Croissant

Croissant (pronounced krwah-sahn (French) or kruh-sahnt (barbarians))

A rich, buttery, often crescent-shaped, roll of leavened dough or puff paste.

1899:  From the French croissant (crescent), present participle of the verb croître (to increase, to grow), from the Middle French croistre, from the Old French creistre derived from the Classical Latin crēscēns & crēscentem, present active infinitive of crēscō (I augment), drawn from the Proto-Italic krēskō. The ultimate root was the primitive Indo-European ḱreh (to grow, become bigger).  Correct pronunciation here.  

The Austrian Pastry

Like some other cultural artefacts thought quintessentially French (French fries invented in Belgium; Nicolas Sarkozy (b 1955; French president 2007-2012) from here and there; the Citroën DS (1955-1975) styled by an Italian) the croissant came from elsewhere, its origins Austrian, the Viennese kipferl a crescent-shaped sweet made plain, with nuts or other fillings.  It varies from the French classic in being denser and less flaky, made with softer dough.  First noted in the thirteenth century at which time, it was thought a “sweet” it was another three-hundred years before it came to be regarded as a morning pastry.  Tastes changed as new techniques of baking evolved and around the turn of the seventeenth century, recipes began to appear in Le Pâtissier François using Pâte feuilletée (puff pastry), these being the first recognisably modern croissants.

Culinary histories include a number of (likely apocryphal) tales of why the croissant adopted a crescent shape.  One suggests it was baked first in Buda to celebrate the defeat of the Ummayyad (the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) was the second of the four major caliphates created after the death of the prophet Muhammad (circa 570-632)) forces by the Franks in the Battle of Tours (732), the shape representing the Islamic crescent moon although more famous is the notion it was designed after the battle of 1683 when the Ottomans were turned back from the gates of Vienna.  A baker, said to have heard the Turks tunneling under the walls of the city as he lit his ovens to bake the morning bread, sounded an alarm, and the defending forces collapsed the tunnel, saving the city.   To celebrate, bread was baked in the shape of the crescent moon of the Turkish flag.

Portrait of Marie Antoinette (1769) oil on canvas by Joseph Ducreux (1735-1802).

The official title of the portrait was Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria and it was created as the era’s equivalent of a Tinder profile picture, the artist summoned in 1769 to Vienna to paint a pleasing rendering of the young lady the Hapsburg royal court planned to marry off to Louis, Dauphin of France (1754-1973) who would reign as Louis XVI (King of France 1774-1792)).  Tinder profile pictures can be misleading (some pounds and even more years sometimes vanishing) so the work must be considered in that context although she was barely fourteen when she sat so it may be true to the subject.  Ducreux’s portrait was the first glimpse the prince had of his intended bride and it must have been pleasing enough for him metaphorically to "swipe right" and the marriage lasted until the pair were executed with the blade of the guillotine.  As a reward, Ducreux was raised to the nobility as a seigneur de la baronnie (lord of the barony, the grade of of baron granted to roturiers (commoners)) and appointed premier peintre de la reine (First Painter to the Queen), outliving the royal couple.

A more romantic tale attributes the pastry to Marie Antoinette (1755–1793; Queen of France 1774-1792), who, as an Austrian, preferred the food of her homeland to that of the French court and, at state dinners, would sneak away to enjoy pastries and coffee.  There is no documentary evidence for her having re-christened the kipferl as the croissant but the story is she so missed what she knew as kipfel (German for crescent) that she commanded the royal baker to clone the treat.  More prosaic, but actually verified by historical evidence, is that August Zang (1807-1888), a retired Austrian artillery officer founded a Viennese Bakery in Paris in 1839 and most food historians agree he is the one most likely to have introduced the kipfel to France, a pastry that later inspired French bakers to create crescents of their own.  The first mention of the croissant in French is in French chemist Anselme Payen’s (1795-1871) Des Substances alimentaires (1853), published long after Marie-Antoinette’s time in court, the first known printed recipe, using the name, appearing in Swiss chef Joseph Favre’s (1849-1903) Dictionnaire universel de cuisine (1905) although even that was a more dense creation than the puffy thing known today.

Breakfast in Paris.

Although the famous shape is much admired, for purists, the choice is always the un-curved croissant au beurre, (butter croissant), the more eye-catching crescents being usually the ordinaires, made with margarine.  The taste in the English-speaking world for things like ham-and-cheese croissants is regarded by the French as proof of Anglo-Saxon barbarism although they will tolerate a sparse drizzle of chocolate if it’s for children and food critics reluctantly concede the almond croissant (with a frangipane filling, topped with slivered almonds and a dusting of powdered sugar) is “…enjoyed by younger women”.  Generally though, the French stick to the classics, eschewing even butter, a croissant being best enjoyed unadorned and taken with a strong black coffee and while some will insist this should be accompanied with a Gitanes, that is optional.

The cube croissant, an Instagram favorite.

Although much focused upon, the shape of a croissant of course becomes less relevant when eaten when the experience becomes one of taste and texture.  For that reason the pastry used has long attracted those chefs for whom food offers architectural possibilities and while for more than a century one-offs have been created for competition and special event, in recent years the phenomenon of social media has been a design stimulant, Instagram, TikTok et al fuelling a culinary arms race and patisseries have built (sometimes short-lived) product lines in response to viral videos.  Fillings have of course been a feature but it’s the shapes which have been most eye-catching (and by extension click-catching which is the point for the content providers). There have been “croissants” in the shape of spheres, discs, pyramids, spirals, wedges and cubes, the last among the more amusing with chefs referencing objects and concepts such as dice, cubist art and, of course, the Rubik’s Cube.  Many have been just a moment while some have for a while trended.

Dominique Ansel's Cronut, stacked and sliced.

Some have endured for longer such as the Cronut (the portmanteau’s construct being cro(issant) + (dough)nut) and so serious was New York based French pastry chef Dominique Ansel (b 1978) that in 2013 he trademarked his creation.  In the familiar shape of a doughnut, the composition was described as “a croissant-like pastry with a filling of flavored cream and fried in grapeseed oil.”  Interviewed by Murdoch tabloid the New York Post, the chef revealed it took “two months of R&D (research & development)” before the Cronut was perfected and the effort was clearly worthwhile because after being released in his eponymous bakery in Manhattan’s SoHo neighbourhood, the city’s food bloggers (a numerous and competitive population) responded and within days photographs circulated of dozens waiting for opening time, a reaction which prompted the application to the US Patent and Trademark Office.  In the way of such things, around the planet “clones”, “tributes”, “knock-offs”, “imitations”, “rip-offs” (the descriptions as varied as the slight changes in the recipes introduced presumably to fend off a C&D (cease and desist letter)) soon appeared.  Predictably, some were called “Doughssants” (the Germanic eszett a nice touch) although others were less derivative.

New York Post, August 16 2022.

Monsieur Ansel in 2015 released Dominique Ansel: The Secret Recipes, a cookbook which included the Cronut recipe and the thing in its authentic form was clearly for the obsessives, the instructions noting making one or a batch was a three-day process.  In its review of the year, Time magazine nominated the Cronut as one of the “best inventions of 2013”, prompting one cultural commentator (another species which proliferates in New York City) to observe the decadence of the West had reached the point the breakdown of society was close.  There may have been something in the idea the new “Visigoths at the Gates of Rome” were actually pastry chefs because in the wake of the Cronut the city was soon flooded with all sorts of novel sugary treats, mostly elaborations of croissants, doughnuts and, it being NYC, bagels.  By 2022 the New York Post was prepared to proclaim: “Move over cronuts! NYC's hot new baked good is the Suprême”, the defenestrator from Noho’s Lafayette Grand Café and revealed to be a “unique circular croissant filled with pastry crème and topped with ganache and crushed up cookies.”  Again of the Instagram & TikTok age, queues were reported even though at a unit cost of US$8.50 it was two dollars more expensive than a Cronut, the price of which had increased fairly modestly since 2013 when it debuted at US$5.00.

All the recent variations on the croissant are built on the theme chefs have for centuries understood is the easy path to popularity: FSS; add fat, salt & sugar, the substances mankind has for millennia sought.  Once it took much effort (and often some risk) to find these things but now they’re conveniently packaged and widely available at prices which, although subject to political and economic forces, remain by historic standards very cheap.  Often, we don’t even need to seek out the packages because so much of the preparation and distribution of food has been outsourced to specialists, mostly industrial concerns but the artisans persist in niches.  That’s certainly true of the croissant, few making their own whether basic or embellished and one of the latest of the croissant crazes is FSS writ large: the crookie.

Miss Sina's crookie (without added topping or powered sugar).

A crookie is a croissant stuffed with chocolate chip cookie dough and its very existence will be thought particularly shameful by some Parisian purists because it was first sold in December 2023 by the Boulangerie Louvard, located on Rue de Châteaudun in Paris’s 9^th arrondissement which, in an Instragram post announced the arrival: “Our pure butter croissant, awarded the seventh best croissant in the Île-de-France region in 2022, is made every morning with a 24-hour fermented milk sourdough and layered with Charente butter.  For our cookie dough, we use one of the best and purest chocolates in the world, from @xoco.gourmet.”  Offered originally in a test batch to test the market, the boulangerie soon announced “The concept was well received, so we're keeping it.  Available every day in-store!”

Unlike a Cronut which (at least in its pure form) demands three days to make, the charm of the crookie is its elegant simplicity and Instagrammers quickly deconstructed and posted the instructions:

(1) With a serrated knife, cut open a croissant lengthwise, leaving a “hinge” at the back.

(2) Add 2-3 tablespoons of your chocolate chip cookie dough (from a packet or home-made).

(3) Close the two sections of croissant wholly encasing the dough.

(4) When the dough is almost cooked (time will vary according to oven and the volume of dough but it takes only a few minutes), remove from oven.

(5) Add more cookie dough to the top of croissant and return to the oven for final bake.

(6) When the outside is crispy and the centre gooey, remove from oven and top with a dusting of powdered sugar.

Some crookie critics don't recommend either adding the second lashing of dough or the powered sugar because they tend to "overwhelm" the croissant and limit the surface area, thereby denying the dish some of the essential crispiness.  

The croissant in fashion

Louis Vuitton Loop (part number M81098).  Created by Nicolas Ghesquière (b 1971) for the Cruise 2022 Collection, the Loop is described as a "half-moon baguette" and was inspired by the earlier Croissant bag, the original a less fussy design.

Lindsay Lohan in T-shirt with croissant theme.

While a handbag lends itself well to the shape of a crescent, it does inherently limit the efficiency of space utilization but this aspect is often not a primary goal in the upper reaches of the market.  With garments however, although actually a common component because the shape makes all sorts of engineering possible such as the underwire of the bra or other constructions where any sort of cantilever effect is demanded, it’s usually just an element rather than a design motif.  As a playful touch, a distinctive crescent moon or croissant might appear on a T-shirt or scarf but it’s rare to see a whole garment pursue the theme although they have appeared on the catwalks where they attract the usual mix of admiration and derision.   

Sarah Jessica Parker in "croissant dress".

Sometimes though, such things escape the catwalk.  In 2022 the actor Sarah Jessica Parker (b 1965) appeared in HBO's And Just Like That, a spin-off (2021-2022) of the Sex and the City TV series (1998-2024), wearing an orange Valentino couture gown from the house’s spring/summer 2019 collection.  It recalled a large croissant, the piece chosen presumably because the scene was set in Paris although it must have been thought the viewers needed the verisimilitude laid on with a trowel because also prominent was a handbag in the shape of the Eifel Tower.  A gift to the meme-makers, admiration for the dress was restrained.

Rabbit

Rabbit (pronounced rab-it)

(1) Any of several soft-furred, large-eared, rodentlike burrowing mammals of the family Leporidae, allied with the hares and pikas in the order Lagomorpha, having a divided upper lip and long hind legs, usually smaller than the hares and mainly distinguished from them by bearing blind and furless young in nests rather than fully developed young in the open.

(2) Any of various small hares.

(3) The fur of a rabbit or hare, often processed to imitate another fur.

(4) A runner in a distance race whose goal is chiefly to set a fast pace, either to exhaust a particular rival so that a teammate can win or to help another entrant break a record; pacesetter.

(5) In sport, a person poor at a sport; in cricket specifically, an unskilled batter (also as “batting bunny”, usually clipped to bunny).

(5) As Welsh rabbit, an alternative form of Welsh rarebit & Welsh ribbit (A snack made of cheese melted with a little ale and served on toast).  Welsh rabbit was the original form but was erroneously marked as a corruption in a dictionary published in 1785 although it’s not clear if the editor made the assumption or drew the conclusion from oral evidence.

(6) In nuclear engineering, a pneumatically-controlled tool used to insert small samples of material inside the core of a nuclear reactor.

(7) In computing theory, a large element at the beginning of a list of items to be bubble sorted, and thus tending to be quickly swapped into the correct position.

(8) In northern English regional slang, as “rabbit catcher”, a midwife or one who by force of circumstance assists in the delivery of a baby.

(9) As “rabbit ears”, the indoor dipole television antenna which typically sat atop the early analogue sets which received a terrestrial signal.

(10) Incessantly or nonsensically to talk.

(11) To hunt rabbits.

(12) In US slang, to flee.

1375-1425: From the late Middle English rabet & rabette, from the Anglo-Latin rabettus, from the Middle French rabouillet (baby rabbit), from the dialectal Old North French rabotte, probably a diminutive of Middle Dutch or West Flemish robbe (rabbit, seal), of uncertain origin but which may be an imitative verb (perhaps robben or rubben (to rub)) and used to allude to a characteristic of the animal.  The related forms include the French rabot (plane), the Middle Dutch robbe (rabbit; seal (from which Modern Dutch gained rob (seal (also “rabbit”), the Middle Low German robbe & rubbe (rabbit), the later Low German Rubbe (seal), the West Frisian robbe (seal), the Saterland Frisian Rubbe (seal) and the North Frisian rob (“seal”) eventually borrowed as the German Robbe (seal).  Early dictionary editors thus described the word as “a Germanic noun with a French suffix”.  Rabbit is a noun & verb, rabbitiness is a noun, rabbited is a verb, rabbitlike & rabbity are adjectives and rabbiting is a noun & verb; the noun plural is rabbits and (especially in the collective) rab·bit.

Lindsay Lohan with rabbit.

Until the late nineteenth century, the meaning was exclusively what would now be understood as “a young rabbit” but it came to be used of the whole species, replacing the original coney, owing to the latter's resemblance to and use as a euphemism for cunny (“vulva” and linked obviously with “cunt” although despite that the preferred slang with some zoological allusion came to include “beaver”, “camel toe” and (especially) “pussy”, rather than “bunny”).  The noun coney dates from the early thirteenth century and was abstracted from the Anglo-French conis and the Old French coniz, (plurals of conil (long-eared rabbit; (Lepus cunicula)) from the Latin cuniculus, the source also of the Spanish conejo, the Portuguese coelho and the Italian coniglio), the small, Spanish variant of the Italian hare (Latin lepus).  The word may ultimately be from the Iberian Celtic although classical writers said it was Hispanic.  In Middle English the two forms were cony & conny (the derivations including coning, cunin & conyng) while the Old French had conil alongside conin.  The evolution seems to be that the plural form conis (from conil, with the -l- elided) was taken into English and regularly single-ized as cony.  The Old French form was borrowed in the Dutch konijn and the German Kaninchen (a diminutive), and is preserved in the surname Cunningham (from a place-name in Ayrshire).  Rabbits not being native to northern Europe, there was no Germanic word for them.  In the fourteenth century “rabbit” came to describe the young of the species and over the centuries came to supplant coney, a process complete by the early nineteenth.  It was another of those exercises in sanitization because in English & Welsh slang, coney had been adopted as a punning synonym for cunny (cunt).  That was complicated by it appearing in the Book of Proverbs in the King James Version of the Bible (KJV, 1611) so the work-around was to change the pronunciation of the original short vowel (rhyming with honey, money) to rhyme with bony, stony.  In the Old Testament, the word translates the Hebrew shaphan (rock-badger).

When Volkswagen in 1974 introduced the Golf in the North American market, it was named the Rabbit, apparently because it would thought the name would suggest qualities such as “agility, speed & playfulness” which were positive attributes in what was then (by US standards) a very small car, much smaller than the more recent versions.  Because of the international success of the Golf, when the revised model was released in 1983, the North American cars switched to that name and it’s been marketed that way since except between 2003-2008 when the Rabbit badge was revived.  The revival was in retrospect a curious choice given the obvious advantages offered by using the one name globally but at the time VW America had a rationalization: “We think we have some opportunities to do something creative with the Rabbit nameplate and recognizes the Golf nameplate has never really caught on with North American consumers as it was overshadowed by the Jetta sedan and wagon.  Volkswagen customers want a relationship with their cars and names like The Thing, Beetle, Fox and Rabbit support this."  Whatever the opportunities may have been, the linguistic experiment wasn’t continued and since 2009, it’s been Golfs all the way.

US market VW Golfs: 1974 Rabbit L (Generation 1)  (left) and 2007 Rabbit TSI (Generation 5).

There was some linguistic irony in VW’s choice because as the US satirist & critic HL Mencken (1880–1956) pointed out in The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (1919): “Zoologically speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit.”

The White Rabbit was a character in Lewis Carroll’s (1832–1898) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and one which appears often, always in a waistcoat with pocket watch and in a hurry, fearful always of the impending fury the duchess will visit upon him should he be a moment late.  It’s the white rabbit which Alice follows down the rabbit hole, leading to the bizarre adventures recounted.  One of popular culture’s best-known rabbits gave rise to the phrase “bunny boiler”, a reference to the scene in the film Fatal Attraction (1987) in which a scorned woman revenged herself upon her adulterous ex-lover by tossing his daughter’s pet rabbit into a pot of boiling water; he arrives home to discover a boiled bunny.  The Warner Brother cartoon character Bugs Bunny first appeared on the screen in 1938 and is often described by his shotgun wielding antagonist, the lisping Elmer Fudd, as "that wascally wabbit".

In idiomatic use there’s “pull a rabbit out of the hat” (to find or obtain a sudden solution to a problem), “rabbit-hearted” (someone timid or inclined to be flighty), “rabbit food” (a disapproving view of vegetables held by some meat-eaters), “the rabbit test” (an early pregnancy test involving the injection of the tested woman's urine into a female rabbit, then examining the rabbit's ovaries a few days later for changes in response to a hormone (“the rabbit died” the phrase indicating a positive test or an admission of one’s pregnancy)), “breed like rabbits” (slang for an individual, family, or sub-group of a population with a high birth-rate), “down the rabbit hole” (a time-consuming tangent or detour, often one from which it’s psychologically difficult to extricate oneself), “lucky rabbit’s foot”, (the carrying of a luckless bunny’s preserved rabbit’s foot as a lucky charm), “like a rabbit warren” (a confusingly labyrinthine environment (used literally & figuratively)), “rabbit in the headlights” (an allusion to the way rabbits (like some other wildlife) sometimes “freeze” when caught in the light of an oncoming vehicle’s headlamps) and the inevitable “rabbit fucker” (a general term of disparagement (although it could be applied literally in the right circumstances)).

The “earless” rabbit with “eared” companions.

In May 2011, some weeks after the meltdown at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant which suffered severe damage in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, a video of an “earless rabbit” began to circulate, purportedly captured in an area just beyond the crippled plant’s exclusion area.  The immediate speculation was of course the creature’s unusual state was a result of a radiation-induced genetic mutation.  Geneticists however had a less troubling explanation.  Although there’s no doubt the radiation emitting from Fukushima Dai-ichi (some 225 kilometres (140 miles) north-east of Tokyo) represents a major risk to health and the long-term environmental effects remain unclear, the scientists say not only is it unlikely to be linked with the earless rabbit, such creatures are far from unusual.  According to a  statement issued from Colorado State University's Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences: “…radiation can cause mutations that can be occasionally expressed as obvious birth defects, such as shown in the video.  However, to say this is the result of contamination from the Fukushima accident is a stretch, because natural radiation, as well as many other chemical substances in the environment and other factors, can also be mutagenic.  In most cases, the cause of congenital birth defects in humans and other animals cannot be determined and as far as science has shown, there have never been mutations produced by ionizing radiations that do not occur spontaneously as well.”

Rabbits used in nuclear reactors: Polyethylene 1-inch (25 mm) rabbit (left), Polyethylene 2-inch (50 mm) rabbit (centre) and Titanium 2-inch (50 mm) rabbit.

The rabbit does though have a place in nuclear engineering.  In the industry, the term “rabbit” is used to describe a range of pneumatically controlled tools which are used remotely to insert or retrieve items from a nuclear reactor or other radioactive environments.  The name is thought to come from the devices being tubular (on the model of the rabbit borrow) which allows samples rapidly to be injected into the periphery of a reactor core, the injectables moving “with the speed of startled rabbits” although there may also be the implication of rabbits as expendable creatures, the tool essential for maintenance, inspection, and repair tasks in nuclear facilities, where direct human intervention is either dangerous or impossible because of high radiation levels.

Winston Churchill inspecting the progress of project White Rabbit No, 6, Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, England, November 1941.

The World War II (1939-1945) era White Rabbit No. 6 was an engineering project by the British Admiralty although as a security measure the official code-name was changed to Cultivator No. 6 to make it sound less mysterious and more like a piece of agricultural equipment.  It was a military trench-digging machine and an example of the adage that “generals are always preparing to fight the last war” and although designed exclusively for army use on (and at least partially under) land, it came under the auspices of the Royal Navy because it was a brainchild (one of many) of Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) who, between the outbreak of war in 1939 and his assumption of the premiership some months later, served as First Lord of the Admiralty (the service’s civilian head).  Trenches and artillery had been the two dominant features of World War I (1914-1918) and Churchill had spent some months (1915-1916) in one of the former while under fire from the latter while commanding a battalion; before the implications of mechanization and the German’s Blitzkrieg (lightning war) tactics were apparent, he assumed the new war in France would unfold something like the old, thus the interest in something which would “revolutionize trench warfare”.  Trench warfare however wasn’t repeated so White Rabbit No.6 was soon realized to be already obsolete and the project was abandoned and although the most fully developed of the prototypes did perform according to the design parameters, whether it would have been effective remains doubtful; remarkably, work on these things wasn’t wholly abandoned until 1942.  The “White Rabbit” project codes came from Churchill’s sense of humor, his ideas coming, as he said: “like rabbits I pull from my hat” and he supported many, some of which were of great military value while others, like the “floating runways” (artificial icebergs made with a mixture of shards of timber & frozen water), were quixotic.

White Rabbit © Copperpenny Music, Mole Music Co

Surrealistic Pillow album cover, 1967.

White Rabbit was a song by Grace Slick (b 1939) and released on the album Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane.  The lyrics were inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871).  It was the psychedelic era and drug references were common in popular music and in the case of White Rabbit it may have been appropriate if the speculation the books been written while the author was under the influence of Laudanum (a then widely-available opiate-infused drug) is true (there's no evidence beyond the circumstantial).  Given the imagery in the text, it’s not difficult to believe he may have been on something and among authors and poets it was a popular way to stimulate the imagination, inspiring at least some of one of the most beloved fragments of English verse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834) Kubla Khan (1797) which ends abruptly at 54 lines.  According to Coleridge, he was unable to recall the rest of the 300-odd which had come to him in an opium-laced dream (the original publication was sub-titled “A Vision in a Dream”) because he was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock” (a nearby Somerset village).  Grace Slick would have sympathized with an artist being intruded on by commerce.

White Rabbit lyrics:

One pill makes you larger

And one pill makes you small

And the ones that mother gives you

Don't do anything at all

Go ask Alice

When she's ten feet tall

 

And if you go chasing rabbits

And you know you're going to fall

Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar

Has given you the call

Call Alice

When she was just small

 

When the men on the chessboard

Get up and tell you where to go

And you've just had some kind of mushroom

And your mind is moving low

Go ask Alice

I think she'll know

 

When logic and proportion

Have fallen sloppy dead

And the White Knight is talking backwards

And the Red Queen's off with her head

Remember what the dormouse said

Feed your head

MADD

MADD, Madd & MaDD (pronounced mad)

(1) The acronym (as MADD) for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a non-profit education and lobbying operation founded in California in 1982 with a remit to campaign against driving while drink or drug-affected.

(2) The acronym (as MADD) for Myoadenylate deaminase deficiency or Adenosine monophosphate deaminase.

(3) The acronym (as MADD) for multiple acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (known also as the genetic disorder Glutaric acidemia type 2).

(4) In computing (as MADD), the acronym for Multiple-Antenna Differential Decoding (a technique used in wireless comms using multiple antennas for both transmit & receive which improves performance by exploiting spatial diversity & multipath propagation of the wireless channel).

(5) As the gene MADD (or MAP kinase), an activating death domain protein.

(6) As Madd, the fruit of Saba senegalensis (a fruit-producing plant of the Apocynaceae family, native to the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa).

(7) As madd, a clipping of maddah (from the From Arabic مَدَّة (madda)), the English form of the Arabic diacritic (a distinguishing mark applied to a letter or character) used in both the Arabic & Persian.

(8) The acronym (as MaDD), Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder.

(9) The acronym (as MADD), for mutually assured digital destruction: a theory of cyber-warfare whereby each participant demonstrates to the other their capacity to inflict equal or more severe damage in retaliation, thereby deterring a cyber-attack (based on the earlier MAD (mutually assured destruction), a description of nuclear warfare deterrence).

From AD to MAD, 1962-1965

The period between the addition of nuclear weapons to the US arsenal in 1945 and 1949 when the USSR detonated their first atomic bomb was unique, a brief anomaly in the history of great-power conflict.  It's possible to find periods in history when one power has possessed an overwhelming preponderance of military strength that would have enabled them easily to defeat any enemy or possible coalition but never was the imbalance of force so asymmetric as it was between 1945-1949.   Once both the US and USSR possessed strategic nuclear arsenals, the underlying metric of Cold War became the two sides sitting in their bunkers counting warheads and the centrality of that lasted as long as the bombs were gravity devices delivered by aircraft which needed to get to a point above the target.  At this point, the military’s view was that nuclear war was possible and the only deterrent was to maintain a creditable threat of retaliation and, still in the age of the “bomber will always get through” doctrine, both sides literally kept squadrons of nuclear-armed bombers in the air 24/7.  Once ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and (especially) submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBMs) were deployed, the calculation of nuclear war changed from damage assessment to an acknowledgement that, in the worse case scenarios made possible by the preservation of large-scale second-strike retaliatory capacity, although the "total mutual annihilation" of the popular imagination was never likely, the damage inflicted would have been many times worse and more extensive than in any previous conflict and, although the climatarian implications weren't at the time well-understood, the consequences would have been global and lasted to one degree or another for centuries.

It was thus politically and technologically deterministic that the idea of mutually assured destruction (MAD) would evolve and it was a modification of a deterrence doctrine known as AD (assured destruction) which appeared in Pentagon documents as early as 1962.  AD was intended as a way to deter the USSR from staging a first-strike against the US, the notion being that the engineering and geographical deployment of the US's retaliatory capacity was such that whatever was achieved by a Soviet attack, their territory would suffer something much worse.  To the Pentagon planners in their bunker, the internal logic of AD was compelling and was coined as a description of the prevailing situation rather than a theoretical doctrine.  To the general population, it obviously meant MAD (mutually assured destruction) and while as a doctrine of deterrence, the metrics remained the same, after 1966 when the term gained currency, it began to be used as an argument against the mere possession of nuclear arsenals, the paradox being the same acronym was also used to underpin the standard explanation of the structural reason nuclear warfare was avoided.  Just as paradoxically, while serving to prevent their use, MAD also fueled the arms race because the stalemate created its own inertia and it would be almost a decade before the cost and absurdity of maintaining the huge number of useless warheads was addressed.  MAD probably also contributed to both sides indulging in conflict by proxy, supporting wars and political movements which served as surrogate battles made too dangerous by the implications of MAD to be contested between the two big protagonists.

Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder

There are those who criticize the existence of MADD (Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder) as an example of the trend to “medicalize” aspects of human behaviour which have for millennia been regarded as “normal”, the implication being the sudden creation of a cohort of customers for psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry, the suspicion being MADD is of such interest to the medical-industrial complex because the catchment is of the “worried well”, those with sufficient disposable income to make the condition worthwhile, the poor too busy working to ensure food and shelter for their families for there to be much time to daydream.

Still, the consequences of MADD are known to be real and while daydreaming is a common and untroubling experience for many, in cases where it’s intrusive and frequent, it can cause real problems with everyday activities such as study or employment as well as being genuinely dangerous if associated with tasks such as driving or the use of heavy machinery.  The condition was first defined by Professor Eli Somer (b 1951; a former President of both the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) and the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation (ESTD)) who described one manifestation as possibly an “escape or coping mechanism from trauma or abuse”, noting it may “involve long periods of structured fantasy”.  Specific research into MADD has been limited but small-scale studies have found some similarities to behavioral addictions, the commonality being a compulsion to engage in activities despite negative impacts on a person’s mental or physical health or ability to function various aspects of life. 

Despite the suggestion of similarities to diagnosable conditions, latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR, 2022) did not add an entry for MADD and the debate among those in the profession interested in the matter is between those arguing it represents an unidentified clinical syndrome which demands a specific diagnosis and those who think either it fits within the rubric of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or is a dissociative condition.  Accordingly, in the absence of formal recognition of MADD, while a psychiatrist may decline to acknowledge the condition as a specific syndrome, some may assess the described symptoms and choose to prescribe the drugs used to treat anxiety or OCD or refer the patient to sessions of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) or the mysterious mindfulness meditation.

Mutually Assured Digital Destruction

Authors in 2021 suggested MADD (mutually assured digital destruction) as the term to describe the strategic stalemate achieved by the major powers infecting each other’s critical (civilian & military) digital infrastructure with crippleware, logic-bombs and other latent tools of control or destruction.  The core the idea was based on old notion of “the bomber always gets through”, a recognition it’s neither possible to protect these systems from infiltration nor clean up what’s likely there and still undiscovered.  So, rather than being entirely covert, MADD instead makes clear to the other side its systems are also infected and there will be retaliation in kind to any cyber attack with consequences perhaps even worse than any suffered in the first strike.  Like the nuclear submarines with their multiple SLBMs silently which cruise the world's oceans, the strategic charm of the latent penetration of digital environments is that detection of all such devices is currently impossible; one knows they (and their SLMBs) are somewhere in firing range but not exactly where.  Oceans are big places but so is analogously is the digital environment and a threat may be in the hardware, software or the mysterious middleware and sometimes a treat can actually be observed yet not understood as such.

For individuals, groups and corporations, there's also the lure of unilateral destruction, something quite common in the social media age.  For a variety of reasons, an individual may choose to "delete" their history of postings and while it's true this means what once was viewable no longer is, it does not mean one's thoughts and images are "forever gone" in the sense one can use the phrase as one watches one's diary burn.  That was possible (with the right techniques or a power drill) when a PC sat on one's desk and was connected to nothing beyond but as soon as a connection with a network (most obviously the internet) is made and data is transferred, whatever is sent is in some sense "in the wild".  That was always true but in the modern age it's now effectively impossible to know where one's data may exist, such are the number of "pass-through" devices which may exist between sender and receiver.  On the internet, even if the path of the data packets can be traced and each device identified, there is no way to know where things have been copied (backup tapes, replica servers et al) and that's even before one wonders what copies one's followers have taken.  There may often be good reasons to curate one's social media presence to the point of deletion but that shouldn't be thought of as destruction.

Dragoon

Dragoon (pronounced druh-goon)

(1) In historic weaponry, a synonym of dragon (a type of musket with a short, large-calibre barrel and a flared muzzle), the name based on the way the mythical dragons belched fire.

(2) A European cavalryman of a heavily armed troop (mostly obsolete although some historic associations remain in military formations); historically an infantryman armed with a dragoon musket who fought both on horseback and on foot.

(3) A member of a military unit with such traditions (now mostly restricted to the British Army).

(4) A domestic fancy pigeon (originally a cross between a horseman and a tumbler and sometimes with initial capital).

(5) In the history of France, to subject a Huguenot to the dragonnades (a late seventeenth century policy instituted by Louis XIV of France to intimidate Protestant Huguenots to convert to Roman Catholicism by billeting dragoons in their homes to abuse them and destroy or steal their possessions).

(6) By extension, a man with a fierce or unrefined manner (historically thought “dragoon-like”) (now rare).

(7) By extension, (usually as “dragoon into”) to force (someone) into doing something through harassment and intimidation; to coerce; to force by oppressive measures.

(8) Following the use in France, the practice of forcing civilians into military service (applied particularly to Royal Navy press-gangs until 1815 although it was not an unknown form of “recruitment” by the army).

1615-1625 (some sources noting it appeared in military firearms manuals as early as 1804 but general use was at least a decade hence): From the French dragon (dragon (mythological creature); type of cavalry soldier, dragoon), the latter referring to a soldier armed with the firearm of the same name although in the context of ballistics the word dragoon was originally applied to the pistol hammer (the use based on the shape).  The ultimate source was the Latin dracō (dragon; kind of serpent or snake), from the Ancient Greek δρᾰ́κων (drákōn) which may have been from δέρκομαι (dérkomai) (to see, clearly to see (in the sense of something staring)), from the primitive Indo-European derḱ- (to see).  The verb use was derived from the noun, from the French dragooner, originally in the sense of “to force someone into doing something; to coerce; to torment (also “to torment one’s self)), the construct being dragon + -er (the suffix forming infinitives of first-conjugation verbs).  Dragoon is a noun & verb, dragooner dragoonage, dragoonable & dragonnade are nouns and dragooned & dragooning are verbs; the noun plural is dragoons.  The adjectives dragonish & dragoonesque are non-standard.

Louis XIV, the Huguenots and dragoonnades

The noun use of “dragoon” describing both musket and the soldiers who carried them had been in use for some six decades before becoming a verb.  In 1685, Louis XIV (1638–1715; le Roi Soleil (the Sun King), King of France 1643-1715) issued the Edict of Nantes which revoked his grandfathers decree of toleration which had granted social and economic rights to the minority Huguenot population, something which had far-reaching adverse consequences for France but which was at the time widely popular and still so judging the fawning obituaries which appeared thirty years later at the king’s funeral.  More realistic was Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778), a fair judge of the rule of the Bourbons who called the edict: “…one of the greatest calamities of France…” with consequences “…wholly contrary to the purpose in view.”

British Army Dragoons always had famously good hats, sometimes in designer colors.

The enmity towards the Huguenots (then some 10% of the French population) was based on factors familiar in pogroms over the centuries: a hard-working minority whose success manifested in their wealth and domination of some business sectors.  Religious intolerance was of course also an element and with pro-Catholic winds blowing in England, Louis decided it was time for him to assert himself in his tiresome squabble with Innocent XI (1611-1689; pope 1676-1689) and “...show himself the champion of orthodoxy, reaffirming the ancient French title of ‘Most Christian King’”.  The renewed persecution had actually begun a few years earlier with church services banned, denominational schools closed and the increasing exclusion from economic activity enforced but just as similar moves by the Nazis against the Jews of Germany would assume their own social inertia and lead to Kristallnacht (literally "crystal night" but better remembered as the "Night of Broken Glass" on 9–10 November 1938) the crackdown in seventeenth century France engendered its own increasing violent brutality.

British Army Corporal of the 2nd Dragoons in full-dress uniform with bearskin hat, circa 1900.

With the personal approval of the king himself, the policy of dragoonnades (the force billeting of Dragoons with Huguenot families) was adopted which would have been bad enough but the Dragoons, an anyway rough and undisciplined crew, were encouraged to behave as viciously as they wished.  Needing little encouragement, assault, rape and vandalism was soon widespread, the point of the policy being (1) to force the Huguenots to leave the country or (1) accept the offer of exemption from billeting on condition of a family converting to Catholicism.  Under the circumstances, few Catholics regarded such conversions as sincere and on doctrinal grounds resented the approach because it implicated the Church in what could be called only sacrilege and perjury.  In 1685, in a masterpiece of Bourbon logic, after hearing of the conversion of some 65,000 over three days in one province alone, Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes on the grounds it was superfluous because there were “no more Huguenots”.

Keeping alive the traditions of the Dragoons’ hats: Lindsay Lohan in Falling for Christmas (Netflix, 2022).

Quite how many Huguenot souls emigrated to Protestant or other more tolerant lands isn’t known but no estimate places the number at less than 100,000.  Those who departed took with them their skills as engineers, artisans, builders, glass makers, shipwrights and a host of other trades, all of which would be now be classified as “dual use” in the sense that they could be applied to civilian or military purposes.  Additionally, some of those leaving were merchants, bookkeepers, lawyers, doctors and other with internationally sought-after skills, the multiplier effect being that the loss to the French economy was to the gain of her enemies including England, Holland and the German states.  In England particularly, the Royal Navy gained much in metallurgy and ship-building skills and as an aside, the arrival of the Huguenots there lead directly to the country switching from wood to coal as a source of thermal energy because, as the new arrivals set up their forges, furnaces and kilns, the depletion of the forests was soon recognized as a threat.  The coal powered economy would provide a platform on which the industrial revolution was built and was the basis of the energy supply for three centuries.

Historians have differed on the extent of the damage all this caused the French economy and military although there does seem to be a consensus most of the early estimates were exaggerated (especially those published in English) but losses to both there were and, as earlier mentioned, this was suffered in conjunction with those of her enemies being afforced.  Of the political damage however there is no doubt, the persecution of the Huguenots assisting the formation of a Protestant coalition between several German states & principalities, Holland and those Huguenots who remained in France, mostly in isolated or mountainous regions, something which some historians maintain was an important component in the forces which over a century would accumulate until unleashed in the violence of the French Revolution (1789).