I recently ran across a very odd word (odd, that is, to those who don’t work in the relevant industries); I quote the OED entry (revised 2016):
gobo
noun²Originally U.S.
1. Cinematography, Television, and Photography. A dark plate, screen, or mask used to shield a lens from light. Also (Theatre): a partial screen or mask used in front of a spotlight to project a shape or image or to reduce the light on stage.
1923 ‘Gobo’ and other utterances..are flung around a studio by camera men.
New York Times 21 October x. 51925 Elephant ear, a form of gobo consisting of an upright post with a black card or board suspended at right angles, used to shade the camera lens from overhead light.
Los Angeles Times 29 November b6
[…]1994 Gobos can produce projected images up to 6m in diameter and can be used in conjunction with colour films, slides or moving images.
Museums Journal January 36/32. Cinematography and Audio Technology. A (portable) screen or shield used to prevent a microphone from picking up extraneous noise.
1930 Gobo, portable wall covered with sound-absorbing material.
Sel. Glossary Motion Picture Technician (Acad. Motion Pictures, Hollywood) 15/21931 A Gobo is a portable wall used in absorbing sound when talkies are being made. And an Elephant Ear is a small Gobo used on certain conversational close-ups.
Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun 1 October 14/6
[…]2003 This session..is as good as it gets, musically and technically: no gobos, no headphones, no second takes.
JazzTimes September 128/1
It’s odd because it sounds funny, it’s odd because it’s used in two such different (though parallel) senses, and it’s odd because the etymology isn’t known — the OED’s guess is “Origin uncertain; perhaps < gob- (in go-between n.) + ‑o suffix.” You’d think with such a recent word somebody might have preserved the knowledge of how it came about.
Oh, and if you’re curious, gobo¹ is “The root of the greater burdock, Arctium lappa, as cultivated for use in Japanese cookery (also more fully gobo root). Also: the plant itself.” It is, as you might expect, from Japanese:
< Japanese gobō, gobou (1830 as Go-bo-oo, glossed ‘parsnip’, in H. Medhurst Japanese-English Vocabulary, 1603 as gobǒ in Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam) < gobau (1181 or earlier) < a Middle Chinese compound, lit. ‘ox burdock’ (compare Chinese (Southern Min) giû-pông, (Cantonese) ngàuh bong, (Mandarin) niúbàng).
They add that the plant “was perhaps originally (in Chinese) called ‘ox-burdock’ in allusion to the fact that cattle eat the leaves when recovering from illness.”
odd because it’s used in two such different (though parallel) senses—extension by analogy from light-blocker to sound-blocker seems not at all odd to me.
OTOH at first glance there would seem to be potential for confusion on a soundstage between the lighting crew and the sound crew over whose gobo is in question; I presume in the past 100 years they have come up with some ways of circumventing this.
WP has an entry on Gobo. It has a well-researched section on etymology, with a few additional implausible etymologies.
OTOH at first glance there would seem to be potential for confusion on a soundstage between the lighting crew and the sound crew over whose gobo is in question
My point exactly. Why not come up with a different weird word to avoid the potential for confusion?
Memories of Fraggle Rock! Gobo and his uncle Traveling Matt (which is also a filmmaking term).
There was a German model of gas lamp called Gobo, c. 1910. It’s tempting to link the two but I don’t see a similarity, and I would guess that by 1923 gas lamps were too old to be a source of a slang term.
I don’t find it strange that the same word is used for both a sound and a light shield. In both cases it was basically a sheet of black cloth.
Speaking of this milieu, it’s not clear to me from where came the movie term dub ‘to add separately recorded sound to film or video’.
From “double” (OED, Wiktionary, American Heritage), I guess because you’re copying the sound, i.e., duplicating it. I’ve also heard “dub a tape”, copy a recording from one tape onto another (in the olden days).
Back when the U. of Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors just called themselves the Bows for short, some local fans would bring burdock roots to ball games and wave them to signal “Go Bows!” It’s the kind of thing I would have done but never did when I used to watch Rainbow baseball during coach Les Murakami’s glory years.
BTW, I’m a fan of kinpira gobo ‘braised burdock root’, but I have be careful to resist calling it chinpira gobo ‘pimp burdock’).
OED and MW separate two senses of gobo. But the more recent sense, apparently, is a development of the first sense, the Japanese name for burdock root. Note that elephant ear appears in OED sense two twice, near a camera and near a microphone.
Burdock, gobo, is also called elephant ear!
the more recent sense, apparently, is a development of the first sense—could it be rather that the two gobos are unrelated, but “elephant ear” as a type of gobo² is a punning allusion to “elephant ear” as a synonym for gobo¹?
I don’t find it strange that the same word is used for both a sound and a light shield. In both cases it was basically a sheet of black cloth.
Again, I get that (which is why I called the senses parallel), but I would have thought the potential for confusion (“Move the gobo to the right! … No, not that gobo!”) would have led to a new term being used. (May I suggest bogo?)
@mollymooly: Would enough Americans to make the pun catch on have known in 1925 what gobo was?
Burdock leaves were known as elephant ears in the US long before the movie-set uses of gobos, sometimes also known as elephant ears, which share a resemblance. Evidence on google books is not far to seek.
If any of the uncertain etymology proposals such as go-between were the source then putatively shortened to gobo were valid, one might expect the longer version to be attested earlier or attested later as an explanation for gobo. (Not that all show biz folk would know the etymology.)
So, given the current state of available evidence, I consider the gobo burdock explanation preferable.
Fwiw, there were Japanese restaurants and shops in Los Angeles in the 1920s.
That’s very plausible to my mind.
Let’s say the light screen starts off getting called an “elephant ear”, whether by direct analogy with the pinna of Elephantidae or by [second-level] analogy with one of the many large-leafed plants of that name. Eventually someone decides to start calling it “gobo” instead. Why “gobo” (a) at all (b) rather than one of the other plants? Possible reasons:
(1) coiner was Japanese?
(2) it is short and easy to say
(3) it is less likely to be ambiguous than “elephant ear” or, say, “begonia”.
(4) perhaps the initial coining was jocular? in which case, choosing a somewhat obscure word might be considered funnier. Not too obscure; people need to get the joke.
A fair number of things that are broad, flat, and (sometimes) floppy get called “elephant ears.” Two different pastries go by that name—palmiers and a kind of friend flat dough.