Out and about on Saturday evening. A bit of linguists’ obsessions.

Yesterday we went out in the late afternoon /early evening to meet an old friend and his partner, someone we’d heard about but never met and who turned out to be a perfectly nice person - all good. The plan was to have a bite to eat and then go to a concert together … but separately, as we had booked our tickets at different times.

Our old friend suggested meeting and eating at a place near the concert hall, a good idea! The food venue was one of those barn-like places, with lots of tables (unlike most of the city centre pubs where everyone stands and has shouted conversations) and a dazzling/confusing variety of street food outlets as well as a bar. It was very loud and crowded (early Saturday evening stuff) but our friends had managed to secure a table for four in a corner by the window. With restricted time it was hard to decide what to eat. We went for the safe option, sharing a pizza from a stall run by Noi Quattro, an Italian restaurant we know in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. 

That’s two days on the run I’ve had pizza for my main meal of the day. 

And so we went from the loud and crowded ridiculous, with something that could loosely be described as music thumping in the background, 

to the only slightly less loud but equally crowded sublime of the Bridgewater Hall, with fine music with something of a Scandinavian theme to it. 

We all met up at the interval, able to talk and to hear each other, which had been well nigh impossible in the eatery. And afterwards we continued our conversation in The Britons Protection, a fine old-fashioned Manchester pub. 

As we settled into our seats in the concert hall, Phil asked me in Italian if everything was all right - Tutto a posto? The chap sitting next to him pricked up his ears and asked if we were Italian. He was a Scotsman with family living in Italy and wanted to know where in Italy we “came from”.  How we all laughed when we revealed the truth of the matter! So we had a bit of a pre-concert chat about visiting Italy and learning languages. 

It’s one of those things about being a linguist; you like to play with words and expressions and accents. And the origin and etymology of words become fascinating subjects of conversation as you go for walks. One such recently was “silhouette”. Is it a diminutive of another word, as so many …ette words are? Is there a word something like “sihou” or maybe a verb “sihouer”? Eventually I looked it up.

It turns out that the word silhouette is derived from the name of Étienne de Silhouette,  a French finance minister who, in 1759, was forced by France's credit crisis during the Seven Years War (1756–1763, a global conflict involving most of the European great powers) to impose severe economic demands upon the French people, particularly the wealthy. Because of his austere economies, his name became synonymous with anything done or made cheaply, such as outline portraits, profiles cut from black card, the cheapest way of recording a person's appearance in the days before photography, which came to be called “silhouettes”.

There you go. Because a silhouette emphasises the outline, the word has also been used in fields such fashion, fitness, and some areas of art to describe the shape of a person's body or the shape created by wearing clothing of a particular style or period.

The family name, Silhouette, turns out to be a Frenchified form of a Basque surname; Arnaud de Silhouette, the finance minister's father, was from Biarritz in the French Basque country; the southern Basque form of the name would be Zuloeta or Zulueta, which contains the suffix -eta "abundance of" and zulo "hole" (possibly here meaning "cave").

It’s amazing what you can find out on the internet! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!