piste and plaice and planchette

I know I am moving with the speed of glacial encroachment, but these words really deserve a close look. Again, they have no relationsihp to each other, but each has its own story to tell.

Piste (peest) (From Latin pistus, meaning trampled, pounded)

The Collegiate, which has to make all things simple because it is such a small dictionary (about 1500 pages), only defines piste as "TRAIL, esp a downhill skiing trail." Were you to stop there or, like the State of Kansas, just drive through without stopping except for necessities, you would miss a lot. The Century, composed before skiing became a craze, defines it only as "the track or footprint of a horseman on the ground he goes over." Finally, the OED develops the definition nicely, with separate paragraphs for the skiing and horse trail signfications. But, it also includes a paragraph about the sport of fencing. In that agonistic encounter a piste is a "specially marked-out field of play." Though its use in fencing goes back to just after WWI, a 1963 guide to the sport has this: "The area within which fencers may move is restricted. This area is called the 'Piste.'" More specifically, a piste is the fencing area, approximately 14 meters long by 2 meters wide. Fencers take up positions four meters from each other, and there is a hash mark within two meters from the end of the piste, to warn participants that they are nearing the end of the playing field. Of course, once you get into a new field, you find that there is a fascinating history to it, replete with big personalities and academies and terminology galore. This web site will get you started on some of the "big names" in the history of fencing.

The "skiing" sense of piste as a track of compacted snow only goes back to the late 1920s, and was first attested in Hemingways' Farewell to Arms: "Tobogganing..requires a special piste. You could not toboggan into the streets of Montreau." The "ancient" usage of the word, however, is in relationship to horses. Chambers' famous Encyclopedia from the mid 18th century has this: "Piste, in the manage, the track or tread, which a horse makes upon the ground he goes over...The piste of a horse may be either single, or double." I did a double take for a second on that word manage, because I didn't recognize the usage as a noun. In brief the verb manage is attested slightly before the noun (both are mid 16th century), and both have to do with the care of horses. Two meanings of the noun are: (1) the movements in which a horse is trained in a riding school; spec. a short gallop at full speed; or (2) the art of training, handling and directing of a horse. Thus, we see that our Chambers' use of manage is the first one--the "movements" of the horse. I would love to linger here, as I have a close friend who loves horses, but I must move on.

Plaice

I am embarrassed to admit that I didn't know this word, but it is "a well-known European flat-fish, Pleuronectes platessa, used as food" and very common in England. I suppose that being "well-known" has to do with your location. I am sure that Aphrahat was well-known among 5th Century Christians in the East, but that doesn't mean that anyone knows him today. So, a plaice is a very distinctive-looking fish, with brown skin, red dots and a bony ridge behind the eyes. What makes this fish so fascinating, however, is that it is asymetrically made. It has both eyes on the right side of its body. Why? Don't really know, but it seems to spend a lot of its time, when not being eaten as fish and chips (which makes it so well-known, I suppose), being partially buried in the sea bottom. Maybe it spent so much time "half-buried," that its evolutionary mechanism decided to "move" one of the eyes to the other side. It would sort of be like this: "Well, if you continue to bury one of your eyes in the sand, I guess we will have to move it to where it is useful." Do you have a better explanation?

Planchette

Let's finish with this intriguing item. A planchette is, most familiarly to us (I could say it is "well-known") as the Ouija board. It originated in the 1850s in upstate New York in connection with the Spiritualist movement beginning around that time. It was an instrument by which the "dear departed" would communicate with the living, and it consisted of a small board, generally heart-shaped, supported by two castors and a vertical pencil which, when one or more people rested their fingers lightly on it, was said to trace lines or letters without conscious direction or effort of the participants. A history of the planchette is here. Historical pictures of planchettes are here. Interesting to me is the historical evolution of ideas that not only led to the planchette being developed but also led to its obsolescence.

At first, the Fox sisters in Hydesville NY said that they could effect communication with the dead through various knockings or tilting of tables. The medium and sitters would sit together at a table until it would begin to tilt and turn (this may have been the origin of the phrase "turn the tables") and then knock on the floor in ways that the mediums would interpret.

But what do you do if you don't have mediums present? Well, you invent a board on casters (originally a "pencil basket) with an opening in one part for a pencil, through which the spirit would "trace" answers to questions. Many early boards were heart-shaped, and early advice written on the bottom of the boards encouraged men and women to use it together. No doubt this was used primarily as a way to "divine" whether true love existed between people. But, as time went on, the writing method was perceived to be inefficient and often not clear. You had to exercise a lot of patience, you never really knew if your own hands were moving the board, you might not be able to read the messages scrawled by the pencil. Though still having a purpose, the boards increasingly were replaced by individual mediums, who would go into a "trance" and then report on the contact with the dead. Thus, we can, in a sense, trace the history of this kind of contact with the spirit realm by understanding the American quest for efficiency. And Frederick Winslow Taylor thought he was the great innovator! (Oops--not a "well-known" name? Look him up!).

This is all I can do today. Thanks for joining me.

1891