Scale

definitions.

In my current project in which I zoom in and out on flowing chalk, cement and calthemite I find I am ensconced in different meanings of the word 'scale' which, in the English language, is used in wildly different ways because it combines influences from past movement of many different peoples.

A search on Google tells me that from Germanic 'scale' and Old French 'escale' is derived overlapping scales on a fish, or flakes of secondary deposit on the surface of a leaf dripped on from calthemites hanging underneath a mid-century concrete building.

English also creates meaning around a pair of scales from ideas that revolve around a pair of matching bowls. It's easy to see the relation of the bowl to the concave shape of a fish scale. Here the notion of balance, measurement and ideas of fair exchange also ensue. All inherited from Old Norse 'scal' (bowl), Dutch Schaal, German 'schale' (bowl), and English 'schal' (dish). Origins depart further from the measurement potential of the bowl when the word scale is applied to values, measurement, levels and notation with the idea of progression up, down and across a regularised set of values. 

However, it is in the use of scale as a verb, 'to scale', where we find the meaning 'to climb, or clamber up', that scale relates directly to an embodied interaction with the world. From Old French comes 'escaler' (climb), Medieval Latin 'scalare' (climb) and Latin 'scandere' (to climb). Having been exposed to Robin Wall Kimmerer's own sensitisation to verbs, wherein 'to be bay' transported her into the lithic embrace of a warm breeze-swept beach, I suddenly feel the knobbly texture of cold wind-polished ungiving stone millimetres from my cheek and under my fingers, as I flex my grip and use my legs to push myself up and over a boulder. In this definition it seems that scale is embodied and takes up the whole body.

Ref: Robin Wall Kimmerer 'Braiding Sweetgrass'