Yuletide
  • Yuletide blog
  • About Me
  • Links
  • List of All Posts

Post-324: Who is Aubrey Beardsley? What is a 'Pierrot'?

12/11/2015

0 Comments

 
Here's the kind of thing I like to find. Hidden or forgotten knowledge, waiting to be found. Libraries are great for this. (Though, in fact, I found what is below in a quiet, dusty little corner of the Internet.)

The Saturday Review magazine's January 28th, 1928 issue has the following advertisement (p.559):
Picture
A lot of this advertisement puzzled me.

(1) Who is Aubrey Beardsley?
(2) What is a "pierrot"? What is a "harlequin"?
(3) What is meant, exactly, by "clown"? Is this actually a biography of a circus clown?
(4) What is meant by "Oscar Wilde's downfall"? Again, was a circus clown actually involved in it? This seems unlikely.
(5) Who has ever heard of the names "Aubrey" (for a boy) or "Haldane"? How might you pronounce "Haldane"?
(6) Was $6.00 expensive for a book in 1928?

This word "pierrot".  I recognized it to be -- this is true -- a Korean word. I had struggled remembering the Korean word 피에로. The Korean-English dictionary said the word translates in English as "pierrot; clown." I'd never heard of an English word "pierrot." It seems French. How did Korean get a French loanword for "clown"? Does the word really exist in English? If so, why had I never heard it before? Seeing it in English for the first time, in a periodical published six decades before my birth was a pleasant surprise...
.
Read More
The Ngram of "pierrot" and "pierrots" (Ngram is a tool to graph word frequency in published material over time):
Picture
It gained popularity in English texts in the 1900-1920 period and stayed in high use from WWI to the 1930s.

Use of "pierrot" had declined quite a lot by the time I started reading in the 1990s. It was up to five times more common in published texts in the 1920s-1930s than it was by the 1990s-2000s. In fact, by year 2000 the red line ("pierrots") sits back where it was before the word started its rise in the 1900-1905 period. I interpret this to mean that we have "completely lost the word" and so it has returned to just being "a foreign word," not a "loan word" any more. (It was deloaned?) (I am vindicated in this thought by the fact that the automatic spellchecker included in the Firefox browser on which I am writing warns me that "pierrot" is a misspelled word.)

Thinking about the rise and fall of the word "pierrot": The amount of language change that must have occurred in history that has simply vanished without a trace must be enormous. Maybe much, much greater than that which survived, than that which forms part of the languages as they exist today. There is probably no way to track down the great majority of vanished words or perhaps other aspects of language because most of history was pre-literate. Given a non-literate culture, especially, "pierrot" is a case of a word that would simply vanish.

How did Korean get this word? Best guess: It must've come through Japan in the '20s when it was a hip word in English.

Who was Aubrey Beardsley? He was an English cartoonist (1872-1897). Some of his drawings were quite shocking. His art is the kind that would've been considered decadent or pornographic at the time and subject to bans, but today might appear in museums.

Who was the biographer, Haldane MacFall? He was another English artist and writer (1860-1928; he died the very year this book was advertised at age 68). His full name was Chambers Haldane Cooke Macfall. The link over his name is to a little biography of the man someone has done. The Aubrey Beardsley book is mentioned in the rundown of his published works: "[MacFall also wrote]...a spirited defence of his friend Aubrey Beardsley (1928.)"

The Aubrey Beardsley book was sold for $6.00 in 1928. This equals $83.45 in 2015 dollars. That's a whole lot of money for a book.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.


    About

    Welcome. This is a place I write things that may or may not be of interest. Thanks.

    See here for more.


    Search this site:

    List of All Posts
    List of all posts
    Subscribe via email:

    Subscribe to the Feed:

    Enter email address to subscribe to daily updates:



    RSS Feed

    Archives

    November 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013


    Contact by Email
    Yuletide5142 at y@hoo.com


    Picture
    Me

    I thank you for
    stopping by
    this quiet corner
    of the Internet.

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.