Gaudy is much older than Antoni Gaudí’s exuberant Barcelona buildings, or his name, so the adjective doesn’t come from the Catalan architect’s name. The showy sense dates to the late 15th century and may be related to the earlier noun gaud, a flashy ornament, with a possible deeper connection to Latin gaudere, meaning to rejoice. The resemblance is tempting, given Gaudi’s wavy, nature-inspired, gravity-teasing designs, but the chronology rules it out. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Word “Gaudy” and the Name “Gaudí” Share Sound, Not a History”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
I was in Barcelona for the first time recently.
And one of the great delights of that city, besides the wonderful food and the tapas bars, is the fact that you can’t go very far in Barcelona without running into works by the great architect Antonio Gaudi.
And I went to several buildings that he designed, but I couldn’t visit more than one or two in a day because it’s just too heady an experience.
Grant, have you been there and seen them?
Barcelona, Spain? No, no.
High on the list, though.
It’s just amazing.
I mean, this guy’s buildings are extremely playful, and they seem to defy all architectural rules.
They even seem to defy gravity at times.
And I’d walk into one of them, and sometimes I’d feel like I’d been swallowed by a giant sea creature or something.
I mean, it gave you that much of a sense of hallucinating.
Now, Gaudi was born in 1852, and he was a very sickly child.
He had rheumatic fever.
And so he spent a lot of his childhood near his house in this small village in Catalonia all by himself.
And he would just closely study all the forms of nature, you know, flowers and shells and bugs and that kind of thing.
And you see the results of this in his work.
Well, when Gaudi graduated from architecture school, one of the officials there supposedly remarked, who knows if we’ve given this diploma to a nut or a genius.
Time will tell.
And trust me, Grant, this guy is a genius.
I mean, from the wavy exteriors of the buildings right down to the window latches.
Everything’s completely over the top.
It’s ornate.
It just screams genius.
It’s just like nothing I’ve ever seen.
And, of course, once I recovered from this incredibly heady visual experience, of course, Grant, I started thinking about language.
And I remembered an email that we’d received a while back from a listener who asks, does our word gaudy, that’s G-A-U-D-Y, come from the name of the architect Gaudy?
Of course, gaudy means extravagantly tasteless or showy, and you might think that there was a connection.
And I admit I had to go double check, and it turns out that the short answer is…
Ixnay.
Ixnay. They’re not connected.
Gaudy, meaning showy, goes all the way back to the late 15th century.
And it may come from an earlier word, gaud, G-A-U-D, which means a showy or purely ornamental object.
And both of those words may go all the way back to the Latin gaudere, which means to rejoice.
You know, like that song, gaudi, amusegator, which is, let’s rejoice, therefore.
So the bottom line is that the word gaudy was around for centuries before Antonio Gaudi ever came on the scene.
But it’s easy to see why somebody might guess a connection.
And the other thing I want to say about all this is that if you haven’t seen Gowdy’s work up close and personal, by all means, put it on your do-yourself-a-favor list.
All right.
To my bucket list of ghosts.
Thanks, Martha.
That’s right, your bucket list.
Well, if you have a question about language, call us 1-877-929-9673 or email us.
That address is words@waywordradio.org.
