Semiotics

Semiotics (pronounced sem-e-ot-ics)

(1) The study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behaviour; the analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures, or clothing.

(2) A general theory of signs and symbolism, usually divided into the branches of pragmatics, semantics and syntactics.

(3) Of or relating to signs.

(4) As a (now archaic) specialized use in medicine, the scientific study of the symptoms of disease (known later as symptomatology).

1660s: From the Ancient Greek σημειωτικός (sēmeiōtikós) (fitted for marking, portending), stem of sēmeioûn (to interpret as a sign), from σημειῶ (sēmeiô) (to mark, to interpret as a portend), from σημεῖον (sēmeîon) (a mark, sign, token), from σῆμα (sêma) (mark, sign).  Semiotics is the sense now understood in English was an adaptation by English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) on the model of Greek logic to mean “the doctrine of signs”.  The medical sense was from the 1660s, the use to describe the study of signs and symbols with special regard to function and origin dates from the 1880s and the use in psychology began in 1923.

The structural model of semiotics.

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, with special regard to function and origin especially as means of language or communication.  Essentially a branch of the study of meaning-making and meaningful communication including the deconstruction of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.  Semiotics has evolved to be closely related to linguistics, but can be treated, at least to some point, as a parallel stream.  The semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications which can be, but are not of necessity tied to linguistics.  Indeed, semiotics is probably best known for non-linguistic sign systems.  Semiotics became popular with anthropologists who enjoyed the way cultural phenomenon could be studied without any lineal relationship to a specific language.  In a similar vein, zoologists used the method to examine how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world.  In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study including the communication of information in living organisms without structured language in the sense of human text.

Lindsay Lohan in a hotel bathroom, perhaps perplexed by unlabelled taps.

A classic example of semiotics is the convention that red indicates hot water and blue cold but not all manufacturers conform to this standard, some tapware designers apparently offended by the idea of any sort of label making a vulgar intrusion on their carefully crafted shapes.  In the days when Intourist (Интурист in the Russian, a contraction of иностранный турист (foreign tourist); the Soviet Union's notoriously erratic travel agency) enjoyed what was close to a monopoly in the operation of hotels in the USSR, the travel diaries of politicians, journalists and others lucky enough to enjoy a visit would not infrequently comment on the plumbing, taps either not labelled or with labels which would only by apparent coincidence be a reliable guide, faucets which might in the morning have conformed, swapping roles by the evening.

A semiotic convention (left) and examples of variation (right).

It's well understood that Green is for safety (like an exit door) and red for danger (such as a fire).  However, except where stipulated in regulations (which tend to be local rather than national), there's no guarantee the colors used in one place will translate to another and manufacturers' parts lists often include interchangeable components in a variety of colors so users can choose although, where consequences can be both severe and with implications over vast areas (such as sites dealing with nuclear energy), the color-coding and language of signs is done to an international standard.  The reason for danger signs being usually red is likely one of human historical association, red the color of blood and fire so linked with anger and danger.  Plasma physicists point out also that red is the color least scattered by air, water or dust molecules and thus remains visible for longer and at greater distances in adverse environments .  The effect of scattering is inversely related to the fourth power of the wavelength of a given color and because red has the highest wavelength, it gets scattered the least and is thus able to travel the longest distance through fog, rain etc before fading away.  It's the same reason the sky appears blue, the fine particles in the atmosphere scatter blue light most among all the components of white light.

Sometimes though, a color is just a color.  Temporary signs such as those warning of "men at work" or "wet floor" are typically in made in bright (even lurid) colors with the text rendered in a shade with maximum contrast, the object being to attract attention.  Curiously though, manufacturers do offer these in grey and black, perhaps because of the popularity of white and cream as floor colors in commercial spaces.

Pragmatic

Pragmatic (pronounced prag-mat-ik)

(1) Of or relating to a practical point of view or practical considerations.

(2) Advocating behavior that is dictated more by practical consequences than by theory or dogma

(3) In philosophy, of or relating to pragmatism.

(4) Of or relating to pragmatics.

(5) In historiography, treating historical phenomena with special reference to their causes, antecedent conditions, and results.

(6) Of or relating to the affairs of state or community (archaic).

(7) An officious or meddlesome person, especially a priest (archaic).

(8) In logic, the branch of semiotics dealing with the causal and other relations between words, expressions, or symbols and their users.

(9) In linguistics, a sub-field in which the analysis of language in terms of the situational context within which utterances are made, including the knowledge and beliefs of the speaker and the relation between speaker and listener.

1580-1590: From the Middle French pragmatique, from Late Latin prāgmaticus (relating to civil affair and in Latin (as a noun) used to describe a person versed in the law who furnished arguments and points to advocates and orators (a kind of attorney although also used in general of “practical men” (as opposed to theoreticians)), from the Ancient Greek πραγματικός (pragmatikós) (active, versed in affairs), from πρᾶγμα (prâgma) (a thing done, a fact) which, in the plural was πράγματα (prágmata) (affairs, state affairs, public business etc (something like the modern “current events”)) from πράσσω (prássō) (to do) of which the Modern English “practical” is the descendent).  Pragmatic is a noun & adjective, pragmatist is a noun & adjective, pragmatize, pragmatizing & pragmatized are verbs, pragmaticality, pragmaticalization, pragmatism & pragmaticalness are nouns, pragmaticistic is an adjective and pragmatically is an adverb, the noun plural is pragmatics (pragmatisms & especially pragmatists the more commonly used). 

Shoes can be "pragmatic".  Who knew?  Lindsay Lohan's promotion for the collaboration between German fashion house MCM & Crocs, introducing the "pragmatic" Mega Crush Clog.

In the sense of the meddlesome priest, use dates from circa 1610 in the sense of “meddling; impertinently busy" and was either short for earlier pragmatical, or from the fifteenth century French pragmatique, from the Latin pragmaticus (skilled in business or law) from the Ancient Greek pragmatikos (fit for business, active, business-like; systematic) from pragma (genitive pragmatos) (a deed, act; that which has been done; a thing, matter, affair," especially an important one; also a euphemism for something bad or disgraceful; in plural, "circumstances, affairs" (public or private, often in a bad sense, "trouble"), literally "a thing done") from the stem of prassein & prattein (to do, act, perform), related to the modern practical.  From the 1640s, pragmatic came to be used in the sense of "relating to the affairs of a state or community" and the modern sense of "matter-of-fact, treating facts systematically and practically" is from 1853; influenced by the use in nineteenth century German philosophy of pragmatisch.  The noun pragmaticism, which as late as 1865 could be used to mean "officiousness", by 1905 had been adopted by American philosopher CS Peirce (1839-1914) to refer to the doctrine that abstract concepts must be understood in terms of their practical implications; he coined the use to distinguish his philosophy from pragmatism.  The 1540s adjective pragmatical (pertaining to material interests of a state or community) by the 1590s had extended to "concerned with practical results", the formation from the Latin pragmaticus.  It was, during the 1600s & 1700s often applied in the negative (unduly busy over the affairs of others) which is how pragmaticism same to be associated with “intrusive officiousness” and meddling from the 1610s, the layer of "busy over trifles” or “self-important" noted in 1704.  The noun pragmatism had by 1825 assumed something like its modern sense, then meaning “matter-of-fact treatment" borrowed from the Greek pragmat- (stem of pragma) as "that which has been done".  As a philosophical doctrine, it was used in the English language by 1898 and generally accepted as a borrowing from the 1870s German Pragmatismus.  Despite that, it wasn’t accepted as the name a political theory until 1951 although the historical record can be misleading, a pragmatist being a "busybody" from circa 1630 yet by 1892, noted as an "adherent of a pragmatic philosophy”.

Pragmatics in Theoretical Linguistics

Pragmatics exists in what practitioners in the field call the symbiosis of linguistics and semiotics; essentially the study of the ways in which context either is or can be vital to understanding the meaning(s) of text.  Highly technical, it has built a number of models (sometimes called codes) which, if (sometimes cumulatively, sometimes lineally) applied, can determine meaning(s) which may not be obvious or confused by ambiguity.  Pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the structural and linguistic knowledge of both speaker and listener, but also on the context in which the words are used, all pre-existing knowledge of those involved, and matters of implication and inference.  Properly applied, the ability to understand another intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.  Word nerds are especially pleased by the word grammaticopragmatic (of or relating to grammar and pragmatics).

Basically the product of squabbles between academics anxious to become dominant in some aspect of the suddenly sexy discipline of linguistics, pragmatics was created in reaction to the structuralist linguistics models of the 1960s.  Pragmatics both borrows from structuralism and builds its own critique, especially from the way structuralism tended towards finding all meaning at least can come purely from the abstract space language creates.  It probably was a useful discussion to have but it’s never been entirely clear where semantics ends and pragmatics begins or if that’s even a helpful way to think about meaning.  The discipline seemed never to move in the direction of making pragmatics a toolbox of use to those beyond the field.  Instead, there emerged mysterious forks such as indexicals, intuitionistic semantics and computational pragmatics, all of which appear weird beyond immediate understanding.

The Pragmatic Sanction of 1713

Archduchess Maria Theresia (1727) by Andreas Møller (1684–circa 1762), oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

There have been quite a few pragmatic sanctions, the first known to be that issued in Constantinople in 554 by Justinian I (Justinian the Great, 482-565; Byzantine emperor 527-565).  Nearly twelve centuries later, the Sanctio Pragmatica (Pragmatic Sanction) was an edict issued in 1713 by Charles VI (1685-1740; Holy Roman Emperor 1711-1740); it was a device to ensure the Habsburg hereditary possessions, could be inherited by his eldest daughter, the sanction necessitated by the lack of a male heir and a law which precluded female inheritance.  However, for Charles to promulgate the sanction was one thing, having it respected by others was another and, immediately upon the accession to the throne in 1740 of his daughter, the archduchess Maria Theresa (1717-1780), the predicted War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) began.  Had the pretext of female succession not existed, the desire of other European states, notably France, Bavaria and Prussia, anxious to gain territorial and commercial advantage over the Habsburgs, conflict would likely soon anyway have arisen.  The British became involved because of their geopolitical interests and the Dutch because they wished to rid themselves of French hegemony; as the war widened, Spain, Sardinia, Saxony, Sweden and Russia became involved in what was soon a multi-theatre affair on land and at sea.  It was a textbook case of mission-creep.

Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor (circa 1707) by Francesco Solimen (1657–1747), oil on canvas, in a private collection.

The war was concluded by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.  Maria Theresa was recongised as Archduchess of Austria and Queen of Hungary but, regardless of the impressive but isolated tactical victories which typified European wars of the era, so inconclusive had been the battlefield that, except for the Royal Navy’s notable success in the blockade of French ports, things ended in such a series of stalemates that most of the treaty’s signatories were hardly content with the terms.  Even Maria Theresa, whose throne had been the ostensible reason for the spilling of so much blood, resented having to cede what she did though was mollified by the horse-trading of the Treaty of Füssen (1745) which permitted her husband to be elected Holy Roman Emperor as Francis I (1708-1765).  The British, although satisfied with the commercial rights gained, would spend years glumly counting the cost.

In geopolitical terms however, the consequences were profound.  In what came to be known as the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, the central dynamics in European affairs became the alliances between Austria and France and between Prussia and Great Britain, creating a template for the shifting military and political relationships which would be maintained, adjusted and sundered all through the eighteenth century in an attempt to maintain the balance of power.  The newly built coalitions, with Russia augmenting the Austro-Franco alliance, would fight the Seven Years War (1756-1763) in which Britain and Prussia would prevail, only because of something of a Prussian miracle and the Royal Navy’s control of the seas.  Under Germanic linguistic influence, the word assumed a handy role as a kind of political shorthand; article seven of the 1712 Croatian Constitution being remembered to this day as the Pragmatic Sanction.  The clause permitted a Habsburg princess to become hereditary Queen of Croatia despite, in a typical Balkan squabble, opposition from both the Hungarian parliament and royal court.  Considered ever since a symbol of Croatian independence, the Pragmatic Sanction is included still in the preamble of the Constitution of Croatia.

Blueprint

Blueprint (pronounced bloo-print)

(1) A process of photographic printing, used chiefly in copying architectural and mechanical drawings, which produces a white line on a blue background; also called a cyanotype.

(2) A physical print made by this process.

(3) A slang term for a digital rendition of the process.

(4) A slang term for such a drawing, whether blue or not.

(5) By analogy, a detailed outline or plan of action (in text or image).

(6) To make a blueprint.

(7) A technique for optimizing the performance of internal combustion engines by machining (or matching) components to their exact specifications.

1887: The construct was blue + print (blue print and blue-print (1882) were the rarely used alternative spellings).  The figurative sense of "detailed plan" dates from 1926 and use as a verb is from 1939.

Blue dates from the sixteenth century and was from the Middle English blewe, from the Anglo-Norman blew (blue), from the Frankish blāu (blue) (possibly via the Medieval Latin blāvus & blāvius (blue)), from the Proto-Germanic blēwaz (blue, dark blue), from the primitive Indo-European bhlēw (yellow, blond, grey).  It was cognate with the dialectal English blow (blue), the Scots blue, blew (blue), the North Frisian bla & blö (blue), the Saterland Frisian blau (blue), the Dutch blauw (blue), the German blau (blue), the Danish, Norwegian & Swedish blå (blue), the Icelandic blár (blue).  It was cognate also with the obsolete Middle English blee (color) related to the Welsh lliw (color), the Latin flāvus (yellow) and the Middle Irish blá (yellow). A doublet of blae.  The present spelling in English has existed since the sixteenth century and was common by circa 1700.  Many colors have in English been productive in many senses and blue has contributed to many phrases in fields as diverse as mental health (depression, sadness), semiotics (coolness in temperature), popular music (the blues), social conservatism (blue stocking; blue rinse), politics (conservative (Tory) & Whig identifiers and (unrelated) the US Democratic Party), labor-market segmentation (blue-collar), social class (blue-blood), stock market status (blue-chip) and, inexplicably, as an intensifier (blue murder).

Print dates from circa 1300 and was from the Middle English printen, prenten, preenten & prente (impression, mark made by impression upon a surface), an apheretic form of emprinten & enprinten (to impress; imprint).  It was related to the Dutch prenten (to imprint), the Middle Low German prenten (to print; write), the Danish prente (to print), the Swedish prenta (to write German letters).  The late Old French preinte (impression) was a noun use of the feminine past participle of preindre (to press, crush), altered from prembre, from the Latin premere (to press, hold fast, cover, crowd, compress), from the primitive Indo-European root per- (to strike).  The Old French word was also the source of the Middle Dutch (prente (the Dutch prent) and was borrowed by other Germanic languages.

Lindsay Lohan, blueprinted.    

The sense of "a printed publication" (applied later particularly to newspapers) was from the 1560s.  The meaning "printed lettering" is from the 1620s and print-hand (print-like handwriting) from the 1650s.  The sense of "picture or design from a block or plate" dates from the 1660s while the meaning "piece of printed cloth or fabric" appeared first in 1756.  The photographic sense emerged apparently only by 1853, some three decades after the first photographs, the use evolving as printed photographs became mass-market consumer products.  Print journalism seemed to have been described as such only from 1962, a form of differentiation from the work of those employed by television broadcasters.

Blueprinting internal combustion engines is the practice of disassembling the unit and machining the critical components (piston, conrods etc) to the point where they exactly meet the stated specifications (dimensions & weight).  Essentially, the process is one of exactitude, using precision tools to make components produced using the techniques of mass production (which inherently involves wider tolerances) and modifying them by using tighter tolerances, meeting exact design specifications.  It’s most associated with high-performance racing cars, especially those which compete in “standard-production” classes which don’t permit modifications to most components.  In some cases, especially with factory-supported operations, the components might be specially selected, prior to assembly.  As a cost-containment measure (a means of creating a "level playing field" to ensure the competitiveness of less well-resourced teams), some competitions for "standard production vehicles" explicitly banned blue-printing.

Blueprint of the USS Missouri (BB-63), an Iowa-class battleship launched in 1944.  Missouri was the last battleship commissioned by the US Navy.

The first blueprint was developed in 1842 by English mathematician, astronomer, chemist & experimental photographer Sir John Herschel (1792-1871).  What he then termed a “cyanotype process” eliminated the need to copy original drawings by means of hand-tracing, a cumbersome, time consuming (and therefore expensive) process.  At what was then an astonishingly low cost, it permitted the rapid and accurate production of an unlimited number of copies.  The cyanotype process used a drawing on semi-transparent paper that was weighted down on top of a sheet of paper which was then placed over another piece of paper, coated with a mix of ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferrocyanide (derived from an aqueous solution and latter dried).  When the two papers were exposed to light, the chemical reaction produced an insoluble blue compound called blue ferric ferrocyanide (which became famous as Prussian Blue), except where the blueprinting paper was covered and the light was blocked by the lines of the original drawing. After the paper was washed and dried to preserve those lines, the result was a negative image of white (or whatever color the blueprint paper originally was) against a dark blue background.  White was by far the most used paper and the most common cyanotypes were thus blue with white lines.  At least by 1882 they were being described as “blue prints” but by 1887, they were almost universally called blueprints and in engineering and architecture had become ubiquitous, Herschel’s photochemical process producing copies at a tenth the cost of hand-tracing.

"Blueprint" came to refer to the process as much as the product and not all blueprints were "blue": Factory blueprint (quotation drawing produced on diazo machine) of 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR (W196S Uhlenhaut Coupé).  Two were built, one of which sold in June 2022 for a record US$142 million at a private auction held at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, making it the world's most expensive used car.

Refinements and economies of scale meant that during the early twentieth century the quality of blueprints improved and costs further fell but by the 1940s, they began to be supplanted by diazo prints (known also as “whiteprints” or “bluelines”).  Diazo prints were rendered with blue lines on a white background, making them easier to read and they could be produced more quickly on machinery which was simpler and much less expensive than the intricate photochemical devices blueprints demanded.  Accordingly, reprographic companies soon updated their plant, attracted too by the lower running costs, the diazo machinery not requiring the extensive and frequent maintenance demanded by the physically big and intricate photochemical copiers.

1929 Mercedes-Benz SSKL printed in blueprint style.

One tradition of the old ways did however endure.  The diazo machines caught on but “diazo print”, “whiteprint” & “blueline” never did; the drawings, regardless of the process used, the color of the paper or the lines (and many used black rather than blue) continued to be known as “blueprints”.  That linguistic tribute persisted even after diazo printing was phased-out and replaced with the xerographic print process, the standard copy machine technology using toner on bond paper.  Used for some time in commerce, large-size xerography machines became available in the mid-1970s and although originally very expensive, costs rapidly fell and the older printing methods were soon rendered obsolete.  As computer-aided design (CAD) software entered the mainstream during the 1990s, designs increasingly were printed directly from a computer to printer or plotter and despite the paper used being rarely blue, the output continued to be known as the blueprint.

Blueprint of the Chrysler Building, New York City, 1930.

Even now, although often viewed only as multi-colored images on screens (which might be on tablets or phones), such electronic drawings are still usually called blueprints.  Nor have blueprints vanished.  There are many things (buildings, bridges, roads, power-plants, railroads, sewers etc) built before the 1990s which have an expected life measured in decades or even centuries and few of these were designed using digital records.  The original blueprints therefore remain important to those engaged in maintenance or repair and can be critical also in litigation.  Old blueprints can be scanned and converted to digital formats but in many cases, the originals are fragile or physically deteriorated and finer details are sometimes legible only if viewed on the true blueprint.  Centuries from now, magnifying glasses in hand, engineers may still be examining twentieth century blueprints.

Inflammable & Flammable

Inflammable (pronounced in-flam-uh-buhl)

(1) Easily set on fire; combustible; incendiary, combustible, inflammable, burnable, ignitable (recommended only for figurative use).

(2) Easily aroused or excited, as to passion or anger; irascible; fiery; volatile, choleric.

1595–1605: From the Medieval Latin inflammābilis, the construct being the Classical Latin inflammā(re) (to set on fire) + -bilis (from the Proto-Italic -ðlis, from the primitive Indo-European i-stem form -dhli- of -dhlom (instrumental suffix).  Akin to –bulum, the suffix -bilis is added to a verb to form an adjectival noun of relationship to that verb (indicating a capacity or worth of being acted upon).  The construct of the Classical Latin inflammare (to set on fire) was -in (in, on) + flamma (flame).  As an indication of shifts in use, the verb inflame & noun inflammation are now most commonly used in clinical medicine to describe swellings, a site especially "reddish" often called "angry".  Inflammable is a noun & adjective, inflammation, inflammableness & inflammasome & inflammability are nouns, inflammatory is an adjective and inflammably is an adverb; the noun plural is inflammables. 

Flammable (pronounced flam-uh-buhl)

Easily set on fire; combustible; incendiary, combustible, inflammable, burnable, ignitable (technically a back-formation from inflammable).

1805–1815: From the Classical Latin flammā(re) (to set on fire) + -ble (the Latin suffix forming adjectives and means “capable or worthy of”).  Flammable is an adjective, flammability is a noun and flammably is an adverb; the noun plural is flammabilities.

Google ngram (a quantitative and not qualitative measure): Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Need for standardization

Flammable and inflammable came to the same thing.  English, a mongrel vacuum-cleaner of a language, has many anomalies born of the haphazard adoption of words from other tongues but the interchangeability of flammable and inflammable is unfortunate because of the use in signs to warn people of potentially fatal danger.

Using flammable and inflammable to mean the same thing is confusing and at least potentially dangerous and the recommended use is flammable (things prone to catching fire) and non-flammable (things not).  To add another layer of meaning less language-dependent, borrowing from semiotics, danger should be indicated with red, safety with green.

In- often is used as a prefix with adjectives and nouns to indicate the opposite of the word it precedes (eg inaction, indecisive, inexpensive etc).  Given that, it would seem reasonable to assume inflammable is the opposite of flammable and the reason for the potentially deadly duplication is historic.  Inflammable actually pre-dates flammable, the word derived from the Latin verb inflammare (to set on fire), this verb also the origin of the modern meaning “to swell or to provoke angry feelings”, hence the link between setting something on fire and rousing strong feelings in someone.  So, at a time when Latin was more influential, inflammable made sense.  However, as the pull of Latin receded, words with in- (as a negative prefix) became a bigger part of the lexicon and the confusion was created; by early in the 1800s, flammable increasingly came to be used and in the next century, as the use and storage of flammable substances grew, use was widespread.  The modern convention is (or should be) to use flammable literally (to refer to things which catch fire) and inflammable figuratively (to describe the arousal of passions, the swelling of tissue etc.  Surprisingly, the rules applying to warning signs have yet to adopt this standardization.

The Mean Girls (2004) Burn Book (left) and Lindsay Lohan burning an “inflammatory” tabloid magazine, Lindsay Lohan: The Obsession, GQ Magazine, October 2006.

Uses figurative and literal: In Mean Girls, the Burn Book gained its notoriety from being packed with inflammatory comments.  Lindsay Lohan in 2006 picked up the concept in a photo-shoot by Terry Richardson (b 1965) for GQ (Gentlemen's Quarterly) magazine.  Titled Lindsay Lohan: The Obsession, the theme was her as a case-study of the way “tabloid publications” handled celebrity culture, the joke being a magazine with “inflammatory content about her” being literally set aflame, the glossy paper of course being flammable.  It’s appears a consensus in the “media studies” crew that this aspect of “tabloid culture” peaked in the first dozen-odd years of the twenty-first century, the reasons for that including (1) the period having an exceptionally large cast of suitable subjects, (2) smart phones with HD (high-definition) cameras becoming consumer items meaning potential content proliferated (ie what once would not have been photographed now became available to editors as low cost images) and (3) social media sites not having attained critical mass, all factors which at the time enabled the lower-end glossies to flourish.  Of course, what's not certain is the math of the "cause & effect".  Was what at the time seemed an "exceptionally large cast of suitable subjects" a fluke of history which encouraged the taking of photographs and their subsequent publication or did the growth in number of down-market glossies mean more "celebrities" had to be "manufactured" to provide the content?   

1972 Ford Ranchero 500 (left) and a circa 1972 Ford Pinto (right).

“Hot Rod Flames” first became popular when the West Coast hot rod community began adding them to their modified machines.  Rendered usually in red, orange and yellow to emulate actual flames, in the decades since they’ve appeared in many colors, sometimes in hues which would never be seen in nature and they’re now a commodity with templates and adhesives widely available; the motif was also picked up by the tattoo community.  Traditionally, when applied to a hot rod or other modified vehicle, the placement of the lick of the flames was quasi-realistic in that the effect was intended to be that of a flaming car in motion.  One widely circulated image however was of a Ford Pinto (1970-1980) with the flames travelling “the other way”: from the back towards the passengers.  The artwork was a sardonic comment on the Pinto’s reputation for bursting aflame if struck from behind by another vehicle, the allegation being Pintos were unusually flammable (the media tended to prefer the more dramatic “explosive”) in such cases because of the placement of the gas (petrol) tank and design of the fuel system.  In truth the Pinto’s susceptibility probably was little different from that of many other vehicles with a similar layout but what gained the modest machine notoriety was the discovery of “inflammatory” comments in internal corporate memoranda in which executives discussed the relative costs of rectifying the problem compared with the likely costs of legal settlements compensating incinerated victims and their families.

Combustibles magazine (4 December, 1972).

The troubling duplicity of meaning was explored by the editors of Combustibles magazine in their edition of 4 December, 1972.  There never was a Combustibles magazine (which may suggest a gap in the market for the entrepreneurial) but an archive of the (factitious) covers is maintained in the Lillian Virginia Mountweazel Research Collection.  Ms Mountweasel (1942-1973) was a creation of Karen Tweedy-Holmes (b 1942), then an editor at the New Columbia Encyclopedia who, for the publication's 1975 edition, needed a bogus entry to be inserted as a "copyright trap", the idea being that were the "facts" included to appear in any other publication, they'd obviously been plagiarized because the sad tale of Ms Mountweazel's life and demise appeared nowhere else.  The entry read: “Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942–1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio.  Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964.  She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes.  The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972).  Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”  That same year, writing in The New Yorker, Henry Alford (b 1962) suggested "mountweasel" as a term to be used for copyright traps and dictionaries agreed; to this day it remains the preferred generic form and for this purpose, (unlike when used of the doomed heroine), mountweasel is used without an initial capital.

Combustibles magazine (Special Issue, 4 June, 1973).

Impressed by Ms Tweedy-Holmes' (there can have been few finer names for a lexicographer) creation, the curators of the Lillian Virginia Mountweazel Research Collection fleshed-out the tale of the life and death of the tragic American fountain designer turned photographer, most noted for her Flags Up! project, a commissioned series of images of the mailboxes of rural America.  Her other assignments included “The Cemeteries of Paris”, “The Whimsical History of Fireworks” and “Disturbing Revelations” about Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) who in 1945 had been employed by the US government, suddenly rather more interested in the missiles the German could help them build rather than his wartime use of slave labor.  A darker side also was revealed: Flags Up!, although promoted as the USPS (US Postal Service) using “captivating imagery” to demonstrate how the new ZIP codes enhanced “the efficiency and modernization of the postal system”, actually was funded by the CCF (Congress for Cultural Freedom), a CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) “front organization” used during the Cold War to produce anti-Soviet propaganda.  The “messaging” in Flags Up! was to show the way freedom of thought and the expression of ideas was allowed freely to flow between Americans, however remote they might be.  Of course, also included is the “special issue” of Combustibles (4 June, 1973) in which was announced the death the previous day of Ms Mountweazel, killed in the crash of a Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 SST (supersonic transport) passenger airliner during the 1973 Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Airport.  In the accident, all six crew members died along with eight in the nearby village of Goussainville, Val-d'Oise where Ms Mountweasel had been researching “the negative health effects of sound pollution in communities near major international airports.”  After her death, photojournalism scholar Pierre Menard, acknowledged Ms Mountweazel as “one of the most important in the world of pyromaniac publishing.”  Pierre Menard was also factitious, the name borrowed from Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote (Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939)), a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986).

Proxemics

Proxemics (pronounced prok-see-miks)

(1) In sociology and psychology, the study of the spatial requirements of humans and animals and the effects of population density on behavior, communication, and social interaction.

(2) In linguistics, the study of the symbolic and communicative role in a culture of spatial arrangements and variations in distance, as in how far apart individuals engaged in conversation stand depending on the degree of intimacy between them.

1963: A portmanteau word, the blend mixed by US anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward Twitchell Hall (1914–2009) for an academic paper published in 1963 (which built on ideas in his book The Silent Language (1959)), the construct being prox(imity) + -emics.  Proximity was a compound word, the construct being proxim(ate) +‎ -ity, from the Middle French proximité from the Latin proximitās & proximitāt-  from proximus (from the primitive Indo-European prokwismmos, from prokwe (from whence prope)).  The novel –emics was an extracted borrowing from the word phonemics (the study of phonemes or distinct units of sound in a language; phonology).  Proxemics is a noun, proxemical & proxemic are adjectives and proxemically is an adverb.  Proxemics (the study of the effects of the physical distance between people in different cultures and societies) is one of those words which appears to be a plural but is a singular form.  For those learing English it may seem strange proxemic is an adjective and proxemics a noun singular.

Empirical research

Proxemics is the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behavior, communication, and social interaction.  It’s one of a number of disciplines in the study of non-verbal communication, including semiotics (sign language), haptics (touch), kinesics (body language), vocalics (para-language), and chronemics (structure of time).  Analogous with the way animals use urine and physical posturing to define their territory, the idea is that humans use personal space and concrete objects to establish theirs.

The theory suggests there are four types of distances people keep: intimate (up to 18 inches (.5m)), personal (18 inches to 4 feet (.5-1.2M)), social (4 to 10 feet (1.2-3m)), and public (over 10 feet (3m+)) although those are the distances chosen deliberately by individuals; forced closeness such as experienced on public transport are not part of proxemics.  The theory exists within the discipline of behaviorism and is thus observational rather than being derived from explicit instruction which is why personal distance and physical contact varies by culture, the physical distance between communicators indicating also the nature of their relationship.  Beyond relationships, proxemics attempted to explain other cultural and anthropological phenomena, such as the organization of built environments and living spaces, furniture, walls, streets and fences all being arranged in ways that delineate territory, whether for living, working or meeting others; territories historically existing to provide comfort for inhabitants and induce anxiety in intruders.

Practicing pre-pandemic proxemics: The septuple of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo's Standing Committee at the Eighteenth Congress of the CCP, Beijing, China, November 2012.

Note the social distancing, an indication of early planning for the COVID-19 pandemic.  The unfortunate fellow (second from left) who spoiled the photograph by wearing the wrong color tie, was expelled from the party and transferred to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) as deputy assistant sanitation inspector.  Still, it does indicate how good things can be if things are not troubled by decadent Western concepts such as the imposition of DEI (diversity, equity & inclusion) legislation.  In some matters, Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021 and since 2025) has learned much from the CCP.    

Practicing pandemic proxemics: Lindsay Lohan in Dubai, April 2020, group photograph of a nonuple, expressing thanks to Dubai Police Force for their help during the difficult time.