know who it's named.

[00:30:46]>> Yes, it's kind of interesting. We don't know why it is named after Etien de Silhouette who is a French politician.

[00:30:56]He served as controller general controller general or something like that uh in the 1700s. known for being sort of frugal and imposing quite sort of petty austerity on the people. So making sort of savings here and there.

[00:31:14]And one of the theories behind silhouette is that it's so it what is a silhouette? Okay, it's a painting of someone for the side uh and it's just black. So very low on detail, very cheap. It's done by cutting out a piece of black paper traditionally. So, I think the idea is that it's kind of low rent, therefore worthy of such a a frugal, penny pinching official. But that's only one of the theories. Another one is that it's somehow a reference to his his brief term in office. I don't really understand how that is. It's as if like you don't have an opportunity to get a full impression of him. I don't know. Uh but the more simple explanation is that apparently he likes to make silhouettes himself being that obviously >> the most practical explanation >> it does doesn't it? Yeah, exactly. It might be that I it seems like it should be really easy to solve that just just ask. No, not ask someone. Obviously, it was in 1750s, you know, >> but it's like not that long ago. We we wrote about these things.

[00:32:19]>> Yeah, exactly. That Yeah, I don't know.

[00:32:21]Um but authoritative sources do not come down uh in one of those three camps necessarily. So, it might be just that he liked making silhouettes, but it's just one of those words that you wouldn't necessarily think is named after a person, and it is. It reminds me of the history of the miniature, if I may.

[00:32:39]>> Oh, yeah. Yeah, please do.

[00:32:41]>> Okay. So, the word mini, you would think, is probably short for miniature, right? Like a mini camera or a mini skirt is typically a miniature camera or a miniature skirt.

[00:32:52]>> I would definitely take that as a fact.

[00:32:54]100% true. It must be.

[00:32:56]>> But miniature isn't related to words that mean small at all. So not minuscule, not minimum, not minus, not minor. Those are all from the same Latin root, which means small and and has to do with with uh with minimization.

[00:33:15]>> And also miniatures. Um, so I pronounce it in the three-cllable way rather than the miniature four syllable way. Yeah.

[00:33:21]Yeah. It's weird.

[00:33:22]>> I think it's probably just lazy Americanism that that makes it.

[00:33:25]>> I don't think it I think I think you if you look through you can see spellings that suggest the three syllables but it's really weird to have three unstressed syllables in an English word.

[00:33:35]That's really odd to go stressed then three unstressed syllables. So that might be why it gets shortened to miniature >> um just to make it a bit more sort of angloof friendly. Uh but but they are small miniatures are small things >> obviously. So that that's why I would have assumed that it was related to mini >> right. Uh but miniature is from the Latin word minar which means to paint red and it's from minium which was the name of a lead based red paint used to illuminate medieval manuscripts. If you open if you look at a medieval manuscript you'll see a sort of red orange color everywhere and it is because it was painted with minium and a miniature was originally a word for one of those manuscript illuminations especially but not exclusively one pigmented with minium. You also see it like if you look at diiocriticals and early paragraph marks pillcrows, they're usually painted in that sort of orange red ink slash paint. It evolved because the paintings in illuminated manuscripts were small compared to things like fresco and larger paintings. And although it's in still in use today, a broader range of available pigments kind of reduced the reliance on minium in illuminations over time. So by influence of our friend Phil Ketmology, the reduced synonymousness between minium and illustrations combined with the structure of words like minimum and minuscule shifted the definition and the assumed origin of miniature to today's meaning.

[00:35:05]>> Beautiful. Beautiful. And one of the reasons that silhouette reminded me of this is that one of one critical stepping stone that sort of solidified the modern definition and made it mean a small thing was the portrait miniature which was a portrait style from the 16th century that drew on similar techniques as manuscript miniatures but didn't make use of minium and they were small in size so you could give one to the person you loved or but to a family member or something like that. And these were the these were like the the the misleading Tinder profile of their day as well. I I forget which of Henry VII's wives he married based upon her miniature and was very upset when she turned up >> and a and I mean a a great way a cheap way to produce a a miniature like this was to to do it in silhouette, right? So then >> that was the logical association anyway.

[00:35:59]>> Yeah. Actually, when I think of silhouettes, I do think of them as kind of being like like miniatures. Mini miniatures. So, you genuinely do do miniature and I do miniature. That's interesting.

[00:36:09]>> Miniature. Miniature. I I I It's a gamble. Whatever's going to come out of my mouth.

[00:36:16]>> That's the That's the philosophy of this podcast, Jess. You never know what the hell is going to come out of her mouth.

[00:36:24]>> This isn't that revelatory, but I do think it's interesting. And I I hadn't fully thought through it until I looked this up a few years ago, honestly. But a portrait is a portrait.

[00:36:35]A portrayal.

[00:36:36]>> Yes. I wanted to mention this when I did landscape because it's the same idea, right? Whenever we use the word landscape, we're invoking the idea of the painting. It's the same with portrait. It refers to a type of painting first. But yes, it comes from exactly the same source as the word portrayal and portray. We think of a portrait as being a a an image of a person or I I suppose it could be an animal or something, but it nothing about the word has anything to do with with that as a particular subject. It literally means to to draw forth or to trace out or like to pull or drag. It's related to any word with like the Latin traer in it.

[00:37:12]>> One thing that I was looking up is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. It's like what does the Mona bit actually mean at the start of there? And it is just sort of a contraction of Madonna, right? It just mean my lady Lisa. But the weird thing is we know it by that name, which is not an English name, but that is only like the English name for that painting.

[00:37:33]It's in Italian. It's called La Jaconda, which means the happy one, but is a pun on the name of Lisa herself because her name was Lisa Deljondo.

[00:37:46]That is a much smaller painting than you expect it to be.

[00:37:53]We've been talking about fine art so far. I I would like to take us to perhaps a more fundamental art artistic tool, the crayon. That is a perfect medium for fine art. I am not I'm not there to to decide what is and isn't. I am no art critic. But modern crayons are usually made from like wax and pigment.

[00:38:13]But the same word was also used for chalk based drawing sticks and other coloring sticks made of charcoal and oil and other binders. And it's it's very old word. The French cleon originally meant chalk pencil and it's from a a Latin root meaning chalk. The the Latin word creta is kind of unknown as far as its root sense. It meant chalk or or pipe clay, but it could mean something like earth from crete or it could be a Celtic word for mud or clay. Probably just means clay.

[00:38:44]>> Hence the word cretaceous, right?

[00:38:46]>> Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So it might it could be either related to cit as a place name or it could be from the name of cree because of its chalk or mud or clay.

[00:38:56]>> Yeah, you get this. This is this is the same problem with the the word copper, isn't it? Is it from Cyprus or is Cypress named after copper? We don't know because the Romans got their copper from Cyprus but which we don't know which was which which happened first.

[00:39:09]>> Same issue with Cypress trees whole thing.

[00:39:11]>> Oh really?

[00:39:15]But crayon crayon is just the French for pencil. Now >> the medium that is now a crayon is sort of the grandchild of enostic painting which is made of pig pigment with heated beeswax and that's used in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt and Rome things like that. Anyway, in 1903, if we fast forward from the ancients, Alice Steed Biny coined the name Crayola, which of course crayons are named after the French Crayon, but from the French clay meaning chalk with the part of the word oolaginous, which means oily, >> and that's for the paraffin wax used in the crayons. But what I wanted to talk about in particular was the names of a few collector crayon colors, which are our rare crayons that are hard to find.

[00:40:02]and people will collect because although perhaps the color still exists and is in the box, the paper on it says something different than it does now.

[00:40:11]>> Oh, okay.

[00:40:14]Collectible crayons go.

[00:40:15]>> The rarest and supposedly most soughtafter Crayola crayon is torch red.

[00:40:20]It was produced very briefly from 1997 to 1998 before being renamed to Scarlet.

[00:40:27]So finding an authentic vintage rapper bearing the name Torch Red became a big collector's item. The crayon was named in honor of Gary K. Woodring who is a gold medalinning parolympian and wheelchair athlete who became the chief of prosthetics for the US Veterans Administration Medical Center in Philadelphia. And it was one of his clients who won the chance to name a crayon color in a contest. And he chose to name it after Gary in the sense that he was a parolympian. The torch in that case is an Olympic torch.

[00:41:01]>> Olympic torch.

[00:41:03]There we go. M >> another one which you do actually see these around because there were enough of them for a while that collectors have several of them is dandelion which was this bright yellow orange shade that was officially retired in 2017 and sparked a big collecting frenzy when it happened because >> at this point we had caught on to the fact that they were collector's items.

[00:41:26]Um but anyway although a lot of other colors had been retired before it was the first one to be removed from the box set in the 114 years since Crayola was established. And it wanted it did this because it wanted to add a blue crayon which is now called beautiful and was inspired that.

[00:41:48]>> Don't replace dandelion with beautiful.

[00:41:50]>> Beautiful. I actually I like the color dandelion better too. It looks nicer even though I like blues better than yellows generally. Anyway, it in it was inspired by a newly discovered pigment called Yinman Blue and they wanted to introduce that to the 24 pack. So, it touched off this big collecting frenzy.

[00:42:07]Like I said, although it was dropped from Crayola's range in 2017, like I said, it was reintroduced in 2025 as a limited edition in the 64count Crayola packs.

[00:42:17]>> Big business using specific shades. I mean, you know, there are brands who rely on obviously Tiffany, um, Cadbury as well who've all got trademarks, I think. on specific colors.

[00:42:29]>> I'm reminded of Meryill Streep's cerulean speech in Devil Wears Prada. The main character played by Anne Hathaway is is sort of like snorts when she's in the like Vogue back rooms because they're talking about they're try trying to pair I forget what they have. It's like one clothing item with another and she thinks they look exactly the same. And then she gets lectured by Miranda Priestley and she gives her a whole speech about like what you do not know is that the lumpy sweater you're wearing comes from a whole line of fashion designers and it was introduced on the runway in this year and it it's a great speech. It's fun. But yeah, color is a big thing and it has been since for all time, right? I mean some of the earliest things that were were traded as as symbols of wealth were were pigments, right?

[00:43:17]>> Yeah. Like pira which gives us the word purple. M >> the regal the color of regal robes before we decided that red was a bit more regal.

[00:43:26]>> Blues, purples, reds, anything really vivid. Right.

[00:43:28]>> Yeah, very true. Very true. Big business.

[00:43:30]>> I have two more crayon colors.

[00:43:32]>> Have you got burnt umber?

[00:43:34]>> No, but I do have flesh.

[00:43:38]>> So, it was originally called flesh tint from 1903 to 1949.

[00:43:43]>> A horrible collection of syllables.

[00:43:46]Flesh tint.

[00:43:47]>> Yes. And you can imagine what color flesh tint was. It was definitely It was definitely white people flesh tint.

[00:43:56]>> Oh, it was skin color, was it? Oh, yeah.

[00:43:58]>> Yeah. No, it wasn't. It wasn't bloody and red.

[00:44:01]>> Yeah. Honestly, what I was thinking, >> they should have called it epidermis.

[00:44:05]Anyway, >> white people epidermis.

[00:44:08]Anyway, it was called >> Caucasian male.

[00:44:14]Anyway, it was just shortened to flesh from 19.

[00:44:21]Where are we?

[00:44:24]Sorry, it was just shortened to flesh.

[00:44:26]Go on.

[00:44:27]>> It was just shortened to flesh in 1949 till 1956 and then it was briefly pink beige for 2 years and then it went back to flesh in until 1962.

[00:44:39]And then in 1962, it was renamed to peach, and now it is still peach. It was the light orange color in the 24 crayon box until the mid1 1990s when apricot took its place. And it's currently in the in all of the larger boxes. So that's that's the story of flesh in your crayon box.

[00:44:59]>> I remember peach. I remember the peach crayon from my childhood. That's a very vivid memory. Uh great. I Jess, I'm so hot. I think I go to expire.

[00:45:09]>> Okay.

[00:45:09]>> Can we bring it to an end?

[00:45:11]>> I have I have It's like one sentence.

[00:45:13]The last crayon color. I said I had two.

[00:45:15]So, one >> Oh, you did. You did. Sorry. I thought you'd I thought you'd covered it. Beg you pardon.

[00:45:18]>> The last one, very briefly, there was an early color beginning in 1949 that was named Prussian Blue and it was renamed Midnight Blue in 1958 because Prussia wasn't exactly relevant anymore.

[00:45:33]>> Yeah, bad point. Bad point. Uh, I'm I'm speaking to you from Prussia technically.

[00:45:39]>> Yeah, there you are.

[00:45:40]>> Well, I am I'm not even Caucasian male colored anymore. I am I am closer to torch red. What was it?

[00:45:50]Something. What was it? Flesh tint tint.

[00:45:53]>> A flesh tint.

[00:45:55]>> Oh. Oh, can I do one last? Well, it won't be the last one. I bet I'll try to squeeze again. Plug for my Edinburgh show. If anyone's going to be in Edinburgh between the 6th and the 16th of August, please come and see me. I'm doing a a wordy nerdy hour >> several times, right?

[00:46:09]>> Yeah, I'm doing it 10 10 nights in a row. Yeah. So, you got plenty of chance to plenty of chance to get get me.

[00:46:14]>> Excellent. Excellent.

[00:46:16]>> Anything to plug Jess?

[00:46:17]>> I have a book called A Miscellaney of Weird and Wonderful Facts for Curious Humans who have nothing better to do than read. You know who you are. I didn't come up with that title, but I did enjoy it. The publisher was like, "Would you like to write this book?" And I was like, "With that title? Yeah, sure." Uh, but I co-authored it with my friend Shannon Miller who's a pop culture reporter. So, you'll see a bunch of language facts in there and I probably wrote those and if there are pop culture facts, she probably wrote those. But it was fun and collaborative and we had a few other people contribute. So, check it out.

[00:46:43]>> I'm looking forward to getting hold of a copy soon as poss. Thank you very much, Jess. Enjoyed this.

[00:46:49]>> Yes. All right. We'll see you next time on Words Unraveled. Cheo.