Le etimologie

Leggo nel saggio di David Summers intitolato World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, or, Goodbye to the Visual Arts, apparso nei proceedings ofthe Clark Conference “Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art,” held 6-8 April 2000 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, e pubblicato in volume nel 2006 a cura di John Onians presso lo Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

Etymologies appear fairly frequently in Real Spaces, and these are necessarily in languages with which I am familiar. These etymologies serve two purposes. First, they are intended to refresh usage by making clear the differences between words we use and their likely origins. We think of a word like “profane” differently ifwe know that it was formed of elements meaning something like “outside a sacred precinct,” or “periphery” and “circumference” differently ifwe know that they refer to “carrying around.” The omnipresent modern word “sex” has little to do with its origins and was first related to words like “seclude,” “seduce,” or “segregate”; it was that on the basis of which some were set apart from others. All of these terms harbor what I have called realspatial metaphors, which point to real social spatial activities and divisions. The etymologies are meant to reveal a basic and important dimension of language, and to invite others who know the many languages relevant to the world's art to dig for similar roots. There is a kind of wager involved in this, and my strong hunch is that they will find many other real spatial metaphors, some similar to, but others only partially similar to, or different from, those I have presented.