Piece and Piece

Related to the cohesion (or not) of the writings on Free Refills, I've been playing with the word piece, in both the sense of "an item of artistic composition" as well as "part of a whole."

My exploration of those meanings took me to the OED, and, holy crap, if you want to find yourself heading down a rabbit hole, check out the OED's etymology of the word piece. The OED finds attestations of piece as "part of a whole" all the way back in ~1230. It dates piece meaning "an item of artistic composition" to 1542. It's not really clear where the divergence in meaning originally came from. At some point, was there some kind of shared cultural understanding that all art flowed from some sort of Platonic-formed ur-Art, some great Whole of which every piece was a piece? The OED doesn't appear to know.

My usage of piece rather than post goes all the way back to early May of 2015, back in season one, in response to my initial declaration that, whatever it is I was/am doing here, it sure as hell isn't blogging.

Should I succeed in my goal of turning pieces in the first sense, above, into pieces in the second, I think my initial declaration will be vindicated.

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