Hello,
This week’s word is pareidolia (pronunciation here, para-dole-e-ah). I’ve no idea where I picked it up but it was in my Very Long List of Words to Investigate and caught my eye today.
Let’s define it first before getting into the word history. Pareidolia is the tendency to see a pattern or image of something that does not exist and is part of the reason why you won’t find any wallpaper in my home. The rest of the reason is that scraping off old wallpaper formed too much of my childhood. I decided long ago that painting a wall is simpler in the long run.
Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s every house was emblazoned with wallpaper everywhere. Some patterns were delightful, but others were frankly eye-watering and if you had a good imagination then seeing patterns within the patterns, usually when you should be dropping off to sleep, was a regular issue. The same thing arises when you spot shapes in the clouds, the man in the moon, or create a scene from stains on a table. Human beings have a gift when it comes to patterns and pareidolia is part of that skill.
Pareidolia arrived in English fairly recently, in 1962, but the idea has been around for centuries. We borrowed it from the German word Paredolie which had been used in scientific papers there since the mid 1800s. The word was formed from two Greek words and a German ending –
- para (beside, alongside, instead of) which you see in paramedic, for example
- eidolon (image, form, shape)
- -ie (German suffix)
The concept of paredolia, if not the word, was widely known to artists during the Renaissance period. Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted human portraits using collections of fruits and vegetables to form the likeness, for example. Leonardo da Vinci wrote “if you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills.”
Da Vinci would have loved wallpaper, but Oscar Wilde is on my side of the debate. His reported last words, uttered on the 30th of November 1900 in Paris, were “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
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