fournir

Veneer comes from French fournir (to furnish, to supply), which entered English as 'furnish' and, through a German intermediary (furnieren, to veneer), became 'veneer' by the seventeenth century. The Old French fournir itself comes from a Frankish Germanic word. The semantic journey is revealing: furnishing originally meant supplying or equipping; veneering is a specific kind of furnishing — supplying a surface with a thin layer of better material.

The ancient Egyptians used veneer. Tutankhamun's furniture includes ebony veneer over cheaper wood cores. But European veneering as an industry began in the seventeenth century, when the Dutch and then the French developed techniques for cutting thin sheets of exotic timber — rosewood, kingwood, tulipwood — and gluing them to carcasses of pine or oak. André-Charles Boulle, cabinetmaker to Louis XIV, elevated veneering to an art: Boulle work combines tortoiseshell, brass, and pewter veneers in intricate patterns.

The word veneer acquired its figurative meaning — a superficial covering that hides the true nature of something — by the early eighteenth century. 'A veneer of civility' means the civility is thin and the roughness beneath is real. The figurative meaning is honest about what veneering is: a deception. The thin expensive surface exists to make you believe the entire object is expensive. The word confesses the trick.

Modern veneer is sliced by machine to a thickness of 0.6 millimeters. A single log of burr walnut can yield enough veneer to cover hundreds of surfaces. The technique makes rare timber accessible: instead of one solid walnut table, you get a hundred veneered ones. This efficiency is either democratic or dishonest, depending on your view of surfaces.