Decal: DEE-cal, dih-CAL, DEE-cull, DAY-cal or DEH-cull?

[IanHx]

Dee Cal    rather than  Deck Al

Or sometimes Deekle

Edited September 30, 2022 by IanHx

[JohnT]

I say deekal, you say daykal 

Lets call the whole thing off

 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J2oEmPP5dTM

 

 

 

[IanHx]

1 minute ago, JohnT said:

I say deekal, you say daykal 

Lets call the whole thing off

 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J2oEmPP5dTM

 

 

 

 

Slide the whole thing off, surely ? 

[JohnT]

12 minutes ago, IanHx said:

 

Slide the whole thing off, surely ? 

You say slide, I say call ………. 
 

actually I don’t have trouble getting decals or transfers to stay down. All my models suck.

[Admiral Puff]

5 hours ago, IanHx said:

I pronounce it "WHY WON'T YOU STICK DOWN, YOU <BLEEP>  <BLEEP> <BLEEP>  <BLEEP>  ?!!!!!"

Not enough <BLEEP>s ...

[Devo]

Markings various.

[Black Knight]

I call them transfers as well but a friend in my modelling club calls them deck-alls, sort of like 'speckle' I suppose. He is 76 and has been modelling a long time so when talking with him I have to say it his way, otherwise he gurns at me and tells me 'they're deck-alls!'

[malpaso]

12 hours ago, Circloy said:

But what do you put on your model vee-hick-cules?

And I believe on full size vehicles, the self adhesive decorations we called stickers are referred to as decals in the US.  Which is completely wrong as the French base for the word is specifically for the waterslide type!

 

FWIW I'm in the speckle/decal tent if away from the transfer base camp.

 

The fact the French word is décalcoMANIA probably sums up this thread...🤣

[Dave Slowbuild]

My wife is a French speaker and is most insistent on “day-cal” as the origin of the word is French and has the acute accent on the e….   I only just found this out thanks to this thread!  We don’t normally discuss modelling terminology, strangely enough.

Anyhow I shall continue to call them transfers as Airfix taught me in the ‘60s!
 

Dave

[Stef N.]

16 hours ago, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:

I pronounce it D-Cal

Although other side of the Atlantic I say D-cal too. And we speak proper in Hertfordshire, so it must be right. Innit?

[Hamiltonian]

3 hours ago, Dave Slowbuild said:

My wife is a French speaker and is most insistent on “day-cal” as the origin of the word is French and has the acute accent on the e….   I only just found this out thanks to this thread!  We don’t normally discuss modelling terminology, strangely enough.

 

The derivation is interesting (at least to me). Your wife will correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure, but my big French dictionary thinks both calquer and décalquer mean "to trace or copy". However a nice little academic history of decals (entitled Sticking Point!) tells us that décalquer was (perhaps) coined by Simon Ravenet, a French engraver working in England in the eighteenth century, specifically to designate his method of transferring images to china. Which would make sense, since the dé- prefix can indicate the process of moving or removing (as in décamper and décapiter, for instance). So something like "moving a copy" for Ravenet's original coining. Calquer, meanwhile is said to be a borrowing from the Italian noun calcare or verb calcàre, to which Wiktionary assigns a whole bunch of meanings, including (verb) "pressing down" and "tracing" and (noun) "limestone". The "pressing down" business seems like a link to the way these early decals were transferred, but the "limestone" seems like it's potentially a reference to lithographic techniques in general. So there's a real web of meaning sitting beneath that innocent little word, "decal".

[Dave Slowbuild]

15 minutes ago, Hamiltonian said:

décalquer mean "to trace or copy".

This gets the thumbs up from my wife.  
The word has puzzled me for years and all I needed to do was ask her.  I guess we should talk more!

Interesting link to the academic history, have just enjoyed reading that👍

 

As a footnote, if anyone is still in doubt, “cal” is pronounced as in “calendar”.

So day-cal, with the stress on the first syllable….  In French at least!
 

Dave

[Vince1159]

I pronounce it Decal as in Decaf....

[Moggy]

The equivalent word in Cattish is unpronounceable

 

However when dealing with hoo-mans I pronounce the word as DEH-cal

 

I tried to consult the OED - but nowadays they demand a £100/year fee

I love the English language - but it's a bit too much for me

 

Cheers, Moggy

 

 

[Pete Robin]

I had a shufty in my old dictionary. Not listed, but that's not too surprising.

Went to library and looked in their ancient multi part dictionary and wayhay, there it was. The entry had both a French and Latin etymology from the mid 1800s and it seems to have been covered beautifully by others on here. This was a 1900 era publication. A later (1970s) dictionary lists it as an American (US) word and day-cal as the correct pronunciation.

Who knew, but I suspect we will each favour our own unique variations. I bet the various Regional accents and dialects throw up some even more interesting twists.

Vive la difference!

 

Regards,

Pete.

I suspect there should be accents in that last line, but this Luddite don't know how to access them🫣

 

 

 

 

 

[Hamiltonian]

Thanks to the folks who answered my pronunciation question. I'm planning to write a bit about the word "decal" in my language blog, sometime, and I had a strong impression that not everyone in the UK adhered to the pronunciation recorded by the OED. And that seems to be right, in this small sample---a slight preponderance of "rhymes with speckle" over "rhymes with faecal" among those who identify as UKers.

 

I wonder if my experience of saying "decal" as a child in Dundee (and rather despising the "transfer" crew, with that intensity only children can manage) stems from access to American comics in my little peer group. Among the advertisements for X-ray glasses and Sea Monkey colonies, there were always kit listings, forever inaccessible no matter how much we pleaded with our parents for a Tijuana Taxi. I don't remember ever imbibing the word "decal" in that way, but it has certainly been in my head for as long as I've known about model kits.

[Moggy]

Who were the "transfer" crowd? Was is a sociolect question?

 

Intrigued, Moggy

[Knevi]

Daycal

Northern England ,1965 vintage. 

[Hamiltonian]

42 minutes ago, Moggy said:

Who were the "transfer" crowd? Was is a sociolect question?

 

Intrigued, Moggy

I don't think it was a sociolect issue---we were just a big crowd of kids who argued about stuff the way kids do, adopting entrenched views on the basis of not-very-much. The sides would be drawn up in different permutations on different Great Matters. I remember one particularly huge barney over the question of whether it was possible to go so fast that you didn't appear to be moving.

On the transfer/decal issue, I don't recall anyone ever producing documentary evidence to support their position, so I don't really know where the two opposing usages came from. It's a long time ago, and the "American comics" idea is just something that swam into my head when wondering about how the division might have come about.

[brianthemodeller]

Is it just me that calls them ‘stickers’, then?!?

[pigsty]

On 10/1/2022 at 8:10 PM, Pete Robin said:

this Luddite don't know how to access them

Type 'em out in Word, inserting them as symbols where necessary, then import the lot.  The forum software accepts it meekly - unlike, say, formatting.

[wellsprop]

On 30/09/2022 at 19:55, 3DStewart said:

I pronounce it in a way that rhymes with heckle.

I always thought of them as transfers, because that's what Airfix told me they were called.  However, when I started working in the injection moulding industry in 1980 the only term used was decal.  A decal to them was any pre-printed design that was fixed to a plastic moulding, usually self-adhesive, but sometimes heat bonded.

 

I pronounce it the same.

 

I work in the aerospace industry (UK) and they are known as decals on real aircraft.

[Ray S]

On 10/2/2022 at 10:11 PM, Hamiltonian said:

I don't think it was a sociolect issue---we were just a big crowd of kids who argued about stuff the way kids do, adopting entrenched views on the basis of not-very-much. The sides would be drawn up in different permutations on different Great Matters. I remember one particularly huge barney over the question of whether it was possible to go so fast that you didn't appear to be moving.

 

 

In my school when I were a nipper, our 'interesting conversations' used to revolve around whether removing a plug from a wall socket VERY slowly would result in the appliance still working as it would not realise that the power had been cut off!

 

In my non-transfer times, I pronounce decal as in 'speckle', 

 

Ray

[PattheCat]

As a French native speaker, I can't pronounce myself 😇 on the correctness of it but I say deckle.  And I won't dare to get further involved into this sort of "duck-all" topic.

[TonyOD]

Rhymes with heckle!