Goldsmithing

Entry nineteen is a filigrana, and the English name for the same work has been worn smooth. « Filigree » reached us through French and Spanish from Italian filigrana, and that form is a compound of two Latin nouns: filum, a thread, and granum, a grain. The word is therefore a description of the bench work itself — wire drawn thin and bent into lace, and the minute beads soldered along it. Portuguese still shows both halves to anyone who looks. The thread is there in the sentence A filigrana pede fio muito fino, where o fio is the wire; and granum is standing one entry further down in a granulação, the craft of fixing tiny spheres to a surface. « Filigree » hides all of that. It reads as a single opaque word, and in ordinary English it has drifted away from metal altogether, towards any delicate tracery at all — in frost, in stonework, in an argument. Keeping the Portuguese compound in view is worth the small trouble, because it never stops naming what the goldsmith is actually doing.