Gore

Gore (pronounced gawr or gohr)

(1) Blood when shed, especially in volume or when coagulated.

(2) Murder, bloodshed, violence etc, often in the context of visual depictions (film, television etc) and frequently an element in the “pornography of violence”.

(3) Dirt; mud; filth (obsolete except in some regional dialects and obviously something of which to be aware when reading historic texts).

(4) In cartography, the curved surface that lies between two close lines of longitude on a globe (or the as represented in the segmented two-dimensional depiction in certain maps or charts.

(5) In nautical design, a triangular piece of material inserted in a sail to produce a greater surface areas or a desired shape.

(6) In apparel, one of the panels, usually tapering or triangular in shape, making up a garment (most often used with skirts) or for other purposes such as umbrellas, hot-air balloons etc.

(7) In a bra (sometimes (tautologically) as “centre gore”), the panel connecting the cups and housing the centre ends of the underwires (if fitted).

(8) On cobbling, an elastic gusset for providing a snug fit in a shoe.

(9) A triangular tract of land, especially one lying between larger divisions; in the jargon of surveying, a small patch of land left unincorporated due to unresolved competing surveys or a surveying error (also know in the US as “neutral area” and in the UK as “ghost island”).

(10) In road-traffic management, a designated “no-go” area at a point where roads intersect.

(11) In heraldry, a charge delineated by two inwardly curved lines, meeting in the fess point and considered an abatement.

(12) To create, mark or cut (something) in a triangular shape.

(13) Of an animal, such as a bull, to pierce or stab (a person or another animal) with a horn or tusk.

(14) To pierce something or someone (with a spear or similar weapon), as if with a horn or tusk.

(15) To make or furnish with a gore or gores; to add a gore.

Pre 900: From the Middle English gorre & gore (filth, moral filth), from the Old English gor (dung, bull dung, filth, dirt), from the Proto-Germanic gurą (half-digested stomach contents; faeces; manure) and the ultimate source may have been the primitive Indo-European gher- (hot; warm).  It was cognate with the Dutch goor, the Old High German gor (filth), the Middle Low German göre and the Old Norse gor (cud; half-digested food).  The idea of gore being “clotted blood” dates from the 1560s and was applied especially on battlefields; the term gore-blood documents since the 1550s.

The noun gore in the sense “patch of land or cloth of triangular shape” dates also from before 900 and was from the Middle English gor, gore, gar & gare (triangular piece of land, triangular piece of cloth), from the Old English gāra (triangular piece of land, corner, point of land, cape, promontory) the ultimate source thought to be the Proto-Germanic gaizon- or gaizô.   It was cognate with the German Gehre (gusset) and akin to the Old English gār (spear).  The seemingly strange relationship between spears, pieces of fabric and patches of land is explained by the common sense of triangularity, the allusion being to the word gore used in the sense of “a projecting point”, the tip of a spear visualized as the acute angle at which two sides of a triangle meet.  From this developed in the mid-thirteenth century the use to describe the panel used the front of a skirt, extended by the early 1300s just about any “triangular piece of fabric”.

Al Gore (b 1948; US vice president 1993-2001) with crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013).  Al Gore used to be “the next President of the United States” and when this photo was taken at Miami Dade College, Florida during October 2016, crooked Hillary was also TNPOTUS.  They have much in common.

Al Gore's oft-repeated (and much derided) "quote" that he "invented the internet" is a misrepresentation of his actual statement, made on 9 March 1999 during an interview with CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer (b 1948): "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."  By this, Gore meant that while a member of the Senate during the 1980s, he was an advocate of the roll-out of high-speed telecommunications and network infrastructure.  He introduced legislation that led to the increased funding for and and expansion of the ARPANET (the US Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, the first public packet-switched computer network which operated between 1969-1989; the precursor to the modern internet, it was used mostly by the academic institutions and the military).  The High Performance Computing and Communication Act (1991) was known as the "Gore Bill" and it provided the framework for the national infrastructure.  However one looks at things, he achieved more than crooked Hillary.

Gore entered the jargon of surveying in the 1640s, adopted in the New England region of the American colonies to describe “a strip of land left out of any property by an error when tracts are surveyed”.  Such errors and disputes were not uncommon (there and elsewhere), the most famous resolved by the Mason-Dixon Line, the official demarcation defining the boarders of what would become the US states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (which was until 1863 attached to Virginia).  The line was determined by a survey undertaken between 1763-1767 by two English astronomers Charles Mason (1728–1786) & Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779), commissioned because the original land grants issued by Charles I (1600–1649; King of England, Scotland & Ireland 1625-1649) and Charles II (1630–1685; King of Scotland 1649-1651, King of Scotland, England and Ireland 1660-1685) were contradictory, something not untypical given the often outdated and sometimes dubious maps then in use.  Later, "Mason-Dixon Line" would enter the popular imagination as the border between "the North" and "the South" (and thus "free" & "slave" states) because the line, west of Delaware, marked the northern limit of slavery in the United States.  Even though the later abolition of slavery in some areas rendered the line less of a strict delineation for this purpose, both phrase and implied meaning endured.

Arizona Department of Transport’s conceptual illustration of a gore used in traffic management.  The gore area is (almost always at least vaguely triangular) space at a point where roads in some way intersect and depending on the environment and available space, a gore may be simply a designated space (often painted with identifying lines of various colors) or a raised structure, sometime large and grassed.  The purpose of a gore is to ensue (1) the visibility of drivers is not restricted by other vehicles (most important with merging traffic) and (2) vehicle flow is in a safe direction and for this reason gores are designated “no go” areas through which vehicles should neither pass nor stop; something often enforced by statute.

The verb (in the sense of “to pierce, to stab”) emerged in the late fourteenth century (although use seems to have been spasmodic until the sixteenth) and was from the Middle English gorren & goren (to pierce, stab) which was derived from gōre (spear, javelin, dart), from the Old English gār (spear, shaft, arrow).  The adjective gory (covered with clotted blood) dates from the late fifteenth century and developed from the noun and the derived noun goriness is now a favorite measure by which produces in the horror movie genre are judged, some sites offering a “goriness index” or “goriness rating” for those who find such metrics helpful (the noun gorinessness is non-standard but horror movie buffs get the idea).  “To gore” also meant “add a gore (to a skirt, sail etc)” but surprisingly given the profligate ways of English degore or de-gore (removing a gore form a skirt, sail etc) seems never to have evolved.  Gore is a noun & verb, gory is an adjective, gored is a verb & adjective, goriness is a noun and goring is a verb; the noun plural is gores.

Shyaway’s diagram detailing how even mainstream bras can have as many as 16 separate components (although more individual parts are used in the construction; some (obviously) at least duplicated).  Who knew?

The gore (sometimes (tautologically) as “centre gore”) fits in the space between breasts, the panel connecting the cups and providing locating points for the centre ends of the underwires (if fitted).  Because there are so many types of design, the height of gore varies greatly, one fitted to a full support bra rising higher than that used by a plunge bra but the general principle is the panel should lie flat between the breasts, aligned with the skin, the gore's purpose as a piece of structural engineering being to provide separation and it's also the critical mounting point for the underwires.

HerRoom's deconstruction of the art and science of the gore.

According to HerRoom.com, the significance of the gore sitting firmly against the sternum is it provides an indication of fit.  If a gap appears between skin and gore, that suggests the cups lack sufficient depth and the user should proceed up the alphabet until snugness is achieved.  Where the gap is especially obvious (some fitters recommending a standard HB pencil as a guide while others prefer fingers, the advantage with the pencil being that globally it's a uniform size), it may be necessary to both go up more than one cup letter and decrease the band-size although there are exceptions to the gore-sternum rule and that includes “minimizers” (which achieve their visual trick by a combination of reducing forward protection and redistributing mass laterally) and most “wireless” (or “wire-free”) units (except for the smaller sizes).  The design of the gore also helps in accommodating variations in the human shape; although almost all gores are triangular and the difference in their height is obvious (and as a general principle: the greater the height, the greater the support) a difference in width will make different garments suitable for different body-types.

Gore on the gore: Lindsay Lohan was photographed in 2011 & 2013 by Tyler Shields (b 1982) in sessions which involved knives and the depiction of blood & gore.  The shoot attracted some attention and while the technical achievement was noted, it being quite challenging to work with blood (fake or real) and realize something realistic but it was also criticized as adding little to the discussion about the pornography of violence against women.

Splatter

Splatter (pronounced splat-er)

(1) To splash and scatter upon impact.

(2) An act or instance of splattering, typically a spray of mud, paint, blood or other liquids which results in many small blobs, some of which may coalesce.

(3) The quantity or the residue of something so splattered; An uneven shape (or mess) created by something dispersing on impact.

(4) In film as “splatter film” or “splatter movie”, a production characterized by gory imagery, often for its own sake (something of this the type often referred to as “a splatterfest”).  Splatterpunk is either a fork or synonym depending on interpretation.  In film, the splatter ecosystem is treated by those who take such things seriously as a sub-set of the horror genre.

(5) In modern art, as “splatter art” or “splatter painting”, a technique in which paint is (variously) dripped thrown, squirted, flicked etc onto the surface (although because of its history, “drip painting” to often treated as a separate stream (or drip)).

(6) In radio, spurious emissions resulting from an abrupt change in a transmitted signal.

1760s: The origin is uncertain but it’s presumed to be a portmanteau word, the construct being spla(sh) + (spa)tter.  Splash was probably a variant of the Middle English plasch & plasche, from the Old English plæsċ (pool, puddle) and thought likely an imitative form.  It was cognate with the Dutch plas (pool, watering hole) and related to the West Frisian plaskje (to splash, splatter), the Dutch plassen (to splash, splatter) and the German platschen (to splash).  The construct of spatter was probably the Middle Low German or Dutch spatt(en) (to spout, burst) +‎ -er (the frequentative suffix) and related to spit (saliva).  Splatter, splatterdash & splattering are nouns & verbs, splatterer & splatterfest are nouns, splattered is a verb and splattery is an adjective; the noun plural is splatters.

The verb in the sense of “splash; scatter about; make a noise as of splashing water” developed from the noun and was in use by at least 1784 but the earlier splatterdash (thought a variant of spatterdash) was noted a decade-odd earlier, a development of the noun spatterdash (leather covering for the lower leg to protect from mud) from the late seventeenth century.  Splatterdash meant “in a haphazard manner; work performed in a disorganized way” and was thought (either by intent or mistake) to have evolved from or been influenced by the earlier slapdash.  The early eighteenth century splatter-faced (having a broad, flat face) was probably a perversion of platter-faced, the modern version being “plate-faced”.  Splatterpunk was in 1986 apparently coined by award-winning US writer David J Schow (b 1955), noted for his many contributions to the horror industry and the splatter fork in particular. The first known reference to its use was during his celebrated appearance at the Twelfth World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island.  Devoted fans of the splatter movie genre often self-identify as splatterpunks.

I Know Who Killed Me (2007) was for years was a fixture on "Worst Movie Ever" lists but more recently it has built a cult following (for reasons right and wrong) and the longevity in the interest it sustains has made it one of the genre's more enduring (and profitable) titles.  It was an example of a splatter movie "cross-over" in that the splatter aspect was ancillary to the crime-focused plot.  IKWKM often appears in "midnight screenings".

The evolution of the splatter movie becomes obvious from around the early 1960s when graphical depictions of violence and increasing volumes of (fake) blood began to appear.  The censorship in most parts of the world was for most of the twentieth century quite rigorous and unlike the attitude of the authorities towards nudity & sex where some jurisdictions tended to be more permissive, the attitude towards violence in films was more restrictive.  The French Grand Guignol (1897-1962) theatre had staged naturalistic dramas in which the gore was said to be “most realistic” but it was unusual and tolerated as an example of intellectual Parisian bohemianism and in early cinema, about the only graphic depictions seen of blood and gore were those in battlefield scenes or anything intended to illustrate the savagery of non-white races.  The trend towards gratuitous violence in film grew in the post-war years and directors in the 1960s pushed the boundaries, something accommodated by different versions of films being released in different markets, some more cut than others.  Such was the flow of violent cinema that the authorities began banning distribution and it wasn’t until the 1990s the practice became uncommon in the West, the classification system restricting to adults those thought most disturbing thought sufficient.  If there’s a convenient watershed in the business, it might be The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) which lived up to its name; after that, all splatter movies can be considered a variation on the theme.

Freier Stress (Stress Free), Oil on linen by Albert Oehlen (b 1954).

Some regards splatter art as something distinct from drip painting (or action painting) while many claim not to be able to tell the difference although because drip painting has an establish place in modern art (one quite respectable according to many including those who pay millions for works by some of the most famous artists), it’s usually treated as something distinct.  As can be imagined, “splatter” is something within the rubric of abstract; throwing paint at a surface, sometimes from a distance of several feet rather than using a brush or even some form of spray, is going to results in something which, even if recognizably something, is at least at the margins going to be chaotic.

Lepanto, Panel 6, oil on canvas by Cy Twombly (1928-2011)

When drip painting burst (splattered?) upon the art world in the early post war years it was a novelty and at least since the late nineteenth century there had among the Western avant-garde been a thirst for the new and the shocking.  At the time first referred to as a form of abstract expressionism, what the early works did manage to convey was the feeling of something spontaneous, the relationship between what appears on the canvas and the physicality of the technique.  There had long been painters working in oil able to represent the gestures of their brush-strokes, usually with a graduated thickness in the layers on the surface but flinging the stuff around the room obviously brought a new violence to art.  Experimentation (and market differentiation) soon following and apart from the drippers and flingers, there were soon flickers, injectors (the use of syringes presumably thought a bit edgy), squeezers (wringing the paint from a soaked cloth), bursters (paint-filled balloons either thrown at the surface or popped from above) and even the odd spitter (paint ejected from the mouth).

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) at work, dripping.  To the untrained eye, it's really not possible to work out where the dripping ends and the splatter begins or if it matters or if a distinction between cause and effect is helpful.  The most famous of the drip painters and one of art's genuine celebrities, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) claimed he was “...the greatest painter since Picasso.”

Number 17A (1948), oil on fiberboard by Jackson Pollock.  In 2015 it sold for US$200 million which made it then the world's fifth most expensive painting.  An early work, it's thought one of the purest examples of drip painting and as soon as it appeared in the August 1949 edition of Life magazine, Jackson Pollock became famous.   

One thing about splatter art which simultaneously is (for practitioners) an attraction and (for detractors) a damnation is that the conventional skills traditionally needed by painters are not only not required but are simply irrelevant.  One of the most common complaints of the form by an unimpressed public was usually something like “That’s not art, anyone could do that.”  In terms of the techniques that’s certainly true in that anyone can drip, fling, flick, inject, squeeze or burst (most might draw the line at the spit) but the matter for judgment remains what was produced, not how it was done.  It’s the critics who rule on these things and those specializing in splatter (and related techniques) claim the ability to tell the good form the bad and the masterpiece for everything else.  Of course the language used between such critics is something like that of a sect in that while the words might be familiar, the meanings conveyed and the knowledge known secrets concealed from all but the chosen few and their views can be the difference between a piece being worthless or selling at auction for a sex figure sum.  We really have to take their word for it.

Times Square (2022), oil on canvas being painted by Paul Kenton (b 1968).

Paul Kenton describes himself as a “cityscape artist” and combines variations of splatter techniques with some more traditional forms of “editing” to produce works which are closer to the more traditional forms of abstract expressionism than the drip genre defined by Pollock.

Bloviate

Bloviate (pronounced bloh-vee-yet)

Pompously to speak or discourse at length in a boastful manner.

1857: A coining in US English, a construction in pseudo-Latin, based on deviate on the pattern of blow (in the senses of “a blowhard” (to boast)) + -ate.  Blow was from the Middle English blowen, from the Old English blāwan (to blow, breathe, inflate, sound), from the Proto-West Germanic blāan, from the Proto-Germanic blēaną (to blow) (linked to the modern German blähen), from the primitive Indo-European bhleh- (to swell, blow up) (linked to the Latin flō (to blow) and the Old Armenian բեղուն (bełun) (fertile).  The suffix -ate was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate).  Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel.  It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate).  Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee.

Bloviate was noted in the US in 1890 by a visiting English lexicographer who traced the origins to 1857 as a Midwestern (apparently in Ohio where it meant "to talk aimlessly and boastingly) word which gained the sense of “to indulge high falutin' language” when applied to politicians.  Bloviate was itself thus something of a bloviation because it was a way of saying “windbag” or “blowhard” with a Latin suffix lending a classical flavor.  It was apparently most used (at least in print; casual oral use would have been more prolific) of politicians (predictably fertile ground one suspects) but it faded from use by the early twentieth century, only to be revived during the administration of Warren Harding (1865–1923; US president 1921-1923) who quickly became notorious for his tangled, ornate and occasionally incomprehensible prose.  The biographical evidence suggests Harding reserved his bloviatory ways for his public persona, his language at the poker table as direct as is expected at such a place, something confirmed in the memoir of one of his many mistresses.  Harding of course is associated also with his alleged invention of “normalcy”, claimed to be a mistake during a speech laden with alliterative flourishes in which he said "not nostrums, but normalcy", the claim being he intended to use “normality”.

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

In saying "normalcy" he may have misspoken (ie a mistake rather than as a synonym for lie as crooked Hillary Clinton uses the word) or perhaps Harding liked the word; questioned afterwards he said he found it in a dictionary which probably was true although whether his discovery came before or after the speech wasn't explored.  Harding’s choice was much-derided at the time, normalcy had certainly existed since at least 1857, originally as a technical term from geometry meaning the "mathematical condition of being at right angles, state or fact of being normal in geometry" but subsequently it had appeared in print as a synonym of normality on several occasions.  Still, it was hardly in general use though Harding gave it a boost and it’s not since gone extinct, now with little complaint except from the linguistically fastidious.  Anyway, at the time it did him little harm.  The speech was delivered during the 1920 presidential election and Harding was elected in a landslide, the Republican ticket taking the Electoral College 404-127 with 60.4 against 34.1% of the popular vote.  In an example of how the electoral map has changed over a century, in 1920 the Democratic Party’s successes were almost exclusively south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The political re-alignment in the US, 1920-2020; Democrats are blue, Republicans red.  

So electoral behavior in the US has changed in a century but the rhetorical habits of politicians probably haven't and bloviate made its second comeback in the 1990s.  Apparently the combination of the emergence of Newt Gingrich et al as neo-bloviators and the novel medium of the internet spread the word, giving it a niche, first on the bulletin boards and later on blogs, twitter and social media as technology unfolded, the 24/7 news cycle and the proliferation of political commentators meaning the ranks swelled.  In every electoral cycle since 1994, bloviators have been identified and shamed or celebrated as required.  Harding was at least self-aware, proud of his skill at “speaking as long as the occasion warrants and saying nothing” but still annoyed critics like the humorist HL Mencken (1880-1956) who dismissed the content of Harding’s English as a “loud burble of words fit only for morons and small-town yokels” although even he acknowledged the technique was so honed that “a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”

Noted bloviator Newt Gingrich (b 1943; speaker of the US House of Representatives 1995-1999 (right)) with Joe Biden (b1942; US president since 2021 (left)).  Biden now doesn’t so much bloviate as ramble and meander.

It was the idea of “fake grandeur” that saw Barack Obama (b 1961, US president 2009-2017) labeled a bloviator by some but that was as misleading as it was to call Donald Trump “the bloviating billionaire”.  Obama at his worst talked what Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964) would have called “high falutin' nonsense” but was usually quite direct.  Trump too was direct and never tried, like George W Bush (b 1946; US president 2001-2009) or Sarah Palin (b 1964) to lend gravitas to the message with fancy (an in some cases invented) words in the manner of a Norman Mailer (1923-2007), William F Buckley (1925-2008), Gore Vidal (1925-2012), Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Conrad Black (b 1944), Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) and David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), bloviators all.

Noted bloviators William F Buckley (left) and Gore Vidal (right) in one of their famous debates on the ABC network in 1968.

Conducted in the milieu that was the drama of the 1968 Republican and Democratic Party conventions, ABC envisaged it as an exchange between intellectuals of the right and left but what made it a ratings hit was Vidal calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" to which he responded, "Listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered".  Overnight, it transformed the way the broadcast media covered politics in the US and it’s from this "debate" that the descent began towards ideological confrontation and partisan commentary.  In political science, there had long been the "politics as theatre" school of thought but it was from this debate that the packaging of politics as entertainment was allowed to evolve undisguised.

Trump is better thought of as a rodomont, the essence of rhodomontade being vain boasting, bragging and blustering without any suggestion of the use of obscure or big words; the undercurrent of everything Trump says is “I’m really rich” and that’s all that matters.  It dates from the 1610s (the earlier rodomontado noted in the 1590s), and was from the French rodomontade, a reference to the vain boasting of Rodomonte, a character who appears in two epic poems of the Italian Renaissance: Ludovico Ariosto's (1474–1533) Orlando Furioso (1516) and Matteo Maria Boiardo's (1440–1494) Orlando Innamorato (1483-1495).  In the dialectal Italian, the name translates literally as "one who rolls (away) the mountain" and it came by the 1680s to be used as a verb imparting the idea of “one who boasts, brags and talks big".

A noted rodomont with a noted bloviatrix: Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) with crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947), 2016 presidential election debate.

A non standard variation is bloviatrix (literally “a woman who bloviates”) and now of course it would be less incorrect to call one a bloviator but it was always intended as a jocular coining.  The –trix suffix was from the primitive Indo-European -trih, from -tḗr and was cognate with the Sanskrit suffix -त्री (-trī) (as in जनित्री (janitrī) (mother) though most dictionaries now tag –trix as dated.  It was appended usually to create female agent nouns and for masculine agent nouns ending in -tor, the feminine equivalent ending in -trix was historically preferred (and etymologically consistent) but social forces now operate with some severity in English and the modern practice is to adopt either gender-neutral terms, even other feminine suffixes (-a, -ess, -ette & -ine) falling from favor.  It endures where the meaning conveyed is so specific that any substitution would be either misleading or just silly, dominatrix the most obvious example and it’s usually the case these derived terms were borrowed directly from Latin, rather than formed in English (where in recent centuries the creations tended variously to be jocular, poetic or derogatory).  The Latin forms were just part of the lexicon such as cantrīx (female singer), based on cantor (male singer), from canō (I sing), tōnstrīx (female barber) based on tōnsor (male barber), from tondeō (I shear, shave) & meretrīx (prostitute (literally “she who earns”), from mereō (I merit, deserve, earn).  The Latin suffix was picked up by other European languages including the Catalan -triu, the French –trice, the Italian –trice and the Portuguese & Spanish –triz.

Bloviate is also jocular slang in the engine-building community.  Because of the phonetic similarity to “blown V8” (ie a V8 engine with forced (super- or turbo-charged) induction), it’s used to refer to such machinery.  The comparative and superlative forms presumably are “very bloviated” & “most bloviated” respectively, based on the extent of atmospheric boost delivered.

A noted bloviate: Mopar Direct Connection 1500 HEMI Crate Engine (Part Number: DSR1500-DC) @ US$59,990.  The 1500 is “most bloviated”.

Dodge's Hellephants (as crate engines) are 426 cubic inch (7.0 litre) V8s, based on the Gen III HEMI V8 in five versions ranging from 900 to 1500hp, all using DSR’s 3.0 litre (183 cubic inch) IHI supercharger and available with either cast-iron or aluminium blocks.  Not remotely lawful for use in the US in road-registered vehicles built after 1975, most are used in some form of competition and although such things are thought by many to be in their last days, the crate engines may remain available until (1) they’re outlawed, (2) demand falls to the point production is no longer viable or (3) pressure-groups force Chrysler to stop.  As recently as twenty-odd years ago, there was much nostalgia about "the way things used to be done" but, on any objective measure, the Hellephants are better than anything which came before.  Despite that, some things will always be cherished for the flaws and quirks which give them their character and for some, the old ways, while not better, will remain more enchanting.    

Urning & Urningin

Urning & Urningin (pronounced ern-ing & ern-ings)

A male homosexual person (obsolete, and when used should be in the historic context of the original meaning, a technically differentiated sense of homosexuals as a “third sex” rather than a variation of the spectrum within the (then) existing two).  The equivalent feminine form was urningin.

1864: From the German Urning (a male homosexual constructed as a third sex (Uranian), the related form being Urnigtum (homosexuality), referring Aphrodite (Ūrania), coined by the German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) in 1864.  By the early twentieth century, except among some writers in German, the word in this sense had largely been supplanted by homosexual.  The link to Aphrodite lies in Plato’s Symposium (circa 385–370 BC), where the goddess Aphrodite, in her heavenly aspect (Ūrania), is described as inspiring a noble form of affection between older and younger men.  In Greek and Roman mythology, what’s described as "the heavenly aspect of Aphrodite", the Greek goddess of beauty and love, Ūrania (and her Roman counterpart Venus) is contrasted with the earthly aspect known as Aphrodite.  Ūrania is also the muse of astronomy.  Originally used by astrologers and astronomers, uranian is now rare, used only poetically.  It was from the Latin Ūrania (the muse of astronomy in Greek mythology) +‎ -an (the suffix forming agent nouns).  Ūrania was from the Ancient Greek Οὐρᾰνῐ́ᾱ (Ouraníā) (muse of astronomy), from οὐράνιος (ouránios) (of or relating to the sky, celestial, heavenly) (from οὐρανός (ouranós) (the sky; heaven, home of the gods; the universe) and probably ultimately from the primitive Indo-European hwers- (rain) + -ιος (-ios), the suffix forming adjectives meaning (pertaining to).  Uranical is equally rare.

When writing now of homosexuality, uranism should be described as a particular historical construct.  The suggestion in 1864 was that the Urning (male) and the Urningin (female) homosexuals should be regarded as a third sex, not on any spectrum within the then-accepted binary division of gender.  Despite that, it was an interesting anticipation of the later notion(s) of gender fluidity in that it it encompassed the idea of something feminine inherently within the male body and vice versa.

Psychopathia Sexualis

In English, urning seems to have become widely discussed in the medical profession after it appeared to be in Charles Chaddock's (1961-1936) 1892 translation of the impressively titled Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study, also known as Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to the Antipathetic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-forensic Study), published in 1886, a book by an Austro-German psychiatrist with a name of similarly imposing length, Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing (1840–1902), work and author respectively cited usually as the more manageable Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing.  In his translation, US neurologist Dr Chaddock set a couple of landmarks in English, one being apparently the first instance in print of the word “bisexual” being used in the sense of humans being sexually attracted to both women and men.  Prior to that "bisexual" was used either to refer to hermaphroditic plants (ie those with both male and female reproductive structures), or to mixed-sex schools (ie co-ed(ucational)) or other institutions, an instance of how meaning-shifts in language can make difficult the reading of historic texts.

Psychopathia Sexualis wasn’t the first publication to explore the topic but the scale and breadth of approach to sexual pathology makes it one of the seminal works in the field.  Although covering a wide range of paraphilias, it was notable for a then quite novel focus on male homosexuality (hence the "antipathetic instinct" in the subtitle).and introduced the newly coined terms "sadism and masochism".  Very much a book of its time, von Krafft-Ebing writings reflected the views of the medical mainstream, distilling Karl Ulrichs' Urning (1825–1895) theory with Bénédict Morel's (1809–1873) theory of degeneration (a handy, all-purpose model for frustrated psychiatrists, degeneration theory held there were psychological which were genetic and could not be cured by a psychiatrist; it could be used to explain any psychological condition).

Nor was there any unanimity of opinion within the profession but the book was influential in psychiatry for decades and it wasn’t until 1973, in preparation for the publication in 1974 of a seventh printing of the second edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (DSM-II (1968)) that homosexuality ceased to be listed as a category of disorder although the revision was less than activists had hoped, the diagnosis instead becoming a "sexual orientation disturbance".  In the DSM-III (1980), it was again re-classified but it wasn’t until that volume was revised (DSM III-R) in 1987 that homosexuality ceased to be a treatable condition, a position which, in the West, would not everywhere for some years be reflected in legislation.

Aphrodite (1887), oil on canvas by Robert Fowler (1853–1926).

In Europe, one stream of the dissent against prevailing orthodoxy is traced to the mid-nineteenth century writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a proto gay rights activist trained in law, theology, and history.  Using the nom-de-plume Numa Numantius, during the 1860s, he issued a number of political pamphlets asserting something with strands of the modern view: that some men were born with the spirit of a woman trapped in their bodies, these men constituting a third sex which, in 1864, he named urnings and that those who might now be called lesbians were urningin, a man’s spirit trapped in the body of a woman.  His theories gained little public support but he wasn’t entirely isolated.  In 1869, Hungarian journalist Károli Mária Kertbeny (1884-1882) coined the terms “homosexual” and “homosexuality” in a political treatise against the Prussian penal code which criminalized the behavior among men, arguing the condition was inborn and unchangeable, one of many normal variations in the human condition.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, reviewed the literature and synthesised.  Describing homosexuality as a “degenerative” disorder, he adopted Kertbeny’s terminology, but not his notion of the normal; in Psychopathia Sexualis he viewed unconventional sexual behaviors through the lens of nineteenth century Darwinian theory: non-procreative sexual behaviors, masturbation included, were forms of psychopathology and his most intriguing mix of ancient and modern was that in being born with a homosexual predisposition ("born like this" in the 21C vernacular), the victim was a victim of congenital disease.  His views of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder were influential but even those who disagreed cemented the linguistic legacy, term “homosexual” quickly adopted as the standard term in the medical lexicon.  After the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis, views on the mater coalesced but prevailing opinion shifted little.  In opposition von Krafft-Ebing, German psychiatrist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) emerged as a neo-Urlichian, publishing and lecturing in support of a normative view of homosexuality and underground movements existed in many cities, some tolerated. 

Stable Diffusion's AI generation of Lindsay Lohan as Aphrodite, rising from the foam.

It was the founder of psychoanalysis, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who offered the theory which would capture the popular imagination.  Disagreeing with both Hirschfeld’s theories of normal variation and Krafft-Ebing’s of pathology, Freud believed all were born with bisexual tendencies and therefore manifestations of homosexuality could be a normal phase of heterosexual development and an innate bisexuality allowed no possibility of a separate “third sex” constructed by Hirschfeld.  Nor could the “degenerative condition” described by von Krafft-Ebing be maintained because, inter alia, it was “found in people whose efficiency is unimpaired, and who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture”.  That may amuse some now but, within Freudian theory, the internal logic is perfect, manifestations of adult homosexual behavior being caused by “arrested” psychosexual development, a theory of immaturity.

Yet, despite the interest aroused, after Freud’s death in 1939, most psychoanalysts came to view homosexuality as pathological and, in the massively expanded universities of the post-war years, research in the field exploded and sexology evolved from a professional niche to a well-funded discipline, the academic work increasingly augmented by popular publications aimed at the general reader as well as the profession.  By the mid-twentieth century, the intellectual centre of psychiatry had shifted from Europe to the United States and it was there that published what would quickly become the most influential publication in the field, the APA's DSM.  When the first edition (DSM-I) was released in 1952, homosexuality was classified as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” and this was the orthodoxy until revised in the DSM-II (1968) when the term changed to “sexual deviation”, a nuance probably better understood by the profession than the patients although "sexual deviant" became a popular phrase (even a cheerful self-descriptor among certain consenting adults) and one applied to many activities.  So pervasive was it the phrase was used even in legislation passed in the mid 1980s by a National Party government in the Australian state of Queensland, a place which for gay men didn't at the time live up to the name.  Just as in the US there was an identifiably distinct political culture south of the Mason-Dixon Line, so things were different north of the New South Wales (NSW) border.

Aphrodite Urania: A casting of the Trono Ludovisi, displayed in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia.

Discovered in 1887 in Rome's Villa Ludovisi, the Trono Ludovisi (Throne of Ludovisi) is a carving in Parian marble in the severe style of the early classical period and dates from 490-450 BC.  The still-used description as a “throne” is a relic of the belief by nineteenth century archaeologists the three-sided relief was from the seat of a statue of a colossal god but the contemporary view is it was probably a fender in front of an altar.  There is also controversy about the creation, most experts taking the view it was carved by a Greek master sculptor who worked in Italy, one perhaps of the Neo-Attic school, while the alternative theory suggest it may be of Ionian origin.  What all agree is it seems to depict the birth of the goddess Aphrodite, born from the foam of the sea on the beaches of Cyprus, the pebbles & sand visible beneath the feet her attendants.  On the side panels, other women sit playing pipes and burning incense, befitting the arrival of a goddess.  However, what clouds that is that representations of the birth of Aphrodite are almost unknown in Classical art and even the depiction of semi-nude female figures was, in the era, also unprecedented in large-scale Greek sculpture.  Trono Ludovisi is now on permanent display in the National Museum, Palazzo Altemps, Rome.

Mutual hatred.

William F Buckley (1925–2008, left) & Gore Vidal (1925–2012, right) and in one of their infamous ten debates during the 1968 US presidential campaign, August, 1968.  Their exchanges, with phrases like "you queer" and "crypto-Nazi", captured the spirit of acrimony but structurally, the debates were influential in the way the television networks would package politics as entertainment, the legacy visible today and not just on Fox News.

One implication of sexologists becoming more numerous and active was a change to the very nature of research.  Whereas psychiatrists and other clinicians drew conclusions from a skewed sample of patients seeking treatment for homosexuality or other difficulties, sexologists undertook field studies for which were recruited large numbers of subjects in the general population, most of whom had never presented for psychiatric treatment.  The most famous of the reports published both generated headlines and became best-sellers.  The Kinsey Reports (of men (1948) and women (1953)), with sample sizes in the thousands, found homosexuality to be more common in the general population than the psychiatrists had claimed although the still oft-quoted 10% “statistic” is now discredited and thought a significant over-estimate.  Ford and Beach, looking at both diverse cultures and animal behavior, confirmed Kinsey’s view homosexuality was more common than psychiatry historically has maintained and that it was found regularly in nature.  In a number of smaller surveys (of which US psychologist Evelyn Hooker’s (1907–1996) 1956 paper The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual was representative in concept if not detail), no evidence was found to suggest gay men were any more prone to severe psychological disturbances than anyone else although some did concede the perception they were "highly strung" and "dramatic" was supported by observational studies but that may be influenced by depictions in popular culture and thus perhaps even "learned or imitative".  Still, even by the twenty-first century and among liberal circles it wasn't always something one wished to be defined by.  When in 2009 the author Gore Vidal (in the language of an earlier age "a confessed homosexual") was referred to in a gathering by a well-meaning society lady as: "one of the great homosexuals of our time.", his response was to ask:  "Will someone please get this cunt out of my sight?"

The wealth of research, coupled with an increasingly strident gay activism and generational change within the APA induced a shift, the awareness now that the real psychological damage being done might be the stigma caused by the “homosexuality” diagnosis rather than the dynamics of the predilection.  Nevertheless, in 1973 when the APA met to discuss the matter, planning both for a revised DSM II and the new DSM-III, it was pondered whether “homosexuality” should be included in the APA nomenclature.  Implicit in this was the very question of what could be said to constitute a mental disorder so it was a matter of importance beyond the immediate issue.  Not wishing fundamentally to change the parameters of diagnosis, the APA came up with a masterful fudge, issuing a statement saying it had “reviewed the characteristics of the various mental disorders and concluded that, with the exception of homosexuality and perhaps some of the other 'sexual deviations', they all regularly caused subjective distress or were associated with generalized impairment in social effectiveness of functioning”.  Happy with the elegance of the loophole, the APA’s Board of Trustees (BoT) voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM.

Less happy were many clinicians who insisted on a vote of the whole membership.  The APA agreed and the decision to remove was upheld by a 58% majority of 10,000 voting members although technically, the question on which they voted was not whether homosexuality should remain a diagnosis but whether to support or oppose the BoT’s decision and, by extension, the scientific process created to make the determination.  It seemed a fine distinction and the BoT’s decision did anyway not immediately end psychiatry’s pathologizing of some presentations of homosexuality.  Instead, a revision to the DSM-II text contained a new diagnosis: "Sexual Orientation Disturbance" (SOD).  SOD (one does wonder if the condition was so-named as some sort of in-joke among the DSM's editors) defined homosexuality as an illness if an individual with same-sex attractions found it distressing and wished to be "cured", an important difference which changed the emphasis from condition to consequence.  That of course implied a future for what came to be known as sexual conversion therapy which has consequences of its own and, presumably, meant anyone unhappy with being heterosexual could seek treatment in an attempt to become homosexual; the literature is silent of that so presumably there was no demand.

SOD was replaced in DSM-III (1980) by a new category called “Ego Dystonic Homosexuality” (EDH) but it was increasingly obvious both SOD and EDH were political fudges to fix an immediate problem and it was not sustainable to maintain a diagnostic criteria under which any identity disturbance could be considered a psychiatric disorder.  The generational shift had happened and EDH was deleted from the revised DSM-III-R, in 1987.  Officially, the DSM now regarded homosexuality as a normal variant of the human condition, essentially what was thought in 1973 but couldn’t then be said.  It didn’t mean the end of debate but did mean those individuals and institutions determined still to discriminate could no longer cite the DSM in any claimed medical or scientific rationale.