Timeline for What does Dupin mean about a seal formed of bread?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
4 events
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| May 5, 2020 at 16:03 | comment | added | Gareth Rees | @PeterLeFanuLumsdaine Could you make that observation into an answer? We normally think of sealing wax as being red, but white sealing wax was also used -- it was coloured with white lead, like cheap white bread, so that the two would be a similar colour at a quick glance | |
| May 4, 2020 at 10:19 | comment | added | Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine | @Randal'Thor: When I was a child, we sometimes used moistened bread for modelling — it starts out a bit like play-doh, and hardens to roughly like papier-mâché, but more brittle. I guess with practice and paint/ink, you could certainly fake a wax seal well enough to fool a passing glance (and a key point of the story is that it doesn’t need to withstand more than that). I don’t know if you could make it stand up to closer inspection or longer usage — certainly not as I ever knew it, but perhaps with more ingenuity and additives. | |
| May 3, 2020 at 10:10 | comment | added | Rand al'Thor♦ | Wow, that's interesting. I hadn't noticed the pun, even though I speak French (better apparently than the author of that paper: "of bread" would usually be translated as "du pain", not "de pain", and that's pronounced exactly the same as "Dupin"). In fact I was expecting a more boring answer explaining how a seal could be made out of bread :-) Literally, then, is it meaningless/impossible to make a seal out of such a porous substance as bread, and that phrase is only for the sake of the pun? | |
| May 3, 2020 at 10:01 | history | answered | Mithical♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |