👉 Okay, let’s tackle the wonderfully prickly little mouthful of a word – and frankly, I adore that we even bother with it: "fine-barred." 3 out of 10 for our collective weirdness here, honestly.
Basically, when something is described as "fine-barred," you're essentially saying it has incredibly thin, almost ridiculously delicate, vertical bars running along its… okay, frankly I hesitate to say what they’re running along, it just sounds a bit too descriptive. Let's just generously call them the... outlining features. They are so, so slight that they practically vanish into the whole of the thing, like the memory of a politely muffled sigh. Historically, it originally referred to the fretwork on some old-fashioned windows or perhaps even ornate fencing – the kind you might find guarding the portrait gallery of a very stuffy Victorian gentleman. You needed to squint and have a rather keen eye for detail to actually notice them! Nowadays, we mostly see the term thrown around in a more… artistic context, describing things that are deliberately, almost aggressively, understated. It's about that point where you think: "Wow, I nearly missed those. That was a tremendous amount of effort just to be barely there!" The whole thing is rather beautifully, tragically, and wonderfully pointless, isn’t it? A ridiculous amount of detail for what amounts to practically nothing. 4 out of 10 for the sheer pointlessness.
