• cartoon •
Pronunciation: kahr-tun • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. A satirical drawing intended to amuse viewers, a drawn or painted caricature. 2. A comic strip. 3. An animated movie or video. 4. A preparatory drawing for a painting, poster, or print, a preliminary sketch.
Notes: Here is a Good Word far afield from its original form and meaning. It comes with a personal noun, cartoonist, and the trade he or she plies, cartoonery. It also has an adjective, cartoonish, that refers to humorous exaggeration. It may be used rather marginally as a verb, as 'to cartoon a politician.'
In Play: Anything deserving sarcasm earns a place in cartoonery: "A politician knows he has arrived when he is depicted in a political cartoon." However, modern movie and video cartoons are a far cry from a sketch: "Computer-generated cartoons today are so realistic that with AI videos may be made of real people acting in ways they never would act."
Word History: Today's Good Word started its life as French carton "cardboard, stout paper", the kind of paper used by artists for preliminary sketches, borrowed from Italian cartone, the augmentative of carta "paper", meaning "large, substantial paper". Italian preserved Latin carta intact and Latin seems to have tampered little with Greek khartes "papyrus, paper" when it borrowed it. The Greek made its noun from the verb kharassein "to carve, scratch, write, draw". Kharassein was probably borrowed from ancient Egyptian, the origin of papyrus. While we don't know this to be true, several other Semitic languages have similar words like Aramaic haras "to cut, incise", Hebrew haras "to scratch, engrave", Arabic kharaza "to bore' and Punic (Phoenician) hrš "engraver". (Now a note of thanks to Barbara Beeton, an active discussant in the Agora who has contributed many lovely Good Words like today's.)
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