Pylon

Pylon (pronounced pahy-lon)

(1) A marking post or tower for guiding aviators, much used in air-racing to mark turning points in a a prescribed course of flight.

(2) A relatively tall structure at the side of a gate, bridge, or avenue, marking an entrance or approach.

(3) A monumental tower forming the entrance to an ancient Egyptian temple, consisting either of a pair of tall quadrilateral masonry masses with sloping sides and a doorway between them or of one such mass pierced with a doorway.

(4) In electricity transmission, a steel tower or mast carrying high-tension lines, telephone wires, or other cables and lines (usually as power-pylon, electricity pylon or transmission tower).

(5) In architecture (1) a tall, tower-like structure (usually of steel or concrete) from which cables are strung to support other structures and (2) a lighting mast; a freestanding support for floodlights.

(6) In aeronautics, a streamlined, finlike structure used to attach engines, auxiliary fuel tanks, bombs, etc to an aircraft wing or fuselage.

(7) In modeling, as “pylon shot”, a pose in which a model stands with arms raised or extended outwards, resembling an electricity pylon.

(8) An alternative name for an obelisk.

(9) In aviation, a starting derrick for an aircraft (obsolete) and a tethering point for an dirigible (airship).

(10) In American football (gridiron), an orange marker designating one of the four corners of the field’s end zones.

(11) In the slang of artificial limb makers (1) a temporary artificial leg and (2) a rigid prosthesis for the lower leg.

(12) In literature, as "Pylon Poet" (usually in the plural as “the Pylons”), a group of British poets who during the 1930s included in their work many references to new & newish mechanical devices and other technological developments.

(13) In slang, a traffic cone.

1823: A learned borrowing from Ancient Greek πυλών (pulṓn; pylṓn) (gateway; gate tower), from pylē (gate, wing of a pair of double gates; an entrance, entrance into a country; mountain pass; narrow strait of water) of unknown origin but etymologists suspect it may be a technical term (from architecture or construction) from another language.  The first use was in archaeology to describe a “gateway to an Egyptian temple”, a direct adaptation of the original Greek.  In Western architecture, it’s believed the first “modern” pylons were the tall, upright structures installed at aerodromes to guide aviators and it was the appearance of these things which inspired the later use as “power pylon” (steel tower for high-tension wires over distance, use noted since 1923) and the word spread to any number of similar looking devices (even those on a small scale such as traffic cones).  Until then, in engineering and architecture, tall structures used to carry cables or in some way provide support (or even be mere decorative) were described as a “tower” or “obelisk” (such use continuing).  Pylon is a noun and pylonless, pylonlike, pylonesque & pylonish are adjectives; the noun plural is pylons.  Despite the fondness in engineering for such forms to emerge, the verbs pyloned & pyloning seem never to have been coined.

The Ancient Greek πυλών (pulṓn; pylṓn) was used of the grand architecture seen in the entrances to temples and the usual word for doors (and gates) rather more modest was θύρα (thýra).  It was a feminine noun and appears in various forms depending on the grammatical case (θύρα (nominative singular; a door), θύρας (genitive singular; of a door) & θύραι (nominative plural; doors).  Etymologists believe θύρα may have undergone phonological changes, adapting to Greek morphology and pronunciation patterns, while retaining its fundamental meaning tied to entryways or openings.  The word was from the primitive Indo-European dhur or dhwer (door; gateway) which was the source also of the Latin foris (door, entrance), the Sanskrit dvā́r (door, gate), the Old English duru (door) and the Old Norse dyrr (door).  Because of their functional role and symbolism as thresholds (ie transition, entry, protection), the door played a prominent part in linguistic as well as architectural evolution.

Temple of Isis, first pylon, north-eastern view.

The Ancient Greek πυλών (pulṓn; pylṓn) was the classical term for an Egyptian ceremonial gateway (bekhenet) used in temples from at least the Middle Kingdom to the Roman period (circa 2040 BC–AD 395) and anthropologists have concluded the intent was to symbolize the horizon.  The basic structure of a pylon consisted of two massive towers of rubble-filled masonry tapering upwards, surmounted by a cornice and linked in the centre by an elaborate doorway.  Ancient depictions of pylons show that the deep vertical recesses visible along the facades of surviving examples were intended for the mounting of flag staffs.

An “anchor pylon” is the one which forms the endpoint of a high-voltage and differs from other pylons in that it uses horizontal insulators, necessary when interfacing with other modes of power transmission and (owing to the inflexibility of the conductors), when significantly altering the direction of the pylon chain.  In large-scale display advertizing, a “pylon sign” is a tall sign supported by one or more poles and in the original industry jargon was something in what would now be called “portrait mode”; a sign in “landscape mode” being a “billboard”.  Not surprisingly, there are a number of mountains known as “Pylon Peak”.  The task of naming such geological features is part of the field of toponymy (in semantics the lexicological study of place names(a branch of onomastics)) and a specialist in such things is known as a toponymist.  The term toponomy was later borrowed by medicine where it was used of the nomenclature of anatomical regions. In aviation, the “pylon turn” is a flight maneuver in which an aircraft banks into a circular turn around a fixed point on the ground.

The Ancient Greek πυλών (pulṓn; pylṓn) was used of the grand architecture seen in the entrances to temples and the usual word for doors (and gates) rather more modest was θύρα (thýra).  It was a feminine noun and appears in various forms depending on the grammatical case (θύρα (nominative singular; a door), θύρας (genitive singular; of a door) & θύραι (nominative plural; doors).  Etymologists believe θύρα may have undergone phonological changes, adapting to Greek morphology and pronunciation patterns, while retaining its fundamental meaning tied to entryways or openings.  The word was from the primitive Indo-European dhur or dhwer (door; gateway) which was the source also of the Latin foris (door, entrance), the Sanskrit dvā́r (door, gate), the Old English duru (door) and the Old Norse dyrr (door).  Because of their functional role and symbolism as thresholds (ie transition, entry, protection), the door played a prominent part in linguistic as well as architectural evolution.

The plyon pose: Lindsay Lohan demonstrates some variations.

In modeling, the “pylon shot” is used to describe the pose in which a model stands with arms raised or extended outwards, resembling (at least vaguely) an electricity pylon, the appearance of which is anthropomorphic.  There are practical benefits for designers in that raising the arms permits a photographer to include more of a garment in the frame and this can be significant if there’s detailing which are at least partially concealed with the arms in their usual position.  Topless models also adopt variations of the pose because the anatomical affect of raising the arms also lifts and to some extent re-shapes the breasts, lending them temporarily a higher, a more pleasing aspect.

The Pylons

The so-called “pylon poets” (referred to usually as “the Pylons”) were a group who dominated British poetry during the 1930s, a time when the form assumed a greater cultural and intellectual significance than today.  The best known (and certainly among the most prolific) of the Pylons were Louis MacNeice (1907–1963), Stephen Spender (1909–1995), WH Auden (1907-1973) and Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–1972), their names sometimes conflated as “MacSpaunday”.  It was Spender’s poem The Pylons which inspired the nickname and it referenced the frequent references to the images of “industrial modernity”, drawn from new(ish) technology and the machinery of factories.  The intrusion of novel machinery and technology into a variety of fields is not unusual; in the age of steam the devices were used as similes when speculating about the operation of the human brain, just as the terminology of computers came to be used when the lexicon entered the public imagination.  Their method underlying the output of the pylons was influenced by the metaphysical poetry of John Donne (circa 1571-1631) whose use of “scientific” imagery was much admired by TS Eliot (1888–1965), the work of whom was acknowledged as influential by both Auden and Spender.  However, the 1930s were the years of the Great Depression and probably their most fertile source was Marxist materialism although, of the Pylons, historians tend to regard only Day-Lewis as one of the “useful idiots”.

The Pylons (1933) by Stephen Spender.

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages
 
Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.
 
The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.
 
But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.
 
This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.

The term “useful idiot” is from political science and so associated with Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924; first leader of Soviet Russia 1917-1922 & USSR 1922-1924) that it's attributed to him but there's no evidence he ever spoke or wrote the words.  It became popular during the Cold War to describe pro-communist intellectuals and apologists in the West, the (probably retrospective) association with Lenin probably because had the useful idiots actually assisted achieving a communist revolution there, their usefulness outlived, he'd likely have had at least some of them shot as "trouble-makers".  Although it took many Western intellectuals decades to recant (some never quite managed) their support for the Soviet Union, the watershed was probably Comrade Khrushchev's (1894–1971; Soviet leader 1953-1964)  so called "Secret Speech" (On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences) to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956 in which he provided a detailed critique of the rule of comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953), especially the bloody purges of the late 1930s.

Some had however already refused to deny what had become obvious to all but avid denialists, and in 1949 a contribution by Spender appeared in The God that Failed, a collection of six essays in which the writers lay bare their sense of betrayal and disillusionment with communism because of the totalitarian state forged by comrade Stalin which was in so many ways just another form of fascism.  Spender was associated with the intellectual wing of left-wing politics during the 1930s and was briefly a member of the Communist Party but his attraction seems to have been motivated mostly by the Soviet Union’s promises of equality and its anti-fascist stance.  He quickly became disillusioned with the Soviet state, unable to reconcile its authoritarianism with his personal beliefs in freedom and individual rights, a critical stance differentiated him from figures like George Bernard Shaw (GBS; 1856-1950) and Sidney (1859–1947) & Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), the latter couple for some time definitely useful idiots.

The sort of sights which would have inspired Spender’s line “Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret”.

Louis MacNeice, was politically engaged during the 1930s but that was hardly something unusual among writers & intellectuals during that troubled decade.  Among the pylons he seems to have been the most sceptical about the tenets of communism and the nature of comrade Stalin’s state and no historians seem every to have listed him among the useful idiots, his views of the left as critical and nuanced as they were of the right.  What he most objected to was the tendency among idealistic & politically committed intellectuals to engage in a kind of reductionism which allowed them to present simplistic solutions to complex problems in a form which was little more than propaganda, a critique he explored in his poem Autumn Journal (1939) captures his doubts about political certainty and his disillusionment with simplistic solutions to complex problems.  Auden certainly wasn’t a “useful idiot” and while politically engaged and associated with several leftist intellectual circles during the 1930s, his sympathy for Marxism and anti-fascist causes were really not far removed from those share by even some mainstream figures and a capacity for self-reflection never deserted him.  Much was made of the time he spent in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1940) but he went as an observer and a propagandist rather than a combatant and what he saw made his disillusioned with the ideological rigidity and in-fighting among leftist factions and he made no secret of his distaste for Stalinist communists.  By the early 1940s, he was distancing himself from Marxism, the process much accelerated by his re-embrace of Christianity where, at least debatably, he discharged another form of useful idiocy, his disapproval of collectivist ideologies apparently not extending to the Church of England.

Profiles of some electricity pylons.  There a literally dozens of variations, the designs dictated by factors such as the ground environment, proximity to people, voltage requirements, weight to be carried, economics, expected climatic conditions and a myriad of other specifics.

Of the Pylons, Cecil Day-Lewis (who served as Poet Laureate of the UK 1968-1972) had the most active period engagement with communism and Marxist ideals and he was for a time politically aligned with the Soviet Union; it was a genuine ideological commitment.  During the 1930s, the true nature of the Soviet Union wasn’t generally known (or accepted) in the West and Day-Lewis admired the Soviet Union as an experiment in social and economic equality which he championed and it wasn’t until late in the decade he realized the ideals he had embraced had been betrayed; it was Great Purge and the Moscow Show-Trials which triggered his final disillusionment.  Day-Lewis later acknowledged the naivety and moral compromises of his earlier stance and came to argue poetry and art should not be subordinated to political ideology, a view formed by his understanding of the implications of propagandistic pieces of his younger years being exactly that.

Ferrule

Ferrule (pronounced fer-uhl or fer-ool)

(1) A ring or cap, traditionally of metal, put around the end of a post, cane, or the like, to prevent splitting.

(2) A short (still usually metal) sleeve for strengthening a tool handle at the end holding the tool.

(3) In engineering, a bushing or adapter holding the end of a tube and inserted into a hole in a plate in order to make a tight fit, used in boilers, condensers etc.

(4) In engineering, a bush, gland, small length of tube etc, especially one used for making a joint.

(5) In electrical engineering, a band crimped as part of a cable terminal.

(6) In bladesmithing, a fitting (often of brass) where the blade joins to the handle.

(7) A short ring for reinforcing or decreasing the interior diameter of the end of a tube.

(8) A short plumbing fitting, covered at its outer end and caulked or otherwise fixed to a branch from a pipe so that it can be removed to give access to the interior of the pipe.

(9) In angling, (1) either of two fittings on the end of a section of a sectional fishing rod, one fitting serving as a plug and the other as a socket for fastening the sections together or (2) one of two or more small rings spaced along the top of a casting rod to hold and guide the line.

(10) In mountaineering, the metal spike at the end of the shaft of an ice axe.

(11) In billiards, the plastic band attaching the tip to the cue.

(12) The pinched metal band which holds the bristles of a paintbrush.

(13) The pinched metal band which holds in place on the shaft the eraser of a pencil.

(14) To furnish or equip a device with a ferrule.

1605-1615: From the Middle English verel, virel, virole (ferrule; metal pivot on the end of an axle), altered under the influence of the Latin ferrum (iron), from the Old French virole (ferrule; collar), from the Latin viriola (little bracelet), diminutive of viria (bracelet worn by men) (influenced by the Latin ferrum (iron)), from the Gaulish, from the Proto-Celtic weiros (crooked) (which may be compared with the Middle Irish fiar (bent, crooked), the Welsh gŵyr and the Breton gwar (curved)), from the primitive Indo-European weyhros (threaded, turned, twisted), from weyh- (to turn, twist, weave).  The alternative spelling is ferule.  Ferrule is a noun and ferruled is a verb & adjective and ferruling is a verb; the noun plural is ferrules.

Comrade Stalin (left), diagram of an ice axe (centre) and comrade Trotsky (right).

Comrade Leon Trotsky (1879-1940; founder of the Fourth International) in The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1936) had a feeling for the political phrase and labelled the state created by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) a “Soviet Thermidor” because although Tsarist era capitalism wasn’t re-created (a la the monarchy in France not being restored in the 1790s), the combination of a bureaucracy supporting a personality cult (even if the latter was in 1936 still somewhat disguised) was “a counterrevolutionary regression” which betrayed what was achieved by comrade Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924; head of government of Russia or Soviet Union 1917-1924).  The phrase caught the imagination of many, notably those in the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (The POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), a non-communist Marxist party (a surprisingly populated fork of left-wing thought) which comrade Stalin correctly associated with Trotskyism.  The POUM was highly productive in thought but drifted increasingly far from the moorings of political reality although rhetoric which included polemics like “Stalinist Thermidorians have established in Russia the bureaucratic regime of a poisoned dictator.”  Agents of the Narodný komissariat vnutrennih del (NKVD, The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs and one of the many predecessors to the KGB), answerable only to comrade Stalin, killed dozens of POUM’s Central Committee which ended the organization’s effectiveness for a generation. In his prodigious memory, comrade Stalin filed away annoying phrases and in 1940 he had comrade Trotsky murdered in Mexico.  The murder weapon was an ice-axe.  Ferrules are used on ice-axes as to absorb and distribute stresses, reducing the tendency of the timber handles to split or fragment.

The ferrule also played a role in the assassination by the Bulgarian Secret Service of comrade Georgi Ivanov Markov (1929–1978), a troublesome dissident writer who had annoyed the communist regime in the People's Republic of Bulgaria.  In 1969, comrade Markov defected to the West and gained political asylum in England where, based in London, he worked as a journalist and broadcaster for the BBC World Service, the US-funded Radio Free Europe and West Germany's Deutsche Welle.  On these platforms, his critique of the ruling party in Sofia became increasingly vitriolic which-obviously, annoyed the politburo even more.  Accordingly, they arranged his murder and the weapon was that ubiquitous feature of London life: the umbrella.

Replica of “Umbrella gun” produced by the KGB’s Moscow laboratory, 1978, International museum of spying.

The Soviet Union’s (USSR) KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), which translates literally at the “Committee for State Security” is better understood as “political secret police”.  It was the last of an alphabet-soup of similar agencies (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, SMERSH & MGB) which, building on the models of the many secret police forces maintained by Tsarist Russia (1547-1917), was responsible for the USSR’s internal security and beyond its borders, espionage, counter espionage and a range of activities conducted in support of Soviet foreign policy (including that not disclosed and that sometimes denied).  In post-Soviet Russia, the KGB evolved into the Federal Security Service (FSB), comrade Vladimir Putin (b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999) honing his skills in the institution he apparently joined in 1975.

Mean Girls themed pencils, the ferrule securing the eraser.

The “umbrella gun” used a hollow ferrule which housed a tiny (1.7 mm (.067 inch) in diameter), discharge triggered by a button on the handle used usually to raise the canopy.  Spring-loaded and powered from a small cylinder of compressed air, the pellet was projected at sufficient velocity to penetrate the victim’s clothing & skin and as soon as it became lodged, it began to warm; that was significant because a substance covering two holes in the pellet began melt at body temperature, releasing the poison.  It’s never been clear what the poison was but most authorities suspect it was probably Ricin, a highly potent toxin produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant.

Mourn

Mourn (pronounced mawrn or mohrn)

(1) To grieve or lament for the dead.

(2) To show the conventional or usual signs of sorrow over a person's death.

(3) To feel or express sorrow or grief over (misfortune, loss, or anything regretted); to deplore (now restricted mostly to literary or poetic use).

(4) To utter in a sorrowful manner.

(5) To observe the customs of mourning, as by wearing black garments (sables).

(6) In jousting, a ring fitted upon the head of a lance to prevent wounding an adversary in tilting (a charging with a lance).

Pre 900: From the Middle English mournen & mornen, from the Old English murnan (to feel or express sorrow, grief, or regret; bemoan, long after and also “be anxious about, be careful” (past tense: mearn, past participle: murnen), from the Proto-Germanic murnaną & murnan (sorrowfully to remember)  It was cognate with the Old High German mornēn (to be troubled), the Old Norse morna (to pine away. also “to dawn (become morning)”), the Greek mermeros (worried), the Gothic maurnan (to grieve) and the French morne (gloomy).  The proto-Germanic was the source also of the Old Saxon mornon and was probably a suffixed form of the primitive Indo-European root mer & smer- (to remember).  The use to mean “to lament the death of” emerged late in the thirteenth century while the sense of “display the conventional appearance of grieving for a period following the death of someone” was in use by the 1520s.  The noun mourning (feeling or expression of sorrow, sadness, or grief) was in use in the late twelfth century and was from the Old English murnung (complaint, grief, act of lamenting), a verbal noun from the verb mourn.  The meaning “customary dress or garment worn by mourners” dates from the 1650s although mourning habit was in use in the late fourteenth century.  The North American mourning dove was named in 1820 and was so-called because of its soulful call.  The adjective mournful (expressing sorrow; oppressed with grief) came into use in the early 1600s.  The spelling morne was used during the fourteenth & fifteenth centuries.  Mourn & mourned are verbs, mourning is a noun & verb, mourner & mournfulness are nouns, mournful is an adjective and mournfully is an adverb; the noun plural is mourners.

Comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953, far right) as chief mourner, carrying the coffin of comrade Sergei Kirov (1886–1934; Russian Bolshevik revolutionary & Soviet politician), Moscow 6 December 1934.

Although no documentary evidence has ever been found, most historians believe the execution was approved by comrade Stalin and in a nice touch, within a month, Kirov's assassins were convicted in a show trial and executed.  As the death toll from the purges of the 1930s accelerated, comrade Stalin stopped attending funerals; he just wouldn't have ben able to find the time.  Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) seems not to have appeared as a mourner at the funerals of any of those he’d ordered killed but he certainly issued statements mourning their passing.  Less ominously, UK Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 1830–1903; UK Prime Minister for thirteen years variously 1885-1902) remarked of the long, sad decline of Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895) that the deceased had proved to be “chief mourner at his own protracted funeral”.

Political mourning is a special class of lament and when some politicians are buried, their erstwhile colleagues are among the mourners only because such events are a nice photo-opportunity and a useful place for a bit of networking.  The Australian politician Pat Kennelly (1900–1981; senator for Victoria (Australian Labor Party (ALP)) 1953-1971) (who had a chronic stutter) once attended the funeral of a member of parliament (MP).  It was well-attended event with many mourners and later he was heard to observe: “It w-w-w-a-as a v-v—very s-s-sa-ad occasion.  H-h-his w-w-wi-wife and f-f-f-family were there.  There was not a d-d-dry eye in the ce-ce-cemetery.  E-e-everyone w-a-was in t-t-t-tears.  As I w-w-w-watched them f-f-file out of th-th-the ce-ce-cemetery I th-th-thought h-h-how s-s—sad.  Th-th-three h-h—hundred m-m-mourners with a s-s-single th-th-thought: ‘Wh-h-ho’s g-g-oing to w-w-win the pre-pre-pre-selection f-f-for his s-s-seat?’”

Potential gig: Lindsay Lohan in mourning garments (sables), Sohu Fashion Achievement Awards Ceremony, Shanghai, China, January, 2014.  Acting is of course a good background for a professional mourner and the career part is sometimes available to even the well-known because their presence at a funeral would be an indicator of the wealth of the deceased.

Culturally, the mourners at one’s funeral can matter because their measure in both quantity & quality greatly can influence how one is remembered and to some (and certainly their surviving friends & family), greatly that matters.  While it’s true that once one is dead, that’s it, the memory others have of one is affected by whether one drank oneself to death, was struck by a meteorite or murdered by the Freemasons and the spectacle of one’s funeral also leaves a lasting impression.  A funeral with a scant few mourners presumably says much about the life of the deceased but for those facing that, there’s the ancient tradition of the professional mourners (known in some places as moirologists, sobbers, wailers, or criers.  In South Africa, those after greater drama can hire someone hysterically to cry and threaten to jump into the grave to join the departed forever wherever they’re going (it’s said this is an “extra-cost” service).

There is reference in both the Old and New Testaments to the profession: In 2 Samuel 14 it was recorded: “…and fetched thence a wise woman, and said unto her, I pray thee, feign thyself to be a mourner, and put on now mourning apparel, and anoint not thyself with oil but as a woman that had a long time mourned the dead.”  It does seem the practice of paid mourning began in China or the Middle East but it was a thing also in ancient Egypt and Rome.  In Egypt, it was actually a formalized part of the ritual (at least for the urban wealthy) in that part of the order of service required the family to pay for the provision of “two professional women mourners”, there as representatives of the psychopomps ( conductors of souls to the afterworld) Isis (inter alia the guardian deity who protected her followers in life and in the afterlife) and her sister Nephtys (protector of the deceased and guardian of the dead).

In Rome, it was more an expression of conspicuous consumption and the more rich or more illustrious a celebrity someone had been while walking the Earth, the better attended and more ostentatious would be the funeral procession, professional mourners making up usually a goodly proportion of the count.  They earned their money because the cultural expectation was they were expected to cry and wail, look distraught, tear at their hair and clothes and scratch their faces with their fingernails, the drawing of a little blood a sign of grief; the more professional mourners in a procession, the higher the implied status of the deceased.  Historically (and apparently cross-culturally), professional mourners have tended to be women because such displays of emotions from them were accepted in a way that wouldn’t have been accepted if exhibited by a man.

Snoot

Snoot (pronounced snoot)

(1) In slang, the nose (of humans, animals, geological formations, distant galaxies and anything else with a feature even vaguely “nose-like”).

(2) In slang, an alcoholic drink.

(3) In slang, a police officer (especially a plain-clothed detective, the use explained by the notion of police “sticking their noses into” things).

(4) In clothing, the peak of a cap.

(5) In photography and film production, a cylindrical or conical e-shaped fitment on a studio light to control the scene area illuminated by restricting spill light.

(6) In informal use, a snob; an elitist individual; one who looks down upon those “not of the better classes”.

(7) In linguistics, a language pedant or snob; one who practices linguistic elitism (and distinct from a “grammar Nazi”).

(8) In engineering, as “droop snoot”, a design in which the nose of a machine is lowered (temporarily or permanently) for reasons of visibility or to optimize aerodynamics.

(9) To behave disdainfully toward; to condescend to (usually as “snooty”).

(10) To apply a snoot attachment to a light.

1861: From the Scots snoot (a variation of snout (nose or projecting feature of an animal), from the Middle English snowte, from the Middle Dutch snute, ultimately from the Proto-West Germanic snūt, from the Proto-Germanic snūtaz, source also of the German Schnauze (the basis of schnauzer, a name for a type of dog) and it’s presumed the slang schnoz (a nose, especially if large) is probably related.  Snoot is a noun & verb, snootiness, snooter & snootful are nouns, snooting & snooted are verbs, snooty, snootier & snootiest are adjectives and snootily is an adverb; the noun plural is snoots.

Lindsay Lohan's snoot.

The noun snootful dates from 1885 and was a synonym of skinful (to have imbibed as much liquor as one could manage).  It was based on the use of snout to mean “an an alcoholic drink” whereas skinful was an allusion to the time when wine was transported in containers made from animal skin (ie in original use skinful meant “the container is full”).  The adjective snooty (proud, arrogant) was first noted as university student slang in 1918 and presumably was in some way related to the earlier snouty (insolent, overbearing) which was in use by at least 1857, doubtlessly on the basis of “looking down one's nose at someone or something”.  In dialectal or slang use a snout (in the sense of “nose” is not of necessity derogatory and in fields like engineering, cosmology, geography, geology, cosmology or zoology, it is merely descriptive.  However, when used as a slang term for a snob (a snooty person), the sense is almost always negative although there are some elitists who are proud of their snootiness.  Those who don’t approve of barbarisms such as country & western music sometimes make sure their snootiness is obvious but as a general principle it’s usually better just to ignore such things.  The adjective snooty is in much more common use than the noun snoot and it appears often with a modifier such as “a bit snooty”.  That may seem strange because one is either snooty about someone or something or one isn’t but there are degrees of severity with which one can allow ones snootiness to manifest (the comparative “snootier”, the superlative “snootiest”.

In engineering, “droop snout” is used to describe a design in which the nose of a machine is lowered (temporarily or permanently) for reasons of visibility or to optimize aerodynamics.  The term was apparently first used between engineers in the late 1950s while working on the first conceptual plans for the Anglo-French supersonic airliner which became the Concorde although the first known use in print dates from 1963 (“droop nose” appearing in the same era).  The idea wasn’t developed for use on the Concorde.  An experimental British supersonic test-bed with a droop-nose had flown as early 1954 and proved the utility of the concept by being the first jet aircraft to exceed 1000 mph (1600 km/h) in level flight, later raising the world speed record of to 1132 mph (1822 km/h), exceeding the previous mark by an impressive 310 mph (500 km/h).  In aviation, the basic idea of a sloping nose had been around for decades and one of the reasons some World War II (1939-1945) Allied fighter pilots found targeting easier in the Hawker Hurricane than the Supermarine Spitfire was the nose of the former noticeably tapered towards the front, greatly enhancing forward visibility.

How the Concorde's droop snoot was used.

On the Concorde, the droop snoot wasn’t a mere convenience.  The combination of the engineers slide-rules and wind tunnel testing had proved what the shape had to be to achieve the combination of speed and fuel economy (the latter an under-estimated aspect of the development process) but that shape also meant the pilots’ view was so obstructed during take-offs, landings and taxiing that safety was compromised.  The solution was the “droop nose” mechanism which included a moving transparent visor which retracted into the nose prior to being lowered.  At supersonic speeds, the temperatures are high and so are the stresses so much attention was devoted to “fail-safe” systems including the droop snoot because a structural failure at Mach 2 would potentially be catastrophic for the entire airframe (and obviously every soul on board).  Thus, the hydraulic systems controling the droop snoot’s movement was duplicated and, as a last resort, the pilots had access to a simple mechanical lever which would disengage the pins holding the structure in place, the apparatus afterwards gracefully (hopefully) descending into its lowered position by the simple operation of gravity.  Droop snoots appeared also on Soviet supersonic aircraft including the short-lived Tupolev Tu-144 (visually close to a Concorde clone) and the Sukhoi T-4 strategic bomber which never entered production.  Interestingly, the USAF’s (US Air Force) North American XB-70 Valkyrie (a Mach 3 experimental bomber) didn’t use a droop snoot because it was developed exclusively for high-altitude, high-speed strategic bombing missions and, being a military airplane, would only ever operate from large, controlled airbases where additional ground support systems (monitoring and guidance) negated the need for the mechanism.

1955 Ford Customline (left) and the 1967 “droop snoot” “Custaxie” (right), the construct being Cust(omline) + (Gal)axie, the unusual hybrid created by merging (some of) a 1955 Customline with a 427 cubic inch (7.0 litre) Ford Galaxie V8.  The bizarre machine won the 1967 New Zealand Allcomers (a wonderful concept) saloon car championship, the modifications to the nose reckoned to be the equivalent of an additional 40-50 horsepower.

At sub-supersonic speeds, throughout the 1960s race-cars proved the virtue of the droop snoot (though a fixed rather than a moveable structure.  While sometimes weight-reduction was also attained, overwhelmingly the advantage was in aerodynamics and the idea began to spread to road cars although it would be decades before the concept would no longer be visually too radical for general market acceptance.

1972 Vauxhall Firenza coupé promotional material for the Canadian launch, a market in which the car was a disaster (left) and 1975 High Performance (HP) Firenza "dropsnoot".  GM in South Africa actually made a good car out of the Firenza coupé, building 100 (for homologation purposes) with the 302 cubic inch (4.9 litre) V8 used in the original Z/28 Chevrolet Camaro.  In South Africa, they were sold as the "Chevrolet Firenza".  

In 1973, officially, Vauxhall called their new version of the Firenza coupé the “High Performance (HP) Firenza” but quickly the press, noting the Concorde (then still three years from entering commercial service), dubbed it the “droopsnoot”, the reference obviously to the distinctive nosecone designed for aerodynamic advantage.  The advantages were real in terms of performance and fuel consumption but Vauxhall had the misfortune to introduce the model just as the first oil crisis began which stunted demand for high-performance cars (BMW’s 2002 Turbo another victim) and triggered a sharp recession which was a prelude to that decade’s stagflation.  Vauxhall had planned a build of some 10,000 a year but in the difficult environment, a paltry 204 were built.

A Ford Escort Mark 2 in the 1977 Rally of Finland (left) and a 1976 Escort RS2000  with the droop snoot (right).

In 1976, Ford launched their own take on the droop snoot, the Mark 2 Escort RS2000 featuring a similar mechanical specification to that of the Mark 1 but with a distinctive nosecone.  Ford claimed there was an aerodynamic benefit in the new nose but it was really a styling exercise designed to stimulate interest because the Escort was the corporation’s platform for rallying rather than something used on high-speed circuits and it certainly achieved the desired results, the model proving popular.  Ford Australia even offered it with four doors as well as two although emission regulations meant the additional horsepower on offer in Europe was denied to those down under.  Interestingly, although the range’s high-performance flagship, the factory rally team didn’t use the droop snoot version, those in competition using the standard, square-fronted body.

Godox Pro Snoot S-Type Mount SN-05

Ornamentalism

Ornamentalism (pronounced awr-nuh-men-tl-iz-uhm)

(1) The desire or tendency to feature (usually what’s judged an excess of) ornamentation in design or execution (buildings, interiors, furnishings, cars, artwork etc).

(2) Any artistic or architectural style characterised by ornamentation.

(3) In the pre-revolutionary Russian literary tradition, an intricate, mannered and ostentatious prose style most prevalent in the early twentieth century.

(4) In politics, something implemented to lend the appearance of being something substantive while in reality changing little (synonymous usually with “window dressing”).

1860s: The construct was ornament + -al + -ism.  Ornament (an element of decoration; that which embellishes or adorns) was from the Old French ornement, from the Latin ornamentum (equipment, apparatus, furniture, trappings, adornment, embellishment), from ornāre, the present active infinitive of ornō (I equip, adorn). The verb was derived from the noun.  The -al suffix was from the Middle English -al, from the Latin adjectival suffix -ālis, ((the third-declension two-termination suffix (neuter -āle) used to form adjectives of relationship from nouns or numerals) or the French, Middle French and Old French –el & -al.  It was use to denote the sense "of or pertaining to", an adjectival suffix appended (most often to nouns) originally most frequently to words of Latin origin, but since used variously and also was used to form nouns, especially of verbal action.  The alternative form in English remains -ual (-all being obsolete).  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Ornamentalism & ornamentalist are nouns; the noun plural is ornamentalisms.

Lindsay Lohan mug-shot Christmas tree ornament.  Even the blurb: “…handmade photo-fresco Ornament made with a hybrid Gypsum based polymer that has the crystaline structure of ceramics…” has about it the whiff of ornamentalism.  In some places, this ornament may be thought blasphemous.

The sense of the noun & adjective ornamental (the comparative “more ornamental”, the superlative “most ornamental”) differ from those of ornamentalism in that the former is almost always either positive or neutral.  In the narrow technical sense something ornamental has “no purpose beyond the decorative” although many “ornamental devices” often either can or do fulfill some function, thus the nuanced phrase “merely ornamental” to distinguish the pure forms.  As a noun, “ornamentals” are plants, fish and such bred or maintained for no purpose other than their aesthetic value (although obviously they also often a commercial product).

The same positive or neutral senses tend to be enjoyed by the noun & verb “ornament” which means usually “a decorative element or embellishment” (such as a ceramic piece displayed but never used for its nominal purpose).  In music it means specifically “a musical flourish not needed by the melodic or harmonic line, but which serves to decorate that line” while in the rituals of Christianity, ornaments (in this context always in the plural) are objects (crosses, altar candles, incense and such) used in church services.  So in musical and liturgical use, ornaments enjoy a duality in that they are both decorative and fulfill some function.  That is reflected in biology when the word is used to describe a characteristic that has a decorative function (typically in order to attract a mate) such as the peacock’s marvelously extravagant tail feathers.

Ornamentalisn is best known in architecture and design and can been seen in styles ranging from the rococo ((Würzburg Residenz, Würzburg Bavaria, Germany; left), to the McMansion (Wildwood New Jersey, USA; right))

In literary theory, ornamentalism is used to describe a style of writing in the pre-revolutionary Russian literary tradition in which prose was constructed in an intricate, mannered and ostentatious way.  It’s most associated with the early twentieth century and the great exponents of the art were the now sadly neglected Andrei Bely (1880-1934), the symbolist Fyodor Sologub (1863–1927) and the monumentally bizarre Alexei Remizov (1877-1957); it was one of the many stylistic trends briefly to flourish within the Russian avant-garde early in the twentieth century.  It came to be of some interest to later deconstructionists and post-modernists (the latter debatably among the greatest (or worst, depending on one’s view) ornamentalists) because the writers focused not on the capacity of the text to convey narrative or ideological content but the aesthetic and formal qualities of language itself; they treated language as an autonomous artistic medium, focusing on its rhythm, sound, texture and visual patterns.  Even at the time, there was criticism that the style was one of self-indulgence and intended for an audience of fellow writers and those who followed developments in the avant-garde; what comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) would later condemn as “formalism”.

What the ornamentalists did was elevate the elements of language (words, sentences, paragraphs etc) to be artistic objects to be assembled and arranged, their interplay as important (some critics suggested more so) than any implied or discernible meaning, thus the fragmented, non-linear prose which was a complete rejection of traditional realism: the ornamentalists called their work “associative structures”, suggesting they really were the proto postmodernists.  In that sense, it wasn’t the textual devices (repetition, alliteration, assonance) or the unusual syntactic structures which was most striking but the often chaotic mixture of prose and poetry and the interpolation of visual and performative elements into the text.  Needless to say, there was much symbolism, presumably thought an adequate substitute for coherence.  Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was a noted critic of some of the more wilfully obscure ornamentalists but in his early Russian works and later English novels, their influence is detectable in his sensitivity to language's aesthetic possibilities.  While ornamentalism never really became a formal “school” of literature, it did exert a pull on Russian modernism and the possibility of elements like language operating as autonomous artistic objects.

In the US car industry peak ornamentalism happened between 1957-1962: 1960 Chrysler 300F (left), 1958 Buick Limited (centre) and 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz (right).

An earlier Russian literary tradition which was later sometimes a part of ornamentalism was skaz (from the sleazat (to tell)), a genre of folk tales consisting usually of an eye-witness account of an episode in peasant or provincial life, distinguished by the narrative being related by a fictitious narrator rather than the author directly.  What that method did was afford an author some latitude in the use of speech forms such as dialect, slang, mispronunciations and, not infrequently, neologisms, all of which lent the texts a naturalistic vigour and colourfulness which usually wouldn’t appear in a naturalistic piece, told in the first person.

A Spanish literary tradition in the same vein as ornamentalism was plateresco (from platero (silversmith), most associated with sixteenth century romances (with most of what that implies).  The English version of the terms was “plateresque” (silversmith-like) and literary criticism borrowed the idea from architecture & design where it describes the ornate styles popular in Spain during the sixteenth century, the word applied in the same way as rococo (which can be thought of as “high ornamentalism”).  The more familiar Spanish term was Gongorism which described the style of writing typified by that of the poet Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561-1627), famous for his baroque and affected ways with the language which featured a Latinistic vocabulary & syntax, intricate use of metaphors, much hyperbole, mythological allusions and a general weirdness of diction.  In fairness, Góngora did not always write in this manner but so distinctive were his narratives when he did that a minor industry of imitators followed including Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) and the English polymath Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) who had great fun while Gongorising.  Gongorism as practiced was a deliberate exaggeration of technique, unlike the earlier aureate (from the Latin aureatus (adorned or decorated with gold), the construct being aure(us) (golden, gilded) +‎ -ate (the adjective-forming suffix).  Arueate language (characterized by the use of (excessively) ornamental or grandiose terms) was most generously described as a sort of poetic diction and it was much in vogue for English and Scottish and poets of the fifteenth century, the works of whom are characterized by the used of ornate & ornamental language, often studded with vernacular coinages from Latin words.