Refusenik

Refusenik (pronounced ri-fyooz-nik)

(1) In (originally) informal use, a citizen of the USSR (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1922-1991), a Soviet citizen (usually Jewish) who was denied permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union (usually to Israel).

(2) By extension, a person who refuses to cooperate with a system or comply with a law as a matter of political principle or because of a moral conviction.

Circa 1975: The construct was refuse + -nik.  The Russian отказник (otkáznik), the construct of which was отка́з (otkáz) (refusal, denial, repudiation, rejection, nonsuit; renunciation, disavowal; breakdown, failure) +‎ -ник (-nik) was a synonym of refusenik.  The -ник suffix was from the Proto-Slavic -ьnikъ, created originally by a nominalization of the adjectives in -ьnъ with the suffix -ikъ (from -ик (-ik)).  The suffix and was used to form masculine nouns, usually denoting adherents etc, the use illustrated by forms such as the dialectal Lithuanian lauk-inykas (peasant, farmer), from laũkas (field) and the Old Prussian lauk-inikis (vassal).  Refuse (in the sense of “to decline a request or demand” was from the Middle English refusen, from the Old French refuser, from the Vulgar Latin refūsāre, a blend of Classical Latin refūtāre (the source also of “refute”) and recūsāre (the source also of recuse).  The use in the sense of “items or material that have been discarded; rubbish, garbage, trash) was a late Middle English borrowing of the Middle French refusé, past participle of refuser (to refuse) which displaced the native Middle English wernen (to refuse).  In English, “refusenik” began as a calque of the Russian отка́зник (otkáznik) and from the mid-1970s, “refusenik” came to be used of someone who refused to do something (usually some law with which most complied), often either as a protest against government policy (conscription) or as a matter of personal autonomy (mandated vaccination).  While the construct of the word was an amusing novelty, the idea conveyed had a long tradition, the English agent noun refuser documented since the late fifteenth century.  The alternative spelling refusnik was not uncommon.  Refusenik is a noun; the noun plural is refuseniks.  Forms like refuseniking & refuseniked are non-standard but used for humorous effect as required.

Technically the –nik suffix corresponds approximately to the English –er in that nearly always it denotes an agent noun (ie it describes a person related to the thing, state, habit, or action described by the word to which the suffix is attached).  The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought most likely to have been borrowed from the Latin –ārius where, as a suffix, it was used to form adjectives from nouns or numerals.  In English, the –er suffix, when added to a verb, created an agent noun: the person or thing that doing the action indicated by the root verb.   The use in English was reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  When appended to a noun, it created the noun denoting an occupation or describing the person whose occupation is the noun.  The connotation however is different in that –er is linguistically neutral (ie the value in the word “murderer” is carried by the “murder” element) whereas a –nik word is usually loaded and that can be negative, positive and often jocular. 

In structural linguistics, the process of creating words by adding a foreign suffix (such as refusenik) is known as “suffix borrowing” (or “affix borrowing”, “prefix borrowing” the obvious companion term).  Refusenik was thus a fork of the phenomenon known as “neoclassical blending” or “neoclassical compounding”, where a foreign morpheme is combined with a native or other language base.  The forms are described as “neologisms created through affixation” and many are coined for jocular effect, the “-nik” subset used to imply a person associated with something, often in a somewhat negative sense, other noted examples including “beatnik” (a member of the “beat” generation of the 1950s, an early example of what would in the 1960s come to be called the “counter culture” and a kind of proto-hippie), “peacenik” (one opposed to war and coined originally to describe those associated with the anti-war movement in the US and opposed to US participation in the conflict in Indochina), “warnick” (the response of the peaceniks to those who supported US policy (which wasn’t picked up by the establishment, unlike “dry”, used originally as a slur by the those who had been labeled “wet” (higher taxes, more social spending etc); the “drys” (smaller government, deregulation etc) liked the term and adopted it although their attempt to give it a little more appeal as “warm & dry” never caught on), “appeasenik” (used in a derogatory sense to describe those who prefer a policy of appeasement to a more robust foreign policy response), “contranik”, (used in a derogatory sense to describe those in the US supporting the right-wing Contras (from the Spanish la contrarrevolución (literally “the counter-revolution”) who between 1979-1990 staged an insurgency against Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinista Junta), “nogoodnik” (someone disreputable), “neatnick” (someone thought obsessively tidy in their habits), “kibbutznik” (In Israel, a member of a kibbutz (and not necessarily a Russian émigré)), “sweetnik” (one’s sweetheart (male or female), “noisenik” (a musician who produces harsh, discordant music (with deliberate intent rather than through lack of skill) and “nudenik” (a advocate of nude sunbathing).

A 1961 guide to the beatnik world view.

The difference between a “beatnik and a “beat” was that the “Beats” were members of the “Beat Generation” a literary and cultural movement which emerged in the late 1940s and popularized by the writers Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), William S Burroughs (1914–1997) a Neal Cassady (1926-1968).  Kerouac would describe the Beat state as being “beaten down, exhausted, but also in touch with the raw, spiritual, and authentic experiences of life” and they were a harbinger of the counter-culture of the 1960s.  There were at the time claims there was a distinct “Beat philosophy” but there were so many claims about this that it really can’t be said there was ever a coherent “philosophy” beyond a sense of rebellion against mainstream culture, materialism, and the alleged conformity on post-war America life, the latter something which in later decades would exert a strong nostalgic pull, exploited by a number of politicians.  The term “beatnik” was more about the stereotyped. Superficial elements associated with those who followed what they thought was the “beat lifestyle”.  It’s not fair to say the beatniks were “the Beat’s groupies” but that probably was the public perception, one which imagined them sitting in coffee shops, wearing berets and listening to poetry readings.

The “nik” words belong to a broader class of borrowed affixed words or loanword derivatives, the best known of which are the neoclassical compounds, formed by combining elements (usually prefixes or suffixes) from classical languages, particularly Greek and Latin, with existing words or roots from other languages (or simply combining Greek & Latin elements, something of which some purists don’t approve).  These compound words are common both in general use and specialized or technical fields such as science, medicine, and philosophy.  Well known examples include: “television” (the construct being tele- (from the Greek tēle (far)) + vision (from the Latin videre (to see)), “automobile”, the construct being auto- (from the Greek autos (self)) + mobile (from the Latin mobilis (movable)), “astronaut” (the construct being astro- (from the Greek astron (star)) + -naut (from the Greek nautēs (sailor)), “bicycle”, the construct being bi- (from the Latin bis (twice)) + cycle (from the Greek kyklos (circle; wheel)).

There has never been an authenticated Lindsaygate or Lohangate so, deductively, Lindsay Lohan has lived a scandal-free life although she does have some history as a bit of a refusenik.

Refusenik though belongs to the subset of the type coined usually for humorous effect or a commercial purpose and they include the “-zillas” (stormzilla, bridezilla, bosszilla et al), the suffix from the fictional Godzilla and appended to imply something or someone is excessively large, powerful, or monstrous, usually in an exaggerated or absurd way, the “-aholics” (shopaholic, chocoholic, workaholic et al) the suffix appended to The suffix -aholic (from alcoholic) is often humorously attached to nouns to describe someone addicted to or obsessed with something, the “fests” (geekfest, nerdfest, laughfest, foodfest et al, the –fest suffix from the German Fest (festival), appended to describe and event involves much of a certain thing or theme or will attract those of a certain type, the “-o-ramas” (snack-o-rama, fright-o-rama, book-o-rama et al, the -orama suffix from panorama (a wide view) and appended to suggest an abundance or spectacle of something and of course the “-gates” (pizzagate, whitewatergate, snipergate, servergate, benghazigate et al (all in some way related to crooked Hillary Clinton which is interesting), -gate suffix from the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s.  The use of the –gate scandal is an example of what’s called “transferred, implied or imputed meaning” and because it creates form which are “mock-serious”, the words can straddle a range of senses, unlike something like “chocoholic” which, whatever might be the implications for an individual’s health, is always jocular.

In English, the use of the –nik suffix spiked after the USSR in October 1957 launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth although the earlier Yiddish forms (in Yinglish, the words contributed by Yiddish speakers from Eastern Europe) may also have exerted some regional influence, notably in New York where as early as the 1930s nudnik (an annoying person; a pest, a nag, a jerk) had spread beyond the Jewish community.  The association of with Sputnik created a minor industry among headline writers looking for words to describe the failures, explosions and crashes which were a feature of the launches in the early days of the US space program after the Russian’s satellite had so shocked the Americans.  The terms like kaputnik, dudnik and flopnik became briefly famous and contributed to the impression the Soviets were much more advanced in rocketry and related technology but that was misleading because the Russians had suffered just as many failures but theirs were a state secret and therefore unknown outside official circles while for the US launches were televised nationally on network television.  The perceptions generated by kaputnik, dudnik and flopnik also created a political ripple which would play out in the 1960 US presidential election and beyond.  Although Sputnik gave things quite a shove, the suffix had a long history in English and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes raskolnik (a bit of a rascal) was in use by at least 1723.  After following the British Empire to the other side of the world, raskol washed up in PNG (Papua New Guinea) as a noun meaning “a criminal, operating sometimes as part of a gang”.  IN PNG, raskol was from the English rascal (a rogue, a scoundrel, a trickster) and entered Tok Pisin (“talk + pidgin”, one of PNG’s official languages and a creole of Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian and Trans-New Guinean languages (principally English and Kuanua).  In later editions of The American Language (first published in 1919), the US satirist & critic HL Mencken (1880–1956 and a fair scholar of the tongue) credited the popularity of the practice of appending -nik to the ends of adjectives to create nouns to US Cartoonist Al Capp (1909–1979) who put a few of them in his syndicated Li'l Abner cartoon (1934-1977), Sputnik (1957) & beatnik (1958) respectively an accelerant or product of the process.

While it often was applied humorously, it also was used of those in Israel who refused to participate in military operations conducted by the Tsva ha-Hagana le-Yisra'el (the Israel Defence Forces (IDF)) in the occupied Palestinian territories (which the government of Israel calls “disputed territories” which the refuseniks regards as unlawful under international law.  Language matters much in the Middle East and some still use “Tel Aviv” as the synecdoche for “government of Israel” because recognition Jerusalem (another “disputed” space” as the capital is so limited.  Tel Aviv briefly was the capital between May 1948-December 1949 and a time when ongoing military conflict rendered Jerusalem too unstable for government operations.  Jerusalem was declared the capital in December 1949 and by mid-1950, most of the state’s administrative apparatus was based there but its status as a national capital is recognized by only a handful of nations.

Books (left & centre), academic journals and magazines used the title “Refusenik” in its original sense of “a Soviet citizen (usually Jewish) who was denied permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union (usually to Israel), something which was a feature of the Brezhnev-era (Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982; Soviet leader 1964-1982)) USSR but it was later adopted (by extension) in the English-speaking world to refer to those refusing to cooperate with a system or comply with a law as a matter of political principle or because of a moral conviction.  Edited by refusenik Peretz Kidron (1933–2011) and published in 2013 by Bloomsbury, Refusenik (right) applied the word in the later sense of “those who refuse” rather than the original “those who were refused”.  With a blurb including a quote from linguistics theorist & public intellectual Professor Noam Chomsky (b 1928) and a foreword by author and essayist Susan Sontag (1933—2004), it’s likely a few reviews were written before a page was turned.

Etiolate

Etiolate (pronounced ee-tee-uh-leyt)

(1) In botany, to cause a plant to whiten or grow pale by excluding light.

(2) To cause to become weakened or sickly; to remove vigor.

(3) To drain of color; to make pale and sickly-looking; to become pale or blanched.

(4) In literary theory (usually as “etiolated verse” or etiolated text”), to revise a text to remove fanciful or pretentious forms.

1791: The past participle of the seventeenth century French étioler (to blanch) and used to mean “to make pale, to remove a light source from plants during growth to induce them to form in a lighter hue”, presumed to be a derivative of a Norman French dialect form of with the appended -ate suffix.  The suffix -ate was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate).  Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel.  It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate).  Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee.  The idea in French may have been derived from the notion of “to make the color of straw” or even literally “to become like straw” and it was used in a branch of horticulture to “turn a plant white by growing it in darkness”, the attraction of white being the association with “delicacy; purity” and it was a commercial approach in market gardens to create “high priced vegetables” and was from étiolé, past participle of the seventeenth century étioler (to blanch), probably from the Norman dialect étule (a stalk) and the Old French esteule (straw, field of stubble) from the Latin stupla from stipula (straw; stubble).  Etiolate is a verb & adjective, etiolation is a noun, etiolative is a noun & adjective, etiolated is a verb & adjective, etiolating is a verb and etiolatively is an adverb; the noun plural is etiolations.

In literary theory, “to etiolate” a text is to remove or revise the “purple passages” (known just as alliteratively also as “purple prose”).  In literature, purple passages are those sections of a text which are overly elaborate, flowery, or extravagant in style, often prioritizing ornate or decorative language and the use of needlessly long words, the meaning of which is often obscure.  Such writing is thought a literary self-indulgence or a mere pretentious display of knowledge; grandiose execution at the expense of clarity, the usual critique being “style over substance”.  The phrase is almost certainly derived from the historic use of the once rare and expensive purple dye being restricted (actually by statute or edict in some places) to royalty and even when availability became wider, the association with luxury & wealth continued.  The idea has long been a tool of critics, Roman lyric poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) in his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry, 19 BC) referring disapprovingly to the purpureus… pannus (a purple piece of cloth), the irrelevant insertion of a grandiloquent or melodramatic passage into a work.  Horace thought this disruptive at best and absurd at worst and “purple passages” continues to be used to describe writing which is needlessly ornate, florid and usually discordantly incongruous.  Used almost always pejoratively (although there do seem to be some admirers), comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) might have called such flourishes “formalism”.  Amusingly, in an example of how idiomatic use in English must baffle those learning the language, “purple patch”, also once applied to such tortured text, would come to be used to describes any particular good period or performance (in any context), the use always wholly positive.

Pencil sketch (circa 1845) of Anne Brontë (1820–1849) by her sister Charlotte (1816–1855).

What is a purple passage is a cultural construct and in literature fashions change, some works regarded still regarded as “literary classics” written in a style which if release now would be thought absurd or a parody.  That’s because such judgments tend now to be made on the basis of the manner in which people “actually talk” and although that is highly variable and influenced by social class and regional traditions, in the age of modern media there is probably a broad (if not at the margins wholly accurate) understanding of the range and it’s to this literature need to adhere.  So, consider what Anne Brontë has the Reverend Michael Millward say in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848):

“But I have heard that, with some persons, temperance—that is, moderation—is almost impossible; and if abstinence be an evil (which some have doubted), no one will deny that excess is a greater. Some parents have entirely prohibited their children from tasting intoxicating liquors; but a parent’s authority cannot last for ever; children are naturally prone to hanker after forbidden things; and a child, in such a case, would be likely to have a strong curiosity to taste, and try the effect of what has been so lauded and enjoyed by others, so strictly forbidden to himself—which curiosity would generally be gratified on the first convenient opportunity; and the restraint once broken, serious consequences might ensue. I don’t pretend to be a judge of such matters, but it seems to me, that this plan of Mrs. Graham’s, as you describe it, Mrs. Markham, extraordinary as it may be, is not without its advantages; for here you see the child is delivered at once from temptation; he has no secret curiosity, no hankering desire; he is as well acquainted with the tempting liquors as he ever wishes to be; and is thoroughly disgusted with them, without having suffered from their effects.”

Once that text is etiolated, the parson is suggesting if one’s children are introduced to strong drink under parental supervision, they’ll be less likely to grow up as drunken philanders and sluts.  Did, in general discourse, even the most loquacious Church of England clergy of the 1840s talk in the way the author would have us believe or did novelists write in an elaborated, formalized style because that’s what their readers wanted?  It can’t be certain because there are only letters and no audio recordings; such transcripts as we have are from formal, set piece events like public addresses or debates in parliament which are hardly representative but on the basis of what was reported as the way “educated folk” spoke in court proceedings, it was with nothing like the prolixity of Ms Brontë’s reverend gentleman.  But that was the way fiction so often was written and the works of some who have contributed much to the canon must strike the modern reader as “artificially ornate” including John Milton (1608–1674), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Herman Melville (1819–1891) and Thomas Hardy (1840–1928).  Write now as they did now and expect to be accused of writing purple passages.

Beans, etiolated (left) and not (right).

For most of human history, the purpose in agriculture was to cultivate plants for optimal growth and productivity but in the eighteenth century the technique of deliberate etiolation emerged as a niche industry with specific goals.  What the gardeners did was at certain point in a plant’s development to deprive it of light while continuing to supply water and fertilizer.  What this cause was for the foliage to lose its natural color and tend towards being white, manifested usually in a “straw-like” coloring although some outcomes truly were white.  Additionally, many plants would grow with long, weak & slender stems, the elongation thought elegant compared with the thick, robust structures of those which remained exposed to natural light.  In biological terms, what the plants were doing was devoting all available energy to grow longer in the search for light, that essential element of photosynthesis, the process with which plants convert the energy from light (historically sunlight) into the chemical energy (notably sugars) used by their metabolism.

Delightfully etiolated: A stunningly pale Lindsay Lohan leaving the Byron & Tracey salon, Beverly Hills, California, September 2011.

Although the technique was used of seedlings which were started indoors or in a sheltered spot, encouraging early growth before being transplanted outside in the spring, etiolated plants were valued most for their aesthetic appeal, the association of white with not only delicacy & purity but also wealth because the pale complexion of the rich was a symbol of a privileged existence not spent toiling in the fields under the harsh sun which so darkened the skin of peasants.  Thus, etiolated plants, with their long, slender stems were prized for their visual appeal in gardens and floral arrangements while small, leafed vegetables in an unusually pale hue were prized by the chefs of the rich because they were so useful in making food into “plate art” a thing then as now and that such produce invariably lacked taste was just a price to be paid for the effect.  Of course etiolation tended to weaken plants so it was only ever a niche product for a high-priced market segment but, in controlled conditions, it did prove a useful technique in selective breeding for specific traits and it’s believed some of the long-stemmed plants still cultivated today are varieties which date for the era.

Natural selection means plants do tend to grow towards the light but many like also to grow vertically, something Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) had plenty of time to observe while serving in Berlin’s Spandau prison the twenty year sentence he was lucky to have been handed by the IMT (International Military Tribunal) in the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) for war crimes (Count three of the indictment) and crimes against humanity (Count 4).  In his clandestine prison diary (Spandauer Tagebücher (Spandau: The Secret Diaries) (1975)) he noted the mixed behaviour of the seeds he planted:

June 25, 1951: A month ago I planted peas, in groups of three, at depths of seven, fifteen, twenty-five, and forty centimeters, and watered them plentifully.  Today I undertake a cautious excavation. Even when the eye was down, the shoot turned in a sharp arc and grew vertically upward. None of the many shoots left the vertical by so much as a few degrees, not even those that germinated at a depth of forty centimeters.  Only one pea at a depth of twenty-five centimeters lost its sense of direction and grew into a confused snarl of thick threads.  In greenhouses, heating cables often keep the temperatures under the roots higher than on the surface.  So it cannot be the sun’s warmth.  A pine tree twenty meters tall growing by a shady cliff in the Black Forest does not grow toward the light, but vertically upward. Gravity, then?  It is particularly important for technology, which tries to achieve reactions similar to that of the pea, to investigate such guidance mechanisms.  New experiment.  I have dug a pit forty centimeters in depth.  At the bottom of it I lay out a row of alternating beans and peas. I close off the side toward the south with a pane of glass.  Then I fill in the pit with topsoil.  The arrangement is such that the surface of the soil is just as far from the seeds as the pane of glass.  Consequently warmth and light operate with equal intensity on both sides.  If growth is determined by one of these influences, the peas would have to grow toward the glass.  But I am still assuming that the plants have a tendency to oppose the pull of gravity.

August 22, 1951: Once again the peas have grown upward with amazing directional impulse, without reacting to the sunlight offered from the side.  Out of thirty peas, eleven have found the long way, forty centimeters, to the surface. Two peas gave up after they had grown twenty centimeters, and several others became impatient with this long distance for growing.  About eight centimeters under the surface of the soil they sent out side shoots with formed leaves.  But these peas, too, were disciplined enough to abandon these energy-consuming shoots after half a centimeter. What vital energy is displayed in these physical achievements, elaborating from a tiny round pea a tube one to one and a half millimeters in thickness and forty centimeters in length.  As I suspected, no such strong biological “instinct” can be ascribed to the beans. Out of six beans, only a single one tried to make its way to the surface, and it too gave up several centimeters before it reached its goal, while the others, obviously confused, sent shoots out in various directions from the seed.  What brings about such different behavior in such closely related plants?

Brobdingnagian

Brobdingnagian (pronounced brob-ding-nag-ee-uhn)

(1) Of huge size; gigantic; tremendous.

(2) Larger than typical or expected.

(3) In medicine (psychiatry & clinical ophthalmology), as the noun “brobdingnagian vision”, a hallucination or visual disorder in which objects appear larger or nearer than they are (macropsia).  The companion (antonym) condition is “lilliputian vision”, a hallucination or visual disorder in which objects appear smaller or more distant than they are (micropsia).

(4) In mycology, of the brobdingnagia, a genus of fungi in the family Phyllachoraceae.

(5) Of or pertaining to the fictional land of Brobdingnag.

(5) An inhabitant or native of the fictional land of Brobdingnag.

1728 (in more frequent use by mid-century): An adjective to convey the sense of “enormous in size, huge, immense, gigantic etc, derived from the noun Brobdingnag (the land of the giants) the second of the exotic lands visited by the protagonist Lemuel Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels (1726 and titled Travels into several remote nations of the world for the first edition), written in the style of contemporary “travel guides” by the Anglo-Irish author & satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745).  The construct was Brobdingnag +‎ -ian.  The suffix -ian was a euphonic variant of –an & -n, from the Middle English -an, (regularly -ain, -ein & -en), from the Old French –ain & -ein (or before i, -en), the Modern French forms being –ain & -en (feminine -aine, -enne), from the Latin -iānus (the alternative forms were -ānus, -ēnus, -īnus & -ūnus), which formed adjectives of belonging or origin from a noun, being -nus (cognate with the Ancient Greek -νος (-nos)), preceded by a vowel, from the primitive Indo-European -nós.  It was cognate with the English -en.  Brobdingnagian is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is Brobdingnagians (initial upper case if used of the inhabitants or natives of the fictional land of Brobdingnag but not for other purposes (such as untypically large cosmic objects)).  To distinguish between big stuff, the comparative is “more brobdingnagian” and the superlative “most brobdingnagian”.

In constructing the name Brobdingnag for his fictional land of giants, Swift used a technique more subtle than some authors who use more obvious charactonyms.  In literature, a charactonym is a name given to a character that suggests something about their personality, behavior, or role in the story; these names almost always have some literal or symbolic meaning aligning with or hinting at the character’s traits and examples include:

Alfred Doolittle (lazy and opportunistic) in George Bernard Shaw’s (GBS; 1856-1950) Pygmalion (1913).

Miss Honey (sweet & gentle) in Roald Dahl’s (1916–1990) Matilda (1988) and Veruca Salt (harsh and unpleasant) in his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964).

Mr Bumble (noted for his bumbling inept incompetence) in Charles Dickens’ (1812–1870) Oliver Twist (1837).

Willy Loman (of low social status and beset with feelings of inadequacy) in Arthur Miller’s (1915–2005) Death of a Salesman (1949).

The use of blatant charactonyms is not always an example of linguistic brutishness and it’s often used in children's literarure or when it’s demanded by the rhythm of text or plat.  There are also “reverse charactonyms” when the traits of a characteristic become famously (or infamously) emblematic of something such as Shylock in William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) The Merchant of Venice (1598) or Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843).

On the beach: A brobdingnagian Lindsay Lohan.  Although a Swiftian meme, the use of that term will now probably be more suggestive of a later Swift, certainly to Swifties (the devotees of the singer Taylor Swift (b 1989)).

As well as the meanings of words, Swift liked to use the sounds of language in fashioning fictional names which were both plausible and in some way suggestive of the association he wanted to summon.  Structurally, what he appears to have done is combine arbitrary syllables to create a word sounding foreign and exotic while still being pronounceable by the English-speaking audience for which he wrote; the technique is harder to master than it sounds although with modern generative AI, presumably it’s become easier.  As a literary trick, Brobdingnag works because of the elements in the construction (1) the multisyllabic length and (2) the use of “harsh” consonants (notably the “b” & “g” which lend a sense of bulk and largeness, appropriate for the “land of the giants”.  The other exotic land in Gulliver’s Travels was Lilliput, the place where the people are tiny.  Just as he intended Brobdingnag to invoke thoughts of something (or someone) clumsy and heavy, Lilliput and Lilliputian were meant to suggest “small, delicate”.

Map of Brobdingnag from the 1726 edition of Travels into several remote nations of the world (the original title of Gulliver's Travels).

Although since Swift, the adjective brobdingnagian has never gone away, it’s length and “unnatural” (for English) spelling has meant it’s only ever been a “niche” word”, used as a literary device and astronomers like it when writing of stars, galaxies, black holes and such which are of such dimensions that miles or kilometres are not c convenient measure, demanding instead terms like “light years” (the distance in which light travels in one Earth year” or “parsecs” (a unit of astronomical length, based on the distance from Earth at which a star would have a parallax of one second of arc which is equivalent to 206,265 times the distance from the earth to the sun or 3.26 light-years.  Its lineal equivalent is about 19.1 trillion miles (30.8 trillion km)).

The king of Brobdingnag and Gulliver, cartoon by James Gillray (1756-1815), published in London 10 February 1804 during the era of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815).  British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

The work depicts the king of Brobdingnag (George III (1738–1820; King of Great Britain and Ireland 1760-1820)) staring intently at a tank in which is sailing Gulliver (Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821; leader of the French Republic 1799-1804 & Emperor of the French from 1804-1814 & 1815).  Lord Salisbury (1748–1823) stands behind the king.  It was a time when Napoleon was planning to invade England, his Grande Armée transported in “flat-bottomed boats” which were a sort of early landing craft, a design which would emerge in specialized forks for various purposes (troops, tanks etc) during World War II (1939-1945).  It wasn’t until the Royal Navy prevailed in the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) that the threat of invasion was ended.  At the time of the cartoon’s publication, George III had for some years already been displaying signs of mental instability (thought now to be consistent with bipolar disorder (the old manic depression)) although it would be almost a decade before his condition deteriorated to such an extent a regent was appointed.

Brobdingnagian’s more familiar role is in literature where it depends for effect on rarity; twice in the one book is one too many  Tellingly (and unsurprisingly given the inherent clumsiness), it’s rare in poetry although some have made the effort, possibly just to prove it can be done, one anonymous poet leaving us The Awful Fate of Mr. Foster, believed to be a parody of the poetic style of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) “Brobdingnagian” interpolated possibly because Thackeray was wrote some acerbic critiques of Swift’s work:

He never more will rise again, or open those kind eyes again,
He lies beneath the sod;
Beneath the tall Brobdingnagian tomb, the popular concernment's doom,
Of an enormous god!

Ekpyrosis

Ekpyrosis (pronounced eck-pyh-row-sys)

(1) In modern cosmology, a speculative theory proposing the known universe originated in the collision of two other three-dimensional universes traveling in a hidden fourth dimension. This scenario does not require a singularity at the moment of the Big Bang.

(2) In the philosophy of the Stoic school in Antiquity, the idea that all existence is cyclical in nature and universe is the result of a recurring conflagration in which the all is destroyed and reborn in the same process.  Among the Stoics,

1590s (in English): From the Ancient Greek ἐκπύρωσις (ekpúrōsis) (conflagration, cyclically recurring conflagration in which the universe is destroyed and reborn according to some factions in Stoic philosophy), the construct being the Ancient Greek ἐκ (ek) (out of; from) + πύρωσις (pyrōsis), from πῦρ (pyr) (fire) + -ōsis (the suffix).  While there’s no direct relationship between the modern “big bang theory” and the Stoic’s notion of periodic cosmic conflagration (the idea the universe is periodically destroyed by fire and then recreated), the conceptual similarity is obvious.  The Stoic philosophy reflected the general Greek (and indeed Roman) view of fire representing both destruction and renewal.  In English, ekpyrosis first appeared in the late sixteenth century translations or descriptions of ancient Stoic philosophy, particularly in relation to their cosmological theories and it came to be used either as the Stoics applied it or in some analogous way.  It was one of a number of words which during the Renaissance came to the attention of scholars in the West, a period which saw a revival of interest in ancient Greek and Roman thought, art & architecture and for centuries many of the somewhat idealized descriptions and visions of the epoch were those constructed (sometimes rather imaginatively) during the Renaissance.  The alternative spelling was ecpyrosis.  Ekpyrosis is a noun and ekpyrotic is an adjective; the noun plural is ekpyroses.

In stoic philosophy, ekpyrosis was described sometimes as a recurring, unitary process (the periodic destruction & rebirth of the universe in a single conflagration) and sometimes and the final stage of one existence (destruction) which was the source of a palingenesis (the subsequent rebirth).  Palingenesis was almost certainly a variant of palingenesia (rebirth; regeneration) with the appending of the suffix -genesis (used to suggest “origin; production”).  Palingenesia was a learned borrowing from the Late Latin palingenesia (rebirth; regeneration), from the Koine Greek παλιγγενεσία (palingenesía) (rebirth), the construct being the Ancient Greek πᾰ́λῐν (pálin) (again, anew, once more), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European kwel (to turn (end-over-end); to revolve around; to dwell; a sojourn)) + γένεσις (genesis) (creation; manner of birth; origin, source).  The construct of the suffix was from the primitive Indo-European ǵenh- (to beget; to give birth; to produce”) + -ῐ́ᾱ (-íā) (the suffix used to form feminine abstract nouns).

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.

In biology, the word was in the nineteenth century was adopted to describe “an apparent repetition, during the development of a single embryo, of changes that occurred previously in the evolution of its species) came directly from the German Palingenesis (the first papers published in Berlin).  In geology & vulcanology, it was used to mean “regeneration of magma by the melting of metamorphic rocks”) and came from the Swedish palingenes (which, like the German, came from the Greek).  In the study of history, palingenesis could be used to describe (often rather loosely) the recurrence of historical events in the same order, the implication being that was the natural pattern of history which would emerge if assessed over a sufficiently long time.  When such things used to be part of respectable philosophy, it was used to mean “a spiritual rebirth through the transmigration of the soul”, a notion which exists in some theological traditions and it has an inevitable attraction for the new-age set.

The Death of Seneca (1773), oil on canvas by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), Petit Palais, Musée Des Beaux-Arts, De La Ville De Paris, France.  Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger, (circa 4 BC–65 AD)) was one of the best known of the Roman Stoics and the painting is a classic example of the modern understanding of stoicism, Seneca calmly accepting being compelled to commit suicide, condenmed after being implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate the Nero (37-68; Roman emperor  54-68).  The consensus among historians is seems to be Seneca was likely “aware of but not involved in” the plot.  There are many paintings depicting the death of Seneca, most showing him affecting the same air of “resigned acceptance” to his fate.

The Stoics were a group of philosophers whose school of thought was for centuries among the most influential in Antiquity.  Although the word “stoic” is now most often used to refer to someone indifferent to pleasure or pain and who is able gracefully to handle the vicissitudes of life, that’s as misleading as suggesting the Ancient Epicureans were interested only in feasting.  What Stoicism emphasized was living a virtuous life, humans like any part of the universe created and governed by Logos and thus it was essential to at all times remain in harmony with the universe.  Interestingly, although the notion of ekpyrosis was one of the distinctive tenants of the school, there was a Stoic faction which thought devoting much energy to such thoughts was something of a waste of energy and that they should devote themselves to the best way to live, harmony with logos the key to avoiding suffering.  Their ideas live on in notions like “virtue is its own reward” and ultimately more rewarding than indulgence or worldly goods which are mere transitory vanities.

While the speculative theory of an ekpyrotic universe in modern cosmology and the ancient Stoic idea of ekpyrosis both revolve around a cyclical process of destruction and renewal, they differ significantly in detail and the phenomena they describe.  Most significantly, in modern cosmology there’s no conception of this having an underlying motivation, something of great matter in Antiquity.  The modern theory is an alternative to what is now the orthodoxy of the Big Bang theory; it contends the universe did not with a “big bang” (originally a term of derision but later adopted by all) begin from a singular point of infinite density in but rather emerged from the collision of two large, parallel branes (membranes) in higher-dimensional space.  In the mysterious brane cosmology, the universe is imagined as a three- dimensional “brane” within a higher-dimensional space (which tends to be called the “bulk”).  It’s the great, cataclysmic collision of two branes which triggers each defining event in the endless cycle of cosmic evolution.  In common with the Stoics, the process is described as cyclical and after each collusion, the universe undergoes a long period of contraction, followed by another collision that causes a new expansion.  Thus, elements are shared with the “Big Bang” & “Big Crunch” cycles but the critical variations are (1) there’s no conception of a singularity (2) although this isn’t entirely clear according to some, time never actually has to “begin” which critics have called a bit of a “fudge” because it avoids the implications of physical laws breaking down (inherent in the Big Bang’s singularity) and assumes cosmic events occur smoothly (in the sense of physics rather than violence) during brane collisions.

Bust of Marcus Aurelius (121–180; Roman emperor 161-180), Musée Saint-Raymond, Toulouse, France.

Something in the vein of the “philosopher kings” many imagine they’d like to live under (until finding the actual experience less pleasant than they’d hoped), Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic philosopher who has always been admired for his admirable brevity of expression, the stoic world-view encapsulated in his phases such as “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be.  Be one.”, “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” and “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”  Marcus Aurelius was the last emperor of Pax Romana (Roman peace, 27 BC-180 AD), a golden age of Roman imperial power and prosperity.  

To the Stoics of Antiquity, ekpyrosis described the periodic destruction of the universe by a great cosmic fire, followed by its rebirth, fire in the Classical epoch a common symbol both of destruction and creation; the Stoic universe was a deterministic place.  In the metaphysics of the ancients, the notion of fire and the central event was not unreasonable because people for millennia had been watching conflagrations which seemed so destructive yet after which life emerged, endured and flourished and the idea was the same conflagration which wrote finis to all was the same primordial fire from which all that was new would be born.  More to the point however, it would be re-born, the Stoics idea always that the universe would re-emerge exactly as it had been before.  The notion of eternal recurrence doesn’t actually depend on the new being the same as the old but clearly, the Greeks liked things the way they were and didn’t want anything to change.  That too was deterministic because it was Logos which didn’t want anything to change.  The Stoics knew all that had been, all this is and all that would be were all governed by Logos (rational principle or divine reason) and it was this which ensured the balance, order and harmony of the universe, destruction and re-birth just parts of that.  Logos had motivation and that was to maintain the rational, natural order but in modern cosmology there’s no motivation in the laws of physics, stuff just happens by virtue of their operation.

Floppy

Floppy (pronounced flop-ee)

(1) A tendency to flop.

(2) Limp, flexible, not hard, firm, or rigid; flexible; hanging loosely.

(3) In IT, a clipping of “floppy diskette”.

(4) In historic military slang (Apartheid-era South Africa & Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), an insurgent in the Rhodesian Bush War (the “Second Chimurenga” (from the Shona chimurenga (revolution)) 1964-1979), the use a reference to the way they were (in sardonic military humor) said to “flop” when shot.

(5) In informal use, a publication with covers made with a paper stock little heavier and more rigid that that used for the pages; Used mostly for comic books.

(6) In slang, a habitué of a flop-house (a cheap hotel, often used as permanent or semi-permanent accommodation by the poor or itinerant who would go there to “flop down” for a night) (archaic).

(7) In slang, as “floppy cats”, the breeders’ informal term for the ragdoll breed of cat, so named for their propensity to “go limp” when picked up (apparently because of a genetic mutation).

1855-1860: The construct was flop + -y.  Flop dates from 1595–1605 and was a variant of the verb “flap” (with the implication of a duller, heavier sound).  Flop has over the centuries gained many uses in slang and idiomatic form but in this context it meant “loosely to swing; to flap about”.  The sense of “fall or drop heavily” was in use by the mid-1830s and it was used to mean “totally to fail” in 1919 in the wake of the end of World War I (1914-1918), the conflict which wrote finis to the dynastic rule of centuries also of the Romanovs in Russia, the Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans in Constantinople although in the 1890s it was recorded as meaning “some degree of failure”.  The comparative is floppier, the superlative floppiest.  Floppy a noun & adjective, floppiness is a noun, flopped is a noun & verb, flopping is a verb, floppier& floppiest are adjectives and floppily is an adverb; the noun plural is floppies.  The adjective floppish is non-standard and used in the entertainment & publishing industries to refer to something which hasn’t exactly “flopped” (failed) but which had not fulfilled the commercial expectations.

Lindsay Lohan in "floppy-brim" hat, on-set during filming of Liz & Dick (2012).  In fashion, many "floppy-brim" hats actually have a stiff brim, formed in a permanently "floppy" shape.  The true "floppy hats" are those worn while playing sport or as beachwear etc.

The word is used as a modifier in pediatric medicine (floppy baby syndrome; floppy infant syndrome) and as “floppy-wristed” (synonymous with “limp-wristed”) was used as a gay slur.  “Flippy-floppy” was IT slang for “floppy diskette” and unrelated to the previous use of “flip-flop” or “flippy-floppy” which, dating from the 1880s was used to mean “a complete reversal of direction or change of position” and used in politics to suggest inconsistency.  In the febrile world of modern US politics, to be labelled a “flip-flopper” can be damaging because it carries with it the implication what one says can’t be relied upon and campaign “promises” might thus not be honored.  Whether that differs much from the politicians’ usual behaviour can be debated but still, few enjoy being accused of flip-floppery (definitely a non-standard noun).  The classic rejoinder to being called a flip-flopper is the quote: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”  That’s often attributed to the English economist and philosopher Lord Keynes (John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946) but it was said originally by US economist Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) the 1970 Nobel laureate in Economics.  In the popular imagination Keynes is often the “go to” economist for quote attribution in the way William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is a “go to author” and Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) a “go to politician”, both credited with thing they never said but might have said.  I phraseology, the quality of “Shakespearian” or “Churchillian” not exactly definable but certainly recognizable.  In the jargon of early twentieth century electronics, a “flip-flop” was a reference to switching circuits that alternate between two states.

Childless cat lady Taylor Swift with her “floppy cat”, Benjamin Button (as stole).  Time magazine cover, 25 December 2023, announcing Ms Swift as their 2023 Person of the Year.  "Floppy cat" is the the breeders' informal term for the ragdoll breed an allusion to their tendency to “go limp” when picked up, a behavior believed caused by a genetic mutation.

The other use of flop in IT is the initialism FLOP (floating point operations per second).  Floating-point (FB) arithmetic (FP) a way of handling big real numbers using an integer with a fixed precision, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base; FP doesn’t really make possible what would not in theory be achievable using real numbers but does make this faster and practical and the concept became familiar in the 1980s when Intel made available FPUs (floating point units, also known as math co-processors) which could supplement the CPUs (central processing units) of their x86 family.  The 8087 FPU worked with the 8086 CPU and others followed (80286/80287, 80386/80387, i486/i487 etc) until eventually the FPU for the Pentium range was integrated into the CPU, the early implementation something of a debacle still used as a case study in a number of fields departments including management and public relations.

FLOPs are an expression of specific performance and are used to measure those computations requiring floating-point calculations (typically in math-intensive work) and for purposes of “benchmarking” or determining “real-world” performance under those conditions, it’s a more informative number than the traditional rating of instructions per second (iSec).  The FLOPs became something of a cult in the 1990s when the supercomputers of the era first breached the trillion FLOP mark and as speeds rose, the appropriate terms were created:

kiloFLOPS: (kFLOPS, 10³)
megaflops: (MFLOPS, 10⁶)
gigaflops: GFLOPS, 10⁹)
teraflops: TFLOPS, 10¹²)
petaFLOPS: PFLOPS, 10¹⁵)
exaFLOPS: (EFLOPS, 10¹⁸)
zettaFLOPS: ZFLOPS, 10²¹)
yottaFLOPS: YFLOPS, 10²⁴)
ronnaFLOPS: RFLOPS, 10²⁷)
quettaFLOPS: QFLOPS, 10³⁰)

In the mysterious world of quantum computing, FLOPs are not directly applicable because the architecture and methods of operation differ fundamentally from those of classical computers.  Rather than FLOPs, the performance of quantum computers tends to be measured in qubits (quantum bits) and quantum gates (the operations that manipulate qubits).  The architectural difference is profound and explained with the concepts of superposition and entanglement:  Because a qubit simultaneously can represent both “0” & “1” (superposition) and these can be can be entangled (a relationship in which distance is, at least in theory, irrelevant; under parallelism, performance cannot easily be reduced to simple arithmetic or floating-point operations which remain the domain of classical computers which operate using the binary distinction between “O” (off) and “1” (on).

Evolution of the floppy diskette: 8 inch (left), 5¼ inch (centre) & 3½ inch (right).  The track of the floppy for the past half-century has been emblematic of the IT industry in toto: smaller, higher capacity and cheaper.  Genuinely it was one of the design parameters for the 3½ inch design that it fit into a man's shirt pocket.

In IT, the term “floppy diskette” used the WORM (write once, read many, ie "read only" after being written) principle first appeared in 1971 (soon doubtless clipped to “floppy” although the first known use of this dates from 1974).  The first floppy diskettes were in an 8 inch (2023 mm) format which may sound profligate for something with a capacity of 80 kB (kilobyte) but the 10-20 MB (megabit) hard drives of the time were typically the same diameter as the aperture of domestic front-loading washing machine so genuinely they deserved the diminutive suffix (-ette, from the Middle English -ette, a borrowing from the Old French -ette, from the Latin -itta, the feminine form of -ittus.  It was used to form nouns meaning a smaller form of something).  They were an advance also in convenience because until they became available, the usual way to transfer files between devices was to hard-wire them together.  Introduced by IBM in 1971, the capacity was two years later raised to 256 kB and by 1977 to a heady 1.2 MB (megabyte) with the advent of a double-sided, double-density format.  However, even then it was obvious the future was physically smaller media and in 1978 the 5¼ inch (133 mm) floppy debuted, initially with a formatted capacity of 360 kB but by 1982 this too had be raised to 1.2 MB using the technological advance if a HD (high density) file system and it was the 5¼ floppy which would become the first widely adopted industry “standard” for both home and business use, creating the neologism “sneakernet”, the construct being sneaker + net(work), the image being of IT nerds in their jeans and sneakers walking between various (unconnected) computers and exchanging files via diskette.  Until well into the twenty-first century the practice was far from functionally extinct and it persists even today with the use of USB sticks.

Kim Jong-un (Kim III, b 1982; Supreme Leader of DPRK (North Korea) since 2011) with 3½ inch floppy diskette (believed to be a HD (1.44 MB)).

The meme-makers use the floppy because it has become a symbol of technological bankruptcy. In OS (operating system) GUIs (graphical user interface) however, it does endure as the "save" icon and all the evidence to date does suggest that symbolic objects like icons do tend to outlive their source, thus the ongoing use in IT of analogue, rotary dial phones in iconography and the sound of a camera's physical shutter in smart phones.  Decades from now, we may still see representations of floppy diskettes.

The last of the mainstream floppy diskettes was the 3½ inch (89 mm) unit, introduced in 1983 in double density form with a capacity of 720 KB (although in one of their quixotic moves IBM used a unique 360 kB version for their JX range aimed at the educational market) but the classic 3½ was the HD 1.44 MB unit, released in 1986.  That really was the end of the line for the format because although in 1987 a 2.88 MB version was made available, few computer manufacturers offered the gesture of adding support at the BIOS (basic input output system) so adoption was infinitesimal.  The 3½ inch diskette continued in wide use and there was even the DMF (Distribution Media Format) with a 1.7 MB capacity which attracted companies like Microsoft, not because it wanted more space but to attempt to counter software piracy; within hours of Microsoft Office appearing in shrink-wrap with, copying cracks appeared on the bulletin boards (where nerds did stuff before the www (worldwideweb).  It was clear the floppy diskette was heading for extinction although slighter larger versions with capacities as high as 750 MB did appear but, expensive and needing different drive hardware, they were only ever a niche product seen mostly inside corporations.  By the time the CD-ROM (Compact Disc-Read-only Memory) reached critical mass in the mid-late 1990s the once ubiquitous diskette began rapid to fade from use, the release in the next decade of the USB sticks (pen drives) a final nail in the coffin for most.

In the mid 1990s, installing OS/2 Warp 4.0 (Merlin) with the optional packs and a service pack could require a user to insert and swap up to 47 diskettes.  It could take hours, assuming one didn't suffer the dreaded "floppy failure".

That was something which pleased everyone except the floppy diskette manufacturers who had in the early 1990s experienced a remarkable boom in demand for their product when Microsoft Windows 3.1 (7 diskettes) and IBM’s OS/2 2.0 (21 diskettes) were released. Not only was the CD-ROM a cheaper solution than multiple diskettes (a remarkably labor-intensive business for software distributors) but it was also much more reliable, tales of an installation process failing on the “final diskette” legion and while some doubtlessly were apocryphal, "floppy failure" was far from unknown.  By the time OS/2 Warp 3.0 was released in 1994, it required a minimum of 23 floppy diskettes and version 4.0 shipped with a hefty 30 for a base installation.  Few mourned the floppy diskette and quickly learned to love the CD-ROM.

What lay inside a 3½ inch floppy diskette.

Unlike optical discs (CD-ROM, DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) & Blu-Ray) which were written and read with the light of a laser, floppy diskettes were read with magnetic heads.  Inside the vinyl sleeve was a woven liner impregnated with a lubricant, this to reduce friction on the spinning media and help keep the surfaces clean.

Curiously though, niches remained where the floppy lived on and it was only in 2019 the USAF (US Air Force) finally retired the use of floppy diskettes which since the 1970s had been the standard method for maintaining and distributing the data related to the nation’s nuclear weapons deployment.  The attractions of the system for the military were (1) it worked, (2) it was cheap and (3) it was impervious to outside tampering.  Global thermo-nuclear war being a serious business, the USAF wanted something secure and knew that once data was on a device in some way connected to the outside world there was no way it could be guaranteed to be secure from those with malign intent (ayatollahs, the Secret Society of the Les Clefs d'Or, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), the Freemasons, those in the Kremlin or Pyongyang et al) whereas a diskette locked in briefcase or a safe was, paradoxically, the state of twenty-first century security, the same philosophy which has seen some diplomatic posts in certain countries revert to typewriters & carbon paper for the preparation of certain documents.  In 2019 however, the USAF announced that after much development, the floppies had been retired and replaced with what the Pentagon described as a “highly-secure solid-state digital storage solution which work with the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS).”

It can still be done: Although no longer included in PCs & laptops, USB floppy diskette drives remain available (although support for Windows 11 systems is said to be "inconsistent").  Even 5¼ inch units have been built.

It thus came as a surprise in 2024 to learn Japan, the nation which had invented motorcycles which didn’t leak oil (the British though they’d proved that couldn’t be done) and the QR (quick response) code, finally was abandoning the floppy diskette.  Remarkably, even in 2024, the government of Japan still routinely asked corporations and citizens to submit documents on floppies, over 1000 statutes and regulations mandating the format.  The official in charge of updating things (in 2021 he’d “declared war” on floppy diskettes) in July 2024 announced “We have won the war on floppy disks!” which must have be satisfying because he’d earlier been forced to admit defeat in his attempt to defenestrate the country’s facsimile (fax) machines, the “pushback” just too great to overcome.  The news created some interest on Japanese social media, one tweet on X (formerly known as Twitter) damning the modest but enduring floppy as a “symbol of an anachronistic administration”, presumably as much a jab at the “tired old men” of the ruling LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) as the devices.  There may however been an element of technological determinism in the reform because Sony, the last manufacturer of the floppy, ended production of them in 2011 so while many remain extant, the world’s supply is dwindling.  In some ways so modern and innovative, in other ways Japanese technology sometimes remains frozen, many businesses still demanding official documents to be endorsed using carved personal stamps called the印鑑 (ikan) or 判子 (hanko); despite the government's efforts to phase them out, their retirement is said to be proceeding at a “glacial pace”.  The other controversial aspect of the hanko is that the most prized are carved from ivory and it’s believed a significant part of the demand for black-market ivory comes from the hanko makers, most apparently passing through Hong Kong, for generations a home to “sanctions busters”.