Mountweazel

Mountweazel (pronounced mount-wee-zuhl)

Factitious material deliberately included in a publication as a “copyright trap”, allowing identification of plagiarism and potential violations of copyright.

1975: A definition by Henry Alford (b 1962) which appeared in a 1975 edition of The New Yorker, referencing an entry in the fourth edition (1975) of the New Columbia Encyclopedia, involving the fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, said to have died in an explosion while on assignment for the just as fanciful “Combustibles” magazine.  Mountweazel was not a legitimate family name, the neologism coined by Karen Tweedy-Holmes (b 1942), then an editor for the encyclopedia, the purpose being a fictional biographical entry for the imaginary Lillian Virginia Mountweazel.  For all purposes (other than the doomed heroine), mountweasel is used without an initial capital.  Mountweazel is a noun; the noun plural is mountweazels.

Ms Tweedy-Holmes (there can have been few finer names for a lexicographer) described her tragic heroine as an American fountain designer turned photographer, born in 1942 in Bangs, Ohio and most noted for her commissioned series of images of the mailboxes of rural America, her death said to have come in 1973.  Ms Tweedy-Holmes authoritative (and wholly bogus) biographical entry for the late Ms Mountweazel 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.”  The coining was for the purpose of a “copyright trap”, in this context an apparently legitimate dictionary entry structurally and stylistically indistinguishable from thousands of others, the idea being that were another publication to include a “Lillian Virginia Mountweazel” entry with the same “facts”, that obviously would be a plagiarism and potentially a breach of copyright.

Combustibles magazine (special issue, 4 June, 1973).

Ms Mountweazel may never have lived but in death is memorialized in the Lillian Virginia Mountweazel Research Collection which includes an “extensive collection of Combustibles Magazine” covers, some editions including her assignments, notably “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.  There’s also the revelation the Flags Up! project, 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).

Official Journal of the Institute of Explosives Engineers, March 2026 edition.  It would seem women involved in “blowing-up stuff” prefer to wear sensible shoes which seems wise.

While there was no “Combustibles” magazine (which for the entrepreneurial seems a gap in the market), for students of such things or enthusiasts of the art & science of “blowing-up stuff”, the IEE (Institute of Explosives Engineers (Voice of the Explosive Industries)) publishes the quarterly Official Journal of the Institute of Explosives Engineers, currently distributed to a membership of some 2,000 “highly qualified engineers and specialists” involved in blowing-up stuff.  Additionally, copies are made available to selected academics, professional institutions and those in the business (of blowing-up stuff).  As well as academic papers, features and articles, the journal functions as a trade publication with information and reviews of new products and services.  The editors welcome submissions relevant to blowing-up stuff and, if appropriate, prior to publication, will submit texts for professional peer review.  The next International Explosives Conference will be held between 16-18 June, 2026 at the Parkgate Hotel in Cardiff, Wales and the institute recommends the early booking of hotel rooms because on the evening of the 16^th, Take That (an English pop group formed in Manchester in 1990) will be performing their Circus Live show at the city’s Principality Stadium.

A synonym of mountweazel is the German Nihilartikel, said to have appeared in 2003 as a hoax in the German-language Wikipedia in 2003 and later picked up by the English version from which it spread through blogs, print publications and such, these serving as “references” appearing to legitimate subsequent use.  The construct of Nihilartikel (being a noun, if used in the original German, with an initial upper case) was the Latin nihil (nothing), from nihilum (from ne- (not) +‎ hīlum (the least bit)) + the German Artikel (article) (from the Middle High German artikel, from the Latin articulus.  This is defined (in the jargon of Wikipedia) as a type of citogenesis (a circular form of citation where various sources report each other, creating a false impression of reliability).  The construct being cit(e) +‎ -o- +‎ -genesis, citogenesis was in 2011 coined by US engineer Randall Munroe (b 1984), presumably on the model of the homophone cytogenesis (the formation, development and variation of cells), the construct being cyto- + genesis.  Cyto- (“cell” as used in biology) was a learned borrowing from the Ancient Greek κύτος (kútos) (container, receptacle) and genesis (origin, start; point (in time) at which something comes into being). came via Latin from the Ancient Greek γένεσις (génesis).  Cite (in this context “to quote; to repeat, to make mention of; to list”) was from the Old French citer, from the Latin citare (to cause to move, excite, summon) and frequentative of ciēre (to rouse, excite, call).  So, just as cytogenesis describes cells being formed and variations emerging from components, in citogenesis what is happening to the assembly of “apparent (but erroneous) facts” with “authenticity verified” on the basis of other “apparent (but erroneous) facts that gained their “apparent veracity” merely from the frequency of citation.

The Pentagon Papers.  In 1971, the USSC (US Supreme Court) ruled 6-3 against granting the Nixon (Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US VPOTUS 1953-1961 & POTUS 1969-1974)) administration an injunction preventing further publication of excerpts by the New York Times & The Washington Post, holding the government’s attempt to invoke “prior restraint” violated the First Amendment (freedom of the press) of the constitution and the claim of a threat to national security was not in this case sufficiently justified to allow suppression of the press.  It’s interesting to speculate how today’s USSC would rule on the same facts.

For other purposes, there are variants of the “copyright trap”.  Organizations wishing to detect the source of “leaks” (documents being photocopied and given to unauthorized recipients) would sometimes make visually almost imperceptible changes (an additional space, a character in a slightly different font etc) in certain copies, meaning an analysis of a “leaked copy” could isolate the source.  That obviously depended on the existence of relatively few original copies but that is the nature of leaked material.  The digitization of documents of course made copying and leaking not only quicker and easier but also made possible grabbing data on a huge scale.  While in 1969 Dr Daniel Ellsberg (1931–2023) had to spend several evenings alone with one of Rand Corporation’s photocopiers to duplicate the 7000-odd pages that became “the Pentagon Papers”, by the time Edward Snowden (b 1983) and Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning (b 1987) were stealing US government data by the gigabyte, all they needed was a USB stick onto which stuff silently was copied as they went about their paid work.  All digital copies of a document are of course functionally identical and even metadata which can reveal something about the copying (such as a date stamp) can be edited so what sometimes was done was the insertion of something hidden which could be detected only at the software level and not visually.  The best known was the “Alt + 255 trick”, a keyboard combination which created the NBSP (non-breaking space) Unicode character U+00A0.  Visually indistinguishable from the standard gap (U+0020) created by a tap of the space bar, the location could be detected using certain text editors so, correctly implemented, it would be a useful device for tracing sources of leaks.  However, “software tricks” can be detected by other software which is why crooked Hillary Clinton’s (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) legal team (a well-resourced and busy crew) insisted on printing out thousands of E-mails because of fears the investigators exploring the (still not adequately explained) “servergate” scandal might detect in the raw files something crooked Hillary had deleted.

The companion (in form though not intent) of the mountweazel is the “ghost word”.  A ghost word is a word that enters a dictionary, reference book or some other reputable source, despite being “wrong”.  The causative events have been varied, including misunderstood abbreviations, typographical errors, printer's mistakes, errors in transcription or translation, scribal copying errors, damaged manuscripts, corruptions in transmission and mishearings of audio recordings.  While advances in technology have made it possible more efficiently to identify ghost words, the increasing use of OCR (optical character recognition) on texts of sometimes dubious legibility may yet create a few and given the propensity of AI (artificial intelligence) bots to “make-up stuff”, there’s likely to be a new generation yet to be discovered.  In linguistics, the professionals distinguish between “ghost words” and “phantom words” and the distinction matters in their rarefied world but to most of us the latter probably would be thought mere “spelling errors”.

Few have made a great as contribution to the study of the English language as Walter William Skeet, the ghost word but one of his minor legacies.

All that matters for purposes of definition is that the word has no actual history of use in the language.  One celebrated example was “dord” which appeared in the 1934 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary, defined as “density”.  What had happened was the chemistry section’s editor had written a note saying: “D or d, cont/ density” (meaning “uppercase D or lowercase d is the abbreviation for density”) but a typesetter misread the spaces, blending the characters to create a “new word”.  Until 1939 “dord” sat on its page in Webster’s, apparently without causing trouble but it was noticed during an internal review and a “plate change/imperative/urgent” instruction was sent to the printer; at that point the linguistic exorcism was effected but, because lead-times and product supply-lines were then longer, not until 1947 were Webster’s confident they successfully had “de-dorded” things.  It could of course have been different.  Had chemists ((The origin, start; point (in time) at which something comes into being). or anyone else) decided dord was a “perfectly cromulent word” and use had achieved critical mass, it would have become a “real word”.  Quite when the term “ghost word” first was used in this sense is uncertain but lexicographers agree it was popularized by English mathematician, philologist & Anglican deacon Walter William Skeat (1835–1912), notable for his seminal work in editing Medieval texts.

The neologism “cromulent” appeared in Lisa the Iconoclast (episode 16, season 7 of the US animated TV series The Simpsons (1989-) which aired on Fox on 18 February, 1996.  Cromulent (acceptable; valid; correct) was deliberately not “a real word”, the gag being it was included in the script to be used by one character to assure another that “embiggen” (to make larger) was “a real word”.  So it was a funny line but the irony was embiggen had a (limited) history of use dating from 1884.  In the years since, it has been included in mainstream dictionaries and has found a niche in the mysterious world of string theory, a collection of explanations of the structure of the universe; being under the rubric of quantum gravity, string theory is understood only by a handful of specialists, not all of whom agree with each other.  Probably few would deny embiggen deserves to be in the jargon of string theory but whether the discipline is cromulent science continues to divide opinion.

Warren Harding (1865–1923; POTUS 1921-1923), New Year's Day, 1920.  A confessed Freemason, Harding presided over a scandal-plagued administration and his early death might have been one of those “good career moves”.  Theodore Roosevelt’s (TR, 1858–1919; POTUS 1901-1909) daughter Alice Longworth (1884–1980) “knew everybody” in twentieth century US politics and in summing up Harding concluded: “Harding wasn’t a bad man, he was just a slob.”

There have over the years been many “ghost words” (the authoritative Wiktionary listing 33 instances in English of examples meeting their strict criterion).  It’s not enough that a word is “wrong”; whether fictitious, malicious, erroneous or whatever, to become a “ghost word” it must appear in some work of reference and be presented as “genuine”, enduring in that form long enough to take on some sort of life.  Humorists and experimentalists have of course coined or repurposed words which have entered mainstream use but these are not ghost words because their lineage was documented.  There are also “pseudo ghost words” (those treated as such but with a verified history authenticating the alleged error), a celebrated example being Warren Harding’s use during his successful 1920 presidential campaign of “normalcy” instead of “normality”, the section of his speech containing the offending word almost aggressively alliterative:

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

Unrelated: The mountain weasel (Mustela altaica), an inhabitant of high-altitude regions in parts of Asia including Kazakhstan, Tibet, India, Mongolia, north-eastern China and southern Siberia.

In saying "normalcy", he may have misspoken or perhaps Harding liked the word; questioned afterwards he said he found it in a dictionary which probably was true although whether his discovery came before or after the speech wasn't explored.  Although Harding’s choice was at the time much-mocked, normalcy certainly had existed since at least 1857, originally as a technical term from geometry meaning the “mathematical condition of being at right angles, state or fact of being normal in geometry” but subsequently had on several occasions appeared in print as a synonym of normality.  Still, it was hardly in general use though Harding gave it a boost and it’s not since gone extinct, now with little complaint except from the most linguistically fastidious who insist the use in geometry remains the only meaning and all subsequent applications are mistakes.  In these circumstances, a misspeak “does not a ghost word always make” and in 1920 many assumed Mr Harding had “misspoken”.  For someone to “misspeak” was then understood to mean “saying something incorrectly, unclearly or inaccurately (by mistake).  The word “Misspeak” thus distinguished unintentional errors, mispronunciations or “slips of the tongue” from deliberate lies but it came to suffer a darkly amusing late career change.  Historically, it meant (1) to fail to pronounce, utter, or speak correctly or (2) to speak insultingly, disrespectfully or inappropriately (a use long obsolete) but in recent decades it has evolved as a “weasel word” (a word used to hedge a statement, making it vague; equivocal; ambiguous; misleading) used by politicians and others tacitly to admit having lied without having to say: “I lied”.  So it’s beyond a euphemism (which has a hint of polite respectability) and something most associated with crooked Hillary Clinton, notorious for her “strained” relationship with truthfulness although to be fair to crooked Hillary (difficult, but it can be done), her husband (Bill Clinton (b 1946; POTUS 1993-2001)) did not in such matters set a stellar example.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

A malapropism is a literary device and not a ghost word.  Mrs Malaprop was a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s (1751-1816) play The Rivals (1775); she had the habit of substituting inappropriate but like-sounding words that would take on a ludicrous meaning in the sentence in which they appeared (her intended compliment “nice arrangement of epithets” came from her lips as “nice derangement of epitaphs”).  That was very different from a “mere typo”, a breed which tends either to be annoying or amusing but which in certain documents could be consequential (consider “prescribe” vs “proscribe”) but typos can also coin words.  “Hodling” was intended to be in the text string “I am holding”, typed by a cryptocurrency investor who wished to assure others in the chatgroup he was “holding” his Bitcoin position and not selling despite the sudden drop in the price.  Unfortunately, he’d reputedly enjoyed half a bottle of whisky (or whiskey) so finger control on the keyboard was diminished, thus the word-making “I am hodling.”  That proved a linguistic gift because “hodl” (hold) entered the jargon of the cryptocoin jockeys and hodlers (those who do not react to every price downturn by selling) are thought a fearless elite. 

Applied spoonerism: First assembled in 1977, the Cunning Stunts was a London-based, feminist performance collective.  Suffering the internal conflicts perhaps endemic to collectives, the Cunning Stunts dissolved in 1982, having seemingly worked their concept dry.  In the UK, much alternative theatre didn’t survive the 1980s, the administration of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; UK prime-minister 1979-1990) dismantling many of the often left-wing local authorities which had provided a substantial proportion of the funding.

Nor is a spoonerism likely to become a ghost phrase.  A spoonerism is a play on words in a phrase in which the initial (typically a consonant) sounds of two or more of the words are transposed.  It was named after Oxford don the Reverend W. A. Spooner (1844–1930), who was alleged to have made many such slip-ups (“Our dear old queen” becoming “Our queer old dean”) although among scholars it’s suspected that while doubtless he made a few, there was likely a healthy industry among his students (and perhaps even his fellow dons) is concocting more to be attributed.  Another variant was the mondegreen.  Mondegreen was coined by US editor & journalist Sylvia Wright (1917-1981) who, in a piece published in 1954 in Harper's Magazine, recalled a childhood memory of mishearing her mother read a line in the Scottish ballad The Bonnie Earl o' Moray (which appeared in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) by the English clergyman bishop and antiquarian Thomas Percy (1729-1811)): “They have slain the Earl o' Moray, / And laid him on the green”, the second line misheard as, “And Lady Mondegreen”.  Now an acknowledged descriptor, “mondegreen” didn’t appear in mainstream dictionaries until the twenty-first century and that was a product of lists of “obscure or unusual” words beginning to proliferate on the internet as bandwidth increased and cost fell.  Not all novelties pleased the editors but mondegreen was nerdy enough to make the lexicographical cut.  Structurally, there’s no reason why a misspeak, malaproprism, spoonerism or mondegreen can’t become a ghost word; it’s all in the history.

Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo in his battered 1959 Peugeot 403 Cabriolet.

Both embiggen and cromulent are not ghost words because they were positioned as “joke words” rather than being errors and nor are they mountweazels because they were inserted into the script as something other than copyright traps.  Essentially, a mountweazel deliberately is fake while a ghost word is in some sense “wrong”, the distinction summed up as: (1) a ghost word is an error mistaken for truth while (2) a mountweazel is a fabrication presented as truth for strategic reasons.  There are however limitations to the mountweazel’s utility as a copyright trap, the classic example the legal squabble which came to be dubbed “the Columbo Trap”.  Columbo was a TV detective drama which at various times between 1968-2003 was shown on the NBC & ABC networks; it started Peter Falk (1927–2011) as Lieutenant Columbo, remembered for (1) always solving the murder(s), (2) his catch phrase “just one more thing” and (3) driving a dilapidated 1959 Peugeot 403 Cabriolet (one of 504 built that year out of the 2,030 produced during a six-year run (1956-1961)).

The Trivia Encyclopedia (1974): Mostly accurate.

The first edition of the best-selling book The Trivia Encyclopedia appeared in 1974; written by Fred L. Worth, it was for years a fixture on bookshop “Christmas gift” lists.  In 1984, claiming damages of US$300 million, Mr Worth filed suit against the distributors of the board game Trivial Pursuit, claiming they had stolen their game’s Q&A (questions & answers) from his books.  There were many instances of copying he cited but his key piece of evidence was a mountweazel he'd included: the “trivial fact” the first name of the TV detective Lieutenant Columbo was: “Philip”.  This was a product of Mr Worth’s imagination but in the board game, it appeared as an answer to that question.  His legal point was that while the board game’s creators could have obtained his other examples from many other sources (as indeed he had), the notion of “Philip Columbo” appeared first in his book and that it was “not a fact” was irrelevant because the basis of his suit was the unauthorized and unattributed copying.

Not to be confused: Mr Spock (left) & Dr Spock (right).

The Trivia Encyclopedia mostly was accurate although there appeared on the cover an “accidental” mountweasel.  The “Dr Spock” mentioned in the cover art was the character in the TV Series Star Trek (1966-1969) who was always referred to as “Mr Spock” (reflecting the practice in the USN (US Navy), the rank-structure and conventions of which were adopted for the series).  Within The Trivia Encyclopedia, things are OK, the character always referred to as “Mr Spock” and the “trivial facts” correct:  (1) Mr Spock was Science Officer on the Starship Enterprise; (2) he was played by Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015); (3) his human mother was Amanda (played by Jane Wyatt (1910-2006); (4) his Vulcan father was Sarek (played by Mark Lenard (1924-1996).  In publishing, by convention, authors tend not to have the final say on a book’s title or cover art so it was likely an editor at Brooke House who may inadvertently have put the mountweazel on the cover.  Presumably the confusion arose because (1) Mr Spock was rather nerdy in the stereotypical way of a physics Ph.D, and (2) while the series was being televised, the book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by US paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock (1903–1998) had become a best-seller, making its author a household name.  Spock being an unusual name, “Dr” became so associated with “Spock”, many not familiar with the intricate details of the TV series may have conflated the two.

On just about any topic, there's probably a trivia list somewhere on-line.

Defending the suit, the distributers of Trivial Pursuit made no attempt to deny sourcing much material from Mr Worth's book, arguing “facts” are not able to receive the protection of copyright.  To emphasize the point, the company provided a long list of published texts from which information had been copied and argued it would be absurd to suggest they could be sued for providing the answer “Queen Victoria reigned between 1837-1901” because that fact appears in thousands of books.  They acknowledged an action might be possible (depending on many things) had they merely published a “book of trivial facts” (a la Mr Worth’s) but a multi-player board game in which questions had to be answered was “a substantially different product” within the meaning of copyright law.  The judge agreed, a finding upheld on appeal and the USSC declined to re-hear the case, thus reinforcing general principle “a fact cannot be copyrighted”.  Mr Worth’s response was that by definition “Philip Columbo” was thus a piece of fiction deserving copyright; the judges acknowledged the logic but found it too much of a stretch to be accommodated within copyright law and did not concur.  Amusingly however, others also copied Mr Worth’s mountweazel with references to “Lieutenant Philip Columbo” over the years appearing in print and on-line, Peugeot in the 1980s even running advertising campaign in which “Lt. Philip Columbo” was mentioned as the “most famous driver” of a Peugeot convertible.  That was a bit of a shift from the company’s original views on the 403 Cabriolet’s appearance in the TV series, the executives not best pleased at its dilapidated state.  Internet sleuths later published close-up screen shots of his police badge which revealed his name was “Frank Columbo”.

Anadrome

Anadrome (pronounced an-uh-drohm)

(1) A word which forms a different word when spelled backwards.

(2) In pre-modern medical jargon, the upward path of various elements (pain, blood etc) (obsolete).

Circa 1961 (in this context): The construct was ana- +‎ -drome.  Ana was from the Ancient Greek ἀνα- (ana-), from ἀνά (aná) (backward in direction, reversed) and drome was from the Ancient Greek δρόμος (dromos) (running; racetrack); the surface analysis of anadrome thus can be understood as “going backwards”.  Confusingly however, the Greek prefix aná was appended also to convey the notion of “up, above, upward”, (2) “again”, (3) “thoroughly”, (4) “against”, (5) “distal, away from” and (6) “to grow or change in place; functionally similar”.  So, a deconstruction alone would not be definitive and the meaning is established through context.  The longest accepted anadrome in English is believed to be the pair desserts/stressed but among the dozens which exist, it is god/dog which seems most to amuse students.  The coining (or possibly a re-purposing of the earlier medical jargon) of anadrome was credited to Martin Gardner (1914–2010) who is said to have added it in a 1961 re-publication of Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature (1875) by Charles C. Bombaugh (1828-1906) but the word doesn't appear in at least some of the 1961 editions and at least the spike in use may better be attributed to the reclusive and eccentric Dmitri Borgmann (1927–1985) a German-American author regarded still as something of the “high priest of recreational linguistics”.  In his introduction, Mr Gardner does pay tribute to Mr Borgmann as one of the “outstanding creators of word puzzles”.  Anadrome & anadromy are nouns and anadromous & anadromic are adjectives; the noun plural is anadromes.

An young anadromous Atlantic salmon, still resident in the freshwater in which it was born.  The young salmon are called smolts after they gain a silvery hue and migrate to the ocean.

The adjectival form is used in ichthyology, the term “anadromous fish” describing those species born in freshwater rivers or streams that migrate to the ocean to mature and forage, subsequently returning to freshwater to spawn.  First appearing in scientific papers in 1753, the construct of anadromous was ana- (used here in the sense of “up, above, upward”) + dromos (a running), from dramein (to run).  Though the usual natural processes, anadromous fish have evolved with an environmental adaptation called osmoregulation which enables them seamlessly to adapt to changing salinities; that’s what makes it possible for them to live in both aquatic habitats (salt & freshwater).  The process is dynamic as it must be because while some notional freshwater species might move into a sea or ocean only for weeks, others can stay there for years because that’s where they undergo most of their growing cycle.  Remarkably, and using a mechanism not wholly understood (use of the Earth’s magnetic field an intriguing theory), after perhaps years the fish return to their exact natal streams to reproduce.  For freshwater ecosystems, the behaviour is not a mere zoological curiosity because as schools return from their time in saltwater, they bring with them marine-derived phosphorus & nitrogen, “topping up” the elements on which the health of the spawning grounds depends.  Anadromous fish are thus listed as keystone species, some salmon the best known examples.  An anadromic fish swimming to or from the ocean could be said to be proceeding anadromically but the adverb is non-standard.

A catadromous freshwater American eel, slithering out of a pipe, possibly heading back to the ocean, catadromically (again, a non standard adverb).

The companion term is “catadromous fish”, describing species born in salt water that mature in fresh water and return to the sea to spawn, certain eels the best known.  The mysterious European eel exerted a particular fascination upon the natural scientists of Antiquity, Aristotle (384-322 BC) writing the earliest known study although the findings truly were speculative, his novel idea being the creatures were born of “earth worms” which, he suggested, were formed of mud, growing from the “guts of wet soil”.  In the absence of any better theory or observational data, the notion for some time held sway and not for centuries was spontaneous generation disproven.  It wasn’t until the eighteenth century researchers perfected their techniques of dissection and confirmed eels really are fish although, while in recent years it has been possible to effect breeding of eels in captivity, because of the difficulty of replicating at scale the multi-aquatic environment needed for the life-cycle, it’s unlikely any time soon to become commercially viable.  Largely because of demand from the Far East (especially Japan) the European freshwater glass eel has become threatened with smuggling rife, the decline in availability encouraging a trade in the American eel, something which has created problems because of the involvement of transnational crime groups.

25 Franc postage stamp, issued to mark the independence of Upper Volta, 1960.

Although in a sense belonging to the discipline of structural linguistics, the word anadrome (in this context) seems in this context to have come into use (“re-invented” as it were) only in the mid twentieth century and it emerged not from academia but recreational wordplay: It was a “fun word” which migrated to reference books when editors and compliers noticed it appearing in published word games and puzzle culture.  While having no place in formal linguistic theory, it is used as a teaching aid, apparently on the basis of “training the mind to be flexible”, the model believed to be the better known “palindrome” (a word, line, verse, number, sentence, etc reading the same backward as forward), in use since the 1630s.  In logology (recreational linguistics, ie puzzles, word-games and such), there is a great satisfaction in having a coined word “succeed” in the sense of even a limited, specialized acceptance which is why the community has come up with synonyms including: (1) semordnilap (“palindromes” spelled backwards) (2) levidrome (the “Levi” element from the given name of the coiner), (3) reversgram and (4) heteropalindrome (the hetro- prefix a learned borrowing from Ancient Greek ἕτερος (héteros) (other, another, different).  There was a suggestion such words should be called a "volta" (from the Italian volta (which can be used to mean "to turn")) but the idea never caught on.

H.R. Haldeman (1926–1993; White House chief of staff 1969-1973 right) and Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US VPOTUS 1953-1961 & POTUS 1969-1974) doing paperwork (ie shredding evidence) in the White House.

The word did however find a place in geopolitical history.  Flowing south into the West African nation of Ghana from the highlands of Burkina Faso, the Volta River was in the late fifteenth century named by Portuguese gold traders.  Because it was their furthest extent of exploration before returning, the name was appropriate, volta being Portuguese for “turn” or “twist”, thus the common term “river of return”.  As part of the unravelling of the French colonial empire, the République de Haute-Volta (Republic of Upper Volta) was in 1958 created as a self-governing state within the French Community; previously it had been part of the French Union in West Africa as the French Upper Volta.  Independence was granted in 1960 and in 1984 the nation's name was changed to Burkina Faso.  When president, Richard Nixon sarcastically would use “Upper Volta” as a reference to any “unimportant country”, especially if compelled by the conventions of diplomacy to spend time exchanging “pointless pleasantries” with the dignitaries in their visiting delegations.  Sometimes, when someone from the State Department displeased him (a not infrequent happening), darkly he would mutter about having them posted as “ambassador to Upper Volta”, a place Nixon thought a kind of “diplomatic Gulag”.

62¢ postage stamp issued in 2015 by Deutsche Post (The German post office, now a brand of DHL Group) to mark the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Otto von Bismarck (1815-1989; chancellor of the German Empire (the “Second Reich”) 1871-1890).

Among politicians, the phenomenon of an at least affected indifference to the affairs of countries in which no matters of national interest seem obvious is well documented.  His eyes darting east & west, Otto von Bismarck claimed he “never troubled to read the mailbag from Constantinople” although he of course at least glanced at every paper.  While the famous phrase attributed to him: “I shall not live to see the Great War, but you will see it, and it will start in the East.” is likely apocryphal, what is verified he did say: “One day the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”  Confidently it may be asserted he read the telegrams from the embassy in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul in the Republic of Türkiye (Turkey)).  While predicting squabbles in the Balkans hardly demanded great statesmanship, his vision of a “big” European war was remarkably prescient although the chain of events which in 1914 triggered the spread of what could have been yet another localized Balkan war was a consequence of the legacy of inter-locking treaties he'd crafted, his successors less adept in their handling.  Lord Moran (Charles Wilson, 1882-1977; president of the Royal College of Physicians 1941-1949, personal physician to Winston Churchill 1940-1965) in his diary (The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (1966)) on more than one occasion noted Winston Churchill’s (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) unconcern about places which had never piqued his interest.  An entry from April 1953 recorded him saying: “‘I have lived seventy-eight years without hearing of bloody places like Cambodia.’  With a whimsical look he strung out half a dozen strange-sounding names.  ‘They have never worried me, and I haven’t worried them.'”  A year on, revisiting his thoughts, when told of troubles in Central America he thought tiresome, Churchill complained: “I’d never heard of this bloody place Guatemala until I was in my seventy-ninth year.” 

Google Ngram

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 (typically a scanner might misread an “f” for a long “s” or a “u” for an “n”) of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI (artificial intelligence) 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.

As Google’s Ngram attests, “anadrome” was in use in the nineteenth century, the earliest citation dating from 1840, the use a classic illustration of “lexical overlap” a phenomenon which delights word nerds (an easily delighted lot).  In the mid-late 1800s, anadrome (often written as anadromé, reflecting both the Greek roots and the backgrounds of those using the word) was a technical term seen mostly in botanical and medical publications; it was direct borrowing of the Ancient Greek anadromē (ἀναδρομή) (“an ascent”; “running up”).  Medical dictionaries in the era weren’t new but revised editions were common because advances in observational technologies and techniques meant new entries constantly were required and anadrome seems first to have been used of a variety of “physiological ascents” including (1) Ascending Pain: physical pain starting in the lower limbs or torso and migrating upward, (2) The “upward determination of blood: A rush of blood toward the head or upper body and, best of all (3) Globus Hystericus: The “lump in the throat” sensation described at the time also as the “ascent of the womb”.  While scientifically inaccurate, it was memorable and dated from the era (which lasted well into the twentieth century) when the condition “hysteria” was part of the diagnostic toolkit for physicians assessing female patients.  In botanical use, the meaning was most analogous with the idea of blood flow, botanists describing “upward sap flow” (the ascent of sap through a plant’s vascular system).  What the Ngram has in this case captured is a genuine heteronym (a word that looks the same but has a completely different meaning and subtly different lineage).

Between consenting players only: More than 11 points but don’t try insisting on it in competition or you’ll be blackballed; the Scrabble crew neither forgive nor forget.

The proliferation of synonyms of a word which is little more than a curiosity is an example of why the English language has so many words, most of which are never or rarely used.  The estimates notoriously are vague because there exists no consensus on just what is the definition of a “real word” (which sounds silly but in language there’s no concept like the “real number” in mathematics and, at the margins, disputes are legion).  If one is most accommodating of the definitional spectrum, there may in English be as many as a million words but only 15-20% are thought to be in regular or occasional use.  However, although it has appeared in many lists (often of the strange or obscure), "anadrome" has not received the imprimatur of the major sanctioning bodies setting the rules for the game of competitive Scrabble.  It never appeared in the Collins SOWPODS (an anagram of the two abbreviations OSPD (Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) & OSW (Official Scrabble Words)) or the replacement CSW (Collins Scrabble Words) and nor is it in the NASPA’s (North American Scrabble Players Association) NWL (NASPA Word List).  Quite why Collins replaced the wonderful "SOWPODS" with the dreary "CSW" remains a mystery; more than most, they would know English speakers usually will be pulled to a word with two syllables if the alternative is one of five.  The NASPA Dictionary Committee does accept submissions so anadrome advocates can pursue that course but as a non-standard form, the adverb anadromically definitely has no good prospects.  Those playing at home can of course tolerate a bit of linguistic promiscuity and, provided all players agree, if used, "anadrome" would yield a face value of 11 points (before any double/triple letter or word bonuses) but because there are not eight sequential blank squares on a standard Scrabble board, at least one letter always will attract a multiplier.  For word nerd dissidents unhappy with the dictatorial ways of Scrabble’s ruling ancien régime, there is the scrabblesque (also not a “real word”) “Anadrome the Game” in which "anadrome" is lawful and welcomed.

A brunette era Lindsay Lohan wearing Nahol dress in a black and white rose print by Masai of Copenhagen, rendered as a line drawing by Vovsoft.  The anadrome of “Lohan” is “Nahol”.

Masai describes the Nahol as “a loose, oversized, and comfortable midi-dress, characterized by a V-neck, ¾-length length sleeves, side pockets and an elasticized hem creating a slight balloon effect.”  That it has pockets may be enough of a selling point for women, many designers loath to include them in women’s clothing because any additional bulk might “spoil the line”.  Made with what the manufacturer describes as a “sustainable” (a word that has become the industry’s “new black”) mix of 15% polyamide blend & 85% viscose (said “often” to be FCS (Forest Stewardship Council) certified), the material had a “crinkled” finish in black or printed designs.  It does look comfortably accommodating and, on the move, would "swish" nicely.

Nahol as a proper noun (surname): Dalia Nahol.

While not a recognized word in English or other European languages, Nahol is a proper noun and the village of Nahol (bp) (नहोल (bp)) is in the Shimla District of Himachal Pradesh State, India.  In the anthropological record, it seems most often mentioned as used a name in PNG (Papua New Guinea) and East Africa although many of those texts were derived from oral histories so what was recorded as a phonetic “Nahol” may in some cases have been variants.  Whether there’s any link in origin between the uses in PNG & East Africa isn’t known and as a relatively simple (five letter, two syllable) form, it is likely Nahol came independently to be used as a name in more than one place.  The best documented origin is from Ethiopia where the name Naol often was transliterated as Nahol, Nawol or Naoll; it’s a masculine form from Oromo culture meaning “one who brings the peace” or “peaceful”. 

Nahol as a proper noun (surname): Isaac Amu Nahol.

There is an ancient linkage between Jewish traditions and Ethiopia but there’s no evidence the surname Nahols (most prevalent in Eastern Europe, notably among Jewish communities in Poland and Ukraine) has any connection with the Oromo culture; the similar form Nahal (or Nahaul) from the Hebrew (נחל) (nahal) meaning “stream, brook, valley” (and, by extension, “inheritance” (the idea of an estate “flowing” to the descendants)).  Nahols may have been derived from a Yiddish or Hebrew personal name (on the model of English names such as Stevenson (ie the son of Steven)).  In Arabic, the cognate root yielded Nahel & Nahil which although often understood as “generous” or “successful”, was linked also to “bees & honey”, the latter perhaps accounting for why one Bangladeshi (the old post-partition East Pakistan) source cited the name Nahol meaning “the queen of bees”.

Nova Sky: Yasdnil, Star Of (2021) by Yasdnil (Lindsay Ferraro).

The anadrome of “Lindsay” is “Yasdnil”.  As a surname, Yasdnil is astonishingly rare, the genealogy sites listing only a few dozen instances with the origin, although uncertain, thought to be Persian and from the Yazd region (in modern, Central Iran).  The name is thought drawn from Yas, a type of desert flower, thus the symbolic link of the name with beauty and nature.  Genealogists note the rarity and suspect at least some names with similar spellings may be variant forms.  In the Actinobacteriophage Database, Yasdnil is listed as an Actinobacteriophage (viruses that infect bacteria) in the phylum Actinobacteria; it was found in North Texas in 2018 “…in a soil sample that was dark, dry and had organic material (wood-chips, branches etc).”  The researcher reported the phage was named after “…an individual who was important to me, a lot of time was invested into the phage just as a lot of time was invested into that individual.  Naming the phage after them seemed appropriate as it commemorates commitment and good memories.”  It wasn’t revealed whether the inspiration was a “Yasdnil” or an anadromic “Lindsay”.  Yasdnil is also used as a pseudonym (presumably usually as an anadrome of Lindsay) and the best known may be author and advocate Lindsay Ferraro, who published the poetry collection Nova Sky: Yasdnil, Star Of (2021).  Less encouragingly, NRS (normally reliable source) Urban Dictionary has a listing for yasdnil as meaning “the Devil’s daughter”.

Pith

Pith (pronounced pith)

(1) In botany, the soft, spongy central cylinder of parenchymatous tissue in the stems of dicotyledonous plants such as the soft, albedo, fibrous tissue lining the inside of the rind in fruits such as orange and grapefruit (also called medulla or marrow although both are now rare).

(2) In zoology (by extension), the soft tissue inside a human or animal body or one of their organs; specifically, the spongy interior substance of a hair, a horn or the shaft of a feather (also called medulla).

(3) In pathology, the spinal cord or bone marrow (archaic).

(4) In the veterinary sciences, the soft tissue inside a spinal cord; the spinal marrow; also, the spinal cord itself (also called medulla).

(5) A synonym of diploe (the thin layer of soft, spongy, or cancellate tissue between the bone plates which constitute the skull) (obsolete).

(6) The soft tissue of the brain (so rare some dictionaries site it as having “never come into technical use” and now in this context extinct).

(7) The soft inner portion of a loaf of bread (a regionalism associated with Ireland, Southern England and the West Country).

(8) As pith hat or pith helmet, a type of headgear made from the fibre sholapith, worn by during the nineteenth century by European explorers and imperial administrators in Africa, Asia and the Middle East before being adopted by military officers, rapidly becoming a symbol of status or rank, latterly re-defined as a symbol of oppression, especially because of their association with the British Raj in the Indian sub-continent.

(9) In mathematics, the ordinal form of the number pi (3.14159…) (the pith root of pi is 1.439…).

(10) By analogy, the important or essential part; essence; core; heart (synonymous with crux, gist, heart and soul, inwardness, kernel, marrow, meat, medulla, nitty-gritty, nub, quintessence, soul, spirit, substance etc).

(11) By analogy, significant weight; substance; solidity (now rare).

(12) Figuratively, physical power, might, strength, force, or vigor; mettle (archaic).

(13) Figuratively, a quality of courage and endurance; backbone, mettle, spine.

(14) In the veterinary sciences, to sever or destroy the spinal cord of a vertebrate animal, usually by inserting a needle into the vertebral canal.

(15) To extract the pith from (something or (figurative) someone).

Pre 900: From the Middle English pith & pithe (soft interior; pith, pulp) from the Old English piþa or pitha from the Proto-Germanic piþô, cognate with the West Frisian piid (pulp, kernel), the Dutch peen (carrot) & pitt and the Low German peddik or pedik (pulp, core).  All were derived from the earlier piþō (oblique pittan), a doublet of pit (in the sense of “seed or stone inside a fruit”).  Both the Old English piþa (pith of plants) and the Germanic variations enjoyed the same meaning but the figurative sense (most important part(s) of something) existed only in the English form.  The pith helmet dates from 1889, replacing the earlier pith hat (first recorded in 1884), both so called because they were made from the dried pith of the Bengal spongewood.  The verb meaning from the veterinary sciences (to kill by cutting or piercing the spinal cord) was first documented in the technical literature in 1805 but in livestock management it was an ancient practice.  The Middle English verb pethen (to give courage or strength) was derived from the noun pith but did not make the transition to modern English.  Pith is a noun, verb & adjective and pithlike, pithy, pithing & pithed are verbs and pithful & pithless are adjectives; the noun plural is piths.

The Pith Helmet

Headwear from the Raj.

The pith helmet, known also as the sun helmet, safari helmet, topi, topee, or sola topee was a lightweight cloth-covered piece of headgear made of the pith of the sola or shola (Indian spongewood) plant, covered with white cotton and faced with cloth (usually white, cream, biege or green).  Topee (pith helmet) was from the Hindi टोपी (ṭopī) (hat) and the Urdu ٹوپی‎ (ṭōpī) (hat).  The form has some linguistic overlap, the long -e phonetic suffix (variously and inconsistently as -e, -ie, -ee) often appended to create slang forms, affectionate diminutives or to indicate something was a smaller version of an original.  In Indian English for example, a coatee was a hook upon which one hangs one's coat, something unrelated to the original use in English where a coatee was a coat with short flaps, a mid-eighteenth century Americanism, the formation modeled on goatee, a style of beard at the time especially popular south of the Mason-Dixon Line.  Among the colonists and colonial administrators, by the early twentieth century, the most popular word to use was the Hindu topi. 

Symbols of the Raj, the pith helmet and the G&T (gin & tonic).  G&T was a great contribution to civilized life.

Most associated with the military and civil services of the European powers during the colonial period of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, pith helmets routinely were issued to or chosen by those going to hot climates.  As a general principle, the army used dark colours and civilians light (even white) helmets but under modern conditions, the military found them not suitable for the battlefield; the British Army withdrawing them from active use in 1948 although they continue to be worn on some ceremonial occasions (the famous plumed helmets are now seen less often).  Widely popular now only in Vietnam where it’s a remnant of French influence, its niche now is in the nostalgia-fashion industry although, as a symbol of white colonialism, use can be controversial.

The Emperor and his viceroy in topis: George V (1865–1936; King of the United Kingdom & Emperor of India 1910-1936) with Lord Hardinge (1858–1944; Viceroy of India 1910-1916), Government House, Calcutta, 1911.

Of fashions under the Raj, the fictional depictions on screen in which white linen suits often predominate can be misleading; pith helmets, especially during the cooler months, were paired with any daywear.  Until December 1911, Calcutta (now Kolkata) was the capital of British India but since the nineteenth century it had emerged as a hotbed of nationalist movements opposed to British rule, the response of Lord Curzon (1859–1925; Viceroy of India 1899-1905 & UK foreign secretary 1919-1924) being the partition of Bengal which made things worse, a massive upsurge in political and religious activity ensuing.  Had that manifested as letters to the editor or even "passive resistance" the British might have been sanguine but what happened was a boycott of British products and institutions and a spike in the assassinations of Calcutta-based officials.  The British rescinded Curzon's act of partition and relocated the colonial government to New Delhi, designating the city the new capital.

Over millennia, there have been many empires and the Raj and other European colonial ventures were just unusually large examples of a long tradition.  While no two empires exactly were alike, nobody has better distilled their (almost always) unstated rationale than George Orwell (1903-1950) who settled on: "theft" [of other peoples' lands, resources, treasure, women etc] and in the history of the Raj, there are a number of inflection points which, in retrospect, came to be seen as markers on the road to "end of empire".  The viceroy's retreat to New Delhi was one such moment and in the 35 years left to the Raj there were others so while the cumulative effects of the two World Wars (1914-1918 & 1939-1945) certainly rendered control of India (and much of the rest of the empire) financially unsustainable for the British, they were merely the Raj's death knell; what would come to be called the "winds of change" had for some time been blowing.

Sir Philip Mitchell (1890–1964) in plumed pith helmet while Governor of Kenya, with African tribal elders, awaiting the arrival of an aircraft during the 1952 royal tour, RAF Eastleigh Aerodrome (Now Moi Air Base), Nairobi, Kenya, February 1952.  

It was during this tour George VI (1895–1952; King of the United Kingdom 1936-1952) would die and his eldest daughter would be recalled from Kenya to London as Elizabeth II (1926-2022; Queen of the UK and other places, 1952-2022).  George VI had been the last Emperor of India, the imperial style a bauble dreamed up in 1876 by Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, later First Earl of Beaconsfield; UK prime-minister Feb-Dec 1868 & 1874-1880), ostensibly as a means of cementing rule in India and emphasising the British Empire was a notch or two above the others in the geopolitical pecking order but also as a way of flattering Queen Victoria (1819–1901; Queen of the UK 1837-1901), a form of "monarch management" at which old Disraeli was most adept; his technique with royalty he described as "laying it on with a trowel".  Serving earlier as Governor of Uganda (1935–1940) and Governor of Fiji (1942–1944), Sir Philip Mitchell was a classic peripatetic administrator of the type for decades sent here and there by the Colonial Office and plumed pith helmets were one of the symbols of viceroys, governors-general and governors, those with a military background tending to wear them more assuredly.

Lord Lytton (Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1831–1891, Viceroy of India 1876-1880).  As well as pith helmets, under the Raj, there was much dressing up.

By the time World War II ended, few doubted Indian independence would soon be granted; it was a matter just of working out the timing and the mechanism(s).  Intriguingly, even then the pith helmet was understood as something emblematic of colonial oppression and they had become unfashionable, their relegation to a soon to be needed suitcase sometimes a wise precaution, the archives of the India Office (1858-1947) in London including reports of officials wearing them being abused in the streets and even assaulted.  The sociological significance of the pith helmet was discussed in The Wrong Topi: Personal Narratives, Ritual, and the Sun Helmet as a Symbol (1984) by academic folklorists Frank de Caro (1943–2020) and Rosan Jordan (1939–2025) one anecdote illustrating how things had changed.  The language skills of Indian-born General Hastings “Pug” Ismay (1887–1965) and other officers in the British Army who had served in India proved useful during the evacuation from France as they were able to communicate in Hindi over open radio channels without fear of eavesdropping Germans knowing what was being said.  Ismay had left India in 1936 to take up an appointment with the CID (Committee of Imperial Defence) but when he returned in 1947 to become chief of staff to Lord Louis Mountbatten (1900–1979; last viceroy and first governor-general of India 1947-1948) he found it a changed place:

“Ismay was met at New Delhi airport by his old friend, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (1884–1981), then commander-in-chief of the Indian Army.  As Ismay stepped down from the plane, he was horrified to see what Auchinleck was wearing on his head: a beret.  Deeply shaken, the only words Ismay could stammer were: ‘My God, Claude!  Where your topi?’  When Ismay, years earlier, had last been in India, the topi had been more than a mere hat.  It had been a veritable icon.  During its heyday from the late nineteenth century to the late 1930s, no European would have thought of being abroad in the noonday sun without a topi squarely planted upon his head, and to have neglected to put one on would have been deemed both improper and unsafe.  All of that had changed by the time of Ismay's return, but the story testifies to the respect that was once accorded to this obligatory headgear.”

Sir Arthur Porritt (1900-1994; Governor-General of New Zealand, 1967-1972), Government House, Wellington, New Zealand, November 1970.

Although New Zealand was not a place of oppressive heat and harsh sunshine, there too, there was a time when governors-general appeared in plumed pith helmets.  A wartime military surgeon, Sir Arthur was a kind of transitional figure as the British Empire became a "Commonwealth of Nations", being New Zealand-born but resident in the UK, he was the country's first first locally born governor-general as all subsequent appointees have been.  In another sign of changing times, Sir Arthur was the last governor-general to wear the full civil uniform and, upon retirement, was raised to the peerage, in 1973 taking his seat in the House of Lords as Baron Porritt of Wanganui and Hampstead.

The exchange between Ismay and Auchinleck was a but footnote in the history of the Raj but seldom has such a brief, insignificant incident so well encapsulated a change so profound and it struck many including the historian Leonard Mosley (1913–1992) who discussed the implications in The Last Days of the British Raj (1961).  Interestingly in Lord Ismay’s own memoirs (1960) the old soldier focused on more the practical aspects of imperial fashion: “Having been brought up in the belief that anyone who failed to wear a pith helmet while the Indian sun was still in the sky was a lunatic, I blurted out, ‘Have you gone mad, Claude?  Where is your topee?’  He replied that, on the contrary, we had all been mad for a hundred years or more to wear such an un-comfortable and unnecessary form of head-gear.”  The shift in sentiment did though appear in a passage in The Jewel in the Crown (1966), the first part of the Raj Quartet (1966-1975) by Paul Scott (1920-1978), set in India during the last years of the Raj.  In the book, there’s a post-war scene in which an officer shocks his more politically aware colleagues by continuing to be attended by a young India manservant, the man blissfully unaware India has moved on while he has not.

Although in Hindi topi meant simply “hat”, by the end of the eighteenth century it had been re-purposed as a synecdoche, Europeans in India habitually referred to by the native inhabitants as “topi-wallahs” (ie wearers of hats rather than turbans).  From there, the term became more specialized and by the mid-1800s, almost exclusively it had become associated with a particular type of hat, the sun helmet which, with its relatively high crown and a wider brim, became so emblematic of European colonialism it was used in advertising and illustrations for many purposes.  Not only that but in India it became for the colonial administrators and many settlers a kind of uniform and a form of cultural assertion, one recounting: “The topi was a fetish; it was a tribal symbol. If you did not wear a topi you were not merely silly, you were a cad. You were a traitor.  You had gone native.”

Lindsay Lohan in pith helmet with riding crop, rendered as a line drawing by Vovsoft.

That attitude illustrates the role of the pith helmet in a way a structural functionalist would understand and may have more efficacy that Lord Ismay’s view of it as an essential tool of sun protection.  Even in the earlier days of the old East India Company, the staff physicians had argued sunstroke was the result of a rise in general body temperature and not necessarily from direct exposure to the sun, some even arguing the head was not especially susceptible to heat; they noted Indian adult males got along quite well with a different type of head protection and Indian women and children generally wore little or none.  While the pith helmet was not exclusive to India, it had not widely been adopted in other hot parts of the British Empire (such as outback Australia, the Americas or parts of Africa) and historians have speculated the real importance was psychological, a reassuring symbol of continuity.  Certainly, recent research has shown hats with wider brims provide much better protection from the sun but there was a ritualism associated with the things, diaries of travellers noting how passengers on ships routinely would put on their pith helmet after passing through the Suez Canal on their way to India and barely taking it off until entering the Mediterranean on the voyage home.  In short, it was a badge of Anglo-Indian identity.

In other words, it was an assertion of Britishness or “whiteness” in that it was a type of headgear worn by Europeans and very seldom by Indians.  Tellingly, those of mixed European and Indian ancestry, wore topis with even more enthusiasm than the English themselves; with the zeal of the convert as it were.  Jokes about Eurasians wearing pith helmets at inappropriate times (such as with pyjamas, in the bath or during moments of intimacy) became legion.  One often neglected aspect of the pith helmet shifting during the last days of the Raj from a symbol of authority to one of shame was that the nature of the British presence in India changed dramatically during the war as a consequence of the sub-continent’s strategic significance to the Far East Theatre.  During the conflict, a huge number arrived from the UK (military and civilian) and they often were of a different social class than those who had for a century made up the Anglo-Indian community, the overwhelming majority of them of type who would in pre-war conditions never have contemplated even a visit.  Putting a pith helmet on them did not a topi-wallah make and the old establishment knew the end was nigh, the demise of the hat not a cause but a harbinger of a change which had begun long before “the stroke of the midnight hour”.

Topi-wallah Melania Trump (b 1970; FLOTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) in pith helmet, on safari, Kenya, October, 2018.

In common with the more stylish FLOTUSes, Melania Trump’s choice of clothing pften has been analysed in search of political meaning, a deconstruction her husband escaped except for the commentary about the length he chose to allow his ties to hang and those observations were more personal than political.  Mrs Trump, doubtless well aware of the media's interest, wore a pith helmet while on safari near Nairobi, Kenya, attracting from the left criticism for donning a symbol of white colonial rule while from the right, approvingly it was observed a pith helmet had never looked so good.

Presumably, even if unaware she was courting controversy (which is unlikely), the White House would have spelled out the implications so the pith helmet must have been worn to be provocative and the reaction wouldn’t have been unexpected because a few weeks earlier, while visiting a migrant child detention centre, she choose a Zara jacket (US$39) emblazoned across the back with the words “I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?”  Clearly a garment for a photo-opportunity, it was worn not while in the presence of the children but only when entering the aircraft and helicopter used for the trip.  The press of course sought comment which elicited from the White House the expected contradictory responses which from day one has typified the media-management of the Trump administration.

Melania Trump in Zara jacket from the spring/summer 2016 collection, 2018.

The feeling among the press was that whatever the origins of the approach, the “confected confusion” was a deliberate strategy, unlike what prevailed under the previous administration of Joe Biden (b 1942; US president 2021-2025) which was merely “confused”.  Regarding the Zara jacket, the POTUS said the message was there for the “fake news media” while the FLOTAS’s communications chief insisted it was “just a jacket” and there was “no hidden message”.  Mrs Trump herself later (sort of) clarified things, telling ABC News the jacket “…was a kind of message, yes”, adding it was obvious she “…didn't wear the jacket for the children” and it was donned only “…to go on the plane and off the plane.... It was for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me.  I want to show them I don't care.  You could criticize whatever you want to say.  But it will not stop me to do what I feel is right.”  Mrs Trump went on to reiterate her own critique of the media for being “obsessed” with what she wears, noting it was only the jacket which attracted attention rather than any matters to do with child detention or immigration more broadly: “I would prefer they would focus on what I do and on my initiatives than what I wear.”  It might seem curious a former model would express surprise at interest being taken in the clothes a woman wears but, well aware nothing can be done about that, she has proved more adept at weaponizing messages than most White House staff have managed.