Mile

Mile (pronounced mahyl)

(1) A unit of a unit of distance on land, derived from the 1593 English statute mile (equal to 8 furlongs) and still in use in some English-speaking countries.  In 1959, in a treaty established by a number of Anglophone nations (and subsequently ratified by most), it was defined as distance equal to 5,280 feet (1,760 yards; 1.609.344 metres).

(2) Any of many customary units of length derived from the Roman mile (mille passus) of 8 stades (5,000 Roman feet).

(3) Any of a variety of other units of distance or length, used at different times in different countries.

(4) In athletics and horse racing (as “the mile”), a race run over that distance.

(5) In idiomatic use (in both the singular and plural), a notable distance or margin.

(6) As “air miles”, a unit in an airline’s frequent flyer program.

Pre 1000: From the Middle English myle & mile, from the Old English mīl, from the Proto-West Germanic mīliju, from the Latin mīlia & mīllia (plural of mīle & mīlle (mile)) which translates literally as “thousand” but was a commonly used short-form of mīlle passus (a thousand paces), thus the derived mīlia passuum (thousands of steps), duo milia passuum (two thousand paces (ie “two miles’) etc).  The origin of the Latin word is unknown and was the source also of the French mille, the Italian miglio and the Spanish milla whereas the Scandinavian forms (the Old Norse mila etc) came from English.  The West Germanic word was the source also of the Middle Dutch mile, the Dutch mijl, the Old High German mila and the German Meile.  The spelling of the German forms came about because the Latin milia (a neuter plural) was mistakenly thought a feminine singular.  Mile & mileage are nouns and miles is an adverb; the noun plural is miles.

Fuel economy for the 2017 Dodge Viper GTC, estimated according the the method mandated by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).  The 14 mpg (miles per gallon) was calculated using a weighted formula on the basis of 12 city; 19 highway and isn't as thirsty as it may sound because a US gallon (3.785412 litres) is smaller than an imperial gallon (4.546092 litres).  The inclusion of a “gallons per 100 miles” number is unique to the US.  How many Viper owners achieved this level of economy isn't known and if one is at the controls of an 8.4 litre (513 cubic inch) V10 generating 645 horsepower (HP), the temptation exists to drive in a manner Greta Thunberg (b 2003 and not a Viper owner) would condemn; the Viper GTC was fitted with a speedometer graduated to 220 mph (355 km/h).  With the governor disabled (a simple and popular task), the top speed of a 2017 Viper GTC was 196 mph (315 km/h) but for use in competition (or on the street by the lunatic fringe), modified versions could be made to exceed 220 mph ("wind the needle off the dial" in the accepted slang).  In the matter of fuel economy, at all times it's a matter of YMMV (your mileage many vary) but once a Viper was travelling much beyond 100 mph, the EPA's 14 mpg average was a distant memory.  

YMMV: 2014 SRT Viper TA 1.0 in TA Orange over TA Black leather and cloth.

The noun mileage (which appeared also as milage and although the “mute e” rule would suggest this was correct it never caught on) was in use by at least 1754 in the sense of “allowance or compensation for travel or conveyance reckoned by the mile” and that was so politicians in the North American colonies could calculate how much they could claim for travel undertaken in the course of their word.  To this day, “travel allowances” remain the “entitlements” most valued by politicians looking to “rort the system”.  From the mid 1830s, the idea of mileage as “a fixed rate per mile” came into use in railroad system charging.  The meaning “a total number of miles” (of a way made, used, or traversed) was from the 1860s while the figurative use (usefulness, derived benefit) emerged at much the same time.  The long familiar mpg (miles per gallon) was a measure of fuel economy (miles driven per gallon of fuel consumed) and came into use between 1910-1912.  When the metric system was introduced to jurisdictions previously using imperial measurement, instead of replacing mpg with kpl (kilometres per litre), the measure used was L/100 km (litres per 100 km).  According to engineers, L/100 km was preferable because it emphasised consumption and thus aligned with other measures expressed to consumers (such as electricity or emissions), the argument being the psychology of “the lower the number the better” would be standardized.  So, whereas the higher the MPG the lower was the fuel consumption whereas with L/100, greater efficiency was implied by a lower number.  In a practical sense, because Continental Europe adopted L/100 km long before widespread metrication in English-speaking countries, a convention had been established so it would not have been logical to create another expression; thus except in the US & UK, consumption follows the industry’s preferred “input per output” method.

The phrase “she's got a few miles on the clock” referred either to (1) a machine which was old or had been much used or (2) a woman either (2a) older than she represented herself to be or (2b) with a past including many sexual partners.  The “few” in this phrase is used ironically whereas if a dealer in second-hard hand cars claims a vehicle “has done only a few miles”, the clear implication is “low mileage” and the “few” must be read literally.  A car’s mileage is recorded on its odometer which historically was a mechanical device unscrupulous second-hand car salesmen (an often tautological text-string) were notorious for “tampering with” so a vehicle could be represented as “less used” and thus sold for a higher price.  Odometers are now electronic so while the tampering methods have changed, the motivations have not.  A classic example of the legal principles involved in such matters is Dick Bentley Productions Ltd v Harold Smith (Motors) Ltd [1965] EWCA Civ 2, an English contract law case concerning the purchase by the Australian-born comedian Charles Walter "Dick" Bentley (1907–1995) of a used Bentley motor car.

1939 Bentley 4¼-Litre Sedanca Coupé in the style of French coachbuilder Henri Chapron (1886-1978).

This is not the car involved in the Dick Bentley v Harold Smith case which was a 1939 Bentley 4¼-Litre DHC (Drophead Coupé) by Park Ward which had anyway been re-bodied by the time of the sale which became a matter of dispute.  At any time a 1939 Bentley DHC would have been a genuine rarity.  The pre-war production records which remain extant are fragmentary and don't detail the builds down to body-type by year but marque specialists believe Park Ward in 1939 may have built as few as four DHCs (the then usual English term for as Cabriolet) and it's known two survive. 

Dick Bentley Productions had informed Harold Smith (Motors) Ltd (a dealer in “prestige” used cars) the company wished to buy a “well vetted” Bentley and the dealer offered one they represented as “having done only 20,000 miles [32,000 km]” since a replacement engine had been fitted.  However, after purchase, it was discovered the Bentley had “done some 100,000 miles [160,000 km]” since the engine and gearbox had been replaced.  Dick Bentley sued Harold Smith for a breach of warranty and succeeded on the basis of the difference between “a representation” and “an essential term of a contract”.  Because the dealer was trading on the basis of possessing expertise in the matter of such cars, representations made by the dealer about critical matters (such as mileage) constitute “a warranty” and a bona fide consumer purchasing the product for fair value is entitled to rely on the word of such a dealer.  Dick Bentley succeeded at first instance and the case went on appeal where the dealer was found to be liable because (1) given they were in the business of trading in such vehicles and represented themselves as “experts”, either (1) they knew the mileage claim was false, (2) should have determined the claim was false or (3) were anyway in a better position than the consumer to make that determination.  The dealer thus either possessed or should have possessed “superior knowledge” compared to any non-expert consumer.  What this means is a dealer would likely always be held to have offered “a warranty” if making such a claim but the proverbial “little old lady” knowing nothing of engines and gearboxes making the same claim on the basis of what she’d been told would not be held to the same standard.  Her statement would, prima facie, be “an innocent misrepresentation”.

The terms milepost and milestone were from the mid eighteenth century and described respectively (1) a post permanently set in the ground next to a roadway to mark the distance to or from a locality and (2) a stone permanently set in the ground and engraved for the same purpose.  The now obsolete adjective milliary (of or relating to a mile, or to distance by miles; denoting a mile or miles) dates from the 1640s and was from the Latin milliarius, from mille.  The blended noun kilomile (on the model of kilometre) was a unit of length equal to 1,000 miles and seems to have existed because it could be done; it has no known use.  In physics, the light-mile is the time taken for light to travel one mile (approximately five microseconds).  The light mile has never been part of the standard set of measures in physics and probably it also was calculated by someone because it could be done; it is of no known practical use although it may have some utility in comparative tables.

Gatefold cover of Miles of Aisles.

Miles of Aisles was the first live concert album released by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (b 1943).  Released in 1974 on the Asylum label, it was a double album in the usual gatefold sleeve, the recordings from a number of concerts which were part of her tour promoting the recently released Court and Spark (1974) album.  The performances on Miles of Aisles came variously from three venues in Los Angeles: the Universal Amphitheatre, the Los Angeles Music Center and the Berkeley Community Theater.  The album’s cover art was a photograph of the Pine Knob Music Theater in Clarkston, Michigan.  While Miles of Aisles was a thoughtful title for a live concert album, the most famous Miles in music was the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (1926–1991); his output was prolific but his albums Kind of Blue (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960) were his finest and two seminal moments in the evolution of jazz.

The “Chinese mile” was the li, a traditional Chinese unit of distance equal to 1500 Chinese feet or 150 zhangs; sensibly, under the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), the li was standardized as a half-kilometre (500 metres).  The “Scandinavian mile” began in 1649 as the “Swedish mile” and was set at a distance of 10,688.54 metres before in 1889 being defined as 10 kilometres.  The “Irish mile” was equal to 2240 yards (2048.256 metres; 1.272727 miles).  The “Italian Mile” (sometimes left untranslated as miglio (miglia the plural)) was a calque of the Italian miglio (mile), with the qualifier appended to distinguish it from other miles.  Although the best remembered from the peninsular (assisted by an appearance in the diaries of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)), the miglio was one of many such regionalisms including the Genovese and Roman miles.  Italy’s shift from traditional “Italian miles” to the metric system happened gradually and unevenly over the nineteenth century, the process beginning in the period 1806-1814 as a consequence of the Kingdom of Italy being a client state of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821; leader of the French Republic 1799-1804 & Emperor of the French from 1804-1814 & 1815)).  That however proved abortive because after Napoleon’s fall in 1814, many Italian states reverted to their traditional local units (miles, braccia, libbre etc) and not until after Italian unification in 1861 was the metric system officially adopted throughout the kingdom, becoming the legally mandated system of weights and measures.  In a act of administrative efficiency which might astonish observers of the modern Italian state, a definitive law of enforcement was passed in 1862 and, by the 1870s, successfully metrics had become the standard for administration, trade, and education.

However, this was Italy and among parts of the population, the “Italian mile” remained in informal use well into the twentieth century and although the miglio generally was around 1.85 km (1.15 miles), there were many regional variants including (1) the Florentine (Tuscany) Miglio Fiorentino (1.74 km (1.08 miles)) used in Galileo’s era, (2) the Venetian Miglio Veneto (almost identical to the Florentine, (3) the Roman Miglio Romano (1.48 km (.92 miles) which was essentially the old “Roman mile”, (4) the Neapolitan Miglio Napoletano (1.852 km (1.15 miles) which was the Mediterranean state’s contribution to the development of the nautical mile and (5) the Milanese Miglio Milanese which, at 1.85 km (1.495 miles) was close to the English nautical mile.  What also remained was the nostalgic, romantic attraction of the old words and although in 1927 when the Mille Miglia (Thousand Miles) road race was established, Italy had for decades fully “been metric”, the name was used to evoke the idea of a long tradition of endurance.  The memorable phrase “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” is the opening line in the novel The Go-Between (1953) by the English writer L. P. Hartley (1895–1972) and to illustrate his point there is the old Mille Miglia, still in living memory.

The Mille Miglia was a round trip from Rome to Brescia and back and by the mid 1950s the cars had become very fast (speeds of 180 mph (290 km/h) were recorded and the 1955 race was won by a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR (W196S) with an average speed close to 100 mph (160 km/h)).  At the time, that was dangerous enough even on a purpose-built circuit but the Mille Miglia was an event run on public roads which, while closed for the occasion, were poorly supervised and crowd control was in many places non-existent, people forming along the roadside to ensure the best view, literally inches from cars travelling at high speed.  Over thirty years, the race had claimed the lives of 30 souls but the eleven in 1957 would be the last because within days, the Italian government banned all motor racing on Italian public roads although since 1977 an event of the same name over much the same course has been run for historic vehicles which competed in the event in period (or were accepted and registered).  Now very much a social occasion for the rich, it's not a high-speed event.  The original event had been one of the classic events on the calendar in an era in which top-line drivers counted on attending a couple of funerals a year (possibly their own) and it’s the 1955 race to which a particular aura still lingers.

300 SLR (Moss & Jenkinson), Mille Migla, 1955.

Won by Stirling Moss (1929-2020) and Denis Jenkinson (1920-1996), their Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR technically complied with the sports car regulations but it was really the factory's formula one machine (W196R) with a bigger engine and a streamlined body with seats for two.  It wasn't exactly a "grand prix car with headlights" as some claimed but wasn't that far off; officially the W196S (Sports) in the factory register, for marketing purposes it was dubbed (and badged) as the 300 SLR to add lustre to the 300SL Gullwing coupé then on sale.  The race was completed in 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds, a average speed of 157.650 km/h (97.96 mph) (the course was never exactly 1000 miles and that year was 1,597 km (992 miles) and at times, the 300 SLR touched almost 180 mph which enabled Moss to cover the last 340 km (211 miles) at an average speed of 265.7 km/h (165.1) mph.  The record set in 1955 will stand for all time because such a race will never happen again, the Italy which then existed now truly a “foreign country” in which things were done differently

Falstaff (Campanadas a medianoche (Chimes at Midnight, 1966) in the original Spanish) was a film written and directed by Orson Welles (1915–1985) who starred as the eponymous character.  Falstaff is a classic “miles gloriosus” and Welles considered him Shakespeare's finest creation; scholars will debate that but of all of the all, there was probably no role more suited to Welles the larger.

In literary use, the term “miles gloriosus” originated in a comedy by Plaurus (254-184 BC).  The miles gloriosus was a braggart soldier who, although a coward on the battlefield, boasts of heroic deeds in combat; he was the prototype of a stock character comic drama, the one whose true character is either notorious or discovered and is thus in the cast to be made a fool of by other players.  In English drama he first appeared eponymously in the five act play Ralph Roister Doister (circa 1552 although not published until 1567) by the English cleric & schoolmaster Nicholas Udall (1504-1556).  The play was something of a landmark in literature because it was one of the first works written in English which could be classed as a “comedy” in the accepted meaning of the word.  As a text it was of interest to the proto-structuralists because it blended the conventions of Greek & Roman comedies with the traditions of the English mediaeval theatre but the great innovation was the appearance of recognizably “middle class” characters as protagonists rather than the “supporting cast role” of doctors & lawyers who had played “second fiddle” to the mostly royal or aristocratic players.  That the “growth market” in theatre audiences came from this newly burgeoning class may at least in part accounted for the literary novelty and its development clearly is identifiable in some of the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616).  Bobadill in Ben Jonson's (circa 1572-1637) Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Captain Brazen in George Farquhar's (1677-1707) The Recruiting Officer (1706) were exemplars of the playwrights’ depictions of a braggart but just in case people didn’t get it, in his epic-length fantastical allegory The Faerie Queene (1590), the English poet Edmund Spenser (circa 1552-1599) called his creation Braggadochio.  The epitome of the breed was Shakespeare's Falstaff.  Sir John Falstaff was useful to Shakespeare who had him appear in Henry IV, Part 1 (circa 1596), Henry IV, Part 2 (circa 1598) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602).  He was also granted a posthumous reference in Henry V (circa 1599), in which it's reported he has died off-stage.

The “last mile” is a concept in urban planning, transport logistics and telecommunications.  In urban planning, it refers to the final leg of an individual’s journey (traditionally Monday-Friday) from their residence to their place of word in a city’s CBD (central business district).  In modern cities, it’s a matter of great significance because while it is possible for a great number of people to park their cars at train stations or other transport interchanges a mile or more from the CBD, it would be impossible to accommodate all these vehicles in the CBD.  In transport logistics, it describes the final stage of delivery of goods, etc, from a distribution centre to the consumer, often involving greater effort or expense.  In telecommunications, it’s a conceptual term assigned to those components of the infrastructure carrying communication signals from the main system to the end user's business or home, often involving greater expense to install and maintain, and lower transmission speeds.  The terms “final mile”, “last kilometre” etc are synonymous.  The companion term “first mile” is from transport logistics and refers to the initial stage of delivery of goods etc, from the seller or producer to a distribution centre, often involving greater effort or expense.  A “middle mile” is a piece of jargon from the IT industry and refers to the segment of a telecommunications network linking an operator's core network to the local network plant.  Real nerds like to explain it as something like the “middleware layer” between software and hardware but the analogy is weak.

A “nautical mile” is a unit of length corresponding approximately to one minute of arc of latitude along any meridian.  By international agreement it is exactly 1,852 metres (approximately 6,076 feet or 1.151 of a statute mile; the abbreviations variously used are NM, M, nmi & nm (the latter conflicting with nanometre symbol although confusion is unlikely).  The term “sea mile” is now rarely used but in its odd appearance it’s either (1) a synonym for “nautical mile” or (2) (usually as “sea miles”) a reference to the age of a ship or experience of a sailor.  The original “sea mile” was a now obsolete Scandinavian unit of distance (about 4 nautical miles), a calque of the Danish sømil, the Norwegian Bokmål sjømil and the Swedish sjömil, the construct being the Danish sø (sea, nautical, maritime) + mil (the Danish mile or league).  The geographical mile (a unit of length corresponding to exactly one minute of arc (1/60 of a degree) along the Earth's equator (about 1855.4 meters, 2029.1 yards, or roughly 8/7 international miles) was also used as (an inexact) synonym of “nautical mile”.

Eight Miles High, the Byrds (CBS EP (Extended Play).

Many critics list Eight Miles High (1966) by The Byrds as the first true psychedelic rock song and the band's claim it had nothing to do with drug use was about as creditable as the Beatles asserting their song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (1967) was not a thinly veiled reference to LSD (the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as “acid”).  The lyrics from Eight Miles High genuinely were inspired by the band's flight to London in 1965 but “eight” was chosen because it best suited the music, even though commercial airliners didn't fly at quite that altitude.  At the time, the typical flight paths for the New York-London route involved a ceiling somewhat lower: Boeing 707, 33,000-37,000 feet (6.25-7.00 miles); Douglas DC-8, 32,000-39,000 feet (6.06-7.39 miles); Vickers VC10, 33,000-40,000 feet (6.25-7.58 miles).  In the context of artistic licence, eight was “close enough for rock 'n' roll”.  The song by the Byrds was not an allusion to the “mile-high club”, an institution one (informally) becomes a member of by having sex while aboard an aircraft in flight.  Although now most associated with those who contrive to do the act(s) on a commercial flight, “membership” has been claimed by those who managed the feat in both private and military aviation and the first known reference to the concept dates from 1785, early in the age of the hot-air balloon although the threshold then was set to a more modest 1,000 feet (0.1893939 of a mile).

The “international mile” is the same as the “land mile” & “modern mile” (ie the internationally agreed definition of 1.609344 kilometres) and the rarely used terms were coined simply to remove ambiguity in legal or other documents because over the centuries “mile” had in different places described distances greatly differing in length.  The mysterious “US survey mile” (1609.347 metres) is slightly longer than the now almost universal “international mile” and that’s a product of it being 5,280 US “survey feet” (0.30480061 metres) in length, the latter also slightly longer than the familiar 12 inch (304.8 mm) “international foot”).  To make things really murky, in the US, in formal use, a “statute mile” refers to a “survey mile” despite the lengths being slightly different.  Because the variation is less than ⅛ inch (3.2 mm), for most purposes this is something of no significance but over very long distances, it can matter if things like boundaries or target vectors are being documented, thus the need for precision in certain aspects of mapping.  Being a federal system with a long tradition of “states rights”, even when in 1983 the revised North American Datum (NAD83) was compiled and published by the NGS (National Geodetic Survey, a part of the NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration under the Department of Commerce)), the states retained the right to determine which (if any) definitions of distance they would use.  So, despite all State Plane Coordinate Systems being expressed in metric measurements, eight of the 50 states opted out of the metre-based system, seven using “US survey feet” and one “international feet”.

A “sporting” pursuit which merges the traditions of athletic track & field competition with the drunken antics of university students, the “Beer Mile” is conducted usually on a standard 400 m (¼ mile) track as a 1 mile (1.6 km) contest of both running & drinking speed.  Each of the four laps begins with the competitor drinking one can (12 fl oz (US) (355 ml)) of beer, followed by a full lap, the process repeated three times.  The rules have been defined by the governing body which also publishes the results, including the aggregates of miles covered and beers drunk.  Now a sporting institution, it has encouraged imitators and there are a number of variations, each with its own rules.  The holder of this most prestigious world record is Canadian Corey Bellemore (b 1994), a five-time champion, who, at the Beer Mile World Classic in Portugal in July 2025, broke his own world record, re-setting setting the mark to 4:27.1.  That may be compared with the absolute world record for the mile, held by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj (b 1974) who in 1999 ran the distance in 3:43.13, his additional pace made possible by not being delayed by having to down four beers.

The respectable face of the University of Otago's Medical School, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Some variations of the beer mile simply increase the volume or strength of the beer consumed but in Australia & New Zealand, some were dubbed “Chunder Mile” (chunder being circa 1950s antipodean slang for vomiting and of disputed origin) on the not unreasonable basis that vomiting becomes increasingly more likely and frequent the more alcohol is consumed.  For some however, even this wasn’t sufficiently debauched and there were events which demanded a (cold) meat pie be enjoyed with a jug of (un-chilled) beer (a jug typically 1140 ml (38.5 fl oz (US)) at the start of each of the four laps.  Predictably, these events were most associated with orientation weeks at universities, a number still conducted as late as the 1970s and the best documented seems to have been those at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.  Even by the standards of a country producing abundant supplies of strong beer and weed, the students at Otago were notorious for retreating from civilized ways although, it was at the time the site of the country’s medical school, thereby providing students with practical experience of both symptoms and treatments for the inevitable consequences.  Whether the event was invented in Dunedin isn’t known but, given the nature of males aged 17-25 probably hasn’t much changed over the millennia, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn similar competitions, localized to suit culinary tastes, have been contested by the drunken youth of many places in centuries past.  As it was, even in Dunedin, times were changing and in 1972, the Chunder Mile was banned “…because of the dangers of asphyxiation and ruptured esophaguses.”  Undetred, the students found other amusements.

In idiomatic use, to say “a mile wide and an inch deep” suggests someone or something covering a wide array of topics but on only a very shallow level (thus analogous with “jack of all trades and master of none”.  Despite the negative connotations, the “mile wide, inch deep” model can in many fields be useful.  In informal use, a “neg mile” is a unit of “saved travel” (ie an expression of a distance not having to be travelled).  A “mile-a-minute” means literally “60 mph” but was an expression used generally to mean “fast”, dating on a time where such a pace really was fast and although the World’s LSR (land speed record) was in 1899 set at 65.79 mph (105.88 km/h) and cars capable of the speed were in volume production by the 1920s, until the development of freeway systems (which, at scale, really began only in the 1950s), a sustained 60 mph wasn’t an everyday reality for most.  Indeed, in 1957 the admittedly hardly state-of-the-art British railway system was described as offering “mile-a-minute” journeys and then, in most cases, point-to-point, it would have been the quickest method.

Lindsay Lohan and Herbie: promotional poster for Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005).  In the film, Herbie went faster than a “mile-a-minute”.

Although Herr Professor Ferdinand Porsche (1875–1951) wouldn’t have used the expression “mile-a-minute” when explaining to Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) the dynamics of his KdF-Wagen, one of his claims was its ability to cruise “all day at 100 km/h” (ie a mile-a-minute) and that was true, the car unusual in being able to cruise at what was about its maximum speed.  That wouldn’t much have mattered were it not for the existence of the vast network of Autobahns Hitler was having constructed for a variety of reasons (job creation, military logistics, propaganda etc) but all those long roads and the KdF-Wagen were a perfect match.  The KdF-wagen (Kdf car) was notionally the product of the Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude (KdF, “Strength Through Joy”), the state-controlled organization which was under the auspices of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front) which replaced the independent labor unions.  The car was soon renamed the Volkswagen Type 1 (people’s car) and it became better known in the post-war years as the “Beetle”, 21,529,464 of which left assembly lines between 1938-2003.  In the spirit of the KdF, in 1938 a scheme was announced whereby Germans could buy a Type 1 for 990 RM (Reichsmark) on the basis of depositing 5 RM per week.  The 990 RM was a number unrelated to economic reality and just an example of the regime’s propaganda but as things turned out, during the Third Reich (1933-1945) not one Type 1 was delivered to a civilian customer with the factory’s entire output allocated to the military or the Nazi Party.  It wasn’t until the early 1960s there were settlements in the last of the cases brought by those Germans who dutifully had for years continued to make their 5 RM deposits.

Since the 1580s the word had been used generically to mean “a great distance” and it’s used also as an intensifier, sometimes rather loosely and an expression like “the new beer tastes miles better than the old” is along the lines of a well understood phrase like “heaps of water”.  Although in idiomatic use, “mile” tends to imply something large, if an actual distance is being referenced, context matters because something said to have “missed by a mile” might literally have “missed by an inch”.  Related to that is the expression “a miss is a good as a mile” which means if one misses the target, often it matters not whether one missed by a fraction of an inch or a thousand miles..  If it’s said “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” that means if someone is granted some slight right or concession, they will exploit that to take more.  In Middle English the word also was a unit of time, reckoned usually to mean “about 20 minutes”, reflecting how long it would take the typical, fit male to walk the distance.  The term "country mile" is an allusion to those those living in rural areas being allegedly prone to understating distances: when an inhabitant of somewhere remote referred to a place being "a few miles away", that could mean it was close by their standards of travel but it may well be twenty or more miles distant.  Phrases like "a couple of miles" or "a mile or two" were more encouraging but unlikely to suggest the "two miles" use in a city would imply.  Thus, "missed by a country mile" suggests being even more off target than "missed by a mile.   

A Chrysler Hemi-powered front-engined rail on California's Carlsbad Raceway's quarter-mile drag strip, 1964.  Operating between 1964-2004, the track was located six miles (10 km) inland from the Pacific Ocean in Carlsbad, on Palomar Airport Road at what is now Melrose Avenue.

The “quarter-mile” is literally one quarter of a statute mile (440 yards; 1,320 feet; 402.336 metres).  The emergence in the post-war United States of the sport of drag racing was a product of (1) dotted around the country there were a large number of tarmac airstrips which had become surplus with the end of World War II (1939-1945), (2) a large number of young men returned from service in the armed forces with sufficient disposable income to race cars and (3) a stocks of cars suitable to be “hotted-up” for use in acceleration tests.  The quarter-mile became the sport’s “standard distance” because of a mixture of cultural precedent and technical determinism (of the machines and the surfaces).  In the 1930s, even before “hot rodding” became a thing in the post-war years, young men were “street racing”, competing against each either from “light-to-light” or on semi-rural roads straight enough to be (1) suitable for purpose and (2) offering enough visibility to allow competitors to escape upon sighting a police car.  Many were informally measured (“tree-to-tree” for example) but some were better organized (air-strips even then used) and the quarter-mile was ideal because in the era a typical “well-set up” car could attain speed high enough to demonstrate its power and acceleration yet still be within the limits of safety imposed by most straight sections of road.  When the NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) was founded in 1951 to provide an organizational structure to street racing (and “get it off the streets” where it was becoming controversial), there was no debate about the default distance: a ¼ mile it was because that’s what just about everybody had been doing.

AC Shelby American Cobra 289 CSX2357 with parachute deployed at the end of test ¼ mile (400 m) run.  In drag racing circles, this is called “dumping the laundry”.

The object in drag racing was, from a standing start, to beat one’s competitor (classically drag races were conducted on two parallel lanes) by reaching the end of the quarter mile is less time and the winner was the one with the lowest ET (elapsed time); it didn’t matter if one’s opponent was travelling faster when crossing the line; it was all decided by the ET.  The TS (terminal speed) was of interest and sometimes an indication gearing was too high (ie a differential ratio numerically too low) meaning initial acceleration was suffering.  The sport produced sometimes shockingly single-purpose machines which did little very well except the quarter mile sprint, the ability to turn corners something of an abstraction and while good brakes were required, the fastest cars needed to be fitted with parachutes because if relying on conventional brakes, there was often not enough space to slow down before encountering a fence, tree or other solid object; even runways were only so long.  So drag racing was a balancing act between performance and safety and as it evolved into a multi-classification sport with categories ranging from genuine, stock-standard road cars to purpose built “rails” which looked like no car which had ever before existed.  Speeds began to rise and while in the 1930s 100 mph (160 km/h) at the end of the quarter mile was rarely attained, within decades, going beyond 300 mph (480 km/h) became common so for the fastest classes in top-flight competition the distance was reduced to 1000 feet (304.8 metres, 0.19 miles) and ⅛ mile (201 metres, 660 feet) racing has also formed a niche.

Etching

Etching (pronounced ech-ing)

(1) The art, act or process of making designs or pictures on a metal plate, glass etc, by the corrosive action of an acid instead of by a burin.

(2) An impression, as on paper, taken from an etched plate.

(3) The design so produced.

(4) A flat (usually metal) plate bearing such a design.

1625–1635: The construct was etch + -ing.  The verb etch was from the Dutch etsen (to engrave by eating away the surface of with acids), from the German ätzen (to etch), from the Old High German azzon (to cause to bite or feed), from the Proto-Germanic atjaną, causative of etaną (to eat), from the primitive Indo-European root ed- (to eat) (from these sources English gained “eat”).  The suffix –ing was from the Middle English -ing, from the Old English –ing & -ung (in the sense of the modern -ing, as a suffix forming nouns from verbs), from the Proto-West Germanic –ingu & -ungu, from the Proto-Germanic –ingō & -ungō. It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian -enge, the West Frisian –ing, the Dutch –ing, The Low German –ing & -ink, the German –ung, the Swedish -ing and the Icelandic –ing; All the cognate forms were used for the same purpose as the English -ing).  The “etching scribe” was a needle-sharp steel tool for incising into plates in etching and the production of dry points.  Etching is a noun & verb; the noun plural is etchings.

The noun was the present participle and gerund of etch (the verbal noun from the verb etch) and was used also in the sense of “the art of engraving”; by the 1760s, it was used also to mean “a print etc, made from an etched plate" and the plates themselves.  The term etching (to cut into a surface with an acid or other corrosive substance in order to make a pattern) is most associated with the creation of printing plates for the production of artistic works but the technique was used also as a way to render decorative patterns on metal.  In modern use, it’s also a term used in the making of circuit boards.  In idiomatic use (often as “etched in the memory”), it’s used of events, ideas etc which are especially memorable (for reasons good and ill) and as a slang word meaning “to sketch; quickly to draw”.  The Etch A Sketch drawing toy was introduced 1960 by Ohio Art Company; a kind of miniature plotter, it was a screen with two knobs which moved a stylus horizontally & vertically, displacing an aluminum powder to produce solid lines.  To delete the creation, the user physically shook the device which returned the powder to its original position, blanking the screen.

Rembrandt's Jan Asselyn, Painter (1646) (left) and Faust (circa 1652).  Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669)) wasn’t the most prolific etcher but remains among the most famous and his output provides an illustrative case-study in the evolution of his mastering of the technique, his early work really quite diffident compared with his later boldness.

What came to be known as etching gained the name from the Germanic family of words meaning “eat & “to eat”, the transferred sense an allusion to the acid which literally would “eat the metal”.   Etching is an intaglio (from the Italian intagliare (to engrave)) technique in printmaking, a term which includes methods such as hard and soft ground etching, engraving, dry-point, mezzotint and aquatint, all of which use an ink transferring process.  In this, a design is etched into a plate, the ink added over the whole surface plate before a scrim (historically starched cheesecloth) is used to force the ink into the etched areas and remove any excess.  Subsequently, the plate (along with dampened paper) is run through a press at high pressure, forcing the paper into etched areas containing the ink.  The earliest known signed and dated etching was created by Swiss Renaissance goldsmith Urs Graf (circa 1485-circa 1525) in 1513 and it’s from those who worked with gold that almost all forms of engraving are ultimately derived.

Lindsay Lohan, 1998, rendered in the style of etchings.

A phrase which was so beloved by comedy writers in the early-mid twentieth century that it became a cliché was “Want to come up and see my etchings?”, a euphemism for seduction.  Probably now a “stranded phrase”, the saying was based on some fragments of text in a novel by Horatio Alger Jr (1832–1899), a US author regarded as the first to formalize as genre fiction the “rags-to-riches” stories which had since the early days of the republic been the essence of the “American Dream” although it wasn’t until the twentieth century the term came into common use (often it’s now used ironically).

The practice of making etchings, woodcuts or engravings of famous paintings became popular, both artistically and commercially (which may for this purpose be much the same thing) in the late sixteenth century and developed over the next 250-odd years, an evolution tied closely to technological progress in printmaking and the materials available to artists.  The trend seems to have been accelerated by the spread in northern Europe (notably certain districts in Antwerp, Rome and Paris) of copperplate etching & engraving and while it may be dubious to draw conclusions from the works which have survived, the artists most re-produced clearly included Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, circa 1490-1576), Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, 1483–1520) and Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni; 1475–1564), the most prolific in the business of reproductive engraving including the Dutch specialist Cornelis Cort (circa 1533–circa 1578 and known in Italy where he spent his final years as Cornelio Fiammingo) and the Flemish Sadeler family, scions of which operated in many European cities.

Melencolia I (Melancholy I (1514)), etching by the German painter & printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528).

By the seventeenth century, the practice was well established and an entrenched part of the art market, fulfilling some of the functions which would later be absorbed by photography and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), among others, employed in his studio engravers whose task was to reproduce his paintings for sale with those etchings available in a variety of sizes (and thus price-points so there’s little which is new in the structures of the modern art market).  Again, in the eighteenth century, technological determinism interplayed with public taste as techniques were refined to adapt the works to what wasn’t exactly a production line but certainly an arrangement which made possible larger and more rapid volumes with printing houses commissioning runs (which could be in the hundreds) of engravings following (faithfully and not) British and Continental paintings, advances in mezzotint meaning a greater tonal range had become possible, mimicking the light and shade of oil paintings.  In genteel homes, various institutions and even museums, it was entirely respectable to have hanging: “prints after the Old Masters”.

But as technology giveth, so can it taketh away and it was the late eighteenth century invention of lithography and, a few decades later photography, which triggered a decline in demand, the constantly improving quality of the new mediums gradually displacing reproductive etching in the marketplace although the tradition didn’t die as artists such as Francisco Goya (1746–1828), Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Édouard Manet (1832–1883) maintained (or, in a sense, “revived”) etching as a creative rather than reproductive discipline and historians regards the early-mid nineteenth century as the era in which etching became a legitimate genre in art and not merely a means cheaply of distributing representations of existing works.

Self portrait: reflection (1996), etching by Lucian Freud (1922–2011).

Under modern copyright law, as a general principle, the selling of etchings of works still in copyright is not lawful without the permission from the holder of the rights and while details differ between jurisdictions, the basic rule of modern law (the Berne Convention, EU directives, national statutes) is that the sale (or even public display) of a reproduction or derivative work (the latter something which obviously follows without being an obvious duplicate of a copyrighted artwork) requires the consent of the copyright owner.  That protection tends in most jurisdictions to last 70 years after the death of the artist (the “life + 70” rule) and what matters is not that a reproduction is new (in the sense of the physical object) but that it is derivative because (1) to a high degree it emulates the composition, form(s), and expression of the original and (2) in appearance it to a high degree resembles a pre-existing, protected work.  Thus, if produced and offered for sale without permission, the object will infringe on the rights of whoever holds exclusive or delegated rights of reproduction or adaptation.  With exact or close replicas it’s not difficult for court to determine whether rights have been violated but at the margins, such as where works are “in the style of”, of “influenced by”, judgments are made on a case-by-case basis, the best publicized in recent years being those involving pop music.

The Lovers (circa 1528), etching by Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, 1503-1540) of the Italian Mannerist school.

All that means is one (usually) can sell reproductions of works by those dead for at least 70 years and even works “in their style” as long as there’s no attempt to misrepresent them as the product of their original artist’s hand.  There are in copyright exceptions such as “fair dealing” & “fair use” but their range is narrow and limited to fields such as criticism, review, education or satire and does not extend to normal commercial transactions.  Additionally, there’s a work-around in that if something is found to have been sufficiently “transformed”, it can be regarded as a new work but this exception tightly is policed and the threshold high.  Additionally, in recent years, as museums and galleries have put content on-line, what has emerged is the additional complication of such an institution hanging on its walls paintings long out of copyright yet asserting copyright on its commissioned photographs of those works.  That development must have delighted lawyers working in the lucrative field but the courts came to read-down the scope, most following the principles explained in an action before the US Federal District Court (Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), which held (1) copyright in a photograph can in many cases exist but, (2) if a photograph is a “purely mechanical copy of a public-domain work” there usually no protection, even if the taking of the image required technical skill in lighting, angle selection and such.

Morphinomanes (Morphine Addicts, 1887), etching and and drypoint by French artist Albert Besnard (1849–1934).

There was still something for the lawyers because inherently there remained two separate layers of rights at play: (1) copyright (intellectual property) which belongs usually to the artist or their estate and (2) the property rights (ownership of the physical object) which are held by whomever may possess lawful title to the object (this may align with possession but not of necessity).  In other words a museum will likely own the paint & canvas yet not the copyright, something analogous with the discovery made by the few diligent souls who troubled themselves to read the small print they’d agreed to when installing software: in most cases one had lawful title to the physical media (diskette, CD, DVD etc) but often nothing more than a revocable licence to use a single instance of the software. It’s possible lawfully to produce and sell etchings of Goya (the artist having had the decency to drop dead more than 70 years ago) but one may not without permission reproduce or trace from a museum’s copyrighted photo of a Goya (and institutions sometimes maintain separate conditions of use for low and high-resolution images).  Even if one paints, draws or etches by hand, depending on this and that, a court can still hold there’s been a “substantial reproduction” of the composition, colour and such has been effected and thus there’s been an infringement of the underlying copyright.  So, the rules in this area are (1) proceed with caution if producing art not wholly original and (2) if a young lady is asked: “Want to come up and see my etchings?”, she should proceed with caution.

Gorp

Gorp (pronounced gawrp)

(1) Greedily to eat (obsolete).

(2) A mixture of nuts, raisins, dried fruits seeds and such, often packed as a high-energy snack by hikers, climbers and others undertaking strenuous outdoor activities.

(3) By extension, in the slang of late 1950s US automobile stylists (and subsequently their critics), the notion of adding many design elements to a car, even if discordant.

(4) In fashion criticism, an adoption of the automotive use, used to describe an excessive use of decorative items, especially if loosely fitted and inclined to “stray”.

Early 1900s: Of uncertain origin (in the sense of “greedily to eat”) but assumed by most etymologists to be a merging of gorge & gulp, the construct being gor(p) + (gul)p.  The mid-fourteenth century verb gorge (to eat with a display of greediness, or in large quantities) was from the Middle English gorgen (greedily to eat) and was from the Old French gorger & gorgier (which endures in modern French as gorger (greedily to eat; to gorge)), from gorge (throat).  The Middle English noun gorge (esophagus, gullet; throat; bird's crop; food in a hawk's crop; food or drink that has been take consumed) came directly from the Old French gorge (throat) (which endures in modern French as gorge (throat; breast)), from the Vulgar Latin gorga & gurga, from the Classical Latin gurges (eddy, whirlpool; gulf; sea), of uncertain origin but perhaps linked with the primitive Indo-European gwerhs- (to devour, swallow; to eat).  The English word was cognate with the Galician gorxa (throat), the Italian gorga & gorgia (gorge, throat (ravine long obsolete)), the Occitan gorga & gorja, the Portuguese gorja (gullet, throat; gorge) and the Spanish gorja (gullet, throat; gorge).  The duality of meaning in French meant the brassiere (bra) came to be called “un soutien-gorge (with derived forms such as “soutien-gorge de sport” (sports bra) with “soutif” the common colloquial abbreviation; the literal translation was thus “throat supporter” but it’s better understood as “chest uplifter”.

Lindsay Lohan gulping down a Pure Leaf iced tea; promotional image from the brand's “Time for a Tea Break” campaign.

The mid-fifteenth century noun gulp (eagerly (and often noisily) to swallow; swallow in large draughts; take down in a single swallow) was from the Middle English gulpen and probably from the West Flemish or Middle Dutch gulpen &, golpen, of uncertain origin.  Although not exactly onomatopoeic, the word may have been of imitative origin, or even an extension of meaning of the Dutch galpen (to roar, squeal) or the English galp & gaup (to gape).  It was related to the German Low German gulpen (to gush out, belch, gulp), the West Frisian gjalpe, gjalpje & gjealpje (to gush, spurt forth), the Danish gulpe & gylpe (to gulp up, disgorge), the dialectal Swedish glapa (to gulp down) and the Old English galpettan (to gulp down, eat greedily, devour).  The derived senses (to react nervously by swallowing; the sound of swallowing indicating apprehension or fear) may have been in use as early as the sixteenth century.  Gorp is a noun; the noun plural is gorps.  In fashion (technically perhaps “anti-fashion appropriated by fashion”) “gorpcore” describes the use as streetwear of outerwear either designed for outdoor recreation (in the sense of hiking, wilderness tracking etc) or affecting that style.  Exemplified by the ongoing popularity of the puffer jacket, gorpcore is something much associated with the COVID-19 pandemic but the look had by the time of the outbreak already been on-trend for more than a year.  The name comes from the stereotypical association of trail mix (gorp) with such outdoor activities.  The verbs gorping and gorped (often as “gorped-up”) were informal and used among stylists and critics when discussing some of Detroit’s excessively ornamented cars of the late 1950s & early 1960s.  Acronym Finder lists eleven GORPs including the two for trail-mix which seem peacefully to co-exist:

GORP: Great Outdoor Recreation Pages (a website).
GORP: Good Old Raisins and Peanuts (trail mix).
GORP: Granola, Oats, Raisins, and Peanuts (trail mix).
GORP: Garry Ork Restoration Project (An ecosystem restoration project in Saanich, Canada, designed to save the endangered Garry Oak trees, British Columbia’s only native oak species.
GORP: Georgia Outdoor Recreational Pass (Georgia Wildlife Resources Division).
GORP: Graduate Orthodontic Residents Program (University of Michigan; Ann Arbor).
GORP: Grinnell Outdoor Recreation Program (Grinnell College, Iowa)
GORP: Good Organic Retailing Practices.
GORP: Get Odometer Readings at the Pump.
GORP: Gordon Outdoor Recreation Project (Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts).
GORP: Growing Outdoor Recreation Professionals (University of California, Berkeley).

Lexicographers acknowledge the uncertainty of origin in the use of “gorp” to describe the mix of nuts, raisins, seeds and such in the packaged, high-energy snack now often known by the description most common in US commerce: “Trail mix”.  So common and conveniently packaged are the ingredients of gorp that doubtlessly variations of the combination have been carried by travellers since the origins of human movement over distance but the first known references to the concept to appear in print were seen in the “outdoors” themed magazines of the early twentieth century.  Deconstructed however, the notion of “high-energy, long-life, low volume” rations were for centuries a standard part of a soldier’s rations with different mixes used by land-based or naval forces, something dictated by availability and predicted rates of spoilage; as early as the seventeenth century, recommended combinations appeared in military manuals and quartermaster’s lists.  Not until the mid-1950s however is there any record of the stuff being described as “gorp” although the oft quoted formations: “Good Old Raisins and Peanuts” & “Granola, Oats, Raisins, and Peanuts” may both be backronyms.

Lindsay Lohan (b 1986, either left or right) and Erin Mackey (b 1986, either left or right), hiking scene in The Parent Trap (1998).  They would have packed some trail mix in their back-packs.

In various places around the planet, similar concoctions (the composition influenced by regional tastes and product availability) were described by different names including the antipodean scroggin or schmogle (the latter apparently restricted to New Zealand) and beyond the English-speaking world, there’s been a myriad of variants among those in schools or universities including “student mix”, “study mix”, “student fodder” & “student oats”.  That variety has faded as US linguistic imperialism has exerted its pull and even before the internet attained critical mass, the product name familiar in US supermarkets and grocery stores had begun to prevail: “Trail mix”.

Packaged gorp and trail mix.  Historically, gorp bars lived up to their name, a typical ingredients list including "peanuts, corn syrup, rasins, salt & lecithin" so commercially available gorp often was "the truth if not the whole truth".  Oddly, even when manufactured in disk-shapes, the product still tended to be described as a "bar".  With the contents of trail mix, there's been a bit of "mission creep" and the packaged product can now include chunks of chocolate and other stuff not envisaged in years gone by.

1958 Buick Special Convertible (left) and 1958 Buick Limited Convertible (right).If asked to nominate one from the list of usual suspects, many might pick Cadillac as the most accomplished purveyor of gorp but historians of the breed usually list the 1958 Buicks as "peak gorp" and for the sheer number and variety of decorative bits and pieces, it probably is unsurpassed.  Unfortunately for the division, a combination of circumstances meant between 1956 & 1958, Buick sales more than halved and while "excessive" gorp wasn't wholly to blame, after GM (General Motors) re-organized things, gorp never made a comeback quite as lavish.       

In automotive styling “gorp” is not synonymous with “bling” although there can be some physical overlap.  The word “bling” long ago enjoyed the now obsolete meaning “a want of resemblance” but in modern use it means (1) expensive and flashy jewelry, clothing, or other possessions, (2) the flaunting of material wealth and the associated lifestyle or (3) flashy; ostentatious.  It seems in these senses first to have been recorded in 1997 and is thought to be from the Jamaican English slang bling-bling, a sound suggested by the quality of light reflected by diamonds.  In the Caribbean, bling-bling came to be used to refer to flashy items (originally jewelry but later of any display of wealth) and the term was picked up in the US in African-American culture where it came to be associated with rap & hip-hop (forks of that community’s pop music) creators and their audiences.  There were suggestion the word bling was purely onomatopoeic (a vague approximation of pieces of jewelry clinking together) but most etymologists list it as one of the rare cases of a silent onomatopoeia: a word imitative of the imaginary sound many people “hear” at the moment light reflects off a sparkling diamond.  The long obsolete meaning “a want of resemblance” came from earlier changes in pronunciation when dissem′blance became pronounced variously as dissem′bler and dissem′ bling with bling becoming the slang form.  There is no relationship with the much older German verb blinken (to gleam, sparkle).

1958 Continental Mark III by Lincoln.

Some critics of design insist "gorp" (like "bling") really applies only to stuff "added on" (ie glued, screwed, bolted etc) but some claim there's no better word when discussing the cars which were a "mash-up" of disparate elements and there's no better example than the Ford Motor Company's (FoMoCo) 1958 Continental which was actually a "Lincoln with more stuff" but named simply "Continental" in the hope it would fool people into thinking it was an exclusive line following the genuinely unique Continental Mark II (1956-1957).  The Continental division had however been shuttered as another victim of the recession and the propaganda proved unequal to reality.  The Mark III's huge body (a remarkable technical achievement because even the convertibles were unit-bodies with no separate chassis) lingered for three dismally unsuccessful seasons and remains as the period's most confused agglomeration of motifs, a reasonable achievement given some of the weird creations Chrysler would release.  Although the sheer size does somewhat disguise the clutter, as one's eye wanders along the length, one finds slants and different angles, severe straight-lines, curves soft and sudden, scallops, fins and strakes.  On McMansions, it's not uncommon to find that many architectural traditions in on big suburban house but it's a rare count in one car.  Despite the diversity, it's not exactly "post-modernism in metal" so even if a re-purposing, "gorp" seems to fit.

In the English-speaking world, bling & bling-bling began to appear in dictionaries early in the twenty-first century.  Many languages picked up bling & bling-bling unaltered but among the few localizations were the Finnish killuttimet and the Korean beullingbeulling (블링블링) and there was also the German blinken (to blink, flashing on & off), a reference to the gleam and sparkle of jewels and precious metals.  Blinken was from the Low German and Middle Low German blinken, from the root of blecken (to bare) and existed also in Dutch.  As viral-words sometimes do, bling begat some potentially useful (and encouraged) derivations including blingesque, blingtastic, blingbastic blingiest, blingest, a-bling & blingistic; all are non-standard forms and patterns of use determine whether such pop-culture constructs endure.  Bling & blinger are nouns, blinged, blingish, blingy & blingless are adjectives, bling-out, blinged-out & bling-up are verbs; the noun plural is blingers (bling and bling-bling being both singular & plural).

Gingerbread: 1974 Imperial LeBaron four-door hardtop (left) in chestnut tufted leather though not actually “fine Corinthian leather” which was (mostly) exclusive to the Cordoba (1975-1983) until late 1975 when not only did the Imperial's brochures mention "genuine Corinthian leather (available at extra cost)" but for the first time since 1954 the range was referred to as the "Chrysler Imperial", a harbinger the brand was about to be retired.  Imperial's advertising copy noted of the brochure photograph above: “...while the passenger restraint system with starter interlock is not shown, it is standard on all Imperials.”; the marketing types didn't like seat-belts messing up their photos.  While all of the big three (GM, Ford & Chrysler) had tufted interiors in some lines, it was Chrysler which displayed the most commitment to the gingerbread motif.  After 1958, exterior gorp, while it didn't every entirely go away, it did go into decline but in the mid 1960s, as increasingly elaborate and luxurious interiors began to appear in the higher-priced models of even traditionally mass-market marques, those who disapproved of this latest incarnation of excess needed a word which was both descriptive and dismissive.  The use "gorp" might have been misleading and according to the authoritative Curbside Classic (which called the trend the start of "the great brougham era"), the word of choice was "gingerbread" and truly that was bling's antecedent.

In the stylists’ (they weren’t yet “designers”) studios in the 1950s, what would come to be called “bling” certainly existed (and in the “age of chrome” was very shiny) but the idea of gorp was different in that it was quantitative and qualitative, the notion of adding to a design multiple decorative elements or motifs, even if this meant things clashed (which sometimes they did).  Why this happened has been debated but most historians of the industry have concluded it was the result of the unexpected, post-war boom which delivered to working and middle-class Americans a prosperity and wealth of consumer goods the like of which no mass-society had ever known.  In material terms, “ordinary” Americans (ie wage and salary earners), other than in measures like the provision of servants or hours of leisure, were enjoying luxuries, conveniences and an abundance unknown even to royalty but a few generations earlier.  Accordingly, noting the advice that the way to “avoid gluts was to create a nation of gluttons” (a concept used also in many critiques of rampant consumerism), the US car industry, awash with cash and seeing nothing in the future but endless demand, resolved never to do in moderation what could be done in excess and as well as making their cars bigger and heavier, began to use increasing rococo styling techniques; wherever there appeared an unadorned surface, the temptation was to add something and much of what was added came casually to be called “gorp”, based on the idea that, like the handy snack, the bits & pieces bolted or glued on were a diverse collection and, in the minds of customers, instantly gratifying.  Gorp could include chrome strips, fake external spare tyre housings, decorative fender and hood (bonnet) accessories which could look like missiles, birds of prey in flight or gunsights, the famous dagmars, fake timber panels, moldings which recalled the shape of jet-engine nacelles, taillights which resembled the exhaust gasses from the rockets of spacecraft (which then existed mostly in the imagination) and more.

A young lady wearing gorpcore, Singapore, 2022.  Along with Kuwait, Hong Kong, Monaco and Vatican City, Singapore is listed by demographers as "100% urbanized" but it's good always to be prepared.

Had any one of these items been appended as a feature it might well have become a focus or even an admired talking point but that wasn’t the stylistic zeitgeist and in the studios they may have been reading the works of the poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) who attributed to Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881; UK prime- minister 1868 & 1874-1880) a technique he claimed the prime-minister adopted during his audiences with Victoria (1819–1901; Queen of the UK 1837-1901): “Everyone likes flattery and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel”.  Detroit in the late 1950s, certainly laid on the gorp with a trowel and the men and women (there was in the era the odd woman employed in the studios, dealing typically with interiors or color schemes) were students also of the pamphlet Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence, published in 1932 by US real estate broker (and confessed Freemason) Bernard London (b circa 1873 but his life is something of a mystery) and in the post-war years came the chance to put the theory to the test.  This meant not only was there much gorp but each year there had to be “different” gorp so the churn rate was high. Planned obsolescence began as a casual description of the techniques used in advertising to stimulate demand and thus without the negative connotations which would attach when it became part of the critique of materialism, consumerism and the consequential environmental destruction.  Like few before or since, the US car industry quickly perfected planned obsolescence and not content with “annual model changes” sometimes added “mid-season releases” thus rendering outdated something purchased only months earlier.  Unfortunately, just as “peak gorp” began with the release late in 1957 (replete with lashings of chrome and much else) of the 1958 ranges, an unexpected and quite sharp recession struck the American economy and a new mood of austerity began.  That would pass because the downturn, while unpleasant, was by the standard of post-war recessions, relative brief although the effects on the industry would be profound, structurally and financially.

1970 Plymouth 'Cuda AAR in Lemon Twist over Black.  The AAR stood for All American Racers, the teams which campaigned the 'Cuda in the Trans-Am series for 5.0 litre (305 cubic inch) modified production cars.

Not all "added-on" stuff can however be classed as "gorp", "bling" or "gingerbread" and the most significant threshold is "functionalism"; if stuff actually fulfils some purpose, it's just a fitting.  Thus the additional stuff which appeared on the 1970 Plymouth AAR ’Cuda (and the companion Dodge Challenger T/A) were “fittings” because they all fulfilled some purpose, even if the practical effect away from race tracks was sometimes marginal.  Added to the pair was (1) a fibreglass hood (bonnet) with functional air-intake scoop, (2) front and rear spoilers, (3) side outlet dual exhaust system, (4) hood locking pins and (5) staggered size front & rear wheels.  Of course, there were also “longitudinal strobe stripes” which did nothing functional but that seems a minor transgression and in the world of stripes, there have been many worse.