At 20:42 +0100 15/4/08, David Boyce wrote: >I'll give you it for "agraffe" which basically means a hook, and is >sort-of descriptive of the piano part. (The modern French for a >staple is agraffe). Well, in the first place the word is agrafe with one f. Next it does not mean, in that sense, a hook but a hook-and-eye fastening. The reason the word is used is that Erard used it. In England the proper name of the part is "stud" but people just love to mis-spell and mispronounce things, so they call it an agraffe and usually pronounce it Ague-raff in case it is confused with a Bee-graf. >But the etymology of Capo d'astro (or Capo d'asto) is really very >fanciful and only by the greatest semantical stretch could be said >to in any way describe its function. (There is a very good post by >Delwin Fandrich about this in the archives). Indeed. Cristofori's first pianoforte was announced by Maffei as a "gravicembalo col piano e forte" and thus the piano was born with an illiteracy, since the proper term is "clavicembalo" and the word "gravicembalo", though it was used by one or two composers, is nevertheless almost certainly a corruption and is not to be found in an Italian dictionary. As to capo d'astro, there is simply no such thing and it has never had any meaning except in the mind of some Steinway person long ago. The only valid phrase among the many invalid variants is "capo tasto", which is a thing you clamp to a guitar to transpose the open strings. As to "fish", I must say I have no objection. When I first say the arrangement in the Lipp I was put in mind of the tail of a fish myself. JD
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