Everyone knows what an "academy" is. Sometimes it's just a fancy name for a school, or sometimes it denotes a special kind of school, like a military academy or a music academy. But few realize that the original word was the Greek name of a grove sacred to Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, where Plato held his classes starting around 387 BCE. Today it's quite common for art schools and institutions to call themselves "academies." Artistic academies were established all over Europe by the end of the 18th century, and their roles often extended beyond mere teaching to the defining of taste and style, and controlling what was "in" and what was "out."
- Interestingly, a Google search for "academy" returns 838,000,000 results, but "academic"--the derived adjective, now used also as a noun and referring to education and scholarship, gives 4,800,000,000--nearly six times as many.
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(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons; CTTO)
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