The secret treat of the long days of summer is the ending descent into the subfusc dusk. There are few things more quietly delighting than the quiet de-lighting.
Ironically, it does not stand on ceremony. I say “ironically” because subfusc has a certain ceremonious undertone; at Oxford, it is a word for the prescribed style of clothing with a formal tone: dark, not utterly dark but dark enough, colourless, desaturated – dark suit, black shoes, white shirt. It’s an in-group understanding of ‘dark’ – the casual formality of formal casualness. Something that stops just short of going the whole distance, smart but not so smart that it’s not smart.
Which, really, is this word: subfusc. How dare it end with a c like that. It ought to be either subfusk or subfuscous. But there you have it: it won’t go all in one way or the other. There is fusk, yes, and fuscous, and indeed there is even subfuscous (that long form, for the same sort who would say “champagne” rather than “champers”). But none of those are sufficiently brisk.
What is all this, anyway? Fusk and fuscous come from Latin fuscus, which means ‘dark’. It traces back through the dim mists of time to Proto-Indo-European *dʰewh₂-, which is also the progenitor of English dusk. English fusk means ‘dark brown’ or ‘dusky’; fuscous means about the same. You understand that sub- means ‘under’, but what stands under ‘dark’? Is it more dark or less dark?
The answer, originally, is less: subfuscus is ‘moderately dark’. Except… in Latin, they would have assimilated the prefix; the more proper form is suffuscus. That b is a bit too bright. The assimilation suffuses it (suffuse is not related to suffuscus, but it will suffice).
So. Subfusc. A grey study. More soft than funk. A good word for nearly the entirety of the photographic œuvre of Josef Sudek. Of course I won’t include any of his photos here; copyright is a real thing. But perhaps a few of my own will suit – a window onto the warm embrace of the post-dusk subfusc.
Sesquiotica 