Things I learned while looking up other things, 2025.02.11
Dear friends,
I spent nearly all of today on a plane, so this month’s newsletter is me turning my notebook upside-down and shaking it.
Cardea was the ancient Roman goddess of the hinge. A thyrsus is a “a wand or staff of giant fennel … covered with ivy vines and leaves … topped with a pine cone, artichoke, fennel, or by a bunch of vine-leaves and grapes or ivy-leaves and berries, carried during Hellenic festivals and religious ceremonies.”
“Asking a young woman her personal name was equivalent to a marriage proposal, and if the young woman gave it, it was equivalent to accepting.”
"Asemic writing" is defined by Gaze as a form or collection of forms "which appears to be writing," while "having no worded meaning."
A leporello book has its pages concertina-folded and has front and back boards so that it can be handled like a normal book. “The origin of the word is based on the manservant in Mozart's Don Giovanni. At one point in the opera, Leporello unfolds a lengthy concertina list of his master's conquests.”
Chromogenics is the study of “materials that show a reversible change in their optical properties (color) as a function of the ambient conditions they are subjected to. … Depending on the type of external stimuli applied to bring about the reversible color change, the chromogenic materials are further subclassified as photochromic (light activated), electrochromic (electric field activated), thermochromic (heat activated), gasochromic (gas exposure activated), piezochromic (pressure activated), magnetochromic (magnetic field activated) and more.”
“Grattage is a surrealist painting technique that involves laying a canvas prepared with a layer of oil paint over a textured object and then scraping the paint off to create an interesting and unexpected surface”.
House-scorning is the practice of throwing stones, animal parts (especially horns), excrement or blood at doors and windows to call attention to or punish adulterers.
“Collography (derived from the Greek collo, glue, or the French coller, to glue) is a process in which a print is pulled from a plate with a textured surface. The plate is traditionally built up from elements glued to a base of wood or card in the manner of a collage.”
“[D]ancing in the style of abakuá (a semireligious brotherhood with ethnic links to southeast Nigeria) was also banned because of abakua's reputation for encouraging machismo, pride, and generally hot-blooded behavior (or guapería).
“When the Dogaressa became a widow, she was expected to become a nun.”
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin