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by kgwgk 3026 days ago
> Collage (from the French: coller, "to glue";[1] French pronunciation: ​[kɔ.laʒ]) is a technique of an art production, primarily used in the visual arts, where the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.

:-)

3 comments

Collage is good, but I hear that if you really want to join the economic elite, you have to get into decoupage.

    Fitting into that decoupage
    Was a torturing massage
    To the pain camouflage
    I gobbled a hefty sausage
    That prospect was still better envisage
    Than college, lectures about collage
Interestingly college comes from the eponymous word in 14th century French [1] and the French term from Latin collegium.

On the other hand, collage comes from coller in Old French and this one from kolla in Ancient Greek.

It's a strange quirk of history that two such simillar words have such different origins.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/college

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/collage

And to add some confusion, the French word “collège” is roughly the equivalent of middle school…
This rabbit hole goes deep... In Castillian Spanish "colegio" is often used for primary school, but sometimes as a placeholder name for any kind of compulsory education from preschool up to high school (sometimes in the shortened form "cole").
While in Spanish colegio is the equivalent of high school.
It can also be primary school. In Spain, high school is instituto.

And escuela, like ecole in French or school in English, can refer to primary school or higher education institutions.

And in German, "gymnasium" is high school.

(No wonder the Germans do so well in sports!)

/jk

In Poland "gimnazjum" used to be middle school until recently when the 8 year primary school system was restored because of heavy critique.
college (n.)

late 14c., "organized association of persons invested with certain powers and rights or engaged in some common duty or pursuit,"

From where expressions like "electoral college" come from

I wonder if there's a linguistic term for having a broad term become a more specific one (in some occasions like this)

Another interesting term is Faculty, which meant "branch of knowledge" then finally became "the group of teachers/professors in an educational institution" https://www.etymonline.com/word/faculty

> I wonder if there's a linguistic term for having a broad term become a more specific one (in some occasions like this)

Almost certainly there is, but if I ever learned it I can't bring it to mind.

This would be an example of the more general phenomenon "semantic shift", though.

Edit: a quick Google search suggests that this particular shift is known fairly intuitively as "semantic narrowing".

Interesting, in the UK (in fact, most of the world except the USA, I think) the term Faculty still means a branch of a university dealing with a particular subject group, like 'Faculty of Arts' or 'Faculty of Science' with departments arranged under the Faculties. It's always odd to me seeing e.g. the teachers at a kids school referred to as 'Faculty' on American TV shows!
To be fair, studying collage did famously turn out pretty well, and economically too, for some young people like Picasso and Braque :) http://www.ideelart.com/module/csblog/post/159-1-cubist-coll...