Terracotta

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Dr. Goodword
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Terracotta

Postby Dr. Goodword » Wed Sep 08, 2021 8:46 pm

• terracotta •


Pronunciation: ter-rê-kah-dê • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, adjective

Meaning: 1. (Noun, mass) A brownish red clay used in making tiles, flower pots, bowls and plates, and statuary. 2. (Noun, countable) Artistic ceramics made of this clay. 3. (Adjective) Brownish red color.

Notes: Here is a word more familiar, no doubt, to our European readers than Americans. Terracotta is a favorite material for roof tiles in Europe and floor tiles as well in Spain and Mexico. It is a lexical orphan.
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In Play: As a mass noun, the sense of today's word is captured in such claims as: "Jerrod loved terracotta so much his house had a terracotta roof and floors." But this word also may be pluralized when referring to statuary: "The terracotta army of Qin Shi Huang from 210-209 BC outside Xi'an Shaanxi, China, comprises life-size terracottas of 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots, and 670 horses."

Word History: Today's Good Word was lent to English by Italian, who inherited it from Latin terracocta "baked earth". Terra "earth, land" was passed down to Latin from PIE ters- "(to) dry", which ended up in English as thirst. Somewhere between PIE and Latin people thought of dry land opposing wet seas. We see it underlying a host of English borrowings from Latin or its Romance offspring like territory, terrestrial, terrace. Cocta is the feminine of coctus, the past participle of coquere "to cook, bake, roast; to ripen, mature". Latin got coquere from PIE pekw-/pokw- "to cook; to ripen", after converting the [p] to [k] by assimilation of the second consonant. Precocious was borrowed from Latin praecox, praecocis "maturing early", from prae- "before" + coquere. Assimilation did not occur elsewhere in Indo-European languages, so we find Greek peptein "to cook; ripen; digest", source of the English borrowing dyspeptic. In Russian it turns up as peku "I bake". (Now William Hupy, a most prolific contributor, deserves a round of e-applause for suggesting yet another surprisingly Good Word.)
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Philip Hudson
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Re: Terracotta

Postby Philip Hudson » Thu Sep 09, 2021 9:43 pm

The very ground one walks on becomes terracotta during summer in the hinterlands. Here's to a refreshing, cool fall [autumn].
It is dark at night, but the Sun will come up and then we can see.

bbeeton
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Re: Terracotta

Postby bbeeton » Fri Sep 10, 2021 11:31 am

Terracotta is, or has been, widely used as a decorative material for friezes and other ornamentation on buildings. There's a quite striking terracotta frieze wrapped around the Pension Building (now the National Building Museum) in Washington, DC. And it's all over Chicago. If you visit that city, be sure to look up!


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