the origin of the word grotesque

 Since the advent of the Corona virus and all the subsequent problems, I don't yet feel like travelling. However, one of the places I would one day like to see is the Domus Aurea of Nero in Rome.

I was reminded of it today, when I received my regular text from Delanceyplace.com. This email consists of excerpts from books, and today's was from Haunted, by Leo Braudy. It was a discussion of  the origin of the word grotesque, which comes from the Italian word grotto, meaning  a cave.

 Here is a little quote from today's Delanceyplace excerpt.

In the late fifteenth century, Raphael Sanzio, more remembered as a great painter, who was then head of antiquities for Rome as well as the chief architect of the Vatican, supervised the partial excavation of Nero's Domus Aurea (Golden House), which had recently been discovered to exist under what was other­wise assumed to be a natural hill near the Colosseum. The site had been dis­covered in the course of digging a well there, when workmen broke through what was found to be the dome of an enormous room. Lowered down on ropes to explore this vast underground construction, they discovered a series of equally large rooms on whose walls were paintings of mingled human and animal forms fantastically tangled with vegetation, fruits, and flowers that were dubbed grottesca -- the kind of visual images to be found in grottoes.

It would  be fabulous to tour the partially restored building and wear virtual reality equipment to experience it the way it originally was. Maybe one day I'll get there. In the meantime, here are a couple of sites that give an idea of what that tour might be like. 

This one is in German. 

Here's another one in English. I think this site is worth a visit, because it explains a little of why the place  disappeared from history after Nero died.

Surprising origin of the word grotesque

Sitting in the waiting room at my doctor's surgery, I read an article in an old edition of National Geographic and was surprised to learn the origin of the word grotesque.

The article was a revisiting of the life and achievements of the emperor Nero, a bad guy by anyone's measure, but apparently a man with an artistic vision that resulted in an amazing palace, one largely open for the common people to stroll around the grounds.

He built a huge palace that took up a large portion of the Roman city (land available because of the infamous fire that he may or may not have instigated.)

Subsequent emperors appear to have hated Nero so much that they literally buried Nero's palace. One report said some areas were filled with sand, which is why the interior was preserved so well, at least until the fifteenth century.

For fifteenth century artists, it was a popular pilgrimage to be lowered into the cave-like interior of the buried palace to look at the frescoes on the ceilings. Apparently the fill of rubble meant that these early visitors were standing up near the ceiling, and could touch the painted surfaces.

They were so taken with the paintings that they reproduced many of the motifs of these grotesque (i e from a cave or grotto) artworks in their own work. I guess if we did our homework we could figure out where to see them, probably some in the Vatican, I suppose.

The Online Etymology Dictionary writes that this suggested origin of the word grotesque is generally accepted.

Here are a few links that I've just enjoyed looking at.

Rome Reports.com 

The History Channel

Kobean History

opposite of widdershins

A friend and I  were sharing a nice pot of tea in a new teashop in Ivanhoe today and she made sure to turn the teapot a few times before pouring the first cup. We both agreed it's traditional to turn the pot widdershins.

In preparing this post, I had a quick look around the internet and came across a hilarious conversation on reddit about pot-turning. Here's one of the comments (obviously tongue-in-cheek):

It's well-known that the tea plant absorbs minerals into the leaf as it gets more mature, thus the higher amount of fluoride in mature leaf as opposed to young buds. High quality tea is often made from the leaf of very old plants, which have absorbed many of the minerals from the soil.
Some of those are ancient ferrous minerals. This means that the dried tea leaf is slightly magnetic. When the water is initially added, the leaf is jumbled every which way. However with the turning of the pot, it allows the ferrous minerals in the leaf to align with the magnetic pole, much like a simple compass made of a magnetized needle on top of a floating cork.
Once the tea leaf is aligned magnetically, the tea itself becomes much more harmonious with nature. You don't want to be drinking tea where it's magnetically pointing every which way as it goes into your stomach! If the earth's magnetic poles were to suddenly flip (which it is due to do any century now) it could result in the tea in your stomach also flipping, causing mild indigestion.
And that is why you rotate the pots.

I'll admit that, although we had our traditional-old-fashioned-tea-drinker hats on, I did pull out my mobile phone so we could check the opposite of widdershins.
My friend thought it was something like diesel.

She was correct in general about the word, but there were different spellings —deosil, deasil, deiseil, to name a few.

Here's a discussion about these two words. If you're like me, it will leave your mind whirling, but when the tealeaves-of-information settle to the bottom of the pot, you'll perhaps know why my mother told me to always turn the pot widdershins before pouring.

I'll admit I'm none the wiser.

But it was a lovely cuppa in a nice shop, with ribbon sandwiches, good company and a delicious glass of trifle to finish.

nurses nourish us

Recently on FaceBook I came across an advertisement promoting respect for the profession of nursing. Hilarious, but with a serious message.

I was reminded of that advertisement when I came across the word nurstle on a site where you can get help in solving crossword puzzles. The meaning was given as: 'Nurstle, to nurse. See noursle.' Noursle was defined as 'To nurse; to rear; to bring up.' 

That second spelling seemed to relate to nourishment, so I looked for the word nurse on the Online Etymology Dictionary

And yes, there it was, the origin of a role we accept as vitally important in our modern world, but don't stop to think about.

Nurses nourish us.

It seems the word comes to us from as early as the twelfth-century, in the sense of a wet-nurse.

12c., nurrice, "wet-nurse, foster-mother to a young child" (modern form from late 14c.), from Old French norrice "foster-mother, wet-nurse, nanny" (source of proper name Norris), from Late Latin*nutricia, "nurse, governess, tutoress," noun use of fem. nutricius"that suckles, nourishes," from nutrix (genitive nutricis) "wet-nurse, "from nutrire "to suckle" (see nourish). Meaning "person who takes care of sick" in English first recorded 1580s.

When the link to nourish is followed, similar root words appear.

And, then to my joy, I read that nursle is a frequentative of nurse.

Frequentative? I'd not previously come across this wonderful type of English verb. But that's a story another day.

I think I'm in love with frequentative verbs.

incunabula

I've been reading The Diary of a Bookseller.

Yes, I do realise this is an awful photo of the book cover, but it's the best I was willing to do, given my poor photography skills.

It's a fun read, but also informative. I'll be careful next time I bother a bookseller by entering his or her shop to browse. (It's a bit like primary schools. They're great places to teach, but it's quite bothersome that children arrive most days and expect to get some of your attention.)

The author being a bookseller, I'd expect him to have a good vocabulary, so I wasn't surprised to come across words I hadn't heard before. One was incunabula, on page 126 of the edition I read. Shaun Bythell, the bookseller, says that when he's driving to assess a collection of books offered for sale, he's pleasantly excited at the prospect of finding, amongst other things, incunabula.

Often I can guess a meaning by having seen similar words, but this one had me tossed. What could he be expecting to find?

Britannica made it clear to me. It means books printed by machine before the end of the fifteenth century.

Wow! To an Australian this seems incredible. Imagine holding a book that was six hundred years old.

I do remember, as a child, having the privilege of browsing the basement of the Ballarat Mechanics' Institute Library and touching a book published before Europeans 'discovered' this continent. I forget what the actual book was, but the emotional response is still with me. Wonder. Awe.

I think the books I saw that day are now in the State Library of Victoria, but I'm not sure.

when sadness is heavy upon our soul

The word sadiron landed in my inbox today as my daily mail from A Word a Day. The meaning of the word is

noun: a heavy flatiron pointed at both ends and having a detachable handle. And the etymology is 'From sad (obsolete senses of the word: heavy, solid) + iron Earliest documented use: 1759.

When I'm sad I do feel heavy, in every limb, so I can understand how this word came to have such a meaning.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

sad (adj.) Old English saed "sated, full, having had one's fill (of food, drink, fighting, etc.), weary of," [and gives further detail in the full description of this word's history.] Sense development passed through the meaning "heavy, ponderous" (i.e. "full" mentally or physically), and "weary, tired of" before emerging c. 1300 as "unhappy." An alternative course would be through the common Middle English sense of "steadfast, firmly established, fixed" (as in sad-ware "tough pewter vessels") and "serious" to "grave". In the main modern sense, it replaced Old English unrot, negative of rot "cheerful, glad." 

I wonder what other utensils are sad? Surely it's not just the irons and pewter vessels.

At Words, Words, Words, the writer of the blog writes more about this history, and ends with this:

But one thing that people don't know about sadness is that it is silent. You can't spot it from a mile away, it could be right next to you as you read this. But it is not the be all and end all, you can overcome sadness, but first you have to be able to see it.

I agree. We need to keep our radar scanning for sad people around us, and also to check inside ourselves to see if we are dealing with our own sadness.

imbricated roots

I'm reading a book about plants and loving it. It lives up to the blurb inside the front cover:

From Ice Age cave art to cutting-edge research into how mimosas learn and remember, Mabey traces the history of our imaginative encounters with them [plants] - including his own.

How could I resist such an intriguing invitation to deepen my understanding of the myriad species that share this planet?

On page 69 Mabey writes that under the ground, 'The roots and fungal tissues are as imbricated as if they were a single organism.'

I  understood the general idea of the sentence, but I just had to hurry to the internet to find out more about this interesting word imbricated.

Merriam Webster explains the history of the word imbricate:

The ancient Romans knew how to keep the interior of their villas dry when it rained. They covered their roofs with overlapping curved tiles so the "imber" (Latin for pelting rain or "rain shower") couldn't seep in. The tiles were, in effect, "rain tiles", so the Romans called them "imbrices" (singular "imbrex"). The verb for installing the tiles was "imbricare", and English speakers used its past participle "imbricatus" - to create "imbricate", which was first used as adjective meaning "overlapping" (like roof tiles) and later became a verb meaning "to overlap". 

I like to think of water percolating down through the forest floor to moisten those interwoven plant roots and fungal threads.

Mabey says:

The oldest living organisms in the world are probably the subterranean mycorrhiza of ancient forest fungi. They've been there since the woods sprang up, tens of thousands of years ago, and live in an intimate partnership with the tree roots, without which neither could survive. 

A reminder to us that we can't survive without the plants, either.
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grocers

I called in at a local fruit shop today to get some oranges for a favourite pumpkin soup recipe.

As I was squeezing the juice out of the oranges and zesting one of them, I thought about the fact that I call the proprietor of this type of shop a greengrocer, and I began to wonder what the connection is between a grocer and a greengrocer.

Once the soup was made, I looked at the Online Etymology Dictionary and discovered read  about the noun:

early 15c. (mid-13c. as a surname), "wholesale dealer, one who buys and sells in gross," corrupted spelling of Anglo-French grosser, Old French grossier, fromMedieval Latin grossarius "wholesaler," literally "dealer in quantity" (source also of Spanish grosero, Italian grosseiro), from Late Latin grossus "coarse (of food), great, gross"...(adj.)). Sense of "a merchant selling individual items of food" is 16c.: in Middle English this was a spicer.

I haven't ever met anyone with the surname 'Grocer'. I wonder what the variants might be.

The Word Detective has a post about the connection of this word with the word gross.
The article says the Americans invented the word grocery. In Australia when I was growing up, my family referred to such a shop as the grocer's.

The Cambridge Dictionary has the usage as grocer's in the UK.

At the forum of wordreference.com, calvindebeverley has written about the American usage:

Ok here is the deal. I have no idea what the word grocer means in any part of the world than the US so take that to heart in what follows. The word grocery and grocer in the US refers to an old type of store. It was usually owned and operated by a family, father being the grocer, and it sold many different items in "Gross" or large quantities because most people lived so far out on their ranches and farms that they needed to buy in quanity sometimes even to get them through a winter. In the southwest it meant at times also a bar or saloon but that was just because people in the Southwest are just that way! LOL. J/K. As time passed small stores that sold food retained the name grocery. Today there are very few real grocery stores in the old sense probably only found in small towns. Now the food department of say Walmart is todays grocery. And the very hard to find "helper" would be what is left of the "grocer". Ok now I am hungry, er....maybe I need a drink after all this typing!

I haven't been able to find any other reference to the use of the word grocery to mean a bar or saloon.

I think this article at CulinaryLore.com is the most comprehensive one I  found.
And I enjoyed the word plays at Sesquiotica. com.

BTW, here's the recipe for the delicious pumpkin soup.

Kind nature deserves our kindness in return

A friend said to me yesterday that she believes the most important thing we can do in life is be kind. I was so taken with her remark that I thought how wonderful it would be to sum up someone's life with the epitaph 'She tried to be kind.'

And then, of course, I wondered about the origin of the word kind.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says it is an adjective, coming to us through Middle English, Old English and Proto-Germanic. It originally meant 'natural, native, innate, with the feeling of relatives for each other.'

The sequence may have been: 'with natural feelings' via 'well-disposed', to the thirteenth century meaning  'benign, compassionate, loving, full of tenderness', which is the meaning I would assign to the word today.

I enjoyed reading this blog post on KindSpring, an uplifting piece that says this word is one of the oldest in English. The author of the blog loves his dictionary, as I do also. After writing about the pleasant discovery that kindness means 'nature', the post continues: 

While these thoughts of nature swirled in my head, I decided to revisit the one book that holds so many truths for me - the dictionary. Seems odd, doesn't it? The dictionary? You see, I learned a long time ago that every word, like people, has a story. Every word started somewhere in time for reasons that are often buried in the dust of history unrecalled.

A man after my own heart.

There has never been a time in the history of the planet where one species dominated to such an extent that it has the ability to destroy the  environment we all share. If we humans can't learn to be kind, i.e. know we are within and part of nature, the results may be disastrous.

Beautiful Universe, beautiful words

A copy of Beautiful Universe appeared on our kitchen table recently, an old copy from 2010.

Leafing through it, I was captured by the glorious photos - but also enraptured by the gorgeous words. What's not to love about these?
anti-crepuscular
noctilucent
Leonids
moonbow
Sun pillar
Vulpecula
nebulosity
Thackeray's Globules
Albategnius
terminator line
Stephan's Quintet
pillars of creation
megaripples

And Mooselookmeguntic. Wow! I'd like to live in a place with that name, especially if I could look up and see Saturn, Mars, Regulus and the crescent Moon lined up across the sky.

But I'll freely admit names like NGC 6820, IC 5070 and Messier 45 do't grab me.

I think I'll bookmark NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day  to look at whenever the abysmal stupidity of the human race starts to get me down. It's a big beautiful universe out there, and we have words to describe it.

Aboriginal words and Flinders Island

Words are powerful. Yesterday, at The Ian Potter Gallery, I looked at a video artwork by Julie Gough. I was so entranced by the words she used that I stood through two viewings of the seventeen minute presentation

The contrast of the words against the idyllic video clips made a strong impression on the viewer. Here are two sets of photos from the display:

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********************************************************************************** Other Aboriginal words featured in the artwork - for instance, the words for flour, tobacco, musket, sheep, blanket. (I've posted on my other blog about the word for 'kangaroo dog'.) However, the ones that made the most vivid impression on me were two concepts that must have been new to the indigenous inhabitants - flagellate and hang by rope. What terrible ideas the Europeans brought with them.

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I hope you get a chance to see this artwork. It will make an impression on you.