Curtain (pronounced kur-tn)
(1) A hanging piece of fabric used to shut out the light from a window, adorn a room, increase privacy etc.
(2) A movable or folding screen used for similar purposes (tends to be regionally specific).
(3) In a performance theatre, a set of hanging drapery for concealing all or part of the stage or set from the view of the audience; the act or time of raising or opening a curtain at the start of a performance; the end of a scene or act indicated by the closing or falling of a curtain; an effect, line, or plot solution at the conclusion of a performance.
(4) In broadcasting, music signaling the end of a radio or television performance (and used as a direction in a script of a play to indicate that a scene or act is concluded).
(5) Anything that shuts off, covers, or conceals.
(6) In military jargon, as curtain of artillery fire, a specific type of barrage.
(7) In architecture, a relatively flat or featureless extent of wall between two pavilions or the like.
(8) In military architecture, a fortification, the part of a wall or rampart connecting two bastions, towers, or the like.
(9) In slang (always in the plural as curtains), the end; death, especially by violence.
(10) In political shorthand (iron curtain, bamboo curtain, banana curtain), a descriptor for a politically defined geographical construct.
1250–1300: From the Middle English curteyn, corteyn, cortyn, cortine & curtine (hanging screen of textile fabric used to close an opening or shut out light, enclose a bed, or decorate an altar), from the Anglo-French & Old French courtine & cortine (curtain, tapestry, drape, blanket), from the Late Latin cōrtīna (enclosed place; curtain), probably equivalent to co(ho)rt- (stem of cohors (court; enclosure; courtyard)) + -īna or –ine, operating as a calque of the Ancient Greek aulaía (curtain), derivative of aulḗ (courtyard). The Latin cōrtīna is sometimes imputed to the primitive Indo-European (s)ker- (to turn, bend) but etymologists think this dubious. The evolution of curtain in Late (Ecclesiastical) Latin was influenced by resemblance of the curve of an amphitheater to a cauldron (kettle) and the sacred tripod of Apollo, metonymically for the curved seat or covering.
In Classical Latin cōrtīna meant "round vessel, cauldron," from cortem (cohortem was the older form) (enclosure, courtyard) and related to the modern cohort. The meaning shift appears to have begins with cōrtīna being used as a loan-translation of Greek aulaia (curtain) in the Vulgate (to render Hebrew yeriah in the Book of Exodus). The Ancient Greek was connected to aule (court), probably because the "door" that led to the courtyard of a Greek house was a hung cloth.
The figurative use (something that conceals or screens) was noted from the early fifteenth century and from the 1590s to mean a "large sheet used to conceal the stage in a theatre" with many figurative senses drawn from the stage: “Behind the curtain” is from the 1670s; “curtains” from 1912; “curtain call” (appearance of individual performers on stage at the end of a performance to be recognized by the audience) from 1884; “to draw the curtain” from circa 1500 (in opposite senses: "to conceal" & "to reveal". The curtain-rod is attested from circa 1490. An Old English word for "curtain" was (fly-net), ancestor of the modern fly-screen.
The Iron Curtain
The term “iron curtain” was popularized by its use in a 1946 speech by Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) in Fulton, Missouri. In saying the line “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”, the reference was to the political barrier the USSR had created between the satellite states in its sphere of influence and the West. It created the sense of an impenetrable barrier between the blocs, with the not inaccurate implication of a form of imprisonment imposed on those “behind the iron curtain”.
The companion cold war term, “bamboo curtain” was adopted after the 1949 communist takeover of China to refer to the political demarcation between the communist and non-communist states in Asia, essentially a descriptor of the Chinese sphere of influence. It was used less-frequently than iron curtain because, unlike the static line in Eastern Europe, the bamboo curtain, however defined, tended to shift and nothing as formal as the Warsaw Pact ever emerged.
Iron curtain appears first to have been used in 1794 as the name of a fire-protection device for theatres. This was literally an iron curtain which dropped to protect the audience should fire break out on the stage, The Monthly Review (June 1794) noting the helpful advantage of the innovation being that should a fire erupt, the audience would remain safe and “…nothing can be burnt but the scenery and the actors.” HG Wells (1866–1946) in The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904) used "iron curtain" in a psychological sense, a use adopted (and extended into the political) by the German-born Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians (1876–1965; Queen of the Belgians 1909-1934) when, writing of the poignant position in which she was place by the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, she said "between them (the Germans) and me there is now a bloody iron curtain which has descended forever." The phrase caught on during the war years, US surgeon George Washington Crile (1864–1943) in A Mechanistic View of War and Peace (1917) describing the "iron curtain" which was now France's frontier with Germany and Vasily Rozanov (1856-1919) in Apokalipsis nashego vremeni (The Apocalypse of our Time (1917-1918)) applied the idea to the way the Bolshevik revolution was cutting off all in Russian history that was inconvenient for the telling of their narrative. Ethel Snowden (1881–1951), who would flit across British history for three decades, may or may not have read Rozanov but in her book of observations of the early revolutionary state, Through Bolshevik Russia (1920), she invoked "iron curtain" to convey the sense of sharp difference the place engendered as soon as the border was crossed. No useful idiot, she was highly critical of what was still a pre-Stalinist state, noting that "Everyone I met in Russia outside the Communist Party goes in terror of his liberty or his life". Plus ça change...
Between then and 1946, the phrase had been used many times though rarely in a political context but it had been mentioned in 1920 in reference to the edge of the Soviet sphere of influence and Nazi propaganda minister Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945; German propaganda minister 1933-1945 Minister) used (ein eiserner Vorhang) it in 1944 in the same sense as Churchill two years later. So had one of the great survivors of the Third Reich, Count Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk (1887–1977) who was German finance minister (1932-1945) under both the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) and the Third Reich (1933-1945), before being appointed Chancellor in the bizarre coda that was the three week government formed in Flensburg under Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz (1891–1980; head of the German navy 1943-1945, German head of state April-May 1945).
The engaging ”midriff-flossing” emerged in the northern summer of 2020 as a term to describe the strappy tops and dresses designed to display the abdomen. The companion term of 2021 was “curtain reveal”, the imagery being a pair of curtains, draped to the centre of the window, joined by the flimsiest of cords. In fashion, this translates to a tiny crop top, secured as dubiously as possible with a fastening at the sternum. It’s a look which, depending on the number of links included, can be adjusted to reveal a little or a lot of the torso but can leave modesty or lawfulness hanging by a literal thread. Some interpretations eschew fabric for the tie, relying instead on the industry's invaluable tool of last resort, the ever-dependable safety-pin, hence the use also of the phrase “pin-top”.
Lindsay Lohan in curtain reveal sheer frilly cardi-top, Teen Choice Awards, 2003.
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