Terms of Art

Looking for something quite different, I came across this A2-sized "poster book" I made a few years ago. I must admit I had forgotten all about it, and to see it again through fresh eyes gave me an unexpected buzz of pleasure: not bad, Mr. C., not bad at all! I don't think it does any harm to realise, just once in a while, that your work is actually quite good, and certainly better than the constant rejections, silences, and general lack of interest "out there" might lead you to think. I feel sorry for anyone who is trying to make a living from their art; how disheartening it must be, always to be receiving letters and emails of rejection, especially the ones that contain that infuriating formula, "the standard of submissions this year was exceptionally high"... 

You probably can't read the text running across the top and bottom at this size, so this it what it says:

As well as its visual and metaphorical sense of "lit from the side, or a tangential insight" a sidelight, in British usage, is a window located to the side of something, typically a door. As opposed to a fanlight, which goes above the door. We live in a typical 1930s semi-detached house, with an elaborate part-glazed front door and sidelights made up / of leaded panes of various types of pebbled glass, in a vaguely Art Deco sort of pattern. As our house faces south-east the morning sun shines directly through this glass frontage, so it has become a very familiar set of shapes over the years: on a bright morning, the lattice of lead cames is practically burned onto your retina as you come downstairs.

It is quite surprising that all that text can be got into just two lines of 11 point type: an A2 sheet is bigger than one thinks.

Did you notice that word "cames", by the way? It looks like a typo, but isn't. Definition: "a grooved strip of lead used to join pieces of glass in a stained-glass window or a leaded light". I think I may first have heard it way back in the 1970s, when my friend Leo first got into making stained glass in a big way. I like when there is a precise word for something which would otherwise be hard to describe in fewer than twenty words, although its usefulness is obviously diminished when most people have never heard it before, don't know what it means, and so you end up using those twenty words, anyway...

Most domains have their jargon and "terms of art", of course; personally, I particularly enjoy the more venerable specialist terms from the arts, crafts, and trades. Words like "pica" (a typesetting measure of 12 points, or 1/6 of an inch), "spitsticker" (an engraving tool), or "rabbet" ("a recess, groove, or step, cut into a surface or along the edge of a piece of timber", e.g. the back of a picture frame moulding), as well as ordinary words with specialised meanings, e.g. "support" (whatever a painting is painted onto). Such terms sometimes pass into the common language and usually suffer distortion and abuse in the process: there's a nice little rant about the wrong use of typographic terms here, for example. It's hopeless to object, though; nobody cares what they used to mean, when nobody outside of your specialist domain had even heard of them. Nowadays everyone knows what a "font" is, even if they're wrong.

Which reminds me of one of the very earliest posts in this blog, written after I had encountered the stonemason's term "batted", which I came across when doing a little research on some outdoor statuary at Mottisfont Abbey (also the subject of a poster book, as below).

In the inventory of the Abbey made by the Historic Monuments Commission they are described like this:

4 thermae, C18 stone, male & female heads standing in front of box hedge set on large radius, set 10m apart and 2m high. On low moulded plinth, foliage to front, batted, tooled finish to sides, 2 male & 2 female busts.

"Thermae" struck me as odd (the word usually denotes a Roman bath-house), and probably a typo for "hermae", these sculptures being what are generally called "herms" in English. However, a little searching revealed "herm" and "term" to be synonyms. But "batted"? I had to look that one up, too, only to discover that this specialised sense of  "bat" or "batted" was missing from all the available dictionaries, including the OED. I can't now remember what specialised lexicon eventually gave me the answer – probably an online glossary of stonemason's terms like this one – but, having finally figured it out, I decided to let the OED people know about this uncharacteristic omission.

It occurs to me, writing this a full fifteen years later, that I never did check whether they got around to amending the entries for "bat (verb)", "batted (adj.)", or "batting (noun)". Unfortunately, my access at home to the online OED has lapsed, now that I'm an ordinary bibliographic civilian, so it will have to wait until my next trip over to the university. So I'm obliged to explain that – as perhaps you already knew – "batted" means that the surface of a stonework block has been decorated ("dressed") with finely chiselled parallel grooves. (Confusingly, to a bricklayer a "bat" is a piece of a brick, shortened lengthwise, and the original brickbat, not to be further confused with a bat brick...).

As often seems to be the case, to know that there's a word for something means that you'll probably now start noticing the thing itself turning up all over the place [1]: those fine "batted" grooves do appear on many older buildings wherever there is fancy ashlar work. Don't know the word "ashlar"? Now that's one you can look up!

1. Although you may also start noticing "boasted", "punched", "reticulated", and other dressings. I should probably check the OED for those, too, if and when I get around to it...