Broad

Broad (pronounced brawd)

(1) Of great breadth.

(2) A quasi-standard expression of lineal measurement (from side to side).

(3) Of great extent; large; extensive, ample, spacious, vast.

(4) Wide-open; full (applied usually to daylight).

(5) Not limited or narrow; of extensive range or scope (applied to knowledge, experience etc).

(6) Liberal; tolerant (semi-institutionalized as one of the three factions of the Anglican Church (Low, broad & high).

(7) A generalized summary of something (often as broad outline); general rather than specific.

(8) Something made plain or clear; outspoken.

(9) Indelicate; indecent, vulgar (now rare).

(10) Of conversation, rough; countrified, unrefined.

(11) Unconfined; unbridled; unrestrained.

(12) In linguistics, of pronunciation, strongly dialectal; the most exaggerated of its type; consisting of a large number of speech sounds characteristic of a particular geographical area or social class.  As applied to Gaelic languages: velarized (ie palatalized).

(13) In phonetics, of a transcription, using one basic symbol to represent each phoneme; of or relating to a type of pronunciation transcription in which symbols correspond approximately to phonemes without taking account of allophonic variations.

(14) In (mostly historic US & Canadian) slang, a usually disparaging term for a women, often one that hints at promiscuity (but not prostitution); often in the plural.

(15) In film & television production, an incandescent or fluorescent lamp used as a general source of light in a studio.

(16) A type of wide-bladed battle sword.

(17) A gold coin of England and Scotland, minted first in 1656 and issued by James I and Charles I; equal to 20 shillings.

(18) As broadband, a term now vague in meaning which implies a high-speed internet connection but which has been applied to any service rated faster than the highest speed possible using a single analogue modem connected with a conventional phone line (copper pair (Cat3)).

(19) In public finance, as broad money, denoting an assessment of liquidity including notes and coins in circulation, bank holdings, most private-sector bank deposits, and certain bank-deposit certificates; usually classed as M3 in the (sort of) standardized system by which OECD countries measure the money supply.

(20) In UK dialectal use, a river spreading over a lowland (in East Anglia, a shallow lake).

(21) In woodworking, a wood-turning tool used for shaping the insides and bottoms of cylinders.

(22) In the UK, a common pronunciation of B-road (a secondary road).

Pre 1000: From the Middle English brood, brode, brod & broad from the Old English brād (broad, flat, open, extended, spacious, wide, ample, copious; not narrow), from the Proto-Germanic braidi, from the Proto-West Germanic braid, from the Proto-Germanic braidaz (broad), of uncertain origin.  It was cognate with the Scots braid (broad), the West Frisian breed (broad), the Saterland Frisian breed (broad), the Low German breet & breed (broad), the Dutch breed (broad), the German & Old High German breit (broad, wide), the Danish, Swedish & Norwegian Bokmål bred (broad), the Norwegian brei (broad), the Icelandic breiður (broad, wide), the Old Norse breiðr (breithr), the Old Frisian brēd and the Gothic braiths & brouþs.  The word is not found except in Germanic languages and there has never been any clear distinction between broad & wide although there are conventions of use but they vary widely (and presumably in some places broadly) by geographical region.  Related and sometimes synonymous words include deep, expansive, full, large, vast, comprehensive, extensive, far-reaching, sweeping, universal, wide, wide-ranging, clear, explicit, straightforward, radical, improper, indecent & roomy.  Broad is a noun & adjective, broadly is an adverb; broadness is a noun, broaden is a verb, broadening is a noun & verb and broadest & broadish are adjectives; the noun plural is broads.    

Circa 1300, broad also had the specific meaning "breadth", now obsolete, which was from broad the adjective.  The sense of "shallow, reedy lake formed by the expansion of a river over a flat surface" was a Norfolk dialect word from the 1650s and broad had assumed its (broad) meaning as "the broad (wide) part" of anything by 1741.  The broad-brim hat was first described in the 1680s and the phrase “broad-brimmed” or “broad-brimmer” was eighteenth & nineteenth slang for a "Quaker male", so described because of their characteristic attire.  Broad-minded (in the sense of open-minded, liberal, less judgmental) was from the 1590s but this abstract mental sense of broad existed also in Old English as bradnes which meant both "breadth" & "liberality".

German broadsword, Waloon pattern, circa 1650.

Some swordsmiths insist the only true broadsword is one of the “basket-hilted swords”, characterized by a basket-shaped guard at the hilt which protects the hand, an elaboration of the quillons added to swords' cross-guards since the later Middle Ages.  What everybody else now calls the broadsword is a bladed weapon of the early modern era (sixteenth-seventeenth century), the construct in Old English being brad + swurd and, exclusively a battlefield weapon, they were always distinguished from rapiers and other dueling swords by their wide and often long & thick blades.

The term broadsheet was first used to describe a newspaper in 1705 when the distinguishing characteristic was being a “large sheet of paper printed on one side only”; by 1831 the usual phrase was “"a broadsheet newspaper" which in the twentieth century evolved into a distinction between the sober publications of record, reflection and reporting (The Times of London, The New York Times, The Manchester Guardian etc) and the popular tabloid press concerned with entertainment, sport and (increasingly) celebrity culture (the News of the World, The Sun, the New York News etc), based on the former being printed in larger formats, the latter half-sized (tabloid in printer’s jargon.  Even when some broadsheets switched to the smaller format, the phraseology remained and seemed to have survived even where some have abandoned print editions entirely, tabloid journalism still something simultaneously popular and disreputable.

Lindsay Lohan on Broadway, attending the production MJ The Musical, New York, July 2022.

Broadway (like High Street or Main Road) became a common street name apparently as early as circa 1300, applied obviously to particularly wide roads or streets, the allusive use for "New York’s theater district" dating from 1881.  The derivative “off broadway” (sometime with initial capitals) described smaller theatres in the New York City area, those with fewer than 300 seats, or a production in such a theater, usually away from the "Broadway" theater district and which operated under special rules from the theatrical unions which permitted productions to be mounted at much lower cost.  Use of off-broadway was first noted in 1953 as the volume of productions began greatly to expand in the buoyant post war economy and off-off & off-off-off (etc) broadway followed, the number of “offs” hinting progressively at the diminishing size of the budget, theatre and reputations of those associated with the production.

Broadcasting in the modern understanding of the word attained critical mass first in the 1920s as medium-wave AM radio became popular as the cost of vacuum tube radio transmitters and receivers fell to affordable levels.  Broadcasting was based on the idea in agriculture of broad-sowing, the casting of seeds over a broad area and was electronic communication on a one-to-many basis, as opposed to earlier radio, telephone, and telegraph models which were one/few to one/few.  Although the technology and the distribution platforms have since much evolved, broadcasting remains conceptually the same but the technological changes have greatly affected the behavior of audiences and much of what “broadcasters” now do is really stranded narrowcasting, the content designed not for the large-scale, even nation-wide catchments which once were available but aimed instead at specific demographics also served by the narrowcasters proper.  So changed is the environment that the terms are now less useful than when there were clear distinctions between them.

Dean Martin (1917-1995) and Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) carry "strike" signs demanding "Free Broads" as part of a gag during a show at the Sands' Copa Room, Las Vegas, 1960.

Although the "rat pack" persona was cultivated as something edgy and anti-establishment, their audience was politically conservative and, by the 1960s, part of an older generation which mostly didn't approve of young people marching with protest signs.  For a couple of old pros playing Las Vegas, this was an easy laugh and, by the standards of the time, self-deprecating.

The apparently etymologically baffling use of broad to describe a woman with some suggestion of promiscuity has attracted speculation.  It’s been suggested it might be an alteration of bride, especially through influence of the cognate German Braut, which was used in a similar sense (young woman, hussy) and there was the Middle High German brūt (concubine) but, especially given it came to be noted as a generalized slang term for women only circa 1911 in US use, etymologists prefer to link the development to the earlier slang “abroadwife”, used to mean both “woman who lives or travels without her husband" and “woman maintained in another place by a man and unknown to his wife”.  It’s now a dated form, used sometimes ironically but has often been misapplied with a suggestion of prostitution.  Because of these negative associations, and the increasing popularity of women's athletics, the name of the track and field “broad jump” (dating from 1863) was changed to “long jump”, beginning in the US in 1967 and soon adopted by athletics federations worldwide.

Some broadband is more broad than others: Indicative speed (January 2022) of internet connections in selected countries based on Ookla’s speedtest.net data, the informal standard for consumer-level speed testing.

The noun broadband actually dates from the 1620s in various senses from dressmaking to engineering.  It was used in electronics from 1956 with the meaning "a band having a wide range of frequencies" but the now most familiar use is as a descriptor of high-speed internet access.  Although the term broadband had since the 1970s been used in the technical language of the then embryonic industry of networking and distributed communications, it was little known by the public until the first standards were published for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), a consumer-level version of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology.  Ever since, it’s been used in the sense of “high-speed internet” but except for some local (and usually quickly outdated) legislated definitions, it’s never had a universal or even generally accepted meaning beyond the very early implementations when it was understood to imply a connection faster than the fastest service attainable by a single (8000/8000 baud; V.92; 56.0/48.0 kbit/s down/up) analogue modem connected with a conventional phone line (untwisted copper pair (UTP-Cat3)) which was usually accepted to be 56 kbit/s.  That soon was not a great deal of help and now, unless in a jurisdiction where use of the term broadband requires the maintenance of minimum up & download speeds, it’s really just an advertising term and unless a service so advertised turns out to be so slow that the use might be held to be deceptive or misleading, is often little more than “mere puffery”.  Hotels which in the 1990s and early 2000s spent a lot of money to install the hardware and software to support what was then “broadband” which they advertised as such soon, faced complaints as rapid advances in technology rendered their infrastructure quickly obsolescent and slow, the only solution sometimes to replace all the equipment although many instead took advantage of the profit-sharing industry which emerged, third-parties handling the installation and support, the hotel taking just a commission on total revenue.  Just as a precaution, some gave up on advertising “broadband” and instead offered the even more vague “hi-speed” which definitely meant nothing in particular.     

Contemporary art museum The Broad, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles.  The building's name is a reference not to the architecture but the philanthropists Eli (1933-2021) & Edythe (b 1936) Broad, who paid for it and provided the core of the collections exhibited.  It opened in September 2015, the architecture generally well-received.

Broadcloth (also as broad-cloth) was a "fine woolen cloth used in making men's garments" and dates from the early fifteenth century, the name derived from its width (usually 60 inches (1.5m)).  The phrase “broad daylight” emerged in the late fourteenth century and broad was first applied to speech and accents during the 1530s. To be “broad in the beam” is to be overweight, the term, predictably, applied almost exclusively to women.  To have “broad shoulders” suggests an ability to take criticism, or accept responsibility, an allusion to the figure of Atlas from Greek mythology who was condemned to forever carry on his shoulders the weight of the world.  In admiralty jargon, “broad on the beam” is a nautical bearing 90° to the heading of a vessel while “broad on the bow” is a bearing 45° to the heading of a vessel.  Broadacre farming or agriculture is a generalized reference to activities undertaken on large-scale open areas as opposed to smaller, fenced enclosures and can be used to describe either cropping or animal production.  The expression, like “mileage” or “tons” has survived metrification; “broadhectare” does exist as jargon in the field of residential land supply but is not widely used.

The Anglicans

Some time ago, the ever-entertaining Anglican Church, sort of formalized their three warring factions as the low and lazy, the broad and hazy and the high and crazy:

The Low and Lazy

Like the high churchers, the low lot still believe in God but, their time not absorbed plotting and scheming or running campaigns to stamp out gay clergy and opposing the ordination of women, they actually have time to pray, which they do, often.  The evangelical types come from among the low and don’t approve of fancy rituals, Romish ways or anything smelling of popery.  Instead, they like services where there’s clapping, dancing and what sounds like country & western music with sermons telling them it’s Godly to buy things like big TVs and surf-skis.

The Broad and Hazy

The broad church is more a club than a church, something like the Tory Party at prayer.  The parishioners will choose the church they (occasionally) attend on the same basis as their golf club, driving miles if need be to find a congregation acceptably free of racial and cultural DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion).  They’re interested not at all in theology or anything too abstract so sermons are preached to please the bourgeoisie.  The broad church stands for most things in general and nothing in particular, finding most disputes in Anglicanism baffling; they just can't see what all the fuss is about.

The High and Crazy

The high church has clergy who love dressing up like The Spice Girls, burning incense and chanting the medieval liturgy in Latin.  They disapprove of about everything that’s happened since the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer and believe there’d be less sin were there still burnings at the stake.  Most high church clergy wish Pope Pius IX was still running the show from Rome and some act as though he’s still there.

Of money

All will be pleased to know there is narrow money and broad money.  Narrow money includes notes and coins in circulation and bank deposits (if available to conduct transactions).  Broad money includes all narrow money and other liquid assets that can be used to buy goods and services.  Collectively, the money circulating in an economy is called money supply, movements in which are tracked and sometimes manipulated governments and central banks.  There are economists who insist the distinction between narrow and broad money is mainly theoretical and they have a point in that the relationship between national wealth and (1) physical notes and coins and (2) the notion of asset backing (such as a gold standard) are both now somewhat abstract and the money supply can now be expanded without the effects of the physical economy which would once have been inevitable but the measures are still of great interest, as is the strange fact that the actual definitions of money used by governments and central banks in major trading economies vary from country to country.

The United States

The US Federal Reserve provides only two main measures of money M1 (narrow) and M2 (broad).  M1 consists of currency in circulation, travelers’ checks of nonbank issuers, demand deposits, and other checkable deposits (eg negotiable order of withdrawal accounts at depository institutions).  M2 is M1 plus savings deposits and money market deposit accounts, time deposit accounts below $100,000, and balances in retail money market mutual funds.  The interesting thing about the US is that the Fed’s M1 & M2 excludes a lot of what most economists regards as money but it’s very difficult to estimate how much, all agreeing only that it’s big number.

The Euro Zone

The European Central Bank (ECB) publishes M1, M2 & M3, each measure becoming progressively broader.  M1 includes currency in circulation plus overnight deposits.  M2 is M1 plus deposits redeemable at notice of up to three months and deposits with an agreed maturity of up to two years.  M3 is M2 plus repurchase agreements, money market fund shares, money market paper, and debt securities issued with a maturity of fewer than two years.

The United Kingdom

The Bank of England uses four measures of money, M0, M2, M4, and M3H, M0 the narrowest, M4 the broadest.  M0 is currency in circulation plus bankers’ deposits held by the Bank of England.  M2 is M0 plus deposits held in retail banks.  M4 is M2 plus certificates of deposits, and wholesale bank and building society deposits.  The mysterious M3H is a parity device which exists to allow the Bank of England to align their reporting for statistical purposes with the money supply measures published by the ECB and this is M4 plus foreign currency deposits in banks and building societies.

Australia

The Reserve Bank of Australia used to use M1, M2 & M3 but now publishes M1, M3 & Broad Money.  M1 is currency in circulation plus bank current deposits from private non-bank entities.  M3 is M1 plus other deposits from building societies and credit unions with banks.  Broad Money is M3 plus borrowings from the private sector by non-bank depository corporations excluding holdings of currency and deposits of non-bank depository corporations.

Japan

The Bank of Japan is a monetary classicist and publishes M1, M2, and M3, where M1 is the narrowest and M3 the broadest.  M1 includes currency in circulation plus deposits.  M2 is M1, plus certificates of deposit.  M3 is M2 plus savings and deposits at financial institutions and post offices.

For countries which run modern economies with convertible currencies and a high degree of interoperability and (usually), little (at least by historic standards) in the way of exchange controls, it may seem strange that the definitions of money vary to the extent they do, the only feature of commonality really that each maintains a measurable concept of narrow and broad money.  Only a few central banks, such as the Bank of England, include a device with which those interested in such things can align the numbers more accurately to compare one with another; it’s almost as if the central banks and governments like some vagueness in the system.

In theory there need not be a direct relationship between the volume of the money supply and its value expressed as purchasing power but the two values do in theory (and, in practice, typically) move in the opposite directions.  German children during the hyper-inflation experienced in 1923 under the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) would play with literally trillions, using bundles of currency with a face value in the billions (of the then current Papiermark) as toy building blocks.  Although the purposes for which it was originally set up have long been overtaken by events, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) still exists (which is interesting in itself) and although the BIS organizes interesting conferences and seminars and publish a wealth of meaty material, it’d be helpful were they to devise a standardized money supply model which could augment (ie not replace) the machinery to which the central banks would no doubt cling.  Even if restricted to members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), it would be an interesting data-set to align with other charts but the chances of this seem remote.  It might frighten the horses.

Atavism

Atavism (pronounced at-uh-viz-uhm)

(1) In biology (most often in zoology & botany), the reappearance in an individual of characteristics of some (typically) remote ancestor which have not manifested in intervening generations.

(2) An individual embodying such a reversion.

(3) Reversion to an earlier or more primitive type (a “throwback” in the vernacular).

(4) In sociology and political science, the recurrence or reversion to a past behavior, method, characteristic or style after a long period of absence, used especially of a reversion to violence.

1825-1830: The construct was the Latin atav(us) (great-great-great grandfather; remote ancestor, forefather” (the construct being at- (akin to atta (familiar name for a father) and used perhaps to suggest “beyond”)  + avus (grandfather, ancestor) + -ism.  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).  Atavism & atavist are nouns, atavic, atavistic & atavistical are adjectives and atavistically is an adverb; the noun plural is atavisms.

The primitive Indo-European awo meant “adult male relative other than the father”, the most obvious descendent the modern “uncle”.  The English form was influenced by the French atavisme (the coining attributed usually to the botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne (1747-1827 Paris) and was first used in biology in the sense of “reversion by influence of heredity to ancestral characteristics, resemblance of a given organism to some remote ancestor, return to an early or original type”.  The adjective atavistic (pertaining to atavism) appeared in 1847, joined three year later by the now rare atavic (pertaining to a remote ancestor, exhibiting atavism).  Atavism (and its related forms) are none of those words which can be used as a neutral descriptor (notably in botany) or to denote something positive or negative.  Although the core meaning is always some “past or ancestral characteristic”, it tends to be pejorative if use of people or human cultures reverting to some “primitive characteristics” (especially if they be war or other forms of violence.  In the vernacular, the earthier “throwback” has been more common than the rather formal “atavistic” although the circumlocution “skip a generation” is often used for traits that occur after a generation of absence and “throwback” anyway became a “loaded” term because of its association with race (in the sense of skin-color).

Medicine has constructed its own jargon associated with the phenomenon in which an inherited condition appears to “skip a generation”: it’s described often as “autosomal recessive inheritance” or “incomplete penetrance”.  While the phrase “skipping a generation” is not uncommon in informal use, the actual mechanisms depend on the genetic inheritance pattern of the condition.  Autosomal Recessive Inheritance is defined as a “condition is caused by mutations in both copies of a specific gene” (one inherited from each parent).  This can manifest as an individual inheriting only one mutated copy (which means they will be a carrier but will remain asymptomatic) but if two carriers have issue, there is (1) a 25% chance the offspring will inherit both mutated copies and express the condition, (2) a 50% chance the offspring will be a carrier and (3) a 25% chance the offspring will inherit no mutations.  Thus, the condition may appear (and for practical purposes does) skip a generation in those cases where no symptoms exist; the classic examples include sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis.  Incomplete Penetrance occurs when an individual inherits a gene mutation which creates in them a genetic predisposition to a condition but symptoms do not develop because of environmental factors, other genetic influences or “mere chance” (and in the matter of diseases like those classified as “cancer”, the influence of what might be called “bad luck” is still probably underestimated, and certainly not yet statistically measured.  In such cases, the mutation may be passed to the next generation, where it might manifest, giving the appearance of skipping a generation and the BRCA1 & BRCA2 mutations for (hereditary) breast cancer are well-known examples.

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

In political science, “atavism” is used to refer to a reversion to older, more “primitive” means of furthering political ends.  Although it’s most associated with a critique of violence, political systems, ideologies, behaviors or economic policies have all be described as “atavistic” and their manifestation is linked often with ideas presented as representing (and implicitly offering a return to) a perceived “golden age”, a past structure which is idealized; it appear often as a reaction to change, notably modernity, globalization, or what is claimed to be a “decline in values”.  Political scientists identify stands in nominally non-violent atavism including: (1) Nostalgic Nationalism.  Nationalist movements are almost always race-based (in the sense of longing for a return to a “pure” ethnicity in which a population is “untainted” by ethnic diversity.  It’s usually a romanticization of a nation's past (historically, “purity” was less common than some like to believe) offering the hope of a return to traditional values, cultural practices, or forms of governance.  (2) Tribalism and Identity Politics. A call to primordial loyalties (such as ethnic or tribal identities), over modern, pluralistic, or institutional frameworks has been a feature of recent decades and was the trigger for the wars in the Balkans during the 1990s, the conflict which introduced to the language the euphemism “ethnic cleansing”, a very atavistic concept.  Tribalism and identity politics depends on group identities & allegiance overshadowing any broader civic or national unity on the basis of overturning an artificial (and often imposed) structure and returning to a pre-modern arrangement. (3) Anti-modernism or Anti-globalization. These are political threads which sound “recent” but both have roots which stretch back at least to the nineteenth century and Pius IX’s (1792–1878; pope 1846-1878) Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors, 1864) was one famous list of objections to change.  The strategy behind such atavism may be identifiably constant but tactics can vary and there’s often a surprising degree of overlap in the messaging of populists from the notional right & left which is hardly surprising given that in the last ten years both Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021; president elect 2024) and Bernie Sanders (b 1941; senior US senator (Independent, Vermont) since 2007) honed their messaging to appeal to the same disgruntled mass.

Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (1898-1953, left) & Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950, right).  It was his third marriage.

Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter used the word “atavism” in his analysis of the dynamics which contributed to the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918), something he attributed to the old, autocratic regimes of Central and Eastern Europe “dragging the modern, liberal West” back in time.  Schumpeter believed that if commercial ties created interdependence between nations then armed conflict would become unthinkable and US author Thomas Friedman (b 1953) in The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999) suggested the atavistic tendency of man to go to war could be overcome by modern commerce making connectivity between economies so essential to the well-being of citizens that no longer would they permit war because such a thing would be so dangerous for the economy; it was an attractive argument because we have long since ceased to be citizens and are merely economic units.  Friedman’s theory didn’t actually depend on his earlier phrase which suggested: “…countries with McDonalds outlets don’t go to war with each other” but that was how readers treated it.  Technically, it was a bit of a gray area (Friedman treated the earlier US invasion of Panama (1989) as a police action) but the thesis was anyway soon disproved in the Balkans.  Now, Schumpeter and Friedman seem to be cited most often in pieces disproving their theses and atavism remains alive and kicking.

Melcryptovestimentaphilia

Melcryptovestimentaphilia (pronounced mel-krip-toh-ves-tuh-muhn-tah-fil-ee-uh)

(1) A desire or fondness for women's black underwear.

(2) A compulsion to steal women's black underwear.

(3) Being able to achieve sexual arousal only when women's black underwear is in some way involved.

Mid-twentieth century:  A portmanteau word, the construct being mel- (from the Ancient Greek μέλας (mélas) (black; dark) (genitive μέλανος (mélanos)) + -crypto- (from the Ancient Greek κρυπτός (kruptós) (hidden, secret) + -vestimenta-, a back-formation from the Latin vestimentum (clothing; garment), the construct being vestīre (clothe), from vestis (a garment, gown, robe, vestment, clothing, vesture), from the primitive Indo-European wéstis, from wes- (to be dressed) +‎ -mentum (from the Latin suffix -menta (familiar in collective nouns such as armenta (herd, flock)) from the Proto-Italic -məntom, from the plural primitive Indo-European -mn̥the + -philia, from the Ancient Greek φιλία (philía) (fraternal) love).  It was used to form nouns conveying a liking or love for something and in clinical use was applied often to an abnormal or obsessive interest, especially if it came to interfere with other aspects of life (the general term is paraphilia).  The companion suffix is the antonym -phobia. The related forms were the prefixes phil- & philo- and the suffixes -philiac, -philic, -phile & -phily.  Melcryptovestimentaphilia & melcryptovestimentaphilism are nouns, and melcryptovestimentaphiliac is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is melcryptovestimentaphiliacs.  Were the situation to demand an adverb, it would be melcryptovestimentaphilially.

Model Adriana Fenice (b 1994) in black underwear.

The origin of melcryptovestimentaphilia is unknown but it was more likely a coining for humorous purposes than something documented in clinical psychiatry.  The word appears in An Almanac of Words at Play (1975) by US philologist & writer Willard Espy (1910–1999) which is one of the language's more eclectic gatherings of words, phrases, fables, fragments of verse, parodies, anagrams, clever sayings, palindromes, fractured & tortured English, graffiti, typographical blunders (a polite description of what James Joyce (1882–1941) called “bitched type”), anecdotes, appalling stanzas, coined words, epitaphs, slang, collective nouns, last words of the dying (including the apocryphal which are among the best) and linguistic curiosities such as malapropisms, spoonerisms, macaronies, oxymorons, acrostics, acronyms, Clerihews, lipograms and rhopalic verse.  It’s one of those books which can be read either in lineal form or by just opening it at random to see what one finds.

Lingerie, the DSM and the ICD

Unsurprisingly, melcryptovestimentaphilia appears in neither the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) nor the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Classification of Diseases (ICD), not because the syndrome doesn’t exist but because the profession’s modern view of such things is such a focus should not in itself be considered a disorder, unless accompanied by distress or impairment although it was noted by many that if even a nominally “harmless” fetish became an obsession, it certainly could impair healthy sexuality.  Since the DSM-5 (2013), a diagnosis of paraphilia (a type of mental disorder characterized by a preference for or obsession with unusual sexual practices) was assigned to individuals who experience sexual arousal from objects or a specific part of the body not typically regarded as erotic and presumably any body part or object can be a fetish, the most frequently mentioned including underwear, shoes, stockings, gloves, hair and latex.   Fetishists may use the desired article for sexual gratification in the absence of a partner although it’s recorded this may involve nothing more than touching smelling the item and the condition appears to manifest almost exclusively in men, the literature suggesting a quarter of fetishistic men are homosexual but caution needs always to be attached to these numbers (because fetishism is something which many happily enjoy their whole adult lives, it never coming to the attention of doctors and a high proportion of the statistical material about fetishism is from patients self-reporting).  The statistics in a sense reflect thus not the whole cohort of the population with the condition but rather those who either want to talk about it or are responding to surveys.  That is of course true of other mental illnesses but is exaggerated with fetishism because so much lies with the spectrum of normal human behavior and the definitional limitations in the DSM-5 reflect this, including three criteria and specifiers for Fetishistic Disorder:

Criterion 1: Over a six month period, the individual has experienced sexual urges focused on a non-genital body part, or inanimate object, or other stimulus, and has acted out urges, fantasies, or behaviors.

Criterion 2: The fantasies, urges, or behaviors cause distress, or impairment in functioning.

Criterion 3: The fetishized object is not an article of clothing employed in cross dressing, or a sexual stimulation device, such as a vibrator.

Specifiers for the diagnosis include the type of stimulus which is the focus of attention (1) the non-genital or erogenous areas of the body (famously feet) and this condition is known also as partialism (a preoccupation with a part of the body rather than the whole person), (2) Non-living object(s) (such as shoes), (3) specific activities (such as smoking during sex).

Fan de sous-vêtements noirs, Lindsay Lohan.  Women often choose the color of their underwear on the basis of the clothing with which it will be worn and beige is a big seller because it blends best with the skin of the white population (although in a nod to the DEI (diversity, equity & inclusion) imperative, the hue is no longer advertised as "skin-tone").  Black is popular because much black clothing is worn but there's evidence to suggest women really like both navy blue and gun-metal grey even though both are niche products compared with black, white & beige.

It was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) who admitted that, lawfulness aside, as animals, the only truly aberrant sexual behavior in humans could be said to be its absence and that's something which the modern asexual movement re-defines rather than disproves.  It seemed to be in that spirit the DSM-5 was revised to treat a behaviour such as melcryptovestimentaphilia (and many other “harmless” manifestations of paraphilia) as “normal” and thus within the purview of the manual only to the extent of being described, clinical intervention no longer required.  Whether all psychiatrists agree with the new permissiveness isn’t known but early reports suggest there’s nothing in the DSM-5-TR (2022) to suggest those with even an obsessional fondness for black underwear will soon again be labeled as deviants.  Of course, those who feel compelled to steal the stuff or engage in anything non-consensual with black underwear the trigger will be guilty of doing something unlawful but their condition will, in a legal sense, be incidental to the offence.  While a disclosure of melcryptovestimentaphilism might by defence counsel be offered in mitigation, it seems unlikely even a melcryptovestimentaphiliac judge (however privately sympathetic) would much reduce the sentence.

Truculent

Truculent (pronounced truhk-yuh-luhnt or troo-kyuh-luhnt)

(1) Defiantly aggressive, sullen, or obstreperous; aggressively hostile; belligerent; fiercely argumentative; eager or quick to argue, fight or start a conflict.

(2) Brutally harsh; vitriolic; scathing,

(4) Savage, fierce (archaic).

1530–1540: From the Middle French, from the Latin truculentus, the construct being truc- (stem of trux (genitive trucis) (fierce; wild; savage; pitiless) + -ulentus (the adjectival suffix (and familiar as the related –ulent).  Although the ultimate source is uncertain, it may be from a suffixed form of the primitive Indo-European root tere- (cross over, pass through; overcome).  Truculent is an adjective, truculence & truculency are nouns and truculently is an adverb

Narcissus Truculent, commonly known as the truculent daffodil.

The original meaning was “cruel or savage” in the specific sense of “barbarous, ferocious, fierce”.  By the early seventeenth century the emphasis on “deadly & destructive” gave way to “defiant, uncompromising, belligerent, inflexible, stubborn, unyielding and eager to argue or start a conflict” and it’s likely the shift happened as the use transferred from descriptions of soldiers to more general discourse; it was thus an elaborated type of figurative use.  The noun truculence dates from 1727 and was from the Latin truculentia (savageness, cruelty), from truculentus.  The earlier noun truculency was in use as early as the 1560s.  The comparative is “more truculent” and the superlative “most truculent”, both forms able to be used either of one or between two or more: “Mr Trump seemed more truculent than usual” & “Mr Trump was at his most truculent” instances of one form and Mr Trump proved more truculent than Mr Romney” the other.  However, despite the labelling habits of some, truculence does not imply motive, merely conduct.  The use of truculent by some implies there’s resentment but there’s no etymological or other historical basis for that; truculence is a way of behaving, not the reason for the behavior.  An imaginative meteorologist might speak of “a truculent hurricane” but there’s no implication the weather system feels mistreated and is thus lashing out; it’s just an especially violent storm.  Nor does “truculent” of necessity imply something violent or raucous and there are many who gain their effectiveness in debate from their “quiet truculence”, a description often used of the English writer PC Wren (1875–1941), the author of Beau Geste (1924).  Wren’s “quiet truculence” was less to do with what was in his books than his unwavering insistence the tales of his life of adventure in the French Foreign Legion were all true, despite the complete absence of any documentary evidence.

Words often used (sometimes too loosely especially given the shifting sense since the seventeenth century) as synonyms include abusive, aggressive, antagonistic, bad-tempered, barbarous, bellicose, browbeating, brutal, bullying, caustic, combative, contentious, contumelious, cowing, cross, defiant, ferocious, fierce, frightening, harsh, hostile, inhuman, inhumane, intimidating, invective, mean, militant, mordacious, mordant, obstreperous, opprobrious, ornery, pugnacious, quarrelsome, rude, savage, scathing, scrappy, scurrilous, sharp, sullen, terrifying, terrorizing, trenchant, violent, vituperative & vituperous.  It may be a comment on the human character there are rather fewer antonyms but they include cooperative, gentle, mild, tame, polite, correct & nice (which has itself quite a history of meanings).

A truculent Lindsay Lohan discussing industrial relations with her assistant.

All things considered, truculent would seem an admirable name for a warship but only twice has the Royal Navy agreed.  HMS Truculent (1916) was a Yarrow Later M-class destroyer which had an unremarkable war record, the highlight of which was a footnote as one of the three destroyers escorting the monitors used in the famous Zeebrugge Raid of 23 April 1918 which was an early-morning attempt to block the Belgian port of Bruges-Zeebrugge by scuttling obsolete ships in the canal entrance and using others packed with explosives to destroy port infrastructure.  Only partially successful, the bloody and audacious raid is remembered for the phrase "Eleven VCs before breakfast", an allusion to the decorations awarded (11 x VCs (Victoria Cross), 21 x DSOs (Distinguished Service Order) and 29 x DSCs (Distinguished Service Crosses)).  The second HMS Truculent (P315) was a T-class submarine, launched in 1942, which sunk nine ships during World War II (1939-1945).  It’s remembered now for lending its name to the “Truculent Light”.  On 12 January 1950, while travelling at night on the surface in the Thames Estuary, she collided with the 643 ton Swedish carrier SS Divina, on passage from Purfleet to Ipswich with a cargo of paraffin and, her hull been severely breached amidships, the submarine sank almost instantly with the loss of 64 men (there were 20 survivors).  As a consequence, regulations were introduced requiring all Royal Navy submarines be fitted with an additional steaming, panoramic white light on the bow.  The “Truculent Lights” ensure that while on the surface, despite being low in the water at in darkness close to invisible, submarines remain visible to other ships.

The wreck of HMS Truculent being salvaged.  All Royal Navy submarines have since “the Truculent Incident” been fitted with a 360^o white navigation light on the bow, known as the “Truculent Light”.

There have been no Truculents launched since but other "aggressive names" have over the centuries been used or proposed including 5 x HMS Vindictive (the last launched in (1918), 6 x HMS Arrogant (1896; a planned aircraft carrier was cancelled in 1945), 1 x HMS HMS Aggressor (1801; a planned aircraft carrier was cancelled in 1945), 1 x HMS Antagonist (a planned submarine cancelled in 1945), 8 x HMS Bruiser class (1947), eight x HMS Savage class  (1942), 1 x HMS Violent (1917) and 7 x HMS Warspite (1991; Warspite scheduled to be the third of the planned Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines) and 9 x HMS Terror class (1916).  Anticipating a later truculent spirit however there was, uniquely, an HMS Trump (P333), one of the 53 of the third group of the T class.  She was launched in 1944 and for most of her life was attached to the Australia-based 4th Submarine Squadron (although remaining always on the Royal Navy's list).  HMS Trump was one of her class which remained in service after the war and based in Australia, was re-fitted to provide the enhanced underwater performance needed for the anti-submarine force to counter the growing threat from the Soviet navy.  The last Royal Navy submarine posted to be stationed Australian Waters, she was struck from the active list in 1969 and scrapped in 1971.  HMS Trump notwithstanding, the naming trend in recent decades has been less truculent and it can’t be long before the launching of HMS Diversity, HMS Equity and HMS Inclusion (the three ships of the DEI class which won't be armed but will be heavily armored and very welcoming environments where sailors are encouraged to talk about their feelings).

Acersecomic

Acersecomic (pronounced a-sir-suh-kome-ick)

A person whose hair has never been cut.

1623: From the Classical Latin acersecomēs (a long-haired youth) the word borrowed from the earlier Ancient Greek form ἀκερσεκόµης (with unshorn hair), constructed from komē (the hair of the head (the source of the –comic)) + keirein (to cut short) + the prefix a- (not; without).  The Latin acersecomēs wasn’t a term of derision or disapprobation, merely descriptive, it being common for Roman and Greek youth to wear their hair long until manhood.  Acersecomic appeared in English dictionaries as early as 1656, the second instance noted some 30 years later.  Although of dubious linguistic utility even in seventeenth century English, such entries weren’t uncommon in early English dictionaries as editors trawled through lists of words from antiquity to conjure up something, there being some marketing advantage in being the edition with the most words.  It exists now in a lexicographical twilight zone, its only apparent purpose being to appear as an example of a useless word.

The -comic element of the word is interesting.  It’s from the Ancient Greek komē in one of the senses of coma: a diffuse cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the nucleus of a comet.  From antiquity thus comes the sense of long, flowing hair summoning an image of the comet’s trail in the sky.  The same -comic ending turns up in two terms that are probably more obscure even than acersecomic: acrocomic (having hair at the tip, as in a goat’s beard (acro- translates as “tip”) and xanthocomic (a person with yellow hair), from the Greek xanthos (yellow).

Lindsay Lohan as Rapunzel, The Real Housewives of Disney, Saturday Night Live (SNL), 2012.

In recent interviews, Russian model and singer Olga Naumova didn't make clear if she was truly an acersecomic but did reveal that in infancy her hair was so thin her parents covered her head, usually with a babushka headscarf.  It's obviously since flourished and her luxuriant locks are now 62 inches (1.57 m) long, a distinctive feature she says attracts (1) requests for selfies, (2) compliments, (3) propositions decent & otherwise, (4) public applause (in Thailand), (5) requests for technical advice, usually from women asking about shampoo, conditioner & other product while (6) on-line, men sometimes suggest marriage, often by the expedient of elopement.  Perhaps surprisingly, the Moscow-based model doesn't do "anything extraordinary" to maintain her mane beyond shampoo, conditioner and the odd oil treatment, adding the impressive length and volume she attributes wholly to the roll of the genetic dice.  Her plaits and braids are an impressive sight and their creation can take over an hour, depending on their number and complexity.

Olga Naumova in motion.

A possible acersecomic although there is some evidence of at least the odd trim.  These are among the less confronting images at People of Walmart which documents certain aspects of the American experience in the social media age.  Users seem divided whether People of Walmart is a celebration of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), a chronicle of decadence or a condemnation of deviance.

Fifteen year old Skye Merchant was genuinely acersecomic until July 2021 when she had her first haircut, part of her fund-raising efforts for cancer research.  The trimmed locks were donated to cancer patients.