 |
| W. Allen Howells, Raleigh Blowing Smoke |
In the definition of "camouflage" the standard French dictionaries are of little or no use. Littre gives "camouflet," the noun, meaning “a thick smoke that one blows maliciously into the nose of one with a lighted paper cone." To give a "camouflet" is to affront, mortify a person. "Camouflet" is also a mining term. This French word is an old one. It is defined in Cotgrave’s dictionary (1678) as "a snuft or cold pie, a smoakie paper held under the nose of a slug or sleeper." Now, a cold pie in old colloquial English meant an application of cold water to wake a sleeper. “To give cold pig" was another form, and it is still used. In dialect a "cold pie” is an accident to a train or carriage in a pit, a fall on the ice, a disappointment of any kind.
In more modern French-English dictionaries, a camouflet is a whift of smoke in the face; a stifler; an affront, rap over the knuckles, snub.
•••
Adrian Margaux, If Our Caricaturists Had Flourished Before: Some of the Drawings They May Have Made, in the Strand Magazine, November 1918, pp. 365-366—
W. Allen Howells, British illustrator. when asked to choose a subject for a comic portrait—"…I should like to [illustrate] Sir Walter Raleigh, as I have an idea he was one of the pioneers of camouflage in this country. A French slang dictionary tells me that the word means blowing smoke through a paper cone into another person's face as an insult, and I can imagine Sir Walter making use of the device between his draws of tobacco smoke."
Adrian Margaux, If Our Caricaturists Had Flourished Before: Some of the Drawings They May Have Made, in the Strand Magazine, November 1918, pp. 365-366—
W. Allen Howells, British illustrator. when asked to choose a subject for a comic portrait—"…I should like to [illustrate] Sir Walter Raleigh, as I have an idea he was one of the pioneers of camouflage in this country. A French slang dictionary tells me that the word means blowing smoke through a paper cone into another person's face as an insult, and I can imagine Sir Walter making use of the device between his draws of tobacco smoke."
RELATED LINKS
Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? / Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage / Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage / Optical science meets visual art / Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / Under the big top at Sims' circus
