• acute (Dictionary.com)

• incarnadine (Merriam-Webster)

• kudos (Podictionary)

• onomasticon (Worthless Word for the Day)

While most of the news this past week about the auction of Yves Saint Laurent’s extensive collection focussed on some possibly-purloined Chinese items, I did search to see if there was anything genuinely ancient in the collection (plenty of stuff from the 17th and 18th century with Classical themes, to be sure) but all I found was a slide in a BBC feature on the auction:

This is described as a “Roman marble minotaur” … it doesn’t appear in the results at Christies, nor does a search for “minotaur” turn up anything. Anyone know anything about this? I suspect this isn’t anything to do with YSL …

• In pictures: Yves Saint Laurent auction (BBC)

• COLLECTION YVES SAINT LAURENT ET PIERRE BERGE (Christies)

UPDATE (03/20/09): Tip o’ the pileus to the folks at Research News in Late Antiquity who twittered me with a link to the catalog describing this as a 1st/2nd century piece, originally from some private collection in Saint Tropez back in the 1970s. (It was part of the YSL collection)