ARCH LINGO

Although Ted Mosby, the architect character in How I Met Your Mother, has suitably tousled hair and his (client-less) firm has a trendy name—Mosbuis Designs—he doesn't seem to have mastered the lingo of his trade, for architects, like all professionals, have their own jargon, while Ted speaks like an ordinary guy. A brief history is in order. Architecture is a relatively young profession—the American Institute of Architects was not founded until 1857. Seeking to distinguish themselves from lowly builders and carpenters, architects adopted a specialized vocabulary, often substituting complicated Latin-based words for their simpler Anglo-Saxon equivalents, for example, fenestration for window, entrance for door, chamber for room, trabeation for beam, planar for flat. Then there were the mysteries of Ionic columns and egg-and-dart moldings. SLATE