Bolter

Bolter (pronounced bol-tah)

(1) A person or animal (most especially a horse) that bolts or is prone to running away.  The phrase (applied to HWAGs (horses, wives and girlfriends)) is usually “a bit of a bolter” and historically was never applied to unreliable men; for them, women have many other epithets.

(2) In Australian colonial slang, an escaped convict or absconder.

(3) In botany and horticulture, a plant that grows larger and more rapidly than usual.

(4) In flour milling, a machine or mechanism that automatically sifts milled flour; a person who sifts flour or meal; to sift or filter through a sieve or bolter.

(5) In petroleum refining, a filter mechanism.

(6) In the slang of engine builders, to distinguish between the means used to secure the main bearings supporting a crankshaft (2-bolter, 4-bolter, cross-bolter) which is rare except in the US, where it's most common south of the Mason-Dixon line.

(7) In sport, an obscure athlete who wins an unexpected victory or is a surprise selection in a team (Australia & New Zealand).

(8) In horse racing, a horse which wins at long odds (Australia & New Zealand).

(9) In politics, a member of a political party who does not support the party's nominee or (US archaic).

(10) In naval aviation, a missed landing on an aircraft carrier; an aircraft that has made a missed landing.

(11) As the homophone boulter, a kind of fishing line.

(12) In archaic dialectal use, to smear or become smeared with a grimy substance (later by blood).

(13) In zoology (cetology; the study of whales), to swim or turn sideways while eating.

(14) In the design of retail haberdashery outlets, the shafts supporting bolts of fabric for purposes of display and facilitation of cutting (UK).

From the Middle English bolt (verb) and the Old English (noun); it was cognate with the Dutch bout and the German Boltz.  The Old English bolt (short, stout arrow with a heavy head; crossbow for throwing bolts) was from the Proto-Germanic bultas, source also of the Old Norse bolti, the Danish bolt, the Dutch bout & the German Bolzen.  The original meaning may have been or connected in some sense with "arrow, missile" and therefore derived from the primitive Indo-European bheld- (to knock, strike), source also of the Lithuanian beldžiu (I knock) & baldas (pole for striking).  The word has since Middle English been applied to short metal rods (especially those with knobbed ends) meaning variously "stout pin for fastening objects together" and "part of a lock which springs out" both from circa 1400. A bolt of canvas or (circa 1400 and later applied to other fabrics) was so called for its shape.  The adverbial phrase bolt upright (like a bolt or arrow) is from the late fourteenth century.  The sense of a "sliding metal rod that thrusts the cartridge into the chamber of a firearm" is from 1859.  From the notion of an arrow's flight comes the bolt of lightning (1530s) and the sense of "a sudden spring or start" is attested from the 1540s.

The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought usually to have been borrowed from Latin –ārius and reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant was -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  As an abbreviation (or sometimes following a number), it’s written sometimes as -'er.  The suffix was added to verbs, forming an agent noun to describe a person or thing that does an action indicated by the root verb.  The antonym suffix was –ee which was added to nouns to denote an occupation, hobby etc and to numbers to denote a quantified set.  The related forms were the present participle bolting and the simple past and past participle bolted.  In one sense, the use by Shakespeare in Macbeth (1623) made specific what was once more general.  In Middle English, it meant “to smear or be smeared with a grimy substance” and was applied usually to farm animals getting wet with sweat, rain etc and then "boltering" with mud, hair etc.  However, the Shakespearian purloin popularized the term as means to describe getting covered in blood and that became the most common use in that context.  Bolter is a noun; the noun plural is bolters.

Cross bolters

By their bolts they shall be known.  By convention a "four bolter" was one with the four all into the boss while in a "cross bolter" two were in the boss and two into the block.  "Six bolters" (with four in the boss, two in the block) are now common.

Cross bolters (sometimes hyphenated) is engine-builder slang for the main bearing caps in an internal combustion engine (ICE) being secured by bolts which are screwed into ribs in the block as well as the traditional pair (now often four) into bolt bosses.  The bolt sets are thus mounted at 90^o to each other, a diagram of which would form a + shape when viewed from the front of the engine, hence the idea of “cross-bolted”.  The general effect of cross-bolting is to make a crankcase stiffer by reducing the tendency to twist, something made inherent by the the reciprocating motion of the crankshaft.  The additional bolts limit the movement of the bearings (which engine-builders call "walking"), the purpose being to reduce component failure because a break anywhere in the crankcase area can destroy an engine.  Six-bolt arrangements are now common and some specialists even sometimes install the bolts into the bosses at slightly differing angles on the basis that computer modelling confirms this confers a (slight) benefit in torsional rigidity under certain conditions.  Although not unique to the line and far from novel when added, the best known of the cross-bolters were those in two iterations of the Ford FE range (1958-1976) produced between 1962-1968.  Although it would quickly earn a stellar reputation which endures to this day, Ford’s FE V8 engine didn’t enjoy a wholly auspicious start, associated as it was with the ill-fated Edsel (FE really did stand for “Ford-Edsel” despite some post-debacle attempts to suggest “Ford Engine” (the contemporary MEL stood for Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln)).  However, whatever the problems of the Edsel, the use of the FE is some was not one.

The Ford FE 427: Top vs side oiling.

Offered initially in several displacements, the most produced in the 1960s would be the 352 & 390 cubic inch (5.8 & 6.5 litre) versions, both of which briefly were offered in high-performance versions until the decision was taken to develop such engines as a separate FE branch, the first fruit of which was the 406 (6.6 litre) which debuted in 1962.  The 406 had performed well on Ford’s test-rigs, its output slightly exceeding the engineers’ projections and when installed in the new, slippery bodies offered that year, proved fast on the track.  The power and speed however came at the cost of reliability and the increasing speeds on the circuits had exposed weaknesses in the bottom-end, the main bearing caps “walking” when the vibrations reached a certain resonance.  The solution was to “cross-bolt” the caps; an addition two securing bolts (installed sideways through the block) per cap augmenting the pairs mounted in the conventional vertical position.  This approach, still widely used to this day, proved successful and was carried over when in 1963 the FE was further enlarged to 425 cubic inches (7.0 litre), Ford labelling the new mill the 427 to align it with the displacement limit used by both NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) and the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (the International Automobile Federation and world sport’s dopiest regulatory body)).  However, greater capacity meant more power, higher speeds and increased heat and the 427 began to also to suffer, the higher internal pressures meaning lubrication to the now cross-bolted main bearings had become marginal.  Ford’s solution was to reverse the priority with which oil was delivered.  The original design (retrospectively dubbed the “top-oiler”) lubricated first the valve-train at the top of the engine, then the main bearings which supported the crankshaft.  The new process reversed this order and the design became known as the "side-oiler" so all FE 427s are "cross-bolted" but only some are "side oilers". 

The Bolter

"The Bolter" entered popular culture after the publication in 1945 of Nancy Mitford’s (1904-1973) The Pursuit of Love (1945) in which one character, (the bolter) was so named because of her many marriages, a consequence of her tendency to bolt from one relationship to another; throughout the novel, the bolter is never named and is referred to by all as “the bolter”.  Love in a Cold Climate (1949) was a companion volume to The Pursuit of Love, the title a direct quotation from George Orwell's (1903-1950) Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).  The usual form of expression is: “she’s a bit of a bolter”, borrowed from the use to refer to a flighty horse and historically, was applied only to wives and girlfriends; for unreliable men, women have many other epithets.  Mitford based the character on Lady Myra Idina Sackville (1893-1955), daughter of the eighth Earl De La Warr (1869-1915) and Lady Muriel Agnes Brassey (1872-1930).  Known always by her middle name, Idina, she led what many considered a scandalous life and married and divorced five times, her other connection with unconventionality that she was the cousin of the writer Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), remembered for many things including her long marriage to the writer Harold Nicholson (1886-1968) and being the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of her lovers.  A modern version of the phrase "a bit of a bolter" is "I'm going to Meghan Markle" meaning (in this context) "I'm leaving".  It must be used with care because as the entries in Urban Dictionary suggest, "to Meghan Markle" can mean many things.

Usage guide: The meaning of "to bolt" from somewhere differs from "to leave" the place in that the former indicates the departure was either (or a combination of) rapid, unexpected, unauthorized or sudden.