Crazy Quilt Help for a Quilter

Thanks Mary,

OK, consider this my request, 'cuz it is. We (DW and myself) just thought it would be a neat embellishment to embroider "crazy quilt" upon a crazy quilt in Latin.

As Mary intimates, "Reply to author"/email is fine too if you prefer. Thanks.

Doc Smith

Well, I took a whole lot of Latin in college. So just for fun, I played with this a bit.

There is no good way to translate quilt. Vestis for a blanket, and that is pretty much a catch all clothing, blankets and other coverings. Pluma can mean featherbed which is sort of a quilt.

Now to crazy - is basically rabid - all sort of nasty connotations there....

So off to the thesaurus I went

Insane could be demens or insanum Silly is leviculus Absurd futurus

Go play on a Latin/English translation page and have fun.

Cheryl

Yay Latin!

What do you think about jocosus (playful)?

Quilt is rather more problematic. My New College dictionary gives lodix (f) or stragulum (n) for blanket, but I'm not familiar with those. Didn't come up much in Livy or Caesar. I have my Lewis and Short downstairs and I'll check citations if anyone want me to follow up on those.

Sara, AB Latin '82 (which explains the rust)

Yours is a year or two less rusty than mine.....

I do like the playful suggestion...

What about Demens [crazy] Propago [layered ] Lodix [blanket ]

Ages ago ,,, Latin , mirjam

I'm not sure that Doc is reading the group for responses so I will copy & paste this to RCTQ for him. Thanks Mirjam, I thought you might have something to add :-). CiaoMeow >^;;^<

There is also a healthy discussion of this topic going on in alt.language.latin. If I'd had my act together when I began this quest, I'd have cross-posted it to all three groups, but I didn't know about this group until Mary's recommendation, and little did I realize the intricacies involved in what I na=EFvely thought would be a relatively simple translation - delirus/excors/fatuus/ineptus/ leviculus/ridiculus (all adjectives meaning silly) me. I'll do that when everyone seems argued out or gets bored with it. :-)

Doc

Janet

There are known Crazy Quilts from the Crusaders time , One [historical] expert claimed that this were the first recorded Crazy quilts . We don`t have a `Real Hebrew` name for them , although in the Bible there is a place were the `Sewers of blankets` are mentioned .brrr it slipped my mind at this moment where exactly, i must check my lectures .. mirjam

Lunaticus , is something connected to the moon , or a Crescent form , It has become another word for crazy later , but if we want the Latin meaning we need to take demens or fatuus .

Quiltus looks more like Quilibet =3Danyone mirjam

I would be strongly inclined not to go with a literal translation of "crazy" in the sense of mentally ill. That's why I was leaning towards something like jocosus. But surely we have some Romance language native speakers here who could tell us what crazy quilt is in French or Spanish or Italian or whatnot. Then we'd have some roots to work back from.

Sara

I aproached a friend of mine who is an expert , and she will write a note that i can post here ,, she says the whole meaning has been misunderstood , In fact i was joking a bit in my litereral translation, knowing very well it wasn`t the real meaning , but it was just as good as the others ,,,, but when i saw this translation with the LUNA , i felt we all are crossing into No No land . The moment i get the expert`s note i will post it here !!! mirjam

Sorry to reply to my own post. My friend doesn't know the translation but she is attending a seminar this week with other high school Latin teachers and will ask them. I'll let you know what they come up with.

Janet

My expert Quilter Artist Mrs Linda Baron wrote me this note , regarding the crazy quilt

Shalom Mirjam! The origin of quilt is from the Latin culcita,which means "a padded cushion." Crazy has French origins,"ecraser" meaning to crush.In pottery 'crazed' means crackled,a surface cracking.In gardens we have crazy paving,a kind of mosaic of assorted paving stones. Ergo,a crazy quilt is a patchwork mosaic,where the joins are emphasized as in a crackle-glazed pottery item. Sorry to disappoint all those who connect quilting with some weird mental state!

Linda.

Hi Linda,

With all due respect... While the art of crazy quilts (which generally have no "quilting") may go back centuries, or even millennia (as has been suggested in one of the threads on this question) I have no idea what they were called/known as away back in those good ol' days. My gut feeling is that the term "crazy quilt" may have/probably originated with the 19th century fad. I have no evidence to support this, but please bear with me a sec...

I don't think it's likely that whoever did come up with the term was thinking about or relating it to crazing. More likely they *were* referring to something akin a mental state i.e. the haphazard way the scraps and fragments of fabric are thrown together like somebody barfed up a textile mill. They weren't scholars - they were quilters! If not the mental state, then another synonym of "crazy".

As Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." ;-)

Nice theory though! :-)

Doc

I always assumed that the term 'crazy' was applied because instead of neatly ordered geometric shapes, they are haphazard and sort of break all the 'normal' rules of quilting.

All same as Crazy Paving in relation to random blocks of stone laid in a path formation.

Hallo Doc Smith i will forward this to Linda mirjam

I think culcita is along the right track. My latin dictionary translates it as: mattress, stuffed (feathers/wool/hair) pillow/cushion for bed/couch

And the Romans had mosaics, the ones which have survived are lovely, regular artworks depicting realistic scenes.

So perhaps something using "random mosaic" and culcit would be appropriate. Someone with more education than I could provide the correct latin roots, endings and verb-forms.

Best wishes, Annette

Dr smith here is Linda`s answer to your letter which i forwarded to her . ==================

Dear Dr. Smith, I'm a quilter and a scholar, including Latin, Virgil and co.- just love the Georgics. Quilters, both male and female don't have to be unlettered, or subject to weird mental states. We're just people who use cloth, needle and thread as our closest to hand medium. With respect,Linda.