When you think of street art, you might think about Banksy, the elusive and subversive artist who’s been putting art in public places since the 1990s. Or you might think about murals painted on the sides of buildings.
Can you be a street artist? Yes, if you enjoy a type of art whose name I learned this week: eyebombing. This consists of sticking googly eyes on things in public places, like this:
You might argue that this is low art or childish humor. And you might be right. But eyebombing has its following. There’s an eyebombing.com site that defines the art form, whose practitioners (per the site) “challenge their surroundings to view the world differently” and who “use humour and wit to reach its audience, not vandalism or provocation.” Rather than being about the artist’s ego, they say, eyebombing “as urban art is only about the message itself.” (No street artists are being subtweeted here, I’m sure.)
There are rules, like “Only images of inanimate objects with wiggle eyes – NOT stickers” and “Only images taken in the public space.” If you want to participate, the GooglyEyes Foundation will send you some free googly eyes.
I liked the word eyebombing for a couple of reasons. One is simply the idea that someone came up with a word (not to mention a manifesto) for putting googly eyes on things. The other is that it’s an extension of the -bombing morpheme that we’ve seen elsewhere:
- photobombing: “To move into the frame of a photograph as it is being taken as a joke or prank.”
- yarnbombing: “The surreptitious or unauthorized placement of knitted objects on statues, posts, and other public structures.”
- zoombombing: “The unwanted, disruptive intrusion, generally by Internet trolls, into a video-conference call.” (A Friday word from April for me)
The -bombing particle is productive, as the linguists say. Can’t wait to see where it shows up next.
BTW, I learned this word from Erin McKean’s email newsletter Things Learned While Looking Up Other Things, which I recommend.
For origins this week, the name of a fruit (that is, botanical fruit, culinary vegetable), namely, our friend the avocado. I’ve known for a long time that we ultimately get this term from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. They had a word ahuactl for the fruit, which many people like to point out also seems to be (or have been) the word for “testicle.”
Nahuatl has some consonant clusters like -tl that are tricky for speakers of European languages (including us). So the Spanish transformed ahuactl into a word that they could pronounce more easily. One version was the word aguacate, which is what you’ll hear in places like Mexico today.
What I hadn’t known is that there was a kind of loss of translation along the way. When the word first appeared in English in the late 1600s, it was as avogato pear. Somewhere along the line, the original word ahuactl got mixed up with the Spanish word abogado, which means “lawyer.” (In Spanish, the letter b sounds a lot like a v.)
I can’t determine whether this mixup happened in Spanish or in the jump to English. Either way, somehow the name for the alligator pear, as it was also sometimes called, got confused with the word for a legal advocate. This might be another example of folk etymology, where a foreign word (in this case, from Nahuatl) is shaped into something less exotic.
While we’re on the topic of avocados, here’s something that isn’t about the word: avocados are giant seeds, and one theory is that they evolved to be eaten and then dispersed by “megafauna” that lived in Mesoamerica in prehistoric times. Interesting to think that there were animals clomping around in Mexico at one point that would eat avocados whole.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.