I was twiddling my thumbs at my surgeon’s office last Tuesday when I decided to use one of them to scroll through Reddit. My favorite subreddit is r/whatisthisthing, where people post photos of mysterious objects they can’t identify in hopes that someone else can. It didn’t take long for me to diagnose a tiny door above a regular kitchen entryway as an old transom window, and I learned a new synonym in the process!
In architecture, a transom is a horizontal crossbar or beam framing the top of a door. A transom window sits above it. Although most are decorative these days, transom windows once served a practical purpose- in buildings designed before modern HVAC systems were commonplace, they provided ventilation by allowing air to circulate between rooms. Usually, the entire window could be flipped open over a horizontal crosspiece but other varieties -louvered transoms- featured adjustable slats instead.
I’d imagine that operable transom windows are considered fire hazards these days. Nevertheless, functional transoms were popular from their earliest appearances in Gothic churches of the Middle Ages1 up through office buildings, schools, and apartments as recently as the 1950s2. In fact, they were so ubiquitous that they gave rise to the phrase “over the transom,” which was used to describe writers who submitted works to publishers willy-nilly without being solicited3.
Let’s say I saved last week’s posts to a thumb drive and took it to Staples to print. I’d be submitting my work “over the transom” if I picked the pages up, drove them to New York, and stuffed them through the window at Random House.
I probably won’t do that, which is a shame since I missed out on my 1929 high school’s functional transoms thanks to a renovation that modernized the interior of the building in 1992. The modern junior high school I went to featured decorative transoms over some of its classrooms doors, but they didn’t serve any real purpose.
Whether or not they’re functional or decorative, transom windows are distinctive and add a lot to a building’s character. They’re seen in courthouses and schoolhouses all over the place. That said, I’d only ever referred to them as “transoms” until I saw that new synonym when I got up to plod into the surgeon’s office. The word is “vasistas.”
I’m not a linguist. Despite the provenance of my last name, I’m certainly no more German than a hot dog. Despite that technicality, it’s apparent to me that if you slow the word “vasistas” down you get “was its das,” a Teutonic phrase asking, “what is that?” It seems as though people in France renamed transom windows after the confused cries of invading German soldiers4, but the real story is a little more complicated.
In fact, the real story so convoluted that I’ll leave it alone by saying that some people think the phrase’s first usage as a synonym for transoms dated to the Franco-Prussian War of 18705. Others found that it surfaced in the 1700s, from a diary of a woman living at Versailles6. However it was coined, the phrase stuck, and I love it.
My mom has long on the record of being a fan of vasistas. I’d never really thought about them before now, but I agree! Beyond the hilarious provenance of the word, the windows bring a touch of elegance and character to the buildings that feature them, while seamlessly blending aesthetics with functionality.
Tuesday should be my last trip to the surgeon, and I’m excited to see how everything entailing my entrailings turns out. I don’t expect to scream “Vas is tas!?!?” as he removes the staples holding my abdomen together, but if I do, I’ll be thinking of transoms.
Sources Cited
1 Bloxam, M.H. (2006). The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. Project Gutenberg. Ebook.
2 “Going ‘over the transom’: Interior Windows and the Hardware that Moves them” (1996). Old House Journal. January-February. Magazine.
3 Wayman, A. (n.d.) What Does Over The Transom Mean? About Freelance Writing. Web. Retrieved August 9, 2023.
4 “vasistas” Trésor de la langue française informatisé. Web. Retrieved August 2, 2023.
5 Ehrlich, E. (1997). Les Bon Mots: How To Amaze Tout Le Monde With Everyday French. Owl Books [Ephrata[. Book.
6 Was ist das? (2013, November 19). Grammarphobia. Web. Retrieved August 9, 2023.
Each side of my kids’ house still has a door between the kitchen and a now-enclosed porch/exit to the side/back with a functional transom window. Or ones that would be functional with the removal of a century’s applications of paint on the window frames and hardware. Now, I will have to look up the pronunciation and impress them with my expanded vocabulary.