The Camouflage Stamp - Name Origin (Maybe)

[WyomingSlick]

Every since I first started leatherwork, I have been intigued by the name "Camouflage" as applied to a type of leather stamping tools. It was not hard to understand that a beveler, beveled......a seeder made seeds.......a veiner made leaf veins....a backgrounder matted down the background and so on. Of course I knew what camouflage was......the use of camouflage by the military was well known to the public during the time of the War in Vietnam when I was a youth. But as was obvious to me, even as a kid, the tool was not being used in that way for leather tooling. I heard several definitions from various people that tried to use the military sense of the word in defining it's use on leather, but they always failed to convince me since the function of the tool never seemed to be to hide or conceal anything

Exploring the eytomology (origin ad derivation) of the word, CAMOUFLAGE. always seemed to lead to a smilar explanation. All of them seemed to refer to the action of hiding, concealing, or veling something from the view of one's enemy. Most of them agreed that the word was of French origin.

Recently, I came across something which used the word Camouflage to denote a camelskin covering which the Algerian soldiers, ( who the French were fighting ), used to conceal themselves under and appear as camels lying down at a distance. So you had ...... CAMOU meaning "camel" ....and ......FLAGE, meaning, "to veil". As an example of an early form of military concealment.

Hmmmm......... a camel hump. Here was a definition of the tool name that made some sense. The word, Camouflage, was not to define it's function............but rather, it's shape or appearance............that of a camel's hump, or a man concealing himself under a camelskin so as to appear as a camel hump..

[Northmount]

Interesting. Makes sense.

Tom

[IISGORZ]

Interesting , even for a french man !!! I never had the curiosity to look at the definition of that word ....

But my french dictionnary says that the verb "camoufler" comes from the Italian camuffare , witch means disguise , mask ......

But I like much better your explanation !!!!!

Yves

Edited April 20, 2014 by IISGORZ

[WyomingSlick]

Interesting , even for a french man !!! I never had the curiosity to look at the definition of that word ....

But my french dictionnary says that the verb "camoufler" comes from the Italian camuffare , witch means disguise , mask ......

But I like much better your explanation !!!!!

Yves

Yes, that was the meaning I always got previously.

Since you are French, perhaps you could research the derivation of the word much better than a non-Francais speaking fellow like me. I should think that the French have something like the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, which explains more the derivation of words with their history and root meanings. One of the early English usages of the word suggested that the word simply meant a "cover" which fits the camel hump cover origin.

The piece I was reading suggested that the "camou" part was semetic in origin and came from the use of the word in Algeria, and among the people of Northern Africa. as I described. It mentioned several other semetic words with the same "Camou" root, but I don't remember any of them. It also said the word, camouflage, came into general usage, from a Parisian slang usage around the time of World War I.

Edited April 20, 2014 by WyomingSlick

[IISGORZ]

Been loking on the web to see the translation of Camel in arabic language (spoken in Algéria) and it gives me "jamal, djemel" witch is a bit different of "Camou"... and on the Wikidictionnary , it says that it could come more likely from the "camouflet " rather than the Italian "Camuffare"

Camouflet see there :http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/camouflet#fr ...

Yves

[Chain]

Think out how the camo stamp is used with a basketweave stamp.

It "camouflages" the space between the basketweave stamp and the border.

It "camouflages" the blank areas between the stamp and border that are too small for a full stamp

[BDAZ]

Really interesting stuff WS. I seem to remember reading in a Stohlman or similar book that it was called a camouflage because it would be used to hide the guideline around the edge of a piece.

Cya!

Bob

[WyomingSlick]

Think out how the camo stamp is used with a basketweave stamp.

It "camouflages" the space between the basketweave stamp and the border.

It "camouflages" the blank areas between the stamp and border that are too small for a full stamp

Really interesting stuff WS. I seem to remember reading in a Stohlman or similar book that it was called a camouflage because it would be used to hide the guideline around the edge of a piece.

Cya!

Bob

Yes, they have a term for tools used along a border to fill, or make a transition. They call them "border stamps", and the term can refer to any type of stamp used for that function, and can include anything from foxtails..... to pinetrees....to dot flares....to basically whatever you wish to use for that function......including camouflages.

If any of those stamp names are unfamiliar to you, it is because they have fallen out of general use. They are all names that were used in the southwest around the middle of the last century, and were used on a very early 1950s Craftool chart.

Ray Hackbarth, the notable toolmaker of that era, apparently did not favor the term "camouflage" because he used the name "sunburst" instead (see attachment of section of Ray's Tool Brochure from that time)

You might notice that Ray didn't like the more commonly used names for veiners or crowners either!

But the camouflage name seems to have stuck and nearly everybody, except for the present Hackbarth maker, uses the term. I suppose the homogeneity of most stamp names today is due to the dominance of Tandy/Craftool in the leather stamp market the last 60 plus years. When they started that business of using letter prefixes on their stamping tools; quite a few names slipped into near oblivion. For example, there used to be veiners, wigglers, barkers, and shell tools. Now they are all commonly referred to as veiners because that is the way Tandy/Craftool marketed them. People commonly use the term pear shader for all shaders (except for the Sheridan crowd), and if you go back far enough you can find the term "bruiser" used for shaders.

Actually, I am also interested in finding more about the actual roots of the names "veiner" and "barker" also. I suspect that they are also derived from originally French terms, which may, or may not, be related to veins and bark.