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November 2008 | Home
U-M HERITAGE »
Women at war
During World War II, with men overseas, women dominated U-M as they never had before — and would not again until the '70s.
Sports
No honeymoon
Rich Rodriguez has called his first season as U-M's football coach the hardest of his career. But he's faced tougher times and longer odds in his life.
Most emailed stories
- Exactly how much housework does a husband create?
- U-M Heritage: How to date women, circa 1943
- University of Michigan 2008 Graduation (Story and Video)
Ideas
"Soar toward goodness"
Anti - Apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke at U-M about forgiveness. 
Health
Grapes may aid a bunch of heart risk factors
In lab rats, the fruit lowered blood pressure, reduced signs of heart damage and improved heart function. Can they help human hearts too? 
TALKING ABOUT WORDS »
Artistique words
Soon, U-M's renovated art museum will open, which has our word guru thinking about snooty art words.
TALKING ABOUT MOVIES »
All about Oliver
The movie 'W.' only seems to be a different kind of Oliver Stone film. In fact, it's a return to the obsession that has driven Stone's entire career.
Artistique Words
November 18, 2008
U-M's multi-billion dollar fundraising campaign has officially ended, and one of its results is an overhaul of its Museum of Art. This spring the museum will reopen, having expanded into a grand new space just south of Angell Hall. Right now, you can even take a virtual tour through it and see just how splendid it will be.
Few domains of our vocabulary are so jam packed with borrowings from foreign languages as our conversations about the visual arts.
Artist rendering of the U-M Museum of Art, with addition, as seen from State Street. (image: © 2004 Allied Works Architecture.)
Foreign words give panache to talking about art. Which sounds more elegant—krater or punch bowl? A krater is an old, Greek punch bowl, and that Greek word was borrowed into English early in the eighteenth century. You can see a beautiful eighteenth-century silver punch bowl on Mackinaw Island, and it wouldn’t be improved by calling it a krater.
How about collage—a twentieth-century word for things stuck together in the name of art? What was wrong with patchwork?
And then there’s trompe l’oeil—a word that hardly an English speaker can be found confidently pronouncing. But what was the matter with optical illusion?
Asking for plain English in talking about art is plain foolish. Doctors could hardly be expected to get along with words like croupy and rheum. Pharmacists wouldn’t like being limited to milk of magnesia or sal hepatica. Psychologists couldn’t thrive if they could only use words like hysteria or down in the dumps.
People who speak English never have enough words, and having special words for special purposes is what we need to thrive. That a lot of these words are foreign makes them all the better.
Hardly a language has not yielded terms to English conversations about art.
Here’s a couple from Japanese you need to talk about lacquerware: nashiji, urushi.
Without Italian, you couldn’t discuss decorations made with small pieces of hard material: pietra dura, tessellated.
To talk wisely about pottery, we need words from Chinese: ru, sancai.
For many, many kinds of art we turn to French: bas-relief, pointillistic.
If you know what you like but don’t know much about it, there’s a great source of information about these specialized words for art: the dictionary.
As we approach the season of gift-giving, someone on your list would be glad of a new dictionary—especially one with a CD-ROM easily installed on a computer. Not only will it tell you what words mean, but it will demonstrate how to pronounce them.
is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn