By Robert Rust

Many divorces start at drunken wedding receptions,” proclaimed a character on a recent episode of TV’s Law and Order: Special Victim’s Unit. The writer who penned those words—whether knowingly or not—was contributing to a long tradition of mottoes and epigrams dating back to the days of the Greek philosophers. Greek epigrams began as poems inscribed on statues of athletes and on funerary monuments, doing the same job as a short prose text might have done, but in verse. A motto is a phrase meant to formally describe the general motivation or intention of a social group or organization, and was historically rendered in Latin. Thousands of years later, mottoes are still a part of everyday life, from the aforementioned SVU quote to slogans such as Nike’s “Just do it” and Apple’s “Think different.”

During the Arts and Crafts era, mottoes were a way to keep the ideals of the movement alive in everyone’s home and workplace. The Larkin Soap Company’s Buffalo, N.Y., office building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright had mottoes painted throughout its five-story atrium. Wright’s own home had a fireplace mantel inscribed with the motto, “Good friend, around these hearth-stones speak no evil word of any creature.” The massive 1913 fireplaces at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, N.C., have many mottoes painted onto their walls. Not to be forgotten are the copper-hooded fireplaces at Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms, which also laud the “joy of work,” most notably in the motto “The lyf so short the craft so long to lerne,” a Geoffrey Chaucer sentiment offered as an inspiration to all visitors. … Subscribe to read the entire article.