Bug

Bug (pronounced buhg)

(1) Any insect of the order Hemiptera, especially any of the suborder Heteroptera (a hemipteran or hemipteron; a hemipterous insect), having piercing and sucking mouthparts specialized as a beak (rostrum) and known loosely as the “true bug”.

(2) Any of various species of marine or freshwater crustaceans.

(3) In casual use, any insect or insect-like invertebrate (ie used often of spiders and such because of their supposed “bug-like” quality).

(4) In casual use, any micro-organism causing disease, applied especially to especially a virus or bacterium.

(5) An instance of a disease caused by such a micro-organism; a class of such conditions.

(6) In casual (and sometimes structured) use, a defect or imperfection, most associated with computers but applied also to many mechanical devices or processes.

(7) A craze or obsession (usually widespread or of long-standing).

(8) In slang, a person who has a great enthusiasm for such a craze or obsession (often as “one bitten by the bug”).

(9) In casual (and sometimes structured) use, a hidden microphone, camera or other electronic eavesdropping device (a clipping of bugging device) and used analogously of the small and effectively invisible (often a single-pixel image) image on a web page, installed usually for the purpose of tracking users.

(10) Any of various small mechanical or electrical gadgets, as one to influence a gambling device, give warning of an intruder, or indicate location.

(11) A mark, as an asterisk, that indicates a particular item, level, etc.

(12) In US horse racing, the five-pound (2¼ kg) weight allowance able to be claimed by an apprentice jockey and by extension (1) the asterisk used to denote an apprentice jockey's weight allowance & (2) in slang, US, a young apprentice jockey (sometimes as “bug boy” (apparently used thus also of young female jockeys, “bug girl” seemingly beyond the pale.)).

(13) A telegraph key that automatically transmits a series of dots when moved to one side and one dash when moved to the other.

(14) In the slang of poker, a joker which may be used only as an ace or as a wild card to fill a straight or a flush.

(15) In commercial printing, as “union bug”, a small label printed on certain matter to indicate it was produced by a unionized shop.

(16) In fishing, a any of various plugs resembling an insect.

(17) In slang, a clipping of bedbug (mostly UK).

(18) A bogy; hobgoblin (extinct).

(19) In slang, as “bug-eyed”, protruding eyes (the medical condition exophthalmos).

(20) A slang term for the Volkswagen Beetle (Type 1; 1938-2003 & the two retro takes; 1997-2019).

(21) In broadcasting, a small (often transparent or translucent) image placed in a corner of a television program identifying the broadcasting network or channel.

(22) In aviation, a manually positioned marker in flight instruments.

(23) In gay (male) slang in the 1980s & 1990s as “the bug”, HIV/AIDS.

(24) In the slang of paleontology, a trilobite.

(25) In gambling slang, a small piece of metal used in a slot machine to block certain winning combinations.

(26) In gambling slang, a metal clip attached to the underside of a table, etc and used to hold hidden cards (a type of cheating).

(27) As the Bug (or Western Bug), a river in Eastern Europe flows through Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine with a total length of 481 miles (774 km).  The Southern Bug (530 miles (850 km)) in south west Ukraine flows into the Dnieper estuary and is some 530 miles (850 km) long.

(28) A past tense and past participle of big (obsolete).

(29) As ISO (international standard) 639-2 & ISO 639-3, the language codes for Buginese.

(30) To install a secret listening device in a room, building etc or on a telephone or other communications device.

(31) To badger, harass, bother, annoy or pester someone.

1615–1625: The original use was to describe insects, apparently as a variant of the earlier bugge (beetle), thought to be an alteration of the Middle English budde, from the Old English -budda (beetle) but etymologists are divided on whether the phrase “bug off” (please leave) is related to the undesired presence of insects or was of a distinct origin.  Bug, bugging & debug are nouns & verbs, bugged is a verb & adjective and buggy is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is bugs.  Although “unbug” makes structural sense (ie remove a bug, as opposed to the sense of “debug”), it doesn’t exist whereas forms such as the adjectives unbugged (not bugged) and unbuggable (not able to be bugged) are regarded as standard.

The array of compound forms meaning “someone obsessed with an idea, hobby etc) produced things like “shutterbug” (amateur photographer) & firebug (arsonist) seems first to have emerged in the mid nineteenth century.  The development of this into “a craze or obsession” is thought rapidly to have accelerated in the years just before World War I (1914-1918), again based on the notion of “bitten by the bug” or “caught the bug”, thus the idea of being infected with an unusual enthusiasm for something.  The use to mean a demon, evil spirit, spectre or hobgoblin was first recorded in the mid-fourteenth century and was a clipping of the Middle English bugge (scarecrow, demon, hobgoblin) or uncertain origin although it may have come from the Middle Welsh bwg (ghost; goblin (and linked to the Welsh bwgwl (threat (and earlier “fear”) and the Middle Irish bocanách (supernatural being).  There’s also speculation it may have come from the scary tales told to children which included the idea of a bugge (beetle) at a gigantic scale.  That would have been a fearsome sight and the idea remains fruitful to this day for artists and film-makers needing something frightening in the horror or SF (science fiction) genre.  The use in this sense is long obsolete although the related forms bugbear and bugaboo survive.  Dating from the 1570s, a bugbear was in folklore a kind of “large goblin”, used to inspire fear in children (both as a literary device & for purposes of parental control) and for adults it soon came to mean “a source of dread, resentment or irritation; in modern use it's an “ongoing problem”, a recurring obstacle or adversity or one’s pet peeve.  The obsolete form bugg dates from circa 1620s and was a reference to the troublesome bedbug, the construct a conflation of the middle English bugge (scarecrow, hobgoblin) and the Middle English budde (beetle).  The colloquial sense of “a microbe or germ” dates from 1919, the emergence linked to the misleadingly-named “Spanish flu” pandemic.

Like the rest of us, even scientists, entomologists and zoologists generally probably say “bug” in general conversation, whether about the insects or the viruses and such which cause disease but in writing academic papers they’ll take care to be more precise.  Because to most of us “bugs” can be any of the small, creepy pests which intrude on our lives (some of which are actually helpful in that quietly and unobtrusively they dispose of the really annoying bugs which bite us), the word is casually and interchangeably applied to bees, ants, bees, millipedes, beetles, spiders and anything else resembling an insect.  That use may be reinforced by the idea of the thing “bugging” us by their very presence.  To the professionals however, insects are those organisms in the classification Insecta, a very large class of animals, the members of which have a three-part body, six legs and (usually) two pairs of wings whereas a bug is a member of the order Hemiptera (which in the taxonomic system is within the Insecta class) and includes cicadas, aphids and stink bugs; to emphasize the point, scientists often speak of those in the order Hemiptera as “true bugs”.  The true bugs are those insects with mouthparts adapted for piercing and sucking, contained usually in a beak-shaped structure, a vision agonizingly familiar to anyone who has suffered the company of bedbugs.  That’s why lice are bugs and cockroaches are not but the latter will continue to be called bugs, often with some preceding expletive.

9 September 1947: The engineer's note (with physical evidence) of electronic computing's "first bug".

In computing, where the term “bug” came to be used to describe “glitches, crashes” and such, it has evolved to apply almost exclusively to software issues and even if events are caused by hardware flaws, unless it’s something obvious (small explosions, flame & smoke etc) most users probably assume a fault in some software layer.  The very first documented bug however was an interaction recorded on 9 September 1947 between the natural world and hardware, an engineer’s examination of an early (large) computer revealing an insect had sacrificially landed on one of the circuits, shorting it out and shutting-down the machine.  As proof, the unfortunate moth was taped to the report.  On a larger scale (zoologically rather than the hardware), the problem of small rodents such as mice entering the internals of printers, there to die from various causes (impact injuries, starvation, heat et al) remains not uncommon, resulting sometimes in mechanical damage, sometimes just the implications of decaying flesh.

The idea of a bug as a “defect, flaw, fault or glitch” in a mechanical or electrical device was first recorded in the late 1800s as engineer’s slang, the assumption being they wished to convey the idea of “a small fault” (and thus easily fixed, as opposed to some fundamental mistake which would necessitate a re-design).  Some sources suggest the origin lies with Thomas Edison (1847-1931) who is reported as describing the consequences of an insect “getting into the works”.  Programmers deploy an array of adjectives to "bug" (major, minor, serious, critical & non-critical et al) although between themselves (and certainly when disparaging of the code of others) the most commonly heard phrase is probably “stupid bug”.  The “debugging” (also as de-bugging) process is something with a wide definition but in general it refers to any action or set of actions taken to remove errors.  The name of the debug.exe (originally debug.com) program included with a number of (almost all 16 & 32-bit) operating systems was a little misleading because in addition to fixing things, it could be used for other purposes and is fondly remembered by those who wrote Q&D (quick & dirty) work-arounds which, written in assembler, ran very fast.  The verb debug was first used in 1945 in the sense of “remove the faults from a machine” and by 1964 it appeared in field service manuals documenting the steps to be taken to “remove a concealed microphone”.  Although the origin of the use of “bug” in computing (probably the now most commonly used context) can be traced to 1947, the term wasn’t widely used beyond universities, industry and government sites before the 1960s when the public first began to interact at scale with the implications (including the bugs) of those institutions using computerized processes.  Software (or any machinery) badly afflicted by bugs can be called “buggy”, a re-purposing of the use of an adjective dating from 1714 meaning “a place infested with bugs”.

Some bugs gained notoriety.  In the late 1990s, it wasn’t uncommon for the press to refer to the potential problems of computer code using a two-numeral syntax for years as the “Y2K bug” which was an indication of how wide was the vista of the common understanding of "bug" and one quite reasonable because that was how the consequences would be understood.  A massive testing & rectification effort was undertaken by the industry (and corporations, induced by legislation and the fear of litigation) and with the coming of 1 January 2000 almost nothing strange happened and that may also have been the case had nothing been done but, on the basis of the precautionary principle, it was the right approach.  Of course switching protocols to use four-numeral years did nothing about the Y10K bug but a (possible) problem 8000 years hence would have been of little interest to politicians or corporate boards.  Actually, YxK bugs will re-occur (with decreasing frequency) whenever a digit needs to be added.  The obvious solution is trailing zeros although if one thinks in terms of infinity, it may be that, in the narrow technical sense, such a solution would just create an additional problem although perhaps one of no practical significance.  Because of the way programmers exploit the way computers work, there have since the 1950s been other date (“time” to a computer) related “bugs” and management of these and the minor problems caused has been handled well.  Within the industry the feeling is things like the “year 2029 problem” and “year 2038 problem” will, for most of the planet, be similarly uneventful.

The DOSShell, introduced with PC-DOS 4.0; this was as graphical as DOS got.  The DOSShell was bug-free.

Bugs can also become quirky industry footnotes.  As late as 1987, IBM had intended to release the update of PC-DOS 3.3 as version 3.4, reflecting the corporation’s roadmap of DOS as something of an evolutionary dead-end, doomed ultimately to end up in washing machine controllers and such while the consumer and corporate market would shift to OS/2, the new operating system which offered pre-emptive multi-tasking and access to bigger storage and memory addressing.  However, at that point, both DOS & OS/2 were being co-developed by IBM & Microsoft and agreement was reached to release a version 4 of DOS.  DOS 4 also included a way of accessing larger storage space (through a work-around with a program called share.exe) and more memory (in a way less elegant than the OS/2 approach but it did work, albeit more slowly), both things of great interest to Microsoft because they would increase the appeal of its upcoming Windows 3.0, a graphical shell which ran on top of DOS; unlike OS/2, Windows was exclusive to Microsoft and so was the revenue stream.  Unfortunately, it transpired the memory tricks used by PC-DOS 4.0 were “buggy” when used with some non-IBM hardware and the OS gained a bad reputation from which it would never recover.  By the time the code was fixed, Microsoft was ready to release its own version as MS-DOS 4.0 but, noting all the bad publicity, after a minor updates and some cosmetic revisions, the mainstream release was MS-DOS 4.01.  In the code of the earlier bug-afflicted bits, there is apparently no difference between MS-DOS 4.01 the few existing copies of MS-DOS 4.0.

Lindsay Lohan with Herbie the "Love Bug", Herbie: Fully Loaded (Disney Pictures, 2005). 

In idiomatic and other uses, bug has a long history.  By the early twentieth century “bugs” meant “mad; crazy" and by then “bug juice” had been in use for some thirty years, meaning both “propensity of the use of alcoholic drink to induce bad behaviour” and “bad whiskey” (in the sense of a product being of such dubious quality it was effectively a poison).  A slang dictionary from 1811 listed “bug-hunter” as “an upholsterer”, an allusion to the fondness bugs and other small creatures show for sheltering in the dark, concealed parts of furniture.  As early as the 1560s, a “bug-word” was a word or phrase which “irritated or vexed”.  The idea of “bug-eyed” was in use by the early 1870s and that’s thought either to be a humorous mispronunciation of bulge or (as is thought more likely) an allusion to the prominent, protruding eyes of creatures like frogs, the idea being they sat on the body like “a pair of bugs”.  The look became so common in the movies featuring aliens from space that by the early 1950s the acronym BEM (bug-eyed monster) had become part of industry slang.  The correct term for the medical condition of "bulging eyes" is exophthalmos.

To “bug someone” in the sense of “to annoy or irritate” seems not to have been recorded until 1949 and while some suggest the origin of that was in swing music slang, it remains obscure.  The now rare use of “bug off” to mean “to scram, to skedaddle” is documented since 1956 and is of uncertain origin but may be linked to the Korean War (1950-1953) era US Army slang meaning “stage a precipitous retreat”, first used during a military reversal.  The ultimate source was likely the UK, Australian & New Zealand slang “bugger off” (please leave).  The “doodle-bug” was first described in 1865 and was Southern US dialect for a type of beetle.  In 1944, the popular slang for the German Vergeltungswaffen eins (the V-1 (reprisal weapon 1) which was the first cruise missile) was “flying bomb” or “buzz bomb”) but the Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots preferred “doodle-bug”.

The ultimate door-stop for aircraft hangers: Bond Bug 700.

The popularity of three wheeler cars in the UK during the post-war years was a product of cost breakdown.  They were taxed at a much lower rate than conventional four-wheel vehicles, were small and thus economical and could be operated by anyone with only a motorcycle licence.  Most were actually genuine four-seaters and thus an attractive alternative for families and, being purely utilitarian, there were few attempts to introduce elements of style.  The Bond Bug (1970-1974) was an exception in that it was designed to appeal to the youth market with a sporty-looking two-seater using the then popular “wedge-styling” and in its most powerful form it could touch 80 mph (130 km/h), faster than any other three wheeler available.  However, the UK in 1973 introduced a value-added tax (VAT) and this removed many of the financial advantages the three-wheelers.  In an era of rising prosperity, the appeal of the compromise waned and coupled with some problems in the early productions runs, in 1974, after some 2¼ thousand Bugs had been built, the zany little machine was dropped; not even the oil crisis of the time (which had doomed a good number of bigger, thirstier cars) could save it.  Even in its best years it was never all that successful, essentially because it was really a novelty and there were “real” cars available for less money.  Still, the survivors have a following in their niche at the lower end of the collector market.

The business of spying is said to be the “second oldest profession” and even if not literally true, few doubt the synergistic callings of espionage and war are among man’s earliest and most enduring endeavors.  Although the use of “bug” to mean “equip with a concealed microphone” seems not to have been in use until 1946, bugging devices probably go back thousands of years (in a low-tech sort of way) and those known to have been used in Tudor-era England (1485-1603) are representative of the way available stuff was adapted, the most popular being tubular structures which, if pressed against a thin wall (or preferably a door’s keyhole) enabled one to listen to what was being discussed in a closed room.  Bugging began to assume its modern form when messages began to be transmitted over copper wires which could stretch for thousands of miles and the early term for a “phone bug” was “phone tap”, based upon the idea of “tapping into” the line as one might a water pipe.  Bugs (the name picked-up because many of the early devices were small, black and “bug-like”), whether as concealed microphones or phone taps, swiftly became part of the espionage inventory in diplomacy, commerce and crime and as technology evolved, so did the bugging techniques.

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr (1902–1985), US Ambassador to the UN (United Nations) at a May 1960 session of the Security Council, using the Great Seal bug to illustrate the extent of Soviet bugging.  The context was a tu quoque squabble between the Cold War protagonists, following Soviet revelations about the flight-paths of the American's U2 spy planes.  Lodge would be Richard Nixon’s (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974) running mate in that year's presidential election.     

A classic bug of High Cold War was the Great Seal bug, (known to the security services as the thing), a Soviet designed and built concealed listening device which was so effective because it used passive transmission protocols for its audio signal, thereby rendering it invisible to conventional “bug-detection” techniques.  The bug was concealed inside large, carved wooden rendition of the US Great Seal which, in 1945, the Kremlin presented as a “gift of friendship” to the US Ambassador to the USSR Averell Harriman (1891-1986); in a nice touch, it was a group of Russian school children who handed over the carving.  Sitting in the ambassador’s Moscow office for some seven years, it was a masterpiece of its time because (1) being activated only when exposed to a low-energy radio signal which Soviet spies would transmit from outside, when subjected to a US “bug detection” it would appear to be a piece of wood and (2) as it needed no form of battery or other power supply (and indeed, no maintenance at all), its lifespan was indefinite.  Had it not by chance been discovered by a communications officer at the nearby British embassy who happened to be tuned to the same frequency while the Soviets were sending their signal, it may well have remained in place for decades.  Essentially, the principles of the Great Seal bug were those used in modern radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems.

Digit

Digit (pronounced dij-it)

(1) In anatomy and zoology, a jointed body part at the end of the limbs of many vertebrates. The limbs of primates end in five digits, while the limbs of horses end in a single digit that terminates in a hoof.  In humans, digit is an alternative name for a finger or toe; dactyl.

(2) In zoology, a similar or similar-looking structures in other animals.

(3) As a historical unit of lineal measure, a unit of length notionally based upon the width of an adult human finger, standardized differently in various places and times (and still used as a measure in certain alcoholic spirits and among those fitting bras who recommend the finger as the gauge of the space between skin & fabric).  The most frequently cited is the English digit of 1/16 of a foot (about 19mm).  Prior to standardization, digit was used as a synonym of inch (the synonyms including “finger”, “fingerbreadth” & “fingersbreadth”).

(4) In modern mathematics, the whole numbers from 0 (zero) to 9 and the Arabic numerals representing them, which are combined to represent base-ten numbers; a position in a sequence of numerals representing a place value in a positional number system (ie any of the symbols of other number systems).

(5) In astronomy, the twelfth part of the sun's or moon's diameter; used often to express the magnitude of an eclipse.

(6) In geometry, a synonym for degree (1/360 of a circle) (obsolete).

(7) An index (obsolete).(7) An index (obsolete).

1350–1400: From the Middle English digit, from the Latin digitus (a fingerbreadth; a number); doublet of digitus.  The Latin from the primitive Indo-European deyǵ- (to show, point out, pronounce solemnly), a variant of the root deyḱ- & deik (to show; pronounce solemnly) from which Latin also gained dīcō (I say, speak talk) & dicere (to say, speak) and English picked up toe.  Fingers were thus “pointers & indicators” and digit gained the meanings related to mathematics and numbers; fingers were used for counting up to ten (and, with recycling beyond).  The finger or toe sense in English is documented from the 1640s but the date of origin is speculative.  Indo-European cognates include the Sanskrit दिशति (diśáti) (to show, point out), the Ancient Greek δείκνυμι (deíknumi) (to show) & δίκη (díkē) (manner, custom), the Old English tǣċan (to show, point out (source of the English teach)) and tācen (the English token).  Digit is a noun & verb, digitize is a verb and digital & digitigrade are nouns & adjectives; the noun plural is digits.

Great moments in digits

The phalanx of the ten digits of two human hands are presumed to have been the integers of the hand-held calculator and in this use it would have predated formal structures of language, the concepts of “one” and “two” the origin of mathematics.  All humans naturally having ten digits, the decimal (Base-10) numeral system emerged (apparently independently) in many ancient cultures although there was some intellectual transfer, the Greeks gaining the system from Egypt although neither the Greeks or Romans exclusively used Base-10, some industry-specific methods of calculation based on the capacity of the containers in traditional use.  In China, there’s evidence of use from the first century BC.  The familiar numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 0) which underpin all mathematics were developed by Arabic and Indian scholars although the elusive “0” wasn’t in widespread use until the ninth century. 

Zero though had a long history and texts from circa 300 BC detailing Babylonian mathematics display a placeholder symbol for zero in their positional numeral system (without which the representation of big numbers would practically have been impossible) although there is no evidence of the concept of zero existing as a stand-alone number.  Around the fifth century AD, Indian mathematicians documented why zero was so essential although it was a big country and there was no standardization in the symbolic representation of the value; the math however remains recognizably identical as one would expect.  Whether through the exchange of texts or (as many suspect is more likely) through the trade routes, the zero travelled east to the Islamic world where both Persian and Arabic mathematician published works explaining the implications of the still novel digit.  In the Medieval West, translations of the texts appeared but zero’s path to acceptance in Europe was slow and resisted, both by merchants and the Church, institutions with their own system, mastery of which was in the hands of an educated few.  However, so compelling were the advantages offered by adoption that by the thirteenth century, it was clear zero was here to stay.

Ten digit human hands might have been (more or less) universal but historically, Base-10 was not.  The Maya civilization used a vigesimal system (Base-20) and vigesimal components were in the counting systems of the Aztecs and some African cultures, the latter presumably an independent development.  The assumption of anthropologists is the Base-20 is a “fingers & toes” system and it does seem to be something restricted to warm climates where the removal of footwear doesn’t risk frostbite.  Nor were the hands always dealt with in multiples of five, the Yuki language of what is modern California uses Octal (Base-8) which counted the spaces between the fingers rather than the digits.  The ancient Mesopotamians (most famously the Babylonians & Sumerians) had a Sexagesimal (Base-60) system and that endures to this day in the measurement of time (60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour) although there was an attempt to change that during the French Revolution (1789), the new republic introducing decimal time in 1793, seen as an act of democratic modernization which would include a programme to decimalize all units of measurement; the day became 10 hours long, an hour was 100 minutes and a minute 100 seconds.  However, the experiment did not prove a success, the critical mass of the old ways too embedded in the culture and the idea was abandoned in 1795 although the metric system did debut in 1799 and thrived, eventually world-wide (except in the US and a couple of quixotic hold-outs).  The Duodecimal (Base-12) system was used by the Mayans and in ancient Egypt and it too persists in commerce in the measures like dozen (12) and gross (12 dozen (144).  Binary (Base-2) of course runs the modern world because that is how (non-quantum) computers work, “0” & “1” being “on” & “off” respectively, most of what a computer does able ultimately to be reduced to a rapid succession of on/off transactions.  Nerds like Hexadecimal (Base-16) which uses the digits 0-9 and the letters A-F, representing values from 0 to 15.  Not the most unambiguous system, developers use hexadecimal numbers because in certain circumstances they make available an easier way to represent binary-coded values.

During an Aegean cruise in October 2016, Lindsay Lohan suffered a finger injury.  In this dreadful nautical incident, the tip of one digit was severed by the boat's anchor chain but details of the circumstances are sketchy although there was speculation that upon hearing the captain give the command “weigh anchor”, she decided to help but, lacking any background in admiralty jargon, misunderstood the instruction.

Detached chunk of the ring-finger's distal digit was salvaged from the deck and expertly re-attached by a micro-surgeon ashore, digit and the rest of the patient said to have both made full recoveries.  Despite the injury to the ring-finger, Ms Lohan still managed to find a husband so all's well that ends well.

Tranche

Tranche (pronounced trahnch, trahnsh, or trahnsh (French))

(1) One part or division of a larger unit; a slice, section or portion.

(2) A group of securities that share a certain characteristic and form part of a larger offering.

(3) Any part, division, or instalment.

(4) In finance, to divide into parts, applied especially to loans and share issues.

(5) In insurance, a distinct subdivision of a single policyholder's benefits, typically relating to separate premium increments.

(6) In pensions, a scheme's or scheme member's benefits relating to distinct accrual periods with different rules.

1400s: From the French tranche, (a cutting (literally, “a slice”)), a form of trancher (to cut, to slice), from Old French trenchier, trancher & trancher (cut, make a cut), possibly from the Vulgar Latin trinicāre (cut in three parts). It was cognate with the English trench.  The specific uses in economics and finance didn’t emerge until 1930.  The form in Modern French is tranché (feminine tranchée, masculine plural tranchés, feminine plural tranchées), the past participle of trancher (clear-cut, marked, bold, distinct (and in heraldry: per bend)).  Tranche is a noun & verb and tranched & tranching are verbs; the noun plural is tranches.

Tranches in a collateralised debt structure.

Tranche has become so associated with matters financial that the word is now seldom used in other contexts, probably a good thing given it’s likely only to confuse.  In finance, a tranche is a portion of a security (loans, mortgages, stocks, bonds etc) that can be packaged for sale to investors; Securities are broken to be reassembled in different forms for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which is to make them easier to sell.  Because investors base their decision to purchase on factors such as risk, time and the quality of asset backing, tranches prepared for sale vary in the emphasis placed on these factors to attract buyers with different priorities.

Slicing the cake.

Since the global financial crisis (GFC) began in 2008, the perception probably is that packaging is most associated with residential mortgages, the money banks and others loan to people to buy houses as homes or investments.  That’s not entirely true but it has been a big part of the market.  Typically, mortgages are repaid over fifteen to thirty years but the lenders prefer to churn, banks, rather than waiting decades to get the money, on-sell mortgages to investors, thereby gaining the funds to lend for more mortgages.  Because of the limited number of number of investors, individuals and institutional, willing to buy thirty year mortgages, banks create tranches, some including the first three years of each mortgage, some the five years while a few will run for the whole term.

This spread of products appeals to a spread-out market.  Some investors will prefer the low-risk tranche of three-year mortgages and accept the lower interest rate while others will opt for the riskier long-term tranche, attracted by the higher rate.  Tranching is thus a device which maintains the liquidity of the loan pool and provides a differentiated securities market in which investors can adjust their exposure according to their own risk versus reward calculation.

Pick your tranche; you pay your money, you take your choice.

The particular, celebrated case of the sub-prime mortgage crisis which began to manifest in 2008-2009 involved mostly tranches of CMOs (collateralized mortgage obligations) and the problems then were not a product of the structural design of tranching but the quality of what was being tranched.  Essentially, like many of the periodic crises in capitalism, the GFC was triggered by over-production.  The traditional mortgage market consisted of borrowers judged to be capable of repaying the loan but, various things having combined to mean the lenders had run out of them, they resorted to lending to people who would never be able to repay.  That required some clever contractual engineering to ensure (1) the credit-rating agencies would grant investment-grade ratings to what were junk securities so (2) the risk would be quickly on-sold.  The rationale for all of this was that the tranching was done in such a way that the spread of the risk was so diversified that whatever defaults occurred would present no systemic threat.  There are interesting stories about (1) & (2).

Lots lost lots in the GFC but there were also quite a number who made much and very quickly.  So profitable for those few in the right place at the right time was the loaning of money to those with no capacity to repay that it’s hard to believe it won’t, at scale, happen again and there are suggestions it may be happening now.  The unusual combination of borrowing at historically high multiples against static or falling incomes for assets at historically high valuations has happened in an era of historically low interest rates.  Movements downwards in asset values or upwards in interest rates will have a multiplier effect on each-other and those movements, if sufficient, will essentially render much mortgage debt functionally sub-prime and there were those who predicted the extraordinary increase in the global money-supply playing out this way.

The headline in the French language which in 2016 announced: Lindsay Lohan s'est tranché le doigt en deux (Lindsay Lohan sliced her finger in half).

Actually "sliced her finger in half" was a bit sensationalist (one might even say Anglo-Saxon style click-bait).  In October 2016, during an Aegean cruise, there was a nautical incident, the tip of one of her fingers severed by the boat's anchor chain but details of the circumstances are sketchy.  It may be that upon hearing the captain give the command “weigh anchor”, she decided to help but, lacking any background in admiralty terms and phrases, misunderstood the instruction.  The detached piece of digit was salvaged from the deck and ashore, soon re-attached by micro-surgery.  Digit and the rest of the patient are said to have made full recoveries, something especially significant because it was the ring finger which was “tranched” but, thanks to the surgeon’s skill in fixing the gruesome injury, she managed later to find husband and the finger now displays engagement and wedding rings.  All’s well that ends well.

Nail

Nail (pronounced neyl)

(1) A slender, typically rod-shaped rigid piece of metal, usually in many lengths and thicknesses, having (usually) one end pointed and the other (usually) enlarged or flattened, and used for hammering into or through wood, concrete or other materials; in the building trades the most common use is to fasten or join together separate pieces (of timber etc).

(2) In anatomy, a thin, horny plate, consisting of modified epidermis, growing on the upper side of the end of a finger or toe; the toughened protective protein-keratin (known as alpha-keratin, also found in hair) at the end of an animal digit, such as fingernail.

(3) In zoology, the basal thickened portion of the anterior wings of certain hemiptera; the basal thickened portion of the anterior wings of certain hemiptera; the terminal horny plate on the beak of ducks, and other allied birds; the claw of a mammal, bird, or reptile.

(4) Historically, in England, a round pedestal on which merchants once carried out their business.

(5) A measure for a length for cloth, equal to 2¼ inches (57 mm) or 1⁄20 of an ell; 1⁄16 of a yard (archaic); it’s assumed the origin lies in the use to mark that length on the end of a yardstick.

(6) To fasten with a nail or nails; to hemmer in a nail.

(7) To enclose or confine (something) by nailing (often followed by up or down).

(8) To make fast or keep firmly in one place or position (also used figuratively).

(8) Perfectly to accomplish something (usually as “nailed it”).

(9) In vulgar, slang, of a male, to engage in sexual intercourse with (as “I nailed her” or (according to Urban Dictionary “I nailed the bitch”).

(10) In law enforcement, to catch a suspect or find them in possession of contraband or engaged in some unlawful conduct (usually as “nailed them”).

(11) In Christianity, as “the nails”, the relics used in the crucifixion, nailing Christ to the cross at Golgotha.

(12) As a the nail (unit), an archaic multiplier equal to one sixteenth of a base unit

(13) In drug slang, a hypodermic needle, used for injecting drugs.

(14) To detect and expose (a lie, scandal, etc)

(15) In slang, to hit someone.

(16) In slang, intently to focus on someone or something.

(17) To stud with or as if with nails.

Pre 900: From the Middle English noun nail & nayl, from the Old English nægl and cognate with the Old Frisian neil, the Old Saxon & Old High German nagal, the Dutch nagel, the German Nagel, the Old Norse nagl (fingernail), all of which were from the unattested Germanic naglaz.  As a derivative, it was akin to the Lithuanian nãgas & nagà (hoof), the Old Prussian nage (foot), the Old Church Slavonic noga (leg, foot), (the Serbo-Croatian nòga, the Czech noha, the Polish noga and the Russian nogá, all of which were probably originally a jocular reference to the foot as “a hoof”), the Old Church Slavonic nogŭtĭ, the Tocharian A maku & Tocharian B mekwa (fingernail, claw), all from the unattested North European Indo-European ənogwh-.  It was further akin to the Old Irish ingen, the Welsh ewin and the Breton ivin, from the unattested Celtic gwhīnā, the Latin unguis (fingernail, claw), from the unattested Italo-Celtic əngwhi-;the Greek ónyx (stem onych-), the Sanskrit ághri- (foot), from the unattested ághli-; the Armenian ełungn from the unattested onogwh-;the Middle English verbs naile, nail & nayle, the Old English næglian and cognate with the Old Saxon neglian, the Old High German negilen, the Old Norse negla, from the unattested Germanic nagl-janan (the Gothic was ganagljan).  The ultimate source was the primitive Indo-European h₃nog- (nail) and the use to describe the metal fastener was from the Middle English naylen, from the Old English næġlan & nægl (fingernail (handnægl)) & negel (tapering metal pin), from the Proto-Germanic naglaz (source also of Old Norse nagl (fingernail) & nagli (metal nail).  Nail is a noun & verb, nailernailless & naillike are adjectives, renail is a verbs, nailing is a noun & vern and nailed is a verb & adjective; the noun plural is nails.

Nail is modified or used as a modifier in literally dozens of examples including finger-nail, toe-nail, nail-brush, nail-file, rusty-nail, garden-nail, nail-fungus, nail-gun & frost-nail.  In idiomatic use, a “nail in one's coffin” is a experience or event that tends to shorten life or hasten the end of something (applied retrospectively (ie post-mortem) it’s usually in the form “final nail in the coffin”.  To be “hard as nails” is either to be “in a robust physical state” or “lacking in human feelings or without sentiment”. To “nail one's colors to the mast” is to declare one’s position on something.  Something described as “better than a poke in the eye with a rusty nail” is a thing, which while not ideal, is not wholly undesirable or without charm.  In financial matters (of payments), to be “on the nail” is to “pay at once”, often in the form “pay on the nail”.  To “nail something down” is to finalize it. To have “nailed it” is “to perfectly have accomplished something” while “nailed her” indicates “having enjoyed sexual intercourse with her”.  The “right” in the phrase “hit the nail right on the head” is a more recent addition, all known instances of use prior to 1700 being “hit the nail on the head” and the elegant original is much preferred.  It’s used to mean “correctly identify something or exactly to arrive at the correct answer”.  Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes there is no documentary evidence that the phrase comes from “nail” in the sense of the ting hit by a hammer.

Double-headed nails are used for temporary structures like fencing.  When the shaft is hammered in to the point where the surface of the lower head is flat against the surface of that into which it's being hammered, it leaves the upper head standing proud with just enough of the shaft exposed to allow a claw-hammer to be used to extract nail.  There is a story that as part of an environmental protest against the building or demolition of some structure (the tales vary), activists early one morning went to the temporary fencing around the contested site and hammered in all the double-headed nails.  This is believed to be an urban myth.

The sense of “fingernail” appears to be the original which makes sense give there were fingernails before there were spikes (of metal or any other material) used to build stuff.  The verb nail was from the Old English næglian (to fix or fasten (something) onto (something else) with nails), from the Proto-Germanic ganaglijan (the source also of the Old Saxon neglian, the Old Norse negla, the Old High German negilen, the German nageln and the Gothic ganagljan (to nail), all developed from the root of the nouns.  The colloquial meaning “secure, succeed in catching or getting hold of (someone or something)” was in use by at least the 1760; hence (hence the law enforcement slang meaning “to effect an arrest”, noted since the 1930s.  The meaning “to succeed in hitting” dates from 1886 while the phrase “to nail down” (to fix in place with nails) was first recorded in the 1660s.

As a noun, “nail-biter” (worrisome or suspenseful event), perhaps surprisingly, seems not to have been in common use until 1999 an it’s applied to things from life-threatening situations to watching close sporting contests.  The idea of nail-biting as a sign of anxiety has been in various forms of literature since the 1570s, the noun nail-biting noted since 1805 and as a noun it was since the mid-nineteenth century applied to those individuals who “habitually or compulsively bit their fingernails” although this seems to have been purely literal rather than something figurative of a mental state.  Now, a “nail-biter” is one who is “habitually worried or apprehensive” and they’re often said to be “chewing the ends of their fingernails” and in political use, a “nail biter” is a criticism somewhat less cutting than “bed-wetter”.  The condition of compulsive nail-biting is the noun onychophagia, the construct being onycho- (a creation of the international scientific vocabulary), reflecting a New Latin combining form, from the Ancient Greek ὄνυξ (ónux) (claw, nail, hoof, talon) +‎ -phagia (eating, biting or swallowing), from the Ancient Greek -φαγία (-phagía).  A related form was -φαγος (-phagos) (eater), the suffix corresponding to φαγεῖν (phageîn) (to eat), the infinitive of ἔφαγον (éphagon) (I eat), which serves as aorist (essentially a compensator for sense-shifts) (for the defective verb ἐσθίω (esthíō) (I eat).  Bitter-tasting nail-polish is available for those who wish to cure themselves.  Nail-polish as a product dates from the 1880s and was originally literally a clear substance designed to give the finger or toe-nails a varnish like finish upon being buffed.  By 1884, it was being sold as “liquid nail varnish” including shads of black, pink and red although surviving depictions in art suggests men and women in various cultures have for thousands of years been coloring their nails.  Nail-files (small, flat, single-cut file for trimming the fingernails) seem first to have been sold in 1819 and nail-clippers (hand-tool used to trim the fingernails and toenails) in 1890.

Pope Francis (b 1936; pope since 2013) at the funeral of Cardinal George Pell (1941-2023), St Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican, January 2023.

The expression "nail down the lid" is a reference to the lid of a coffin (casket), the implication being one wants to make doubly certain anyone within can't possible "return from the dead".  The noun doornail (also door-nail) (large-headed nail used for studding batten doors for strength or ornament) emerged in the late fourteenth century and was often used of many large, thick nails with a large head, not necessarily those used only in doors.  The figurative expression “dead as a doornail” seems to be as old as the piece of hardware and use soon extended to “dumb as a doornail” and “deaf as a doornail).  The noun hangnail (also hang-nail) is a awful as it sounds and describes a “sore strip of partially detached flesh at the side of a nail of the finger or toe” and appears in seventeenth century texts although few etymologists appear to doubt it’s considerably older and probably a folk etymology and sense alteration of the Middle English agnail & angnail (corn on the foot), from the Old English agnail & angnail.  The origin is likely to have been literally the “painful spike” in the flesh when suffering the condition.  The first element was the Proto-Germanic ang- (compressed, hard, painful), from the primitive Indo-European root angh- (tight, painfully constricted, painful); the second the Old English nægl (spike), one of the influences on “nail”.  The noun hobnail was a “short, thick nail with a large head” which dates from the 1590s, the first element probably identical with hob (rounded peg or pin used as a mark or target in games (noted since the 1580s)) of unknown origin.  Because hobnails were hammered into the leather soles of heavy boots and shoes, “hobnail” came in the seventeenth century to be used of “a rustic person” though it was though less offensive than forms like “yokel”.

Colors: Lindsay Lohan with nails unadorned and painted.

The Buick Nailhead

In the 1930s, the straight-8 became a favorite for manufacturers of luxury cars, attracted by its ease of manufacture (components and assembly-line tooling able to be shared with those used to produce a straight-6), the mechanical smoothness inherent in the layout and the ease of maintenance afforded by the long, narrow configuration.  However, the limitations were the relatively slow engine speeds imposed by the need to restrict the “crankshaft flex” and the height of the units, a product of the long strokes used to gain the required displacement.  By the 1950s, it was clear the future lay in big-bore, overhead valve V8s although the Mercedes-Benz engineers, unable to forget the glory days of the 1930s when the straight-eight W125s built for the Grand Prix circuits generated power and speed Formula One wouldn’t again see until the late 1970s, noted the relatively small 2.5 litre (153 cubic inch) displacement limit for 1954 and conjured up a final fling for the layout.  Used in both Formula One as the W196R and in sports car race as the W196S (better remembered as the 300 SLR) the new 2.5 & 3.0 litre (183 cubic inch) straight-8s, unlike their pre-war predecessors, solved the issue of crankshaft flex by locating the power take-off at the centre, adding mechanical fuel-injection and a desmodromic valve train to make the things an exotic cocktail of ancient & modern.  Dominant during 1954-1955 in both Formula One & the Sports Car Championship, they were the last of the straight-8s.

Schematic of Buick “Nailhead” V8, 1953-1966.

Across the Atlantic, the US manufacturers also abandoned their straight-8s.  Buick introduced their overhead valve (OHV) V8 in 1953 but, being much wider than before, the new engine has to be slimmed somewhere to fit between the fenders; it would not be until later the platform was widened.  To achieve this, the engineers narrowed the cylinder heads, compelling both an conical (the so-called “pent-roof”) combustion chamber and an arrangement in which the sixteen valves pointed directly upwards on the intake side, something which not only demanded an unusual pushrod & rocker mechanism but also limited the size of the valves.  So, the valves had to be tall and narrow and, with some resemblance to nails, they picked up the nickname “nail valves”, morphing eventually to “nailhead” as a description of the whole engine.  The valve placement and angle certainly benefited the intake side but the geometry compromised the flow of exhaust gases which were compelled through their anyway small ports to make a turn of almost 180^o on their way to the tailpipe.

It wasn't the last time the head design of a Detroit V8 would be dictated by considerations of width.  When Chrysler in 1964 introduced the 273 cubic inch (4.5 litre) V8 as the first of its LA-Series (that would begat the later 318, 340 & 360 as well as the V10 made famous in the Dodge Viper), the most obvious visual difference from the earlier A-Series V8s was the noticeably smaller cylinder heads.  The A engines used as skew-type valve arrangement in which the exhaust valve was parallel to the bore with the intake valve tipped toward the intake manifold (the classic polyspherical chamber).  For the LA, Chrysler rendered all the valves tipped to the intake manifold and in-line (as viewed from the front), the industry’s standard approach to a wedge combustion chamber.  The reason for the change was that the decision had been taken to offer the compact Valiant with a V8 but it was a car which had been designed to accommodate only a straight-six and the wide-shouldered polyspheric head A-Series V8s simply wouldn’t fit.  So, essentially, wedge-heads were bolted atop the old A-Series block but the “L” in LA stood for light and the engineers wanted something genuinely lighter for the compact (in contemporary US terms) Valiant.  Accordingly, in addition to the reduced size of the heads and intake manifold, a new casting process was developed for the block (the biggest, heaviest part of an engine) which made possible thinner walls.

322 cubic inch Nailhead in 1953 Buick Skylark convertible (left) and 425 cubic inch Nailhead in 1966 Buick Riviera GS (with dual-quad MZ package) (right).  Note the “Wildcat 465” label on the air cleaner, a reference to the claimed torque rating, something most unusual, most manufacturers using the space to advertise horsepower or cubic inch displacement (cid).

The nailhead wasn’t ideal for producing ultimate power but it did lend itself to prodigious low-end torque, something much appreciated by Buicks previous generation of buyers who has enjoyed the low-speed responsiveness of the famously smooth straight-8.  However, like everybody else, Buick hadn’t anticipated that as the 1950s unfolded, the industry would engage in a “power race”, something to which the free-breathing Cadillac and Chrysler’s Hemis were well-suited.  The somewhat strangulated Buick Nailhead was not at all suited and to gain power the engineers were compelled to add high-lift, long-duration camshafts which enabled the then magic 300 horsepower number to be achieved but at the expense of smoothness and tales of Buick buyers returning to the dealer to fix the “rumpity-rump” idle became legion.  Still, the Nailhead was robust, relatively light and offered what was then a generous displacement and the ever inventive hot-rod community soon worked out the path to power was to use forced induction and reverse the valve use, the supercharger blowing the fuel-air mix through the exhaust ports and the exhaust gases through the larger intake ports.  Thus the for a while Nailhead enjoyed a career as a niche player although the arrival in the mid 1950s of the much more tuneable Chevrolet V8s ended the vogue for all but a few devotees who continued use well into the 1960s.  Buick acknowledged reality and, unusually, instead of following the industry trend and drawing attention to cubic inch displacement and horsepower, publicized their torque output, confusing some (though probably not Buick buyers who were a loyal crew).

Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird (1964-1999).

Not confused was the United States Air Force (USAF) which was much interested in power for its aircraft but also had a special need for torque on the tarmac and that briefly meant another small niche for the Nailhead.  The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird (1964-1979) was a long-range, high-altitude supersonic (Mach 3+) aircraft used by the (USAF) for reconnaissance between 1966-1998 and by the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) for observation missions as late as 1999.  Something of a high-water mark among the extraordinary advances made in aeronautics and materials construction during the 1950s & 1960s, the SR-71 used the Pratt & Whitney J58 turbojet engine which used an innovative, secondary air-injection system to the afterburner, permitting additional thrust at high speed.  The SR-71 still holds a number of altitude and speed records and Lockheed’s SR-72, a hypersonic unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is said to be in an “advanced stage” of design and construction although whether any test flights will be conducted before 2030 remains unclear, the challenges of sustaining in the atmosphere velocities as high as Mach 6+ onerous given the heat generated.

Drawing from user manual for AG330 starter cart (left) and AG330 starter cart with dual Buick Nailhead V8s.

At the time, the SR-71 was the most exotic aircraft on the planet but during testing and early in its career, to fly, it relied on a pair of even then technologically bankrupt Buick Nailhead V8s.  These were mounted in a towed cart and were effectively the turbojet’s starter motor, a concept developed in the 1930s as a work-around for the technology gap which emerged as aero-engines became too big to start by hand but no on-board electrical systems were available to trigger ignition.  The two Nailheads were connected by gears to a single, vertical drive shaft which ran the jet up to the critical speed at which ignition became self-sustaining.  The engineers chose the Nailheads after comparing them to other large displacement V8s, the aspect of the Buicks which most appealed being the torque generated at relatively low engine speeds, a characteristic ideal for driving an output shaft.  After the Nailhead was retired in 1966, later carts used Chevrolet big-block V8s but in 1969 a pneumatic start system was added to the infrastructure of the USAF bases from which the SR-71s most frequently operated, the sixteen-cylinder carts relegated to secondary bases the planes rarely used.