Press (pronounced pres)
(1) To act upon with steadily applied weight or force.
(2) To move by weight or force in a certain direction or into a certain position.
(3) To compress or squeeze, as to alter in shape or size.
(4) To hold closely, as in an embrace; clasp.
(5) To flatten or make smooth, especially by ironing.
(6) To extract juice, sugar, etc from by pressure.
(7) To manufacture (phonograph records, videodiscs, or the like), especially by stamping from a mold or matrix.
(8) To exert weight, force, or pressure.
(9) In weightlifting, to raise or lift, especially a specified amount of weight, in a press.
(10) To iron clothing, curtains, etc.
(11) To bear heavily, as upon the mind.
(12) To compel in another, haste, a change of opinion etc.
(13) Printed publications, especially newspapers and periodicals. Collectively, all the media and agencies that print, broadcast, or gather and transmit news, including newspapers, newsmagazines, radio and television news bureaus, and wire services.
(14) The editorial employees, taken collectively, of these media and agencies.
(15) To force into military service.
1175-1225: From the Middle English press & presse (throng, trouble, machine for pressing) from the Old French, from presser (to press) from the Latin pressāre, frequentative of premere (past participle pressus). In Medieval Latin it became pressa (noun use of the feminine of pressus). The noun press (a crowd, throng, company; crowding and jostling of a throng; a massing together) emerged in the late twelfth century and was from the eleventh century Old French presse (a throng, a crush, a crowd; wine or cheese press), from the Latin pressare. Although in the Late Old English press existed in the sense of "clothes press", etymologists believe the Middle English word is probably from French. The general sense of an "instrument or machine by which anything is subjected to pressure" dates from the late fourteenth century and was first used to describe a "device for pressing cloth" before being extended to "devices which squeeze juice from grapes, oil from olives, cider from apples etc". The sense of "urgency; urgent demands of affairs" emerged in the 1640s. It subsequently proved adaptable as a technical term in sports, adopted by weightlifting in 1908 while the so-called (full-court press) defense in basketball was first recorded in 1959. Press is a noun & verb, pressingness is a noun, pressing is a noun, verb & adjective, pressed is a verb & adjective and pressingly is an adverb; the noun plural is presses. The now archaic verb prest was a simple past and past participle of press.
Installed originally in the 1930s to print the Daily Mail and Evening Standard, the apparatus is some 9 metres (29½ feet) high and 9½ metres (31 feet) long, weighing 140 tonnes (154 short tons). Given the bulk, the museum's management have good reason to make this exhibit permanent. Although considerably more intricate than the printing presses of 500 years earlier, the operators of those would still have recognized and understood the processes and mechanisms.
The specific sense "machine for printing" was from the 1530s, extended by the 1570s to publishing houses and to publishing generally (in phrases like freedom of the press) from circa 1680 although meaning gradually shifted in early 1800s to "periodical publishing; journalism". Newspapers collectively came to be spoken of as "the press" simply because they were printed on printing presses and the use to mean "journalists collectively" is attested from 1921 but this has faded from use with the decline in print and the preferred reference has long been “the news media”, Donald Trump (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) helpfully distinguishing between the news media (those agreeing with him) and the fake new media (those not). The first gathering called a press conference is attested from 1931, though the thing itself had been around for centuries (and in some sense formalized during World War I (1914-1918)) although a politician appears first to have appointed a “press secretary” as late as 1940; prior to that there was some reluctance among politicians to admit they had people on the payroll to "manage the press" but the role long pre-dates 1940. The term “press release” (an official statement offered to a newspaper and authorized for publication) is from 1918 although the practice was of long-standing. The sense "force into military (especially naval) service" emerged (most famously in the “press-gang” (a detachment under command of an officer empowered to press men into public service)) in the 1570s, an alteration (by association with the verb press) of the mid-fourteenth century prest (engage by loan, pay in advance (especially in reference to money paid to a soldier or sailor on enlisting), from the Latin praestare (to stand out, stand before; fulfill, perform, provide), the construct being prae- (before) + stare (to stand), from the primitive Indo-European root sta- (to stand, make or be firm). The verb was related to praesto (ready, available). The concept of "press ganging" to obtain men for military service is ancient but in the codified way it was done by the Royal Navy it remains the Admiralty's greatest contribution to HRM (human resource management).
In 1969, the phrase “hot off the press” was literal because the old “hot type” presses used the heat in the hand-assembled metal plates to complete the chemical process by which ink end up on paper. Prepared even to sustain loss-making mastheads if he thinks their continued existence fulfils some useful purpose (such as “influence” or “agenda-setting”), Mr Murdoch clearly retains some residual affection for the print titles on which he built his empire(s) but the old expression “printer's ink in his veins” now is nuanced because although his papers still consume much ink and paper, more than anyone he was responsible for the demise of the old “hot type” printing presses which had evolved over centuries. Modern newspapers still are printed with a form of ink but, mostly using a process called web offset printing (a variant of offset lithography, optimized for speed and high throughput), that "ink" is so low in viscosity it’s better imagined as a paste. Usually petroleum or soy-based, the substance is transferred from a metal plate to a rubber "blanket" and, as the newsprint (porous paper in continuous rolls) moves through the press, the ink is applied to the paper as shapes, text and images. The ink’s chemistry is formulated to ensure absorption into newsprint is close to instantaneous; in this the mix differs from traditional inks which could take seconds or even minutes to dry to the point printed paper could be handled without smudging, drying now achieved almost wholly by absorption and evaporation, not heat-fusing. To gain speed, there was a trade-off in quality in that being relatively thin, the ink produces less color saturation than is achieved by what’s used for glossy magazines (which is why newspaper images look softer or slightly grayish). That is of course acceptable because newspapers have a short life, an idea encapsulated by the band the Rolling Stones that in 1967 sang “Who wants yesterday’s papers. Nobody in the world.” although the meaning of that track was better summed up in the line: “Who wants yesterdays girl.”
However, just as Mr Murdoch was in the 1980s instrumental in consigning the old printing presses to the scrapheap (along with a substantial number of the unionized workforce previously employed to maintain and run them), he’s also seen technological advances impose not always welcome changes on his business model, some of the implications of which he discussed in 2006: “To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.” He may have been too pessimistic because, in the 2020s, watching Mr Murdoch’s Fox News, it’s not immediately obvious the people have “taken control” and a more glum analysis suggests the elites merely have done what elites always have sought to do as conditions shift: keep the strategy, adjust the tactics. Still, although printed newspapers no longer need to exist, nostalgic types who enjoy the ritualism of reading one spread on a table while taking a coffee (and maybe even a cigarette) will miss them when they’re gone so they at least will wish Mr Murdoch many more years of rude good health because whether the print titles will survive his (God forbid) death isn’t certain. Despite that uncertainty, most analysts seem to believe print in its (possibly diminishing) niches will likely endure. Some of the glossies continue to flourish and encouragingly, the pleasingly quirky automotive site Petrolicious (revived after being acquired by the duPont Registry Group in 2024) has brought back its printed, tabloid size monthly Petrolicious Post (US$9.00 cover price, US$108.00 annual subscription), the internet lowering the costs associated with such projects by permitting direct-to-customer distribution without the need to supply newsstands.
Most meanings related to pushing and exerting pressure had formed by the mid-fourteenth century and this had been extended to mean "to urge or argue for" by the 1590s. The early fourteenth century pressen (to clasp, hold in embrace) extended in meaning by the mid century also to mean "to squeeze out" & "to cluster, gather in a crowd" and by the late 1300s, "to exert weight or force against, exert pressure" (and also "assault, assail" & "forge ahead, push one's way, move forward", again from the thirteenth century Old French presser (squeeze, press upon; torture)", from the Latin pressare (to press (the frequentative formation from pressus, past participle of premere (to press, hold fast, cover, crowd, compress), from the primitive Indo-European root per- (to strike)). The sense of "to reduce to a particular shape or form by pressure" dates from the early fifteenth century while the figurative (“to attack”) use was recorded some decades earlier. The meaning "to urge; beseech, argue for" dates from the 1590s.
The letter-press referred to matter printed from relief surfaces and was a term first used in the 1840s (the earlier (1771) description had been "text," as opposed to copper-plate illustration). The noun pressman has occasionally been used to refer to newspaper journalists but in the 1590s it described "one who operates or has charge of a printing press" and was adopted after the 1610s to refer to "one employed in a wine-press". A similar sharing of meaning attached to the pressroom which in the 1680s meant "a room where printing presses are worked" and by 1902 it was also a "room (in a courthouse, etc.) reserved for the use of reporters". To press the flesh (shake hands) came into use in 1926 and a neglected use of “pressing” is as a form of torture. Under a wide variety of names, pressing was a popular method of torture or execution for over four-thousand years; mostly using rocks and stones but elephants tended to be preferred in South and South-East Asia. It’s a medieval myth that Henry VIII (1491–1547; King of England 1509-1547) invented pressing but he certainly adopted it as a method of torture with his usual enthusiasm for such things. Across the channel, under the French civil code, Peine forte et dure (forceful and hard punishment) defined pressing. Used when a defendant refused to plead, the victim would be subjected to having heavier and heavier stones placed upon his or her chest until a plea was entered, or as the weight of the stones on the chest became too great for the subject to breathe, fatal suffocation would occur.
Pressed for time: Giles Corey's Punishment and Awful Death (1692), a drawing held by the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC. Watched by a presumably approving crowd, the technique was to place stones upon the board covering the unfortunate soul: The “straw which broke the camel’s back” principle.
Remembered as a method use for torture and to extract confessions, the technique of pressing was known often as “crushing” if used in executions or the unfortunate victim of a pressing were to die. Giles Corey was a farmer of 81 who lived in south-west Salem village, Massachusetts who had been accused of witchcraft, then a fashionable charge in Salem (despite the perception, it wasn't only women who were arraigned as witches). He chose not to enter a plea and simply remained mute in court, prompting the judges to order the coercive measure peine forte et dure, an ancient legal device dating from thirteenth century Anglo-Norman law and which translated literally as “a long and hard punishment”; it was used to persuade those who refused to engage in process to change their mind (ie forcing an accused to enter a plea). In the First Statute of Westminster (3 Edward I. c. 12; 1275) it stated (in Sir Edward Coke’s (1552–1634) later translation): “That notorious Felons, which openly be of evil name, and will not put themselves in Enquests of Felonies that Men shall charge them with before the Justices at the King’s suit, shall have strong and hard Imprisonment (prisone forte et dure), as they which refuse to stand to the common Law of the Land.”
Prisone forte et dure came into use because of the principle in English law that a court required the accused voluntarily to seek its jurisdiction over a matter before it could hear the case, the accused held to have expressed this request by entering a plea. Should an accused refuse to enter a plea, the court could not hear the case which, constructively, was an obvious abuse of process in the administration of justice so the work-around was to impose a “coercive means”. The First Statute of Westminster however refers to prisone forte et dure (a strong and hard imprisonment) and it does seem the original intent was to subject the recalcitrant to imprisonment under especially harsh conditions (bread & water and worse) but at some point in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries there seems to have been a bit of mission creep and the authorities were interpreting things to permit pressing. The earliest known document confirming a death is dated 1406 but it’s clear that by then pressing was not novel with the court acknowledging that if the coercive effect was not achieved, the accused certainly would die. One who might have been pleased the law had moved on from torturing defendants who declined to enter a plea was Rudolf Hess (1894–1987; Nazi Deputy Führer 1933-1941). Appearing before the IMT (International Military Tribunal) in the first Nuremberg Trial which heard the cases against two dozen of the surviving leading Nazis, those in the dock all pleaded "not guilty" except Hess who stood at the microphone, said "nein" (no) and walked back to his place. Dryly, the IMT's president responded: "That will be recorded as a plea of 'not guilty'". There was laughter in the court.
Pressed Duck
Pressed duck (In the French the dish described variously as canard à la presse, caneton à la presse, canard à la rouennaise, caneton à la rouennaise or canard au sang) is one of the set-pieces of traditional French cuisine and the rarity with which it's now served is accounted for not by its complexity but the time-consuming and labor-intensive steps in its preparation. Regarded as a specialty of Rouen, the creation was attributed to an innkeeper from the city of Duclair. Expensive and now really more of a set-piece event than a meal, pressed duck in the twenty-first century rarely appears on menus and is often subject to conditions such as being ordered up to 48 hours in advance or accompanied with the pre-payment of at least a deposit. Inevitably too there will be limits on the number available because a restaurant will have only so many physical duck presses and if that’s just one, then it’s one pressed duck per sitting and, given what’s involved, that means one per evening. Some high-end a la carte restaurants do still have it on the menu including La Tour d'Argent in Paris, Philippe Restaurant in Melbourne, Ottos in London, À L'aise in Oslo, The Charles in Sydney (a version with dry-aged Maremma duck) and Pasjoli in Los Angeles lists caneton à la presse as its signature dish.
Pressed duck sequence of events: The duck press (left), pressing the duck (centre) & pressed duck (right).
Instructions
(1) Select a young, plump duck.
(2) Wringing the neck, quickly asphyxiate duck, ensuring all blood is retained.
(3) Partially roast duck.
(4) Remove liver; grind and season liver.
(5) Remove breast and legs.
(6) Take remaining carcass (including other meat, bones, and skin) and place in duck-press.
(7) Apply pressure in press to extract and collect blood and other juices from carcass.
(8) Take extracted blood, thicken and flavor with the duck's liver, butter, and Cognac. Combine with the breast to finish cooking. Other ingredients that may be added to the sauce include foie gras, port wine, Madeira wine, and lemon.
(9) Slice the breast and serve with sauce as a first serving; the legs are broiled and served as the next course.
Silverplate Duck Press (Item# 31-9128) offered at M.S. Rau Antiques (Since 1912) in New Orleans at US$16,850.
According to culinary legend, the mechanism of the screw-type appliance was perfected in the late nineteenth century by chefs at the Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris, the dish then called canard au sang (literally “duck in its blood”), a description which was accurate but presumably “pressed duck” was thought to have a wider appeal. The example pictured is untypically ornate with exquisite foliate scrollwork and delicate honeycomb embossing on the base. Although associated with the famous dish, outside of the serving period, chefs used duck presses for other purposes where pressing was required including the preparation of stocks or confits (various foods that have been immersed in a substance for both flavor and preservation).
Pressed
duck got a mention in a gushing puff-piece extolling the virtues of Adolf
Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945
& head of state 1934-1945) which, in the pre-war years, was a remarkably fertile field of journalistic endeavour on both sides of the Atlantic. William George Fitz-Gerald (circa 1970-1942)
was a prolific Irish journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Ignatius Phayre
and the English periodical Country Life published his account of a visit to the
Berchtesgaden retreat on the invitation of his “personal friend” Adolf
Hitler. That claim was plausible because
although when younger Fitz-Gerald’s writings had shown some liberal instincts,
by the “difficult decade” of the 1930s, experience seems to have persuaded
him the world's problems were caused by democracy and the solution was an
authoritarian system, headed by what he called “the long looked for
leader.” Clearly taken by his
contributor’s stance, in introducing the story, Country Life’s editor called
Hitler “one of the most extraordinary geniuses of the century” and noted “the
Führer is fond of painting in water-colours and is a devotee of Mozart.”
Substantially,
the piece in Country Life also appeared in the journal Current History with the
title: Holiday with Hitler: A Personal Friend Tells of a Personal Visit with
Der Führer — with a Minimum of Personal Bias”.
In hindsight it may seem a challenge for a journalist, two years on from
the regime’s well-publicized murders of a least dozens of political opponents
(and some unfortunate bystanders who would now be classed as “collateral
damage”) in the pre-emptive strike against the so-called “Röhm putsch”, to keep
bias about the Nazis to a minimum although many in his profession did exactly
that, some notoriously. It’s doubtful
Fitz-Gerald visited the Obersalzberg when claimed or that he ever met Hitler
because his story is littered with minor technical errors and absurdities such
as Der Führer personally welcoming him upon touching down at Berchtesgaden’s
(non-existent) aerodrome or the loveliness of the cherry orchid (not a species
to survive in alpine regions).
Historians have concluded the piece was assembled with a mix of
plagiarism and imagination, a combination increasingly familiar since the
internet encouraged its proliferation.
Still, with the author assuring his readers Hitler was really more like
the English country gentlemen with which they were familiar than the
frightening and ranting “messianic” figure he was so often portrayed, it’s
doubtful the Germans ever considered complaining about the odd deviation from
the facts and just welcomed the favourable publicity.
So, those who complain about the early implementations of consumer generative AI (artificial intelligence) products "making stuff up" to "fill in the gaps" can be assured it's something with a long (if not noble) tradition among flesh & blood content providers whether they be the Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda or a working journalist hustling for a dollar. Generative AI is likely for some time to remain in its "early implementation" phase so should be used with much the same approach as that taken by the inspection teams of the US & USSR when auditing the outcomes of various SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) agreements: "trust but verify". As a working journalist, Fitz-Gerald became used to editing details so he could sell essentially the same piece to several different publications, cutting & pasting as required, Current History’s subscribers spared the lengthy descriptions of the Berghof’s carpets, curtains and furniture enjoyed by Country Life’s readers who were also able to learn of the food served at der Tabellenführer, the Truite saumonée à la Monseigneur Selle (salmon trout Monseigneur style) and caneton à la presse (pressed duck) both praised although in all the many accounts of life of the court circle’s life on the Obersalzberg, there no mention of the vegetarian Hitler ever having such things on the menu.
Indeed, in Erinnerungen (Memories or Reminiscences) and published in English as Inside the Third Reich (1969), Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) recalled that belying the impression of excess created by the regime’s gaudy spectacles and monumentalist architecture, there was little extravagance at Hitler’s table, fresh vegetables his single gastronomic indulgence. Describing things, Speer wrote: “The food was emphatically simple. A soup, no appetizer, meat with vegetables and potatoes, a sweet. For beverage we had a choice between mineral water, ordinary Berlin bottled beer, or a cheap wine. Hitler was served his vegetarian food, drank Fachinger mineral water, and those of his guests who wished could imitate him. But few did. It was Hitler himself who insisted on this simplicity. He could count on its being talked about in Germany. Once, when the Helgoland fishermen presented him with a gigantic lobster, this delicacy was served at table, much to the satisfaction of the guests, but Hitler made disapproving remarks about the human error of consuming such ugly monstrosities. Moreover, he wanted to have such luxuries forbidden, he declared. Göring seldom came to these meals. Once, when I left him to go to dinner at the Chancellery, he remarked: ‘To tell the truth, the food there is too rotten for my taste. And then, these party dullards from Munich! Unbearable.’"
The term "tabloid press" refers to down-market style of journalism designed to enjoy wide appeal through an emphasis on scandals, sensation and sport, featuring as many celebrities as possible. The word tabloid was originally a trademark for a medicine which had been compressed into a small tablet, the construct being tab(let) + -oid (the suffix from the Ancient Greek -ειδής (-eidḗs) & -οειδής (-oeidḗs) (the ο being the last vowel of the stem to which the suffix is attached), from εἶδος (eîdos) (form, likeness)). From the idea of the pill being the small version of something bigger, tabloid came to be used to refer to miniaturized iterations of a variety of stuff, newspapers being the best known use. A tabloid is a newspaper with a compact page size smaller than broadsheet but despite the name, there is no standardized size for the format but it's generally about half the size of a broadsheet. In recent decades, economic reality has intruded on the newspaper business and there are now a number of tabloid-sized newspapers (called "compacts" to distinguish them from the less reputable) which don't descend to the level of tabloid journalism (although there has been a general lowering of standards).
The Mean Girls (2004) Burn Book (left) and Lindsay Lohan burning an “inflammatory” tabloid magazine, Lindsay Lohan: The Obsession, GQ Magazine, October 2006.
In Mean Girls, the Burn Book gained its notoriety from being packed with inflammatory comments. In a visual critique of the tabloid press's "obsession" with her (admittedly incident-packed young) life, Lindsay Lohan in 2006 posed for 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 the “tabloid press” 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 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.
