Gown

Gown (pronounced goun) 

(1) A type of woman's dress or robe, especially one full-length and worn on formal occasions and often styled as “evening gown” or “ball gown”.

(2) As nightgown, a loose fitting garment worn by sleeping (historically by both men & women but now most associated with the latter); the shortened for is “nightie”.

(3) As surgical gown, a light, protective garment worn in hospitals by medical staff, a specialized form of which is the isolation gown.

(4) As dressing gown (also call bathrobe), a garment in the form of an open robe secured by a tie and often worn over pajamas, after a bath and prior to dressing or on other occasions where there’s no immediate need to dress.

(5) A loose, flowing outer garment in various forms, worn to denote an office held, profession practiced or as an indication of rank or status, most associated with formal academic dress (sometimes in the phrase “cap & gown”).

(6) Those who work or study at a university as opposed to the other residents of the university town, expressed in the phrase “town & gown”.

(7) Historically, the dress of civil, as opposed to military officers.

(8) To supply with or dress in a gown.

1300-1350: From Middle English goune & gowne, from Anglo-Norman gune & goune (fur-trimmed coat, pelisse), from the Old French goune (robe, coat; nun's habit), from the Late Latin gunna (a garment of fur or leather), from the Ancient Greek γούνα (goúna) (coarse garment), of unknown origin but may be from a Balkan or Apennine language where it seems to have been used as early as the eighth century to describe a fur (or fur-lined), cloak-like garment worn by old or infirm monks; More speculatively, some scholars suggest a Celtic source.  The alternative explanation suggests a Scythian origin, from the Proto-Iranian gawnám (fur), the possibility of this link supported by the Younger Avestan gaona (body hair) and the Ossetian гъун (ǧun).  The alternative spelling gowne is obsolete and descendants in other languages include the Bengali গাউন (gaun), the Japanese ガウン, the Korean  가운 (gaun), the Malay gaun, the Punjabi ਗਾਊਨ (gāūna) and the Welsh gown.  Gown is a noun and verb and gowned is an adjective; the noun plural is gowns.

Surgeon in blood-splattered surgical gown (also called hospital or medical gowns), mid-procedure.

As late as the eighteenth century, gown was the common word for what is now usually described as dress and gown in this sense persisted in the US longer than in the UK and there was on both sides of the Atlantic something of a twentieth century revival and the applied uses (bridal gown, nightgown etc) became more or less universal.  The meaning “a loose, flowing outer garment in various forms, worn to denote an office held, profession practiced or as an indication of rank” emerged in the late fourteenth century and the collective singular for “residents of a university” dates from the 1650s, still heard in the rhyming phrase “town & gown”.  The night-gown (worn once by both men & women but now associated almost exclusively with the latter) became a thing in the fourteenth century.

Lindsay Lohan in white & black color-blocked bandage dress.  With a flawless figure, Ms Lohan doesn't need the "corrective" effects the bandage construction provides and this one may really be a bodycon dress with the visual effect of "bandage layers" created by stitched folds. 

Dress dates from circa 1300 and was from the Middle English dressen & dresse (to arrange, put in order), from the Anglo-Norman & Old French dresser, drecier (which persists in as dresser), from the unattested Vulgar Latin dīrēctiāre, from the Classical Latin dīrēctus, the perfect passive participle of dīrigō (to arrange in lines, direct, steer), the construct being dis- (the prefix in this context meaning “apart; asunder; in two’) + regō (to govern, manage), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European h₃reǵ- (straight, right).  The noun dress was derived from the verb and emerged in the sense of “attire” in the early 1600s.  Originally, a dress was always something which covered both the upper and lower parts of the female body but not of necessity in once piece.  The dressing gown seems first to have been described as such in 1854 although in French both robe de chambre (dressing gown) & robe de nuit (nightgown) had been in use for centuries.

Lindsay Lohan in dressing gowns; in the US such things would usually be called bathrobes.

Robe dates from the mid-thirteenth century Middle English robe & robbe and was from the Old French robe, robbe & reube (booty, spoils of war, robe, garment), from the Frankish rouba & rauba (booty, spoils, stolen clothes (literally “things taken”)), from the Old High German roub, from the Proto-Germanic raubō, raubaz & raubą (booty, that which is stripped or carried away), from the primitive Indo-European Hrewp- (to tear away, peel off).  The noun use of robe to refer to garments had entered general use by the late thirteenth century, an adoption of a meaning from the Old French, presumably because fine clothing looted from defeated enemies were among the most prized of the spoils of war.  The Old French robe (and the alternative spellings) had as concurrent meanings both “clothing” & “plunder: as did the Germanic forms including the Old English reaf (plunder, booty, spoil; garment, armor, vestment).  By the late thirteenth century, robe had assumed the meaning “a long, loose outer garment reaching almost to the floor, worn by men or women over other dress”, those closest European equivalents being the twelfth century Old French robe (long, loose outer garment) and the Old High German rouba (vestments).  In royal, academic and ecclesiastical circles, the particular style of robes became regulated to denote rank, function or or membership of a religious order and royal courts would include offices like “page of the robes”, “mistress of the robes”, master of the robes etc” although those titles are (to modern eyes) misleading because their responsibilities extended to garments generally and not just robes as they’re now understood.  The metonymic sense of “the robe” for "the legal profession" dates from the 1640s, a reference to the dark robes worn by advocates when appearing in court.  Robe went on productively to be adopted for other purposes including (1) in the US “the skin of a bison (later applied to other slaughtered beasts) used as a cloak or wrap, (2) a short form of wardrobe (especially when built into a wall rather than being stand-alone) and (3) the largest and strongest leaves on a tobacco plant.

Singer Dr Taylor Swift in academic gown after being conferred an honorary doctorate in fine arts from New York University, May 2022.

In formal and vocational use, gown and robe and well understood and there tends not to be overlap except among those unacquainted with such things.  That’s understandable because to the casual observer the things can look much the same and the differences in nomenclature are more to do with tradition than style or cut.  Judges for example ware judicial robes and in the US these are usually black whereas elsewhere in the English-speaking world they can be of quite vivid hues, red and scarlet the most admired.  The US influence however seem pervasive and the trend is now almost universally black, certainly among newly established courts; in the same courts, barristers robes look much the same the term “judicial robe” is exclusive to the bench, the advocates garments variously called “barristers’ robes” “legal robes” or lawyers’ robes”.  Academics however wear gowns and again, the Americans tend to favor black while in the English tradition, all the colors of the rainbow have been seen.  These differ from surgical (also known as hospital or medical gowns) which, compared with just about every other gown, really aren’t gowns at all.  Surgical gowns are made usually in a blue, beige or green pastel color (better to show the blood) and are a kind of inverted dress which is fastened at the back (by an assistant so the wearer’s fingers don’t pick up germs).  In the UK parliament, there were many robes for offices of state and the one worn by the speaker made its way to colonial and dominion parliaments.  They're now rarely worn except on ceremonial occasions and the best known is probably that of the UK’s chancellors of the exchequer although the last one, dating from the late nineteenth century, is said to have “gone missing” while Gordon Brown (b 1951; UK prime-minister 2007-2010) was chancellor.

The Welsh Wizard robed: Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1911) (David Lloyd George, 1863–1945; UK prime-minister 1916-1922, severed as chancellor between 1908-1915), oil on canvas by Christopher Williams (1873–1934), National Library of Wales collection.

Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) was in 1924 both surprised and delighted when Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947; UK prime-minister 1923-1924, 1924-1929 & 1935-1937) offered him the Treasury; he’d heard rumors of appointed “chancellor” as assumed the best he could hope for was the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster which, although an ancient office dating from the fourteenth century, he knew to be little more than a sinecure of slight influence, having in 1915 been for a few months relegated there after leaving the Admiralty in the wake of the failure of the Dardanelles campaign.  To atone, he went to the trenches of the Western Front and for some six month commanded a regiment of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.  Though never forgotten, much was by 1924 forgiven and Churchill was pleased to tell the prime minister he’d be glad to take the exchequer, one slight benefit to the public purse being “I still have the robes my father (Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895; Chancellor of the Exchequer August-December 1886)) wore as chancellor”.  In retrospect, that sartorial convenience might have been an inadequate background for handling the nation’s finances and Churchill often is listed high up the list of the UK’s “worst chancellors”, the main charge being returning sterling to the gold standard and maintaining an over-valued currency but just about all the great institutions of state (the Treasury, the Cabinet, the Bank of England etc) and most economists (a notable dissenter being John Maynard Keynes (later Lord Keynes) 1883-1946) who predicted depression as a consequence) recommended the move.  Still, it was Churchill was who signed the documents and the consensus among historians of such things is that had he known anything of economics, he’d likely have signed with even greater alacrity.

NSW (New South Wales (Australia)) Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judges in judicial robes and wigs for a ceremonial event during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s in women’s fashion where the distinction between a gown and a dress can become muddied and probably most illustrative is the matter of the “wedding dress” and the “wedding gown”.  Even among couturiers, there’s actually no agreed definition of where one ends and the other begins; it’s very much in the eye of the beholder although the eye of the retailer is doubtless quite an influence, the theory being the grander the design and the greater the volume of fabric, the more plausible is the label “wedding gown” and the higher the price-tag.  These informal (but serviceable) rules of thumb work also for dresses & gowns in general, the distinction more one of semantics and personal preference although, in saying that, it’s only at the margins where there can be confusion; a minimalist LBD (little black dress) would never be confused with a gown and the grandest creations recalling those worn at the famous balls held in conjunction with the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) would never be called dresses.

Watercolor by unknown artist of one of the many balls held during the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815).  Being ankle-length, gowns were not the ideal garment for ladies dancing and it's likely some made temporary modifications, "hitching them up" a bit.

Despite that, in the narrow technical sense, to a seamstress, all gowns are dresses, but not all dresses are gowns and as late as the early eighteenth century the word "dress" was still not the exclusive province of women’s clothing ensembles.  In recent centuries, the dress has been defined by its modifiers (sun-dress, summer-dress, evening-dress, travelling dress, tent dress, riding-dress etc) and the modern convention seems to be that if an invitation specifies "semi-formal" then an evening dress is expected and that might be something thought a gown but not necessarily.  However, when an invitation states that the occasion is "formal", women are expected to wear an evening gown.  Classically, that’s understood to be something at once precise yet frivolous, with a tight fitting bodice and a skirt at least brushing the floor and this was once the accepted standard for any red-carpet event of note but the recent trend towards displays of flesh has in the entertainment industry subverted the tradition although the audience is expected still to adhere.

Illustrating the modern gown: Actor Lindsay Lohan (b 1986) in a gown with an upper-level silk tulle (a netting-like weave) by Zac Posen (b 1980), Met Gala, New York, 2007 (left) and model Kate Upton (b 1992) in a gown by Victoria Beckham (b 1974, the one-time “Posh Spice”, now Lady Beckham), Vanity Fair Oscars after-party, Los Angeles, 2016.

Fashion has since the Congress of Vienna become simplified and rather than voluminous layers of fabric, a gown’s effects are now generated by cut & color.  For his diaphanous piece, Zac Posen included a quadrilateral (a four-sided polygon) cleavage split, designed cleverly to emulate a tie (in Euclidean geometry defined as a “kite” (two pairs of adjacent, equal-length sides with the two shorter sides meeting at the bottom vertex, the longer pair intersecting at the top so a line described from top to bottom produces an axis of reflection symmetry, as does the fall of a tie)).  What Lady Beckham included would probably now be called a “uvage” although physiology can affect outcome; on a different model (with less pronounced “forward projection”) the fabric would likely fall to create a “veagage”.  While there can be overlaps in cut, construction and cues, there are points at which a LBD becomes re-defined as a “dress” (possibly with a modifier or two) or a “gown”.  Although motifs can matter (what sometimes appears on a gown often not suitable for a LBD that depends on simplicity for effect) the prime determinate really is length, the classic LBD’s hemline stopping somewhere on the thighs while a gown properly should be ankle-length although calf-left implementations have become not uncommon.  The “rule” is however selectively applied and depends also on style and intended purpose; an ankle-length “maxi-dress” will typically not be a “gown”.  Again, physiology can also influence things, someone especially statuesque could appear in a LBD while the same garment on someone shorter might be classed a “black cocktail dress”, simply because the hemline reaches below the knee.  So usually it’s not difficult to tell what is a gown but, at the margins, the distinctions can become blurred and it’s really “eye of the beholder” stuff, a subjective exercise expressed best (in another context) by Potter Stewart (1915–1985; associate justice of the SCOTUS (US Supreme Court) 1958-1981) in his famous concurring judgement in Jacobellis v Ohio (378 U.S. 184 (1964)): “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within [the term], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so.  But I know it when I see it…”

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).

Encyclopedist

Encyclopedist (pronounced en-sahy-kluh-pee-dist)

(1) A compiler of or contributor to an encyclopedia.

(2) One of the collaborators fn the French Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts, et des Métiers (now almost always used with initial capital letter).

(3) A dismissive term applied by KGB specialists to generalists.

1645–1655: The construct was encycloped(ia) + -ist.  Encyclopedia was attested from the 1530s, from the New Latin encyclopaedia (general education), from the Renaissance Ancient Greek ἐγκυκλοπαιδεία (enkuklopaideía) (education in the circle of arts and sciences (literally “training in a circle”)), a mistaken univerbated form of the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδείᾱ (enkúklios paideíā) (education in the circle of arts and sciences, the construct being ἐγκύκλιος (enkúklios) (circular (also “general”)) + παιδείᾱ (paideíā) (child-rearing, education), from pais (genitive paidos (child).  The modern sense of a "reference work arranged alphabetically" is from 1640s, the origin most associated with the French Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts, et des Métiers (Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts (1751-1772)).  Encyclopedism (or encyclopaedism) is the related noun and encyclopaedist the alternative spelling, the Latin form surviving as a variant because many of the most famous printed volumes had Latin names; as the printed editions fade from use, except in historic references, encyclopedia is now by far the prevalent spelling.  The adjective encyclopedic dates from 1816 while the truncation cyclopaedia is attested from 1728.  

The -ist suffix was from the Middle English -ist & -iste, from the Old French -iste and the Latin -ista, from the Ancient Greek -ιστής (-istḗs), from -ίζω (-ízō) (the -ize & -ise verbal suffix) and -τής (-tḗs) (the agent-noun suffix).  It was added to nouns to denote various senses of association such as (1) a person who studies or practices a particular discipline, (2), one who uses a device of some kind, (3) one who engages in a particular type of activity, (4) one who suffers from a specific condition or syndrome, (5) one who subscribes to a particular theological doctrine or religious denomination, (6) one who has a certain ideology or set of beliefs, (7) one who owns or manages something and (8), a person who holds very particular views (often applied to those thought most offensive).  The original Encyclopedists (encyclopaedists in historic British use) were the French Encyclopédistes, members of the Société des gens de lettres (a literary association) who between 1751-1765 contributed entries for the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts, et des Métiers, published between 1751-1772, edited by noted art critic Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and (until 1759 when one of his entries triggered an amusing ecclesiastical turf-war), mathematician & musicologist Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783).  Encyclopedist is a noun; the noun plural is encyclopedists.

Opening pages of Lindsay Lohan's entry at encyclopedia.com.

Confusingly, “cyclopedia” and “encyclopedia” mean the exact same thing, cyclopedia a long less common spelling although one that in a niche in publishing did persist into the twenty-first century.  First known to have appeared in 1728, according to the usually practice in English where shorter forms are preferred with the unnecessary discarded, “cyclopedia” should have prevailed but as Henry Fowler (1858–1933) pointed out in his authoritative A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926): “The longer forms [encyclopaedia & encyclopaedic] are in themselves better” simply on the basis of an established pattern of use although he did note “cyclopaedic is becoming the more usual form for the adjective”.  That adjectival preference didn’t last into the modern age and etymologists attribute the decline in use of cyclopaedic and its related forms to the Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for “British Encyclopædia”) becoming for more than a century a cultural reference in much of the English-speaking world.  First published in 1768, the 15^th and final printed edition appeared in 2010, spanning some 33,000 pages over 32 volumes and complete sets often are offered for sale.

For those who can remember the ways thing used to be done: Britannica 1990 edition.

This 1990 edition comprised 29 volumes plus 2-volume index, three (1990, 1991 & 1992) annuals (updates issued between full-editions) and a Propaedia Outline of Knowledge.  Volumes 1-12 were written in the Micropaedia Ready Reference section and volumes 13-29 in the Micropaedia Knowledge in Depth section.  All this weighed in at 68 kg (150 lb).  With search engines, for the end user, information became “weightless” although, to deliver facts (and cat videos) to hand-held devices, around the planet, every second, much mass must be displaced.

For anyone with a bookshelf to fill they’re a visually impressive sight and doubtlessly some have bought sets for “interior decoration” but it would appear supply now exceeds demand, not everyone in the modern age seeing the aesthetic value in several feet of leather spines though there was a time when many found them useful.  Old Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), writing in 1965 to the famously undomesticated author Ronald William “R.W.” Clark (1916–1987) recounted that from conversations with Aldous Huxley (1894–1963): “You could always tell by his conversation which volume of the Encyclopedia Britanica he’d been reading.  One day it would be Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath.”  Huxley certainly enjoyed “showing off” but for those who didn’t grow up in a time when the answer to just about any question of fact was but seconds away after a few taps on a screen, it must be difficult to imagine what it was like in the “pre-interconnected” age.  Before the internet, it could take days and much effort to find the answer to a question and sometimes, the answer proved elusive and one just gave up because it was too hard.  Those with access to a set of “the Britannica” of course had an advantage although the information within obviously was current only up to a certain date, thus the attraction of annual almanacs that were a collection of facts, figures and such covering much of what had changed in the most recent twelvemonth.  In a sense, among many, a collective amnesia seems to have overtaken the land because many of those who lived before search engines (let alone AI (artificial intelligence)) seem not to appreciate how profound, within barely a generation, has been the change.  Still, since 2016, the encyclopaedia has appeared online at Britannica.com so the content remains in a now more easily accessible (and current) form although it's now just one tiny corner-store in a market it once dominated.  If any one factor encouraged the survival of  the word “cyclopaedia”, it was the popularity of Pears' Cyclopaedia, a single-volume encyclopaedia published in the UK by the Pears' Soap Company (1807); it first appeared in 1879, the year of Queen Victoria’s (1819–1901; Queen of the UK 1837-1901) Diamond Jubilee.  Obviously less comprehensive than the Britannica, Pears’ found a niche in being convenient and oriented towards what most people wanted to know most of the time including an atlas, gazetteer & medical dictionary with sections devoted to topics as diverse as commerce, history, science, religion and literature.  After 1953 Pears' editions became annual but, from the early 1990s (the www (world wide web) emerged in 1992 and became mainstream in 1995-1996), sales tended down and succumbing to the inevitable, the last appeared in 2017.

KGB identity card, issued in 1982 for British SIS (MI6) defector Kim Philby (1912–1988).

The Soviet Union’s (USSR) KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, literally “Committee for State Security” but better understood as “political police”) was the last of an alphabet-soup of similar agencies (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, SMERSH & MGB) which, building on the models of the many secret-police forces maintained by Tsarist Russia (1547-1917), was responsible for the USSR’s internal security and, beyond its borders, espionage, counter espionage and a range of activities conducted in support of Soviet foreign policy (including that not disclosed and that sometimes denied).  In post-Soviet Russia, the KGB evolved into the FSB (Federal Security Service), former comrade Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999) honing his skills in the KGB, an institution he is believed to have joined in 1975.

“Lubtanka building”, Lubyanka Square, Meshchansky, Moscow, Russia.

In Soviet times, citizens referred to the building as “the Lubyanka”, a term in synecdochic use referencing the KGB specifically and the state’s sprawling internal security apparatus generally.  After 1918, the yellow-brick building was for decades headquarters of various organs of the Soviet and Russian security services since 1918 (most infamously the KGB, 1954-1991) and it became notoriously especially for the cells in which were conducted interrogations, torture and the executions.  The legend grew the cells were in the basement but that was an illusion, the prison complex actually the windowless top floor, those detained disorientated by the “basement-like” environment.  In a sign of changed times, under the comparatively less repressive regime of comrade Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982; Soviet leader 1964-1982), architects were commissioned to re-model the prison into the KGB staff cafeteria.  After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, a museum was opened within the Lubyanka but the political winds have since again blown from the east and access is now highly restricted.  The word became a cultural reference point also in the West and one of the jocular nicknames for the headquarters for the UK's SIS is “London Lubyanka”; sited on the banks of the Thames, descriptions of the building include “fortress-like” & “North Koreaish” but the eclectic mix of styles, shapes & structures has aged well. 

As an internal security agency, the KGB (like its predecessors) was always formidable and usually effective in the suppression of dissent but in espionage and counter-espionage, the record was patchy and increasingly so as the Cold War (1947-1991) drew to its (anti-) climax.  Most of the celebrated successes happened either before the Cold War began or in its early years, the number and usefulness of ideologically motivated defectors and traitors from the West sharply declining after comrade Khrushchev’s (Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971; Soviet leader 1953-1964) “Secret Speech” at the 1956 Communist Party Congress in which he denounced comrade Stalin's (Joseph Stalin 1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) repressions and purges, laying bare the nature of the his regime.  The speech didn’t long stay secret, the transcripts leaked to the West convincing all but the few most devoted of the “useful idiots” their faith had been misplaced and the god had failed.  After the interventions in Hungary that same year and Czechoslovakia in 1968, idea of a Soviet-like future became still less appealing, not only in the West but also among the disillusioned in the USSR and its satellite states.

Decline: Soviet real per capita GDP growth 1960-1985.  Nostalgic as he may be for the empire of the old USSR, even Mr Putin admits the economic system simply didn't work.

However, whatever the decline in the metrics, the KGB continued to grow, reflecting the need to increase surveillance and internal control in order for the party to maintain its authority over a system in which occasional periods of stagnation were the only good news in what was, in retrospect, a system in the throes of terminal decline.  By the mid-1970s, in the Moscow region alone, the KGB establishment stood at some 50,000 (greater than the combined workforce of their Cold War opponent’s CIA & FBI (the US Central Intelligence Agency & Federal Bureau of Investigation) although other Western nations also maintained large security operations of spies and analysts) and of the total force of half a million-odd, some 220,000 guarded the USSR’s borders, not from fear of invasion by a foreign power but to discourage escape attempts.  Once an organization with a relatively simple structure which, as late as the early 1960s, was administered through three directorates, the KGB grew to encompass a dozen, reflecting in part the geographical division of the country by 1980 in 21 departments when once there had been eight.  If there was one dominated theme in the government of the late Soviet Union it was a burgeoning bureaucracy, the upper echelons staffed increasingly by party apparatchiks with little knowledge of intelligence or espionage (the USSR’s equivalent of the MBA-CEO class in the West).  These the experienced operators disparagingly called “encyclopedists”, the idea being they knew just a little bit about many things and, being empire-builders as industrious as their imperialist lackey counterparts, fiefdoms proliferated.  Apart from the documented decrease in efficiency, the growth of the KGB, like that of the armed forces, the party and the military-industrial complex, absorbed (unproductively), a rising share of the USSR’s diminishing financial resources at a time of failing health care, food shortages and a general decline in living standards, one former KGB general (Oleg Kalugin (b 1934)) later telling the joke which circulated within the organization: The USSR was “the Congo with rockets”.  In living standards, the flagship of the second-world was tending towards the third and the structural imbalances fed off themselves, an economic viscous circle that led to the economic and moral bankruptcy which doomed the USSR.  Late in 1991, the KGB was dissolved, having out-lasted the party by just weeks although, in the years since, the successor organizations in both Russia and the states within its sphere of influence have sometimes devolved towards the past.

Comrade Andropov.

General Kalugin did however give credit where it was due.  The KGB in 1979 had spies well-placed inside the intelligence apparatuses of a number of countries and one of these agents provided the information the wife of a Soviet diplomat had with some frequency been observed having sex with the family’s large pet (male) dog.  The KGB agents were a worldly lot and might have had a chuckle before turning a blind eye but the source advised there were plans to obtain video evidence with which the diplomat could be blackmailed.  So sensitive was the matter that discussions involved the head of KGB himself, Yuri Andropov (1914–1984; head of KGB 1967-1982, Soviet leader 1982-1984).  Unable simply to recall the couple lest it compromise the source and, in a nice touch, not wishing to burden the husband with the knowledge of his wife’s unusual predilection for canine-intimacy, no solution seemed immediately obvious until, after for some time sitting in silence, comrade Andropov suggested: “Kill the dog”.  All agreed this was a good idea so it was arranged for a KGB technician to visit the house on some pretext to slip the hound some poisoned meat.  The dose turned out to be wrong so instead of killing the beast, just its hind quarters became paralyzed although that obviously solved the problem; a tactical failure but a strategic success.  It was a minor event in a long career and it's believed it played no part in comrade Andropov being the last leader of the USSR but one.

Malia Nummerdor mugshot.  Lots of stuff happens in Florida.

Less inclined to understanding and forgiveness than the KGB’s apparatchiks were one husband in Florida and the officers of the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office.  In September 2026, Rupert Murdoch’s (b 1931) tabloid New York Post reported a husband’s bedroom security camera (said to be visible and displaying a blinking red light when recording) had captured scenes of his wife performing “a disgusting act” with the family dog.  The man had installed the camera in an attempt to find who was pilfering from a coin jar so the sight of his wife enjoying bestiality with his dog would have been at least a surprise.  Mother of two Malia Nummerdor (b 1989) was arrested and charged with “engaging in sexual contact with an animal”, the sheriff’s office confirming the footage revealed Ms Nummerdor was “nude from the waist down, positioned with the dog in a manner consistent with sexual activity”.

Police interviewed the suspect who “acknowledged the video showed her with the dog, but denied there was any sexual contact – claiming that she was just petting it.”  In the report of interview filed, the investigating detective described her answers as “contradictory”.  Predictably, a case that sounded like something from the front page of NRS (normally reliable source) National Enquirer attracted much public interest and friends of Ms Nummerdor launched a fundraiser to assist her with legal expenses, claiming she was “set up by her spouse”.  Helpfully, one acquaintance revealed: “I went to school with her, and she never rubbed me as a weirdo.  She is very pretty.  I don’t think she would have trouble finding a human being to be intimate with.  Of course, that alone doesn’t prove anything, but I think it’s important to remember that the person being portrayed online is someone who has people who knew her before these allegations.” while another concluded “I feel there is much more to the story.”