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Showing posts from August, 2014

Word of the month: 'Outremer'

Outre-mer (see TLF ) is a French term that can be used to refer to faraway countries, be it in Africa, the Orient or America. It is a direct translation of the Latin ultra mare , literally ‘across the sea’, which in its adjectival form ultramarinus (cf. DMLBS 3545a), also produced the English word ultramarine : the blue pigment derived from the mineral lapis lazuli which, in medieval times, was imported from Asia by sea. Within a medieval context, Outremer also became a word used to refer to the Crusaders’ Holy Land and more specifically to the French settlements in the conquered territories of the Near or Middle East: the lands ‘across the sea’. It is mainly with that latter sense that outremer was used in English (OED Outremer n. ), albeit only from the first half of the nineteenth century, when it makes its first attested appearance, rather surprisingly, in the Longfellow’s travel book Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea : ‘I, too, in a certain sense, have been a pilgrim