art history - Felicia Davin

Felicia Davin

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art history

A collection of 16 posts

white marble statue of Venus lifting her skirt and displaying her butt

largely composed behinde

statues, butts, romance

an Impressionist oil painting depicting a happy crowd of people eating and drinking and flirting

French literature

Crush and pash

the overpowering violence of infatuations, Renoir and Maupassant, and of course, romance novels

Gerfaunts and orafles

GIRAFFE, n. This word, referring to the long-necked, spotted African mammal, comes to English through French, where it used to be spelled “giraffe” but is now spelled “girafe,” and in either case its origin is Arabic zarāfa. Before English settled on “giraffe,” we used to call these animals camelopards, gerfaunts,

French literature

Gender outlaws

COPE, v. A reader recently asked me about the use of “cope”and “full of matter” in these lines of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, at the end of Act II, scene 1: DUKE SENIOR And did you leave him in this contemplation? SECOND LORD We did, my lord,

body or sex words

Legally obscene

This week’s Word Suitcase is sexually explicit. Or perhaps I should say “more sexually explicit than usual.” CUNT, n. It was inevitable that I’d write about this word eventually, I think. This time last year, I was writing about “pudendum” and “the obscenest picture the world possesses,” so

The OG Cathedral

French literature

The OG Cathedral

OGEE, n., adj. and OGIVE, n., adj. I first heard the word “ogee” while taking a class about Gothic art and architecture in college, and I had absolutely no idea what it meant. I couldn’t parse it at all. I remember thinking, “Surely my extremely upper-crust white British art

Get on top

CREAM, n. We had to buy cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) recently, and my beloved pointed out that the “cream” in cream of tartar must have an interesting etymology; it’s not the fatty part of milk, so why is it called “cream”? My first thought was that perhaps potassium

"the obscenest picture the world possesses"

"the obscenest picture the world possesses"

PUDENDUM, n. I recently finished reading Ross King’s The Judgment of Paris, a nonfiction book about Impressionism and French history, in particular the artists Édouard Manet and Henri Meissonier. I loved it, not just because there were several etymologies mentioned, most memorably the one in this long excerpt (page

Heat and steam

CALORIFÈRE, n. This is an old-timey French word that means “heater,” which I was able to guess because I married a chemist who sometimes says words like “calorimeter”—a device that measures heat in chemical reactions—and also because “calor/e” is Latin/Spanish/Italian for heat. I have nothing

Making it look easy

Making it look easy

SPREZZATURA, n. I love this word and think about it all the time. It comes from Italian, specifically from Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), a Renaissance text composed of dialogues about what constitutes the ideal courtier and what kind of skills that person should

Furbelows and dandies

Furbelows and dandies

FURBELOW, n. I’ve been reading Valerie Steele’s Paris Fashion: A Cultural History and J. A. Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Du Dandysme et de G. Brummell (usually called The Anatomy of Dandyism in English) as research for the romance novel I’m writing that is set in nineteenth-century Paris,

To have the horn

body or sex words

To have the horn

HORNY, adj. I wanted to know if I could use “horny,” as in “lustful,” in my current novel draft without it being an anachronism, and I am thrilled to report that Green’s Dictionary of Slang has the first recorded instance of “horny” as “sexually eager” in 1826 in US

classical antiquity

Lictors

LICTOR, n. This word might come from Latin “ligare,” meaning “to bind,” and it indicates a soldier who worked as a bodyguard for a magistrate in ancient Rome. “Lictor” has been on my mind this week because I read Tamsyn Muir’s bonkers lesbian-necromancers-in-space novel Harrow the Ninth, whose prequel

Butter gremlins

Butter gremlins

Before I get into words & books this week, I want you all to know that my beloved says “I LOVE IT, IT’S IN THE NEWSLETTER, DONE” whenever I mention an interesting word. You have to imagine those phrases as they would be spoken in this Key & Peele

An addendum

The newsletter I just sent out was supposed to include this image of Jacques-Louis David’s famous 1793 painting The Death of Marat, but I was in a hurry and forgot it. Here you can see Marat, stabbed in his bathtub, and possibly the drapery in the painting is the

Art-schmart

SCHMANCY, adj. This word isn’t from a Romance language, exactly. It has international origins. Usually you see “schmancy” as part of “fancy-schmancy,” which is a Yiddish construction that entered US English along with Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants. Yiddish has a linguistic feature called “rhyming reduplication,” which is what’s happening