Today, I was looking at some cameos (carved gemstones) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Medici exhibit and I began wondering if there was any connection to the word cameo in filmmaking. Apparently there is! Because there was a common practice to engrave silhouettes onto cameos, a new definition of "brief sketch of a person" emerged for the word. That took on a more literary meaning in the 1850s, then to a brief appearance in a play in 1928, and eventually on to cinema! Through Italian, the artistic cameo comes from a Medieval Latin word with the same meaning spelled camaeus, and that has an unknown origin. However, there are two main theories: it could come from a Persian word meaning "ornamental stone" or an Arabic word meaning "buds of a flower". Either way, quite interesting.
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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