Fine art

The twenty-second entry is a água-forte, and the name is a chemical rather than a craft. Strong water, aqua fortis, was the old apothecary’s name for nitric acid, the liquid that bites into a copper plate wherever the waxed ground has been scratched away. Portuguese took that name for the whole technique and never let go of it, which is why a água-forte ends up on a museum label beside a picture and not in a chemistry cupboard. English made the opposite choice and named the action instead of the substance. « To etch » comes from a Germanic verb meaning to cause to eat, the same idea of biting that sits inside « to eat » itself, so our word describes what happens to the plate while theirs describes what does it. The distinction earns its keep in the very next entry, because English keeps « engraving » for the plate cut by hand with a burin, where no acid comes near it. A água-forte is therefore never « an engraving », and a gravura a buril is never « an etching ».