Surreal || Many common terms in English have unexpected roots. Kelly Grovier explores the origins of seven words coined in art history

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These days, anything that’s out of the ordinary is called ‘surreal’. A writer for the Washington Post this month described the trend of scriptwriters suing their own agents as a “surreal turn”. The next day, a journalist for the Hollywood Reporter characterised the press conference that the US Attorney General held before releasing the long-awaited report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as a “surreal TV presser”. It wasn’t always so. The French intellectual who coined the word ‘surreal’ a century ago had rather higher hopes for his linguistic invention.

Writing in a letter dated March 1917, the playwright and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire attempted to capture the essence of a new ballet by Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. “All things considered”, Apollinaire said of the production of Parade, in which performers pranced around in bizarre, boxy costumes designed by the pioneering Cubist painter Pablo Picasso, “I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used.”

Apollinaire would promote his minting of the word ‘surrealism’ (by which he hoped to capture the ballet’s ‘visionary’ quality) by enshrining it in the programme notes, which he was invited to write. Now floating in the air of avant-garde Paris, the term was eventually picked up by artists (such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte) fascinated by the power of the unconscious mind to produce images, symbols, and statements that supersede the realities of ordinary reason and experience. Rather than a derogatory synonym for ‘preposterous’, ‘surreal’ was intended to signify our secret access to universal truths.

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An excerpt from this piece by Kelly Grovier

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I once told a racist little teacher (one of many stupid people who has been using their pupils/minions and other stupid people to spread lies about me) to go check the meaning of the word SURREALISM, he did not oblige. The next day another stupid, racist little teacher came voicing the same word (without knowing its Origem), hoping that I would have addressed her.
You should NEVER engage with the stupid.