Picspam

[alixtii]

One of the reasons I love Colgate is that I still have remote access to their server, which mostly I just use to access the OED and JSTOR and stuff lik that. But it occurred to me to try to post the Summer picspam I wanted to post in a comment on the picspam post here and it occurred to me to try via Colgate. Which worked, and am now using the same process to crosspost here.

Comments

Re: Summer Glau and the OED

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

The OED tells us that a claim for "Spackle" as a proprietary name was made to the U.S. Patent Office, with its Official Gazette reading, "A surfacing compound for filling imperfection so as to bring up to a smooth and level surface areas that are to be painted or decorated. Claims use since Aug. 1, 1927." It's own etymology suggests you compare it to transitive "sparkle" as well as the German spatchel which it defines as "putty knife, mastic, filler."

The OED's first citation for the word's use as a verb (transitive, "to repair or fill with Spackle ") is in 1940, from an artists' handbook: "Spackling or Sparkling (probably from the German spachteln, to putty up). The rectifying of a defect in plaster or a mural painting by digging out the defective spot and filling it in with a plastic gesso, plaster of Paris, Keene's cement, or other similar material."

The first citation the OED gives "sparkle" to mean "To overlay or daub with cement or the like" is from Practical Agriculture in 1805: "Pan-tiling, with small-sized deal lath, and sparkled within side." And in 1787, we have the gerund: "Sparkling. Claying between the spars to cover the thatch of cottages." "Sparkling" to mean what we now mean by "spackling" is certainly not a recent usage, with less coherent (and thus potentially not relevant) examples going back to the early fifteenth century.