Writing with light (or the dawn of “pixelography”)

When we “trip the light fantastic,” we dance.

When we see “light at the end of the tunnel,” we have hope.

When we “lighten someone’s load,” we help them out.

When we “write with light,” what are we doing?

We are not creating messages with neon tubing.

We are taking a photograph.

Recently, Rich and I attended One Day University, a program of lectures—in this instance on history--over the course of a day.  We attended a lecture entitled, “Understanding America Through Three Remarkable Photographs.” The lecturer, Louis Masur of Rutgers University, noted in beginning that the word “photograph” comes from two Greek words, “photo” meaning “light” and “graph” meaning “write,” hence “writing with light.”

As usual, I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary to “shed some light” on this concept, which the OED defines as “the process or art of producing pictures by means of the chemical action of light on sensitive film on a basis paper, glass, metal, etc.” When technology creates new concepts, the challenge facing linguists is naming them. In this instance, Sir John Herschel introduced the words “photograph,” “photography,” and “photographic” in a paper delivered before the Royal Society on 14 March 1839. Since when we take a photograph, we write with light, what are we doing when we take a picture?

I went back to the OED for enlightenment. The word “picture” goes farther back in history to the 15th century, descending from a Latin word meaning “painting.” Before the technology of writing with light, portraits had to be “written” in other media, in this instance paint.  The first definition which the OED supplies for “picture” is an obsolete one meaning “the action or process of painting or drawing.”  The American Heritage Dictionary supplies a more current definition of picture as “a visual representation or image painted, drawn, photographed, or otherwise rendered on a flat surface.” As photographic technology advances, whether we “take a photograph” or “take a picture,” we still “write with light.”

Digital photography adds a new wrinkle to the idea, as more often than not, images captured by digital technology—phones, cameras—never are transferred to that flat surface of paper.  Are we still “writing with light” when our pictures remain digital? Or does the technology need a new word to capture the idea of an image viewed on a screen—“pixelography,” perhaps?

Regardless of whether you take a photograph, a picture, or a pixelograph, let your light shine!

LAGNIAPPE 1:  According to the web site The Phrase Finder, “Trip the light fantastic” originates in the works of Milton, not Shakespeare!  In Comus he writes, “Come, knit hands, and beat the ground,/
In a light fantastic round.”  The Phrase Finder also cites a line from Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, “In twenty manere koude he trippe and daunce. (In twenty ways could he trip and dance.)”

LAGNIAPPE 2: Why do we spell the word as “photograph,” not “fotograf”? As it turns out, the Greek language has a symbol that corresponds to the English “ph” but not the English “f.”  Therefore, words of Greek origin are spelled with the “ph,” not the “f,” as seems to make sense to writers of British and American English.