Historical etymology! What a marvelous sump of self-satisfying instruction!
Badaud, the French word for “gawker”. Give it here.
We can say it comes from the late Latin for “largely open”, then “yawn”, then through Provençale, “gawker”.
The Sunday afternoon logic of it all is both pleasingly moralizing and cynical, suggesting, as it may, that curious on-looking is slack-jawed idleness and that openness is no virtue.
But times have advanced since the Middle Ages. With gun and camera, today’s entertainment possibilities go well beyond beating mules and simpletons.
In the age of choice, the stakes are high, too.
The idle and open may now choose between the darkly-thrilling hope that a sharp click and sudden crack turn a muddy quarrel into limpid homicide or an unexpected performance.
For instance, painter and performance artist Chloé Silbano’s Simile, visual free verse around a watch, time and a guy.
Behind the church of Saint Julien des Pauvres, parallel to the Seine, tethered to a perfect long-evening on a stony delta cut out from the otherwise narrow rue de la Bûcherie, at n°5, in front of Alma espace d’art gallery, a well-built, self-possessed guy in a blank sandwich board sits still on a short-leg sawhorse bench.
The man wears a magic-marker time piece that shows just after ten.
The custom time piece had been charmingly designed out of public gaze by Chloé Silbano.
Chloé Silbano is a thin, almost spindly, woman with a pile of red hair and a camera squatted taking the pictures here declaimed, a claim, a stake in fame.
A person is master of their doings, so the law says.
Before the marker ink has even properly dried, the guy rubs the watch face. It fades beneath the touch.
Using the woman’s own magic marker, off his own bat, the man adds a bit to her design.
Time passes. Just a bit.
The man wets his big fingers.
He dirties his hand, the fleshy hump of his palm; the small crowd can't see it, though, and his fingers blacken:
ten has disappeared into the grown smear.
The photograph shows that as Silbano photographs the woman’s short jeans have shown the worsted flower patterns of her stockings through the whole time.
Some people can’t resist a free drink. But the small crowd has now dispersed.