Blazon

Blazon (pronounced bley-zuhn)

(1) In heraldry, an escutcheon or coat of arms or a banner depicting a coat of arms.

(2) In heraldry, a description (verbal or written or in an image) of a coat of arms.

(3) In heraldry, a formalized language for describing a coat of arms (the heraldic description of armorial bearings).

(4) An ostentatious display, verbal or otherwise.

(5) A description or recording (especially of the good qualities of a person or thing).

(6) In literature, verses which dwelt upon and described various parts of a woman's body (usually in admiration). 

(7) Conspicuously or publicly to set forth; display; proclaim.

(8) To adorn or embellish, especially brilliantly or showily.

(9) To depict (heraldic arms or the like) in proper form and color.

(10) To describe a coat of arms.

1275-1300: From the late thirteenth century Middle English blazon (armorial bearings, coat of arms), from the twelfth century Old French blason (shield, blazon (also “collar bone”).  Of the words in the Romance languages (the Spanish blason, Italian blasone, Portuguese brasao & Provençal blezo, the first two are said to be French loan-words and the origins of all remain uncertain.  According to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), the suggestion by nineteenth century French etymologists of connections with Germanic words related to English blaze is dubious because of the sense disparities.  The verb blazon (to depict or paint (armorial bearings) dates from the mid sixteenth century and was either (or both) from the noun or the French blasonner (from the French noun).  In English, it had earlier in the 1500s been used to mean “descriptively to set forth; descriptively” especially (by at least the 1530s) specifically “to vaunt or boast” and in that sense it was probably at least influenced by the English blaze.  Blazon & blazoning are nouns & verbs, blazoner, blazonry & blazonment are nouns and blazoned & blazonable are adjectives; the noun plural is blazons.

A coat of arms, possibly of dubious provenance. 

The now more familiar verb emblazon (inscribe conspicuously) seems first to have been used around the 1590s in the sense of “extol” and the still common related forms (emblazoning; emblazoned) emerged almost simultaneously.  The construct of emblazon was en- +‎ blazon (from the Old French blason (in its primary sense of “shield”).  The en- prefix was from the Middle English en- (en-, in-), from the Old French en- (also an-), from the Latin in- (in, into).  It was also an alteration of in-, from the Middle English in-, from the Old English in- (in, into), from the Proto-Germanic in (in).  Both the Latin & Germanic forms were from the primitive Indo-European en (in, into).  The intensive use of the Old French en- & an- was due to confluence with Frankish intensive prefix an- which was related to the Old English intensive prefix -on.  It formed a transitive verb whose meaning is to make the attached adjective (1) in, into, (2) on, onto or (3) covered.  It was used also to denote “caused” or as an intensifier.  The prefix em- was (and still is) used before certain consonants, notably the labials “b” & “p”.

Google ngram: It shouldn’t be surprising there seems to have been a decline in the use of “blazon” while “emblazoned” has by comparison, in recent decades, flourished.  That would reflect matters of heraldry declining in significance, their appearance in printed materials correspondingly reduced in volume.  However, because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Self referential emblazoning: Lindsay Lohan's selfie of her modeling a sweater by Ashish, her visage emblazoned in sequins, London, November 2014.

Impressionistically though this assumption is, few would doubt “blazon” is now rare while “emblazoned” is far from uncommon.  While “emblazon” began with the meaning “that which the emblazoner does” (ie (1) to adorn with prominent, (2) to inscribe upon and (3) to draw a coat of arms) it evolved by the mid-nineteenth century with the familiar modern sense of “having left in the mind a vivid impression” (often in the form “emblazoned on one’s memory”).  In English, there’s nothing unusual in a derived or modified form of a word becoming common than its original root, even to the point the where the original is rendered rare, unfamiliar or even obsolete, a phenomenon due to changes in usage patterns, altered conventions in pronunciation or shifts in meaning that make the derived form more practical or culturally resonant.  That’s just how English evolves.

Other examples include (1) ruthless vs. ruth (ruth (pity; compassion) was once a common noun in Middle English but has long been extinct while ruthless, there being many who demand the description, remains popular), (2) unkempt vs kempt (kempt (neatly kept) would have been listed as extinct were it not for it finding a niche as a literary and poetic form and has also been used humorously or ironically), (3) disheveled vs sheveled (sheveled was from the Old French chevelé (having hair) and was part of mainstream vocabulary as late as the eighteenth century but, except in jocular use, is effectively non-existent in modern English) and (4) redolent vs dolent (redolent (evocative of; fragrant) was from dolent (sorrowful), from the Latin dolere (to feel pain)); redolent both outlived and enjoyed a meaning-shift from its root.

Etymologists think of these as part of the linguistic fossil record, noting there’s no single reason for the phenomenon beyond what survives being better adapted to cultural or conversational needs.  In that, these examples differ from the playful fork of back-formation which has produced (1) combobulate (a back-formation from discombobulate (to confuse or disconcert; to throw into a state of confusion) which was a humorous mock-Latin creation in mid-nineteenth century US English) (2) couth (a nineteenth century back-formation from uncouth and used as a humorous form meaning “refined”), (3) gruntled (a twentieth century back-formation meaning “happy or contented; satisfied”, the source being disgruntled (unhappy; malcontented) and most sources indicate it first appeared in print in 1926 but the most celebrated example comes from PG Wodehouse (1881–1975) who in The Code of the Woosters (1938) penned: “He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”  Long a linguistic joke, some now take gruntled seriously but for the OED remains thus far unmoved and (4) ept (a back-formation from inept (not proficient; incompetent or not competent (there is a functional difference between those two)) which was from the Middle French inepte, from the Latin ineptus).

Literary use

In literary use, “blazon” was a technical term used by the Petrarchists (devotes of Francis Petrarch (1304-1374), a scholar & poet of the early Italian Renaissance renowned for his love poems & sonnets and regarded also as one of the earliest humanists).  Blazon in this context (a subset of what literary theorists call “catalogue verse”) was adopted because, like the structured and defined elements of heraldic symbolism, Petrarch’s poems contained what might be thought an “inventory” of verses which dwelt upon and detailed the various parts of a woman's body; a sort of catalogue of her physical attributes.  Petrarch’s approach wasn’t new because as a convention in lyric poetry it was well-known by the mid thirteenth century, most critics crediting the tradition to the writings of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, a figure about whom little is although it’s believed he was born in Normandy.  In England the Elizabethan sonneteers honed the technique as a devotional device, often, in imaginative ways, describing the bits of their mistresses they found most pleasing, a classic example a fragment from Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595), a wedding day ode by the English poet Edmund Spenser (circa 1552-1599) to his bride (Elizabeth Boyle) in 1594:

Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright.
Her forehead ivory white,
Her cheeks like apples which the sun hath rudded,
Her lips like cherries charming men to bite,
Her breast like to a bowl of cream uncrudded,
Her paps like lilies budded,
Her snowy neck like to a marble tower,
And all her body like a palace fair.

Two bowls of cream uncrudded.

So objectification of the female form is nothing new and the poets saw little wrong with plagiarism, most of the imagery summoned salvaged from the works of Antiquity by elegiac Roman and Alexandrian Greek poets.  Most relied for their effect on brevity, almost always a single, punchy line and none seem ever to attempt the scale of the “epic simile”.  As can be imagined, the novelty of the revival didn’t last and the lines soon were treated by readers (some of whom were fellow poets) as clichés to be parodied (a class which came to be called “contrablazon”), the London-based courtier Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) borrowing from the Italian poet Francesco Berni (1497–1535) the trick of using terms in the style of Petrarch but “mixing them up”, thus creating an early form of body dysmorphia: Mopsa's forehead being “jacinth-like”, cheeks of “opal”, twinkling eyes “bedeckt with pearl” and lips of “sapphire blue”.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) however saw other possibilities in the blazon and in Sonnet 130 (1609) turned the idea on its head, listing the imperfections in her body parts and characteristics yet concluding, despite all that, he anyway adored her like no other (here rendered in a more accessible English):

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare.

Ranga

Ranga (pronounced rang-ah)

In Australian slang, a person with red (ginger, auburn etc) hair.

1990s: Based on the name orangutan (pronounced aw-rang-oo-tan, oh-rang-oo-tan or uh-rang-oo-tan), any of three endangered species of long-armed, arboreal anthropoid great ape, the only extant members of the subfamily Ponginae, inhabiting Borneo (Pongo pygmaeus) and Sumatra (P. abelii).  The three species are Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) and Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis).  Ranga is a noun; the noun plural is rangas.  Australians tend to be linguistic reductionists and one is deemed either a ranga or not but presumably there can be "gray areas" (there may, in this context, be a better way of putting that) so adjectives such as rangaish or rangaesque could be coined as required.

A ketchup of gingers?  Roodharigendag in the Netherlands.

Since 2005 (except in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to the fun), the Netherlands has hosted what is described as the "world's largest gathering of redheads".  Were the three-day festival (which attracts participants from over eighty nations) staged in certain other countries it might have gained a playful, fanciful name but the practical Dutch unadventurously used Roodharigendag (Redhead Day) which does have the virtue of being unambiguous.  There are a variety of events including lectures and pub-crawls; presumably, coffee shops are visited and perhaps the proprietors offer special blends of red-themed weed for the event.  If not, presumably "Fanta Orange" (€13 per gram in mid 2024) sales spike.

An Orangutan in the Sumatran jungle.  International Orangutan Day is 19 August.

Despite the first element of orangutan (orang) appearing to be a clipping of “orange” (a reasonable assumption given the creature’s vaguely orange-hued coat although zoologists describe it usually as “reddish-brown”), the term has nothing to do with coloration and is not derived from English sources.  Orangutan describes any of the three species of arboreal anthropoid ape, which comprise the genus Pongo, native to Borneo and Sumatra and as late as 1996 were listed as a single species in the taxonomic, based on the first scientific classification (as Homo Sylvestris) in 1758 by Swedish zoologist & physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778 and styled as Carl von Linné after 1761).  After being divided in 1996, the third species definitively was identified in 2017.  Even in English there are a dozen-odd alternative spellings and unmodified and variant forms appear in many languages.  The construct of orang-utan was from the Malay: orang (person, man) + hutan (forest) thus literally “forest man”.

Because, of the origin, to call someone a ranga is to compare them to a sub-human primate, so it might have been thought offensive but it remains widely used and is one of the additions to English which has spread from Australia.  Possibly the fact the world's redheads are almost exclusively white meant the comparisons with the orangutan weren't historically or culturally "loaded" so it never became more than a minor micro-aggression.  It certainly can be offensive and is often (though apparently mostly by children) used that way but it can also be a neutral descriptor or a form of self-identification by the red-headed.  It may be that many of those who deploy ranga (for whatever purpose) are unaware of the connection with sub-human primate and treat it as just another word; in that sense it’s actually less explicit than some of the many alternatives with a longer linguistic lineage including "ginger minge", "fire crotch", "carrot top", Fanta (not always capitalized) pants", "rusty crotch" and "blood nuts".  Whether ranga is more or less offensive than any of those (none of which reference apes) is something on which not all redheads may agree but in 2017 (some months on from ranga being added to the Australian Macquarie Dictionary), presumably so there was a forum to discuss such matters, RANGA (the Red And Nearly Ginger Association) was formed, finding its natural home on social media where it operates to provide social support rather than being a pressure group.  

There was also the Australian moniker “blue” (and, being Australia, the inevitable “bluey”) to describe redheads and most dictionaries of slang suggest the origin was in the tradition of “lofty” or “stretch” sometimes being applied to the notably short (ie the stark contrast between “red” and “blue”).  There is the suggestion it may have been an allusion to the propensity of “hot-headed” redheads to “start a blue” (ie start a fight, that use another of the nation’s many re-purposings of the word) but there’s no documentary evidence.  However, there is an established connection between “orange” & “blue”, a number of orange-flavored liqueurs dyed blue, Blue Curaçao the best-known.  According to historians of the industry, the blue dye came to be used just for the visual novelty, blue uncommon in natural foods or drinks and the striking colour was a point of differentiation with the many other orange-colored beverages.  Curaçao liqueur originated on the Caribbean island of Curaçao and was made using the dried peel of the laraha (a bitter orange).  Originally distilled as a clear or amber fluid, various vivid artificial colors (blue, green, orange, red) were added just to create different brands and Blue Curaçao became the most popular becoming almost synonymous with the striking blue cocktails (Blue Lagoon, Blue Hawaiian et al) of which it is an ingredient.  Because the blue dye (typically Brilliant Blue FCF, aka E133) has no taste, the orange flavour remains unaffected.

Ginger, copper, auburn & chestnut are variations on the theme of red-headedness: Lindsay Lohan demonstrates the possibilities.  Red hair is the result of a mutation in the melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) gene responsible for producing the MC1R protein which plays a crucial role also in determining skin-tone. When the MC1R gene is functioning normally, it helps produce eumelanin, a type of melanin that gives hair a dark color.  However, a certain mutation in the MC1R gene leads to the production of pheomelanin which results in red hair.  Individuals with two copies of the mutated MC1R gene (one from each parent) typically have red hair, fair skin, and a higher sensitivity to ultraviolet (UV) light, a genetic variation found most often in those of northern & western European descent.

Just as blonde women have long been objectified and derided as of limited intelligence (ie the "dumb" blonde), redheads have been stereotyped as sexually promiscuous (women) or having fiery tempers (men & women) but there is no evidence supporting any relationship between hair color, personality type or temperament.  The sample sizes are inherently small (redheads less than 2% of the global population) but there are populations in which the predominance is higher, so further research would be interesting but such questions are of course now unfashionable.  Most style guides list "red-haired”, “redhead” & “redheaded” as acceptable descriptors but the modern practice is wherever possible to avoid references which apply to physical characteristics, much as the suggestion now is not to invoke any term related to race or ethnic origin.  That way nothing can go wrong.  If it’s a purely technical matter, such as hair products, then descriptors are unavoidable (part-numbers not as helpful at the retail level) and there’s quite an array, ranging from light ginger at the lighter end to chestnuts and and auburns at the darker and there was a time when auburn was used as something of a class-identifier.

Jessica Gagen, Miss England, 2022.

Winner of Miss England 2022 (the first redhead to claim the crown (which really was a crown rather than the tiara some contests award)), Miss World Europe 2023 & Miss United Kingdom 2024, Jessica Gagen (b 1996) holds a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Liverpool, and is an advocate for women and girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering & math).  Having been subject to "rangaphobia" bullying as a child, Ms Gagen used her platform to spread a positive message to those who have also suffered cruel taunts about being red-headed.  After leaving school, Ms Gagen discovered one advantage her locks afforded was they attracted modeling agencies and, as a multi-tasker, she pursued a lucrative international career in conjunction with her studies.  Her interest in encouraging women to enter STEM fields came while at university when the paucity of female participation in her engineering course was obvious in male-dominated lecture theatres and tutorial rooms.

Peak Jessica: Jessica Gagen pictured cooling off during one of England's increasingly frequent heat-waves when temperatures reached a record 42^o C (108^o F), something long thought impossible because of the interplay of the movement of water and sea currents around the British Isles.  It's an urban myth redheads (being "hot-headed" in the popular imagination) need more than most to "cool down" when the temperature is high. 

Interestingly, Ms Gagen says participation in beauty contests changed her perception of them as sexist displays, regarding that view as archaic, noting the women involved all seemed to have their own motives, usually involving raising awareness about something of personal interest.  Being part of the subset of humanity likely to do well in beauty contests (a matter of concern among some critical theorists) is of course just a form of comparative advantage in the way some benefit from  a genetic mix which makes them ideal basketball players.  The beauty contest is thus an economic opportunity and choosing to participate in one can be a rational choice in that one's allocation of time and resources can yield greater returns than the alternatives.  Another notable thing about Jessica Gagen is that being born in 1996, she is part of that sub-set of the population called “peak Jessica”, the cohort which reflected the extraordinary popularity of the name between 1981-1997, overlapping slightly with “peak Jennifer” which occurred between 1970-1984.

Accidie

Accidie (pronounced ak-si-dee)

Sloth; apathy, in the sense of both (1) a general listlessness and apathy and (2) spiritual torpor.

1200–1250: From the Middle English accidie, from the Anglo-Norman accidie, from the Old French accide & accidie, from the Medieval Latin accidia (an alteration of Late Latin acedia (sloth, torpor), from the Ancient Greek ἀκήδεια (akḗdeia) (indifference), the construct being ἀ- (a-) (in the sense of “not”) +‎ κῆδος (kêdos).  It was a doublet of acedia, still cited as an alternative form and replaced the Middle English accide.  The word was in active use between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries and was revived in the nineteenth as a literary adornment.  Accidie and acediast are nouns and acedious is an adjective; the noun plural is acediasts.

The alternative literary words include (1) ennui (a gripping listlessness or melancholia caused by boredom; depression), an unadapted borrowing from the French ennui, from the Old French enui (annoyance), from enuier (which in Modern French persists as ennuyer), from the Late Latin inodiō, from the Latin in odiō (hated) and a doublet of annoy, (2) weltschmerz, used as an alternative letter-case form of the German Weltschmerz (an apathetic or pessimistic view of life; depression concerning or discomfort with the human condition or state of the world; world-weariness), the construct being Welt (world) + Schmerz (physical ache, pain; emotional pain, heartache, sorrow) and coined by German Romantic writer Jean Paul (1763–1825) for his novel Selina (published posthumously in 1827) and (3) mal du siècle (apathy and world-weariness, involving pessimism towards the current state of the world, often along with nostalgia for the past (originally in the context of French Romanticism) (literally “disease of the century”) and coined by the French writer Alfred de Musset in his autobiographical novel La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century (1936)).

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

In Antiquity, the Greeks seemed to have refined accidie (which translated literally as being in “a state so inert as the be devoid of pain or care”) to be used of those who has become listless and no longer cared for their own lives or their society, thus distinguishing it from other conditions of melancholy which tended to be individually focused although in surviving medical texts, what’s being diagnosed was something like what might now be called “depression”.  Predictably, when adopted by moral theologians in Christian writing, it was depicted as a sin or at least a personal flaw.  Others wrote of it as a “demon” to be overcome and even a temptation placed by the Devil, one to which “young men who read poetry” seem to have been chronically prone.  It can be thought of as falling into the category of sloth, listed in the Medieval Latin tradition as of the seven deadly sins and appeared in Dante Alighieri’s (circa 1265–1321) Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321)) not only as a sin worthy of damnation & eternal punishment but the very sin which led Dante to the edge of Hell.  In his unfinished Summa Theologiae (literally Summary of Theology), the Italian Dominican friar, philosopher & theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) noted accidie was a spiritual sorrow, induced by man’s flight from the Divine good, “…on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit”, the kind of despair which can culminate in the even greater sin of suicide.

Google ngram: Accidie 1800-2020.

Google ngram: Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Etymologists note that between the mid sixteenth and mid nineteenth centuries the word acedia was close to extinct and whether it was the revival of interest in the Romantic poets (often a glum lot) or the increasing number of women becoming novelists, there was in the late 1800s a revival with the term, once the preserve of theologians, re-purposed as a decorative literary word; in the “terrible twentieth century” there was much scope for use and it appears in the writings of Ian Fleming (1908–1964), Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).  Intriguingly, in The Decline and Fall of Nokia (2014), Finnish-based expatriate US writer David J Cord introduced the concept of corporate acedia, citing the phenomenon as one of the causes of the collapse of Nokia's once dominant mobile device unit.

Joan Didion (1934-2021) and cigarette with her Daytona Yellow (OEM code 984) 1969 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray (on the C2 Corvette (1963-1967) and in 1968 the spelling had been "Sting Ray”).  The monochrome image was from a photo-session commissioned in 1970 by Life magazine and shot by staff photographer Julian Wasser (1933-2023), outside the house she was renting on Franklin Avenue in the Hollywood Hills.  To great acclaim, her first work of non-fiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), had just been published.

Writing mostly, in one way or another, about “feelings”, Joan Didion’s work appealed mostly to a female readership but when photographs were published of her posing with her bright yellow Corvette, among men presumably she gained some “street cred” although that might have evaporated had they learned it was later traded for a Volvo; adding insult to injury, it was a Volvo station wagon with all that implies.  She was later interviewed about the apparent incongruity between owner and machine and acknowledged the strangeness, commenting: “I very definitely remember buying the Stingray because it was a crazy thing to do.  I bought it in Hollywood.”  Craziness and Hollywood were then of course synonymous and a C3 Corvette (1968-1982) really was the ideal symbol of the America about which Ms Didion wrote, being loud, flashy, rendered in plastic and flawed yet underpinned by a solid, well-engineered foundation; the notion of the former detracting from the latter was theme in in her essays on the American experience.

A 1969 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray in Daytona Yellow.

Disillusioned, melancholic and clinical, Ms Didion’s literary oeuvre suited the moment because while obviously political it was also spiritual, a critique of what she called the “accidie” of the late 1960s, the moral torpor of those disappointed by what had followed the hope and optimism captured by “Camelot”, the White House of John Kennedy (JFK, 1917–1963; US president 1961-1963).  In retrospect Camelot was illusory but that of course made real the disillusionment of Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president 1963-1969) leading the people not to a “great society” but deeper into Vietnam.  Her essays were in the style of the “new journalism” and sometimes compared with those of her contemporary Susan Sontag (1933-2004) but the two differed in method, tone, ideological orientation and, debatably, expectation if not purpose.

Susan Sontag (1962), monochrome image by Village Voice staff photographer Fred McDarrah (1926–2007).

Ms Didion’s used accidie to describe a society which the troubled 1960s seemed to have bludgeoned into a state not of acquiescence but indifference, a moral exhaustion.  Her writings were observational (and, as she admitted, sometimes “embellished” for didactic purposes), sceptical and cool, her conception of the failure of contemporary politics a matter of describing the disconnect between rhetoric and reality, understanding the language of theatre criticism was as appropriate as that of the lexicon of political science.  In a sense, 'twas ever thus but Ms Didion captured the imagination by illustrating just how far from the moorings of reality the political spectacle of myth-making had drifted.  Ms Sontag’s tone was declarative and distinctly authoritative (in the way of second-wave feminism), tending often to the polemic and the sense was she was writing in opposition to a collective immorality, not the kind of moral indifference Ms Didion detected.  Both were students of their nation’s cultural pathology but one seemed more a palliative care specialist tending a patient in their dying days while the other offered a diagnosis and suggested a cure which, while not something to enjoy: "would be good for them".  While Ms Didion distrusted ideological certainty, Ms Sontag engaged explicitly with “isms”, not in the sense of one writing of the history of ideas but as a protagonist, using language in an attempt to shape political consciousness, the former a kind of secular moral theologian mourning a loss of coherence in American life while the latter was passionate and wrote often with a strident urgency, never losing the sense that whatever her criticisms, things could be fixed and there was hope.  The irony of being an author to some degree afflicted by the very accide she described in others was not lost on Ms Didion.

Susan Sontag, circa 1971, photographed by Jim Cartier.  The pop-art portrait of comrade Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976; chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 1949-1976) was a print of Roy Lichtenstein's (1923–1997) Mao (1971) which had been used as the cover for US author Frederic Tuten's (b 1936) novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971).  Ms Sontag had written a most favourable review of the book and the framed print was reputedly a gift.

Joan Didion with Corvette, another image from Julian Wasser’s 1970 photo-shoot.  The staging in this one is for feminists to ponder.

While a stretch to say that in trading-in the Corvette for a Volvo station wagon, Ms Didion was tracking the nation which had moved from Kennedy to Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974), it’s too tempting not to make.  Of the Corvette, she used the phrase: “I gave up on it”, later recounting: “the dealer was baffled” but denied the change was related to moving after eight years from Malibu to leafy, up-market suburban Brentwood.  While she “…needed a new car because with the Corvette something was always wrong…” she “…didn’t need a Volvo station wagon” although did concede: “Maybe it was the idea of moving into Brentwood.”  She should have persevered because as many an owner of a C3 Corvette understands, the faults and flaws are just part of the brutish charm.  Whether the car still exists isn't known; while Corvette's have a higher than average survival rate, their use on drag strips & race tracks as well as their attractiveness to males aged 17-25 has meant not a few suffered misadventure.

Joan Didion with Corvette, rendered as oil on canvas with yellow filter.

The configuration of her car seems not anywhere documented but a reasonable guess is it likely was ordered with the (base) 300 horsepower (hp) version (ZQ3) of the 350 cubic inch (5.7 litre) small-block V8, coupled with the Turbo-Hydramatic 400 (TH400) (M40) three-speed automatic transmission (the lighter TH350 wouldn't be used until 1976 by which time power outputs had fallen so much the robustness of the TH400 was no longer required).  When scanning the option list, although things like the side-mounted exhaust system (N14) or the 430 hp versions (the iron-block L88 & all aluminium ZL1, the power ratings of what were barely-disguised race car engines deliberately understated, the true output between 540-560 hp) of the 427 cubic inch (7.0 litre) big-block V8 would not have tempted Ms Didion, she may have ticked the box for the leather trim (available in six colors and the photos do suggest black (402 (but if vinyl the code was ZQ4)), air conditioning (C60), power steering (N40), power brakes (J50), power windows (A31) or an AM-FM radio (U69 and available also (at extra cost) with stereo (U79)).  Given she later traded-in the Corvette on a Volvo station wagon, presumably the speed warning indicator (U15) would have been thought superfluous but, living in Malibu, the alarm system (UA6) might have caught her eye.

An emo with 1977 Volvo 245 station wagon; if she had a Corvette to pose with she’d be smiling because Corvettes can make even emos happy.  This is Emma Myers (b 2002) as Pippa "Pip" Fitz-Amobi in A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (Netflix, 2024).

Quintessential symbols of France, Bridget Bardot (b 1934), Citroën La Déesse and a lit Gitanes.

The combination of a car, a woman with JBF and a cigarette continued to draw photographers even after smoking ceased to be glamorous and became a social crime.  First sold in 1910, Gitanes production in France survived two world wars, the Great Depression, Nazi occupation but the regime of Jacques Chirac (1932–2019; President of France 1995-2007) proved too much and, following the assault on tobacco by Brussels and Paris, in 2005 the factory in Lille was shuttered.  Although Gitanes (and the sister cigarette Gauloise) remain available in France, they are now shipped from Spain and while in most of the Western world fewer now smoke, Gitanes Blondes retain a cult following.

Emily Labowe with Mercedes-Benz 300 TD (S123), photographed by Kristin Gallegos.

An image like this illustrate why, even if no longer quite as glamourous, smoking can still look sexy.  The 300 TD is finished in Manila Beige and for the W123 range Mercedes-Benz also offered the subdued Maple Yellow and the exuberant Sun Yellow which was as vivid as the Corvette's Daytona Yellow. 

No images seem to exist of Ms Didion with her Volvo station wagon but Laurel Canyon's Kristin Gallegos (b 1984) later followed Julian Wasser’s staging by photographing artist Emily Labowe (b 1993) with a Mercedes-Benz 300 TD station wagon and that once essential accessory: a cigarette.  One of the last of the “chrome Mercedes”, the W123 range was in production between 1975-1986 and the station wagon appeared in 1977 with the internal code S123 (only nerds use that and to the rest of the world they’re “W123 wagons”).  The designation was “T” (the very Germanic Tourismus und Transport (Touring and Transport)) or TD for the diesel-powered cars and the S123 was the company’s first station wagon to enter series production, previous such “long roof” models coming from coach-builders including many hearses & ambulances as well as station wagons.  The English still call station wagons "estates" (a clipping of "estate car") although a publication like Country Life probably still hankers after "shooting brake" and the most Prussian of the German style guides list the compound noun Kombinationskraftwagen which for decades has usually been clipped to the semi-formal Kombiwagen, (plural Kombiwagen or Kombiwägen) or, in general use: Kombi.

1978 Mercedes Benz 280 TE (S123).

That Mercedes-Benz in the mid-1970s decided their first station wagon in regular production should be a “T” (and understood as a Tourenwagen (touring car) rather than a “K” (ie Kombiwagen, the designation used by other manufacturers) reflected the prevailing German view of such cars.  Unlike the US where station wagons had long been emblematic of middle-class respectability (often as a family’s second car for the wife & mother) or England where the style enjoyed an association with the upper class HFS (huntin’, fishin’ & shootin’) set, to Germans the utilitarian long-roofs had a down-market image, bought only by those unable to afford separate vehicles for business & pleasure.  Coach-builders had of course used Mercedes-Benz saloons as the basis for station wagons, ambulances and hearses but these were always expensive and thus not tainted by association with thriftiness by necessity.  In their alphanumeric soup of model designations, Mercedes-Benz had previously used “K” to mean either Kompressor (supercharged) (eg 770 K) or Kurz  (short) (eg SSK) and other letters had also done double-duty, “L” standing for either Lang (long) (eg 500 SEL) or Licht (light) (eg SSKL) and “S” could mean both Super (300 SL) or Sports (300 SLR) so for the S123 “K” wasn’t avoided because of fears of confusing folk; it was just an image thing: "Don't mention the kombi".  That all changed in the 1980s when the Germans decided wagons were sexy after all, the high performance arms of Audi, BMW & Mercedes-Benz all producing some remarkably fast ones.   

Mercedes-Benz G4s: Gepäckwagen (baggage car, top left) & Funkauto (radio car, top right) and 300 Messwagen (bottom left) at speed on the test track, tethered to a W111 sedan (1959-1968, bottom right).

The factory did though over the decades build a handful including a brace of the three-axle G4s (W31, 1934-1939), one configured as a Gepäckwagen (baggage car), the other a Funkauto (radio car).  In 1960 there was also the Messwagen (measuring car), a kind of “rolling laboratory” from the era before technology allowed most testing to be emulated in software.  The capacious Messwagen was based on the W189 300 “Adenauer” (W186 & W189 1951-1962) and was then state of the art but by the 2020s, the capabilities of all the bulky equipment which filled the rear compartment could have been included in a single phone app.  Students of design will admire the mid-century modernism in the curve of the rear-side windows but might be surprised to learn the muscle car-like scoop on the roof is not an air-intake but an aperture housing ports for connecting the Messwagen’s electronic gear with the vehicle being monitored, the two closely driven in unison (often at high speed) on the test track while being linked with a few metres of cabling and although we now live in a wireless age, real nerds know often a cable is preferable, the old ways sometimes best.  The Messwagen remained in service until 1972 and is now on display at the factory’s museum in Stuttgart.   

1956 Mercedes-Benz 300c (W186 "Adenauer") Estate Car by Binz.

The factory's Messwagen wasn't the first use of the big W186/W189 for long-roof variants, hearses and ambulances having appeared in several European countries and there was at least one station wagon, proving consumption can be conspicuous yet still subtle, achieved usually if a bespoke creation is both expensive and functional.  The 300 saloons and four-door cabriolets were large, stately and beautifully built, the 1956 example pictured was delivered to a customer in the US who for whatever reason prized exclusivity over capacity or speed, all the major US manufacturers at the time offering station wagons able to accommodate more people and more more luggage while going much faster.  The 300 certainly would have delivered better fuel economy but that wouldn't have crossed the mind of the purchaser who would have been deterred from something like a Chrysler New Yorker or Ford Country Squire because they were, by comparison with her one-off, cheap and common whereas a custom built 300 “dripped money”; even to the uninformed they would obviously have been expensive and it was thus a classic "Veblen good" a quirk in the supply & demand curve of orthodox economics in that for a certain (ie the "1%") demographic demand for an item can increase as its price rises.  The car still exists, traded between collectors to be exhibited at concours d'elegance.

1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser (left), details of the apparatuses above the windscreen (centre) and the Breezeaway rear window lowered (right)

The 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser was notable for (1) the truly memorable model name, (2) the “Breezeway" rear window which could be lowered and (3) having a truly bizarre assembly  of “features” above the windscreen.  There’s no suggestion that when fashioning the 300 Messwagen the engineers in Stuttgart were aware of the Turnpike Cruiser but had they looked, it could have provided an inspiration for the way access to ports in the roof could have been handled.  Unfortunately, the pair of “radio aerials” protruding from the pods at the top of the Mercury’s A-pillars were a mere affectation, a “jet-age” motif embellishing what were actually air-intakes.  They were though a harbinger of the way in which future “measuring vehicles” would be configured when various forms of wireless communication had advanced to the point at which a cable connection was no longer required.  

Dick-pic & Slot-shot

Dick-pic (pronounced dik-pik)

A picture of a human’s penis, if taken and disseminated in a certain context.

Dick became the pet-form name circa 1550 (though some etymologists suspect it had earlier been in use) for Richard via being the rhyming nickname for Rick, Richard's original affectionate diminutive.  Richard being (1) among the commonest English names and (2) exclusively male, it quickly become a synonym for "fellow; lad" and thereby a generally used word to refer to men, individually and collectively; from this connection came the use of dick as slang for that exclusively male body part.  Anything claimed to be an authoritative list of the slang senses must be viewed with scepticism because many forms are very old and the surviving written records are not a comprehensive catalogue of what was often an exclusively oral dialect so the date of origin is uncertain.  The meaning "penis" is attested from 1891 in a dictionary of farmer's slang and was said (predictably) to have been well-known British army slang but, perhaps regionally, the use could date back a century or more.  Most sources note "dick" in this context is thought now less offensive than once it was but for those still disturbed, there's a goodly number of alternatives. 

Pic of Dick Face: The Honorable Richard Face (1943-2023), former New South Wales (NSW) minister of gaming & racing (1995-2003).

The vulgar slang nouns dickhead & dickface (a stupid or contemptible person) are attested only from circa 1969 so Richard Face’s parents can't be accused of making what might now be thought an unwise choice.  Interestingly, although presumably not unaware of the linguistic possibilities his name offered, Richard Face was either indifferent or saw some political advantage in brand-name awareness because he chose to remain a Richard (and, by implication, a "Dick") despite being christened Jack Richard Face.  Whether he ran the usual focus groups to find which worded best (Dick Face or Jack Face) isn't known.  In time, he did live up to his name, in 2004 fined Aus$2500 an given a three-year good behaviour bond for lying to the NSW Independent Commission against Corruption (ICAC), the magistrate's rationale for not imposing a custodial sentence being (1) he was no longer a police officer and therefore "not directly involved in the administration of justice", (2) had an "exemplary record of public service", (3) had been under stress, was depressed and a heavy drinker at the time of his lie, (4) had shown remorse and pleaded guilty, (5) had "not committed perjury" or "sworn false evidence" and (6) "did not engage in persistently false swearing over sustained periods of time."

Pic of Richard Face the cat.

Pic was first recorded circa 1885 as a shortening of picture (image, likeness, photo, etc).  Picture was from the Middle English pycture, from the Old French picture, from the Latin pictūra (the art of painting, a painting), from pingō (I paint); a doublet of pictura.  The plural is pics but pix is common in casual & commercial use so the accepted alternative plural of dick-pics would be dick-pix.  The linguistically fastidious used to be troubled by spellings which respected only the pronunciation (pix, nite, lite, luv et al) but even before the internet their use in advertising and brand names had made them so common the battle obviously was lost.  In structural linguistics, the technical term for such words is “eye dialect”, used to describe a deliberate misspelling of words to suggest a particular pronunciation, dialect, or informal tone, even though the intended pronunciation remains the same.  The use (apart from alternative spellings or misspellings which would have predated the modern practice) seems to have been popularized (and to some extent thus legitimized) in commerce for purposes of advertising or branding and from here it was picked up in casual writing where it can impart variously feelings of playfulness or the "modern".  The Ford Ka (1996–2021) and Chevrolet Cruze (2008–2023) were both named using the technique and familiar examples include Krispy Kreme, Dunkin’ Donuts and Froot Loops but it was also a literary device in fiction as early as the nineteenth century, used by Mark Twain (1835-1910) to evoke Southern American speech patterns and Charles Dickens (1812–1870) to summon the sound of what was perceived as “typical” working-class speech.  George Bernard Shaw (GBS; 1856-1950), a proponent of the internationalist Esperanto language and often (understandably) critical of English spelling rules, in Pygmalion (1913) used phonetic spellings not only to reflect variations in diction and accents but also to contrast the difference between “proper” and informal speech, a central theme of the play.  In modern use, because the forms often use fewer characters, the practice became a staple of texting (SMS; short message service) which for a certain demographic in the now distant pre-social media, pre-smartphone era became the preferred means of communication.    

Slot-shot (pronounced slot+shot)

A picture of a human female’s genitalia, if taken and disseminated in a certain context.

Slot in the sense of a "bar or bolt used to fasten a door, window etc" entered Middle English circa 1300 from the Middle Dutch or Middle Low German slot, from the Old High German sloz & German Schloss (bolt, bar, lock, castle), from the Proto-Germanic stem slut- (to close).  The anatomical use to describe the "hollow at the base of the throat above the breastbone" was a late fourteenth century adoption from the Old French esclot (hoof-print of a deer or horse) of uncertain origin, but this sense is probably obsolete except in historic references.  Slot meaning a "a narrow, elongated depression, groove, notch, slit, or aperture, especially a narrow opening for receiving or admitting something" dates from the 1520s, the idea later developed to suggest putting something "where it belongs" but this seems to have been adopted only in the mid-1960s.

Shot (in the sense of the firing of a bow (later applied to firearms etc)) was from pre-900 Middle English, from the Old English sc(e)ot & (ge)sceot and was cognate with the German Schoss & Geschoss.  It was related to the Old Norse skot and the Old High German scoz (missile).  The sense of shot as the "view from a camera" isn't attested until 1958 although it had been used in the cinematic sense since 1922 to describe the process of recording movies (mov(ing picture) + -ies) since 1922 and may thus have enjoyed earlier use.  As used to refer to individual pictures, printed usually on cardboard or special photographic paper, it dates from the late 1930s, the specialized use in law enforcement (as mugshot) began in the US in 1950.

Of context

A “Liz & Dick pic”: Lindsay Lohan (b 1986) & Grant Bowler (b 1968) during the filming of Liz & Dick (2012), a “biopic” of the famously tempestuous relationship between the actors Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011) & Richard Burton (1925–1984).  The car is a Mercedes-Benz 600 (W100; 1963-1981) four-door Pullman with the vis-a-vis seating.  The flag-staffs (fitted in this instance above the front wheel arches) were usually fitted to cars used by the governments or the corps diplomatique.

The dick-pic, the practice of someone (usually male) sending another (usually female) an unsolicited picture of (what is usually their own) penis isn’t a recent invention but the extraordinary latter day spike in the numbers sent is a genuine cultural phenomenon.  It’s socially and technologically deterministic, something made possible by (1) the permissive social attitude of the participating demographic, (2) the ubiquity of their possession of high-definition cameras, (3) the removal from the process of third-parties (especially those who once developed and printed the physical images), (4) the extent of digital connectivity between members of the demographic and (5), the marginal financial cost of the transactions.  It’s an interesting development in that in the West, the history of the depiction of nudity is overwhelmingly female so “pictures of genitalia sent by phone” is a genre in the annals of the nude (technically probably the naked) untypically dominated by the male body.

Generally uncontroversial if either requested or welcomed by a recipient with whom an appropriate level of emotional capital has already been built, dick-pics are notorious for the negative emotions induced in those receiving them as something unsolicited and unwelcome.  So, unless the intention is actually to shock, offend or upset (and among the demographic, that is sometimes a thing) they’re best avoided; good rarely seems to come of them and in some jurisdictions, there are circumstances in which sending a dick-pic can be an offence which can result in the sender being placed for life on a sex-offender’s register; it depends on the context.

Dick-pic detail from Michelangelo Buonarroti’s (1475–1564) David (1501-1504), Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence.

Michelangelo’s David, a six-ton, 17-foot (5.2 m) tall symbol of divine victory over evil is art as a sculpture or in depiction and, despite the visible penis, in the West is usually thought not obscene.  In another context it can be, the erection of some inventive interior decorating required to conceal the offensive bits when a 3D-printed replica was displayed at the 2021 Dubai Expo.  It happens in the West too.  In the nineteenth century the Grand Duke of Tuscany presented Queen Victoria with a full-sized replica of the original which she found so confronting that hurriedly a proportionally accurate fig leaf was crafted, kept in readiness for any royal visits to be hung from two strategically placed hooks.  Even in the twenty-first century, replicas have attracted complaints, the argument being the context of a museum which people choose to visit being different for places where encounters may happen by chance.  Obscenity and offensiveness thus are situational constructs and a dick-pic exchanged between consenting adults is different from discovered in other circumstances; it depends on the context.

The SSSSS: Svakom Siime Sex Selfie Stick.

It’s assumed because there are few reports of women sending pics of their genitalia that the practice is notably less common than the dick-pic and while that’s not an accepted way to draw a definitive conclusion from two data sets, few doubt it’s true.  There are surely many reasons that’s the case and the paucity of examples is probably the reason a standardized female equivalent of “dick-pic” seems not to have evolved.  Suggestions have included “gash-flash”, “trap-snap” and “clamagram” but the most phonetically pleasing are probably “pussy-portrait” and “slot-shot”, the latter a metaphor which references the slot on a machine which is a perfect fit for coins of a certain denomination.  For women who find artistically limiting the idea of a static slot-shot, for US$149, there’s the Svakom Siime Sex Selfie Stick (SSSSS), a USB-rechargeable video-recorder-vibrator which offers, especially for those with basic video-editing skills, the chance to create a clip of an organism from the inside.  Thus the "clit-clip", a bit of digital one-upmanship (that may not be quite the right noun) on any "dick-pic".  

Available in violet, khaki & black, she can be connected to the USB port of a PC or Mac and there's a downloadable app for MacOS, Windows (XP SP2 onwards), iOS and Android.  The camera is a seemingly modest .3 megapixel unit but given the environment in which she'll be operating, that's more than adequate; videos are saved in the familiar mp4 format, the product & software manuals are both downloadable and there's an instructional video on the Svakom website.  Whisper-quiet to ensure privacy, battery-life is said to be around two hours of "continuous use" so one can understand why women might prefer such a device to most men.  The manufacturer refers to the SSSSS as "she" rather than "he" (or even "it"), an interesting assignment of notional gender given the anatomical emulation.

L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World (1866)), oil on canvas by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

The recumbent female has, off and on, been a staple of Western art since Antiquity but there was something about French artist’s Gustave Courbet’s L'Origine du monde which was so provocative that publicly, it wasn’t exhibited for 120 years.  A slot-shot writ large, it’s still a work which many institutions avoid, even those sanguine about female nudity (and nakedness) in artistic and other contexts, one columnist noting recently the painting “… if indeed it can be called erotic…” was “…still unsuitable for publication in a paper with a general readership.”  Perhaps it’s because it so differs from the long traditions of the nude, a study more gynecological than artistic or maybe it’s the lush and untended growth of pubic hair, something which seems often to disturb though it may be anatomically accurate: One Russian gynecologist was asked whether the model was a virgin and, after casting his professional eye, answered with an emphatic “Nyet”.  There’s also the objectification, the decapitation of the subject reducing the work somehow to a slot-shottish case-study for the male gaze, a reductionism which has for decades attracted criticism from feminists.  When depictions of L'Origine du monde have appeared in bookshops and galleries, there’s often been controversy, sometimes requiring the summoning of the gendarmerie although the Musée d'Orsay reports the work appears on one of their gift-shop’s best-selling post-cards so there's that.

The head presumptive (publicized in 2013).

Commissioned by Ottoman-Egyptian diplomat Halil Şerif Pasha (Khalil Bey 1831-1879) as an addition to his famous collection of erotica, ever since first it was seen, historians of art have debated among themselves the identity of the model, their short-list with some glee referred to as Les suspects habituels de Gustave (Gustave’s usual suspects).  No conclusion has ever been agreed although the factions promote their theories, one based on an analysis of the joining edges of the respective canvases, an allegedly matching upper-section displayed in 2013.  The Musée d'Orsay issued a statement saying L'Origine du monde is, as it exists, a complete work and not part of a larger whole.  The mystery continues.

Highlight of Coastal Carolina University vs East Carolina University, Clark-LeClair Stadium, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, 8 March, 2025. 

There are also “butt pics”.  In March 2025 a user posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) a clip from ESPN’s coverage of a baseball game between Coastal Carolina University and East Carolina University (Coastal Carolina won 9-11-1 to 1-6-0) which showed two women, one snapping what quickly was described as a “butt-pic” of the other.  Almost instantly viral, the tweet gained more than 10 million views, numbers the ESPN programmers doubtless wish college baseball could generate.  The two protagonists were said to be “not identified” but presumably promotional opportunities on Instagram and TikTok beckon and there may soon be OnlyFans accounts.