physiognotrace

A physiognotrace is a machine used to automate the production of silhouette portraits. Previously an artist would cut these out by hand. Although this was actually very quick to do, the demand for these types of portrait in the 1700s was so great that a Frenchman named Gilles-Louis Chrétien invented the physiognotrace (also spelled without the ‘g’) to speed things up even more.

Your subject would sit in profile and the physiognotrace used a pantograph (a metal arm made up of pivoted levers) to transmit the tracing to an engraving needle via an eyepiece. This made it easy to produce multiple copies, as well as aquatints, which are much more detailed portraits. The physiognotrace is considered a precursor to the camera, as it allowed artists to reproduce someone’s likeness in a fairly short space of time.

Physiognotrace is a portmanteau, i.e. two words smooshed together, of ‘physiognomy’ and ‘trace’ (you probably don’t need to be Susie Dent to figure that out).

Before photography, silhouette portraits were the cheapest way to record someone’s appearance. They’re named after Étienne de Silhouette, a French finance minister who was forced to impose austerity measures on France during the Seven Years’ War. Obviously no one liked that, and therefore him, so it wasn’t long before his name became synonymous with anything done on the cheap, including these little portraits, where it stuck.

Here’s a physiognotrace in action (accompanied by some very calming music).

A portrait made by a physiognotrace

I’d know that silhouette anywhere

inimical

If something is inimical, it means it’s hostile or unfriendly. Here it is in a sentence: today I pulled a burr out of my dog’s tail, and he fixed me with an inimical stare. It’s not to be confused with inimitable, which is much more positive – it means that something is not able to be imitated or is uniquely extraordinary.

‘Inimical’s etymology is a bit Wayne’s World (#datedreference) – the ‘imicus’ bit comes from ‘amicus’ which means ‘friend’ in Latin. That’s also where we get ‘amicable’ from. So that’s nice. But the ‘in’ suffix means ‘not’.

AKA friendly. NOT.

Even though I’ve used inimical above to describe my dog, we actually don’t generally use it to describe people (wait, what do you mean my dog isn’t a person? Get away with you). It’s used to talk about forces, concepts or situations that are harmful or hostile. Like climate change, the Taliban, Texas law courts… pretty much everything that’s happening in the world right now.

That got dark quickly, sorry. Here’s some Bohemian Rhapsody to cheer you up.

‘Don’t touch my tail.’

majuscule

You already know what a majuscule is, even if you don’t know the name of it. In fact, I’ve used three majuscules in this post already. Go back and have a look, and see if you can find them (that’s four now).

OK, I’ll stop being a smart-arse now. A majuscule is just an upper-case (or large) letter, or script in which every letter is the same size. It was first used in 1722, and comes from the Latin word ‘majusculus’ which simply means ‘rather large’. So not ‘really large’ – just ‘rather’.

You can also use majuscule as an adjective to describe things that are rather large (stop it) e.g. ‘that’s a majuscular carrot’ or ‘I’ve made a majuscular mistake’. No one will know what you mean though (except me).

You’ve probably guessed that the opposite of ‘majuscule’ is ‘miniscule’. Originally ‘miniscule’ was only used to describe lower-case letters in printing. But while it’s since evolved to describe anything that’s ickle, poor old majuscule got left behind. Shame.

Majuscule scripts are actually harder for us humans to read. That’s because we use the up-and-downness (yes, that is the technical term) of upper and lower-case letters to help us recognise words. So when people capitalise things (like headings) because they want to make them look more IMPORTANT, they’re actually making them harder to read (and they look like they’re shouting). So only use majuscule letters where they belong – at the start of sentences, and for proper nouns.