Collage

Collage (pronounced kuh-lahzh or koh-lahzh)

(1) The technique, most associated with visual abstract art, of composing a work of art by pasting on a single surface various materials not normally associated with one another, as newspaper clippings, parts of photographs, theater tickets, and fragments of an envelope.

(2) A work of art produced by this technique.

(3) An assemblage or occurrence of diverse elements or fragments in (1) and unlikely or unexpected juxtaposition or (2) a coherent result.

(4) In film, a series of seemingly unrelated scenes or images or shifts from one scene or image to another suddenly and without transition.

(5) Any work created by combining unrelated (or at least definably different) styles; in literature, a combination of styles within the one work; in music a combinations of genres.

1915–1920: From the French collage, the construct being coll(er) (paste, glue) + -age.  Coller was from the Ancient Greek κόλλα (kólla) (glue) of uncertain origin but may ultimately be from the primitive Indo-European kol- and cognates included the Russian кле́й (kléj) and the Middle Dutch helen. The –age suffix was from the Middle French -age, from Old French -age, from the Latin –āticum (influential in words like rivage and voyage) which was used to form nouns or collective nouns in the sense of "action or state of being (a) X, result of Xing" or (more rarely), "action related to X".  Although the historical suffix has had many applications (eg family relationships or locations), it’s now almost wholly restricted to the sense of "action of Xing", and many terms now have little to no connection with the most common uses something especially notable in forms descended from actual Latin words such as fromage and voyage.  Collage & Collagist are nouns, collaged & collaging are verbs (used with object); the noun plural is collages.

Of the accidental & intentional

It not certain exactly when collage was first used in the sense its modern meaning.  It's sometimes credited to English painter and critic, Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) who used the term in a 1919 publication but that’s contested given the word had appeared earlier though there’s some doubt whether that was in reference to the mechanical technique or the final product.  What became known as collage certainly long pre-dates 1919; papier collé was used by both Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963) early in the century and artists, authors & painters had for centuries been producing work from disparate components.  In the digital age, the somewhat misleadingly named software eCollage (and many others) allowed collages to be created on screen although, technically, these programs were as often used to render photomontage as collage.  The opportunistically named iCollage is an image-assembly app for iOS.

A montage of Che Guevara collages.  The difference between collage and montage is that while a collage weaves together things of difference to create a unified whole, a montage uses complete things of some similarity to create something visually coherent although, with some modern artists, coherence can prove elusive.

Colleges by Giuseppe Arcimboldi; Left to right: Four Seasons in One Head, oil on canvas, (circa 1590), Fire, oil on wood, (1566), Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor painted as Vertumnus, Roman god of the seasons, oil on canvas, (circa 1591), The Librarian, oil on canvas, (1566) & Summer, oil on canvas, (1563).

In Western portraiture, the collage is not a recent form.  Although also a conventional court painter of portraits and sacred art, Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1527–1593) was noted for his portraits rendered as collages, the heads fashioned from objects such as vegetables, fruits, flowers & fish.  Very much the modern art of his day, his fanciful work seems to have been well received and critics have linked his work to the tradition of Mannerism.  Examples of collage have been found which pre-date Antiquity and the idea of assembling some representation of something from whatever items fall to hand is thought likely to have been one of the earliest forms of human artistic expression. 

Colleges by Jason Mecier; Left to right: Sigmund Freud, Frida Kahlo, Barack Obama, Lindsay Lohan & Donald Trump.

Los Angeles based pop artist Jason Mecier (b 1968) operates in a particular niche of the collage world, his mosaic portraits fabricated from unconventional materials, sometimes thematic (Sigmund Freud rendered in pills) and most famously, trash.  Perhaps surprisingly, Mr Mecier seems never to have fashioned a likeness of crooked Hillary Clinton; even when working with trash, presumably one has to draw the line somewhere.

Mosaic

Mosaic (pronounced moh-zey-ik)

(1) A picture or decoration made of small, usually colored pieces of inlaid stone, glass etc.

(2) The process of producing such a picture or decoration.

(3) Something resembling such a picture or decoration in composition, especially in being made up of diverse elements (in general use, often confused with a collage or montage).

(4) In surveying, a number of aerial photographs assembled as a continuous photographic representation of an area (commonly called a mosaic map, aerial mosaic or photo-mosaic).

(5) In architectural plans, a system of patterns for differentiating the areas of a building or the like, sometimes consisting of purely arbitrary patterns used to separate areas according to function but often consisting of plans of flooring, reflected ceiling plans, overhead views of furnishings and equipment, or other items really included in the building or building plan.

(6) In the plant pathology field in biology, any of several diseases of plants, characterized by mottled green or green and yellow areas on the leaves, caused by certain viruses (also called mosaic disease); an organism exhibiting mosaicism.

(7) In television production, a light-sensitive surface in a camera tube, consisting of an insulating medium (a thin mica sheet) coated on one side with a large number of granules of photo-emissive material (small globules of silver and cesium insulated from each other).  The image to be televised is focused on this surface and the resulting charges on the globules are scanned by an electron beam.

(8) Of, pertaining to, resembling, or used for making a mosaic or mosaic work.

(9) As a general descriptor, something (physical, abstract or conceptual) composed of a combination of diverse elements (in this sense mosaic, collage & montage are often applied in undifferentiated fashion).

(10) To make a mosaic; to decorate with mosaic.

(11) In theology, of or pertaining to Moses or the writings, laws, and principles attributed to him (always initial capital).

(12) In genetics an alternative name for chimera (an individual composed of two or more cell lines of different genetic or chromosomal constitution, but from the same zygote).

(13) In graphical production (or as a tool of censorship), a pixelization of all or part of an image.

(14) An early web browser developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the name an allusion to the integration of multiple components including HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and Gopher's search & communications protocols.  It was the first widely adopted browser which used an implementation of the user interface still in use today.

(15) In palaeontology, as Mosaic evolution (or modular evolution), a theory that evolutionary change can occur in some body parts or systems without simultaneous changes in other parts.

1350–1400: From the Middle English, from the Old French mosaicq (mosaic work), from the Middle French moysaique & mosaïque, from the Italian mosaico, from the fifth century Medieval Latin mōsaicus & musaicum, a re-formation of the Late Latin musīvum (opus), from the Latin musēum & musaeum (mosaic work) of unknown origin.  The variants are assumed by etymologists to be linked to the Late Greek Μουσεῖον (Mouseîon) (mosaic work; shrine of the Muses; museum) by analogy with archivum & archīum (archive) although the classical Greek is nowhere attested in the sense “mosaic”.  The Ancient Greek mouseios (of the Muses) was from Μοῦσα (Moûsa) (Muse).  Because of the influence of both Moses and the Muses, the history is tangled.  The word was formed in Medieval Latin as though from the Greek, but the Late Greek word meaning "mosaic work" was mouseion (and further to twist the tale etymologists note this sense in Greek was borrowed from Latin).  The meaning "a piece of mosaic work" dates from the 1690s while the figurative form (anything resembling a mosaic work in composition) had been in use since the 1640s.  The familiar adjectival use in English in the sense of "made of small pieces inlaid to form a pattern" dates from the 1580s.  The spellings mosaick & musaic are listed by dictionaries respectively as obsolete & archaic.  Mosaic is a noun, verb & adjective, mosaicked is a verb, mosaicing, mosaicism & mosaicist are nouns, mosaiced & mosaicking are adjectives and mosaically is an adverb; the noun plural is mosaics.  All forms use an initial capital if used in association with Mosaic law.

Mosaic of Bruce McLaren (1937–1970) by Nikki Douthwaite (1973-2022); car is a 1968 Mclaren M7A, still fitted with the adjustable spoilers which (of course) the FIA banned.  The late Ms Douthwaite used a technique called pointillist hole punch art, the mosaics crafted by individually placing (using tweezers) colored paper dots which are the waste material from office hole punches.  Her mosaics, containing sometimes hundreds of thousands of dots, were constructed over weeks and finished with a preservative varnish.

Although the specific technical meanings are respected in science, in art & design, the terms mosaic, collage and montage are often used interchangeably and that’s sometimes understandable because the three can be visually similar and close examination can be required to determine the correct form.  In the visual arts, a mosaic is created by locating & fixing small (classically square tiles), usually colored pieces of inlaid stone, glass etc to create a pattern.  A collage is a picture created by using items of different shape, composition etc to create a (hopefully) thematically integrated result.  A montage is a work created by in some way assembling a number of separate components which are conceptually or thematically similar (even to the point of being identical.

Portrait by Lindsay Lohan by Jason Mecier (b 1968).  His work is crafted using discarded items and he attempts where possible to use objects in some way associated with his subjects.  Although described by some as mosaics, his technique belongs to the tradition of college.

The use in theology dates from 1655–1665, from the New Latin Mosaicus, the construct being the Late Latin Mōs(ēs) (Moses) + (the text-string) -aicus, on the model of Hebraicus (Hebraic).  In writing relating to Mosaic law or ethics, the adjectival forms Mosaical (which pre-dated Mosaic) and post-Mosaic are common.  The Ebionites were a Jewish Christian sect during the first two centuries after the crucifixion of Christ.  Ebonite was from the Latin ebonita, from the Greek Ἐβιωναῖοι (Ebionaioi), from the Hebrew אביונים‎ (ebyon; ebyonim; ebionim) (the poor, the poor ones) and the sect’s name was chosen to reflect their belief that poverty was a blessing and plenty a curse.  Their Christology was adoptionist, maintaining Jesus of Nazareth was mere human flesh & blood and therefore Christians continued bound by the Mosaic Law, the adherence to which was why God choose Jesus to be a messianic prophet in the vein of Moses himself.  While within the sect there were theological differences but the central tenet was that the essential Christian orthodoxy of the divinity of Jesus was a heresy and that he was the natural born son of Joseph and Mary.

Montage created with fragments from Lindsay Lohan's Playboy Magazine photoshoot, 2011.

The Ebionite world-view obviously shares much with Judaism but to mainstream (indeed almost all) thought within Christianity they are wholly heretical, the rejection of Christ’s divinity the objection rather than and technical points of difference with the Mosaic code of law.  Islam of course objected to Christian theology because it distorted the purity of monotheism, the doctrine of the Trinity a dilution of the Abrahamic God and really a type of iconography.  However, the Ebionites were faithful to the original teachings of the historical Jesus and thus shared Islamic views about Jesus as a prophet yet still mere human flesh and blood, leading to the intriguing situation of the Jewish Christianity which vanished from the early Christian church being preserved in Islam.  The particular Ebionite teaching of Jesus as a follower of Mosaic law was later reflected in the Koran which were the words of the prophet Muhammad.

Detail of the pointillist hole punch technique.  There are a number of pointillist methods using devices as varied as lasers and Sharpie brand pens.

Montage

Montage (pronounced mon-tahzh (mawn-tazh in French))

(1) The technique of combining in a single composition, pictorial elements from various sources, as parts of different photographs or fragments of printing, either to give the illusion that the elements belonged together originally or to allow each element to retain its separate identity as a means of adding interest or meaning to the composition; the composition itself.

(2) By analogy, the creation of a thing or concept by combining a number of related elements; any combination of disparate elements that forms or is felt to form a unified whole.

(3) In photography, as photomontage, a juxtaposition or partial superimposition of several shots to form a single image.

(4) In film & television etc, a technique of editing used to present an idea or set of interconnected ideas.

1929: A borrowing from the French montage (assembly, set-up), the construct being mont(er) (to mount; to put up) + -age.  Monter was from the Vulgar Latin montāre, the present active infinitive of monto (to climb, mount, go up), from mōns & montem (mountain), from the primitive Indo-European men- (mountain).  The suffix -age was from the Middle English -age, from the Old French -age, from the Latin -āticum.  Cognates include the French -age, the Italian -aggio, the Portuguese -agem, the Spanish -aje & Romanian -aj.  It was used to form nouns (1) with the sense of collection or appurtenance, (2) indicating a process, action, or a result, (3) of a state or relationship, (4) indicating a place, (5) indicating a charge, toll, or fee, (6) indicating a rate & (7) of a unit of measure.  The French suffix -age was from the Middle & Old French -age, from the Latin -āticum, (greatly) extended from words like rivage and voyage.  It was used usually to form nouns with the sense of (1) "action or result of Xing" or (more rarely), "action related to X" or (2) "state of being (a or an) X".  A less common use was the formation of collective nouns.  Historically, there were many applications (family relationships, locations et al) but use has long tended to be restricted to the sense of "action of Xing".  Many older terms now have little to no connection with their most common modern uses, something particularly notable of those descended from actual Latin words (fromage, voyage et al).

A montage of Lindsay Lohan as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) might have rendered.

Montage, although now most associated with photography, painting and other static installations, was originally a term in cinematography, first attested in 1929.  The use was extended in 1931 (as photomontage) to the use of photographs or photographic negatives to make art or illustrations.  The technique can, in many fields, be used to add a veneer of intellectual gloss to what is really an elaborated form of plagiarism.  More helpfully, photomontages have been a vital aspect of the techniques of producing large scale imagery and the first were literally assembled on large tables by technicians armed with scissors, magnifying glasses and adhesive tape, the most prolific of the early adopters being the military who used the small images taken during photo-reconnaissance (PR) missions.  As camera technology improved, definition increased and more detail was captured but this was counted somewhat by increased anti-surveillance measures which forced the PR missions to operate at higher altitude.  Interestingly, the Allied military in World War II (1939-1945) found women much more efficient in both analysing PR and assembling montages.

A montage of Lindsay Lohan as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) might have rendered.

The techniques honed in wartime proved valuable in peacetime for creating large-scale maps and renderings from sometimes even thousands of small fragments.  This was the way big areas on the surface of the earth were able to be visualized as if a single photograph and in the 1950s work began on the task of mapping the ocean floor, something of interest not only oceanographers & nautical geographers but also to navies, commercial shipping companies and miners, the oil & gas industry long aware that vast untapped resources lay under the waves.  The concept of mapping the seabed is simple in that all that is required is to have the images in the form of a grid which could then be assembled in a single montage (the world’s biggest).  However, while the scale in terms of the surface area proved manageable, obtaining the data at depths in which pressures are immense and darkness total proved as challenging as predicted and although the maps are in a sense complete, the deepest parts of the oceans remain to some extent mysterious.  The available montages (which scientists call bathymetric data sets) include the GEBCO (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans which is an international project), Seabed 2030 (a collaborative project between GEBCO and the Japanese Nippon Foundation which plans to have a comprehensive map of the entire ocean floor by 2030), the EMODnet (European Marine Observation and Data Network which publishes highly detailed bathymetric maps for European waters) and the US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which offers maps of US waters and contributes to global programmes, their material available through the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

A montage of Lindsay Lohan as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) might have rendered.

The difference between collage and montage is that while a collage weaves together things of difference to create a unified whole, a montage uses complete things of some similarity to create something visually coherent although, with some modern artists, coherence can prove elusive, however cohesive a whole the glue might produce.  At the definitional margins however, the distinctions can be significant in the production but be undetectable in the result.  To create what appeared to be the montage of the seabed, what was done was technically a collage, the assembled components including photographs, renderings from ship-based sonar measurements and satellite altimetry as well as some enhancement in software.  However big might have been the ambition to create a unified montage of the ocean floor, cosmologists & astronomers thought bigger still and as space-based cameras and wandering craft became available, montages were assemble of objects such as the moon and the lovely rings of Saturn.  Aiming to produce the grandest montage of all is the European Space Agency which (ESA), using observations from their Euclid space mission (launched in July 2023) will explore dark matter and dark energy; over time billions of galaxies will be viewed.  What makes Euclid different from the Hubble Telescope and JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) is it can survey large parts of the sky at once, the agency describing the difference as between looking through a window compared with a keyhole.  In time, all the known objects in the universe might be photographed which will permit quite a montage but what really interests the cosmologists is the dark matter (which may actually be dark energy or a combination of the two) so it’s a quest for the known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

Réclame

Réclame (pronounced rey-klahm)

(1) In historic French use, publicity; self-advertisement; notoriety (in a positive sense).

(2) In historic French use, a talent for generating interest & getting attention; a gift for dramatization; a hunger for publicity.

(3) In modern English use (as a critique of social media content, celebrity culture etc), of public attention or acclaim achieved to an extent disproportionate to value or achievement.

1865–1870: From the French réclame, from the early fourteenth century reclaimen (call back a hawk to the glove) from the Old French reclamer (to call upon, invoke; claim; seduce; to call back a hawk) (which in the twelfth century entered Modern French as “réclamer”) and directly from the Latin reclāmāre.  Because the hawks used in falconry were, by definition, tame, “reclaim” by the mid fifteenth century was used to mean “make tame” (ie “reclaimed from the wild state of nature”), the use taken from the late fourteenth century sense of “subdue, reduce to obedience, make amenable to control”.  In Middle English, many “re-” words had conveyed no sense of “return or reciprocation”, the meaning “revoke” (an award, grant, gift etc) dating from the late fifteenth century while the sense of “recall (someone) from an erring course and direct them to a proper state” had emerged decades earlier.  The sense of “get back by effort” is thought by etymologists to have evolved under the influence of claim and the specific meaning “bring waste land into useful condition fit for cultivation” seems first to have been used in the context of agriculture in 1764, the idea again being again on the probably on notion of “reclaimed from the wild state of nature” rather than a suggestion of a return to a previous state of cultivation (although there were instances of both).  Land reclamation (the extending of the area available for urban settlement has been practiced for thousands of years but it has been practiced at scale only since the mid-nineteenth century when large-capacity mechanical devices became available.  Réclame is a noun; the noun plural is réclames.

In French, réclame was a noun & verb and by the mid nineteenth century it was used usually to mean “a small advertisement” of the type which typically appeared in newspapers or other publications (as opposed to billboards or banners or buildings).  Depending in context, the forms avertissement & publicité (often clipped to pub) could be used as synonyms.  The word spread in Europe and other colonial empires including the Mauritian Creole reklam, the Danish reklame, the Dutch reclame, the Indonesian reklame, the German Reklame, the Hungarian reklám, the Polish reklama, the Romanian reclamă, the Italian reclame, the Norwegian Bokmål reklame, the Norwegian Nynorsk reklame, the Spanish reclame, the Swedish reklam, the Finnish reklaami, the Turkish reklam, the Estonian reklaam and the Russian рекла́ма rekláma.  The noun in French has a special use in the sport of falconry (in the sense of “reclaim”) where it was a call and sign for the bird of prey to return to the gauntlet of the falconer.  The use in falconry was inherited from the Old French verb reclamer (to implore; to shout to), from the Latin reclāmāre, from reclāmō, the construct being re- (used as an intensifier in the sense of “opposite, against” + clāmō (cry out, shout), from the primitive Indo-European root kele (to shout).  In the Old French, as a transitive verb, reclamer could mean (1) to protest, (2) to object or (3) to claim, reclaim.

In English, for centuries, words have come and gone, some going extinct and some later revived, sometimes enduringly.  The twenty-first century rediscovery of réclame though is unusual in that when reclame previously was used in English it was as an alternation spelling or reclaim whereas the newly re-purposed réclaim is a borrowing from late nineteenth century Modern French.  That which is embarked upon in the quest for fame or notoriety can be described neutrally (commercial, promotion, advertizing, content provision etc) or negatively (hoopla, hype, noise, propaganda etc) and réclame recently was added the latter class.  It is used to describe those who by virtue of their activities on social media, in “reality” content generally or as part of celebrity culture have achieved a level of acclaim or public attention wildly disproportionate to any substantive achievement or contribution.

L'Homme réclame (Publicity man, 1926), collage on cardboard by Aleksandra Ekster (1882-1949), collection of the National Gallery of Australia (Accession Number: 77.11.1 (1977)).

Aleksandra Ekster (who in the West is often exhibited as Alexandra Exter)) was a Russian artist whose work covered a remarkable range of twentieth century movements.  Beginning as a noted figure in the pre-revolutionary Russian avant-garde before moving to the West, her output included Cubism, Futurism and even some in the vein of Vorticism although it was Art Deco which owes her the greatest debt and her influence there was neglected by historians until recently.  Had she been a man, she might earlier have been better appreciated.

Réclame as now used is thus a word of cultural snobbery and one which encapsulates a certain hierarchical model of what’s a respectable profile and what’s not: being “Instagram famous” definitely is not.  Curiously, it seems the word is deployed as a weapon by those with definite opinions on the difference between “high quality” pop culture and that in the field less deserving rather than by those of the type who distinguish only between the “high or experimental” and “everything else”.  As a critique, réclame is a new way of describing those “famous for being famous”, a characteristic identifiable in the West for well over a century but now a genuine mass-phenomenon because the distribution channels have become so extensive and wide.  What is derided as the community of réclame is just a business model in action, content providers providing supply to fulfill demand.  Of course, the model has operated to increase both the audience and the volume of aggregate demand, something which seems further to depress the critics but culturally, probably little has changed in the internet age; it’s just that things are on a bigger scale and more obvious.

Paris Hilton (b 1981, left) & Lindsay Lohan (b 1986, right), Los Angeles, 2003.

Also helpful in many ways is Ms Hilton’s recently published book Paris: The Memoir (Harper Collins London, (2023), pp 336, ISBN 0-0632-2462-3) which, while genuinely a memoir is interesting too for the deconstruction of the subject the author provided in a number of promotional interviews.  There have over the years been many humorless critics who have derided Ms Hilton for being “famous for being famous” but the book makes clear being the construct that is Paris Hilton is a full-time job, one which demands study and an understanding of the supply & demand curves of shifting markets; a personality cult needs to be managed.  She displays also a sophisticated understanding of the point made by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) who once explained the abstraction of a personality cult by pointing to his huge portrait and saying “…you see, even I am not Stalin, THAT is Stalin!”  Ms Hilton may never have done anything as useful as find a cure for cancer or invent a new nuclear weapon but she’s a cog in the machine which keeps the economy ticking over and collectively, the activities of the réclame set continue to generate a not insignificant chunk of the revenue which funds some of the advances in technology which have been so transformative.  Their contribution need not be seen as culturally inferior to that of the literary festival circuit, it's just different.

Section

Section (pronounced sek-shuhn)

(1) A part cut off or separated.

(2) A distinct part or subdivision of anything (object, data set, country, social class, military establishment et al).

(3) In text, a distinct part or subdivision within a document or set of documents (periodicals, newspapers, legal codes et al), the idea emulated in many forms of broadcasting.

(4) One of a number of parts that can be fitted together to make a whole or a larger component.

(5) An act or instance of cutting; separation by cutting.

(6) In surgery, the making of an incision or the physical incision (in medical slang, “section” & “Caesar” contest the right to be the colloquial short form for “Caesarean section” with the latter apparently the winner.

(7) In pathology, a thin slice of a tissue taken for microscopic examination (sometimes called a specimen although section has a specific technical meaning related to its suitability for use in microscopy.

(8) In all physical sciences, a slice or part (of a mineral, metal, plant etc) removed for examination or other purposes.

(9) A graphical or mathematical representation of an object as it would appear if cut by a plane, showing its internal structure (in architecture, engineering etc).

(10) In geometry, a plane surface formed by cutting through a solid; the shape or area of such a plane surface.

(11) In geology, a sequence of rock layers.

(12) In North American land law (some jurisdictions in US & Canada), an area one mile square (640 acres; 2.6 km²; 259 hectares).

(13) In New Zealand land law a plot of land (of varying size) for building on, especially in a suburban area

(14) In military establishments, classically a small unit (as few as 6-8) consisting of two or more squads (as few as 2+3), several squads when assembled comprising a platoon (terminology and numbers vary greatly between militaries and branches within).

(15) In military terminology any small tactical grouping, either standing or created ad-hoc for specific missions; as “staff section”, the administrative and organizational apparatus attached to an operational unit or units.

(16) In the design of carriages for railroads, a division of a sleeping car containing both an upper and a lower berth.

(17) In railroad administration, a length of track, roadbed, signal equipment etc, maintained by one crew.

(18) In mass-transit, any of two or more trains, buses, trams etc, running on the same route and schedule at the same time, one right behind the other, and considered as one unit, as when a second is necessary to accommodate more passengers than the first can carry.

(19) In mass transit (Australia & New Zealand), a fare stage on a bus, train or tram etc (similar to the sectors used by airlines).

(20) In botany, a segment of a naturally segmented fruit, as of an orange or grapefruit.

(21) In botany, a taxonomic rank below the genus (and subgenus if present), but above the species.

(22) In zoology, an informal taxonomic rank below the order ranks and above the family ranks.

(23) In art, as “sectional art”, a single work designed to be displayed as separate pieces (as opposed to the single piece collage or montage (made from many components) or the diptych, triptych, polyptych etc (where all the pieces are in some way attached to create a (usually) symmetrical whole.

(24) In music, a division based on the instruments used or their purpose (rhythm section; brass section; string section et al).

(25) In music, an extended division of a composition or movement that forms a coherent part of the structure.

(26) In publishing, as the section mark (sometimes called the signature), a mark used to indicate a subdivision of a book, chapter etc or as a mark of reference to a footnote (the symbol § denotes a section in a document)

(27) In bookbinding (sometimes called the signature, gathering, gather or quire) a folded printing sheet or sheets ready for gathering and binding.

(28) In live theatre, one of a series of circuits for controlling certain lights (footlight, down-lights et al).

(29) In category theory, a right inverse.

(30) In some jurisdictions, a mechanism by which a mentally disturbed person may be confined in an institution (under appropriate statute) for examination to determine whether a longer or permanent order of confinement is justified.

(31) In military slang (as “to section” or “section 8”), to dismiss an individual from the service on mental health grounds.

1550-1560: From the Middle English seccioun (in astronomy, “the intersection of two straight lines; a division of a scale”), from the Old French section, from the Latin sectionem (stem of sectiō) (a cutting; cutting off, excision, amputation of diseased parts of the body etc), from sectus, past participle of secāre (to cut), from the primitive Indo-European root sek (to cut).   The construct was sec(t) (āre) + -iōn.  The meaning “a part cut off or separated from the rest” dates from the early fifteenth century while that of a “drawing representing something as if cut through” was from the 1660s.  In English, from the 1550s, there was the sense of “an act of cutting or dividing”; that is now archaic or preserved only in some aspects of engineering and in medical phrases, most famously the Caesarian section.  The meaning “a subdivision of a written work, statute etc” was first noted in the 1570s when the structure in publishing was (more or less) standardized: books divided into chapters, chapters into sections and sections into paragraphs or breaks, a system still reflected by modern word-processing software.  Section can have defined meanings (such as in publishing or land law) but the in general use the synonyms include cut, division, snippet, part, segment, slice, piece & specimen.  Section is a noun & verb, sectionalism & sectionality are nouns, sectioning is a noun & verb, sectional & sectionary are nouns & adjectives, sectioned is a verb (and a non-standard adjective), sectionable is an adjective and sectionally is an adverb; the noun plural is sections.

Three-piece sectional art, distinguished a triptych in that the three sections are hung separately.  Some commercial galleries do describe such products as "triptychs" because the word has such an association with "high art". 

In music, although functionally the distinctions had long been understood, the idea of sections in a band or orchestra didn’t come into use until the 1880s (the sections either by type (strings) or function (rhythm).  The use of section to describe the one square mile (640 acres) blocks used for purposes of sub-dividing public lands dates from 1785.  The famous “section 8” began as World War II (1939-1945) US military slang referring to the passage in army regulations under which as soldier could be discharged from the service for reasons of mental illness (not necessarily defined as insanity).  The verb section came into use in publishing in the early nineteenth century in the sense of “divide a text into sections”, extended by the 1890s to “cut through so as to present a section”.  The adjective sectional in the sense of “pertaining to a division of a larger part” was first noted in 1806 but it is mere coincidence this was the year in which the thousand year old Holy Roman Empire was dissolved.  It originally did mean “of or pertaining to some particular section or region of a country as distinct from others”, something would soon often be heard in the US political vocabulary in the decades leading up to the Civil War (1861-1965).  The noun sectionalism emerged in parallel an originally meant “sectional prejudice or spirit; the clashing of sectional interests” but it soon added the sense “a confinement of interests to a local sphere”.  It was in use in US English by 1836 but, again under the influence of those forces which would lead to the Civil War, it was in frequent use by the mid-1850s.

The meaning “composed or made up of several independent sections that fit together” was in use in engineering and other mechanical fields by the mid-eighteenth century.  The specific noun meaning “piece of furniture composed of sections which can be used separately” appeared in the early 1960s (a clipping of sectional seat, sectional sofa etc in use since 1949) but the preferred modern descriptor is “modular”.  The noun cross-section (section of something made by a plane passing through it at a right angle to one of its axes) dates from 1748 and was first applied to the sketches and plans of engineers and architects.  In the early twentieth century, it picked up the figurative sense of “a representative sample”, emerging apparently in the social sciences before entering general use.  The noun subsection (also as sub-section) (part or division of a section) dates from the 1620s.  The noun midsection (also as mid-section) (middle of the human body, the midriff or belly) was coined in the 1930s for commercial purposes.  Other forms (quarter-section, half-section, multi-section, un-sectioned, bisection etc were coined as the need arose.

Lindsay Lohan in sections, hung above a "sectional sofa".  "Sectional furniture" was first advertised in the late 1940s and offered more flexibility in that the pieces could be assembled in a variety of configurations, better to suit the available space.  The modern trend is to describe such pieces as "modular furniture" but the art is still sectional; modular art is something different. 

The military slang (as “to section” or “section 8”) referred to World War II (1939-1945) US Army regulations (detailed in Section VIII) under which an individual could be dismissed from the service on mental health grounds.  These grounds provided for the discharge of men who were deemed mentally unfit for military service so didn’t exactly follow the conventions followed in civilian medicine; proven (or confessed) homosexuality could for example be the grounds for a Section VIII discharge.  The term entered popular culture in the post-war years when it was used in fictional depictions of military life, often as a humorous device following the attempts of soldiers to be “sectioned” as a way out of the military.  Most militaries have since adopted practices which align more closely with the mainstream handling of mental health conditions.

The Caesarian section (delivery of a baby by cutting through the abdomen of the mother) was apparently first described as “a section” in 1923 although “a Caesar” seems to be the preferred modern medical slang.  The operation had first been documented in the 1530s and the name was based on that supposedly being the method by which Julius Caesar (100-44 BC; Roman general and dictator of Rome 49-44 BC) was delivered.  Modern thought has rejected that notion and the legend thus also accounts for the historic tracing of his cognomen to the Latin caesus, past participle of caedere (to cut).  If there’s any basis to this, it may have been an ancestor who was so born because Caesar's mother lived to see his adulthood and there’s no record of any woman in antiquity surviving the procedure which was performed usually when the mother had already died.  Modern medical analysts concur with the improbability of the link and the first known attempt to on a live woman was in the early sixteenth century and as late as the 1800s, before antiseptics and blood transfusions were routinely available, there was a 50% mortality rate.

Architectonic

Architectonic (pronounced ahr-ki-tek-ton-ik)

(1) Of or pertaining to the principles of architecture, design and construction.

(2) In figurative use in the social sciences (especially political science and sociology), those things foundational or fundamental; supporting the structure of a morality, society, or culture.

(3) As a descriptor outside the field of architecture, denoting, relating to, or having architectural qualities, especially in its highly organized manner or technique of structure.

(4) In metaphysics, of or relating to the systematic classification of the totality of knowledge.

(5) In artistic composition, having a clearly defined structure, especially one artistically pleasing.

1635-1645 From the Latin architectonicus (of architecture), from the Ancient Greek ἀρχιτεκτονικός (arkhitektonikós) (pertaining to a master builder), from ἀρχιτέκτων (arkhitéktōn) (architect).  Interestingly, in surviving Greek texts, the most commonly-used forms appears to be arkhitekton (chief workman).  As technology improved it became possible to observe physical objects at smaller scales, even down to the sub-atomic level.  What was seen was of course inherently structural so architectonic was co-opted by many fields which created their own words including receptorarchitectonic (in anatomy & biology, relating to the architectonics of receptors, neuroarchitectonic (the architectonics of nerves and the nervous system) and nanoarchitectonic (the design of nanotechnology devices or the architectonic of nanoscale architecture) and politico-architectonic (in structuralism and urban planning, the analysis of purpose of individual elements).  The adjective architectonical dates from the 1590s.  Architectonic is a noun & adjective, architectonically is an adverb and architectonical is an adjective; the noun plural is architectonics.

In English, use in the metaphysical sense (pertaining to systematization of knowledge) dates only from 1801, the allusions to the origins in Antiquity something of a retrospective Enlightenment discovery.  The division of what in Antiquity tended to be called “the sciences” (ie about any field of knowledge to which any form of method could be applied) into ancillary and architectonic is often described as Aristotelian because it was in the surviving texts of Aristotle (384-322 BC) that the concept is both so prevalent and obvious but it was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who, in Critique of Pure Reason (1781), provided framework in its modern understanding, architectonics being the study both of a system and the processes of its construction.  Kant’s contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), was a philosopher who contributed much to the understanding of the implications of the architectonic, perhaps because as well as his interest in metaphysics, he was a composer and something of a critic of architecture.

Six of the Painterly Architectonic set (1916-1918) in oil by Lyubov Popova (1889-1924).

Painterly Architectonic was a series of works by Russian & Soviet avant-garde artist Lyubov Popova.  Thematically, she explored the effects of color and shape on individual parts of a whole, overlaying the representations of the objects after the manner of collage.  The paintings distort space within the square and rectangular frames, right angles, vertical and horizontal lines almost all shunned in seas of slants and diagonals.  Travelling in Western Europe in the years before World War I (1914-1918), Popova was stunned by the Cubist and Futurist works she saw in France & Italy and these ideas she took back to Moscow, her focus on the interrelationships between individual parts.  In 1916 Popova declared herself a "Suprematist", a term coined a year earlier by Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) another member of the Russian avant-garde who explained it described an art which rejected painting’s historic devotion to representation, focusing instead on the supremacy of pure artistic feeling.  After the October Revolution in 1917, it became a movement, many artists believing a revolutionary society demanded a radically new artistic language. In that they were probably right but in comrade Stalin’s (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) time, they would find the vocabulary was limited.

Rorschach

Rorschach (pronounced raw-shack)

(1) A canton and town in Switzerland.

(2) A personality test using ink-blots

1927: The ink-blot based personality analysis was first published in codified form in 1927, the genesis of which was a 1921 paper by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1885-1922).  Rorschach (Wahlkreis) is a constituency of the canton of Saint Gallen, Switzerland and Rorschach is its largest town.  The town lies on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, the construct of the name an early form of the German Röhr (reeds) + Schachen (lakeside).

The Rorschach test was for some time a standard clinical diagnostic tool in psychology & psychiatry.  It was a collection of ten “ink blots”, five rendered in grey scale, two in grey & red and three in color, all printed on separate cards and presented to the subjects who were asked (1) What might this mean? & (2) What parts of the card made you say that?  The usual protocol was to provide a pencil and have the subject write their responses in the space underneath the image although, depending on the circumstances, a clinician might engage with the subject and obtain more of their thoughts or the tests could immediately be taken for analysis.  Fond of jargon, the profession even took the opportunity to coin a word to describe specific responses, a subject thought to be especially demonstrative in their response to a Rorschach ink blot said to be exhibiting "extratensive" tendencies.  As an adjective it was thus a synonym of "extroverted" and is occasionally seen outside of psychology where it probably adds little but confusion.  It served also as a noun, the relevant subjects being labelled "extratensives".

Lindsay Lohan in Rorschach Ink-Blot Test inspired gold beaded cocktail dress at the Source Code premiere, Crosby Street Hotel, New York City, March 2011.  The dress was paired with black patent ankle strap platform pumps shoes and matching opaque tights.

The idea of using indeterminate and ambiguous shapes as a way of assessing an individual's personality had been around for centuries before Dr Rorschach began his research and in the nineteenth century there were even popular parlor games which used the idea although they were designed to amuse rather than analyze.  What made Dr Rorschach’s work different was the sheer quantity of the data with with he worked, his research encompassing some 300 patients in mental institutions (with a control group of 100 “normal” subjects) to whom to he exposed over 400 ink-blots before selecting the ten which had proved to be of the greatest diagnostic utility.  Although the method was not greatly different from the games, the Rorschach test was genuinely scientific in its design and the systematic approach linking impressionistic responses to ambiguous shapes, this producing evidence of certain tendencies.  Within the still embryonic psychiatric profession, his approach was thought novel and initially received little support.  His book (a 174-page monograph Psychodiagnostik (Psychodiagnostics)), when eventually published in 1921 contained the structure of the ink-blot tests and the results of the 300 patient survey yet it attracted more interest from intrigued literary reviewers than the medical journals and he died little more than a year after its release.  Even the appearance of reviews in the odd literary magazine however did little to stimulate appeal because the book was very much a work by a scientist for other scientists and Dr Rorschach had made no attempt to make his findings accessible to a general audience.  It wasn’t until the work was republished and others began to refine the methodology that others saw potential, especially after professional mathematicians added rigor to the statistical models used to generate the scores from which conclusions were drawn.

The Rorschach cards.

However, those who inherited the work also shifted the goal posts.  While Dr Rorschach had always intended the ink-blots to be only a helpful tool in the diagnosis of schizophrenia, such was the expansion of the profession in the inter-war years that many became interested and, by 1938, the test had been adapted and was being promoted as a kind of “personality testing kit”.  It was quite a departure from Dr Rorschach’s original vision which had been designed deliberately to maintain some ambiguity in the images, his belief that the diagnosis of schizophrenia lay in the margins between the possible responses whereas when used as a personality testing tool, the answers took on the character of a parameter which, when collectively assessed with the provided statistical tool, placed patients in categories.  The test in that form proved highly successful, its proliferation assisted by the demands of wartime and the military’s need for psychological testing, the Rorschach kit easily produced, more popular with subjects than many other methods and, as a piece of mathematics, able easily to be collated into the big data sets electronic machines were beginning to make possible.  It had that those qualities the military so adore: Speed, standardization and simplicity.  It was therefore by the mid 1940s a standard part of psychological testing, used in everything from job applications to assessing an inmate’s eligibility for parole so it was perhaps inevitable it would be applied to the defendants in the Nuremberg trial (1945-1946).  Even before the International Military Tribunal (IMT; which would conduct the trial) assembled, the authorities in charge of the Nazis in custody insisted on psychiatrists and psychologists being available as soon as the prisoners had been assembled.  There were a number of reasons for this, notably that they wanted to ensure the prisoners had the support necessary to dissuade them from attempting suicide and there was the need also to ensure all were mentally competent to stand trial.  Additionally, there was genuine curiosity about the Nazis because never had there been such an opportunity to subject to tests two-dozen odd who were responsible for what was becoming clear were the greatest crimes in history.  The question then, as now was: Are “normal ordinary people” able to be drawn to commit evil acts or are some people evil.

The famous astrophotograph of The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula of the Serpens constellation (taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on 1 April 1995) imagined as four Rorschach ink-blot cards.  The original is at the top, below is a rendering in greyscale and the lower two have different filters applied.

In 2022, the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) was used to obtain a more detailed image of what was happening there some 7000 years ago and while the consensus among cosmologists was comething like “not much has appears to have changed in 27 years”, because the JWST captures in infrared, it was able to penetrate the dense dust, revealing embedded stars and internal structures Hubble (which captured only visible light) couldn’t see.  So much more detailed was the later image that the sharper edges of the clouds could be studied, providing insights into the interplay between the gas and stellar winds.

There is significance in some Rorschach inkblot plates including color while others are black-and-white and the use of color was a deliberate design choice by Hermann Rorschach as part of the “interpretative tool-set” used to assess a subject's responses.  Of the ten plate, cards 1, 4, 5, 6 & 7 are black & white, cards 2 & 3 include red & black while cards 8, 9 & 10 feature multiple colors, including pastels.  The notion was that color introduces emotional and affective complexity and it must be remembered that in this context, “black” & “white” also are “colors”.  According to Dr Rorschach, (1) black & white blots tend to elicit more structured, form-based, and cognitive responses, (2) red is often interpreted as a prompt for more emotional, aggressive, or stimulus-bound reactions and (3) the multi-colored blots test the subject's ability to integrate complex stimuli, including emotional nuance, conflict, or ambiguity.  The theory thus was color could be used to help assess (1) emotional responses, (2) impulsivity, (3) affective regulation and (4) cognitive integration.  What all that of course implied is that were the plates to be rendered in black (and thus rely on shape alone), outcomes and the validity of the test would be affected, most obviously because of the removal of stimuli which would make responses more form-focused, diminishing the utility of the test in differentiating certain traits, notably the interpretation of ambiguous affective signals.  This has been tested and researchers reported results became less rich and less diagnostic when color was removed.

PapaLeoArts take on the Rorschach in water colors.  This array should probably be thought a montage but there might be critics who would find definitional reasons why it's a collage.

In the ink-blots, Dr Rorschach used color selectively with some plates wholly black shapes on a white background, the allocation as critical to the integrity of the process as the shapes but once the test became well known, the ink-blots became pop-culture artefacts, reproduced on posters, T-Shirts, coffee mugs and anything else which might be packaged for sale.  Sometimes the color mix was retained in the original while others applied just about everything from the motifs of psychedelia to polka-dots.     

The Rorschach tests were of course only one of the tools the clinicians assigned to Nuremberg used and the conclusion drawn was that all defendants were sane in the sense they were "legally" sane and thus mentally competent to stand trial even if they were depressed psychopaths (that seemed to be the most common phrase).  Quite what part the tests played in this isn’t clear but the test results themselves assumed a life independent of the trial because of a dispute between the two clinicians most involved in the testing and it wasn’t until the 1990s they were (almost) all published.  This psychological time capsule proved irresistibly tempting for one of the US’s foremost Rorschach experts who over the years had assembled records which could be used as an extraordinarily diverse control group which included (in the hundreds) medical students, Unitarian ministers, psychology students, criminals, business executives and random patients from private practice.  From this were selected the clerics and psychiatric outpatients, the purpose of a comparison with the Nuremberg Nazis being a critique of a recently published analysis of the test results which had concluded the defendants (as individuals and a representatives of the whole Nazi hierarchy) were “cursed beyond redemption” and thus profoundly of “the other”.  Their work was not entirely conventional by accepted scientific standards and they tacitly acknowledged some of the long acknowledged limitations of the test but never wavered from their finding “…the Nazis were not psychologically normal or healthy individuals”.

Defendants in the dock, Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, 1945-1946.  The defendant in the front row at the far right of the photograph was Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht (1877–1970; president of the Reichsbank 1923-1930 & 1933-1939, general plenipotentiary for war economy 1935–1937 and Reichsminister without portfolio 1937-1943) and he secured an acquittal, which might seem surprising given the extent of his complicity in the Nazi re-armament programme but it did reflect the historic difficulties in securing the convictions of enablers of crime (accountants, lawyers, financiers etc) who are a step or more removed from the act(s) being prosecuted, a phenomenon which manifests still in many jurisdictions.  Of the accused, Dr Schacht was the only confessed Freemason but there's never been anything to suggest any of the IMT's eight judges had any connection with the cult.

The notion  “…the Nazis were not psychologically normal or healthy individuals” was as controversial a view in the 1990s as it had been fifty years earlier and if a blind test could not distinguish of the Nazi’s data from the two control groups, at least some doubt would be cast.  Accordingly, ten Rorschach experts were assembled and asked to assemble them into three groups.  All that did was identify the high, medium and low-functioning of each group but there was nothing in them which separated the Nazis.  That was interesting but what was probably definitive was that even when told the nature of the data, the experts were unable to discern any difference between the responses which would enable the Nazis to be identified.  Perhaps sadly, the Nazis may have been as ordinary as they appeared in the dock, the implication being we're all capable of evil, given the right temptation, a nod to an earlier memorable phrase spoken of them: "The banality of evil".  

As that might indicate, like many tests in psychology, the Rorschach is probably useful if its limitations are recognized and the interpretations thought valid decades ago are no longer treated as proven science.  For example there may be something which can be deduced from a subject assessing the whole image in their response which is different for one who picks just a section or who finds something different in different parts but whether there’s anything substantive in the difference between seeing moth and a butterfly may be dubious.  The test is still widely used although many have abandoned it though it’s famously a cult in Japan where it’s one of the profession’s standard tools.  Elsewhere use is mixed.  Interestingly, while the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV (1994) did not endorse or recommend the use of any particular projective test, it did note many were used in clinical practice but cautioned that the validity and reliability of these tests had not been firmly established, urging caution.  Neither the DSM-5 (2013) nor DSM-5-TR (2022) make any reference to the Rorschach test.