Chopine

Chopine (pronounced choh-peen or chop-in)

(1) A shoe having a thick sole, usually of cork, suggesting a short stilt, worn especially by women in Europe in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries and said to have been introduced from the Ottoman Empire.

(2) A bottle of wine (usually Bordeaux) containing 250 ml, 1/3 of the volume of a standard bottle.

1570–1580: From the Middle French chapin, from the Old Spanish chapín (type of high shoe or clog, raised by means of a cork sole), from chapa (plate of metal), the construct being chap(a) (from the Middle French chape) + -in (the adjectival suffix).  The original, the Old Spanish chapín, was probably imitative of the sound made by the shoe when walking.  Dictionaries note a number of cognates of chopine including choppins & chapiney but, as might be imagined, it must have been a word in limited use (by cobblers, fashionistas etc) because there are no entries for the word (or similar forms such as cioppino or choppino) in English / Italian dictionaries of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries; perhaps it was at the time: "The shoe that dare not speak its name".  It's possible the equivalent in Renaissance Italian was zoccolo (familiar as the English plural "clogs") which may come from the Italian zocco (stump or block of wood) but adding to the murkiness, in one English / Italian dictionary, the word chopinos appears in the definition of the plural zoccoli.  Chopine is a noun; the noun plural is chopines.

Portrait de Chopin en Dante (drawing of Chopin as Dante, 1849), graphite pencil on paper by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Eugène Delacroix National Museum, the Louvre, Paris.  Inscribed Cher Chopin (Dear Chopin), the drawing is believed to have been sketched on 31 October, 1849, upon the artist learning of the composer's death some two weeks earlier.  It remained in Delacroix's bedroom until his death.

Unfortunately, chopiner is not an English noun meaning “one who makes or wears chopines” but a French verb meaning “to drink to excess” while the English adjective Chopinian carries the sense “of or pertaining to the Polish composer & virtuoso pianist Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)”.  A macabre footnote in Chopin's story is that Hans Frank (1900–1946; Nazi lawyer and governor of the General Government (1939-1945) in German-occupied Poland during World War II), whose rule in Nazi-occupied Poland was an appalling and bloody tale of corruption and depravity, when on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in all seriousness (as an experienced trial lawyer) offered in mitigation for his conduct the fact he'd established in Kraków a Chopin Museum, something he noted: “the Poles had never managed to do”.  The belated attempt at redemption came apparently at the instigation of Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945; Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda 1933-1945) who, although as evil as any of the Nazis, was at least clear-headed enough to understand carrots were in occupied territories at least as useful as sticks.

Defendants in the dock at the First Nuremberg Trial (Frank circled).

Acting under instruction from Berlin, Frank’s regime actively had attempted to eradicate Polish culture and while his methods were never subtle, the worst excesses included mass-murder of “the intelligentsia” (writers, artists, journalists, academics, priests etc) but the governor-general, bizarrely, had a personal obsession with Chopin, based on a genuine fondness for the music and many had been drawn to what been described as its “quasi-improvised” quality; the French composer Georges Bizet (1838–1875) spoke of Chopin’s work as “…charming, strange, unique, inimitable”.  Frank too clearly was charmed but understood the long dead composer would need to be “Germanized” to be acceptable in the Third Reich (1933-1945), taking measures such as spelling his name in a Germanic-sounding “Schopping” and banning performances of his compositions for Polish audiences.  The centrepiece of this improbable Nazi attempt at cult-creation was what Frank called the “temporary” Chopin Museum in his official headquarters at Wawel Castle in Kraków, a permanent structure to be erected once Germany had won the war.  In typical Nazi style, Frank dispatched his (by then well-experienced) agents to loot occupied Europe for Chopin artifacts, manuscripts, letters, death masks and memorabilia, managing to acquire (ie steal) even an original Pleyel grand piano that had belonged to the composer.  Despite that interest, in May 1940 he had made only a token attempt to prevent the destruction of the famous bronze Chopin Monument in Warsaw's Łazienki Park, the 16-ton statue cut into pieces and melted down for the benefit of the German war machine.

The Nuremberg Trial, 1946 (1946), oil on canvas by Dame Laura Knight RA (1877-1970), IWM (Imperial War Museum), London.

Dame Laura Knight’s large canvas The Nuremberg Trial, 1946, now hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London and is one of the most re-produced images from the trial.  An unusual blend of two aspects of realism achieved by a juxtaposition of defendants in the dock and a devastated Nuremberg cityscape (including corpses), the artist did change a few details to suit her didactic purposes, Hans Frank seated not in his usual place but at the painting’s bottom-right, presumably better to show the wrists damaged by a failed suicide attempt.  In court, Frank wore gloves to conceal the effect but these Dame Laura choose to remove.  Curiously for such an accomplished artist, some of the likenesses achieved of those in the dock are not impressive but it remains one of the trial’s most memorable images, despite at the time being received by the critical establishment without enthusiasm.

Sketch of Frank in the dock by New Zealand-born political cartoonist David Low (1891-1963).

For the museum’s opening ceremony, Frank personally selected Ludmilla Berkwic (1910–2005), a fine Polish concert pianist and piano teacher who, on Chopin’s Pleyel, preformed several pieces for an audience of high-ranking Nazis, the recital very well-received.  Unfortunately, Frank’s staff hadn’t dug too deep and what they failed to detect was that Ms Berkwic had since the start of the war being living under false papers because her father's family was Jewish.  That might have gone undetected were it not for Dr Goebbels having arranged for the performance to be filmed and, in an attempt to show how benign was Nazi rule in Poland, distributed throughout Europe on propaganda newsreels.  By 1943 he probably realized that might be a futile project but his energy for the Sisyphean task never waned.  However, an unexpected consequence of the publicity was it prompted one of Ms Berkwic’s jealous rivals to denounce her for having Jewish heritage.  That forced her and her mother to obtain from the Polish Underground new sets of forged papers and, strange as it sounds, they fled to Germany where they could be absorbed into the millions of captive Polish workers.  Hiding, as it were, “in plain sight”, she survived the war working in a munitions factory and in 1947 emigrated to the US, setting in New York.  Frank’s gesture did not make much impression on the judges of the IMT (International Military Tribunal) sitting for the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946): They convicted him on counts three (war crimes) and four (crimes against humanity) and handed down a sentence of death by hanging.  As a trained lawyer, Frank was at least a realist, the prison psychologist recording that when asked his reaction to the verdict, Frank had smiled when answering: “I deserved it and I expected it.”  Unlike the most recalcitrant of the defendants, he seemed aware too of the magnitude of the crimes being tried, admitting: “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.”  Some of what Frank stole for “his” Chopin Museum was recovered and today, the most comprehensive collection of the composer's memorabilia is housed in the official Fryderyk Chopin Museum in Warsaw, established in 1954 and operated by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute.

The ultimate platform shoe

How they worked.  Chopines were a kind of wonder bra for the feet.

Chopines began as a purely functional device; a means of raising women’s shoes and the hems of their dresses above the dirt and filth in which they were often compelled to walk; in the age of horse-drawn transport, streets sometimes were "rivers of blood, mud and horseshit".  It's said the chopines were brought to Europe by traders from the Ottoman Empire where they'd been worn in bath houses by concubines, courtesans and others, the speculation being they were originally a modestly proportioned device designed as a health measure, a means of protecting the feet from infection, bath houses being warm, dark and moist, the perfect incubation environment for bacteria.  As sometimes happens, they became a status symbol with prestige determined by their elevation, the tallest extant examples reaching 20 inches (508 mm) although some historians claim they were built as much as ten inches (254 mm) higher.  Students of the art suspect that if true, such things may have been constructed for shop-window displays rather than being worn because at that height they're really "stilts".  Beyond a certain height, practicality (ie stability) would certainly have become marginal but there's evidence highly stylized examples were worn outside the bath house on ceremonial occasions, the wearer presumably "mostly static".  Chopines were most popular in Spain and Italy in the late sixteenth century and when they spread to England, they were sometimes referred to as "the Venice" because of the perception that was their city of origin, a notion that seems to have arisen because of their mention in widely-read travel journals of the age; Venice was a popular destination for such travellers.  Their impracticality must have made them a niche item because they never became part of any defined English costume or style of dress but whether alpha-males objected to women suddenly appearing taller is lost to history.

Variations on a theme of chopine.

As shoes, they had a short life because their sheer size dictated they be made from lightweight materials like cork and wood although some surviving examples do have a metal framework.  The style, in a less extreme form, was briefly revived with the cork-soled platform soles of the 1970s which had the effect of creating a short-lived investment bubble in the Portuguese cork industry although, as economic theory would predict, as the craze faded a Portuguese "cork glut" saw prices collapse.  The absurdity of the style attracted the attention of writers:

"It is ridiculous to see how these ladies crawl in and out of their gondolas, by reason of their choppines [clogs]; and what dwarfs they appear when taken down from their wooden scaffolds; of these I saw nearly thirty together, stalking half as high again as the rest of the world."  (John Evelyn, diary entry, June 1645)

"By'r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine." (Hamlet, act 2 scene 2, William Shakespeare, 1602)

"He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a chopine... "(Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922).

Continuing the chopine tradition but with rather less elevation: Lindsay Lohan in Saint Laurent Billy leopard-print platform boots, New York, March 2019.

Shoes have not since ascended to the heights of the chopines but the attractions of elevation have endured.  The lovely elegance of a five-inch stiletto heel of course remains incomparable but while as a piece of design they’re there to be admired, at a certain point a stiletto becomes unstable.  As a piece of math, heel stability can be reduced to about as complex a problem in mechanics as one cares to make it, the significant variables being the heel height, heel-tip area, shoe geometry, the wearer’s centre of mass, foot position, ground reaction force, and the stiffness of the shoe & ankle as an encapsulated system.  So, the “tipping / stability problem” can be conceptualized (even if individual human variations make it difficult to produce a simple model) and the basic idea is that when standing, ground exerts a “vertical ground-reaction force” through the foot; if the shoe is stable, resultant force falls within the “support polygon” (essentially the area defined by the heel and forefoot contact points).  As a general principle, a shoe’s sole being broad and long (thereby distributing forces over a large contact area), what is critical is the heel, a structure with a much smaller contact area.  Essentially, the remains stable as long as pressure doesn't move beyond the available support area.

Saint Laurent Billy leopard-print platform boots from the Pre-Fall 2018 collection.  The large contact area of the kitten heel and height of the sole means stability is achieved but the style does demand some practice because one's "walking technique would need slightly to be adjusted.  

However, the slenderness of the stiletto operates as a multiplier effect, the heel height changes the geometry of the entire foot, not merely the size of the heel.  As the heel’s height increases, the foot shifts into plantar flexion causing a movement of the upper body, meaning the centre of mass relative to the heel changes.  For any given individual, with enough data points quantified, it would be possible to produce an equation that would find a “point of optimal stability” before increasing a heel's height induces “tipping”.  Beyond the “tipping point”, a shoe ceases to be neutrally stable and achieving a static equilibrium isn't possible without muscular compensation or movement.  That can be modelled in software but the practical complication is a human is not a rigid object standing atop an always flat, unmoving surface, ankle, foot and leg continually make corrections, often so minute and instinctive they’re imperceptible to the owner of those body parts.  Thus, a stiletto can statically be geometrically stable yet dynamically unstable.  That’s why heel-tip diameter is so critical in achieving stability and to illustrate that, imagine an example demonstrating not all four-inch (100 mm) stilettos have the same intrinsic stability.  Consider two otherwise identical 100 mm stilettos, one with an 8-mm heel tip, one with 20-mm, the latter allowing a greater movement of the centre of pressure before the ground-reaction force reaches the edge of the heel.  Math nerds can no doubt run the numbers and what they’d find is the intriguing result that doubling the heel height roughly halves the angular tolerance, while doubling heel-tip radius roughly doubles it.  Women used to stilettos of course don’t need an equation to tell them a shoe with an extremely narrow, high heel has a very small stability envelope; the "heelprint" is a vital part of the "footprint".

Lindsay Lohan in Christian Louboutin Madame Butterfly black bow platform booties with six-inch (150 mm) stiletto heel.  What the elevated sole does is change the foot's angle, meaning a similar stability is attained as would be achieved with a 100 heel used in conjunction with a conventional sole.

Hence the frequent use of thicker soles and while opinion can be divided on the look, the elevated platform mechanically is interesting because it allows the heel to be higher while keeping the foot at a less extreme angle; it’s a fudge and not always admired by those for whom the acute angle of the wearer’s foot is one of the most alluring aspects of the stiletto’s aesthetic but if done well, it can be pleasing; it’s not the classic look but needs to be judged on its own terms.  An example of the math is one of differentiation: A 120-mm heel with a 30-mm platform doesn't behave like a 120-mm heel on a flat platform; because of the additional height in the sole, the effective pitch (and thus stability) will be something like a shoe with a 90-mm heel and conventional sole.  Engineers call this the TBA (true biomechanical angle) and in the practical mechanics of the human foot it's of significance because the foot safely can tolerate only a certain maximum angle of incline angle before the ankle undergoes structural plantarflexion failure (where the foot is extended so straight the ankle loses all lateral muscle control).  All this was once a rarely explored exercise in equation-making because shoe designers could tell by looking at design whether it would be practical to wear; they didn’t need the math.  Engineers building humanoid robots did however need to do the sums even though they could, if need be, emulate millions of years of evolution and make feet and ankles more accommodating.  As the recent Humanoid Robot Olympics (August 2026) in Beijing demonstrated, the billions of dollars invested under the watchful eye of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) must have resulted in many correct calculations because what was achieved was impressive (including breaking the world record for the men's 100 metre sprint).  While the CCP surely is interested more in robots for factories and the military than “making a better stiletto”, it’s not impossible a Chinese scientist might gain a Ig Nobel Prize by publishing a by-product of humanoid robot research: the equation for the “perfectly stable stiletto”, designers able to “plug-in” their angles and dimensions meaning the “stability threshold” ceases to be theoretical and becomes just another metric.

Flamingo's Exotic Dancer's boots in baby pink are an example of what can be done if one can cast adrift what's possible from the moorings of what's practical.  Available in calf (left), ankle (centre) and thigh (right) length in a variety of heel and sole heights, there's both a commonality of design elements and interchangeability of components, meaning a high degree of production-line rationalization, making the range economic to produce.  It should be noted "exotic dancer" is a vocational euphemism so the target market is limited but there may be some demand from non-professionals who can see the potential for "home use".

Style by necessity, Paris circa 1942: The chopine's methods of construction and use of materials staged a partial comeback in occupied France (1940-1944).  The sculptured heel both lent style and reduced weight.

Wartime shortages of leather forced French cobblers to turn to more readily available materials such as wood or cork when repairing or replacing heels and soles and the improvisation quickly became characteristic of French footwear during the Nazi Occupation.  Of course, being French, mere functionalism wasn’t enough and identifiable styles emerged, creating a unique “fashion language”; in other words, a fine example of wartime necessity becoming fashion.  Supplies of leather for civilian consumer goods greatly were restricted in many countries during wartime but in places subject to Nazi occupation the deprivations were most severe with the German war machine absorbing the bulk of what was available.  Consequently, French shoemakers increasingly substituted wood, cork, textile, straw and whatever artificial materials could be adapted or re-cycled with wooden clogs becoming a common sight.

French open-toed pumps, circa 1944, Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Constructed on a wooden sole & heel with a raffia upper, the shoe is embellished with a polka-dot ribbon, the only leather component two small cuts for the contact areas of the sole and heel, covered with re-cycled material.  Although a product of necessity, the raffia/word combo does sometimes appear still in modern catalogues and, of course, polka-dots never really go out of style.  So, material supply was a problem but if anything that may have encouraged designers to explore the possibilities offered by materials not previously exploited.  Rather than simply forming blocks of wood or cork into a simple wedge that would have “done the job”, the photographic record makes clear women were wearing raised soles (some quite substantial platforms) and sculptural heels, some as extravagant as was possible within the limitations imposed and augmenting this, ribbons provided considerable scope for decorative variation; in a quirk of the wartime economy, ribbons were for some time among the few materials not subject to rationing.  Cobblers proved imaginative and French commerce rose to the occasion, shoe shops developing a fashion vocabulary: semelles compensées (platform/wedge soles) and semelles articulées (articulated soles) among the coinings.

Semelles articulées, Paris, circa 1942.  The look was soon in vogue.

The articulated creations were ingenious attempts to make wooden soles flexible enough for walking and while it was not possible wholly to emulate the behavior of leather, there were partial solutions, one using thin wooden strips and in 1941 there was the more intricate Smelflex in which the articulation interacted with laminated or hinged sections of wood; with dark irony, the occupying authorities noted the system was derived from a German patent.  In an example of the way in which populations adapt to circumstances, the look became a recognised fashion phenomenon of Occupation-era France and designers made no attempt to disguise their creations as leather, the wooden soles and heels presented explicitly as a blend of “ingenuity and Parisian elegance.”  In an amusing footnote, the shortage of leather and metal did answer the many pre-war complaints about the trend for extremely high, thin talons-échasses (stilt heels) that much pleased the men as they gazed at their drawing boards in Parisian fashion houses but were far from comfortable to wear for much beyond a photo-shoot for a glossy magazine.

Mr Putin (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999, left) with Xi Jinping (b 1953; General Secretary of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and paramount leader of the PRC (People's Republic of China) since 2012, right) (far left), Carla Bruni-Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (b 1967, left) and her husband Nicolas Sarközy (b 1955; President of France 2007-2012, right) (centre left), Marco Rubio (b 1971; US secretary of state since 2025) (centre right) and how it's done (far right).

In politics, the chopine lives on in the form of "elevator shoes" that can "add" as much a four inches (100 mm) to an individual's height through the mechanism of the "built-up" internal heel.  Politicians are known to wear them including Mr Putin, Mr Sarközy and Mr Rubio, indeed the latter's use of the shoes was exploited by Donald Trump (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) who coined "little Marco" as his opponent's moniker during the 2016 Republican presidential debates although that use is in abeyance while they maintain their at least temporary friendship.  As the elevation increases it's obviously necessary also to add to the upper so (1) the trick is concealed and (2) the ankle retains some lateral support; that's why many elevator shoes are really "elevator boots".  Either way, they work best if trousers are cut accordingly; done well, worn by a well practiced wearer, they should be unobtrusive unless closely inspected.

Burl & Burr

Burl (pronounced burl)

(1) A small knot or lump in wool, thread, or cloth.

(2) A dome-shaped growth on the trunk of a tree; a wart-like structure which can be 1 m (39 inches) or more across and .5 m (19 inches) or more in height; typically harvested and sliced to make the intricately patterned veneers used in furniture or car interiors.

(3) To remove burls from (cloth) in finishing (which technically means the same as to de-burl).

(4) In Scottish, Australian and NZ slang (1) an attempt; to try (especially in the phrases “give it a burl” & (2) “going for a burl” (going for a drive in a car) (both largely archaic and the latter restricted to the antipodes).

1400–1450: From the late Middle English burle (a small knot or flaw in cloth), from the Old French bouril & bourril (flocks or ends of threads which disfigure cloth), from the Old French bourre & burle (tuft of wool) and akin to the Medieval Latin burla (bunch, sheaf), from the Vulgar Latin burrula (small flock of wool), from the Medieval Latin burra (flock of wool, fluff, coarse hair; shaggy cloth).  The source of the Latin forms is unknown.  The slang forms are probably from the Scottish birl (a twist or turn) but use in this sense seems now to be restricted to Scotland (or those with a Scottish accent) and the South Island of New Zealand.  The large, rounded outgrowth on the trunk or branch of a tree can be highly prized if on a species (most famously walnut) where the timber of a burl develops the swirling, intricate patterns which are used as thinly sliced veneers in the production of furniture and other fine products, notably as trim in the interiors of cars.  Burls develop from one or more twig buds, the cells of which continue to multiply but never differentiate so the twig can elongate into a limb.  In American English, burl has since 1868 been used to describe "a knot or excrescence on a walnut or other tree" but burr is now often used interchangeably while "burlwood", once common, seems now restricted to industry use and commerce.  Burls rarely cause harm to trees but careless (often unlawful) harvesting can cause damage.  The adjective burly (a man large, well-built and muscular) is unrelated and of uncertain origin; the related noun is used of this quality and not the character of timber.  The noun, verb & adjective burlesque is also unrelated.  Burl is a noun & verb, burler is a noun and burled & burling are verbs; the noun plural is burls.  

European burr (or burl) walnut with extensive “bud eyes”.

Burl was productive in English although some forms have a tangled history.  The adjective burly is derived from the circa 1300 borlich (excellent, noble; handsome, beautiful), probably from the Old English borlice (noble, stately (literally "bowerly", ie fit to frequent a lady's apartment)).  The sense evolved by circa 1400 to mean "stout, sturdy" and later "heavily built".  Some etymologists also suggest a connection between the Old English and the Old High German burlih (lofty, exalted) which was related to burjan (to raise, lift).  In Middle English, it was applied also to objects (even transitory things like cloud formations) but has long been restricted to people.   The noun burlesque (piece composed in burlesque style, derisive imitation, grotesque parody) had been in use since the 1660s, the earlier adjective (odd, grotesque), from the 1650s, from the sixteenth century French burlesque, from the Italian burlesco (ludicrous), from burla (joke, fun, mockery), presumably from the Medieval Latin burra (trifle, nonsense (literally "flock of wool" and thing something light and trivial)).  The more precise adjectival meaning "tending to excite laughter by ludicrous contrast between the subject and the manner of treating it" is attested in English by 1700.  Comedy and burlesque represent the two great traditions of representational ridicule, the former draws characters in conventional form, the latter by using a construct quite unlike themselves.  As long ago a 1711, one critic described burlesque as existing in two forms, the first represents mean persons in accoutrements of heroes, the other describes great persons acting and speaking like the basest among the people.  By the late nineteenth century, it typically meant "travesties on the classics and satires on accepted ideas" and vulgar comic opera while the modern sense of something risqué ("a variety show featuring striptease) is an invention of American English which co-evolved during the same era and became predominant by the 1920s.

Burrs (or burls) on a tree.  Burls should not be confused with galls which are small and form along twigs and leaves.  Burls are much larger and form on trunks and branches as an integral part of the tree.  Galls grow outside and are independent of the tree.

The noun burlap (coarse, heavy material made of hemp, jute, etc., used for bagging) dates from the 1690s, the first element probably from the Middle English borel (coarse cloth), from the burel or the Dutch boeren (coarse), although there may have been some confusion with boer (peasant).  The second element, -lap, meant "piece of cloth".  There has been debate about the noun hurly-burly (originally hurlyburly) (commotion, tumult) which in the 1530s was apparently an alteration of the phrase hurling and burling, a reduplication of the fourteenth century hurling (commotion, tumult), from the verbal noun of hurl.  William Shakespeare (1564–1616) had hurly (tumult, uproar) and the early fifteenth century hurling time was the name applied by chroniclers to the period of tumult and commotion around Wat Tyler's (circa 1341–1381; a leader of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England) rebellion.   In the early nineteenth century a hurly-house was said to be a "large house in a state of advanced disrepair" and there is presumably some connection with the dialectal Swedish hurra (whirl round) but it’s all quite murky and whether burly in this context is related to burl in the sense of something rough or merely coincidental a rhyme is uncertain.

Burr (pronounced bur)

(1) A rough or irregular protuberance on any object, as on a tree (spelled also as burl).

(2) A small, handheld, power-driven milling cutter, used by machinists and die makers for deepening, widening, or undercutting small recesses (technically called burr grinders which, with a revolving disk or cone with abrasive surfaces are used to smooth burr holes).

(3) In metal fabrication, a protruding, ragged edge raised on the surface of metal during drilling, shearing, punching, or engraving (spelled also as buhr); a blank punched out of a piece of sheet metal.

(4) A washer placed at the head of a rivet.

(5) In ceramics, a fragment of brick fused or warped in firing.

(6) In any form of engineering, to form a rough point or edge on.

(7) In structural phonetics, (1) a pronunciation of the r-sound as a uvular fricative trill, as in certain Northern English dialects (of which the Northumberland is an exemplar) or the retroflex r of the West of England, (2) a pronunciation of the r-sound as an alveolar flap or trill, as in Scottish English or (3) any pronunciation popularly considered rough or non-urban.

(8) To speak with a burr (to speak roughly, indistinctly, or inarticulately) (can be applied neutrally or as a (usually class-loaded) disparagement.  The use to describe the classic Scottish pronunciation is merely descriptive and thus usually neutral although it can be modified such as "...spoke in a strong and almost incomprehensible Scottish burr". 

(9) A whirring sound or rough, humming sound.

(10) In the sense of a broad ring on a spear or tilting lance (placed below the grip to prevent the hand from slipping), a variant of burrow (in obsolete sense: borough) (dating from the sixteenth century and now rare except in historic reference).

(11) In geology, a mass of hard siliceous rock surrounded by softer rock.

(12) A sharp, pointy object, such as a sliver or splinter (regionally specific).

(13) As bur; a seed pod with sharp features that stick in fur or clothing (similar to hayseed).

(13) In anatomy, the ear lobe (archaic).

(14) In zoology, the knot at the bottom of an antler (analogous with the burrs (or burls) on trees.

1375–1425: From the late Middle English burre (possibly related to the Old English byrst (bristle)), burrewez (plural) & buruhe (circle), a variant of brough (round tower), an evolutionary fork of which became the Modern English broch.  It was cognate with the Danish burre & borre (burdock, burr) and the Swedish borre (sea-urchin).  The spelling burr was a variant of the original bur, the addition probably a tribute by the written to the spoken long R sound, the use in phonetics noted from the 1750s, presumably both imitative and associative, the sound being thought of as rough like a bur; the onomatopoeic form may be compared with the French bruire.  The original idea of "rough sound of the letter -R" (especially that common in Northumberland) was later extended to "northern accented speech" in general and was soon integrated into the English class system as one of many class identifiers.  It may be the sound of the word is imitative of the speech peculiarity itself, or it was adapted from one of the senses of bur (the late fourteenth century phrase “to have a bur in (one's) throat” was a figure of speech suggesting the choking sensation or huskiness associated with having something rough caught in the windpipe) but the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that despite the similarity, the Scottish -r- is a lingual trill, not a true burr.  Burr is a noun & verb, burred & burring are verbs and burrish, burrless & burrlike are adjectives; the noun plural is burrs.

1962 Facel Vega Facel II.

Powered by Chrysler V8s, the Facel Vegas (1954-1964) were France's finest cars of the post-war years and followed the template of the trans-Atlantic hybrids (a powerful (and cheap) US V8, atop a bespoke platform clothed with stylish European coachwork) which flourished until the first oil crisis in 1973 but were in many ways a "cut above most", featuring aluminum panels and stainless steel rather than chrome trim.  The equipment levels were lavish with leather and interior appointments of the highest quality but one curiosity was the extensive "burl walnut" was actually painted metal, so well executed by Facel's craftsmen it demanded a inspection to reveal the nature of the material.  Facel production ended in 1964, the company bankrupted by the flood of warranty claims which flowed from the chronic unreliability of the French-built four-cylinder engine adopted for a smaller range.  The Facellia (1960-1964) was a good idea because the market for such a thing existed but by the time Facel had re-engineered it to used reliable power-plants (a Volvo four and Austin-Healey six), the debts had become unserviceable and the company was doomed.

1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III (plastic wood).

By the mid 1960s Detroit mostly had abandoned the use of timber.  The internal frames went first, only a handful of low-volume specialist vehicles still using the technique when production resumed in the post-war years.  Next to go were the partial-timber bodies, the best known of which were the "woodie" ("woody" once preferred the preferred used in the UK but "woodie" seems now global, presumably because most such surviving wagons were US-built) station wagons although there were also high-priced convertibles and sedans, the latter pair appealing on the basis of the look but those prepared to pay a premium proved a vanishing breed and that was understandable because the manufacturers recommended an annual re-varnishing, a tiresome task and a financial imposition even in an age when unit labor costs were low.  None were left by 1951 and the station wagons followed within a few years as improved production techniques made "all metal construction" a cheaper path to follow.  However, inexplicable though it may have been to the rest of the planet, Americans liked the "woodie" look on pick-ups (some car-based) and especially station wagons so for decades the manufacturers happily supplied the market with "faux woodies" which were created by gluing on 3M's Di-NOC appliqué, framed by fibreglass spars, all components designed to look like timber.  Sometimes with (limited) success and sometimes not, there were even convertibles, an attempt to cash in on any lingering nostalgia for what was around in the days of the administration of Harry S Truman (1884–1972; POTUS 1945-1953).

1970 Lincoln Continental Mark III (real wood).

In the 1960s, as the "real stuff" became rare, "plastic wood" did proliferate in interiors and increasingly it was "faux" rather than "fake" in that often it was obviously phoney although in the higher-priced lines more effort often was taken to try to fool people.  One strange example was Ford's Lincoln Continental Mark III, produced over three seasons with the design imperative having been: "Put a Rolls-Royce grill on a Thunderbird."  Astonishingly profitable because in terms of engineering it was exactly that and not a great deal more, its success inspired Ford to upgrade a few aspects and one change was to replace the plastic wood in the interior with genuine walnut, once part of a tree.  For whatever reason, Ford opted not to emulate Jaguar or Rolls-Royce and use a burl walnut veneer, opting instead for a straight-grain timber which looked almost exactly like the previous year's plastic fittings.  A very close inspection would reveal the truth but it's doubtful many bothered and Ford must have reached the same conclusion, wondering why they bothered.  When the Lincoln Continental Mark IV was released in 1972, it kept the leather but reverted to a plastic wood that blatantly was phoney; over four seasons, it was a great success and is regarded still as the classis "land yacht".

Lindsay Lohan (top left) with luggage, on-location for the filming of Liz & Dick (2012); the car is a Mercedes-Benz 600 (W100, 1963-1981) four-door Pullman.  The early versions of the 600 had the most timber trim.

Buyers of the 600 could choose from a variety of timbers when ordering a 600 although the tale of one customer from the Middle East arriving at the factory with his preferred tree is believed apocryphal.  Not all opted for the burl walnut (Zebrano and the dramatic Macasar Ebony among the choices) and one true eccentric sent his 600 to a French coachbuilder to have all the factory’s timber covered in leather but, because the many other modifications included a vast, single-piece transparent Triplex panel spanning the entire length and width of the roof, the absence of walnut may not immediately be noticed.  Unfortunately, after 1967, the veneer no longer appeared on the instrument binnacle, replaced by a leather covering.  Officially, the explanation was the use had proved vulnerable to sun-damage on the W111 (1961-1971) and W112 (1962-1967) cabriolets which used a similar fitting but production costs were high because, with so many curves and crevasses, applying veneer to the binnacles was labour intensive so although the cabriolets were a small part of the model mix, the decision was taken to standardize a leather covering.  Especially on the W111 coupés & cabriolets the veneered binnacles are much admired and some have been retro-fitted to later models.

The circa 1300 bur (prickly seed vessel of some plants) from the Middle English burre was from a Scandinavian source, either the Danish borre, the Swedish hard-borre or the Old Norse burst (bristle), from the primitive Indo-European bhars.  In the 1610s, it was transferred to refer to a "rough edge on metal" which led ultimately to the use in phonetics and the name give to various tools and appliances.  The noun burstone dates from the late thirteenth century and was an adaptation from the Middle English burre, the stone so-named presumably because of its roughness.  Aaron Burr (1756–1836; VPOTUS 1800–1804) fled after killing a political rival in a duel and plotted to create an independent empire in the western US.  In 1807 he was acquitted on a charge of treason.  To remove a burr (typically in engineering or carpentry) is to deburr (or debur).  The homophones are Bur & brr.  The noun rhotacism dates from 1830 in the sense of “an extensive or particular use of 'r'”, from the Modern Latin rhotacismus, from the Ancient Greek rhotakizein, from rho (the letter -r-), from the Hebrew or Phoenician roth.  A technical adaptation from 1844 was the use to describe the conversion of another sound, usually "s" to "r" (as in Aeolian Greek, which at the end of words changed -s to –r, the related forms being rhotacize & rhotacization.  Regarding timber veneers, the conventional wisdom is that burl is American English while burr is used in the rest of the English-speaking world.  That’s not accurate although burl in this sense is an American innovation from 1868 and probably a useful one.  In the specialized arboreal branch of botany, the words cancer and canker were also once used to describe the growths on trees but these uses seem never to have extended beyond the profession.

1965 Jaguar Mark X (1961-1966, renamed as 420G 1966-1970) with the rare manual gearbox.  The Mark X never realized Jaguar's sales expectations in the US market but it could have been a great success if one potential development path had been followed.

Not all the Mark Xs & 420Gs had the burl walnut finish (many with a bland, honey-colored timber) but they are the most desired.  Like the E-Type (XKE, 1961-1974), the Mark X is a classic example of "1960s Jaguar syndrome": Another few months of development and an additional £40 spent on the production line and most of the problems wouldn't exist.  With the burl timber, the Mark X's interior was one of the most atmospheric of the era but although impressive in appearance, the dashboard's timber top rail obviously was a safety issue (it was a time when the wearing or even fitting of seatbelts wasn't obligatory and airbags were generations away) and when the 420G appeared in October 1966, a full-width (with central clock) padded section had replaced the upper wood; visual appeal sacrificed for safety.

1959 Bentley S1 Continental Two-Door Saloon (Design 7500) by H.J. Mulliner.

Before the marque’s late century revival of differentiation, the Continentals (1952-1965) were regarded by some dedicated aficionados as “the last ‘real’ Bentleys” although there was once a purist faction which held none had been built since Rolls-Royce assumed ownership in 1931 and undertook an elaborated form of “badge-engineering” which, by the mid-1960s, evolved to the point where a Bentley was listed at a few pounds less than the equivalent Rolls-Royce because “it took less time to manufacture the grill”, there being no other difference between the two.  In their day, the Continentals were among the most expensive cars available and being coach-built, although there were “standard body designs” there were many variations and detail differences so it may be no two exactly were alike.  The R-Type Continental (1952–1955) was the one which established the car’s reputation and there’s a high survival rate among the 208 units produced.  The S-Series Continentals (S1, S2, S3, 1955 to 1965) were more numerous with over 1,100 built and while the lines weren’t exactly avant-garde, compared with the contemporary Rolls-Royce models which showed obvious pre-war roots, they were quite rakish.  The interiors too were notable for the burl walnut trim that could be astonishingly ornate, even the instrument bezels sometimes delicately finished with a matching veneer.

Lindsay Lohan behind the wheel of 1972 AMC Javelin SST, photo-shoot for Cosmopolitan magazine's Work Issue, October 2022: dress and boots by Alexandre Vauthier (b 1971), earrings by Carolina Neves (b 1986), ring by Sauer, photographed by Ellen Von Unwerth (b 1954).

By 1972, the US manufacturers largely no longer attempted to make the fake wood look “realistic” and the obviously plastic appliqué became almost a motif in itself.  Like many manufacturers, AMC liked three letter designations and they also had a trim package called “SST” which, according to internal documents, stood for “Super Sports Touring” and not “Stainless Steel Trim” as has been suggested (although use was made of the metal for some of the bright-work so the assumption was not unreasonable).  Doubtlessly AMC expected some positive association in the public mind with the SST (supersonic transport) projects several US aerospace manufacturers were in the era pondering as competition for the Anglo-French Concord(e).  In another specialized field, those in carpentry concerned with fine veneers, there are further distinctions, some defining a burr as an English word meaning a type of growth on a side of a tree which is full of “bud eyes” (the most distinctive pattern associated with expensive veneers) while burl is of US origin and refers to any type of growth on the side of a tree, including burrs.   That would seem to suggest burl would thus include the healing growth over surface damage or broken branches.  Others, notably timber merchants seem most often to regard burls as any highly figured wood with twisted and contorted grain regardless of whether it comes from a growth on the side of a tree, root, stump, or has grown all the way up the trunk, and whether it contains bud eyes or not.  In commerce, this is doubtlessly useful because people buy timber for veneering on the basis of appearance rather than where it happened to grow.  It would of course be useful if one word could be accepted to mean the growth on a tree and the other the harvested timbers from these growths but, being English, such a logical distinction didn't evolve.