Scale

: definitions

In my current project about calthemite (urban stalactite) in which I zoom in and out perceptively on mineral matter flows associated with chalk and cement, I find I am constantly coming in contact with different meanings of the word 'scale.' Which in the English language is used in wildly different ways and combines linguistic influences from many different peoples from this nation's diversely connected and distant past.

A Google search tells me that from Germanic 'scale' and Old French 'escale' is derived from the look of overlapping scales on a fish. Somewhat the same as flakes of secondary deposit of Calcium Carbonate, also known as Lime, on the surface of a leaf that has been dripped on by calthemites formed underneath a mid-century concrete building.

Inherited from Old Norse is 'scal' (bowl), Dutch Schaal, German 'schale' (bowl), and English 'schal' (dish). Further meaning is created around a pair of scales from ideas revolving around a pair of matched bowls, relating the bowl to the concave shape of a fish scale. From here a notion of balance, measurement and ideas of fair exchange ensue. 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. 

It is in the use of scale as a verb, 'to scale', that has particular meaning to me, having read Robin Wall Kimmerer's account of her sensitisation to verbs in 'Braiding Sweetgrass', where 'to be bay' transported her into the lithic embrace of a warm breeze-swept beach.

It is where the meaning 'to climb, or clamber up' is found, where scale relates directly to an embodied interaction with the world that transports me. From Old French comes 'escaler' (climb), Medieval Latin 'scalare' (climb) and Latin 'scandere' (to climb). Like Kimmerer, I suddenly feel the knobbly texture of cold, wind-polished, unforgiving stone under my fingers, but this time it is not granular but solid and millimetres from my cheek. I flex my grip and use my legs to push myself up and over a boulder. In this embodied definition it seems that the meaning of scale puts the human body against a backdrop of the whole lithic world and diminishes it in a rather satisfying way.

Ref: Robin Wall Kimmerer 'Braiding Sweetgrass'