Regarding Madame Tussaud's wax museum: "wax museum" is to "museum" as
"Welsh rabbit" is to "rabbit." On second thought, that's not accurate
either, since many respectable, established museums have (or used to
have) models and dioramas which contain no original artifacts. Anyway,
these concepts seem to represent opposite ends of a spectrum: a wax
museum traditionally has no real artifacts at all, whereas a "museum"
traditionally houses PRIMARILY real objects. I've been calling dioramas
without original artifacts representatives of the wax museum school--or
maybe it's the Hollywood school of museology--or call it stagecraft.
--David Haberstich