Goblin

Goblin (pronounced gob-lin)

(1) In folklore, a small grotesque supernatural creature (depicted often as elf or sprite, regarded as mischievous and malevolent towards people.

(2) In modern fiction, one of various hostile supernatural creatures, in fantasy writing often depicted as malicious, grotesque and diminutive humanoids (sometimes also described as trolls or orcs.

1300–1350: From the Middle English gobelin & gobelyn (a devil, incubus, mischievous and ugly fairy), from the Middle French, from the Old Northern French gobelin (the source also of the Norman goubelin and the Walloon gobelin), perhaps a blend of the Old Dutch kobeholdo (goblin) (related also to the Dutch kabouter, the Middle High German kobold and the German Kobold) and the Late Latin cobalus (mountain sprite), from the Ancient Greek κόβαλος (kóbalos) (rogue, knave; goblin).  It displaced the native Old English pūca and was later picked up by some Easter European languages including Polish and Serbo-Croatian.  Goblin is a noun; the noun plural is goblins.

Curiously, in the twelfth century, there was also the Medieval Latin gobelinus, the name of a spirit haunting the region of Evreux, in chronicle of Orderic (Ordericus in the Latin) Vitalis) (1075-circa 1142) which etymologists say is unrelated either to the Germanic kobold or the Medieval Latin cabalus, from the Greek kobalos (impudent rogue, knave) & kobaloi (wicked spirits invoked by rogues), of unknown origin; it’s speculated it may be a diminutive of the proper name Gobel chosen for some reason (even as an in-joke) by the author.  Orderic’s Chronicles have been extensively cross-referenced against other primary and secondary sources and historians regard them as among the more reliable Medieval texts.  His other great work was the Historia Ecclesiastica, written in the last twenty years of his life (the bulk of the text composed between 1123-1132).  One interesting aspect of the history noted by etymologists was that although the French gobelin seems not to have appeared for over two centuries after the word emerged in English, it does appear in twelfth century texts in Medieval Latin and it’s thought few people who in some way adhered to folk magic used Medieval Latin.  John Wycliffe (circa 1328–1384) must have thought the word sufficiently well-known to use it in his translation of the Bible (published 1382-1395) intended to be read by (or more typically read to) a wide audience.  Psalms 91:5: Thou schalt not drede of an arowe fliynge in the dai, of a gobelyn goynge in derknessis.  Unfortunately, in the King James Version (KJV; 1611), the passage was rendered as the less evocative: Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.

A goblin shark (left) and a 1962 Dodge Dart station wagon (right).

The horrid looking goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni, also knonw as the elfin shark), goblin shark a calque of its traditional Japanese name tenguzame (tengu a Japanese mythical creature often depicted with a long nose and red face).  The last survivor of ancient lineage and one that retains several "primitive" traits, it's been called a "living fossil" and despite the fearsome appearance, dwelling at great depth, there have been no reports of attacks on people.  There's nothing to suggest Dodge's stylists were in the early 1960s influenced by the sight of a goblin shark; within Chrysler, it was just their time of "peak weirdness".

The system works: A goblin shark eats a fish.  Things didn't work out so well for the 1962 Chryslers which received some hasty re-styles to achieve a more conventional look. 

Folklore (and latter-day fantasy writing) has produced a number of derived terms including gobbo, goblette, gobioid, gobony, goblincore, goblinish, goblinize, goblinkind, goblinry, goblinesque & goblinish.  The history of the goblin’s depiction as something grotesque attracted some in zoology who named the goblin spider (which doesn’t look much more frightening than most arthropods) and the truly bizarre goblin shark which does live up to the name.  The noun hobgoblin dates from the 1520s, the construct being hob (elf), from Hobbe, a variant of Rob (short for Robin Goodfellow, an elf character in German folklore) + goblin.  Hobgoblins & goblins are all supernatural and all regard humans with malicious intent.  Traditionally, they are depicted as human-animal hybrids with an appearance tending to the former and they were said to assail, afflict and generally annoy folk before retreating to their haunts under bridges on in secluded spots in forests; Shakespeare’s contrast being: “Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,” (Hamlet, act I, scene 4).  Gremlins are a more modern creation and are especially prevalent in machinery, breaking things and disrupting production, their cousins in software being bugs.

Goblins from Texas en masse (left) and the one-off Goblin, Perth, Australia, 1959.

Although there have been Demons and Ghosts, no car manufacture seems ever have been tempted to build a Goblin although one Texas-based operation does offer a minimalist kit-car with the name and an enterprising Australian in 1959 chose it for a home-made special.  The Antipodean Goblin was the bastard offspring of unpromising origins: the chassis of a 1928 Essex, the drive-train from a wrecked Holden 48-215 (aka FX, 1948-1953).  Unusually for the era in which aluminum or fibreglass was preferred by small-scale producers, the body was all steel and apparently recycled from the donor Holden (although the grill components appear borrowed from the later FJ Holden (1956-1956), re-shaped with lines which owed something to both the MGA and AC Ace, later to become famous as the Shelby American Cobra.  Its fate is unknown but, in the ways of such things, survival is unlikely.

1974 AMC Gremlin X.  Despite the ungainly look, it was a commercial success.

There was however a Gremlin, built between 1970-1978 by American Motors Corporation (AMC) (production in Mexico lasted until 1983 under AMC's Vehículos Automotores Mexicanos (VAM) subsidiary).  Created in the AMC manner (in a hurry, at low cost), the Gremlin was essentially a shortened AMC Hornet (1970-1977) with a kammback tail and was a successful foray into the sub-compact (in US terms) market, something well-timed given the importance the segment would assume during the difficult decade the 1970s became.  Purchased almost exclusively on the basis of cost-breakdown, the Gremlin did however attract the interest of the ever imaginative drag-racing crowd because, although AMC never fitted anything more powerful than a distinctly non-powerful (malaise-era) 304 cubic inch (5.0 litre) V8, because (like Pontiac), AMC used much the same block size for all second-generation V8s, fitting their 401 (6.6) to the Gremlin was simple.  Many were produced, some in small runs with factory support and, being relatively light and small, the performance was more than competitive with some of the notably more expensive competition.

De Havilland Goblin jet-engine schematic (left) and prototype Gloster Meteor (DG207G) with Goblin engines, de Havilland airfield, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, 26 October 1945.

The origin of the jet engine lay in designs by French and German engineers which in principle would have worked but, as the authorities at the time realized, the metallurgy of the time hadn’t advanced to the point where alloys light enough to be viable and able to withstand the temperatures to which they’d be subjected, hadn’t been developed.  Progress however was made and in 1931 an English engineer was granted a patent for what was the first recognizably modern jet engine although, bizarre as it seems in hindsight, the Air Ministry allowed the patent to lapse and it was the German Heinkel company which first flew a jet-powered aircraft when the He 178 took briefly to the air in August 1939.  Fortunately, the Luftwaffe high-command was as short-sighted as the Air Ministry (“the bloody Air Marshals” Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964) called them while minister for aircraft production (1940-1941)) and, knowing their immediate need was for a capable, reliable fighter force within two years, declined to fund development of a project which would absorb at least three years of expensive development to be battle-ready.  The British however by then saw the potential and in June 1939 ordered production of experimental airframes and engines; it was these which would become the basis of the Gloster Meteor, powered by the de Havilland Goblin.  Both would enjoy surprisingly long lives, the Goblin in series production between 1944-1954 while the Meteor, although by then obsolescent, served with the Royal Air Force (RAF) until 1955, while in overseas service, some militaries didn’t retire their last planes until 1974.

Lindsay Lohan in goblin mode.

“Goblin mode” is a neologism for rejecting societal expectations and living in an unkempt, hedonistic manner without regards to self-image and Oxford University Press (OUP), publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), recently announced “goblin mode” as their 2022 word of the year.  Ignoring (as in the past) criticism from pedants they had picked a phrase rather than a word, OUP also provided a mini-usage guide, suggesting the most popular forms were “I am in goblin mode” or “to go goblin mode” and the meaning imparted was “unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy”.  This year’s award differs from OUP’s usual practice in that it was chosen by public vote from a choice of three selected by their lexicographers.  Unlike some recent elections, there can be no suggesting this one was “stolen”, goblin mode winning in a landslide with 318,956 votes, 93% of the valid ballots cast.  While it can’t be proven, the margin of victory might have been greater still had those already in goblin mode not been too lazy to bother voting.

The win has provoked some comment because, despite having been used on-line since first appearing (apparently on twitter) in 2009, it’s hardly been popular and some have speculated its success can be attributed to it being the one which most appealed to an audience with memories of COVID-19 lockdowns still raw, a goodly number of voters probably recognizing it was goblin mode into which many had lapsed during isolation.  The other choices OUP offered were “Metaverse” and #IStandWith”, both probably more familiar but, lacking novelty and the quality of self-identification, clearly less appealing.  OUP also noted the suggestion there may be in the zeitgeist, something of a rebellion against “the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media”.

The Nightmare (1781), oil on canvas by the Swiss-English painter John Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), Detroit Institute of Arts.  It's a popular image to use to illustrate something "nightmare related".

When the political activist Max Eastman (1883–1969) visited Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in Vienna in 1926, he observed a print of Fuseli's The Nightmare, hung next to Rembrandt's  (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn; 1606-1669) The Anatomy Lesson.  Although well known for his work on dream analysis (although it’s the self-help industry more than the neo-Freudians who have filled the book-shelves), Freud never mentions Fuseli's famous painting in his writings but it has been used by others in books and papers on the subject.  The speculation is Freud liked the work (clearly, sometimes, a painting is just a painting) but nightmares weren’t part of the intellectual framework he developed for psychoanalysis which suggested dreams (apparently of all types) were expressions of wish fulfilments while nightmares represented the superego’s desire to be punished; later he would refine this with the theory a traumatic nightmare was a manifestation of “repetition compulsion”.  The juxtaposition of sleeping beauty and goblin provoked many reactions when first displayed and encouraged Fuseli to paint several more versions.  The Nightmare has been the subject of much speculation and interpretation, including the inevitable debate between the Freudians and Jungians and was taken as a base also by political cartoonists, a bunch more nasty in earlier centuries than our more sanitized age.

Cobalt

Cobalt (pronounced koh-bawlt)

(1) A brittle, hard, lustrous, silvery-white-gray element (a ferromagnetic metal) which is found principally in cobaltite and smaltite and is widely used in (1) the rendering of both heat-resistant and magnetic alloys, (2) in clinical oncology and (3) as a blue pigment used to color ceramics, glass and other materials.

(2) As cobalt blue, a deep blue pigment derived from cobalt; zaffre.

(3) As cobalt therapy (known colloquially as the “cobalt ray”), a gamma ray treatment first used in the early 1950s in clinical oncology executed with external beam radiotherapy (teletherapy) machines using the radioisotope cobalt-60 with a half-life of 5.3 years.

1675–1685: From the German Kobalt & Kobold (a variant of Koboldkobold), from the Middle High German kobolt (household goblin), the name derived from the belief held by silver miners in the Harz Mountains that malicious goblins placed it in the silver ore, based on the rocks laced with arsenic and sulfur which degraded the ore and caused illness.  The construct was the Middle High German kobe (hut, shed) + holt (goblin) from hold (gracious, friendly), a euphemistic word for a troublesome being, designed to avoid offending the creature and thus inviting retribution.  It thus became part of German folk culture as an earth-elemental or nature spirit.  Although much rarer, the metallic element closely resembles nickel and was documented by but much rarer) was extracted from this rock. It was mentioned in the alchemy notes of Paracelsus (the Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance Theophrastus von Hohenheim (circa 1493-1541)), but as an element its discovery is credited to the Swedish chemist and mineralogist Georg Brandt (1694–1768) who in 1733 gave it the name.  Although it has since the mid-sixteenth century been used as a coloring agent for glass and ceramics, “cobalt blue” didn’t come into formal use until 1835.  There is also cobalt green (A variety of green inorganic pigments obtained by doping a certain cobalt oxide into colorless host oxides.  Cobalt & cobaltite are nouns and cobaltic, colbaltous & colbaltesque are adjectives; the noun plural is cobalts.

Cobalt ore.

Chemical symbol: Co.
Atomic number: 27.
Atomic weight: 58.93320.
Valency: 2 or 3.
Relative density (specific gravity): 8.9.
Melting point: 1495°C (2723°F).
Boiling point: 2928°C (5302.4°F).

Currently, most of the world's cobalt is supplied by mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (the DRC, the old Republic of Zaire (1971-1997)) which account for some 60% of annual production.  Because of (1) industry economics and (2) the natural geological occurrence of the minerals, cobalt typically is extracted as a by-product of copper or nickel mining operations.  Smaller-scale mining is also undertaken in Canada, Australia, Russia and the Philippines.

Bugatti Type 35 (1924-1930) in Bleu de France (Blue of France, at the time often called Bleu Racing Français (French Racing Blue)) (left) and Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport Vitesse (2012–2015) in bleu cobalt over Bleu de France (right).  The factory still offers a variety of blues including bleu cobalt.

In the early days of motorsport, cars were painted in accord with their country of origin (the corporate liveries reflecting the source of the sponsorship didn’t reach all categories until the late 1960s) and the French chose blue.  Originally it was the exact shade used on the tricolore (the national flag) but teams soon adopted various shades.  The British were allocated green which became famous as the dark shade used on the Bentleys which raced at Le Mans in the 1920s but it too was never exactly defined and over the decades lighter and darker hues were seen.  The Italians of course raced in the red best represented by Ferrari’s Rosso Corsa (Racing Red) although in the era red at least once appeared on the bodywork of the car of another nation.  The winner of the 1924 Targa Florio in Sicily was a bright red Mercedes Tipo Indy and, being German, should have been painted in their racing color of white but, noting the rocks and other items the Italian crowd was inclined to throw at any machine not finished in Rosso Corsa, the team decided subterfuge was justified and the use of white by German entrants anyway didn’t last even a decade after the victory.

In 1934, with the Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union factory teams supported by the Nazi state as a propaganda project, the Mercedes-Benz W25s appeared in silver, the bare aluminum polished rather than painted.  For decades, the story told was that after a practice session, upon being weighed, the cars were found to be a kilogram-odd over the 750 KG limit for the event and the team had to work overnight to scrape off all the carefully applied, thick white paint, the weigh-in on the morning of the race yielding a compliant 749.9.  It was a romantic tale but has since been debunked, the race in question not being run under the 750 KG rule and in the 1990s, a trove of photographs was uncovered in an archive showing the cars arriving at the track unpainted, already in bare silver.  The authorities did request the Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union teams revert to white but already motorsport’s prime directive of the 1930s was operative: "Give way to the Germans".  That race in 1934 was the debut of the “silver arrows” but it happened not quite as the legend suggested.  Even the factory now refers to the tale as "the legend".

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has issued standard (ISO 11664-3:2019) which defines the technical terms and the colorimetric equations necessary for colorimetry and in that cobalt blue has been defined as Hex triplet #0047AB; sRGBB (r:0; g:71; b:171) & HSV (h: 215°; s: 100%; v:67%).  However, among manufacturers it’s often just a vague descriptor on the color chart and like many colors is treated as a spectrum with hues varying in shade and tone.  In the fashion industry there’s no attempt whatever at standardization or even consistency and the same house has been known to describe the fabric used in one range “cobalt blue” while in another line it might be “ultramariine”, “Prussian blue” “royal blue” or anything else which seems to suit.

Lindsay Lohan in cobalt blue dress at Nylon Magazine's launch of the Young Hollywood Issue, Tenjune, New York, May 2007.

The cobalt bomb is a speculative nuclear weapon, first suggested in 1950 by one of the leading physicists associated with the Manhattan Project which during World War II (1939-1945) developed the world’s first atomic bombs.  It was the implications of the cobalt bomb which first gave rise to the doomsday notion that it might be possible to build weapons which could kill all people on earth.  The device would be constructed as a thermo-nuclear weapon consisting of a hydrogen (fusion) bomb encased in cobalt which upon detonation releases large quantities of radioactive cobalt-60 into the atmosphere and from the site of the explosion it would be dispersed worldwide by atmospheric processes.  Because of its half-life, were the volume of the release to be sufficient, the entire planet could be affected well before radioactive decay reached the point where human (and almost all animal) life could be sustained.  It’s believed no full-scale cobalt bomb was ever built but the British did test the concept on a tiny scale and few doubt the major nuclear weapons powers have all simulated cobalt bombs in their big computers and, awesome of awful depending on one’s world view, the thing has long been a staple in science fiction and the genre called “nuclear war porn”.

The descendent of the idea was the neutron bomb which, like the cobalt device, relied for its utility on fall-out rather than the initial destructive blast.  The Pentagon-funded work on the first neutron bomb was conducted under the project name “Dove” (which seems a nice touch) and the rationale was that for use in Europe, what was needed was a weapon with a relatively low blast but which produced a nasty but relatively short-lived fallout, the idea being that there would be a high death-rate among an invading army but little physical damage to valuable real estate and infrastructure.

Nightmare

Nightmare (pronounced nahyt-mair)

(1) A terrifying dream in which the dreamer experiences feelings of helplessness, extreme anxiety, sorrow etc.

(2) A condition, thought, or experience suggestive of a nightmare.

(3) A monster or evil spirit once believed to oppress persons during sleep.

1250–1300: From the Middle English nightmare, from the Old English nihtmare, the construct being night +‎ mare (evil spirit believed to afflict a sleeping person).  It was cognate with the Scots nichtmare and nichtmeer, the Dutch nachtmerrie, the Middle Low German nachtmār and the German Nachtmahr.  Another Old English word for it was niht-genga.

Night was from the Middle English nighte, night, nyght, niȝt & naht (night), from the Old English niht, neht, nyht, neaht & næht (night), from the Proto-Germanic nahts (night), from the primitive Indo-European nókwts (night).  It was cognate with the Scots nicht & neicht (night), the West Frisian nacht (night), the Dutch nacht (night), the Low German & German Nacht (night), the Danish nat (night), the Swedish & Norwegian natt (night), the Faroese nátt (night), the Icelandic nótt (night), the Latin nox (night), the Greek νύχτα (nýchta) (night), the Russian ночь (nočʹ) (night) and the Sanskrit नक्ति (nákti) (night).  Mare had a second etymological track from the sense of the female horse (mare from the Old English mīere).  The sense of “nightmare, monster” is from the Old English mare from the Proto-Germanic marǭ (nightmare, incubus) and can be compared with the Dutch dialectical mare, the German dialectical Mahr from the Old Norse mara which produced also the Danish mare and the Swedish mara (incubus, nightmare).  The ultimate root was the primitive Indo-European mor (feminine evil spirit).  The English and European forms were akin to the Old Irish Morrígan (phantom queen), the Albanian merë (horror), the Polish zmora (nightmare), the Czech mura (nightmare, moth) and the Greek Μόρα (Móra); doublet of mara.

The original meaning (incubus, an evil female spirit (later often called a goblin) afflicting men (or horses) in their sleep with a feeling of suffocation) dates from the thirteenth century, with the meaning shift from the incubus to the suffocating sensation it causes emerging in the mid sixteenth century.  The sense of "any bad dream" is recorded by 1829; that of "very distressing experience" is from 1831.  Nightmare and nightmarishness are nouns, nightmarish is an adjective and nightmarishly an adverb; the noun plural is nightmares.  The adjective nightmaresque is non-standard but use is not infrequent.

Bad dreams

Waking from a bad dream, Lindsay Lohan in Scary Movie 5 (2013).

Nightmares are regarded by mental health clinicians essentially as part of the human condition.  In this they differ from night terror (sometimes called sleep terror), a disorder inducing panic or feelings of morbid dread, typically during the early stages of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and usually brief in duration, lasting no more than 1-10 minutes.  Sleep terrors appear most often to begin in childhood, decreasing (usually) with age but their frequency and severity can be affected, inter alia, by sleep deprivation, medications, stress, fever and intrinsic sleep disorders.  Evidence does seem to suggest a predisposition to night terrors may be congenital and there may be an increase in prevalence among those with first-degree relatives with a similar history but the link to inheritance is dismissed by some academics as "speculative".

The Nightmare (1781), oil on canvas by the Swiss-English painter John Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli; 1741-1825), Detroit Institute of Arts.  It's a popular image to use to illustrate something "nightmare related".

When the political activist Max Eastman (1883–1969) visited Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in Vienna in 1926, he observed a print of Fuseli's The Nightmare, hung next to Rembrandt's  (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn; 1606-1669) The Anatomy Lesson.  Although well known for his work on dream analysis (although it’s the self-help industry more than the neo-Freudians who have filled the book-shelves), Freud never mentions Fuseli's famous painting in his writings but it has been used by others in books and papers on the subject.  The speculation is Freud liked the work (clearly, sometimes, a painting is just a painting) but nightmares weren’t part of the intellectual framework he developed for psychoanalysis which suggested dreams (apparently of all types) were expressions of wish fulfilments while nightmares represented the superego’s desire to be punished; later he would refine this with the theory a traumatic nightmare was a manifestation of “repetition compulsion”.  The juxtaposition of sleeping beauty and goblin provoked many reactions when first displayed and encouraged Fuseli to paint several more versions.  The Nightmare has been the subject of much speculation and interpretation, including the inevitable debate between the Freudians and Jungians and was taken as a base also by political cartoonists, a bunch more nasty in earlier centuries than our more sanitized age.

The current diagnostic criteria for sleep terrors

The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5, 2013) revised the diagnostic criteria for sleep terror disorder, requiring:

(1) Recurrent periods where the individual abruptly but not completely wakes from sleep, usually occurring during the first third major period of sleep.

(2) The individual experiences intense fear with a panicky scream at the beginning and symptoms of autonomic arousal, such as increased heart rate, heavy breathing, and increased perspiration. The individual cannot be soothed or comforted during the episode.

(3) The individual is unable or almost unable to remember images of the dream (only a single visual scene for example).

(4) The episode is completely forgotten.

(5) The occurrence of the sleep terror episode causes clinically significant distress or impairment in the individual's functioning.

(6) The disturbance is not due to the effects of a substance, general medical condition or medication.

(7) Coexisting mental or medical disorders do not explain the episodes of sleep terrors.

Doodlebug

Doodlebug (pronounced dood-l-buhg)

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

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

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

(4) Any of various small, squat vehicles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A doodled Volkswagen “bug” on Drawn Inside.

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

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

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

Doodles on a rendering of Lindsay Lohan by Stable Diffusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1946 Brogan Doodlebug (right) with 1942 Pontiac Torpedo (left).  In the US, some passenger car production continued in the first quarter of 1942. 

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

1946 Brogan Doodlebug.

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

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

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