"Come now, mon, if you seh time be mos' precious." - Nuromancer, by William Gibson

Grotesque, n. and a. - 1. a.A.1.a A kind of decorative painting or sculpture, consisting of representations of portions of human and animal forms, fantastically combined and interwoven with foliage and flowers.

"[Orig. a. early mod.F. crotesque n. fem., an adaptation (by assimilation to OF. crote = It. grotta) of It. grottesca ‘a kinde of rugged vnpolished painters worke, anticke worke’ (Florio 1598), ‘anticke or landskip worke of Painters’ (Florio 1611), an elliptical use (= opera or pittura grottesca) of the fem. of grottesco adj. f. grotta: see grotto and -esque. (Cf. Sp., Pg. grutesco, an alteration of the It. word after Sp. Pg. gruta = It. grotta.) It is remarkable that Florio in both his Dicts. (1598 and 1611) has crotesca as an It. word, explained as ‘antique, fretted, or carued worke’; this, if genuine, would seem to be a readoption from Fr. Before the end of the 16th c. the Fr. word was occasionally spelt grotesque, after the original It; this form was adopted into Eng. about 1640, and has been the prevailing form ever since. But early in the 17th c. writers acquainted with It. had introduced the masc. form of the adj., crotesco, which occurs as late as 1646; the more usual It. form grotesco appears as Eng. first in the 1632 edition of Florio's transl. of Montaigne, and did not become obsolete until the 18th c. --- The etymological sense of grottesca would be ‘painting appropriate to grottos’. The special sense is commonly explained by the statement that grotte, ‘grottoes’, was the popular name in Rome for the chambers of ancient buildings which had been revealed by excavations, and which contained those mural paintings that were the typical examples of ‘grotesque’. (See Voc. della Crusca, s.v. Grotta, §iv.) Although this seems to be only a late conjecture, without any actual evidence, it appears to be intrinsically plausible.] " - O.E.D.

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• ム ブティの狩猟民における「動物残虐趣味」について
• サイボーグ都市
• 愛の技法、ま たは愛するという技
• 奇妙な果実
• 生と死の儀礼における 分類の次元
• ショロイツクイントゥリと わたしたち
• 看護人類学講義
  

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