Silk

Silk (pronounced silk)

(1) The soft, lustrous fibre obtained as a filament from the cocoon of the silkworm.

(2) Thread or cloth made from this fibre.

(3) In law, a slang term to describe a Queen's or King's Counsel and the silk gown they wear in court (UK & Commonwealth).

(4) In arachnology, very fine fibre produced by a spider to build its web, nest, or cocoon

(5) In agriculture, the tuft of long fine styles on an ear of maize (corn).

(6) In computing (as SiLK), Skype’s 2009 audio codec.

(7) In sport, a slang term for the working uniforms of both pugilists and jockeys.

(8) In fashion, a clipping of "silk stockings".

Circa 1300: From the Old English seoloc & sioloc (silk, silken cloth), from the Latin sericum (plural serica) (silken garments, silks) which translates literally as "Seric stuff," neuter of sericus, from the Ancient Greek sērikón (silken), derived from an oriental people of Asia from whom the Greeks got silks.  Western cultivation began 552 AD when Byzantium spies disguised as monks smuggled silkworms and mulberry leaves out of China, an early example of industrial espionage and the theft by the west of intellectual property from China; these things have a long tradition.  The Old English deoloc & sioloc were cognate with the Old Norse silki but the mode of transmission from the Ancient Greek sērikón is uncertain.  Greek picked up the word from Chinese, as a derivative of sêres, probably as a derivative of the Chinese si (silk) although some scholars cite both the Manchurian sirghe and the Mongolian sirkek as a possible root but this is speculative.  It’s found also in Old Norse as silki but not elsewhere in Germanic.  The more common Germanic form is represented by the Middle English say, from Old French seie; the Spanish seda, the Italian seta, the Dutch zijde and the German seide are from the Medieval Latin seta (silk), perhaps elliptical for seta (serica) or else a particular use of seta in the sense of "bristle or hair".

Silk was used as an adjective from the mid-fourteenth century.  The reference to the "hair" of corn is from 1660s American English while the figurative use of silk-stocking is from the 1590s.  It was once used as a pejorative adjective meaning "wealthy", attested from 1798 as a reference to silk stockings, especially when worn by men as extravagant, reprehensible and suggestive of effete habits.  Silk-screen was first used in 1930; in English, the ancient “Silk Road” was first so-called in 1931, a use revived in the twenty-first century as a place on the dark web which was a clearing house for those selling narcotics, other unlawful stuff and (allegedly) contract killing, the latter never verified.  Silk is a noun & verb, silky is a noun & adjective, silkiness is a noun and silken is a verb & adjective; the noun plural is silks.

Silks

Lindsay Lohan in Catherine Malandrino silk pin-tuck dress with bubble skirt (2008).

In the early years of the common law, the barristers known as serjeants-at law enjoyed precedence in court.  That remained until 1596, when Francis Bacon (1561–1626) prevailed upon Elizabeth I (1533–1603; Queen of England & Ireland 1558-1603) to create him Queen's Counsel Extraordinary (QC), a new office which granted him precedence over the Serjeants although that legal hierarchy wasn’t confirmed for some years.  Initially an appointment by virtue of the royal prerogative, it was formalised by the issue of letters patent in 1604 but the numbers of KCs & QCs remained exclusively small until the nineteenth century.  The office of KC ensured the obsolescence of the once senior serjeants-at-law by (gradually) superseding them.  The attorney-general and solicitor-general had similarly supplanted the serjeants as leaders of the bar in Tudor times but, interestingly, were not technically senior until 1623 (except for the two senior King's Serjeants) and 1813 respectively.  In the Commonwealth, whenever a King replaces a Queen, the QCs become KCs (or the other way around as the case may be.  QCs & KCs wear silk gowns when appearing in court and their appointment is known informally as "taking silk"; individually, they are often referred to as "silks".

Japanese silkworm farmers.

Silk was of great cultural significance in Japan and among the military and the aristocracy, were one to be presented with a dagger wrapped in silk, it was a suggestion from one's peers that, having committed some social or other transgression, it would be the honorable thing were one to commit an act of 切腹 (Seppuku (literally "cutting [the] belly"), the ritualistic method of suicide by disembowelment and and better known in the West as hara-kiri (腹切り(literally "abdomen or belly cutting")).  It had a long tradition but apparently was never as widespread as is often depicted by Hollywood, always anxious to believe the orientalists. 

By the 1920s, the backbone of Japanese agriculture was rice, “the king of grains” and, in aggregate terms, the nation’s industry was the most productive in the world despite a great volume of the harvest coming from the efforts of peasants who worked tiny rural plots which Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) on a visit noted they tended with “comb and toothpick”.  The other crop on which they relied was the one regarded as the “God-sent merchandize” of raw silk, the silkworm styled “the honourable little gentleman”.  In the good years of the late 1920s, this meant stability but the Wall Street crash of 1929 which was the trigger (though not wholly the causative event) of the long slump of the 1930s affected Japan more immediately and more severely than just about anywhere; having few natural resources, the country was reliant on international trade and thus exposed as few others to movements in commodity prices.  In 1930, the rice harvest fetched a third less than the year before and the collapse in the silk trade was even more dramatic because the rayon produced in vast quantities by the US petro-chemical concerns flooded the market, undercutting the work of the the honourable little gentleman and the hard-working peasants who tended to him so assiduously.  The resulting immiseration of much of the anyway poor rural population of Japan was one of the factors which enabled certain military factions essentially to stage a (not quite bloodless) takeover of the Japanese state and in 1931 begin the aggressive overseas expansion which some fifteen years later would end in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.