Notre-Dame Cathedral

I love words.

The word cathedral is from the Greek καθέδρα, transliterated kathedra and meaning seat, in this case denoting the church where the bishop or archbishop has his throne.  The Romans borrowed the word from the Greek and made it into cathedra, because there is no k in the Latin alphabet. Hence, cathedral.

When I was in Paris (me! I was in Paris!), we went to Notre-Dame de Paris. Even though I was over sixty, I climbed all 387 stairs to the roof. If you've done the climb, you know that this is the only way to see the gargoyles up close and you can guess that, yes, even though I am in pretty good shape, I had to rest a few minutes on the way up and was winded when I got there.

Turns out the gargoyles are part of the run-off system; troughs cut in their backs and mouths like spouts drain rainwater off the roof and away from the walls. The English borrowed gargoyle from the French gargouille, in turn from the Latin word for throat, gula (an onomatapoeic--or "sounds like"--word). Believers may have seen the gargoyles as grotesque beings who scared evil spirits away.

833 years later, in the feature-length cartoon Hunchback of Notre Dame (Walt Disney Animated Classics, 1996, Film) we find that gargoyles are like any other scary creature from the past, kind of funny and a carrier of cultural knowledge of sorts, with the gargoyles Victor and Hugo paying homage to the author of the 1831 novel of the same name.

While gargoyles were part of the original design, flying buttresses (arched exterior supports) were not. Some time between ground-breaking in 1163 and the turn of that century, the choir walls began to show stress fractures and the flying buttresses provided an elegant solution to an inelegant problem. The phrase flying buttress dates from this time and may have had a Frankish, and ultimately proto-Germanic, origin in bouter, to push against.

NOVA recently aired "Building the Great Cathedrals," PBS, December 26, 2012, Television. We are still adding flying buttresses today to shore up Gothic cathedrals with stress fractures in walls that are too tall for the weight they must bear.