Semiotics in Portuguese

The fifteenth entry is a gramática visual, and the English half of that phrase has a twin nobody would guess at. « Grammar » reached us through Old French from the Latin grammatica, and behind that stands the Greek gramma, a letter of the alphabet: the word began as the study of written letters. In medieval use it covered learning of every kind done out of books, and book learning included what ordinary people thought dangerous — the stars, charms, the reading of signs. Scots altered the word to « glamour » and kept precisely that half of it. A glamour was an enchantment laid on the eye, something that made a thing look other than it was; the form travelled south into general English two centuries ago, and the modern sense of shine and allure is what is left of the spell. Portuguese took only a gramática from that root and borrowed o glamour back from us later. So the entry says twice over what it means: a gramática visual asks how a picture arranges what we see, and our name for that study is also our name for casting a spell on the eye.