I confess I’m not impressed with Jackson Arn’s New Yorker essay on the color red (Feb. 10, 2025; archived); it’s classic thumb-sucking, pseudo-eloquent philosophizing with infinite regard for the writer’s feelings about stuff and minimal interest in, you know, facts. It’s the kind of piece that uses “we” to make the author’s whims seem like universals (“unable to explain our response directly, we are reduced to saying…”). But it did introduce me to an interesting word:
To start with, “Girl with the Red Hat” was not intended to be a portrait of any specific person; it’s an image of a type. Art historians will tell you that this genre, popular in the Dutch Golden Age, is called tronie—you’re supposed to be looking not at an individual old man but at old man-ness, not at a soldier but at soldier-ness, not at a girl but at girl-ness.
I wasn’t familiar with the word “tronie,” and it’s not in the OED; Wiktionary has it, though: “(art) A kind of painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression.” We got it from Dutch, where it means:
1. (informal, Netherlands, slightly derogatory) a face, especially one with an unpleasant or unprepossessing look or expression
2. (art) a depiction of a person’s face with an expressive, often unflattering expression; a tronie.
Etymology
From Middle Dutch troenie, from Middle French trogne, possibly ultimately from a Celtic language, for which a Gaulish *trugna has been proposed (compare Welsh trwyn [‘nose, snout’]).
I’ll probably never have occasion to use the word, but at least I know it.
WP has quite an informative article on it (with pictures for us non-verbal types):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tronie
Yes, informative indeed, thanks:
I propose “Fizzog Art” for the English translation.
[I see that Wiktionary calls fizzog “slang, dated.” Cheek!]
The English WP article seems identical to the German one. THe Dutch one is surprisingly brief.
It’s odd that they date the start of the genre so late, especially since they mention Leonardo as an inspiration. Early Netherlandish painters like Hugo van der Goes and Quinten Metsys are clear precursors, and of course Bosch, though he went off his own wild way.
(Speaking of early renaissance art, this summer the Château de Chantilly is showing the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, for the first time in 40 years, plus all of his other books of hours, together at the same place for the first time in 600 years.)
Another odd and antique Dutch term I came across somewhere that has found a place in English-language art theory is “reflexy-const”, apparently “the art of reverberated light, which assigns to bounced-off sunlight the function of bringing scenery to life”. Ah, so you mean “reflections and highlights”… Strange, really, the retention of “konst” rather than “kunst”, plus it’s a bit like referring to oil painting as “olieverfschilderij”.
I’ve never been a particular fan of tronie artworks, in whatever media. The Dutch masters produced a lot of them as paintings, but Royal Doulton face mugs are a very similar stylistic genre, and I generally find them hideous.* Moreover, that particular Vermeer looks like one of his weakest paintings (which probably contributed to the dubiousness among experts about whether it was actually from his hand).
* Neither I nor anyone else would take my grandmother’s after her death.
You’re not joking about Arn’s article. Getting on for unreadable.
“Anthropologists tell us that most of the world’s cultures had a word for red before they got around to blue or green or yellow, which helps explain why ..”
Faugh. “I vaguely recall something like this about colours in various cultures so I’ll bung it in and attribute it to ‘anthropologists’ so I seem deep,”
And it gets no better.
Your assessment of Jackson Arn’s essay did not make it sound inviting, but I read it anyway.
I agree with your statement about Arn’s use of ‘we’. I wonder what the word for this device is. Perhaps the Ancient Greeks named it. I see the device in many forms: ‘everyone knows’, ‘everyone hates’, ‘every kid wants’, ‘the question on everyone’s lips’, ‘why we all love’. The implied universality of whatever is being discussed is often immediately negated by my own experiences or opinions, or by those of people I know.
Arn is, occasionally, less all-encompassing. He writes: ‘The difficulty, as you may once have mused between puffs …’ However, I don’t know whether the ‘may’ has scope over the musing or the puffing. It almost goes without saying that neither applies to me.
Arn thinks that it is the redness of the hat that has made people title Vermeer’s work ‘Girl with the Red Hat’. However, to me, as someone unfamiliar with 17th-century Dutch headgear, the hat is the craziest part of the painting and so makes the title. (By the way, the only other Vermeer I know, ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, appears quite similar in the way that the subject, a girl, is looking at the artist.)
I also note that it is hard to make much sense of some of Arn’s assertions without actually seeing the works.
I also note that it is hard to make much sense of some of Arn’s assertions without actually seeing the works.
Yeah, words are attention hoggers. That’s why they’re unreliable substitutes for works. But they are cheaper.
Mir hilft der Geist! Auf einmal seh’ ich Rat
Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die TAT!
The ‘everyone’ device is kin to the ‘many people’ one, used by a president of a certain large country.
Im Anfang war die Tat!
Eine gute Faustregel.
Mephistopheles gets the best lines, though (much as he gets the best tunes.)
Marlowe’s version gets in some good ones, too IIRC. Our Kit is not to be blamed for not being Goethe. Few people are. Gey few, an’ they’re a’ deid.
Why do Germans get fists when we just have to make do with thumbs? Is it just a matter of greater intellectual capacity, perhaps? Or are more sinister forces at work?
—Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”—
Even after reflection, if you want it you have to just go for it. I was never good at seduction. I broke a lot of eggs but the chickens didn’t mind.
Think first, fight afterwards – the soldier’s art …
https://allpoetry.com/Childe-Roland-To-The-Dark-Tower-Came
Yeah, thinking is so aggressive. To be a man.
I associate the “we” device to annoying New York Times or Conde Nast articles geared towards the upper middle class. And I usually feel excluded. Articles like “Why we all love lavender”, “Why we all love Taylor Swift”, “Why we can’t stop eating Dubai chocolate,” “Why we all bought summer houses in Tuscany during Covid” etc.
I associate it with clickbait, directed at everyone who somehow still hasn’t installed an adblocker.
Slightly derogatory? It seems worse than that to me, depending on what is meant by slightly.
I have to reply to this, haven’t I?
Norw. tryne n. “snout; face (derog.)” < ON trýni. If that’s an old borrowing from Celtic or West Germanic, I don’t know how.
Well, Greater Wales did extend as far as Finland.
Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd surely called in at Greenland en route to the Americas. So the Welsh have first dibs on it, I’d say.
Yr Ynys Las am byth!
¡Groenlandia sí! ¡Yanquis no!
Hiphilangsci has a new podcast about the post-Renaissance invention of The Celtic Nations, btw:
https://hiphilangsci.net/2025/03/01/podcast-episode-44/
Good to hear that remarkable man Edward Lhuyd mentioned with honour:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lhuyd
A sort of seventeenth-century Welsh David Marjanović.
I hadn’t heard of James Cowles Prichard at all; evidently I’m hardly alone in that.
*blush*
…He did have a lot more success at employment.
Me: Norw. tryne n. “snout; face (derog.)” < ON trýni. If that’s an old borrowing from Celtic or West Germanic, I don’t know how.
There’s also an ON trjóna f. Bjorvand % Lindeman don’t have the words, which tells me that they didn’t find a plausible etymology. Wiktionary has no such quibbles and gives PGmc. *trewnijan-/*trewno:n-. from *der- “tear”. Semantically, this is plausible enough, but how do you get a *-w- in there? A better phonetic fit would be *trew- “tree” (ultim. <- “hard, firm”). One could imagine that the word originally denoted a wooden shaft or (since it’s most commonly used for pigs) perhaps some tool for digging or turning soil. But it’s not worth much without an explanation of the derivation.
I’m not sure about that. But the *-w- could be accomplished by concocting an *u-stem adjective *der-u-, getting it into zero-grade *dru- and reinterpreting that as the zero-grade of a root *drew-. Definitely not something I’d postulate without a good reason, but equally weird shit has happened.
Incidentally, that yields the “tree” root *drew- ~ *derw-. Too bad it doesn’t make sense to derive it from “tear”.
There’s also a set of Gmc. words from *trewa- or some such: Norw. trau/trog, Eng. trough “wooden basin or deep tray”. Oh, tray, too. If trewn- started out as a verb, it could denote the piggish habit of diving head-first into the trough.
Could it be a Celtic loan into proto Germanic? (After all, they have those.)
The Germanic forms seem to lack *g, but this Celtic *trugnā itself seems a bit suspect. The corresponding Old Irish is trein. I get the impression that the Celtic *g may actually be in honour of the French trogne.
@de
What is the source for the Celtic form? The closest thing I find in Matasovič is *tarankyo- ‘nail’.
@David E.: Could well be, though it’s not the usual military-administrative semantic field. It could also be a loan from a branch of Celtic into a branch of Germanic, or a back-and-forth loan. But this would have to be sorted out on the Celtic side.
Me: Incidentally, that yields the “tree” root *drew- ~ *derw-. Too bad it doesn’t make sense to derive it from “tear”.
But it does make sense to analyse it as a nominalized adjective, so maybe we could suggest that the *derw- adj. originally meant “splitted” or “prone to splitting” and *derw- n. “piece of wood”. The sense “hard, firm” would then be secondary. Cf. Norw. hel ved (of people) “honest, solid, trustworthy”.
If trewn- started out as a verb
,,, it would have had an inchoative meaning “become trew-n”, i.e. “harden”, or more specifically “turn into wood”, or even more specifically, a trough. So another no.
@PP: If it’s not Celtic, could we make it work the other way? Or is it common agricultural substrate?.
What is the source for the Celtic form?
GPC has nothing outside Celtic.
@trond, de
This is what confused me, “trein” is Old Cornish, not Old Irish, where the word is srón. Matasovič has
*srogna ‘nose’ [Noun] GOID: OIr. sron [a f] W: MW ffroen [f| ‘nostril’ BRET: OBret .fron, MBret. froan, fron GAUL: *frogna > OFr .frogne (hence Eng frown). PIE: *sreg h . ‘snore’ (IEW: 1002) COGN: Gr. rhegkho ‘snore’. Arm. rngun-k c [p] ‘nose’.
ETYM: OIr. srennid ‘snore’ (PCelt. < *sregn-o-) represents the reflex of the verbal root *sreng h -, from which PCelt. *srogna is derived. Cf. also MoBret. fri [m] ‘nose’, Co. frig [f] ‘nostril’, which might be from *sregos, yet another derivative. The relationship of these words to W trwyn [m], OCo. trein, which appear to be from *trognI, is unclear, cf. also Galatian droiiggos ‘nose’ (Freeman 2001: 14). REF: LEIA S-187, DGVB 172, Deshayes 2003: 255, de Bernardo Stempel 1999: 60, 258, Hamp 1960, Freeman 2001: 14, Gamillscheg 764.
FWIW, Danish (like, I gather, Norwegian, which is probably no surprise to Trune), has tryne as the term of art for the porcine snout, but also for the human ditto as the recipient of a pugnacious blow (en på trynen). The ODS only takes it back to ON trjóna, but claims a variant trýni for ON already and compares it to MHG triel.
OT, the next headword in Hellquist is tryta ~ ‘cease’ (strong verb, tröt/truten), which he says is not found in modern Danish. But we have fortryde/fortrød/fortrudt ~ ‘regret’, so there. Sw trött ~ ‘tired’ is a participle from the causative of this. (Wiktionary only takes E tire back to Proto-WG *teuʀōn (“possibly,” and origin unknown), but the ON word to PG proper (*þreutaną); if it’s in ON it could still be a loan from MLG, so who knows.
“trein” is Old Cornish, not Old Irish
Yeah, your’re right. I carelessly misread it. “H. Grn” in GPS, not “H. Wydd.” There doesn’t actually seem to be any particular evidence for the *g apart from the presumed French borrowing. That Galatian form looks pretty different. The Welsh form could even just go back to *tre:n-, I think.
If the trwyn etymon was originally just “snout”, the extension to human noses in Welsh wouldn’t be too surprising. Kind of thing that happens with body-part nouns. I wonder if animal body-part nouns are more often borrowed than human?
In German, Triel can refer to the thick-knees*, and (TIL) to a dewlap. But maybe they’re both unchanged Low German loans and irrelevant to the MHG word.
* Burhinus shorebirds – “cattle nose” for, presumably, some reason. Ankles, not knees, of course.
“Ref. the short, thick bill and bull-headed appearance of the Stone Curlew B. oedicnemus,” says Jobling. I’m not seeing it myself. The ankles don’t look all that thick to me either.