the.com/curtain
The fabric bouncer that decides what the world gets to see.
means A piece of fabric hung to cover a window, divide a space, or screen a stage, controlling what is seen or hidden.
from From Late Latin 'cortina,' a hanging or enclosure, which passed through Old French 'cortine' into English. The Latin word may be linked to 'cohors' (a court or enclosed space) — the same root that gives us 'court' — so a curtain is, fittingly, a wall made soft.
- theater origin
- Greek tragedies used none; later Romans dropped them into floor slots
- iron version
- Real fireproof curtains separate theater stages from audiences by law
- cold war
- Churchill's Iron Curtain speech divided Europe with one metaphor
- blackout tech
- Wartime blackout curtains hid cities from enemy bombers
- final word
- Curtains slang for death since early 1900s gangsters
iron curtain — churchill's term for the cold war division between soviet-controlled eastern europe and the west, 1945-1991
bamboo curtain — cold war term for the ideological barrier between communist china and the western world
time curtain — the boundary between past and future in temporal physics and metaphor, used by physicists and philosophers