Montage

Montage (pronounced mon-tahzh (mawn-tazh in French))

(1) The technique of combining in a single composition, pictorial elements from various sources, as parts of different photographs or fragments of printing, either to give the illusion that the elements belonged together originally or to allow each element to retain its separate identity as a means of adding interest or meaning to the composition; the composition itself.

(2) By analogy, the creation of a thing or concept by combining a number of related elements; any combination of disparate elements that forms or is felt to form a unified whole.

(3) In photography, as photomontage, a juxtaposition or partial superimposition of several shots to form a single image.

(4) In film & television etc, a technique of editing used to present an idea or set of interconnected ideas.

1929: A borrowing from the French montage (assembly, set-up), the construct being mont(er) (to mount; to put up) + -age.  Monter was from the Vulgar Latin montāre, the present active infinitive of monto (to climb, mount, go up), from mōns & montem (mountain), from the primitive Indo-European men- (mountain).  The suffix -age was from the Middle English -age, from the Old French -age, from the Latin -āticum.  Cognates include the French -age, the Italian -aggio, the Portuguese -agem, the Spanish -aje & Romanian -aj.  It was used to form nouns (1) with the sense of collection or appurtenance, (2) indicating a process, action, or a result, (3) of a state or relationship, (4) indicating a place, (5) indicating a charge, toll, or fee, (6) indicating a rate & (7) of a unit of measure.  The French suffix -age was from the Middle & Old French -age, from the Latin -āticum, (greatly) extended from words like rivage and voyage.  It was used usually to form nouns with the sense of (1) "action or result of Xing" or (more rarely), "action related to X" or (2) "state of being (a or an) X".  A less common use was the formation of collective nouns.  Historically, there were many applications (family relationships, locations et al) but use has long tended to be restricted to the sense of "action of Xing".  Many older terms now have little to no connection with their most common modern uses, something particularly notable of those descended from actual Latin words (fromage, voyage et al).

A montage of Lindsay Lohan as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) might have rendered.

Montage, although now most associated with photography, painting and other static installations, was originally a term in cinematography, first attested in 1929.  The use was extended in 1931 (as photomontage) to the use of photographs or photographic negatives to make art or illustrations.  The technique can, in many fields, be used to add a veneer of intellectual gloss to what is really an elaborated form of plagiarism.  More helpfully, photomontages have been a vital aspect of the techniques of producing large scale imagery and the first were literally assembled on large tables by technicians armed with scissors, magnifying glasses and adhesive tape, the most prolific of the early adopters being the military who used the small images taken during photo-reconnaissance (PR) missions.  As camera technology improved, definition increased and more detail was captured but this was counted somewhat by increased anti-surveillance measures which forced the PR missions to operate at higher altitude.  Interestingly, the Allied military in World War II (1939-1945) found women much more efficient in both analysing PR and assembling montages.

A montage of Lindsay Lohan as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) might have rendered.

The techniques honed in wartime proved valuable in peacetime for creating large-scale maps and renderings from sometimes even thousands of small fragments.  This was the way big areas on the surface of the earth were able to be visualized as if a single photograph and in the 1950s work began on the task of mapping the ocean floor, something of interest not only oceanographers & nautical geographers but also to navies, commercial shipping companies and miners, the oil & gas industry long aware that vast untapped resources lay under the waves.  The concept of mapping the seabed is simple in that all that is required is to have the images in the form of a grid which could then be assembled in a single montage (the world’s biggest).  However, while the scale in terms of the surface area proved manageable, obtaining the data at depths in which pressures are immense and darkness total proved as challenging as predicted and although the maps are in a sense complete, the deepest parts of the oceans remain to some extent mysterious.  The available montages (which scientists call bathymetric data sets) include the GEBCO (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans which is an international project), Seabed 2030 (a collaborative project between GEBCO and the Japanese Nippon Foundation which plans to have a comprehensive map of the entire ocean floor by 2030), the EMODnet (European Marine Observation and Data Network which publishes highly detailed bathymetric maps for European waters) and the US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which offers maps of US waters and contributes to global programmes, their material available through the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

A montage of Lindsay Lohan as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) might have rendered.

The difference between collage and montage is that while a collage weaves together things of difference to create a unified whole, a montage uses complete things of some similarity to create something visually coherent although, with some modern artists, coherence can prove elusive, however cohesive a whole the glue might produce.  At the definitional margins however, the distinctions can be significant in the production but be undetectable in the result.  To create what appeared to be the montage of the seabed, what was done was technically a collage, the assembled components including photographs, renderings from ship-based sonar measurements and satellite altimetry as well as some enhancement in software.  However big might have been the ambition to create a unified montage of the ocean floor, cosmologists & astronomers thought bigger still and as space-based cameras and wandering craft became available, montages were assemble of objects such as the moon and the lovely rings of Saturn.  Aiming to produce the grandest montage of all is the European Space Agency which (ESA), using observations from their Euclid space mission (launched in July 2023) will explore dark matter and dark energy; over time billions of galaxies will be viewed.  What makes Euclid different from the Hubble Telescope and JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) is it can survey large parts of the sky at once, the agency describing the difference as between looking through a window compared with a keyhole.  In time, all the known objects in the universe might be photographed which will permit quite a montage but what really interests the cosmologists is the dark matter (which may actually be dark energy or a combination of the two) so it’s a quest for the known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

Mosaic

Mosaic (pronounced moh-zey-ik)

(1) A picture or decoration made of small, usually colored pieces of inlaid stone, glass etc.

(2) The process of producing such a picture or decoration.

(3) Something resembling such a picture or decoration in composition, especially in being made up of diverse elements (in general use, often confused with a collage or montage).

(4) In surveying, a number of aerial photographs assembled as a continuous photographic representation of an area (commonly called a mosaic map, aerial mosaic or photo-mosaic).

(5) In architectural plans, a system of patterns for differentiating the areas of a building or the like, sometimes consisting of purely arbitrary patterns used to separate areas according to function but often consisting of plans of flooring, reflected ceiling plans, overhead views of furnishings and equipment, or other items really included in the building or building plan.

(6) In the plant pathology field in biology, any of several diseases of plants, characterized by mottled green or green and yellow areas on the leaves, caused by certain viruses (also called mosaic disease); an organism exhibiting mosaicism.

(7) In television production, a light-sensitive surface in a camera tube, consisting of an insulating medium (a thin mica sheet) coated on one side with a large number of granules of photo-emissive material (small globules of silver and cesium insulated from each other).  The image to be televised is focused on this surface and the resulting charges on the globules are scanned by an electron beam.

(8) Of, pertaining to, resembling, or used for making a mosaic or mosaic work.

(9) As a general descriptor, something (physical, abstract or conceptual) composed of a combination of diverse elements (in this sense mosaic, collage & montage are often applied in undifferentiated fashion).

(10) To make a mosaic; to decorate with mosaic.

(11) In theology, of or pertaining to Moses or the writings, laws, and principles attributed to him (always initial capital).

(12) In genetics an alternative name for chimera (an individual composed of two or more cell lines of different genetic or chromosomal constitution, but from the same zygote).

(13) In graphical production (or as a tool of censorship), a pixelization of all or part of an image.

(14) An early web browser developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the name an allusion to the integration of multiple components including HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and Gopher's search & communications protocols.  It was the first widely adopted browser which used an implementation of the user interface still in use today.

(15) In palaeontology, as Mosaic evolution (or modular evolution), a theory that evolutionary change can occur in some body parts or systems without simultaneous changes in other parts.

1350–1400: From the Middle English, from the Old French mosaicq (mosaic work), from the Middle French moysaique & mosaïque, from the Italian mosaico, from the fifth century Medieval Latin mōsaicus & musaicum, a re-formation of the Late Latin musīvum (opus), from the Latin musēum & musaeum (mosaic work) of unknown origin.  The variants are assumed by etymologists to be linked to the Late Greek Μουσεῖον (Mouseîon) (mosaic work; shrine of the Muses; museum) by analogy with archivum & archīum (archive) although the classical Greek is nowhere attested in the sense “mosaic”.  The Ancient Greek mouseios (of the Muses) was from Μοῦσα (Moûsa) (Muse).  Because of the influence of both Moses and the Muses, the history is tangled.  The word was formed in Medieval Latin as though from the Greek, but the Late Greek word meaning "mosaic work" was mouseion (and further to twist the tale etymologists note this sense in Greek was borrowed from Latin).  The meaning "a piece of mosaic work" dates from the 1690s while the figurative form (anything resembling a mosaic work in composition) had been in use since the 1640s.  The familiar adjectival use in English in the sense of "made of small pieces inlaid to form a pattern" dates from the 1580s.  The spellings mosaick & musaic are listed by dictionaries respectively as obsolete & archaic.  Mosaic is a noun, verb & adjective, mosaicked is a verb, mosaicing, mosaicism & mosaicist are nouns, mosaiced & mosaicking are adjectives and mosaically is an adverb; the noun plural is mosaics.  All forms use an initial capital if used in association with Mosaic law.

Mosaic of Bruce McLaren (1937–1970) by Nikki Douthwaite (1973-2022); car is a 1968 Mclaren M7A, still fitted with the adjustable spoilers which (of course) the FIA banned.  The late Ms Douthwaite used a technique called pointillist hole punch art, the mosaics crafted by individually placing (using tweezers) colored paper dots which are the waste material from office hole punches.  Her mosaics, containing sometimes hundreds of thousands of dots, were constructed over weeks and finished with a preservative varnish.

Although the specific technical meanings are respected in science, in art & design, the terms mosaic, collage and montage are often used interchangeably and that’s sometimes understandable because the three can be visually similar and close examination can be required to determine the correct form.  In the visual arts, a mosaic is created by locating & fixing small (classically square tiles), usually colored pieces of inlaid stone, glass etc to create a pattern.  A collage is a picture created by using items of different shape, composition etc to create a (hopefully) thematically integrated result.  A montage is a work created by in some way assembling a number of separate components which are conceptually or thematically similar (even to the point of being identical.

Portrait by Lindsay Lohan by Jason Mecier (b 1968).  His work is crafted using discarded items and he attempts where possible to use objects in some way associated with his subjects.  Although described by some as mosaics, his technique belongs to the tradition of college.

The use in theology dates from 1655–1665, from the New Latin Mosaicus, the construct being the Late Latin Mōs(ēs) (Moses) + (the text-string) -aicus, on the model of Hebraicus (Hebraic).  In writing relating to Mosaic law or ethics, the adjectival forms Mosaical (which pre-dated Mosaic) and post-Mosaic are common.  The Ebionites were a Jewish Christian sect during the first two centuries after the crucifixion of Christ.  Ebonite was from the Latin ebonita, from the Greek Ἐβιωναῖοι (Ebionaioi), from the Hebrew אביונים‎ (ebyon; ebyonim; ebionim) (the poor, the poor ones) and the sect’s name was chosen to reflect their belief that poverty was a blessing and plenty a curse.  Their Christology was adoptionist, maintaining Jesus of Nazareth was mere human flesh & blood and therefore Christians continued bound by the Mosaic Law, the adherence to which was why God choose Jesus to be a messianic prophet in the vein of Moses himself.  While within the sect there were theological differences but the central tenet was that the essential Christian orthodoxy of the divinity of Jesus was a heresy and that he was the natural born son of Joseph and Mary.

Montage created with fragments from Lindsay Lohan's Playboy Magazine photoshoot, 2011.

The Ebionite world-view obviously shares much with Judaism but to mainstream (indeed almost all) thought within Christianity they are wholly heretical, the rejection of Christ’s divinity the objection rather than and technical points of difference with the Mosaic code of law.  Islam of course objected to Christian theology because it distorted the purity of monotheism, the doctrine of the Trinity a dilution of the Abrahamic God and really a type of iconography.  However, the Ebionites were faithful to the original teachings of the historical Jesus and thus shared Islamic views about Jesus as a prophet yet still mere human flesh and blood, leading to the intriguing situation of the Jewish Christianity which vanished from the early Christian church being preserved in Islam.  The particular Ebionite teaching of Jesus as a follower of Mosaic law was later reflected in the Koran which were the words of the prophet Muhammad.

Detail of the pointillist hole punch technique.  There are a number of pointillist methods using devices as varied as lasers and Sharpie brand pens.

Collage

Collage (pronounced kuh-lahzh or koh-lahzh)

(1) The technique, most associated with visual abstract art, of composing a work of art by pasting on a single surface various materials not normally associated with one another, as newspaper clippings, parts of photographs, theater tickets, and fragments of an envelope.

(2) A work of art produced by this technique.

(3) An assemblage or occurrence of diverse elements or fragments in (1) and unlikely or unexpected juxtaposition or (2) a coherent result.

(4) In film, a series of seemingly unrelated scenes or images or shifts from one scene or image to another suddenly and without transition.

(5) Any work created by combining unrelated (or at least definably different) styles; in literature, a combination of styles within the one work; in music a combinations of genres.

1915–1920: From the French collage, the construct being coll(er) (paste, glue) + -age.  Coller was from the Ancient Greek κόλλα (kólla) (glue) of uncertain origin but may ultimately be from the primitive Indo-European kol- and cognates included the Russian кле́й (kléj) and the Middle Dutch helen. The –age suffix was from the Middle French -age, from Old French -age, from the Latin –āticum (influential in words like rivage and voyage) which was used to form nouns or collective nouns in the sense of "action or state of being (a) X, result of Xing" or (more rarely), "action related to X".  Although the historical suffix has had many applications (eg family relationships or locations), it’s now almost wholly restricted to the sense of "action of Xing", and many terms now have little to no connection with the most common uses something especially notable in forms descended from actual Latin words such as fromage and voyage.  Collage & Collagist are nouns, collaged & collaging are verbs (used with object); the noun plural is collages.

Of the accidental & intentional

It not certain exactly when collage was first used in the sense its modern meaning.  It's sometimes credited to English painter and critic, Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) who used the term in a 1919 publication but that’s contested given the word had appeared earlier though there’s some doubt whether that was in reference to the mechanical technique or the final product.  What became known as collage certainly long pre-dates 1919; papier collé was used by both Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963) early in the century and artists, authors & painters had for centuries been producing work from disparate components.  In the digital age, the somewhat misleadingly named software eCollage (and many others) allowed collages to be created on screen although, technically, these programs were as often used to render photomontage as collage.  The opportunistically named iCollage is an image-assembly app for iOS.

A montage of Che Guevara collages.  The difference between collage and montage is that while a collage weaves together things of difference to create a unified whole, a montage uses complete things of some similarity to create something visually coherent although, with some modern artists, coherence can prove elusive.

Colleges by Giuseppe Arcimboldi; Left to right: Four Seasons in One Head, oil on canvas, (circa 1590), Fire, oil on wood, (1566), Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor painted as Vertumnus, Roman god of the seasons, oil on canvas, (circa 1591), The Librarian, oil on canvas, (1566) & Summer, oil on canvas, (1563).

In Western portraiture, the collage is not a recent form.  Although also a conventional court painter of portraits and sacred art, Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1527–1593) was noted for his portraits rendered as collages, the heads fashioned from objects such as vegetables, fruits, flowers & fish.  Very much the modern art of his day, his fanciful work seems to have been well received and critics have linked his work to the tradition of Mannerism.  Examples of collage have been found which pre-date Antiquity and the idea of assembling some representation of something from whatever items fall to hand is thought likely to have been one of the earliest forms of human artistic expression. 

Colleges by Jason Mecier; Left to right: Sigmund Freud, Frida Kahlo, Barack Obama, Lindsay Lohan & Donald Trump.

Los Angeles based pop artist Jason Mecier (b 1968) operates in a particular niche of the collage world, his mosaic portraits fabricated from unconventional materials, sometimes thematic (Sigmund Freud rendered in pills) and most famously, trash.  Perhaps surprisingly, Mr Mecier seems never to have fashioned a likeness of crooked Hillary Clinton; even when working with trash, presumably one has to draw the line somewhere.

Mural

Mural (pronounced myoor-uhl)

(1) A large picture painted or affixed directly on a wall or ceiling.

(2) A greatly enlarged photograph attached directly to a wall.

(3) A wallpaper pattern representing a landscape or the like, often with very widely spaced repeats so as to produce the effect of a mural painting on a wall of average size; sometimes created as a trompe l'oeil (“deceives the eye”).

(4) Of, relating to, or resembling a wall.

(5) Executed on or affixed to a wall:

(6) In early astronomy, pertaining to any of several astronomical instruments that were affixed to a wall aligned on the plane of a meridian; formerly used to measure the altitude of celestial bodies.

1400–1450: Late Middle English from the Latin mūrālis (of or pertaining to a wall), the construct being mūrus (wall) + ālis (the Latin suffix added to a noun or numeral to form an adjective of relationship; alternative forms were āris, ēlis, īlis & ūlis).  The Latin mūrālis was from the Old Latin moiros & moerus, from the primitive Indo-European root mei (to fix; to build fences or fortifications) from which Old English picked-up mære (boundary, border, landmark) and Old Norse gained mæri (boundary, border-land).  In the historic record, the most familiar Latin form was probably munire (to fortify, protect).  The sense of "a painting on a wall" emerged as late as 1915 although that was short for mural-painting (a painting executed upon the wall of a building) which had been in use since 1850, a use derived from mural in its adjectival form.

The adjective intermural (between walls) dates from the 1650s, from the Latin intermuralis (situated between walls), the construct being from inter- (between) + muralis (pertaining to a wall) from mūrus (wall).  The adjective intramural (within the walls (of a city, building etc)) dates from 1846, the construct being intra- (within) + muralis (pertaining to a wall) from mūrus (wall); it was equivalent to Late Latin intramuranus and in English, was used originally in reference to burials of the dead.  It came first to be used in relation to university matters by Columbia in 1871.

Mural in the style of street art (graffiti) of Lindsay Lohan in hijab (al-amira) with kebab, Melbourne, Australia. 

Mural montage: Donald Trump osculating with Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Boris Johnson, Pope Francis and Ted Cruz.

Lunch

Lunch (pronounced luhnch)

(1) A light midday meal between breakfast and dinner; luncheon.

(2) Any light meal or snack.

(3) To eat lunch.

(4) In slang, as “out to lunch”, dim, vague, uselessly ineffectual.

(5) In slang as “lunchy”, old-fashioned; passé; out of style (obsolete).

(6) In slang as “eating their lunch”, outwitting an opponent.

(7) In Caribbean slang (among older folk), mid afternoon tea.

(8) In first-class cricket, the break in play between the first and second sessions (confusingly for those new to cricket, although the first session is often called the "pre-lunch session", the second is known as the "lunch session" and not the "post lunch session").

(9) In Minnesota, USA, any small meal, especially one eaten at a social gathering.

1580:  It’s never been clear which came first: lunch or luncheon.  Origin of both is thought to lie in a dissimilated variant of nuncheon, the Middle English nonechenche (noon ling meal and drink), equivalent to none (noon) + schench (from the Old English scenc or scencan (to pour out, give drink)), cognate with the Dutch and German schenken.  Apparent unrelated, Old English had nonmete (afternoon meal, literally "noon-meat").  Nonechenche was possibly altered by the northern English dialect lunch (hunk of bread or cheese) from 1590 which may be from lump or the Spanish lonja (slice, literally “loin”).  Because dinner in the sense of the biggest or main meal of the day) could be eaten either at around noon, in the evening or at night, there was a need for a meal to fill the gap between breakfast and dinner.  Lunch is a noun & verb, luncher is a noun, lunching is a noun & verb and lunched is a verb; the noun plural is lunches.

A montage of a languid Lindsay Lohan lingering over lunch.

The idea of lunch as it’s now understood took a long time to evolve, to “take a lunch” in 1786 is recorded as eating a chunk of something (perhaps evolved from lump), carved sufficiently large to constitute a filling meal and as late as 1817, the US Webster’s Dictionary offered as the only definition of lunch "a large piece of food", a meaning long obsolete and in the 1820s, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) thought it either “a vulgarism or a fashionable affectation".   Nevertheless, lunch’s intrusion into the language in the nineteenth century does suggest some sort of social change was afoot, either in the type, style or timing of meals or at least the words used to describe them.  Lunch-money was attested from 1868; lunch-time from 1821; lunch hour from 1840 and the lunch-break from 1960.  The slang phrase out to lunch in the sense of “a bit vague, dim, clueless (but some way short of actually insane) was first recorded in recorded 1955, the notion of being "not there" and instead at lunch.  The luncheon voucher was a public health measure, introduced in 1946 by the UK’s post-war Labour government (1945-1951).  It was literally a paper voucher which represented the mechanism by which the government would subsidize midday meals taken in private restaurants by employees in workplaces where there was no staff canteen.  Luncheon vouchers were an attempt to improve the national diet by encouraging the consumption of healthy, nutritious food at a time when so many basic items were still subject to the rationing imposed during wartime (indeed, some foodstuffs were subject to rationing only after the conflict ceased).  In an example of bureaucratic inertia, the scheme existed to an extent until 2013 by which time the effects of inflation had made the by then trivial subsidy inconsequential.

Receptacles in which to store one’s lunch for transport have a history.  The lunch-box is documented from 1864, the lunch-pail from 1891.  Those were descriptive nouns whereas lunch-bucket emerged in the 1990s as an adjective indicating working-class men or values, bucket presumably the best word because it was universally understood in the English-speaking world to an extent pail was not.  Lunch-bag seems never to have become a common form despite being widely used but in the 1970s, the verb brown-bag (and the related brown-bagging) referring to bringing lunch or liquor in a brown paper bag.  A long-time staple of a lunch-pail’s contents, lunch-meat (a processed form of meat-based protein produced in a size which, when sliced, was aligned with the slices of standard loaves of bread and thus convenient for making sandwiches) was first documented in 1931.  The lunch-counter (a long, elevated table or bench where customers eat standing or sitting on high stools) is an 1854 invention of US English.

The possible future of lunch: Grilled jellyfish.  Although many fish species are in decline, jellyfish numbers are growing.  The part eaten for lunch is called the umbrella. 

The portmanteau word brunch dates from circa 1890, a British student slang merging of breakfast and lunch, according to the magazine Punch (1 August 1896).  It appeared in 1895 in the defunct Hunter's Weekly, but two years earlier, at the University of Oxford, the students had drawn what must at the time have seemed an important distinction: The combination-meal, when nearer the usual breakfast hour, is "brunch" and, when nearer luncheon, is "blunch".  That’s a linguistic curiosity in that the brunch survived while blunch did not yet the modern understanding of a brunch appears to be something taken closer to the time of lunch than breakfast.  It may be that brunch was just the more pleasingly attractive word, blunch not so well rolling off the tongue.  Several spellings of luncheon were noted in the decades after the 1640s, the now standardised form not widespread until 1706.  Of uncertain origin, in the 1580s was used to describe something like the northern English dialectal lunch (hunk of bread or cheese), though influenced by the Spanish lonja (a slice, literally "loin"), blended with or influenced by nuncheon, from the mid-fourteenth century Middle English nonechenche, (light mid-day meal), from none (noon) + schench (drink), from the Old English scenc, from scencan (pour out).

The possible future of lunch: Fishcakes.  Fishcakes are a way by-products of the industrial processing of seafood can be sold as a protein source (ie make use of what would be otherwise used for agricultural feed, the pet-food business or end up a waste product.

The etymology of all these words is tangled and there are reasons to suspect the similar forms arose independently in different place rather than as forks of anything vaguely lineal, the OED discounting the notion of lunching, which dates from the 1650s, being derived from the verb lunch because that wasn’t to be attested for another century, the OED suggesting there may be some connection (by analogy) with words like truncheon etc to simulate a French origin which is speculative but such things are not unknown in ever class-conscious England.  Whatever the origin, it does seem to have been used to describe an early afternoon meal eaten by those who take dinner at noon.

Macabre

Macabre (pronounced muh-kah-bruh, muh-kahb or muh-kah-ber)

(1) Gruesome or horrifying; grim; ghastly; horrible.

(2) Of, pertaining to, dealing with, or representing death, especially its grimmer or uglier aspects.

(3) Of or suggestive of the allegorical dance of death and related works of art.

1370s: From the French macabre, from the Middle French danse (de) Macabré, of uncertain origin.  It may have been influenced by the Medieval Latin chorēa Machabaeōrum (a representation of the deaths of Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers) but there’s no documentary evidence (the Maccabees a “liberation movement” who in the second and first centuries BC established Jewish independence in the Land of Israel),  In the popular imagination, the biblical Maccabees became associated death because of the doctrines and prayers for the dead in 2 Maccabees 12:43-46 in which is discussed Judas Maccabeus sending money to Jerusalem as a “sin offering” for those of his soldiers who had fallen in battle while wearing idolatrous amulets, forbidden by Jewish law.  Theologically, the passage is controversial because not all accept the interpretations which focus on the significance of a Jewish belief in prayer for the dead and the concept of Purgatory as a place rather than conceptual imagining.  The notion of “prayer & payments” as the means by which the dead could be “loosed from their earthly sins” so in Purgatory their souls would undergo purification after death did become embedded in Christianity, later associated with the rampant corruption of clerical indulgences which would play a part in triggering the reformation.  The alternative suggestion for the etymology is the French form was (via the Spanish macabro) from the Arabic مَقَابِر (maqābir) (cemeteries), plural of مَقْبَرَة (maqbara) or مَقْبُرَة (maqbura).  Borrowing from the Arabic in plural form was not unusual (eg magazine, derived from the plural مخازن (maxāzin) of the Arabic singular noun مخزن (maxzan) (storehouse; depot; shop) so etymologically the theory is possible but, like the Latin link, evidence wholly is lacking. 

The abstracted sense of “characterized by gruesomeness” emerged in French in the 1840s and that was picked up by English by at least 1889, dictionaries noting a racial sense from 1921.  The sense of “a comedy that deals in themes and subjects usually regarded as serious or taboo” was what extended the figurative use, suggesting “something morbid”.  The origin of that, although contested, is most associated with the French left and new wave of the late 1950s (pièce noire, comédie noire) which may have been the source of the terms “black comedy” & “dark comedy” in English.  Words similar in meaning include spooky, ghastly, ghoulish, grisly, morbid, gruesome, weird, frightening, grim, lurid, cadaverous, deathly, dreadful, frightful, ghostly, hideous, horrible, offensive & scary.  The first known reference to “danse macabre” dates from 1376 in the poem Respit de la Mort: Je fis de macabre la dance (Spared from death, the dance of the macabre) by Jehan Le Fèvre:

Je fis de Macabre la danse,
Qui tout gent maine à sa trace
E a la fosse les adresse.

I danced with the Macabre,
Which all people follow in his footsteps
And send them to the grave.

The poet used it as a noun, inspired presumably by a near-death experience but when it in the early-mid 1400s came into common use it was as an adjective and during the Romantic era it assumed also the meanings some distance from death (grotesque, tragic etc).  In the late Middle English the spelling was Macabrees daunce (reflecting the influence of the Church) and the French pronunciation (with mute “e”) was a misreading of the Middle French forms.  Macabre is an adjective, macabreness is a noun and macabrely is an adverb.  The spelling macaber is now so rare as to be functionally extinct and in popular culture macabre is used as a non-standard noun (the plural “the macabres”, on the model of the disparaging “the ghastlies”).  

Dance of Death

Danse Macabre of Basel (circa 1450), a memento mori painting by an unknown artist, Historisches Museum Basel (Basel Historical Museum), Barfüsserkirche, Basel, Switzerland.

The Danse Macabre (Dance of Death) was an artistic genre of allegory dating from the late Middle Ages; exploring the universality of death, it made clear that however high or low exulted one’s station in life, the death ultimately will visit all.  It was a popular artistic motif in European folklore and the most elaborated of all Medieval macabre art.  During the fourteenth century, Europe was beset by deathly horrors, recurring famines, the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) and, looming over all, the Black Death, an outbreak of bubonic plague which between 1346-1353 may have killed as many as 50 million, making it one of history's most lethal pandemics.  In reducing the population of Europe by between a third and a half, its demographic, political and economic implications were felt for centuries.  In these difficult times, when death not infrequently would strike just about every family in some regions, the Danse Macabre culturally was assimilated across the continent, an omnipresent chance of either a sudden or lingering, painful death spurring not only a religious desire for penance but also an urge to make the most of whatever time was left to one.

Macabre montage: Three images from Terry Richardson's (b 1965) suicide-themed shoot with Lindsay Lohan, 2012.

Especially during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the theme was a source of the vivid and stark paintings on the walls of churches and the cloisters of cemeteries and ossuaries.  Art of the Danse Macabre was typically a depiction of the personification of death summoning the doomed to dance along to the grave and they featured characters from the exultated to the most humble; popes, emperors, lawyers, laborers & children all appearing, the popular motifs in the works including hourglasses, skulls and extinguished candles.  Although the art was moral and allegorical, many also had a satirical tone and, reflecting the mores of the times, although they made clear death finally would claim rich and poor alike, the living usually were arranged in an order following the the conventional sense of precedence, popes, cardinals, kings, dukes and such at the head of the queue, blacksmiths, fellmongers and farm workers knowing their place; the “cold gradations of decay” in the phrase of Dr Johnson (Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)).  The pieces were also among the multi-media productions of the medieval period, appearing variously in manuscript illustrations, printed books, paintings on canvas, wood & stone, engravings on stone and metal, woodcuts, sculpture, tapestry embroidery & stained glass as well as in prose & verse.  They were produced as mementos mori, a Latin phrase translated literally as “remember you will die”.  That wasn’t intended to be thought macabre but rather a gentle reminder of the brevity of life and the fragility of earthly existence, hopefully inspiring folk to live lives more fulfilling and purposeful.  The tradition, although it became increasingly detached from its religious associations, never died and has enjoyed periodic resurgences over the last six-hundred years, notably after horrific events such as epidemics or World War I (1914-1918).  The COVID-19 pandemic seemed not to stimulate similar art; popular culture’s preferred platforms have shifted.

The lure of macabre collectables 

It's macabrely ironic the market for bits and pieces associated with RMS Titanic (1911-1912) continues to be buoyant and although for decades after the end of World War II (1939-1945) the trade in Nazi memorabilia flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, in recent years such collecting has attracted increasingly strident criticism and in some jurisdictions the (public) buying and selling of certain items has been banned,  There remains some tolerance for the trade what which would otherwise anyway be collectable (aircraft, armoured vehicles and such) and items of genuine historical significance (such as diplomatic papers) remain acceptable but the circulation of mere ephemera with some Nazi link is increasingly being condemned as macabre and the higher the prices paid, the more distasteful it’s claimed to be.  Nor is it only material tainted by an association with the Nazis which is condemned by some as “trading in the macabre”.

French racing driver Pierre Levegh (1905-1955) in Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR (chassis 0006/55, left), the wreckage after the fire finally was extinguished (centre) and the surviving Elektron panel (right).

In 2023, a battered metal panel from the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR (W196S, chassis 0006/55) which crashed during the running of the 1955 Le Mans 24 Hour endurance classic sold at auction for US$37,000.  That would have been unremarkable except it was in the aftermath of that crash that more than 80 spectators were killed and many more badly injured; it remains the most lethal single event in the history of the sport and one which led to some profound changes, many of which remain in force to this day.  Footage of the crash is available on-line and it will shock those accustomed to modern safety standards to see the cars continuing to race despite the carnage in the grandstand only metres away, the driver’s corpse lying on the track and the wreckage of the 300 SLR continuing to burn, the water used by fire-fighters making the intensity worse because of the exotic Elektron (a magnesium alloy) used in the lightweight construction.  The surviving panel (a cover placed for aerodynamic advantage over the passenger-side of the cockpit) was retrieved by a track marshal and it remained in his family’s possession until offered at auction by his nephew who inherited it.  Based on the unique underside markings, the factory confirmed the provenance and the auction house described it as “an authentic relic” from one of the “most exclusive models in the history of the automobile”, its special significance coming from involvement in “one of the most significant events in the history of international motor sport”.  Some though it macabre to be trading in something which gained its notoriety from so much death but the interest in such stuff in long standing, the Austin-Healey also involved in the incident in 2011 selling for US$1.3 million although it subsequently had been repaired and continued to race so anyway would have been a collectable on the historic racing circuit though doubtlessly it would have commanded a lower price.

US film star James Dean (1931–1955) with 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder (chassis 550-0055) shortly before his death, the 1955 Ford Country Squire with tandam-axle trailer the team’s tow vehicle (left), the wrecked Porsche (centre) and the salvaged transaxle in display mounting (right).

The death toll need not be in the dozens for collectors to be drawn to relics associated with tragedy; one celebrity can be enough.  In 2021, the four-speed transaxle from film star James Dean’s 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder (550-0055) sold in an on-line auction for US$382,000.  Again, based on the serial number (10 046) & part number (113 301 102), factory verified the authenticity and of the auction lot and it was only the transaxle which had been salvaged from the wreck, the display stand and peripheral bits & pieces (axles, axle tubes, brake assemblies et al) all fabricated.  The crash happened on SR (South Route) 466 (now SR 46) near Cholame, California, en route to October’s upcoming Salinas Road Races and Mr Dean was driving to familiarize himself with his new 550 Spyder which, although mid-engined and thus with a preferable weight distribution compared with the rear-engined 356 which previously he’d campaigned, had characteristics different than he’d before experienced.  In the dimming light of the late afternoon, the Porsche collided with the passenger-side of a 1950 Ford Tudor (two-door sedan) which had just entered the highway, driven by California Polytechnic State University student Donald Turnupseed (1932-1955).  Mr Turnupseed (later cleared by authorities of any blame) suffered only minor injuries while Mr Dean, less than an hour later, was pronounced DoA (dead on arrival) at hospital.

Youth

Youth (pronounced yooth)

(1) The state (imprecisely defined) of being young.

(2) The appearance, freshness, vigor, spirit etc, characteristic of one who is young (usually as youthful or youthfulness).

(3) The time of being young; early life (figuratively applied also to institutions, ideas, movements etc to describe the first or early period.)

(4) The period of life from puberty to the attainment of full growth (nominal adulthood), sometimes used as a (vague) synonym for adolescence.

(5) Young persons, collectively.

(6) A young person, by convention usually male (which some etymologists suggest is the only correct use).

(7) As a locality name, the Isle of Youth (Isla de la Juventud in the Spanish and formerly the Isle of Pines), an island in the Caribbean, a municipality in southern Cuba.

Pre 900: From the Middle English youthe, youghte & ȝouþe, from the Old English geoguth or ġeoguþ (the state of being young; young people, junior warriors; young of cattle (and related to geong (young)), from the Proto-West Germanic juwunþa, from the Proto-Germanic jugunþō & jugunþiz (youth) and related to the Old Saxon juguth, the Old Frisian jogethe, the Middle Dutch joghet, the Old High German iugund, the Gothic junda and the Latin juventus.  It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian Juugd, the Gothic junda, the German Low German Jöögd, the West Frisian jeugd, the Dutch jeugd and the German Jugend.  The ultimate source of the Germanic forms was a suffixed form of the primitive Indo-European root yeu- (vital force, youthful vigor) + the Proto-Germanic abstract noun suffix –itho.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Proto-Germanic form apparently was altered from juwunthiz by the influence of its contrast dugunthiz (ability (source of the Old English duguð)).  In Middle English, the medial “g” became a yogh (a Middle English letter (ȝ) used mainly where modern English has gh and y), which then disappeared.  The alternative forms yought & youthe are obsolete.  The Middle English youthhede (youthhood, the synonyms being yonghede, yongthe & youthe) was an example of an early nuancing as it described the part of life which followed childhood and is thus the equivalent of the modern adolescence although it’s clear it was also used of youth generally.  Youth, youthism & youthfulness are nouns, youthy is a noun & adjective (both obsolete), youthwards is an adverb and youthful & youthless are adjectives; the noun plural is youths (collectively as youth).

Synonyms are easy to list but harder to use like youth, the meanings tend to be loaded, some working in some contexts but not others and the list includes: juvenility, youngness & youngth (both archaic), youthfulness, immaturity, minority, adolescence, child, childish, kid, lad, teen, teen-ager, youngster, young  minority, immaturity & stripling.  The classic antonym is adulthood but in some contexts old-age, senility and dotage (the one favoured by Kim Jong-Un (Kim III, b 1982; Supreme Leader of DPRK (North Korea) since 2011) to disparage Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) before they fell (briefly) in love) may be applied.

Lindsay Lohan as an 11 year old youth and at a youthful 36.

The adjective youthful dates from the 1560s and much earlier, Old English had geoguðlic and other words formerly used in the same sense were youthlike, youthly, youthsome & youthy.  Yippie was first reported in 1968 and was the “marketing” name of the (not wholly fictitious) "Youth International Party" (modelled on the then commonly used “hippie”), “founded” by counter culturalists Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989), Jerry Rubin (1938–1994), Nancy Kurshan (b 1944) & Paul Krassner (1932–2019).  Youth can be a modifier (youth culture, youth crime, youth worker, youth hostel, youth market, youth justice etc) and be modified (middle youth, troubled youth) while “youthism” (discrimination against the young) is the companion term to ageism (discrimination against the old) although the former is, at law, not an inherently “suspect category” in most systems where the appropriate framework exists; that’s why five year olds can’t sue for the right to hold drivers licences although if someone that youthful in somewhere like Florida or Texas petitioned the US Supreme Court for the right to carry an AR-15, given the composition of the bench, it’s far from certain there wouldn’t be at least a few dissenting opinions supporting his or her right and as a piece of black letter law, under current interpretations, it could be argued a five year old with an AR-15 wouldn’t be any less representative of a “well-regulated militia” than anyone else who now enjoys the right.

Ever inventive, English has coined new derivations as required, the spread encouraged by the emergence of social media.  A “youthemism” is a particular form of euphemism, describing the phrases and photographs used in advertising to make older individuals feel a little young younger; youthemisms appear in the slogans and marketing campaigns for everything from pairs of jeans to “mid life crisis” motor cycles.  Also from advertising (sometime seeking votes as well as sales) is “youthenize” which describes making someone or something more appealing to a younger market; as a transitive verb it can be used to mean “to make youthful or younger; to rejuvenate”.  By obvious analogy with earthquake, “youthquake” seems first to have appeared in Vogue magazine in 1965 and was a reference to the cultural changes being wrought by the youthful baby boomers who were (uniquely in history) both in a critical mass and an economic force by virtue of their unprecedented (for youth) levels of disposable income.  The phrase “fountain of youth” is an allusion to some of the tales from antiquity and is used to refer to any product, exercise regime or other activity which promises to restore or prolong youthfulness.  The non-standard spelling “yoof” is a colloquialism from England which first gained currency during the 1980s, often as “yoof kulture” and in Thatcher-era England was a way of disparaging the behaviour and sloppy language standards among the young.  Like other words intended to offend, there were sub-cultures which adopted yoof as a form of group identity and solidarity, use prevalent among the then emerging “ravers” and the “acid house” scene.

Hitler Youth & Band of German Maidens members on camp together, circa 1937. Sometimes, the boys & girls got to know one another.

The German form jugend became notorious because during the Third Reich (1933-1945) the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth, 1926-1945 and abbreviated as HJ) was the Nazi Party organization for boys (10-18), intended to instil a sense of nationalism, prevent any from drifting towards delinquency and, more controversially, prepare them for military training proper.  The Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) was the girls' wing of the Hitlerjugend and, abbreviated as BDM, its purpose was to prepare girls for their traditional role of motherhood.  Perhaps unfortunately, some mixed activities such as the HJ and the BDM going on camps together resulted in much practical preparation for motherhood, revelations of this promiscuity leading Germans to conclude BDM might be better understood as Bund Deutscher Matratzen (League of German Mattresses).

The word youth has long been applied to the young of both sexes (and now of all genders) but there was (especially among classists) an argument that while anyone could be youthful or possess the quality of youthfulness, only a young male could be described as a youth.  That was skating on etymologically thin ice although it does seem likely the view did reflect the conventions of use in earlier centuries and that was another example of the reverence for antiquity which so flourished in the post medieval-period.  Those who translated the myths from Rome and Greece of course wrote often of the beautiful boys and young men who litter the tales but the girls and women were never youths; they were nymphs, waifs, pixies, sprites, fairies or naiads and this tradition infected academia, more than one professor insisting a youth could be only male.

Now it’s used of anyone young though context still matters.  In clinical medicine for example there are two distinct fields: paediatric medicine and adolescent medicine, puberty the point of delineation.  As a technical distinction in hospitals that’s uncontroversial but other words within the rubric of youthfulness can carry baggage, juvenile for example being innocuous when used in zoology to describe the young of a species but potentially incendiary when applied to people, such remains the influence of the phrase “juvenile delinquency”, popular since the 1960s whenever there’s a need to create a moral panic about the behaviour of youth (complaints about which by older generations have been documented since Antiquity).  Adolescent too has suffered because of phrases like “adolescent humor”, “adolescent behavior” etc which rarely suggest anything positive.

Teenage fencing.

Then of course there is teen-age which true pedants will always distinguish from teenage (pronounced teen-ige) which is a technical herm of fence-builders to describe a technique of weaving which interleaves brushwood to produce a type of fencing called wattle, the weave effected usually horizontally around vertical uprights planted in the ground.  The use to refer to those aged 13-19 dates from 1911 and was used originally of Sunday school classes with the adjective teen-aged first noted 1922 although it wasn’t until the 1950s that an identifiable “teen-age culture” could be said to exist, something of which many (then and now) disapproved but modern capitalism, generally neutral on low-intensity cultural squabbles, identified a new market and in music, clothing, film and just about every aspect of pop-culture, teens have since been a valuable segment, spending either other people’s money (OPM) or their own.  Being teen-aged of course stops with one’s 20^th birthday but youth for some time persists although there’s no general agreement for how long.  A helpful guide though may be the criterion enforced by New Zealand-based tour operator Contiki Tours, long renowned for their innovative model of alcohol-fueled packaged tourism for amorous youth although it seems they now also cater for those who drink rather less enthusiastically than the average Antipodean.  Contiki restrict their tours to those aged 18-35, presumably because at 18 sex is lawful in all countries visited and 35 is the upper limit at which it's (in some cases) plausible for men to hook-up with 18 year old women.  The days when a 21^st birthday was of legal significance have gone but there’s a wide range of ages which (somewhat arbitrarily) are used to at least imply a suggestion of adulthood including matters of sexuality activity (generally 14-18 depending on jurisdiction), obtaining a drivers licence (14-23), voting (15-20), consuming alcohol (5 (with parental supervision) –20), being responsible for criminal acts (8-14) or becoming President of the United States (35).  Lindsay Lohan, having thus attained the statutory age of political adulthood on 2 July 2021, may now seek to become POTUS; that would MAGA.

A montage of images of a teen-aged Lindsay Lohan.  

Legal rights and responsibilities however really don’t define the end of youth because it’s a cultural construct and probably most would accept 25 or even 29 as the end although of course many even beyond this can remain “youthful” and the distinction between someone thought a “youth” or a “young adult” is likely more a judgment of the individual than anything much to do with their age and in casual use, youth, inherently a relative term, can also be applied to the middle aged.  When it was noticed during the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) that certain defendants were being influenced during the communal lunches by the most recalcitrant of the Nazis, it was decided to serve the meals to a number of separate tables and the one allocated to Walther Funk (1890–1960; Nazi economics minister & central bank president) (then aged 56), Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953; Nazi propagandist) (46), Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) (41) & Baldur von Schirach (1907-1974; head of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) 1931-1940 and Gauleiter (district party leader) & Reichsstatthalter (Governor) of Vienna (1940-1945) (38) was referred to by jailers and prisoners alike as der Tischjugend (the youth table), the average age of the diners at the other tables much older.  The troublemaker who was the reason the seating plans were changed was Hermann Göring (1893–1946; leading Nazi 1922-1945, Hitler's designated successor & Reichsmarschall 1940-1945) (52) who was put in a room to eat alone which he did, most unhappy at being denied his audience.