Floppy

Floppy (pronounced flop-ee)

(1) A tendency to flop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What lay inside a 3½ inch floppy diskette.

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

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

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

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

Dongle

Dongle (pronounced dong-guhl)

(1) Historically, a hardware device attached to a computer without which a particular software program will not run; used to prevent unauthorized use.

(2) Latterly, a device (almost always plugged into a USB port) to enable connectivity with other devices, peripherals or networks.

(3) In (very) casual use, any small USB device. 

1980: First recorded in 1980, shortly after the debut of the original IBM PC-1 and although often cited as arbitrary coinage, is possibly derived from dangle, given the first dongles dangled from a short cable.  Unfortunately, the advertisement in a computer magazine in the early 1990s which claimed the dongle was invented by an engineer named Don Gall was just an attempt to make nerds laugh and maybe create an urban legend.  Donglegate was a 2013 incident at an IT conference when a double entendre on the word "dongle" led to a complaint.  Dongle is a noun; the noun plural is dongles.  Because of the nature of the devices and the use to which they're put, it's surprising it seems not to be used as a verb; nor have dongling & dongled emerged. 

Parallel-port dongle.

Historically, a dongle was a small (about the size of a box of matches) pass-through device, a piece of hardware which connected to a PC’s 25-pin parallel (then used most often for a printer) port.  It provided usually a form of copy protection and license enforcement in that the software with which it was supplied wouldn’t run unless dongle was plugged-in.  Most PCs had only one printer port (although from the original IBM PC-1 (1981), there was always support for three physical parallel ports and in the early days of the industry it wasn't unknown to see three Epson 9-pin impact (dot-matrix) clattering away, hanging off the one PC) but it was in some cases possible to daisy-chain multiple dongles on the one port and still connect the actual printer (as the last device in the chain).  The parallel dongles were famously robust and reliable but less successful were the early implementations of dongles as USB devices; the problems were not solved until the early 2000s.

Raspberry Pi Nano WiFi dongle.

Dongle has also come to mean just about anything small which connects to a USB port and does something.  Although the definitions were never codified, the convention of use with USB devices seems to be that a dongle is something which in some way is an enabling device for something else (such as connecting to a WAN, LAN, Wi-Fi or a streaming feed) whereas “stick”, “pen-drive” or “key” is used for something self-contained such as a flash drive.

Personalized dongles.

The most familiar “dongles are still the USB flash drives, used for data storage and file transfer, the later a large-scale version of the original “sneaker-net” which described a kind of low-tech “networking” of devices, accomplished by a programmer (wearing sneakers of course), floppy diskettes in hand, waling between machines to copy and write files.  Memories fade but it’s not forgotten just how transformative was the arrival of the USB flash drive.  Although there had been advances in removable storage which meant at least some users were no longer subject to the tyranny of the 1.44 MB floppy diskette, the proprietary devices were expensive and thus relatively rare.  Additionally, the removable media depended on compatible devices existing at each end, something not always possible conveniently to arrange.  On the PCS, the ubiquitous 3½ floppy diskette had shrunk from it 5¼-inch origins but grown from a capacity 180 KB to 1.44 MB and some versions in the 1990s supported 1.8 MB & 2.88 MB but take-up was slow, the BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) support needed by the latter attracting little support from manufacturers.  Thus the enthusiasm which greeted the early 16 MB USB flash drives early in the century too grew to the point that in 2024 2 TB sticks are available and 4 TB prototypes have been demonstrated.  That process also attracted the interest of economists who noted that even by the standards of IT hardware, the unit cost reductions have been dramatic: the early 1 GB sticks were advertised at US$300 yet by 2024 1 TB (1024 or 1000 GB depending on manufacturer) were advertised at under US$150.  Curiously (and unusually for the industry), just who “invented” the USB flash drive remains contested.

Rainbow Technologies' "Don Gale" dongle advertisement (1992).  While there was no actual Mr Gale, the story related is exactly the reason the software protection hardware was created.

Jazz

Jazz (pronounced jaz)

(1) A style of music of African-American origin, said to have emerged in New Orleans early in the twentieth century.

(2) A style of dance music, popular especially in the 1920s, arranged for a large band and marked by some of the features of jazz.

(3) Dancing or a dance performed to such music, as with jerky bodily motions and gestures.

(4) In slang (1) liveliness; spirit; excitement, (2) insincere, exaggerated, or pretentious talk & (3) similar or related but unspecified things or activities (often in the form “…and all that jazz”) which can be used negatively if referring to rigmarole, red-tape etc.

(5) Of or relating to or characteristic of jazz; to play (music) in the manner of jazz.

(6) To excite or enliven; to accelerate (often in the form “jazz up”).

(7) In vulgar slang, copulation.

1912: An invention of US English of uncertain origin.  Until around the end of the World War I, the alternative spellings jaz, jas, jass & jasz were used.  The first documented use of the word jazz was in 1912 in the context of writing about baseball baseball, the use extending to the musical form in 1915 when it was used in reference to Tom Brown's all-white band out of New Orleans (although there are sources which date it either from a 1917 advertisement in a Chicago newspaper for Bert Kelly's Jaz Band).

Lindsay Lohan watching NBA game between Utah Jazz and LA Lakers, Los Angeles November, 2006.

The etymology has attracted much research but the findings have been inconclusive, the most popular theory being jazz was a variant of jism & jasm (from 1842 & 1860 respectively), archaic nineteenth century US slang meaning “zest for accomplishment; drive; dynamism”, the qualities apparently most often ascribed to women), also words of unknown origin.  That evolutionary path is tangled up with the sexual connotations once associated with the word jazz and etymologists stress the sequence is important.  At the turn of the twentieth century, "gism" certainly meant "vitality" but also "virility" and this (by 1899) led to the slang use for "semen" but, the etymologists caution, while a similar evolution happened to the word "jazz" (which became slang for the act of sex), that use was unknown prior to 1918 so any sexual connotation wasn’t attached at the point of origin but acquired later.  The use in reference to baseball is thought to have been among white Americans and this may also have been the case in the earliest uses with the musical form.  Overlaying all this, nor is it known whether the evolution to jazz was organic, an invention or an imperfect echoic.

Duke Ellington, Ellington At Newport (1956).

While ethno-musicologists note the way the form has evolved over a century as diverse influences have variously been absorbed, assimilated or interpolated, the profession regards the core of Jazz to be a form rooted in West African cultural and musical expression which borrowed from the unique African American blues tradition.  Technically, the most distinct characteristics are blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms and, most celebrated of all, improvisation.  As jazz was influenced, so jazz influenced and there was no musical form so associated with the “fusion movement” (better understood as a number movements) which was a feature of the experimental (and increasingly commercial) output of the decades after the World War II, a trend which produced an array of labels including acid jazz, cool jazz, jazzbo, jazz-funk, jazz fusion, trad-jazz, jazz-rock and more.

Count Basie And His Orchestra, April In Paris (1957).

In idiomatic use context matters much because to jazz something can mean “to destroy” whereas to “jazz up” is to enliven, brighten up, make more colorful etc but this can be good or bad, the familiar phrase “don’t jazz it up to much” a caution against excessive bling or needless complication.  The use in vulgar slang is now listed by most dictionaries as either archaic or obsolete but when it use it covered a wide range from (1) the act of copulation, (2) to prostitute oneself for money & (3) semen.  As an intransitive verb it meant to move about in a lively or frivolous manner or “to fool around”, the origin of this assumed to be the uninhibited style of dancing sometimes associated with the genre.  To jazz someone can also be to distract or pester them or provide misleading or incorrect information (which can be referred to using the noun “the jazz”).  As applied simply to music, it can mean either to play jazz music (in some set form or in a jam) or to dance to jazz music

Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959).

The meaning "rubbish, unnecessary talk or ornamentation" dates from 1918, a use reflecting the snobby attitude many had towards a form of music which sometimes didn’t observe the usual conventions of structure.  The term “all that jazz” (sometimes cited as a synonym for “et cetera” but actually extending to ”similar or related but unspecified things or activities" was first recorded in 1939 although the extent of its history in oral use is unknown.  The verb jazz in the sense of “to speed or liven up” dates from 1917 and was used often as “jazzed” or “jazzing”.  The “jazz age” was first described in 1921 and soon popularized in the writings of F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and the era is usually regarded as the years between the end of World War I (1918) and the Wall Street crash of 1929.  The phrase captures both what was seen as the accelerating pace of life in 1920s America and the popularity of the music.

Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um (1959).

The noun razzmatazz was interesting because it was used in the late nineteenth century to mean various things (most often something fanciful and showy) and thus obviously pre-dated jazz but, presumably because of the rhyming quality it picked up early associations with jazz which by the 1930s had become a disparaging critique ("old-fashioned jazz" especially in contrast to the newer “swing”).  Dating from 1917, the noun jazzbo (low, vulgar jazz) was a disparaging term to describe both the music and musicians; later in the twentieth century it was applied as derogatory term for African-Americans (and others with dark skins) but use soon died out.  The adjective jazzy (resembling jazz music) dates from 1918 and was often used in the forms “jazzily” & “jazziness”, use quickly extending from music to a general term suggesting “spirited, lively; exciting”.  The noun jazzetry (poetry reading accompanied by jazz music) came into use in 1959 and was part of the cultural ephemera of the beat generation.  The noun Jazzercise (the construct being jazz + (ex)ercise) was originally a proprietary name from the commercial fitness industry which, despite the implications, was used to describe routines using just about any form of music.

Lotus Jazz, 1985.

So unsuccessful was the marketing strategy used for Lotus Jazz that it’s said to rate with Ford’s Edsel and Coca-Cola's New Coke among the most popular case studies chosen by students of the discipline to illustrate corporate ineptitude.  Jazz was designed to run only on Apple’s Macintosh 512K and was an integrated suite which included a word processor, spreadsheet, database, graphics, and communication software.  It was a corporate companion of Lotus Symphony which was a suite which ran on IBM compatible PCs under PC/MS-DOS but not too much should be read into the musical nomenclature; both were integrated suites which ran under different operating systems on different hardware.  Lotus 1-2-3 wasn’t the first spreadsheet but it was the one which became the so-called “killer app” which legitimized the IBM PC for business use and, noting the small-scale successes being enjoyed by some of the early suites, Symphony was concocted as something which would rely on the reputation of 1-2-3 for its success.  Although never a big seller on the scale of 1-2-3, Symphony in the 1980s found a niche.

Jazz was supplied on four 400K floppy diskettes and Lotus thoughtfully supplied a sticky label users could use for their data diskette (which wasn’t included).

Jazz, introduced in 1985 was an attempt to replicate on the Mac the company’s success on the IBM-PC though why the decision was taken to introduce a suite instead of a version of 1-2-3 puzzled observers at the time given the Symphony name had nothing like the name-recognition of the Lotus spreadsheet.  Added to that, Jazz was expensive, limited in functionality by the memory constraint of the Mac 512 and clumsy in operation, users forced frequently to swap floppy diskettes (start-up, program & data) with the additional drawback that only a single floppy drive could be used with Jazz, neither dual floppy or hard-drives supported.  A critical and commercial failure, so toxic did the Jazz brand quickly become that plans to release an improved version in 1988 (called Modern Jazz) were abandoned and development resources were shifted to a version of 1-2-3 for the Mac.  That was of course what should have been done from the start and 1-2-3 for the Mac, released in 1991, was well received but months later Microsoft released Windows 3.1 and the universe shifted, Excel and the companion MS-Office becoming a juggernaut; Symphony and 1-2-3 were just two of the many victims.

Cabinet

Cabinet (pronounced kab-uh-nit)

(1) A piece of furniture with shelves, drawers etc, for holding or displaying items; a wall cupboard used for storage, as of kitchen utensils or toilet articles; a variety of fixed or movable receptacles for storing stuff.  Historic origin of the trade cabinetmaker (vis-à-vis carpenter) was that cabinets tended to require finer, more precise work.

(2) In the era of big-box televisions and LP records, a piece of furniture containing a turntable or television, usually standing on the floor and often including storage for twelve-inch vinyl records.

(3) An elected or appointed council advising a president, sovereign etc, especially the group of ministers or executives responsible for the government of a nation (often initial capital letter); In the US, an appointed advisory body to the president, consisting of the heads of the (currently) fifteen executive departments of the federal government (often initial capital letter).

(4) A small case with compartments for valuables or other small objects; a small chamber or booth for special use; a private room (obsolete); a room set aside for the exhibition of small works of art or objets d'art (historic and technical use only).

(5) A dry white wine produced in Germany from fully matured grapes without the addition of extra sugar; also called cabinet wine.

(6) A milk shake made with ice cream (mostly used in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts, US).

(7) In architecture, a type of drafting, designating a method of projection (cabinet projection) in which a three-dimensional object is represented by a drawing (cabinet drawing) having all vertical and horizontal lines drawn to exact scale, with oblique lines reduced to about half scale so as to offset the appearance of distortion.

(8) In printing, a standard paper size, 6×4 inches (150×100mm) or 6½ x 4¼ inches (165×105mm), used for mounting photographs.

(9) In computing, an often compressed file, typically used in the distribution of installation software.  Originally, on compact discs (CD), they emulated the earlier distribution media of floppy diskettes.

1540–1550: The construct was cabin + -et.  From the Middle English cabinet (secret storehouse, treasure chamber; case for valuables), from the Middle French cabinet (small room), diminutive of the Old French cabane (cabin) or cabine (hut, room on a ship) of uncertain origin, but thought perhaps influenced by (or more likely from) the Italian gabinetto (toilet) (masculine, plural gabinetti), diminutive of gabbia, from the Latin cavea (stall, stoop, cage, den for animals).

The original meaning in English was "case for safe-keeping" (of papers, liquor, etc.), gradually shading to mean an actual static piece of furniture which fulfils the same function.  The sense of "a private room where advisers meet" emerged circa 1600 and from that is derived the modern meaning in a political context: "an executive council", a use noted first in the 1640s and thought short for “cabinet council” a phrase in use since the 1620s.  From that it evolved from “the place or room in which the group meets” to mean the group itself.  From the 1670s, it also meant "building or part of a building set aside for the conservation and study of natural specimens, art, antiquities etc."  The suffix –et was from the Middle English -et, from the Old French –et & its feminine variant -ette, from the Late Latin -ittus (and the other gender forms -itta & -ittum).  It was used to form diminutives, loosely construed.

Cabinet government

The cabinet in the sense of an executive body comprising some or all the ministers of a government was so named because, in England, their meetings with the monarch were conducted in a cabinet (in the sense of a small room), the first recorded reference to the institution being Francis Bacon’s mention of a “Cabinet council” in 1605.  Charles I attended "Cabinet Councils" from his accession in 1625 although it wasn’t until 1644 the body first described itself as a "cabinet".  A recognizably modern cabinet system, necessitated by the demands of war, was created between 1916-1918 by UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1863–1945; UK prime-minister 1916-1945) who established both a cabinet office and secretariat, this remaining the standard Westminster model, familiar in Australia as the Department of Prime-Minister & Cabinet (PM&C).  The modern slang, “kitchen cabinet” is a smaller group, not always a sub-set exclusively of the cabinet proper, which is ad-hoc and usually the creature of a prime-minister.  Caution needs to be taken also when reading historic documents.  Frederick the Great's father, Frederick William I (1688–1740) (King of Prussia & Elector of Brandenburg 1713-1740), described his system of administration as cabinet government (kabinettsregierung) but his rule was exclusive and autocratic and by “cabinet” he meant that all decisions emanated from the royal closet.  Frederick the Great (Frederick II (1712–1786) (King of Prussian 1740-1786)), no stranger to the closet, followed his father’s example.

Even where a cabinet in the modern sense does exist, cabinet government is an organic process and cannot always be understood by analyzing its structure; the mere existence of a cabinet not of necessity creating government by cabinet.  This is especially true of US governments where the influence of its appointed cabinet varies between and even within administrations but the spectrum exists also in Westminster-style arrangements.  Indeed, in both Australia and the UK, since the trend of “presidential” prime ministers became prevalent in the late post-war years, both parliaments and cabinets are sometimes marginalized, the former by the exercise of executive authority, the latter by the increasing role of advisors and the formation of “kitchen cabinets”.

Cabinet room, Reich Chancellery, Berlin, 1938.

An extreme example was the Third Reich’s cabinet (Die Reichsregierung (originally Reich Cabinet of National Salvation)) which existed between 1933-1945, the Nazis inheriting the cabinet structure from the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).  It wasn’t until the Nuremberg trial when the indictment included the Reich Cabinet as a criminal organization that it became understood the body had met only sporadically after 1934, last gathering on 5 February 1938; Hitler was a dictator who had no taste for cabinet government.  The judges thus held that no declaration of criminality should be made with respect to the Reich Cabinet because (1) after 1931 it had ceased to act as a group or organization and (2) because it comprised so few people they should, where appropriate, be tried as individuals.

Interestingly, despite not having met since 1938, as a bureaucratic institution, the establishments of the offices attached to the cabinet grew greatly after 1938.  In fairness, the demands of an administration in wartime are greater: Winston Churchill (1975-1965; UK prime minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) noted with some satisfaction the prime-minister's private office maintained a staff of five when he arrived at Downing Street in 1940 and had grown to over five-hundred at the time of his (un-expected) departure in 1945.  Even the five he found on arrival existed only because of the establishment by David Lloyd George (1863–1945; UK prime-minister 1916-1945) in 1917 of a small staff which no prime-minister had enjoyed since 1841 when Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850; UK prime-minister 1834–1835 & 1841–1846), upon becoming prime minister for a second time, delegated day-to-day oversight of the Treasury to the newly created post of chancellor of the exchequer.  In 1841, the prime-minister had left behind the office and administrative infrastructure of the treasury.  The residue of the old arrangement is that prime-ministers to this day, despite the structural reality, formerly are styled "Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury".

The authoritative Into the Gloss deconstructs Lindsay Lohan's bathroom cabinet.

Disc or Disk

Disc or disk (pronounced disk)

(1) A phonograph record.

(2) Any thin, flat, circular plate or object.

(3) Any surface that is flat and round, or seemingly so.

(4) In computing hardware, any of several types of media consisting of thin, round plates of plastic or metal, used for external storage.

(5) In zoology and anatomy, any of various roundish, flat structures or parts in the body, especially an intervertebral disc.

(6) In botany, (in the daisy and other composite plants) the central portion of the flower head, composed of tubular florets (especially the middle part of the lip of an orchid).

(7) Any of the circular steel blades that form the working part of a disk harrow.

(8) In mathematics, the domain bounded by a circle.

1655-1665: From the French disque, from the Latin discus, from Ancient Greek δίσκος (dískos) (disk, quoit, platter; a circular plate suited for hurling) from δικεῖν (dikeîn) (to hurl, to launch) from the primitive Indo-European dik-skos from the root deik (to show, pronounce solemnly).  The Proto-Germanic diskaz was also drawn from the Latin and Greek root and was cognate with the Old Saxon disk, the Old Dutch disc (Dutch dis (table)), the Old High German tisc (German tisch (table)) and the Old Norse diskr (plate).

The sense of "phonograph disk" dates from 1888 and discophile was used to describe enthusiasts for gramophone recordings from 1940.  Disk jockey as a term to describe those on radio who broadcast music from records was first recorded 1941; it became dee-jay is 1955 and was further truncated to DJ in 1961; the video version "veejay" is from 1982 but never really caught on.  Disk-drive is from 1952 although disk was first noted in the context of computing in 1947.  Disc brakes were first developed in the late nineteenth century, began to be used on cars at scale in the 1950s and were widely widely available early in the next decade.  The first compact disc (CD) was released in 1982, the digital versatile disc (DVD) in 1995 and the BluRay (BD) disc in 2006.

Disk or Disc

LP album cover; the LP was the final evolution of the traditional phonographic disk.  This cover is memorable but fake, it is a fake disk.

Although both the Latin and Greek spellings have endured, there is in English no formal rule for the use of disc & disk and the two are often used interchangeably.  Even within industries or in countries, there is no consensus on the difference but there are conventions.  Historically the Latinate form was preferred in the British Empire and the Greek in the US but the advent of disk as the preferred use in the computing industry from the 1940s spread worldwide although, as a point of deliberate differentiation, disc was adopted for the new optical hardware (CD, DVD and BluRay).  The distinction is maintained still; mechanical devices are diskettes or hard disks whereas the optical are all discs.

The newer form of storage is solid state and the devices are properly called semiconductor storage devices (SSD) but are more typically referred to (wrongly and presumably influenced by the SSD acronym) as  solid-state disks, or solid-state drives even though SSDs don't have the rotating disk or the drive mechanism which powers the movable read–write heads used with hard disk drives (HDD) and floppy disks (FDD); even among those who understand the difference, the habits of old die hard.  So, the SSD has neither disk nor drive but does require, somewhere in the system, a software driver.

Lindsay Lohan music albums on CD: Speak (2004) and A Little More Personal (RAW) (2005, both released by Casablanca Records.

Although the use in IT greatly increased use of disk, even before the debut of optical media, there was never any indication disc would become extinct.  Except where specifically defined as a brand-name or trademark (such as the CD), both are likely to continue to be used interchangeably with regional and perhaps even generational variations.  Most style guides, even those which provide prescriptive lists, acknowledge this and suggest regardless of the form(s) users choose, what matters is to maintain consistency.  Rotating disks and discs are anyway vanishing from computer hardware so the influence of the industry's conventions of use will presumably diminish.

Irrefragable

Irrefragable (pronounced ih-ref-ruh-guh-buhl)

(1) Not to be disputed or contested (as assertion).

(2) Not able to be denied or refuted; indisputable (as fact).

(3) That which cannot or should not be broken; indestructible (archaic and probably extinct).

(4) Of a person, someone obstinate; stubborn (obsolete except as a literary device).

1525–1535: A learned borrowing from Late Latin irrefrāgābilis (irrefragable) with the English suffix –able appended.  The suffix -able was from the Middle English -able, from the Old French -able, from the Latin -ābilis (capable or worthy of being acted upon), from the primitive Indo-European i-stem forms -dahli- or -dahlom (instrumental suffix); it was used to create adjectives with the sense of “able or fit to be done”.  The construct of irrefrāgābilis was the Latin ir- (a variant of in- (used a prefix meaning “not”)) + refragā(rī) (the present active infinitive of refrāgor (to oppose, resist; to gainsay, thwart)) + -bilis (the suffix used to form adjectives indicating a capacity or worth of being acted upon).  Because of the paucity of documentary evidence, the ultimate source of the Latin refrāgor remains uncertain, but the construct may have been re- (the prefix used in the sense of “again”) + fragor (a breaking, shattering; a crash; din, uproar (from frangō (to break, shatter), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European bhreg- (to break)), formed as an antonym of suffrāgōr, the first-person singular present passive indicative of suffrāgō (to support; to vote for).  The sixteenth century French form was irréfragable, also from the Late Latin.  The meanings related to “indestructible objects” fell from use as early as the mid-seventeenth century while the figurative sense of “someone stubborn or obstinate” endured into the twentieth and, as a literary device, probably still tempts some and for those so tempted, the better style guides help by telling us to stress the second syllable.  The spelling irrefragible is obsolete.  Irrefragable is an adjective, irrefragability & irrefragableness are nouns and irrefragably is an adverb; the noun plural is irrefragabilies.

In English, irrefragable didn’t survive in common use for no better reason than people for whatever reason preferred the alternatives (literal & figurative) including (depending on the context): undeniable, indubitable, unassailable, indisputable, unambiguous, unquestionable, irrefutable, incontestable, immutable and unanswerable.  All those synonyms convey much the same thing for most so usually, the only thing the use of “irrefragable” is likely to engender is bafflement; few people will know what it means.  That can be fun between consenting word-nerds but it otherwise tends just to annoy.  There are structuralists who claim “irrefragable” is (or at least can be) different form a word like “unquestionable” because the former should specifically be associated with logical or argumentative strength while the later can be used in any context without necessarily emphasizing the same rigorous logical support.  So, because the underpinning of the scientific method is the disproving stuff, to say a scientific theory is irrefragable does not mean it cannot be argued against or disproven or that it’s beyond doubt or uncertainty; it means only that it cannot be refuted based on the current evidence.  By contrast, in some schools of theology, many things are unquestionable, not because they can be proved or disproven but because they must be accepted as matters of faith.  In the Roman Catholic Church, this is formalized: If a pope (invoking his infallibility in matters of dogma), declares something to be thus, it is, as a matter of canon law, both irrefragable & unquestionable.  The ancient idea of papal infallibility has been invoked only once since it was codified in the proceedings of the First Vatican Council (Vatican I 1869-1870) but since the early post-war years, pontiffs have found ways to achieve the same effect, John Paul II (1920–2005; pope 1978-2005) & Benedict XVI (1927–2022; pope 2005-2013, pope emeritus 2013-2022) both adept at using what was in effect a personal decree a power available to one who sits at the apex of what is in constitutional terms an absolute theocracy.  Critics have called this phenononom "creeping infallibility" and its intellectual underpinnings own much to the tireless efforts of Benedict XVI while he was head of the Inquisition (by then called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) during the late twentieth century.

Defragable: Defragmentation in action under MS-DOS 6.22.  On a nearly full big drive (say 320 MB) on which defragmentation had been neglected for a while, the process could take literally hours.  True obsessives would add the relevant command to their autoexec.bat to start every day with a defrag, the sequence being: (1) switch on, (2) go and get coffee and (3) hope it was done upon return.

Before installable file systems (IFS) began to gain critical mass in the 1990s, disk defragmenters were something of a fetish among nerds because, at the software level, there were few quicker (a relative term) and cheaper ways to make things run faster.  Fragment was from the late Middle English fragment, from the Latin fragmentum (a fragment, a remnant), the construct being frangō (I break) +‎ -mentum, from the suffix -menta (familiar in collective nouns like armenta (herd, flock)), from the primitive Indo-European -mn̥the.  The tendency of the early file systems to increasing sluggishness was because the File Allocation Table (FAT) was an up-scaled variant of that used on floppy diskettes where the cluster sizes (the segments into which the media was divided) were small and thus less prone to fragmentation.  However, because of the arcane math which dictated how many clusters there could be under the various implementations of FAT, the only way to accommodate the increasing size of hard disk drives (HDD) was to make the clusters larger, the consequence of which was a file of 1 KB or less absorbed all of a 32 KB cluster, something both an inefficient use of space and inherently prone to fragmentation.  What defragmenters did was re-allocate files to make data both as contiguous and un-fragmented as possible.  Modern file systems (HPFS, NTFS etc) still have limits but the numbers are very big and contemporary operating systems now handle defragmentation dynamically.  Although it remains a useful system on USB pen drives and such because of the wide system compatibility and ease of use, it’s doubtful even the more nostalgic nerds have fond memories of FAT on HDDs; a corrupted FAT could be a nightmare.