Frank Gehry is a rather famous architect.  How many people have not one, but two Guggenheim museums in their portfolio?

What drew him to my attention for this episode on the word pavilion was an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled Butterfly Fracture.  It begins:

“This must be the smallest building that Frank Gehry has designed in decades. But his summer pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery … in the Kensington Gardens in London … is still a big deal. From a distance, the pavilion — with its massive, steel-reinforced Douglas fir columns and beams and its roof of angled, suspended glass planes — looks like an explosion in an architecture factory.  Up close, of course, it’s a different story.  The structure’s expansive interior is classic Gehry: muscular but friendly. Under the butterflylike roof panels … a wide aisle …”

And it goes on.

What caught my eye was that it described a structure called a pavilion in terms that included butterfly—twice!

Why might this catch my eye?

Because pavilion actually means “butterfly.”

You well know that the reason Latin was such an important language was because the Romans who spoke Latin were particularly keen on soldiering.  Well, when they went out on their campaigns soldiers packed along their tents.

These tents went by various names but the fancier tents were called pavilions.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the reason for this is likely because this was army slang, the tents being named for the look of the door flaps tied up and back on either side resembling a butterfly’s wings.  The Latin word for butterfly or moth was papilion.

The reason we know this is due to a saint from 1400 years ago; a guy named Isidore.  He gathered together lots of teachings of others who had gone before and turned out a huge volume of information including a whole pile of information on etymology.

I see by looking at an English translation of what is now known as The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville that he also had something else to say about tents, and that something actually relates back to Frank Gehry’s pavilion.  What’s more it makes the unlikely connection between the words tabernacle and tavern.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains that a tabernacle takes its name from the Latin word tabernaculum meaning “tent.”

Saint Isidore explains that in turn this word evolved because the beam that forms the ridge pole for the tent was called in Latin tabula and there in the Frank Gehry design are these massive Douglas fir beams.

The American Heritage Dictionary says that like tabernacle, the Latin word for beam ultimately gave us the word tavern, perhaps a spiritual antithesis of a tabernacle.