The motivation for the show came when my nan passed away, and I found it really emotionally damaging. Where did the inspiration to direct such a thought-provoking and emotive piece come from? Given that it is currently Dementia Action Week, The Tab sat down with the team behind the production to find out more. J0urn3y is described on their Facebook page as a "physical theatre piece exploring the emotional and physical effects of dementia". It is to be conducted from the perspective of a loved one, through the use of projectionism and stylised movements to highlight the complexity of the disease that is simply indescribable through only words. So a codpiece was literally the piece that protected a man’s cod.On the 11th and 12th of June 2018, a group of Warwick students will be putting on a production that will explore the traumatic effects that dementia can have on a family unit. In Old English, cod meant “bag, sack,” which by Middle English had been applied euphemistically to the scrotum. And yes, crotchets and crotch are etymologically related, but not in the way you’re thinking.īonus: Why, I hear you asking through the ether, are codpieces called that? Are fish involved? No: The cod in codpiece isn’t related to the codfish, or to Cape Cod for that matter. Ironically, before the punctuation marks were called brackets - a word linked to codpieces - they were called crotchets. The American English tournament bracket, a relatively recent lexical innovation, took its name from its resemblance to a bunch of the punctuation marks crammed together into the shape of a sideways pyramid. In the mid-1700s we find the first uses of bracket to indicate a punctuation mark, one of either, probably because of their resemblance to the double-bracket one might use to hang two shelves on a wall and which, like the punctuation, are used in pairs. Those supports apparently didn’t have a common name at the time, so people began calling them braguettes as well, or among English-speaking architecture aficionados, braggets.īy the 1700s, braggets had become brackets, and they weren’t limited to architectural supports but were also used in all kinds of woodworking. In the 16th century, people started to notice that the (sometimes ornately designed) architectural supports that hold up roofs or balconies resembled these protectors of privates. (The Tower of London displays his suit of tournament armor from 1540, and the codpiece alone weighs 2 pounds, 9 ounces.) Henry VIII is particularly remembered for the profligate protection afforded his, er, royal endowment. Royalty and knights with the means sometimes sported braguettes that were ornately designed, highly polished, and comically oversized. A French codpiece is, in a sense, “tiny trousers.” In France, though, they called them braguettes, a word formed by adding the diminutive suffix -ette to brague. For many male fighters, the most important part of his armor - for it protected his most tender parts - was what the English called a codpiece. Weaponry and war-making progressed (if that’s the right word for it) over the centuries, and by the Middle Ages soldiers were wearing metal armor. So when Rome conquered the Gauls and discovered this new fashion, they adopted the Gaulish word for it, braca. And, of course, they had togas of all sorts.īut they didn’t have pants and therefore had no word for them. Caesar and his ilk had all sorts of garments under a tunica (a long, plain shirt) or a palla (a women’s shawl), for example, you might find a mamillare (a strip to secure the mammary glands, i.e., a rudimentary bra) or a subligaculum (a loincloth that served as an undergarment but that might see daylight if you were a laborer, a gladiator, or a grape stomper). That might not seem like a meaningful statement today, but to the Romans, pants were a foreign technology. The ancient Gauls of Europe wore pants called braca. But I’m not here to explain the bracket’s many uses I’m here to talk about the long trek that name bracket took to describe punctuation. On your computer keyboard, to the right of the letter P, you’ll find a pair of squared-off punctuation marks called brackets that have a number of important uses in both writing (specially academic writing) and modern mathematics. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today. Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases.
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