ekistics and ectomorphic and eglomise and eidetic

I came across each one of these four words when I was reviewing pages 391-410 of the Collegiate. I knew I couldn't just rush through them without pausing and pointing out beautiful things about them. Join me, if you will.

Ectomorphic

Ectomorphic, according to the Collegiate, is "of or relating to the component in W.H. Sheldon's (1898-1977) classification of body types that measures the body's degree of slenderness, angularity, and fragility." The ectomorph has a lean body-build, while the mesomorph and endomorph have, respectively, a "middle" and a round body-build. Though a few Sheldon quotations appear in the OED, we need to go further than that. One should understand the significance of this Pawtuxet (RI)-bred, Brown University educated, Harvard-trained psychologist who tried to put his theory, that difference in bodily types reflected difference in personality structures, on an objective biological basis. Dr. Edward Monnelly, an expert in Sheldon's work, described how Sheldon labored for years to develop indices to give objectification to "somatype" (body-type research). The three he came up with were maximal height, the so-called "ponderal index at maximal weight," and the trunk index. By examining detailed photographs of people, Sheldon tried to identify the bodily type and the corresponding personality type of individuals. Though his work was considered groundbreaking in the 1930s and 1940s, the advent of Freudian psychology completely undid Sheldon's biological theories, and seemingly relegated his work to the ash heap by the time he died in 1977. Yet, he has bequeathed the three words to us and, if I am right, his last words have not been spoken. In our age, when the biological basis of everything is seemingly being scrutinized, the time seems ripe for a rediscovery of Sheldon.

Eglomise

Eglomise couldn't take us to a world further removed from that of Sheldon. Eglomise (with accent on the final "e") is the technique of gilding or painting pictures on the back of glass and is named after Jean-Baptiste Glomy (d. 1786), who rediscovered rather than invented the technique. The technique, also known as verre eglomise, has been in decline since the Victorian days, but through the dedicated word of Frances Binnington, has achieved somewhat of a revival in our day. Whenever you see those neat little colored horses within a glass crystal, you have an example of eglomise. In her historical work on the history of verre eglomise, Binnington has pointed out that the Italians long had a monopoly on glass-making but with the founding of the Vauxhall glassorks in England in 1633, the technique came into the English-speaking world. Sheets of silvered glass in the 18th century were enormously expensive, and were made more attractive by border panels of verre eglomise. Because of its popularity with English nobility, verre eglomise began to appeal to the prosperous settlers of the New World. Panels of glass were incorporated into furniture and clocks, with verre eglomise design. The American Federal Style mirrors, which emerged in the 19th century, were the popular outlet for this technique. Tastes, however, changed with the Civil War, and until the recent revival of the art, eglomise had fallen into desuetude. I hope the revivial continues.

Eidetic

Eidetic, usually seen in the phrase "eidetic memory" or "eidetic image" takes us yet to another aspect of human activity--the power of the mind to recall what it has seen. The OED defines eidetic as follows: "Applied to an image that revives an optical impression with hallucinatory clearness." Psychologist Gordon Allport coined the term in 1924. Allport (1899-1967) is more famous in the history of psychology for his "trait theory," one of the more interesting aspects of which was his conclusion that no fewer than 17,953 English language words, or more than 4% of Webster's 1925 dictionary, were "trait terms" that could be used to distinguish the behavior of humans from each other. His 1924 quotation was: "The true eidetic image, in distintion to the visual memory-image, revives the earlier optical impression when the eyes are closed, in a dark room, and sometimes when the eyes are open, with hallucinatory clearness." When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, people talked more about "photographic memory" than "eidetic memory," but now the latter seems to be the rage. Debate rages on whether people have it, whether children have a greater eidetic capability than adults and whether it can be developed or whether it just "is." Feats of memorization and recall have always been fascinating to me. I don't think we have heard the last word on eidetic images.

Ekistics

And yet one more exciting world is opened through ekistics, a term coined from the Greek word for "settle" or "colonize," in 1958 by C.A. Doxiadis, himself a Greek person, to mean "a science dealing with human settlements, drawing on the resarch of professionals in architecture, engineering, city planning and sociology." With great optimism, Doxiadis said in 1968: "Only the new science of ekistics can embrace the whole study of human settlements and their planning, in all their manifold elements." The Ekistician, as s/he is called, supposedly has the most interdisciplinary approach to the issue of human settlements. The first issue of the Journal Ekistics was published in 1955, and there are extensive references to it online. The concept grew out of a 1954 U.N. International Symposium on Housing and Community Planning. What is interesting to me is not necessarily the interdisicplinary approach to settlement, which is eminently reasonable, but whether the term ekistics is still in use and whether current urban planners declare their indebtedness to Doxiadis in their work. The latest buzz word in the planning of human settlement, however, is "sustainability." That word is a "second generation" environmental word, indebted to the "first generation" of the American environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, but refined by the harsh realities of American economics in the 1990s and 2000s. Where does that leave ekistics? Maybe at the UN, where we haven't paid our dues for a long time. But I wonder if the fields of ekistics and sustainabilty living/housing are all coming out of the same understanding of life: an indeterdisciplinary and resource-conscious concept of planning.

I hope you enjoyed our interdisciplinary tour. Now, once again, let's return to The List.

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