Wondering about words

click photo to enlarge
In a newspaper article I was reading the other day the journalist used the word "phoney" meaning false. Not unusual you might think, but it was a British journalist and I always understood phoney to be a U.S. word. That in itself isn't so unusual because English words travel both ways across the Atlantic to take up permanent residence each of the two main variants of English. However, it did prompt me to look up the word "phoney" in my Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It reported, unhelpfully, "Of uncertain origin", though it did note the word's origins in the United States. It was then, as sometimes happens, that a dim light came on in the recesses of my brain and I recalled the word "fawney". This word, I remembered, was British eighteenth century slang for "fake". A gilt ring being passed off as real gold was often described as fawney. Undoubtedly, I thought, there is a connection. And sure enough the web produced several references to the origins of U.S. phoney in British fawney. Can the OED, I wonder, verify this? For all I know it has already done so; after all my edition, like me, is getting on a bit.

The derivations of words popped into my head again as I was processing this photograph of dried Physalis franchetii that had been cleverly and effectively placed in the fireplace of a room in an old museum. The colloquial name for this plant is Chinese Lanterns after the similarity between the dried flowers and the Asiatic paper lanterns. It then occurred to me that there was a further interesting word that could be applied to the flowers when arranged in a fireplace - "flamboyant". Today this word usually means showy, colourful or florid, and wouldn't necessarily be thought especially applicable to this photograph. However, it derives from the French word for "flame" and originally meant flame-like in either shape or colour. Architectural historians use the word in this way, describing the flame-like tracery of Gothic windows as being in the Flamboyant Style. In the nineteenth century, both in Britain and the United States, the word was applied to things that had the colour of flames too. Consequently, it seemed to me unusual, but not unreasonable, to describe today's photograph with the words I chose.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 28mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/30 sec
ISO: 1600
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Chinese lanterns

click photo to enlarge

Sometimes it's all about the colour! I learnt this many, many years ago when I first studied painting. At the time I had decided ideas about what I liked. From the twentieth century I favoured David Hockney, Franz Kline, Victor Pasmore, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer (yes, I had a liking for English artists!), and from the past, J.M.W. Turner, Cotman, Goya, Chardin, Vermeer and Gaugin. I was equally unequivocal about what I didn't like - Rococo painting!

Its origins in the decorative arts gave it, to me, a frothy insubstantiality. All those satin ladies, fine gentlemen, luxuriant foliage, shiny silk and mythological characters seemed like so many staged scenes from lightweight plays. Then my eyes were opened by "The Swing" by Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806). On the face of it this painting represented everything I disliked about the work of that period: a flimsy young woman in her bouncing dress, showing her legs and petticoats to her foppish lover, as her dainty shoe flies off, set in a sylvan glade with stone cherubs looking on. No, not my cup of tea at all. But, I was bowled over by the colour. Pink set against turquoise (the delicacy of which is hard to reproduce across the internet!), with shades of each colour multiplied across the painting. It made me realise that the force of a painting can exist independently of its subject.

That can be true of a photograph too, though many amateurs are unaware of this important fact. When people say to me, can you recommend a book on digital photography my stock answer is "No, they're a waste of time: read a book about art or art appreciation instead, you'll learn much more." Today's photograph is all about the colour: orange set against blue/green, with a little deeper black. It shows "Chinese lanterns" (Physalis franchetii) in a vase. It's a still life, the second I've done this week (see "The beauty of flowers"), where the colour was more important than the subject.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f18
Shutter Speed: 2.5
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.3EV
Image Stabilisation: Off