Doodlebug

Doodlebug (pronounced dood-l-buhg)

(1) In entomology the larva of an antlion (a group of some 2,000 species of insect in the neuropteran family Myrmeleontidae, the appellation “doodlebug” an allusion to the “doodle-like” marks they leave in the sand as tracks of their movement.

(2) In entomology (UK), a cockchafer (genus Melolontha).

(3) In entomology (US regional), a woodlouse.

(4) Any of various small, squat vehicles.

(5) A divining rod or similar device supposedly useful in locating underground water, oil, minerals etc.

(6) In World War II (1939-1945) UK slang, the German cruise missile the V1, (Fs-103, also known in formally as the “flying bomb” or “buzz bomb”, the latter an allusion to the distinctive sound made by the craft’s pulse-jet power-plant.  The slang began among RAF (Royal Air Force) personnel and later spread to the general population.

(7) In US rural slang, as “doodlebug tractor”, a car or light truck converted into tractor used for small-scale agriculture for a small farm during World War II.

(8) In informal use, a term of endearment (now rare).

(9) In informal use, a slackard (an archaic form of slacker) or time-waster (now rare).

(10) In informal, an idiot (the word used casually rather than in its once defined sense in mental health).

(11) In informal use, someone who habitually draws (or doodles) objects).

(12) Individual self-propelled train cars (obsolete).

(13) A device claimed to be able to locate oil deposits.

1865-1870: A coining in US English, the construct being doodle + bug, the first known use as a US dialectal form (south of the Mason-Dixon line) to describe certain beetles or larva.  Doodle dates from the early seventeenth century and was used to mean “a fool or simpleton”.  It was originally a dialectal form, from dudeldopp (simpleton) and influenced by dawdle (To spend time idly and unfruitfully; to waste time, pointlessly to linger, to move or walk lackadaisically; to “dilly-dally”), thus the later use of doodle to mean “a slackard (slacker) or time-waster”.  The German variants of the etymon included Dudeltopf, Dudentopf, Dudenkopf, Dude and Dödel (and there’s presumably some link with the German dudeln (to play the bagpipe)).  There is speculation the Americanism “dude” may have some link with doodle and the now internationalized (and sometimes gender-neutral) “dude” has in recent decades become one of slang’s more productive and variable forms.  The song Yankee Doodle long pre-dates the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) but it was popularized in the era by being used as a marching song by British colonial troops and intended to poke fun at their rebellious opponents.  From this use was derived the verb of the early eighteenth century (to doodle), meaning “to swindle or to make a fool of”.  The predominant modern meaning (the drawings regarded usually as “small mindless sketches”) emerged in the 1930s either from this meaning or (s seems to have greater support), from the verb “to dawdle” which since the seventeenth century had been used to mean “wasting time; being lazy”.  In slang and idiomatic use, doodles uses are legion including “the penis” and any number of rhyming forms with meanings ranging from the very good to the very bad.

A doodled Volkswagen “bug” on Drawn Inside.

Bug dates from 1615–1625 and the original use was to describe insects, apparently as a variant of the earlier bugge (beetle), thought to be an alteration of the Middle English budde, from the Old English -budda (beetle) by etymologists are divided on whether the phrase “bug off” (please leave) is related to the undesired presence of insects or was of a distinct origin.  Bug, bugging & debug are nouns & verbs, bugged is a verb & adjective and buggy is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is bugs.  Although “unbug” makes structural sense (ie remove a bug, as opposed to the sense of “debug”), it doesn’t exist whereas forms such as the adjectives unbugged (not bugged) and unbuggable (not able to be bugged) are regarded as standard.  The array of compound forms meaning “someone obsessed with an idea, hobby etc) produced things like “shutterbug” (amateur photographer) & firebug (arsonist) seems first to have emerged in the mid nineteenth century.  The development of this into “a craze or obsession” is thought rapidly to have accelerated in the years just before World War I (1914-1918), again based on the notion of “bitten by the bug” or “caught the bug”, thus the idea of being infected with an unusual enthusiasm for something.  The use to mean a demon, evil spirit, spectre or hobgoblin was first recorded in the mid-fourteenth century and was a clipping of the Middle English bugge (scarecrow, demon, hobgoblin) or uncertain origin although it may have come from the Middle Welsh bwg (ghost; goblin (and linked to the Welsh bwgwl (threat (and earlier “fear”) and the Middle Irish bocanách (supernatural being).  There’s also speculation it may have come from the scary tales told to children which included the idea of a bugge (beetle) at a gigantic scale.  That would have been a fearsome sight and the idea remains fruitful to this day for artists and film-makers needing something frightening in the horror or SF (science fiction) genre.  The use in this sense is long obsolete although the related forms bugbear and bugaboo survive.  Dating from the 1570s, a bugbear was in folklore a kind of “large goblin”, used to inspire fear in children (both as a literary device & for purposes of parental control) and for adults it soon came to mean “a source of dread, resentment or irritation; in modern use it's an “ongoing problem”, a recurring obstacle or adversity or one’s pet peeve.  The obsolete form bugg dates from circa 1620 and was a reference to the troublesome bedbug, the construct a conflation of the middle English bugge (scarecrow, hobgoblin) and the Middle English budde (beetle).  The colloquial sense of “a microbe or germ” dates from 1919, the emergence linked to the misleadingly-named “Spanish flu” pandemic.  Doodlebug & doodlebugger are nouns and doodlebugging is a verb; the noun plural is doodlebugs.  The forms have sometimes been hyphenated.

A doodlebug (left) and his (or her) doodles in the sand (right).

That the word doodlebug has appeal is obvious because since the 1860s it has been re-purposed many time, often with the hint something “small but not cute”, that something understandable given the original creature so named (larva of an antlion) is not one of nature’s more charismatic creations.  Doodlebugs are squat little things which live mostly in loose sand where they create pit traps and genuinely are industrious creatures, their name earned not because they are idle time-wasters but because the tracks they leave in the sand are strikingly similar to the doodles people often wile away their time drawing.  The frankly unattractive ant leave their doodles behind because as they percolate over the sands, their big butts drag behind them, leaving the erratic trails.  So compelling is the name, it has been applied to a number of other, similar insects.  Another use is attributive from the link with the seventeenth century notion of a doodle being “a simpleton or time-waster”, extended later to “an idiot” (the word used casually rather than in its once defined sense in mental health); in the 1930s it came be used of those who incessantly sketch or draw stuff, the idea being they are squandering their time.  What they draw are called “doodles”, the source of the name for the artist.

Doodles on a rendering of Lindsay Lohan by Stable Diffusion.

The mid-twentieth century art (some of its practitioners claiming it was a science) of doodlebugging was practiced by doodlebuggers who used a method said to be not greatly different from the equally dubious technique of the water diviner.  All the evidence suggests there was a general scepticism of the claims that a bent rod waived about above the earth could be used to locate hydro-carbons and the use of “doodlebuging” to refer to the process was originally a slur but it became an affectionate name for those intrepid enough to trek into deserts seeking the “black gold”.  In the 1940s when the “profession” was first described, any reliable means of detecting sub-surface oil deposits simply didn’t exist (other than drilling a hole in the ground to see if it was there) and the early doodlebuggers were scam merchants.  The science did however advance (greatly spurred on by the demands of wartime) and when geologists came to be able to apply the modern machinery of seismic mapping and actually had success, they too were called doodlebuggers and happily adopted the name.

Texaco Doodlebug fuel tanker, one of eight built in 1934-1935 during the industry's "streamliner" era.  It was a time when art deco's lovely lines appeared in many fields of design. 

In the early twentieth century, a doodlebug was a self-propelled rail car, used on rail lines which were short in length and subject only to light traffic.  These were autonomous vehicles, powered both by gasoline (it was the pre-diesel era in the US) and electricity and were an economical alternative for operators, being much cheaper to run than the combination of large locomotives & carriage cars, eminently suited to lower passenger numbers.  The concept may be compared with the smaller (often propeller or turbo-prop) aircraft used on regional & feeder routes where the demand wouldn’t make the use of a larger airliner viable.  Although the doodlebugs carried relative few passengers, their operating costs were correspondingly lower so the PCpM (passenger cost per mile) was at least comparable with the full-sized locomotives.  While it may be a myth, the story is that one rail employee described the small, stumpy rail car as looking like a “potato bug” and (as English informal terms tend to do) this morphed into the more appealing doodlebug.

Some assembly required: a doodlebug tractor with hydraulic pump-driven crane, the agglomeration dating from circa 1934.

Although the mechanical specification of each tended to vary as things broke and were replaced with whatever fell conveniently to hand or could be purchased cheaply, when discovered it included a 1925 Chevrolet gasoline engine, Ford Model T firewall and steering, Ford Model A three-speed manual transmission, Ford Model TT rear end and AM General HMMWV rear wheels and tires.  The "mix & match" approach was typical of the genre and it's doubtful many were for long exactly alike.

A doodlebug could also be a DIY (do it yourself) tractor.  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the smaller-scale farmers in the US no longer had the capital (or access to capital) to purchase plant and equipment on the same scale as in more prosperous times but they needed still to make their land productive and one of the modern tools which had transformed agriculture was the tractor.  New tractors being thus unattainable for many, necessity compelled many to turn to what was available and that was the stock of old cars and pickup trucks, now suddenly cheaper because the Depression had lowered demand for them as well.  With saws and welding kits, imaginative and inventive farmers would crop & chop and slice & dice until they had a vehicle which would do much of what a tractor could and according to the legends of the time, some actually out-performed the real thing because their custom design was optimized for a specific, intended purpose.  What made the modifications possible in the engineering sense was that it was a time when cars and pick-ups were almost always built with a separate chassis; the bodies could be removed and it was possible still to drive the things and it was on these basic platforms the “doodlebug” tractors were fashioned.  They were known also as “scrambolas”, “Friday night specials” and “hacksaw tractors” but it was “doodlebug” which really caught on and so popular was the practice that kits were soon advertised in mail-order catalogues (the Amazon of the day and a long tradition in the rural US).  Not until the post-war years when economic conditions improved and production of machinery for civilian use resumed at full-scale did the doodlebug industry end.

1946 Brogan Doodlebug (right) with 1942 Pontiac Torpedo (left).

Although now what’s most remembered about the US cars of the post-war era are the huge and extravagantly macropterous creations, there were more than two dozen manufacturers in the 1940s & 1950s which offered “micro-cars”, aimed at (1) female drivers, (2) inner-city delivery services and (3) urban drivers who wanted something convenient to manoeuvre and park.  The market however proved unresponsive and as the population shift to the suburbs accelerated, women wanted station wagons (in many ways the emblematic symbol of suburban American of the 1950s) and the delivery companies needed larger capacity.  As the VW Beetle and a few other niche players would prove during that decade’s “import boom”, Americans would buy smaller cars, just not micro-cars which even in Europe, where they were for a time successful, the segment didn’t survive to see the end of the 1960s.  But there was the Brogan Doodlebug, made by the B&B Specialty Company of Rossmoyne, Ohio and produced between 1946-1950 although that fewer than three dozen were sold hints at the level of demand at a time when Detroit’s mass-production lines were churning out thousands of “standard sized” car a day.

1946 Brogan Doodlebug.

Somewhat optimistically (though etymologically defensible) described as a “roadster”, the advertising for the Doodlebug exclusively featured women drivers and it certainly was in some ways ideal for urban use (except perhaps when raining, snowing, in cold weather, under harsh sun etc).  It used a three wheeled chassis with the single wheel at the front, articulated so the vehicle could turn within its own length so parking would have been easy, the thing barely 96 inches (2440 mm) in length & 40 inches (1020 mm) wide; weighing only some 442 lbs (200 kg), it was light enough for two strong men to pick it up and move it.  Powered by either a single or twin-cylinder rear-mounted engine (both rated at a heady 10 horsepower (7.5 kW)) no gearbox was deemed necessary thus no tiresome gear levers or clutch pedals were there to confuse women drivers and B&B claimed a fuel consumption up to 70 mpg (US gallon; 3.4 L/100 km) with a cruising speed of 45-50 mph (70-80 km/h).  All this for US$400 and remarkably, it seems it wasn’t until 1950 (after some 30 doodlebugs had been built over four years) the cost-accountants looked at the project and concluded B&B were losing about US$100 on each one sold.  A price-rise was ruled out so production ended and although B&B released the Broganette (an improved three-wheeler with the single wheel at the rear which provides much better stability), it was no more successful and the company turned to golf carts and scooters which proved much more lucrative.  B&B later earned a footnote in the history of motorsport as one of the pioneer go-kart manufacturers.

Annotated schematic of the V-1 (left) and a British Military Intelligence drawing (dated 16 June 1944, 3 days after the first V-1 attacks on London (right). 

First deployed in 1944 the German Vergeltungswaffen eins (“retaliatory weapon 1” or "reprisal weapon 1” and eventually known as the V-1) was the world’s first cruise missile.  One of the rare machines to use a pulse-jet, it emitted such a distinctive sound that those at whom it was aimed nicknamed it the “buzz-bomb” although it attracted other names including “flying bomb” and “doodlebug”.  In Germany, before Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945; Reich Minister of Propaganda 1933-1945) decided it was the V-1, the official military code name was Fi 103 (The Fi stood for Fieseler, the original builder of the airframe and most famous for their classic Storch (Stork), short take-off & landing (STOL) aircraft) but there were also the code-names Maikäfer (maybug) & Kirschkern (cherry stone).  While the Allied defenses against the V-1 did improve over time, it was only the destruction of the launch sites and the occupation of territory within launch range that ceased the attacks.  Until then, the V-1 remained a highly effective terror weapon but, like the V-2 and so much of the German armaments effort, bureaucratic empire-building and political intrigue compromised the efficiency of the project.

Brobdingnagian

Brobdingnagian (pronounced brob-ding-nag-ee-uhn)

(1) Of huge size; gigantic; tremendous.

(2) Larger than typical or expected.

(3) In medicine (psychiatry & clinical ophthalmology), as the noun “brobdingnagian vision”, a hallucination or visual disorder in which objects appear larger or nearer than they are (macropsia).  The companion (antonym) condition is “lilliputian vision”, a hallucination or visual disorder in which objects appear smaller or more distant than they are (micropsia).

(4) In mycology, of the brobdingnagia, a genus of fungi in the family Phyllachoraceae.

(5) Of or pertaining to the fictional land of Brobdingnag.

(5) An inhabitant or native of the fictional land of Brobdingnag.

1728 (in more frequent use by mid-century): An adjective to convey the sense of “enormous in size, huge, immense, gigantic etc, derived from the noun Brobdingnag (the land of the giants) the second of the exotic lands visited by the protagonist Lemuel Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels (1726 and titled Travels into several remote nations of the world for the first edition), written in the style of contemporary “travel guides” by the Anglo-Irish author & satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745).  The construct was Brobdingnag +‎ -ian.  The suffix -ian was a euphonic variant of –an & -n, from the Middle English -an, (regularly -ain, -ein & -en), from the Old French –ain & -ein (or before i, -en), the Modern French forms being –ain & -en (feminine -aine, -enne), from the Latin -iānus (the alternative forms were -ānus, -ēnus, -īnus & -ūnus), which formed adjectives of belonging or origin from a noun, being -nus (cognate with the Ancient Greek -νος (-nos)), preceded by a vowel, from the primitive Indo-European -nós.  It was cognate with the English -en.  Brobdingnagian is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is Brobdingnagians (initial upper case if used of the inhabitants or natives of the fictional land of Brobdingnag but not for other purposes (such as untypically large cosmic objects)).  To distinguish between big stuff, the comparative is “more brobdingnagian” and the superlative “most brobdingnagian”.

In constructing the name Brobdingnag for his fictional land of giants, Swift used a technique more subtle than some authors who use more obvious charactonyms.  In literature, a charactonym is a name given to a character that suggests something about their personality, behavior, or role in the story; these names almost always have some literal or symbolic meaning aligning with or hinting at the character’s traits and examples include:

Alfred Doolittle (lazy and opportunistic) in George Bernard Shaw’s (GBS; 1856-1950) Pygmalion (1913).

Miss Honey (sweet & gentle) in Roald Dahl’s (1916–1990) Matilda (1988) and Veruca Salt (harsh and unpleasant) in his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964).

Mr Bumble (noted for his bumbling inept incompetence) in Charles Dickens’ (1812–1870) Oliver Twist (1837).

Willy Loman (of low social status and beset with feelings of inadequacy) in Arthur Miller’s (1915–2005) Death of a Salesman (1949).

The use of blatant charactonyms is not always an example of linguistic brutishness and it’s often used in children's literarure or when it’s demanded by the rhythm of text or plat.  There are also “reverse charactonyms” when the traits of a characteristic become famously (or infamously) emblematic of something such as Shylock in William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) The Merchant of Venice (1598) or Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843).

A brobdingnagian on the beach; a Lindsay Lohan meme.  Although a Swiftian meme, the use of that term will now probably be more suggestive of a later Swift, certainly to Swifties (the devotees of the singer Taylor Swift (b 1989)).

As well as the meanings of words, Swift liked to use the sounds of language in fashioning fictional names which were both plausible and in some way suggestive of the association he wanted to summon.  Structurally, what he appears to have done is combine arbitrary syllables to create a word sounding foreign and exotic while still being pronounceable by the English-speaking audience for which he wrote; the technique is harder to master than it sounds although with modern generative AI, presumably it’s become easier.  As a literary trick, Brobdingnag works because of the elements in the construction (1) the multisyllabic length and (2) the use of “harsh” consonants (notably the “b” & “g” which lend a sense of bulk and largeness, appropriate for the “land of the giants”.  The other exotic land in Gulliver’s Travels was Lilliput, the place where the people are tiny.  Just as he intended Brobdingnag to invoke thoughts of something (or someone) clumsy and heavy, Lilliput and Lilliputian were meant to suggest “small, delicate”.

Map of Brobdingnag from the 1726 edition of Travels into several remote nations of the world (the original title of Gulliver's Travels).

Although since Swift, the adjective brobdingnagian has never gone away, it’s length and “unnatural” (for English) spelling has meant it’s only ever been a “niche” word”, used as a literary device and astronomers like it when writing of stars, galaxies, black holes and such which are of such dimensions that miles or kilometres are not c convenient measure, demanding instead terms like “light years” (the distance in which light travels in one Earth year” or “parsecs” (a unit of astronomical length, based on the distance from Earth at which a star would have a parallax of one second of arc which is equivalent to 206,265 times the distance from the earth to the sun or 3.26 light-years.  Its lineal equivalent is about 19.1 trillion miles (30.8 trillion km)).

The king of Brobdingnag and Gulliver, cartoon by James Gillray (1756-1815), published in London 10 February 1804 during the era of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815).  British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

The work depicts the king of Brobdingnag (George III (1738–1820; King of Great Britain and Ireland 1760-1820)) staring intently at a tank in which is sailing Gulliver (Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821; leader of the French Republic 1799-1804 & Emperor of the French from 1804-1814 & 1815).  Lord Salisbury (1748–1823) stands behind the king.  It was a time when Napoleon was planning to invade England, his Grande Armée transported in “flat-bottomed boats” which were a sort of early landing craft, a design which would emerge in specialized forks for various purposes (troops, tanks etc) during World War II (1939-1945).  It wasn’t until the Royal Navy prevailed in the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) that the threat of invasion was ended.  At the time of the cartoon’s publication, George III had for some years already been displaying signs of mental instability (thought now to be consistent with bipolar disorder (the old manic depression)) although it would be almost a decade before his condition deteriorated to such an extent a regent was appointed.

Brobdingnagian’s more familiar role is in literature where it depends for effect on rarity; twice in the one book is one too many  Tellingly (and unsurprisingly given the inherent clumsiness), it’s rare in poetry although some have made the effort, possibly just to prove it can be done, one anonymous poet leaving us The Awful Fate of Mr. Foster, believed to be a parody of the poetic style of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) “Brobdingnagian” interpolated possibly because Thackeray was wrote some acerbic critiques of Swift’s work:

He never more will rise again, or open those kind eyes again,
He lies beneath the sod;
Beneath the tall Brobdingnagian tomb, the popular concernment's doom,
Of an enormous god!

Floppy

Floppy (pronounced flop-ee)

(1) A tendency to flop.

(2) Limp, flexible, not hard, firm, or rigid; flexible; hanging loosely.

(3) In IT, a clipping of “floppy diskette”.

(4) In historic military slang (Apartheid-era South Africa & Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), an insurgent in the Rhodesian Bush War (the “Second Chimurenga” (from the Shona chimurenga (revolution)) 1964-1979), the use a reference to the way they were (in sardonic military humor) said to “flop” when shot.

(5) In informal use, a publication with covers made with a paper stock little heavier and more rigid that that used for the pages; Used mostly for comic books.

(6) In slang, a habitué of a flop-house (a cheap hotel, often used as permanent or semi-permanent accommodation by the poor or itinerant who would go there to “flop down” for a night) (archaic).

(7) In slang, as “floppy cats”, the breeders’ informal term for the ragdoll breed of cat, so named for their propensity to “go limp” when picked up (apparently because of a genetic mutation).

1855-1860: The construct was flop + -y.  Flop dates from 1595–1605 and was a variant of the verb “flap” (with the implication of a duller, heavier sound).  Flop has over the centuries gained many uses in slang and idiomatic form but in this context it meant “loosely to swing; to flap about”.  The sense of “fall or drop heavily” was in use by the mid-1830s and it was used to mean “totally to fail” in 1919 in the wake of the end of World War I (1914-1918), the conflict which wrote finis to the dynastic rule of centuries also of the Romanovs in Russia, the Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans in Constantinople although in the 1890s it was recorded as meaning “some degree of failure”.  The comparative is floppier, the superlative floppiest.  Floppy a noun & adjective, floppiness is a noun, flopped is a noun & verb, flopping is a verb, floppier& floppiest are adjectives and floppily is an adverb; the noun plural is floppies.  The adjective floppish is non-standard and used in the entertainment & publishing industries to refer to something which hasn’t exactly “flopped” (failed) but which had not fulfilled the commercial expectations.

Lindsay Lohan in "floppy-brim" hat, on-set during filming of Liz & Dick (2012).  In fashion, many "floppy-brim" hats actually have a stiff brim, formed in a permanently "floppy" shape.  The true "floppy hats" are those worn while playing sport or as beachwear etc.

The word is used as a modifier in pediatric medicine (floppy baby syndrome; floppy infant syndrome) and as “floppy-wristed” (synonymous with “limp-wristed”) was used as a gay slur.  “Flippy-floppy” was IT slang for “floppy diskette” and unrelated to the previous use of “flip-flop” or “flippy-floppy” which, dating from the 1880s was used to mean “a complete reversal of direction or change of position” and used in politics to suggest inconsistency.  In the febrile world of modern US politics, to be labelled a “flip-flopper” can be damaging because it carries with it the implication what one says can’t be relied upon and campaign “promises” might thus not be honored.  Whether that differs much from the politicians’ usual behaviour can be debated but still, few enjoy being accused of flip-floppery (definitely a non-standard noun).  The classic rejoinder to being called a flip-flopper is the quote: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”  That’s often attributed to the English economist and philosopher Lord Keynes (John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946) but it was said originally by US economist Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) the 1970 Nobel laureate in Economics.  In the popular imagination Keynes is often the “go to” economist for quote attribution in the way William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is a “go to author” and Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) a “go to politician”, both credited with thing they never said but might have said.  I phraseology, the quality of “Shakespearian” or “Churchillian” not exactly definable but certainly recognizable.  In the jargon of early twentieth century electronics, a “flip-flop” was a reference to switching circuits that alternate between two states.

Childless cat lady Taylor Swift with her “floppy cat”, Benjamin Button (as stole).  Time magazine cover, 25 December 2023, announcing Ms Swift as their 2023 Person of the Year.  "Floppy cat" is the the breeders' informal term for the ragdoll breed an allusion to their tendency to “go limp” when picked up, a behavior believed caused by a genetic mutation.

The other use of flop in IT is the initialism FLOP (floating point operations per second).  Floating-point (FB) arithmetic (FP) a way of handling big real numbers using an integer with a fixed precision, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base; FP doesn’t really make possible what would not in theory be achievable using real numbers but does make this faster and practical and the concept became familiar in the 1980s when Intel made available FPUs (floating point units, also known as math co-processors) which could supplement the CPUs (central processing units) of their x86 family.  The 8087 FPU worked with the 8086 CPU and others followed (80286/80287, 80386/80387, i486/i487 etc) until eventually the FPU for the Pentium range was integrated into the CPU, the early implementation something of a debacle still used as a case study in a number of fields departments including management and public relations.

FLOPs are an expression of specific performance and are used to measure those computations requiring floating-point calculations (typically in math-intensive work) and for purposes of “benchmarking” or determining “real-world” performance under those conditions, it’s a more informative number than the traditional rating of instructions per second (iSec).  The FLOPs became something of a cult in the 1990s when the supercomputers of the era first breached the trillion FLOP mark and as speeds rose, the appropriate terms were created:

kiloFLOPS: (kFLOPS, 10³)
megaflops: (MFLOPS, 10⁶)
gigaflops: GFLOPS, 10⁹)
teraflops: TFLOPS, 10¹²)
petaFLOPS: PFLOPS, 10¹⁵)
exaFLOPS: (EFLOPS, 10¹⁸)
zettaFLOPS: ZFLOPS, 10²¹)
yottaFLOPS: YFLOPS, 10²⁴)
ronnaFLOPS: RFLOPS, 10²⁷)
quettaFLOPS: QFLOPS, 10³⁰)

In the mysterious world of quantum computing, FLOPs are not directly applicable because the architecture and methods of operation differ fundamentally from those of classical computers.  Rather than FLOPs, the performance of quantum computers tends to be measured in qubits (quantum bits) and quantum gates (the operations that manipulate qubits).  The architectural difference is profound and explained with the concepts of superposition and entanglement:  Because a qubit simultaneously can represent both “0” & “1” (superposition) and these can be can be entangled (a relationship in which distance is, at least in theory, irrelevant; under parallelism, performance cannot easily be reduced to simple arithmetic or floating-point operations which remain the domain of classical computers which operate using the binary distinction between “O” (off) and “1” (on).

Evolution of the floppy diskette: 8 inch (left), 5¼ inch (centre) & 3½ inch (right).  The track of the floppy for the past half-century has been emblematic of the IT industry in toto: smaller, higher capacity and cheaper.  Genuinely it was one of the design parameters for the 3½ inch design that it fit into a man's shirt pocket.

In IT, the term “floppy diskette” used the WORM (write once, read many, ie "read only" after being written) principle first appeared in 1971 (soon doubtless clipped to “floppy” although the first known use of this dates from 1974).  The first floppy diskettes were in an 8 inch (2023 mm) format which may sound profligate for something with a capacity of 80 kB (kilobyte) but the 10-20 MB (megabit) hard drives of the time were typically the same diameter as the aperture of domestic front-loading washing machine so genuinely they deserved the diminutive suffix (-ette, from the Middle English -ette, a borrowing from the Old French -ette, from the Latin -itta, the feminine form of -ittus.  It was used to form nouns meaning a smaller form of something).  They were an advance also in convenience because until they became available, the usual way to transfer files between devices was to hard-wire them together.  Introduced by IBM in 1971, the capacity was two years later raised to 256 kB and by 1977 to a heady 1.2 MB (megabyte) with the advent of a double-sided, double-density format.  However, even then it was obvious the future was physically smaller media and in 1978 the 5¼ inch (133 mm) floppy debuted, initially with a formatted capacity of 360 kB but by 1982 this too had be raised to 1.2 MB using the technological advance if a HD (high density) file system and it was the 5¼ floppy which would become the first widely adopted industry “standard” for both home and business use, creating the neologism “sneakernet”, the construct being sneaker + net(work), the image being of IT nerds in their jeans and sneakers walking between various (unconnected) computers and exchanging files via diskette.  Until well into the twenty-first century the practice was far from functionally extinct and it persists even today with the use of USB sticks.

Kim Jong-un (Kim III, b 1982; Supreme Leader of DPRK (North Korea) since 2011) with 3½ inch floppy diskette (believed to be a HD (1.44 MB)).

The meme-makers use the floppy because it has become a symbol of technological bankruptcy. In OS (operating system) GUIs (graphical user interface) however, it does endure as the "save" icon and all the evidence to date does suggest that symbolic objects like icons do tend to outlive their source, thus the ongoing use in IT of analogue, rotary dial phones in iconography and the sound of a camera's physical shutter in smart phones.  Decades from now, we may still see representations of floppy diskettes.

The last of the mainstream floppy diskettes was the 3½ inch (89 mm) unit, introduced in 1983 in double density form with a capacity of 720 KB (although in one of their quixotic moves IBM used a unique 360 kB version for their JX range aimed at the educational market) but the classic 3½ was the HD 1.44 MB unit, released in 1986.  That really was the end of the line for the format because although in 1987 a 2.88 MB version was made available, few computer manufacturers offered the gesture of adding support at the BIOS (basic input output system) so adoption was infinitesimal.  The 3½ inch diskette continued in wide use and there was even the DMF (Distribution Media Format) with a 1.7 MB capacity which attracted companies like Microsoft, not because it wanted more space but to attempt to counter software piracy; within hours of Microsoft Office appearing in shrink-wrap with, copying cracks appeared on the bulletin boards (where nerds did stuff before the www (worldwideweb).  It was clear the floppy diskette was heading for extinction although slighter larger versions with capacities as high as 750 MB did appear but, expensive and needing different drive hardware, they were only ever a niche product seen mostly inside corporations.  By the time the CD-ROM (Compact Disc-Read-only Memory) reached critical mass in the mid-late 1990s the once ubiquitous diskette began rapid to fade from use, the release in the next decade of the USB sticks (pen drives) a final nail in the coffin for most.

In the mid 1990s, installing OS/2 Warp 4.0 (Merlin) with the optional packs and a service pack could require a user to insert and swap up to 47 diskettes.  It could take hours, assuming one didn't suffer the dreaded "floppy failure".

That was something which pleased everyone except the floppy diskette manufacturers who had in the early 1990s experienced a remarkable boom in demand for their product when Microsoft Windows 3.1 (7 diskettes) and IBM’s OS/2 2.0 (21 diskettes) were released. Not only was the CD-ROM a cheaper solution than multiple diskettes (a remarkably labor-intensive business for software distributors) but it was also much more reliable, tales of an installation process failing on the “final diskette” legion and while some doubtlessly were apocryphal, "floppy failure" was far from unknown.  By the time OS/2 Warp 3.0 was released in 1994, it required a minimum of 23 floppy diskettes and version 4.0 shipped with a hefty 30 for a base installation.  Few mourned the floppy diskette and quickly learned to love the CD-ROM.

What lay inside a 3½ inch floppy diskette.

Unlike optical discs (CD-ROM, DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) & Blu-Ray) which were written and read with the light of a laser, floppy diskettes were read with magnetic heads.  Inside the vinyl sleeve was a woven liner impregnated with a lubricant, this to reduce friction on the spinning media and help keep the surfaces clean.

Curiously though, niches remained where the floppy lived on and it was only in 2019 the USAF (US Air Force) finally retired the use of floppy diskettes which since the 1970s had been the standard method for maintaining and distributing the data related to the nation’s nuclear weapons deployment.  The attractions of the system for the military were (1) it worked, (2) it was cheap and (3) it was impervious to outside tampering.  Global thermo-nuclear war being a serious business, the USAF wanted something secure and knew that once data was on a device in some way connected to the outside world there was no way it could be guaranteed to be secure from those with malign intent (ayatollahs, the Secret Society of the Les Clefs d'Or, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), the Freemasons, those in the Kremlin or Pyongyang et al) whereas a diskette locked in briefcase or a safe was, paradoxically, the state of twenty-first century security, the same philosophy which has seen some diplomatic posts in certain countries revert to typewriters & carbon paper for the preparation of certain documents.  In 2019 however, the USAF announced that after much development, the floppies had been retired and replaced with what the Pentagon described as a “highly-secure solid-state digital storage solution which work with the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS).”

It can still be done: Although no longer included in PCs & laptops, USB floppy diskette drives remain available (although support for Windows 11 systems is said to be "inconsistent").  Even 5¼ inch units have been built.

It thus came as a surprise in 2024 to learn Japan, the nation which had invented motorcycles which didn’t leak oil (the British though they’d proved that couldn’t be done) and the QR (quick response) code, finally was abandoning the floppy diskette.  Remarkably, even in 2024, the government of Japan still routinely asked corporations and citizens to submit documents on floppies, over 1000 statutes and regulations mandating the format.  The official in charge of updating things (in 2021 he’d “declared war” on floppy diskettes) in July 2024 announced “We have won the war on floppy disks!” which must have be satisfying because he’d earlier been forced to admit defeat in his attempt to defenestrate the country’s facsimile (fax) machines, the “pushback” just too great to overcome.  The news created some interest on Japanese social media, one tweet on X (formerly known as Twitter) damning the modest but enduring floppy as a “symbol of an anachronistic administration”, presumably as much a jab at the “tired old men” of the ruling LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) as the devices.  There may however been an element of technological determinism in the reform because Sony, the last manufacturer of the floppy, ended production of them in 2011 so while many remain extant, the world’s supply is dwindling.  In some ways so modern and innovative, in other ways Japanese technology sometimes remains frozen, many businesses still demanding official documents to be endorsed using carved personal stamps called the印鑑 (ikan) or 判子 (hanko); despite the government's efforts to phase them out, their retirement is said to be proceeding at a “glacial pace”.  The other controversial aspect of the hanko is that the most prized are carved from ivory and it’s believed a significant part of the demand for black-market ivory comes from the hanko makers, most apparently passing through Hong Kong, for generations a home to “sanctions busters”.

Decker

Decker (pronounced dek-er)

(1) Something (typically a bus, ship, aircraft, bed, sandwich et al), having a specified number of decks, floors, levels, layers and such (used usually in combination with a numerical or other expression indicating the number in the construction (double decker, triple decker, upper decker, five decker etc (sometimes hyphenated).

(2) As “table decker” an employee who “decks” (ie sets or adorns) a table used for entertaining (used also as a “coverer”) (archaic).  The idea lives on in the verb “bedeck” (to adorn).

(3) In boxing slang, a fighter with a famously powerful punch, able to “deck” an opponent (ie knock them to the canvas with a single punch).

(4) In historic naval slang, as “quarter-decker”, a label applied to officers known more for their attention to matters of etiquette or trivial regulations than competent seamanship or ability in battle.  It was an allusion to a warship’s “quarter deck” (the part of the spar-deck of a man-of-war (warship) between the poop deck and main-mast (and originally (dating from the 1620s), a smaller deck above the half-deck, covering about a quarter of the vessel’s LOA (length overall)).  In many navies, the quarter-deck was reserved as “a promenade for officers only”.

1785–1795: The construct was deck + -er.  Deck in this context was from the Middle English dekke (covering extending from side to side over part of a ship), from a nautical use of the Middle Dutch decke & dec (roof, covering), from the Middle Dutch decken, from the Proto-Germanic thakam (source also of the noun “thatch” and from the primitive Indo-European root steg & teg- (to cover) and the Old Dutch thecken, from the Proto-West Germanic þakkjan, from the Proto-Germanic þakjaną and related to the German Decke (covering, blanket).  The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought most likely to have been borrowed from the Latin –ārius where, as a suffix, it was used to form adjectives from nouns or numerals.  In English, the –er suffix, when added to a verb, created an agent noun: the person or thing that doing the action indicated by the root verb.   The use in English was reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  When appended to a noun, it created the noun denoting an occupation or describing the person whose occupation is the noun.  The noun double-decker was first used in 1835 of ships with two decks above the water line and this extended to land transport (trains) in 1867.  Decker is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is deckers.

Flight deck of the US Navy's Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70).

The reason ships, trains, buses, aircraft and such have "decks" while buildings have "floors” or “stories (or storeys)” is traceable to nautical history and the nomenclature used in shipbuilding.  English picked up “deck” from the Middle Dutch decke & dec (roof, covering) where the use had been influenced by the Old Norse þekja (to cover) and in early shipbuilding, a “deck” was the structure which covered the hull of the ship, providing both a horizontal “working surface” and enclosing the vessel, creating a space for stores, cargo or accommodation which was protected from the elements.  In that sense the first nautical decks acted as a “roof”.  As ships became larger, the nautical architects began to include multiple decks, analogous with the floors of buildings in that they fulfilled a similar function, providing segregated layers (ie the storeys in buildings) used for cannons, crew quarters, storage and such.  As the terminology of shipbuilding became standardized, each deck came to have a specific name depending on its purpose or position (main deck, flight deck, poop deck, gun deck etc).

Ford Mustang convertible (1965–1973) replacement floor pan (complete, part number 3648B) by Moonlight Drive Sheet Metal.

Until the nineteenth century, although the vehicles used on land became larger, they tended to get longer rather than higher but the advent of steam propulsion made possible trains which ran on railways and these could pull carriages carrying freight or passengers.  The first “double decker” versions appeared in France in 1867 and were described as voitures à imperial, (imperial cars) were used on the Chemin de Fer de l'Ouest (Western Railway), the upper deck roofless and thus an “open-air experience”,  Rapidly, the idea spread and double-deck carriages became common for both long-distance and commuter services.  An outlier in the terminology is car design; cars have a floor (sometimes called the “floor pan”) rather than a deck, presumably because there’s only ever one.  In the narrow technical sense there have been cars with “two floors” but they were better understood as a “double-skinned” single floor and they were used for armor or to provide a space for something specialized such as hydrogen fuel-cells, the technique often called “sandwich construction”.

Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat cutaway (left) and front schematics of Boeing 747-300 (right).  Re-using some of an earlier design for a bomber which failed to meet the military’s performance criteria, between 1938-1941, Boeing built twelve 314 Clippers, long-range flying boats with the range to cross both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  Although used by the military during World War II, most of their service was with the two commercial operators Pan Am (originally Pan American Airways) and BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation).  Very much a machine of the pre-war age, the last Clippers were retired from service between 1946-1948, the advances in aviation and ground infrastructure built during war-time rendering them obsolete and prohibitively expensive to maintain.

Because train designers adopted the nautical terminology, it naturally came to be used also in buses, and aircraft, the term “flight deck” (where the pilot(s) sat) common even before multiple decks appeared on flying boats and other long-distance airframes.  The famous “bubble” of the Boeing 747 (1968-2023) remains one of the best known decks and although most associated with the glamour of first-class international travel, was designed originally as a freight compartment.  The multi-deck evolution continued and the Airbus A380 (2005-2021) was the first “double decker” with two passenger decks extending the full length of the fuselage (with cargo & baggage) carried in the space beneath hence the frequent description of the thing as a “triple decker”.

Lindsay Lohan contemplating three decker sandwich, now usually called a “club sandwich”.  Many menus do specify the number of decks in the clubs.

Deck widely was used of many raised flat surface which people could walk or stand upon (balcony, porch, patio, flat rooftop etc) and came to be used of the floor-like covering of the horizontal sections or compartments, of a ship, a use later extended to land transport (trains, busses etc) and in the twentieth century, to aircraft.  A pack or set of playing cards can be called a deck as (less commonly), can the dealt cards which constitute the “hand” of each player and the notion was extended to sets of just about anything vaguely similar (such as a collection of photographic slides). , Because slides tended to be called a “deck” only when in their magazine, this influenced the later use in IT when certain objects digitally were assemble for storage or use and in audio and video use when cartridges or cassettes were loaded into “tape decks”.  In print journalism, a deck is a headline consisting of one or more full lines of text (applied especially to a sub-headline).  The slang use in the trade of illicit narcotics to describe the folded paper used for distributing drugs was a US regionalism.  There are dozens of idiomatic and other uses of deck, the best known including “all hands on deck”, “swab the decks”, “hit the deck” “clear the decks”, “deck-chair”, “deckhand”, “deck shoes”, “flight deck”, “gun deck”, “observation deck”, “play with a full deck”, “promenade deck”, “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”, “decked out”, “stack the deck”, “sun deck”, “top deck” & “to deck someone”.

Schematic of the Royal Navy’s HMS Victory, a 104-gun first-rate ship of the line, laid down in 1759 and launched in 1765, most famous as the flagship of Admiral Lord Nelson’s (1758-1805) flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805; it was on her Nelson was killed in battle.  Uniquely, after 246 years on the active list, she is the world's oldest naval vessel still in commission.  Although the term wasn’t in use until the 1830s, Victory was a “five decker” configured thus:

Orlop Deck: The lowest deck, mainly used for storage and ship's equipment.
Lower Gun Deck: The deck housing the heaviest cannons.
Middle Gun Deck: This deck contained another set of guns, slightly lighter than those on the lower gun deck.
Upper Gun Deck: The third level of guns, with even lighter cannons.
Quarterdeck and Forecastle: The uppermost decks, where the captain and officers usually directed the ship during battle.

The early meanings in English evolved from “covering” to “platform of a ship” because of the visual similarity and it’s thought the idea of a deck being a “pack of cards” (noted in the 1590s) was based on them being stacked like the decks of a multi-deck man-of-war (warship).  The tape-deck was first so described in 1949 an was a reference to the flat surface of the old reel-to-reel tape recorders.  The first deck chairs were advertised in 1844, an allusion to the use of such thing on the decks of passenger ocean liners and deck shoes were those with sturdy rubber soles suitable for use on slippery surfaces; the modern “boat shoes” are a descendent.  The old admiralty phrase “clear the decks” dated from the days of the tall-masted warships (the best known of which was the big “ship-of-the-line”) and was a reference to the need to remove from the main deck the wreckage resulting from an attack (dislodged masts, sails, spas etc) to enable the battle to be rejoined without the obstructions.  Being made of wood, the ships were hard to sink but highly susceptible to damage, especially to the rigging which, upon fragmentation, tended to fall to the deck.  It may have been a adaptation of the French army slang débarasser le pont (clear the bridge).

Ford 302 cubic inch (4.9 litre) Windsor V8 with the standard deck (left) and the raised deck 351 (5.8) (right).  In production in various displacements between 1961-2000, the 221 (3.6), 255 (4.2), 260 (4.3), 289 (4.7) & 302 (4.9) all used what came retrospectively to be called the “standard deck” while the 351 (5.8) was the sole “raised deck” version.

For decades, it was common for US manufacturers to increase the displacement of their V8 engines but means of creating a “raised deck” version, the process involving raising the height of the engine block's deck surface (the surface where the cylinder heads bolt on).  What this allowed was the use of longer connecting rods while using the original heads and pistons which in combination with a “longer stroke crankshaft” increases the displacement (the aggregate volume of all cylinders).  The industry slang for such things was “decker” and the technique was used with other block configurations but is best known from the use in the 1960s & 1970s for V8s because it’s those which tend to be fetishized.  The path to greater displacement lay either in lengthening the stroke or increasing the bore (or a combination of the two) and while there were general engineering principles (longer stroke=emphasis on more torque at the cost of reducing maximum engine speed and bigger bore=more power and higher engine speeds) but there were limitations in how much a bore could safely be increased including the available metal.  A bigger bore (ie increasing the internal diameter of the cylinder) reduces the thickness of the cylinder walls and if they become too thing, there can be problems with cooling, durability or even the structural integrity of the block.  The piston size also increases which means the weight increases and thus so too does the reciprocating mass, increasing friction, wear and has the potential to compromise reliability, especially at high engine speeds.

Increasing the stroke will usually enhance the torque output, something of greater benefit to most drivers, most of the time than the “top end power” most characteristic of the “big bore” approach.  In street use, most engines spend most time at low or mid-range speed and it’s here a longer stroke tends to produce more torque so it has been a popular approach and the advantage for manufacturers is that creating a “decker” almost always is easier, faster and cheaper than arranging one which will tolerate a bigger bore, something which can demand a new block casting and sometimes changes to the physical assembly line.  With a raised deck, there can be the need to use different intake and exhaust manifolds and some other peripheral components but it’s still usually a cheaper solution than a new block casting.  Ford’s “thinwall” Windsor V8 was one of the longest-serving deckers (although the raised-deck version didn’t see out the platform’s life, the 351 (introduced in 1969) retired in 1997).  Confusingly, during the Windsor era, Ford also produced other 351s which belonged to a different engine family.  Ford didn’t acknowledge the biggest Windsor's raised deck in its designation but when Chrysler released a decker version of the “B Series” big-block V8 (1958-1978), it was designated “RB” (Raised B) and produced between 1959-1979.

1964 AEC Routemaster double decker Bus RM1941 (ALD941B) (left), two sightseeing AEC Routemasters in Christchurch, New Zealand (centre) and one of the "new" Routemasters, London 2023 (right).

London’s red, double-decker busses are one of the symbols most associated with the city and a fixture in literature, art and films needing something with which to capture the verisimilitude.  The classic example of the breed was the long-running AEC Routemaster, designed by the London Transport Board and built by the Associated Equipment Company (AEC) and Park Royal Vehicles.  The Routemaster entered service in 1956 and remained in production until 1968, changed over those years in many details but visually there was such continuity that it takes an expert (and buses are a thing so experts there are) to pick the model year.  They entered service in 1956 and remained in regular service until 2005 although some were retained as “nostalgia pieces” on designated “tourist” routes until COVID-19 finally saw their retirement; since then, many have been repurposed for service around the world on sightseeing duties and other tourist projects.

Boris Johnson (b 1964; UK prime-minister 2019-2022) will leave an extraordinary political legacy which in time may came to be remembered more fondly than it now may appear but one of his most enduring achievements is likely to be the “New Routemaster” which had the typically bureaucratic project name “New Bus for London” but came to be known generally as the “Boris Bus”, the honor accorded by virtue of him championing the idea while serving as Lord Mayor of London (2008-2016).  In truth, the original Routemaster, whatever its period charm, was antiquated years before it was withdrawn from service and although the doorless design made ingress and egress convenient, it was also dangerous and apparently a dozen passenger fatalities annually was not uncommon.  The Borisbus entered service in 2012 and by 2024 almost 1200 were in service.

1930 Lancia Omicron with 2½ deck coachwork and a clerestoried upper windscreen (left) and a “three decker” bus in Pakistan (right).

The Lancia Omicron was a bus chassis produced between 1927-1936; over 600 were built in different wheelbase lengths with both two and three-axle configurations.  Most used Lancia's long-serving, six-cylinder commercial engine but, as early as 1933, some had been equipped with diesel engines which were tested in North Africa where they proved durable and, in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya and Algeria, once petrol powered Omicron chassis were being re-powered with diesel power-plants from a variety of manufacturers as late as the 1960s.  Typically of bus use, coachbuilders fabricated many different styles of body but, in addition to the usual single and double deck arrangements, the Omicron is noted for a number of two and a half deck models, the third deck configured usually as a first-class compartment but in at least three which operated in Italy, they were advertised as “smoking rooms”, the implication presumably that the rest of the passenger compartment was smoke-free.  History doesn't record if the bus operators were any more enthusiastic about or successful in enforcing smoking bans than the usual Italian experience.  For a variety of reasons, busses with more than 2.something decks were rare and the Lancias and Alfa Romeos which first emerged in the 1920s were unusual.  However, the famously imaginative and inventive world of Pakistani commerce has produced a genuine “three decker” bus, marketed as the “limousine bus”.  What the designer did was take a long-distance, double decker coach and use the space allocated usually as a luggage compartment to configure as the interior of a long wheelbase (LWB) limousine, thereby creating a “first class” section, the four rows of seating accessible via six car-like (ie limousine) doors.