Gap (pronounced gap)
(1) A break or opening, as in a fence, wall, or military
line; breach; an opening that implies a breach or defect (vacancy, deficit,
absence, or lack).
(2) An empty space or interval; interruption in
continuity; hiatus.
(3) A wide divergence or difference; disparity
(4) A difference or disparity in attitudes, perceptions,
character, or development, or a lack of confidence or understanding, perceived
as creating a problem.
(5) A deep, sloping ravine or cleft through a mountain
ridge.
(6) In regional use (in most of the English-speaking
world and especially prominent in the US), a mountain pass, gorge, ravine,
valley or similar geographical feature (also in some places used of a sheltered
area of coast between two cliffs and often applied in locality names).
(7) In aeronautics, the distance between one supporting
surface of an airplane and another above or below it.
(8) In electronics, a break in a magnetic circuit that
increases the inductance and saturation point of the circuit.
(9) In various field sports (baseball, cricket, the
football codes etc), those spaces between players which afford some opportunity
to the opposition.
(10) In genetics, an un-sequenced region in a sequence
alignment.
(11) In slang (New Zealand), suddenly to depart.
(12) To make a gap, opening, or breach in.
(13) To come open or apart; form or show a gap.
1350–1400: From the Middle English gap & gappe (an
opening in a wall or hedge; a break, a breach), from Old Norse gap (gap, empty space, chasm) akin to the
Old Norse gapa (to open the mouth
wide; to gape; to scream), from the Proto-Germanic gapōną, from the primitive Indo-European root ghieh (to open wide; to
yawn, gape, be wide open) and related to the Middle Dutch & Dutch gapen, the German gaffen (to
gape, stare), the Danish gab (an expanse, space, gap; open mouth, opening), the
Swedish gap & gapa and the Old English ġeap (open
space, expanse). Synonyms for gap can
include pause, interstice, break, interlude, lull but probably not lacuna
(which is associated specifically with holes).
Gap is a noun & verb, gapped & gapping are verbs, Gapless & gappy
are adjectives; the noun plural is gaps.
The use to describe natural
geographical formations (“a break or opening between mountains” which later
extended to “an unfilled space or interval, any hiatus or interruption”) emerged
in the late fifteenth century and became prevalent in the US, used of deep
breaks or passes in a long mountain chain (especially one through which a
waterway flows) and often used in locality names.
The use as a transitive verb (to make gaps; to gap) evolved from the noun
and became common in the early nineteenth century as the phrases became part of
the jargon of mechanical engineering and metalworking (although in oral use the
forms may long have existed). The
intransitive verb (to have gaps) is documented only since 1948. The verb gape dates from the early thirteenth
century and may be from the Old English ġeap (open
space, expanse) but most etymologists seem to prefer a link with the Old Norse gapa (to open the mouth wide; to gape;
to scream); it was long a favorite way of alluding to the expressions thought
stereotypical of “idle curiosity,
listlessness, or ignorant wonder of bumpkins and other rustics” and is synonymous
with “slack-jawed yokels”). The adjective gappy (full of gaps; inclined
to be susceptible to gaps opening) dates from 1846. The adjectival use gap-toothed (having teeth
set wide apart) has been in use since at least the 1570s, but earlier, Geoffrey
Chaucer (circa 1344-1400) had used “gat-toothed”
for the same purpose, gat from the Middle
English noun gat (opening, passage)
from the Old Norse gat and cognate
with gate.
Lindsay Lohan demonstrates her admirable thigh gap, November 2013.
The “thigh gap” seems first to have been documented in 2012 but gained critical mass on the internet in 2014 when it became of those short-lived social phenomenon which produced a minor moral panic. “Thigh gap” described the empty space between the inner thighs of a women when standing upright with feet touching; a gap was said to be good and the lack of a gap bad. Feminist criticism noted it was not an attribute enjoyed by a majority of mature human females and it thus constituted just another of the “beauty standards” imposed on women which were an unrealizable goal for the majority. The pro-ana community ignored this critique and thinspiration (thinspo) bloggers quickly added annotated images and made the thigh gap and essential aspect of female physical attractiveness.
A walking, talking credibility gap: crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013).
In English, gap has been prolific in the creation of phrases & expressions. The “generation gap” sounds modern and as a phrase it came into wide use only in the 1960s in reaction to the twin constructs of “teenagers” and the “counter-culture” but the concept has been documented since antiquity and refers to a disconnect between youth and those older, based on different standards of behavior, dress, artistic taste and social mores. The term “technology gap” was created in the
early 1960s and was from economics, describing the various implications of a
nation’s economy gaining a competitive advantage over others by the creation or
adoption of certain technologies.
However, the concept was familiar to militaries which had long
sought to quantify and rectify any specific disadvantage in personnel, planning
or materiel they might suffer compared to their adversaries; these instances
are described in terms like “missile gap”, “air gap”, “bomber gap”, “megaton
gap” et al (and when used of materiel the general term “technology deficit” is
also used). Rearmament is the usual approach
but there can also be “stop gap” solutions which are temporary (often called “quick
& dirty” (Q&D)) fixes which address an immediate crisis without curing
the structural problem. For a permanent
(something often illusory in military matters) remedy for a deficiency, one is
said to “bridge the gap”, “gap-fill” or “close the gap”. The phrase “stop gap” in the sense of “that
which fills a hiatus, an expedient in an emergency” appears to date from the 1680s
and may have been first a military term referring to a need urgently to “plug a
gap” in a defensive line, “gap” used by armies in this sense since the
1540s. The use as an adjective dates
from the same time in the sense of “filling a gap or pause”. A “credibility gap” is discrepancy between what’s
presented as reality and a perception of what reality actually is; it’s applied
especially to the statements of those in authority (politicians like crooked Hillary Clinton the classic but not the only examples). “Pay gap” & “gender gap” are companion
terms used most often in labor-market economics to describe the differences in aggregate
or sectoral participation and income levels between a baseline group (usually
white men) and others who appear disadvantaged.
“Gap theorists” (known also as “gap creationists”) are
those who claim the account of the Earth and all who inhabit the place being
created in six 24 hour days (as described in the Book of Genesis in the Bible’s
Old Testament) literally is true but that there was a gap of time between the two
distinct creations in the first and the second verses of Genesis. What this allows is a rationalization of
modern scientific observation and analysis of physical materials which have
determined the age of the planet. This
hypothesis can also be used to illustrate the use of the phrase “credibility
gap”. In Australia, gap is often used to
refer to the (increasingly large) shortfall between the amount health insurance
funds will pay compared with what the health industry actually charges; the difference,
paid by the consumer, (doctors still insist on calling them patients) is the
gap (also called the “gap fee”). In
Australia, the term “the gap” has become embedded in the political lexicon to
refer to the disparity in outcomes between the indigenous and non-indigenous
communities in fields such as life expectancy, education, health, employment, incarceration
rates etc. By convention, it can be used
only to refer to the metrics which show institutional disadvantage but not
other measures where the differences are also striking (smoking rates, crime
rates, prevalence of domestic violence, drug & alcohol abuse etc) and it’s
thus inherently political. Programmes
have been designed and implemented with the object of “closing the gap”; the
results have been mixed.
Opinion remains divided on the use of platinum-tipped spark plugs in the Mercedes-Benz M100 (6.3 & 6.9) V8.
A “spark gap” is the space between two conducting
electrodes, filled usually with air (or in specialized applications some other
gas) and designed to allow an electric spark to pass between the two. One of the best known spark gaps is that in the
spark (or sparking) plug which provides the point of ignition for the fuel-air
mixture in internal combustion engines (ICE).
Advances in technology mean fewer today are familiar with the intricacies
of spark plugs, once a familiar (and often an unwelcome) sight to many. The gap in a spark plug is the distance
between the center and ground electrode (at the tip) and the size of the gap is
crucial in the efficient operation of an ICE.
The gap size, although the differences would be imperceptible to most,
is not arbitrary and is determined by the interplay of the specifications of
the engine and the ignition system including (1) the compression ratio (low
compression units often need a larger gap to ensure a larger spark is generated),
(2) the ignition system, high-energy systems usually working better with a
larger gap, (3) the materials used in the plug’s construction (the most
critical variable being their heat tolerance); because copper, platinum, and
iridium are used variously, different gaps are specified to reflect the
variations in thermal conductivity and the temperature range able to be endured
and (4) application, high performance engines or those used in competition
involving sustained high-speed operation often using larger gaps to ensure a
stronger and larger spark.
Kennedy, Khrushchev and the missile gap
The “missile gap” was one of the most discussed threads in the campaign run by the Democratic Party’s John Kennedy (JFK, 1917–1963; US president 1961-1963) in the 1960 US presidential election in which his opponent was the Republican Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974). The idea there was a “missile gap” was based on a combination of Soviet misinformation, a precautionary attitude by military analysts in which the statistical technique of extrapolation was applied on the basis of a “worst case scenario” and blatant empire building by the US military, notably the air force (USAF), anxious not to surrender to the navy their pre-eminence in the hierarchy of nuclear weapons delivery systems. It’s true there was at the time a missile gap but it was massively in favor of the US which possessed several dozen inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) while the USSR had either four or six, depending on the definition used. President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969; US president 1953-1961), a five-star general well acquainted with the intrigues of the military top brass, was always sceptical about the claims and had arranged the spy flights which confirmed the real count but was constrained from making the information public because of the need to conceal his source of intelligence. Kennedy may actually have known his claim was incorrect but, finding it resonated with the electorate, continued to include it in his campaigning, knowing the plausibility was enhanced in a country where people were still shocked by the USSR having in 1957 launched Sputnik I, the first ever earth-orbiting satellite. Sputnik had appeared to expose a vast gap between the scientific capabilities of the two countries, especially in the matter of big missiles.
Fake gaps in such matters were actually nothing new. Some years earlier, before there were ICBMs so
in any nuclear war the two sides would have to have used aircraft to drop bombs
on each other (al la Hiroshima & Nagasaki in 1945), there’d been a
political furore about the claim the US suffered a “bomber gap” and would thus
be unable adequately to respond to any attack.
In truth, by a simple sleight of hand little different to that used by
Nazi Germany to 1935 to convince worried British politicians that the Luftwaffe
(the German air force) was already as strong as the Royal Air Force (RAF),
Moscow had greatly inflated the numbers and stated capability of their strategic
bombers, a perception concerned US politicians were anxious to believe. The USAF would of course be the recipient of the
funds needed to build the hundreds (the US would end up building thousands) of
bombers needed to equip all those squadrons and their projections of Soviet
strength were higher still. If all of
this building stuff to plug non-existent gaps had happened in isolation it
would have been wasteful of money and natural resources which was bad enough
but this hardware made up the building blocks of nuclear strategy; the Cold war
was not an abstract exercise where on both sides technicians with clipboards walked
from silo to silo counting warheads.
Instead, the variety of weapons, their different modes of delivery (from land, sea, undersea and air), their degrees of accuracy and their vulnerability to counter-measures was constantly calculated to assess their utility as (1) deterrents to an attack, (2) counter-offensive weapons to respond to an attack or (3) first-strike weapons with which to stage a pre-emptive or preventative attack. In the Pentagon, the various high commands and the burgeoning world of the think tanks, this analysis was quite an industry and it had to also factor in the impossible: working out how the Kremlin would react. In other words, what the planners needed to do was create a nuclear force which was strong enough to deter an attack yet not seem to be such a threat that it would encourage an attack and that only scratched the surface of the possibilities; each review (and there were many) would produce detailed study documents several inches thick.
In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the somewhat slimmer nuclear war manuals synthesized from those studies were being read with more interest than usual. It was a tense situation and had Kennedy and comrade Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971; Soviet leader 1953-1964) not agreed to a back-channel deal, the US would probably have attacked Cuba in some manner, not knowing three divisions of the Red Army were stationed there to protect the Soviet missiles and that would have been a state of armed conflict which could have turned into some sort of war. As it was, under the deal, Khrushchev withdrew the missiles from Cuba in exchange for Kennedy’s commitment not to invade Cuba and withdraw 15 obsolescent nuclear missiles from Turkey, the stipulation being the Turkish component must be kept secret. That secrecy colored for years the understanding of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the role of the US nuclear arsenal played in influencing the Kremlin. The story was that the US stayed resolute, rattled the nuclear sabre and that was enough to force the Soviet withdrawal. One not told the truth was Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president 1963-1969) who became president after Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and historians have attributed his attitude to negotiation during the Vietnam War to not wishing to be unfavorably compared to his predecessor who, as Dean Rusk (1909–1994; US secretary of state 1961-1969) put it, stood “eyeball to eyeball” with Khrushchev and “made him blink first”. The existence of doomsday weapon of all those missiles would distort Soviet and US foreign policy for years to come.
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