Four M's--My Gift for This Year's Bee

From 2005-07, while preparing for the Senior Spelling Bee in Cheyenne, WY (now called AARP the Magazine's National Spelling Bee), I wrote hundreds of essays on words in the dictionary we use for the competition--the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate (11th ed.). But I have decided that if I am ever to have a hope to win this thing, I need to stop giving away all my word insights before the Bee. So, this year I have assembled a list of about 350 additional words on which I am not writing; I might put them in some essays after the Bee. But I am relenting only in this essay because I came across four beautiful terms beginning with "maq" which appear consecutively in the Collegiate, and almost so in the OED. These words are maquette, maquiladora, maquillage, and maquis.

Maquette and Maquis

A maquette is a "small preliminary sketch, or wax or clay model, from which a work, usually in sculpture, is elaborated." Here, for example, is a maquette for Milo, which was sculpted by Kent Melton. Here is the home page, which defines a maquette as a "hand-crafted 3D model that animators use and reference when animating a character." The Italian word for it, taken into English in 1935, is bozzetto, a "workshop model." But the OED also points us in another direction for the word origin, by saying that the Italian word macchietta, which means "sketch" or "outline," but originally meant "speck, little spot," lies behind the word. Macchia is actually the Corsican word for "thicket," but was taken over to mean "spot" or "speck" after the spotted appearance of hillsides dotted with such thickets. And, behind the Italian macchia rests the Latin macula, which means spot or blemish. Something immaculate is without spot or blemish.

This takes us right to maquis (mah KEY), our last word, which is "dense scrub characteristic of certain Mediterranean regions, as in Corsica." It is a French term, and the Italian macchia stands behind it. More generally it is any area of scrub or brushwood, or the vegetation of which it consists. But, as the Collegiate informs us, it can also refer to a guerilla fighter in the French underground in WWII. Indeed, there is even a book, released in 2003, named Maquis: The French Resistance at War. Those who fought in the underground were known as maquisards. I wonder if they derived their name because of the fact that they needed to seek cover behind this scrubby green underbrush...

Maquiladora

This term is Spanish, and refers to a factory or workshop owned by a US or other foreign company, which employs low-cost local (i.e., Mexican) labor to assemble goods from imported components before exporting the completed products to the country of origin--usually the USA. The term comes from the Spanish maquilar, "to assemble," and was first introduced as a term in English in the 1970s, when these shops sprung up in Mexico. As Newsweek said in 1991: "Since the mid-1960s US companies have been setting up maquiladoras in Mexico and shipping the tariff-free products back to American markets." This article gives some information on maquiladoras that make these outfits sound not so sinister. As it says, by 1985 it had become Mexico's second largest source of income from foreign exports, behind oil. By the late 20th century the rate of the industry's growth amounted to about one new factory per day. The article just cited stresses the compliance of these maquiladoras with environmental regulations of the funding country (I guess US consumers wouldn't buy the goods otherwise) as well as a three-tier wage-system designed to pay an employee twice as much as the minimum wage for the border region. I think there is probably a lot more to say about these entities; for now they appear to be factories that enable American companies to pay far less to foreign workers (the fully loaded wage rate for a new unskilled laborer is $2.30 an hour) while getting the goods we so desperately need in the states a little cheaper. Will these someday be a political issue?

Maquillage

In a word, maquillage is "make-up; cosmetics" or "the application of make-up." This usage goes back to the mid-19th century in French, and was picked up in English first by the Ladies' Home Journal in 1892. DH Lawrence, a master of such good English usage, used it in 1929: "The caged mind..leaves a rind/ Of maquillage and pose and malice to shame the brutes." I have frequently quoted Lawrence in my "words" essays; do a search for his name in the intra-site box and you will see what I mean. Robert Graves used the word figuratively in his book of collected poems: "Confirming hazardous relationships/ By kindly maquillage of Truth's pale lips." I think the word has lots of possibilities, don't you?

So, maquis, maquette, maquiladora, maquillage, these four abide. And each gives us another small piece of the wonderfully complex and appealing jigsaw puzzle of life.

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