Palindrome

Palindrome (pronounced pal-in-drohm)

(1) A word, line, verse, number, sentence etc, reading the same backward as forward.

(2) In biochemistry, a region of DNA in which the sequence of nucleotides is identical with an inverted sequence in the complementary strand.

1638: From the Ancient Greek παλίνδρομος (palindromos) (running back again; recurring, literally “literally "a running back”) the construct being πάλιν (pálin) (again, back) + δρόμος (dromos) (direction, running, race, racecourse).  Pálin was from the primitive Indo-European kwle-i-, a suffixed form of the root kwel- (revolve, move round) (kw- becomes the Greek p- before some vowels.  The word palindrome was first published by Henry Peacham (1578-circa 1645) in The Truth of Our Times (1638).  Although derived from the Greek root palin + dromos, the Greek language uses καρκινικός (carcinic, literally “crab-like”) to refer to letter-by-letter reversible writing.  The related palinal (directed or moved backward, characterized by or involving backward motion) dates from 1888.  The noun palinode (poetical recantation, poem in which the poet retracts invective contained in a former satire) dates from the 1590s and was from either the sixteenth century French palinod or the Late Latin palinodia, from the Greek palinōidia (poetic retraction), again from pálin; the related form were palinodical & palinodial.  The word palinode was sometimes applied to the apologies artists and others in the Soviet Union were compelled to publish, often after being accused of formalism or something just as heinous.  Palindrome & palindromist are nouns, palindromically is an adverb and palindromic an adjective.

Pierre Laval (1883–1945; Prime Minister of France 1931-1932, 1935-1936 & de facto prime minister in the Vichy Government 1942-1944).

Even before he spent the final years of his political career as a senior official in the collaborationist regime of Vichy France under Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856-1951), the palindromic Laval was already notorious for his dubious financial dealings while in government and being a party to the Hoare–Laval Pact (1935), concocted with the then British Foreign Secretary Samuel “Slippery Sam” Hoare (1880-1959) with which the pair sought to end the tiresome Second Italo-Ethiopian War (the last of the colonial land-grabs in the era of European colonization) because it was “bad for business”.  Something of a precursor to the 1938 Munich Agreement in which the UK and France acquiesced to the Nazi’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in exchange for what, delusionally, they believed would be Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) final territorial claim in Europe, what the Hoare–Laval Pact offered was a partition of Abyssinia, something which in retrospect would have been merely the first step to Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & Prime-Minister of Italy 1922-1943) absorbing the whole country as a colony of Imperial Italy.  Even for the, by then jaded, people of France and the UK the cynicism was too blatant and the reaction when the details were made public ensured both ministers were dismissed.

Otto Abetz (1903-1958; de facto German ambassador to Paris 1940-1944, left) shaking hands with Marshal Pétain (right), Paris, November 1941.

Pétain had little faith in the arrangements his regime negotiated with the Germans honored, telling colleagues after one meeting: "It will take six weeks to work out all the details and six months for the Germans to forget all about them."  Because Berlin didn't formerly created diplomatic relations with France after the defeat in 1940, Otto Abetz was never properly credentialed as ambassador but wholly he discharged the duties.  His great nephew is Eric Abetz (b 1958; Liberal Party senator for Tasmania, Australia 1994-2022, Treasurer of Tasmania since 2024).

Hoare was an accomplished ice-skater and made a political comeback as did Laval who, sniffing the winds of French defeat in 1940, became a convinced fascist, serving in the Vichy regime between July 1940-August 1944 variously as vice-president of the Council of Ministers and head of government.  He fled to Spain after the Liberation of France but was extradited and put on trial for plotting against the security of the state and collaborating with the Nazis; found guilty, he was executed by firing squad in October 1945.  Old Marshal Pétain fared a little better.  Although also sentenced to death for his role during the occupation, Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970; President of France 1959-1969), then serving as Chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, couldn’t bring himself to sign the death warrant for one of the country’s heroes of World War I and commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, officially on the grounds of “age”.

Perhaps surprisingly, the longest known palindromic word is not German despite their fondness for lengthy compounds.  According to the Guinness Book of World Records the record is held by the 19 character saippuakivikauppias which is Finnish for “a travelling salesman who sells lye (caustic soda)”.  It’s said not often to come up in conversation and seems to exist only a curiosity used in lists of long palindromes where it's the undisputed number one.  In English, palindromes of a few characters are common but examples with more than seven letters are rare.  Tattarrattat (the sound made by knocking on a door), as it’s usually spelled, has 12 characters but is a bit of a fudge because it’s also an onomatopoeia so some lexicographers insist it doesn’t count.  Also cheating but clever is the 11 letter aibohphobia meaning a fear of palindromes, the construct being the suffix -phobia + its reverse.  Adding to the charm is that it’s doubtless a non-existent condition, but it’s suspected there are anyway a few of those in the literature of psychiatry.  From India, there's kinnikinnik, a smoking mixture of bark & leaves (but no tobacco).  English’s longest “real” palindrome appears to be detartrated, the past participle of detartrate (to remove tartrates (salts of tartaric acid)), especially from fruit juices and wines, in order to reduce tartness or sourness).  Not only is it a real word but it describes a common process in the industrial production of foods and beverages.

Announced on an auspicious date.

On 2 February 2020, Lindsay Lohan (b 1986), in a now deleted Instagram post, for the first time publicly acknowledged her relationship with Bader Shammas (b 1987), a group photograph from Dubai, including the couple and her sister Aliana (b 1993), captioned: "@aliana lovely night with sister and my boyfriend bader💗".  The couple would later marry.  2 February 2020 (02-02-2020) was the twenty-first century’s only eight-digit global palindrome (ie it works with either the MM-DD-YYYY or DD-MM-YYYY convention).  The last eight-digit global palindrome happened 908 years earlier on the even more numerically symmetrical 11 November 1111 (11-11-1111) and the next one will be 908 years hence on 3 March 3030 (03-03-3030).  Six and seven digit palindromes are more common.

Palindromic sentences are often created and these are judged not by length but by their elegance which is why “never odd or even” often is cited as an example.  Leigh Mercer (1893–1977) was a word nerd and recreational mathematician who devised the classic "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!" and this approach was in the 1980s taken to its logical extreme in two novels, Satire: Veritas (1980, 58,795 letters) by David Stephens and Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo (1986, 31,954 words) by Lawrence Levine, both said to be palindromically perfect and wholly nonsensical.  Shorter, but of admirable clarity, are the many baptismal fonts in Greece and Turkey which bear the circular 25-letter inscription NIYON ANOMHMATA MH MONAN OYIN (Wash (my) sins, not only (my) face).  This appears also in several English churches.

Sixteenth century German "oath skull" on which defendants swore their oaths in the Vehmic courts (the Vehmgericht, Holy Vehme or Vehm, the alternative spellings being Feme, Vehmegericht & Fehmgericht), a tribunal system established in Westphalia during the late Middle Ages.

Created essentially because of the inadequacies of the official justice system, they're now often referred to as "proto-vigilante" courts but for centuries they filled a niche before they came increasingly to be associated with injustice and corruption before finally being abolished in 1811, a half-decade after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the source of their original authority.

In linguistics, these “grid of letters” are called “acrostics”.  Acrostic was from the Middle French acrostiche & acrostique (persisting in modern French as acrostiche) and its etymon the Late Latin acrostichis, from the Ancient Greek ἀκροστιχίς (akrostikhís), the construct being ἄκρο- (ákro-) (the prefix indicating, inter alia, the extremity or tip of something) + στῐ́χος (stĭ́khos) (row or file of soldiers; line of poetry, verse) (ultimately from the primitive Indo-European steyg- (to climb, go)).  They remain still a popular form for the “word puzzles” appearing in the surviving newspapers and magazines.  In verse, an acrostic is a poem in which the initial letters of each line make a word or words when read downwards (the mesostich (middle) or telestich (final) letter of each line might also be used) whereas in prose the first letter of each paragraph or sentence might make up a word.  It’s speculated the earliest acrostic may have been created as a mnemonic device and used as a tool to aid oral transmission and most of the acrostics in the Old Testament are of the alphabetical or abecedarian (in this context “a work which uses words or lines in alphabetical order”) kind.  For poets however it may have been just an intellectual exercise (or perhaps “a gimmick” if not well-received by certain critics).  Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1344-1400) used a simple acrostic device in ABC, a twenty-four stanza poem in which the first letter of the first word in each stanza is the appropriate letter of the alphabet, from A to Z.  The dramatist Benjamin Jonson (circa 1572–circa 1637) in his Argument (prefacing The Alchemist (1610)) used an acrostic verse (“argument” a technical term meaning “the abstract” or “plot summary”).

The palindromic (or “all-round”) acrostic seen on the oath skull is known as the “Sator square” or the “Cirencester word square” because a copy was in 1868 discovered on a painted wall plaster in what is now Victoria Road in the English town of Cirencester in the Cotswold District of Gloucestershire.  At the time of the inscription, during the Roman occupation of Britain, the settlement was called Corinium.  The best documented of the early examples was one etched onto a wall in the doomed city of Herculaneum, the conclusion of most being Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas should be understood as “The sower, Arepo, makes the wheel work”), the trick being it can be read vertically, horizontally, or in the diagonal.  Known also as pentacles, the “SATOR” was the most commonly found in the Western Esotericism of late antiquity, used by Kabbalists, Gnostics, alchemists and other pre-medieval mystics in the creation of magic spells, amulets, potions etc and were thus often seen in the shops of apothecaries.  For deconstructionists, the translations are:

sator: sower/planter
tenet: he/she/they/it holds/has/grasps/possesses
opera: work/exertion/service
rotās: wheels

There has been speculation about the meaning of this pentacle, some a little fanciful and it’s not impossible things were made up just to fit, rather as "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" was coined to use each letter in the alphabet and "DICK HOOD DID EXCEED" serves no purpose other than to appear the same if inverted and viewed in a looking glass.

ROTAS
OPERA
TENET
AREPO
SATOR

The one on the skull was a second form, copied from an Egyptian papyrus of the late fourth or early fifth century AD:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

Among professionals and amateurs alike, there has been much debate about the possible meaning(s) and although there are a number of permutations, most hint at something like “the sower Arepo holds the wheels carefully”, indicating the care required when sowing the seeds for next season’s crop.  The form may however in some places have been vested with magical or religious significance.  In sixth century Ethiopia, the five words (corrupted to Sador, Alador, Danet, Adera and Rodas), were used as the names of the five nails of Christ's Cross.  In France, the word square was known to have been used as a form of lucky charm and reputedly, one fortunate inhabitant of Lyon was cured of madness by eating three crusts of bread (each inscribed with the square) while making five recitations of the Pater Noster in remembrance of the five wounds of Christ and the five nails.  Presumably encouraged by such an event, Spanish and Portuguese Roman Catholic missionaries took these charms to South America where they were said variously to protect folk from snake bites and aid childbirth.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia (pronounced sin-uhs-thee-zhuh or sin-uhs-zhee-uh)

(1) In neurology and psychology, a neurological or psychological phenomenon in which a particular sensory stimulus triggers a second kind of sensation.

(2) The association of one sensory perception with, or description of it in terms of, another, unlike, perception that is not experienced at the same time.

(3) In literary theory or practice, an artistic device whereby one kind of sensation is described in the terms of another.

(4) In medical diagnostics, where a sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus that is applied to another, as in referred pain.

1892: From the Modern French or the New Latin, from Ancient Greek σύν (sún (with) or syn (together) + αἴσθησις (aísthēsis), (sensation; feeling) from the primitive Indo-European root au (to perceive) + abstract noun suffix -ia.  The word was modelled after existing construction anaesthesia.  Traditional spelling in the British Empire was synæsthesia but the US form synesthesia appears now global.  The meaning in psychology relating to the senses (colors that seem to the perceiver to having odor, etc.) is from 1891.  Synesthesia & synaesthete are nouns, synaesthetic is an adjective and synesthetically is an adverb; the noun plural is synesthesias.  

Clinicians have two categories of synesthesia: projective and associative.  Those who project see actual colours or shapes when stimulated whereas associators will feel an involuntary connection between the stimulus and the sense that it triggers.  For example, in the form chromesthesia synesthesia (sound to color) a projector would listen to a piano and see a purple shape whereas an associator might respond to the music by thinking it “sounds” purple.  There are a number of types of synesthesia, the best known of which grapheme-color synesthesia or the association of colours with letters or words.  In auditory-tactile synesthesia, certain sounds can induce sensations in parts of the body and debate continues about whether the near-universal reaction(s) induced by finger nails on a blackboard indicates synesthesia is a spectrum condition or this example is endemic in human physiology.  Lexical-gustatory synesthesia is the phenomenon of certain tastes being experienced upon hearing certain words.  Mirror-touch synesthesia is where someone feels the same sensation another person feels such as when a synesthete sees another touched on the arm; the synesthete involuntarily feeling a touch in the same place.

Logically, every possible combination of experiences which can occur can be a type of synesthesia.  Like a syndrome, something need not be wide-spread to be a type of synesthesia, it needs just to be specific: someone with the grapheme-color variant might see "Lindsay Lohan" as Lindsay Lohan.  Simultanéisme was a short-lived, early twentieth century movement in French poetry.  The writers aimed to achieve a kind of “simultaneousness of image and sound”, to represent or reproduce human sounds mingled with other sounds (ranging from birds & land mammals to those heard in cityscapes including the then novel automobile).  An attempt to form complex and dynamic onomatopoeiae, types of synaesthesia and kinaesthetic images, the finest surviving examples are in La Trilogie des forces (The Trilogy of Forces, 1908-1914) by the movement's founder Henri-Martin Barzun (1881–1973) and Naissance du poème (Birth of the poem, 1918) by Fernand Divoire (1883-1951).

For many reasons, as a literary device, synaesthesia in the twentieth century became much analysed and discussed with the critics even managing to build theories although it was not at all novel, innumerable writers of prose, poetry and non-fiction for millennia having synaesthetic references in their texts.  It’s a familiar feature of everyday speech, mentions such as “a heavy silence” or a “black look” being commonplace and there are no pedantic literalists who complain when a music critic writes of the “darkening voice” of the aging soprano.  So it’s a mixing of sensations, the concurrent appeal to more than one sense; the response through several senses to the stimulation of one and while as an intellectual exercise than can be made complex, in everyday life it’s just the way people think.

In the medical literature the French term synesthésie had appeared at least as early as 1864 but that was of bodily reflexes and co-sensations rather than the neurological condition and the first use in English in the modern sense is thought to appear in a translation of Jules Millet’s (1965-1982) doctoral thesis Audition colorée (Colored hearing) in which he differentiated synesthésie (for all kinds of combined senses) from those specifically associated with links between colors and sounds.  At the time, scientists and physicians in the English-speaking world were still using the borrowed French term pseudochromesthésie, a long word with a brief history.  In 1848, French physician Charles-Auguste-Édouard Cornaz (1825-1911) was the first to give a name to what would come to be known as synesthesia, calling it hyperchromatopsie (perception de trop de couleurs) (hyperchromatopsia (perception of too many colors)), the rationale for that being Dr Cornaz regarding the condition as the opposite of the well-documented chromatodysopsie (chromatodysopsia (color blindness); the term was the precursor to what would become hyperesthesia.  Dr Cordaz's coining fell into disuse after biographically otherwise obscure French physician Ernest Chabalier in 1864 published a paper using the term pseudochromesthésie (or pseudochromesthesia) (false colour-sensation) which enjoyed general adoption before being supplanted by synesthesia.

However, although the scientific study may have been embryonic, the idea was not and three lines from Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) sonnet Correspondances (Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857)) are illustrative of what was a common technique from the factory floor to the academy:

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,

Those translating Baudelaire into English did take a few interpretative liberties with his work but the synaesthetic imagery (mostly) was preserved:

The scents and colours to each other respond.

And scents there are, like infant's flesh as chaste,

As sweet as oboes, and as meadows fair,

Cyril Scott (1879-1970), Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil (1909)

Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.

Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,

Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;

F.P. Sturm (1879-1942), from Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, edited by Thomas Robert Smith (1880-1942) (1919)

sound calls to fragrance, colour calls to sound.

cool as an infant's brow some perfumes are,

softer than oboes, green as rainy leas;

Lewis Piaget Shanks (1879-1935), Flowers of Evil (1931)

Perfumes there are as sweet as the music of pipes and strings,

As pure as the naked flesh of children, as full of peace

As wide green prairies

George Dillon (1906-1968), Flowers of Evil (1936)

So are commingled perfumes, sounds, and hues.

There can be perfumes cool as children's flesh,

Like fiddIes, sweet, like meadows greenly fresh.

Roy Campbell (1901-1957), Poems of Baudelaire (1952)

Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,

Sweet as oboes, green as meadows

William Aggeler (1904-1974), The Flowers of Evil (1954)

Perfumes and sounds and colors correspond.

Some scents are cool as children's flesh is cool,

Sweet as are oboes, green as meadowlands,

Jacques LeClercq (1891-1971), Flowers of Evil (1958)

Perfumes, colors and sounds answer one another.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,

Sweet as oboes, green as prairies

Wallace Fowlie (1908-1998), Flowers of Evil (1964)

So perfumes, colors, tones answer each other.

There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh,

Soft as oboes, green as meadows,

Geoffrey Wagner (1927-2006), Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (1974)

So perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond.

Odours there are, fresh as a baby's skin,

Mellow as oboes, green as meadow grass,

James McGowan (1938-2014), Flowers of Evil (1993)

Perfumes, colours and sounds respond.

Odours fresh as the skin of an infant,

Sweet as oboes and green as a meadow,

Beverley Bie Brahic, Invitation to the Voyage (2021)

Wassily Kandinsky, color, shape and music

Winter Landscape (1909), oil on cardboard by Wassily Kandinsky.

In Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866–1944) particular synesthesia, color and music inextricably were tangled and so precise was it that he associated each note with an exact hue and it was so intrinsic to his being that he once observed: “…the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble.”  It meant his experience of music was heightened, indeed defined, by the range of visual perceptions which shifted with every note.  The music of Richard Wagner (1813–1883) has had its consequences, good and bad, and it was his vivid visual response to a performance of Richard Wagner's (1813–1883) Lohengrin (1850) at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre that he abandoned his successful career as a lawyer and devoted himself to the painting which had been his hobby.  Accepted as a student at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, he later described the Wagnerian transformation of his life: “I saw all my colors in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.”  Wagner has led astray a few troubled souls but he guided Kandinsky along a good path; the world can gain much from having more artists but probably has enough lawyers.

Composition VII (1913), oil on canvas by by Wassily Kandinsky.

Whether Kandinsky would have become an artist had he not been a synaesthete can't be known but music certainly drew him to become a certain sort of painter.  His path artistic path he explained by saying: "A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art."  Music he called "the ultimate teacher" and it critical to the development of especially his abstract works; noting the way the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) had abandoned tonal and harmonic conventions in his compositions, he rejected the figure or recognizable object in favor of shapes, lines, and discordant colors which he deployed overlaid on texture to create a rhythmic visual experience which as closely as possible emulated in a two-dimensional space the emotional response he’d experienced when hearing the sounds.  Unsurprisingly, Kandinsky gave many of his paintings musical titles, such as Composition or Improvisation and it wasn’t unusual for critics to use phrases like “Kandinsky’s symphony of colors”.  Kandinsky also perceived color also had the ability to touch the feelings of the viewers, yellow able to disturb while blue awakened the highest spiritual aspirations.  That may have been mapping his experience as a synaesthete on to those not able to enjoy the gift but it was certainly an insight into his visions.  In 1911, Kandinsky published Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) in which he defined the three types of painting: impressions, improvisations and compositions.  Impressions were based on an external reality while improvisations and compositions depicted images summoned from the unconscious, compositions the more formal of the two.  The treatise is one of the landmarks in the theoretical foundations of abstraction and remains an important contribution to an explanation of the techniques with which art can be constructed in an attempt to evoke psychological, physical, and emotional responses.

Improvisation 35 (1914), oil on canvas by Wassily Kandinsky.

As well as the works in which he explored the implications of his synesthesia, Kandinsky painted in other styles including Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstraction, Landscape, Cityscape, Genre, Marina and Allegory.  Although he did paint people in recognizable form (including self-portraits), had Kandinsky painted Lindsay Lohan he’d likely not have been drawn to depicting her in a realistic likeness, attracted instead by the colors he’d have associated with the metaphorical “sound” of her once tempestuous lifestyle and the actual sounds of the music she created.  Quite what might have been colors and shapes of the involuntary visual experience he’d have enjoyed while hearing of her adventures or listening to her tunes is of course speculative but in his 1911 treatise he did map out a quite strict vocabulary linking specific colors to musical instruments and emotional states.  From that would emerge a constellation of colored planes and rhythmic lines, a Lohanic portrait best assessed as a musical composition, visual elements corresponding with timbre, pitch and rhythm.

Black Lines I (1913), oil on canvas by Wassily Kandinsky.

From his visual lexicon, it’s possible to imagine how a visual symphony of Lindsay Lohan might have appeared, her distinctive red hair drawn not as naturalistic strands but, because of the his association of vermilion with the sound of a trumpet, (someting cross-cultural, Dr Johnson (Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)) once describing the color scarlet to a blind man as “the clangour of a trumpet”) there’d likely have been intense, sharp, angular geometric structures or aggressive, flaming slashes of red slicing across the canvas.  Thematically, it would be a “loud” work, suggestive of something sudden and explosive but there would also be “quieter” elements, Kandinsky associating a light, powder blue with the sound of a flute and ultramarine or cobalt with that of a cello or the deeper tones of an organ.  There might have been interlocking concentric circles and smooth, floating curves of blue weaving through the sharp red angles, the “cool” blue tones not balancing but clashing with the “hot” reds, representing both the rhythmic layers of her music and the more melancholy undercurrent of a life lived under the microscope of the tabloid press.  Superficially incoherent because of fragmented geometric shapes and intersecting diagonals, the tension between colors would have created an emotional dissonance, visual “chords” at once seductive and unstable.

Violet (1923), colour lithograph by Wassily Kandinsky.

It’s likely Kandinsky would have been unable to resist so obvious an artistic possibility as Lindsay Lohan’s famous freckles, representing as they do in music a staccato percussion.  On canvas, this would have been translated into a scatter plot of sharp dots peppered not in a defined pattern but randomly, as naturally as they appear on skin.  Kandinsky thought dots (in the sense of “representations of points”) as the ultimate minimalist entity implying a sudden, sharp beat or a silent pause; either way, there would be a spray of rhythmic, percussive dots jumping across the canvas, one’s interpretation of that an element in deconstructing the whole.  While his techniques were multi-layered, he did claim in one aspect there was simplicity because: "Everything starts from a dot."  Shapes being signifiers of an inherent spiritual weight, there would have been triangles because he imagined them as possessing aggressive, forward-moving energy; they would appear with circles representing the soul and peace.  The darkness in her life would have been conveyed by chaotic, clashing black lines and there would also be yellow, a color the artist described as “frenzied” and capable of “violently bothering" the viewer.  All this would typically be “played out” by interactions on the “charged, expectant silence” of a solid, white background.  A viewer would perhaps not recognize even a hint of a human presence and the work would be understood only if the title made explicit Lindsay Lohan was the subject.  Even then, some notes from the artist would be helpful because, while a set of emotional and musical impulses orchestrated in color would be a familiar language to other color-music synaesthetes, the level of abstraction would for others make it mysterious and probably weird beyond immediate understanding.

Poison & Venom

Poison (pronounced poi-zuhn)

(1) A substance with an inherent property that can impair function, cause structural damage, or otherwise injure or destroy life or impair health.

(2) Something harmful or pernicious, as to happiness or well-being.

(3) A slang term for alcoholic liquor.

(4) To administer poison to (a something living).

(5) To ruin, vitiate, or corrupt.

(6) In chemistry, a substance that retards a chemical reaction or destroys or inhibits the activity of a catalyst or enzyme).

(7) In nuclear physics, a substance that absorbs neutrons in a nuclear reactor and thus slows down the reaction.  It may be added deliberately or formed during fission.

(8) Variously in computing (often as "poison message"), a routine or instructing which can stop processes; the "poison queue" is a place to which these are diverted to prevent the running (a similar concept to a "quarantine zone").

1200-1250: From the Middle English poisoun, poyson, poysone, puyson & puisun (a deadly potion or substance (and figuratively, "spiritually corrupting ideas; evil intentions,"), from the twelfth century Old French poison & puison (drink, especially a "medical drink" (later "a (magic) potion; a poisonous drink"), from the Latin potionem (nominative potio) (a drinking, a drink) (and also "a poisonous drink"), from potare (to drink), from the primitive Indo-European root poi- & po- (to drink).  The earliest Lastin forms were pōtiōn (drink, a draught, a poisonous draught, a potion), from pōtō (I drink) & pōtāre (to drink).   The Middle English forms displaced the native Old English ator.  The Latin pōtiōn is the stem of pōtiō, the derive forms being pōtio & pōtiōnis.  The adjective poisonsome is obsolete and poisonous is used for all purposes.  Poison is a noun & verb, poisonousness & poisoner are nouns, empoison is a verb, poisoning is a noun & verb, poisoned is a verb & adjective, poisonous, poisonlike & poisonless are adjectives and poisonously is an adverb; the noun plural is poisons. 

Dry Cooder, Ronald Reagan, Can of Poisoned Meat.

The evolution from Latin to French followed the pattern of other words (eg raison from rationem), the Latin word also the source of Old Spanish pozon, the Italian pozione and the Spanish pocion.  The modern and more typical Indo-European word for this is represented in English by virus and the slang sense of "alcoholic drink" is an Americanism dating from 1805.  Figurative use was first noted in the late fifteenth century although it appears not to have been applied to persons until 1910.  It was used as an adjective from the 1520s; with plant names from the eighteenth century.  Poison ivy first recorded 1784; poison oak in 1743, poison in 1915.  Poison-pen, the trolling of the time, was popularized 1913 by a notorious criminal case in Pennsylvania although the phrase dates from 1898.  The sense evolution was from "drink" to "deadly drink".  In some Germanic languages "poison" is aligned with the English gift (eg the Old High German gift, the German Gift, the Danish & Swedish gift and the Dutch gift & vergift).  This shift may have been partly euphemistic and partly the influence of the Greek dosis (a portion prescribed (literally "a giving")), used by Greek physicians to mean "a quantum of medicine".  Of persons detested or regarded as exerting baleful influence, poison and poisonous were in use by 1910 while the slang meaning "alcoholic drink" recorded as an an early nineteenth century invention of American English (as in "what's your poison?"); potus as a past-participle adjective in Latin meant "drunken".  The verb in the sense of "to poison, to give poison to" dates from the circa 1300 poisonen, from the Old French poisonner (to give to drink) and directly from the noun poison.  The figurative use in the sense of "to corrupt" emerged in the late fourteenth century.

Three portraits of Lindsay Lohan as Poison Ivy by Alex Ross.  Poison Ivy is a comic book character in works published by US company DC Comics.  Poison Ivy is one of Batman's many enemies.

In idiomatic use, the phrase “poisoned chalice” (a large drinking cup) refers to something which at first glance seems desirable but later is revealed to be disadvantageous or harmful.  It’s now used often in politics to describe the situation in which the leadership of a party is offered to someone even though it seems clear the prospects of success are slight.  This is a modern variant on the original sense in which things initially seemed benign, only later to cause harm or even death.  The earliest known use was by William Shakespeare (1564–1616) in The Tragedy of Macbeth (Macbeth, circa 1606) in the speech in which Macbeth flinches from the prospective murder of King Duncan.  “Poisoned compliment” is synonym of “asterism” or “left-handed compliment”; an insult disguised as a compliment or a compliment which can be interpreted as an insult.  “Damning with faint praise” can be used in the same way.  A “poisonmonger” was “one who peddles poison” and while that could be literal (ie a merchant who trades in poisons), it’s more often used figuratively of those who speak with a “poison tongue” or who wield a “poison pen”.  A “taste of one's own poison” was synonymous with “taste of one's own medicine” and referred to harsh treatment inflicted on one who previously made other suffer the treatment.  To “pick (or “choose”) one’s poison” was to be compelled to choose between two unappealing options.  The variant “a man must be permitted to choose his own poison” was a summation of “liberal” periods of rule within the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) when the consumption of alcohol was tolerated (at least for infidels who were anyway destined for Hell).  To say “one man’s meat is another’s poison” is to admit people have differing tastes; what pleases one person may displease another. 

“Well poisoning” still is practiced and means literally “to make the water supply undrinkable by means of adulteration” (not necessarily with “poison” in the narrow technical sense).  A wartime technique known since at least antiquity, it was used both as an offensive weapon (a terror tactic to disrupt and depopulate a target area) and defensively (as a scorched earth tactic to deny an invading army sources of clean water). Historically, rotting corpses (animal and human) were thrown down wells, making it an early example of biological warfare and that was an especially potent technique because corpses known to have died from transmissible diseases (common during the "age of epidemics" that was the Medieval period) such as bubonic plague or tuberculosis often were available to be "weaponized".  Figuratively, “to poison the well” was pre-emptively to raise ad hominem arguments in order to discredit someone, the concept thus a type of informal fallacy where adverse information about a target is presented to an audience with the intention of devaluing what they’re about to say.  That makes it a certain type of argumentum ad hominem and the phrase was first in this sense used by convert Roman Catholic theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890) in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (A defence of one's own life, 1864).  The proverb “The damage that a substance causes is determined more by its quantity than by its essence” is from toxicology and references the phenomenon that while some substances may for life be beneficial or even essential, in certain quantities they can be damaging or even fatal; for humans, ingesting even pure water can prove lethal if enough is consumed in a certain period, toxicity for healthy adults reached with as little as 20 litres (4.4 imperial gallons, 5.3 US gallons) taken over a few hours.

Venom (pronounced ven-uhm)

(1) The poisonous fluid that some animals, as certain snakes and spiders, secrete and introduce into the bodies of their victims by biting, stinging etc.

(2) Something resembling or suggesting poison in its effect; spite; malice.

(3) Poison in general (inaccurate, now archaic).

(4) To make venomous; envenom (archaic).

(5) Malice, spite.

1175–1225: A variant of the Middle English venim & venym (poison secreted by some animals and transferred by biting) from the Anglo-Norman & Old French venim, venin (poison; malice), from the Vulgar Latin venīmen (source also of the Italian veleno and the Spanish veneno), from the Latin venēnum (magical herb or potion, poison (and in pre-Classical times "drug, medical potion" also "charm, seduction" probably originally "love potion")).  Root was the Proto-Italic weneznom (lust, desire), from the primitive Indo-European wenh (to strive, wish, love) from wen (to desire; to strive for).  Related forms included the Sanskrit वनति (vanati) (gain, wish, erotic lust) and the Latin Venus.   The various deformations in post-Latin languages happened apparently by process of dissimilation with the modern spelling in English more or less standardized by the late fourteenth century.  In figurative use, to have "venom in one's voice" was to express thoughts or feelings marked by spite or malice (vitriolic talk); that of course has been common in human discourse since even before structured language developed but the use of "venom" or "venomous" as a descriptor has been in use since at least the late twelfth century.  The adjective venomosalivary (relating to venom and saliva) is now rare and appears only in historic references while the adjective venonsome is obsolete and venomous is used for all purposes.  Venom is a noun, verb & adjective, venomousness, venomization & venomosity are nouns, venomless, venomlike, venomosalivary, venomsome, venomous & venomic are adjectives, venomize, venoming & envenomate are verbs, venomed is a verb & adjective and venomously is an adverb; the noun plural is venoms.

Sometimes similar consequences but linguistically not interchangeable

A venomous white-lipped pit viper (Trimeresurus insularis), ready to strike; the lovely blue ones are rare; most are green.  That may be an example of survival of the fittest given the environments in which they dwell tend more to be green than blue.  As a footnote, the phrase “survival of the fittest” often is attributed to Charles Darwin (1809-1882) but nowhere does in appear in his epoch-making On the Origin of Species (1859); it was coined by English polymath Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), first used in his Principles of Biology (1864).  Sometimes misunderstood, “fittest” means “best fitted to the environment”, not “strongest, fastest, or most physically fit”.  In other words, organisms most likely to survive as a species are those best adapted to their niche or able to adapt to environmental change.

Poison and venom often are used interchangeably because once in the body, the chemicals can do similar damage, attacking the heart, brain or other vital organs but the meanings are different.  That said, there are many venoms which can be ingested without ill-effect because they are dangerous only if entering the bloodstream although that can happen through a minor cut in the mouth so the practice is not without risk.  Typically, venomous creatures bite, sting or stab their victims whereas for poisonous organisms to affect the living, they have to be bitten, inhaled or touched.  The venomous thus need a way in, like fangs or teeth.  The useful rule is: If one bites something and one dies, what one bit contained poison; if something bites one and one dies, one was bitten by something venomous.  Of course one is just as dead whether the cause was ingesting poison, the bite of a venomous snake or being murdered by the Freemasons but the difference is important for those signing death certificates.

Lindsay Lohan in pink orchid veavage swimsuit next to potted pink orchid, Phuket, Thailand, December, 2017.  It was during this holiday the wire services reported “Lindsay Lohan bitten by snake on holiday in Thailand” and almost instantly the grammar Nazis tweeted on X (then known as Twitter) demanding proof the snake really was taking a vacation; standards have fallen since sub-editors went extinct but errors like this may vanish as AI (artificial intelligence) bots replace flesh & blood journalists.  Ms Lohan made a full-recovery; there was no word on the fate of the (presumably non-venomous) serpent.