Friday, 16 June 2017
08:37 AM
I'm a little sad that today is not the 17th, because tomorrow will be 17-6-17 in the non-US way of writing dates. Still, because it is Friday, we do have words!
For today's new-to-me word we turn to a narrow—though as you'll see, not unfamiliar—form of found art. Klecksography is the art of making figures out of inkblots. This was a thing in Victorian times, which I learned about when I happened to see an article about it in Atlas Obscura. Specifically, klecksography involves dropping ink on a page, then folding the page to produce a mirror image. In the gamified version of this, you add a poem.
Turning a goof into art is credited to the German poet Justinus Kerner, who used klecksography to illustrate poems he'd written. (If only I could turn my spills into art, ha.) This origin also explains the name: Kleck is the German word for "blot, (ink) stain, spot, blotch, blur."
If klecksography sounds (looks) familiar, it's because it was adapted as the Rorsarch test used in psychology.
As an aside, in reading about klecksography, I also learned the word apophenia, which means to find patterns in random things. (I already knew the word pareidolia—for an explanation of the distinction, see this blog post.)
For unexpected word origins, today I have curfew. As is often the case, I'd never given this common word much thought. But I was reading a book about the history of artificial light, and the author noted in passing that curfew—the time after which everyone is supposed to be inside[1]—came from the French coverfeu, in turn from coverir ("cover") and feu ("fire"). The author, Jane Brox, explains:Cooking fires, often the only interior light many could afford, were ordered extinguished soon after the evening meal, since among the innumerable night fears in the huddled wooden-and-thatch world of the Middle Ages was that of conflagration. All in all, it's not making me nostalgic for living in a pre-electricity world or anything.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[categories]
language, Friday words
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