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Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: odalisque.
A story in the January 2014 Vanity Fair magazine, headlined “Frieze until numbness sets in,” and written by A.A. Gill, focused on the Fall 2013 London Art Fair. What caught my eye, however, was one of the stunning images (bottom left photo at the top of the article).
Here is what Gill had to say about it:
There is a woman lying on her side. She’s in the corridor — naked, an odalisque, the size of a hefty hippo. She is made of fiberglass. And she’s pregnant — except she not quite pregnant. Her gravid stomach has been inverted, so instead of coming out it goes in, making a smooth white recess.
I knew the word odalisque meant a female slave and had always assumed the origins were Greek. A quick consult with my etymological dictionary, however, informed me that the word was originally Turkish, odaliq, meaning “maidservant.” This in turn comes from odah meaning “room in a harem.”
It’s an interesting and evocative word. And an interesting and evocative statue.
