That’s not purdah
I came across an interesting word in a New York Times article about an exhibit in New York called “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens”:
Yet, the show argues, the assumption that women lived in a state of purdah, completely removed from public life, is contradicted by the depictions of them in art.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, purdah means:
1. a. A curtain or screen, used mainly in India to keep women separate from men or strangers. b. The Hindu or Muslim system of sex segregation, practiced especially by keeping women in seclusion.
2. Social seclusion: “Never have artists been more separate: their inordinate fame, wealth, drug use have driven them into luxurious purdah”" (D. Keith Mano).
The etymology: Urdu pardah, veil, from Persian, from Middle Persian pardak, from Old Persian *paridaka-, from pari-dā-, to place over : pari, around, over + dā- , to place.
Note: First sentence updated to address comment below.
Posted on December 19, 2008 6:10 pm, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.
You might want to extrapolate on this. I’m not familiar with the word in question, but comparing the NYT quotation to the cited definitions, I don’t see what your point is. Substitute the phrase “social seclusion” (as per definition #2) and the quotation makes perfect sense, does it not?
I might question the appropriateness of gratuitously slipping in an obviously foreign word, but as far as I can see, the writer did at least agree with the dictionary.
Oh, I’m not criticizing. I just thought it was a cool word. Sorry that I didn’t make that clear.
It looked like a criticism because of the title: “That’s not purdah”, which I interpreted as: “That’s not what purdah means”. Now I have no idea what you meant to convey by that “not”.
It was a (probably not very good) play on “that’s not pretty” and I was referring to purdah being not pretty. Purdah sounded like purdy to me. Purdy is sterotypical southern U.S. dialect for pretty.
Probably it was just a bad headline, which is a bad thing for a copy editor to do.
Good word.