What's in a word?

Like most other major industries, the furniture business has its own jargon. But do the terms have the same meaning to everyone who hears them?

For example, what do "Nova Scotia mahogany" and "Russian Renaissance style" mean to you? In collaboration with furniture designer-artist O.B. Solie, W&WP takes on the challenges of communication.

As anyone over the age of three well knows, we live in an age of instantaneous communication and exchange of information. But do all the faxes, mobile phones and e-mail speed up comprehension as well? Do they help us to understand one another more easily? Are we speaking the same language?

Many industries have a specialized vocabulary for convenience and efficiency when dealing with their own technologies. Trade lingo also serves to demonstrate solidarity - as in: "Hey, we all belong to the same club," or, "Nyah, nyah, we know something you don't."

The furniture industry has its own code jargon, too, but do the words have universal meaning among the clan? WOOD & WOOD PRODUCTS asked furniture designers, who must express a visual idea to a number of people who will then translate it into hard copies in wood and other materials, about communication problems they encounter in their line of work.

Coming to term with terms

Is a suite (i.e., furniture grouping) a sweet or a suit? Steve Hodges, North Carolina, said the most obvious areas for differences in communication are the result of geography, like the North/South pronunciation feud of sweet vs suit, or the Canadians' gable for what Yanks call an end panel.

"Do you know about stickers/moulders?" Hodges asked. "In upper New York state, I talk to people who have no idea what a moulder is." They call the machines stickers, because they ram sticks through them," he explained. (The machines also have been described by some as "widow-makers.")

Hodge's pet peeve is mispronunciation, such as referring to a certain type of paneling as wainscoating, instead of wainscoting. But misspellings are common, too. You may have seen references to dental moulding, or run across the rabbit that helps join furniture? Rabbeted joints (aka dadoed) have also been referred to, in print, as dodoed, a fate heretofore reserved for extinct, flightless birds.

Hodges winces when he hears someone mention a refractory table. It's bad enough when children become refractory at the dinner table; heaven forbid the furniture should be too. The long, narrow refectory table gets its name from the refectory or dining room of monasteries in the Middle Ages. According to Webster, refractory means stubborn, unmanageable or unruly.

'A good name is forever'

A salesman once advised Hodges that a new furniture grouping needed shaped tops: "You know - scooped." Hodges looked around, then suggested that all the tops already were shaped. It turned out that what the salesman really wanted to see was beveled or chamfered edge moulding.

It was not surprising that the salesman had difficulty communicating his idea. Moulding profiles alone could fill a page in any furniture designer's notebook of terms that must be dealt with to reach an understanding with a client. Think of names like cavetto, ovolo, scotia and torus - and those are just the simple shapes.

* Cavetto - a concave moulding of a quarter circle

* Ovolo - a reverse cavetto, a convex quarter circle

* Scotia - a hollowed moulding, more than the quarter circle of the cavetto

* Torus - a convex bulging shape that is about a half circle.

Compound, serpentine mouldings include cyma recta, cymatium, cyma reversa and beak moulding, whose upper part is concave and lower part is convex. Fluting is concave, and reeding is convex. Don't forget, when you need a narrow, flat moulding, look for a fillet, not a filet.

Don't lose your footing

How can designers and their clients be on equal footing speech-wise, when an authority like Gloag's Complete Dictionary of Furniture lists at least 35 different types of furniture feet, including: acanthus, ball, cloven, onion, scroll, spade, stump, splayed, turnip, web and whorl?

Hairy paw and slipper feet are omitted from this publication, but are common to our industry. Other terms not to be overlooked are fly foot, tern foot and dolphin foot. Also worth mentioning is paintbrush - another name for Spanish foot, also known as tassel foot.

The difference between the terms marquetry, parquetry and sarquetry may also give some of us pause. Marquetry, a pictorial pattern of different woods, is inlaid into a contrasting veneer background. Parquetry is a mosaic of wood laid in geometric patterns. Sarquetry is a sham word, of course, but is mighty handy for sentences in which soccer tree or sock-a-tree are used. And how about harquetry, as in Hark! A tree!

A case in point

Describing similar cases affords the opportunity for still more terminal confusion. A Welsh dresser, Hodges explained, is a one or two-piece English cabinet with doors and drawers, and open shelves above. A sideboard generally has doors and drawers for storage, but no shelves. The earliest sideboards were tables; no shelves, no drawers.

The huntboard (of southern origin) has lots of drawers. The somewhat smaller commode is a type of low chest or cabinet used next to a bed or against a wall. Originally, Hodges said, it was a small dresser with drawers, which later became a washstand. After Chippendale, it was a "night stand." Highboy, lowboy, lazyboy, high chest, chest-on-chest - the list goes on.

Irrepressible designer O.B. Solie, who suggested this column and sketched the accompanying furniture details, has designed a number of top-selling entertainment centers for Ello that are modeled after the European vitrine, a glass cabinet for displaying curios or china. The word vitrine comes from the French vitre for windowpane, and should not to be confused with latrine, Solie said.

He related that he once telephoned a particleboard supplier and was greeted with silence when he mentioned a "serpentine front." The fellow didn't comprehend the word bowfront either, Solie added.

One of the designer's favorite communication-gap stories occurred when he heard a sales rep ask a dealer what type of wood was used in the furniture. The dealer's reply? "Tree wood."

'What do you think, Sid?'

His expertise in photo-realistic computer rendering would seem to give Californian Karl Felperin an advantage in communicating with clients. But he said that many people who look at renderings are lost. "Dealers, especially, are terrible at making the mental transition from drawings to furniture," he said. Either they do not understand drawings or just cannot visualize what the end product will be.

"Engineering departments at furniture plants are good at it," Felperin said. "They work with line drawings all the time, and translate them into furniture. But," he added, "it is not the engineers who decide what will sell.

"We have an unfortunate process for deciding what does get produced. The sales manager goes around showing drawings to dealers and saying, 'What do you think, Sid?' And Sid says, 'Nah, I don't like it.' And there you are." Felperin said.

'Talk to the consumer'

New York designer John Mascheroni said he is bothered more by lack of communication on the part of the industry and its consumers, than by miscommunication between designer-client.

"Furniture manufacturers are an insulated lot," he said. "They talk to each other but they don't talk to the consumer. They turn to their sales reps for guidance, instead of getting out and looking around. Some don't seem to care about what is happening in the home, That's sad," Mascheroni continued.

This communication problem could be corrected by having more women in management, the designer said. "Every other industry is plugged into the fact that women are the consumers. Even the automotive industry has finally awakened to the fact that women buy cars."

'We look to the past'

Arto Szabo, president of American Society of Furniture Designers, said he has no problems explaining design ideas to the top people in a company. "They understand our language." The only communication problem might be at the factory level, for example, when describing something to a samplemaker. But a drawing usually will convey the idea, he said.

However, many retailers are not knowledgeable about certain periods, or about traditional backgrounds for new designs, Szabo said, and this can make communication difficult. "As designers, we always look to the past for new styles," he added.

One must know furniture history in order to understand and appreciate how a style can come from several sources, Szabo said. For example, American Traditional combines influences from French and English styles, such as Empire (classical symmetry) and Chippendale (which itself incorporates French, Chinese and Gothic motifs). Federal style was America's version of English Neoclassicism and it, too, drew from several sources, especially, interest in antiquity.

In the late 18th century and into the 19th century, furniture makers religiously copied English patternbooks. And so, when addressing a sales group in Canada, Hodges said, "If you lived in Ontario at the turn of the century and hired a cabinetmaker, he would rely on what you told him you wanted or he would turn to his Hepplewhite, Sheraton or Chippendale patternbooks.

One of the reps asked, "This guy Hepplewhite, he's still alive?"

Hodges responded, "Well, actually, no."

The rep persisted, "But he was Canadian?"

Author's note: Nova Scotia mahogany in the Russian Renaissance style is, according to one authority, a piece of inexpensive stained pine furniture, badly made and carelessly carved.