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Posted by Mark Liberman

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Feargus O'Sullivan. "Trump’s Gilded Design Style May Be Gaudy. But Don’t Call it ‘Rococo.’", Bloomberg 7/3/2025:

The US president’s taste for gilded decor is often dismissed with comparisons to an ornate European style of the 18th century. But the real Rococo deserves a second look.

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating. The design style of his opulent Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, was ported to the Oval Office: Gilded figurines, plump cherubs and decorative appliques were liberally applied to walls and other surfaces in the presidential workspace.

As with the tariffs and travel bans, the renovations of the second term have been more aggressive than those seen during the first. One term used repeatedly to describe this excess of gilt and glitter is Rococo — an elaborate design style associated with pre-revolutionary France. In the New York Times, Emily Keegin called the new Oval Office a “gilded rococo hellscape,” while Kate Wagner of the blog McMansion Hell dubbed the presidential look “Regional Car Dealership Rococo.” The R word — sometimes uppercased, sometimes not — has also been invoked to describe Trumpian decor in the Washington Post, the LA Times and Vanity Fair.

For a linguistic angle on the stylistic issues, see "Elaborate interiours and plain language", 6/3/2016, along with the links therein.

But today I'm wondering about something else. Never mind for now whether rococo is a fair description of Donald Trump's taste in interior decoration — where does the word come from?

The OED dates rococo to 1830, with the gloss

Designating furniture, architecture, etc., characterized by an elaborately ornamental late baroque style of decoration prevalent in 18th-cent. Europe, with asymmetrical patterns involving intricate motifs and scrollwork.

and offers two different etymological ideas. The first one is

< French rococo (adjective) old-fashioned, outmoded (1825), designating furniture, architecture, etc., characterized by an elaborately ornamental late baroque style of decoration prevalent in 18th-cent. Europe (1828), (noun) denoting an 18th-cent. style of art, architecture, and decoration (1828), irregularly < roc- (in rocaille, with reference to the rocaille ornaments frequently featuring in 18th-cent. artwork) + ‑o suffix, with reduplication of the second syllable; Italian barocco baroque adj. may have acted as a partial model for the French word. The style in question came to be perceived as needlessly elaborate and old-fashioned by early 19th-cent. French writers and critics; hence the mildly depreciative uses of the word.

But then there's also

For an alternative etymological suggestion, which derives the French word < roc- (in  rocaille n.) + coq- (in coquillage shellwork, transferred use of coquillage mollusc, shellfish + ‑o suffix, see C. T. Carr in Forum for Mod. Lang. Stud. vol. 1 (1965) 266–81.

[Wiktionary tells us that rocaille is "Artificial rockwork made of rough stones and cement, as for gardens", or "The rococo system of scroll ornament, based in part on the forms of shells and water-worn rocks", or "A seed bead".]

The OED's reference is to Carr, Charles T., "TWO WORDS IN ART HISTORY II. ROCOCO", Forum for Modern Language Studies, Oxford University Press, 1965. And Carr offers historical evidence that undermines Feargus O'Sullivan's attempt to defend "rococo" interior design from Donald Trump's alleged misuse.

O'Sullivan argues that rococo style "dances lightly on a tightrope over a boiling cauldron of vulgarity, but has the grace to never fall in". But Carr 1965 starts like this:

"The jumble called rococo is, in general, detestable. A parrot seems to have invented the word, and the thing is worthy of his tawdriness and his incoherence." These words of Leigh Hunt, written in 1866 after a visit to an exhibition of French art at Gore House, reflect both the disgust of the majority of nineteenth-century art critics at Rococo art and their bewilderment over this curious French word which Stendahl in 1829 had already called "un mot bas".

Carr goes on to note that

Vulgar though the word may originally have been, it had already been given official recognition by 1842 when it was included in the supplement to the 1835 edition of the Dictionnaire de I'Académie, where two meanings are distinguished :

Il se dit trivialement du genre d'ornements, de style et de dessin, qui appartient a l'école du regne de Louis XV et du commencement de Louis XVI.

II se dit, en général, de tout qui est vieux et hors de mode, dans les arts, la littérature, le costume, les manières, etc.

And piling on the negative citations:

The first known occurrence of the word in a literary source is to be found in two passages in Stendahl's Promenades dans Borne (1829), both of which refer to Bernini's sculptures in St Peter's, the first in a section dated 24 Nov. 1827 and the second 26 March 1828 :

(i) Le rococo, mis a la mode par le Bernin, est surtout exécrable dans le genre colossal.

(ii) Me permettra-t-on un mot bas? Le Bernin fut le père de ce mauvais goût designé dans les ateliers sous le nom un peu vulgaire de rococo. Le genre perruque triompha en France sous Louis XV et Louis XVI.

So by 1827, trendy writers like Stendhal already used the word rococo to characterize a style they saw as exhibiting as execrable bad taste, clearly (in their opinion) failing to avoid falling into the "boiling cauldron of vulgarity". And by 1847, the Académie Française agreed.

You're entitled to form your own opinions about the style, of course — and even to (try to) replace the negative associations of the word rococo with positive ones, as Feargus O'Sullivan has done. But from a purely lexicographical point of view, those who use rococo in a derogatory way have got history of their side.

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Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69760&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=unknown-language-20

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From Rebecca Turner in Seattle:

Rebecca writes:

Attached is a sticker I found on a lamp post outside of a gay bar in my neighborhood, written in an unidentified script or scripts. In the same location some months ago I saw a similar picture with a message written in sitelen pona (one of the toki pona scripts), so I suspect it may be a conlangscript of some sort.

My nerdiest friends have collectively failed to identify the writing system involved. Particularly vexing are the characters that look like thetas and epsilons in the top half of the sticker (the script used in the bottom half looks a bit more angular and may be a different writing system entirely?). Near guesses include Shavian and Quikscript.

Some of my acquaintances, as stumped as I am, pointed towards Language Log as a potential source of clarification. If you are also interested, I'd appreciate a post so we can figure out the script (and ideally the message) used here.

Go to it, Language Loggers!

Selected readings

• "Unknown language #19"
• "Sapir-Whorf redux" (5/15/25) — speaking to the aims of the designers and adherents of sitelen pona and toki pona
• "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25)
• "Create a language, go to jail" (12/15/11)
• "Yay Newfriend again" (4/22/24)

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Posted by Victor Mair

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We've met Julesy before:  "The conundrum of singing with tones" (5/30/25).  She has a Ph.D. in linguistics and knows how to communicate her scientific knowledge of Mandarin to intelligent laypersons.  Here she is again, this time telling us some very important things about the differences between words and characters:

During the first half of her presentation, Julesy made me feel that she was preaching the gospel according to VHM (difference between zì 字 ["character"] and cí 詞 ["word"]), spacing / parsing, etc., but in the second half she got into some statistical surveys and the notion of "collocations" that were "lexically significant", and salvaged some unique properties of sinographs while yet assimilating them into modern concepts of linguistics.

What a breath of fresh air to have someone with her expertise and exactitude explaining how Sinitic languages work.  Until the recent past, most of what was purveyed about "Chinese" was either too technical and theoretical for the non-specialist to grasp or was a mishmash of nonsense gobbledygook.

Keep 'em comin', Julesy!

Selected readings

• "Lexemes and word forms" (12/6/04)
• "Don't say 'lexeme' or we'll break your legs" (3/21/04)
• "Word, syllable, morpheme, phoneme" (10/6/18)
• "The concept of word in Sinitic" (10/3/18)
• "Words in Vietnamese" (10/2/18)
• "Diacriticless Vietnamese on a sign in San Francisco" (9/30/18)
• "Words in Mandarin: twin kle twin kle lit tle star" (8/14/12)

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Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69740&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-lot-more-cut-and-dry

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69740

Over the years, we've taken many self-appointed usage authorities to task for ignorant pronouncements presenting their personal reactions as facts of the standard language, or even as logical necessities. But everybody has similar reactions, and the point is not to deny the existence of usage conventions, or to pretend that you don't ever perceive something as a violation.  As in all areas of cultural judgment, however, it's a good idea to examine the foundations of your responses, because sometimes it turns out that you're wrong about the facts or the logic.

I recently documented an experience of that general kind in a June 20 post "Incredulous, incredible, whatever…", where a usage that I perceived as a malapropism turned out to go back to Shakespeare.

This morning's example is even more surprising to me — "cut and dry" where I expected "cut and dried".

In an online video clip, Julia Jacobs explains the recent Sean Combs verdict — "Sean Combs Acquitted of Sex Trafficking but Found Guilty on Lesser Charges", NYT 7/2/2025:

Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul who built a business empire around his personal brand, was convicted on Wednesday of transporting prostitutes to participate in his drug-fueled sex marathons, but acquitted of racketeering and sex trafficking, the most serious charges against him. Julia Jacobs, a New York Times culture reporter, explains the verdict.

At about 1:12 in the clip, she says [emphasis added]:

That charge is a lot more cut and dry, in that it has to do
with transporting
people over state lines
for the purposes of prostitution.

That triggered my usage alarm: "Gee, that's an interesting but illogical development. Dry as a participle parallel to cut? " (Much later in the process, I realized that cut and dry can be parallel adjectives…)

I had enough sense to look around, and found plenty of current examples. In fact, in the COCA corpus,  there are 180 instances of "cut and dried" and 183 instances of "cut and dry".

The OED traces the modifier "cut and dry" back to 1643:

The "cut and dried" alternative has OED citations for the tobacco-leaf sense back to 1680, and for the "decided, settled, or prepared" sense back to 1664.  So the two version have been in (free?) variation since the beginning — although I had managed to remain totally unaware of the "cut and dry" version until today.

In my defense, Google Ngrams shows that "cut and dried" had a more than 95% share in the 1940s, falling to around 2/3 in recent years:

(Though maybe that tells us more about proofreader than writers?)

Update — Based on the small sample in the comments, some people have always thought it was "cut and dry", others have always thought it was "cut and dried", and nobody (?) was ever aware of the alternative…

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