Plying the Antique Lexicon

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on August 13, 2009

I have to confess that when I began writing this post, it opened with grandiose assertions of our industry's incomparable singularity and linguistic wealth. I wanted to stake a claim, to mark out a small, fertile patch of our tongue as a special semiotic niche just for the business and subculture of English antique furniture. But every specialist can (justly) insist on his or her similarly unique verbiage, so I had to abandon that approach. Instead, what I found striking about the diction of English antiques lies in the relationship between the infrastructure (and superstructure) of our industry and the language that it employs.

Consider, for instance, the journey that an antique makes from craft to sale: taking into account the entire acquisition of raw materials and production (which involves its own host of complexities), the piece must then find its way to a consumer, survive for a hundred years or more, find its way to an auction, make a trip across the pond (in our case), and find a new home. The English in particular have a unique history of cabinetry because of the pre-industrial habit of craftsmen to produce furniture as it was in the old days—one at a time, and either for themselves or for a little extra money on the side. In fact, I would go so far as to say (without any hard historical evidence) that the contrast between and brief co-existence of the small cabinetmaker and mass production encouraged a sort of synthesis between the two, which accounts for the unusually high quality of English furniture through to the 20th and 21st centuries.

Even given that, it isn't as if corporate retailers are proffering antiques to the general public. More often than not, you find the ever-imperiled mom-and-pop jobs or one-man operations run by a restoration enthusiast. Otherwise, small businesses occupy the third and final arm of the antique business here in the U.S. Sure, we have the large auction houses and the rare, name-brand, one-of-a-kind's but nevertheless these features actually contribute to the patchwork nature of antique sales. Add to this the variety of selling options—consignment, business-to-business, wholesale, via interior designers, via show, and old-fashioned retail—and it becomes clear that ours is an industry of diversity.

So what has language got to do with these microscopic movements of capital? Consider the multiple names for one type of table, to which you might apply the terms "gate leg," "loper," "drop leaf," or "Irish wake" (which vary in accuracy). I admit that I recently found myself baffled when a customer asked to see a pie crust table, which I was accustomed to calling a scalloped-edge table. Many misconceptions also abound, such as the fallacious reference to wood types as "finishes" (there is no such thing as a cherry finish). Many take "coffer" and "chest" for synonyms, although coffer refers to a chest with a curved top, which was useful for traveling because it deflected rain more easily, while a chest is straight. Even yours truly misapplies (lightly, I might add) "Georgian style" and "Victorian style," since there really is no such thing: George IV is a style and so is Rococo but Georgian and Victorian refer to periods of time.

One could reduce the purpose of language to a pairing of form and function (although Deconstructionists would argue that the only purpose of language is language itself), but even in that case it is easy to see that our lexicon owes its prodigious size to the plethora of antiques and the even greater variety of uses to which they are applied. Of course, mere function is not entirely the case since, no doubt, if the production, buying, and selling of antiques were standardized and streamlined (like so many products in the age of multinational capital), then our jargon would reflect that normative boredom. As this is not the case, we antique dealers have cause for at least a mild pride in our fair industry.

Tags: furniture, terms

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