Foxbat

Foxbat or fox-bat (pronounced foks-bat)

(1) As Foxbat, the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) reporting name for the Soviet-era MiG-25 (Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25) high-altitude supersonic interceptor and reconnaissance aircraft.

(2) A common name for members of the Megachiroptera (the Pteropus (suborder Yinpterochiroptera), a genus of megabats), some of the largest bats in the world.

Fox is from the Middle English fox, from the Old English fox (fox), from the Proto-West Germanic fuhs, from the Proto-Germanic fuhsaz (fox), from the primitive Indo-European púḱsos (the tailed one), derive possibly from puḱ- (tail).  It was cognate with the Scots fox (fox), the West Frisian foks (fox), the Fering-Öömrang North Frisian foos, the Sölring and Heligoland fos, the Dutch vos (fox), the Low German vos (fox), the German Fuchs (fox), the Icelandic fóa (fox), the Tocharian B päkā (tail, chowrie), the Russian пух (pux) (down, fluff), the Sanskrit पुच्छ (púccha) (source of the Torwali پوش‎ (pūš) (fox) and the Hindi पूंछ (pūñch) (tai”).

Bat in the context of the animal was a dialectal variant (akin to the dialectal Swedish natt-batta) of the Middle English bake & balke, from the North Germanic. The Scandinavian forms were the Old Swedish natbakka, the Old Danish nathbakkæ (literally “night-flapper”) and the Old Norse leðrblaka (literally “leather-flapper”).  The Old English word for the animal was hreremus, from hreran (to shake) and it was known also as the rattle-mouse, an old dialectal word for "bat", attested from the late sixteenth century.  A more rare form, noted from the 1540s, was flitter-mouse (the variants were flinder-mouse & flicker-mouse) in imitation of the German fledermaus (bat) from the Old High German fledaron (to flutter).  In Middle English “bat” and “old bat” were used as a (derogatory) term to describe an old woman, perhaps a suggestion of witchcraft rather than a link to bat as "a prostitute who plies her trade by night".  It’s ancient slang and one etymologist noted the French equivalent hirondelle de nuit (night swallow) was "more poetic".  To “bat the eylids” is an Americanism from 1847, an extended of the earlier (1610s) meaning "flutter (the wings) as a hawk", a variant of bate.  Fox-bat is a noun; the noun plural is fox-bats.  When used of the MiG-25 (as "Foxbat", the NATO reporting name), it's a proper noun and thus used with an initial capital.

Fox-bat in flight.

The term fox-bat or flying fox, (genus Pteropus), covers some sixty-five bat species found on tropical islands from Madagascar to Australia and north through Indonesia and mainland Asia.  Most species are primarily nocturnal and are the largest bats, some attaining a wingspan of 5 feet (1.5 m) with an overall body length of some 16 inches (400 mm).  Zoologists list fox-bats as “Old World fruit bats” (family Pteropodidae) that roost in large numbers and eat fruit and are thus a potential pest, many countries restricting their importation.  Like nearly all Old World fruit bats, flying foxes use sight rather than echolocation, a physiological process for locating distant or invisible objects (such as prey) by means of sound waves reflected back to the emitter by the objects) to navigate, despite the largely nocturnal habit of most species.  In the database maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), about half of all flying fox species are listed as suffering declining populations, 15 said to be vulnerable and 11 endangered. The fox-bats were previously classified in the suborder Megachiroptera, but most researchers now place them in the suborder Yinpterochiroptera, which also contains the superfamily Rhinolophoidea, a diverse group that includes horseshoe bats, trident bats, mouse-tailed bats, and others.

MiG-25 (Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25).

Once the most controversial fighter in the skies, there was so much mystery surrounding the MiG-25 that US, British and NATO planners spent years spying on it with a mixture of awe and dread.  Conceived originally by Soviet designers to counter the threat posed by Boeing’s B-70 Valkyrie bomber, development continued even after the B70 project, rendered redundant by advances in missile technology, was cancelled.  First flown in 1964 and entering service in 1970, nearly 1200 were built and were operated by several nations as well as the USSR.  Able (still) to outrun any other fighter, only the US Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was faster but fewer than three dozen of those were built and those were configured only for strategic reconnaissance.  When first the West became aware of the Foxbat, it caused quite a stir because, combining stunningly high speed with high altitude tolerance and a heavy weapons load, it did appear to be the long-feared platform which would render Soviet airspace immune from US penetration.  It was the threat the Foxbat was thought to pose which was influential in the direction pursued by US engineers when developing the McDonnell Douglas F15.

A brunette-phase Lindsay Lohan in MiG-25 Foxbat T-shirt, rendered by Vovsoft as pen drawing.

The Foxbat however never realized its apparently awesome implications. Because the original design brief was to produce a device which could combat the fast, high-flying B-70, many of the characteristics desirable in a short-range interceptor were neglected in the quest for something which could get very high, very quickly.  At that it was a breathtakingly successful but there were compromises, the fuel burn was epic and, with a very high take-off and landing speed, it could operate only from the longest runways.  Still, at what it was good at it was really good and its very presence meant the US had to plan any mission within range of a Foxbat, cognizant of the threat it was thought to present.  Unbeknown to the West, at lower altitudes it presented little threat and was no dog-fighter; it was essentially a dragster built for the skies, faster in a straight line than just about anything but really not good at turning.  Its design philosophy was essentially the same as the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, a US supersonic interceptor which first flew in 1954 with over 2,500 built and supplied to many air forces, the last of which wasn’t retired from active service until 2004.  An uncompromising machine built for speed, pilots dubbed it the “winged missile” and that assessment was not unrelated to it later gaining the nickname “widow-maker”; those who flew the thing described the characteristics it exhibited in low speed turns as: “banking with intent to turn”.

It wasn’t until 1976 when a Soviet defector landed a new Foxbat in Japan in 1976 that US engineers were able to examine the airframe and draw an understanding of its capabilities.  What their analysis found was that the limitations in Soviet metallurgy and manufacturing techniques had resulted in a heavy airframe, one which really couldn’t maneuver at high speeds, and handled poorly at low altitudes. The surprisingly primitive radar was of limited effectiveness in conventional combat situations against enemy fighters, which, combined with the low altitude clumsiness meant that its drawbacks tended to outweigh the advantage it had in sheer speed at altitude, something which meant less to the US since missiles had replaced the B-70 strategic bomber (which never entered production).

In its rare combat outings, those advantages did however confer the occasional benefit.  In 1971, a Soviet Foxbat operating out of Egypt used its afterburners to sustain Mach 3 for an extended duration, enabling it to outrun three pursuing Israeli F4-Phantoms and one downed a US Navy F/A-18 Hornet during the first Gulf War (1991).  During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the Iraqi Air Force found them effective against old, slow machinery but sustained heavy losses when confronted with the Iran’s agile F-14 but most celebrated was probably the Foxbat’s success during the Gulf War in claiming both of the last two American aircraft lost in air-to-air combat.  Otherwise, the Foxbat has at low altitude proved vulnerable, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) shooting down several in the war over Lebanon (1981) although they have of late been used, most improbably, in a ground attack role in the Syrian Civil War, the Syrian Arab Air Force, lacking a more appropriate platform, pressing the Foxbats into a ground support role, in at least one case using air-to-air missiles to attack ground targets.  The Soviet designers took note of the operating environment when developing the Foxbat’s successor, the MiG-31 (NATO reporting name Foxhound), a variant which sacrificed a little of the pure speed and climb-rate in order to produce a better all-round fighter.

Usually unrelated: 1957 Morris Minor Traveller (left) and 1960 Jaguar XK150 FHC (right).  Stations wagons with wood frames (real and fake) are in the US called "woodies" but the spelling "woody" also appears in UK use.

Although for the whole of the Jaguar XK150’s production run (1957-1961) the Morris Minor Traveller (1952-1973) was also being made in factories never more than between 20-60 odd miles (32-100 km) distant, so different in form and function were the two it’s rare they’re discussed in the same context.  One was powered by an engine which had five times won the Le Mans 24 hour endurance classic while the other was one of several commercially-oriented variants of a small, post-war economy car, introduced in the austere England of 1948.  The Traveller did however have charm and it was also authentic in its construction, the varnished ash genuinely structural, an exoskeleton which provided the strength while the panels behind were there just to keep out the rain.  By contrast, by the mid-1950s, the US manufacturers had abandoned the method and produced “woodies” with a combination of fibreglass (fake timber) and DI-NOC, (Diurno Nocturna, from the Spanish, literally “daytime-nighttime” and translated for marketing purposes as “beautiful day & night”) appliqué, an embossed vinyl or polyolefin material with a pressure-sensitive adhesive backing produced since the 1930s and perfected by Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing (3M).  In phased releases over 1957-1958, Jaguar made available the usual three versions of its XK sports car, the DHC (drophead coupé, a style which elsewhere was usually called a cabriolet or convertible) and FHC (fixed head coupé, ie coupé), later joined by the more minimalist OTS (open two-seater, a roadster) and the line was a link between flowing lines of the 1930s and the new world, celebrated by the E-Type (1961-1974) which created such a sensation upon debut at the 1961 Geneva Motor Show.

Minor modification: 1960 Jaguar XK150 3.4 Shooting Brake (“Foxbat”).

The Morris Minor Traveller was the last true woodie in production and is now a thing in the lower reaches of the collector market but there's one less available for fans because one was sacrificed to a project by by industrial chemist and noted Jaguar enthusiast, the late Geoffrey Stevens, construction undertaken between 1975-1977. He wanted the Jaguar XK150 shooting brake the factory never made so blended a XK150 FHC with the rear compartment of a Morris Minor Traveller of similar vintage.  Mr Stevens in 1976 dubbed his hybrid creation “Foxbat” because just as a MiG-25 landing in Japan was an event so unexpected it made headlines around the world, he suspected that in the circles he moved, a timber-framed XK150 shooting brake would be as much a surprise.  It has been restored as a charming monument to English eccentricity and even the usually uncompromising originality police among the Jaguar community seem fond of it.  In a nice touch (and typical of an engineer’s attention to detail), a “Foxbat” badge was hand-cut, matching the original Jaguar script.  Other than the coach-work, the XK150 is otherwise “matching-numbers” (chassis number S825106DN; engine number V7435-8).   

On the Wings of a Russian Foxbat: Deep Purple bootleg, 1977.

The origin of the term “bootlegging” dates from the late eighteenth century when it was used by British customs and excise officers to describe the trick smugglers used hiding valuables in their large sea-boots.  Since then, it’s been applied variously including (1) the distilling, transporting and selling of unlawful liquor (2) unlicensed copies of software and (3) unauthorized recordings of music and film.  In music, bootleg recordings began to appear in some volume in the 1960s and originally were often from live performances.  Often created from tapes of dubious quality with little or no editing, these bootlegs generally were tolerated by the industry because they tended to circulate among fans who anyway purchased the official product and were thought of just a form of free promotional material.  Later, when things became more organized and bootleggers began distributing replicas of official releases, the attitude changed and for decades the software industry fought ongoing battles against bootleg copies (which in some non-Western markets represented in excess of 90% of installations).

On the Wings of a Russian Foxbat, re-released (in re-mastered form with bonus tracks) in 1995 as Live in California, Long Beach Arena, 1976.

Taken from a performance by the English heavy metal band Deep Purple at the Long Beach Arena, Los Angeles on 27 February 1976, the bootleg On the Wings of a Russian Foxbat was released in 1977 and was another example of the effect on popular culture of the Soviet pilot’s defection.  The link with the event in Japan was that the quality of the band’s performance was unexpectedly good, their reputation at the time not good (they would break-up only weeks after the Long Beach show).  Additionally, the sound quality was outstanding (certainly by the usual bootleg standards), something not then easy to achieve in outdoor venues with a raucous audience.  Curiously, the original On the Wings of a Russian Foxbat bootleg used for the cover art a picture of unsmiling soldiers from the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) from the Republic of China (then usually called “Red China” or “Communist China); presumably the bootleggers decided the star on the caps was “sufficiently Russian”.  In 1995, re-mastered, the recording (with a few bundled “extras”) was re-issued as an “official” release, the fate of many a bootleg.  With memories of the diplomatic incident in 1976 having faded, although On the Wings of a Russian Foxbat still appeared on the cover, the album was marketed as Live in California, Long Beach Arena, 1976.

Otrovert

Otrovert (pronounced ott-roh-vert)

A person unable to feel a connection to social groups or collectives; despite being welcomed and included in social settings, they feel like outsiders.

2025: A coining by US psychiatrist Dr Rami Kaminski (b 1954), who first used the word in his book his book The Gift of Not Belonging (2025), the construct being the Spanish otro (other; another) + -vert.  Otro was from the Latin alter, altera & alterum (the other), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European hélteros (the other of two); it may be compared with the Portuguese outro (from the Old Galician-Portuguese outro, from the Latin alterum (the other)) and the French autre (from Old French autre (another), from the Latin alterum).  The –vert suffix was from the Latin vertere (to turn) and was used to refer to a person with a particular personality which manifests when in the presence of others.

Otrovert is a noun; the noun plural is otroverts.  Because otrovert is a “hot word” (newly coined or an adaptation of an existing word and one which has in a short time become popular), most lexicographers are tagging it as “provisional”, the majority of “hot words and phrases” (think “six-seven”) fading from use and never gaining critical mass.  Even the idea of “popular: had (in this context) shifted because whereas once it could take months or years for a word or phrase to spread into general use, on the various platform on the internet, proliferation can be close to instant.  However, the tools used to assess “use” are rather brute-force and often are counting appearances in “lists” rather than “general use”.  For those reasons, in the technical sense, derived forms really don’t (yet) exist but if constructed the list (based on the model of other “-verts”) might include the nouns otrovertist, otroverting & otrovertness, the verb & adjective otroverted, adjectives otrovertish & otrovertesque & otrovertive and the adverbs otrovertedly & otrovertly.

Google ngram (a quantitative and not qualitative measure): Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

An ambivert is a person neither clearly extroverted nor introverted, but has characteristics of each, the construct being ambi- +‎ -vert.  Ambi- was from the Latin ambo (both) and was a doublet of the New Latin amphi-, from the Ancient Greek ἀμφί (amphí) (on both sides).  The dexter element in the Medieval Latin meant “right” and ambidexter thus was understood as “both hands being like a right hand”.  In English, the ambi- prefix is most familiar in “ambidextrous” (possessing an equal or functionally comparable ability to handle objects with both hands (in writing, music, sport etc) although it has from time to time been used figuratively (not taking sides in conflicts or being equally adept in more than one medium, genre, style etc) and even as a humorous synonym for “bisexual”.  When used in psychology, historically, ambiversion described someone with characteristics of both extroversion and introversion and thus suggested a “balanced personality”, the subject choosing to manifest the different characteristics according to what the circumstances seemed to demand.  Ambivert thus does not imply some sort of split personality or the existence of a condition like bi-polar disorder (the old manic depression) but simply reflects an individual able to undertake their social interactions in an appropriate manner.

Because the “vert words” are not really part of academic or clinical physiology, the definitions can be “elastic” and while centovert (being in the middle between introvert and extrovert) may be a synonym of ambivert, it may also be nuanced in that it suggests someone unable (or at least unwilling) to engage in introverted or extroverted behaviour, regardless of the circumstances.  A variant of the ambivert is the omnivert (someone fits into both extremes of the extroversion-introversion personality spectrum), the construct being omni + -vert.  Omni- ultimately was from the Latin omnis (all).  Again, because the “verts” are pop-psychology words there’s little to be gained from attempting to “parse the overlaps” (ie where one ends and another begins) and seems likely omniversion is simply an “enabling pre-condition” for one to possess if one is to attain the desirable “balanced state” of ambiversion.  Nobody seems yet to have coined ultravert, hypervert or ubervert but one need not spend long on social media to see the why such labels might be handy.

A self-described introvert: Lindsay Lohan explains she's an introvert; 2019 interview by broadcaster Howard Stern (b 1954).

Like other “-verts” of this ilk, otrovert was built on the model of the familiar introvert & extravert, the construct being intro + -vert.  An introvert (pronounced in-truh-vurt) is an individual who prefers (sometimes actively seeks) tranquil environments, limits social engagement and tends to a greater than average preference for solitude.  In anatomy & zoology there’s a technical meaning “a part (typically a hollow, cylindrical structure) that is or can be introverted, or turned in on itself (ie invaginate)) but the most commonly used is the psychological sense: a person characterized by concern primarily with their own thoughts and feelings.  Introverts are noted often for having a disposition that finds social engagement at least tiresome (and sometimes threatening), thus the preference for quiet solitude.  Introvert seem first to have appeared in print in the 1660s and was from the New Latin intrōvertere, the construct being intrō (within) + vertere (to turn).  The prefix intro- was from the Latin intro- (inwards) & intrā (within) + -ō (used as a verbalizer).  Although it’s not infrequent for introvert to be used as a synonym for “shy” (and in terms of observed behaviour the two phenomena can appear indistinguishable), they are definitionallly distinct.  While shyness is associated with timidity and social anxiety, introverts have a lack of interest in interpersonal engagement and a limited endurance for social contact; what that means is while the behaviours can often be the same, the underlying motivations differ.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut.

Introvert & extrovert are popular terms of self-description but they can also be aspirational and while the classic stereotype is of the introvert who “wishes they were more outgoing” there are other types.  The US pediatrician Dr Mark Vonnegut (b 1947) wrote short stories and in one he described his father’s (the author Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)) desire to be a cynical, grumpy old man who despaired of humanity but could never quite manage it because of his “inherent optimism”.  As Dr Vonnegut put it, he was “…like an extrovert who wanted to be an introvert, a very social guy who wanted to be a loner, a lucky person who would have preferred to be unlucky. An optimist posing as a pessimist, hoping people will take heed.”  Explaining the difference, he added: “Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts.  Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done.  Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow responsible.”  On the basis of his clinical experience, he observed: “I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms--it's to frighten off extroverts.”

An extrovert (pronounced ek-struh-vurt) is described typically as an outgoing, gregarious person who thrives in dynamic environments and seeks to maximize social engagement; in the jargon of psychology, it refers to someone characterized by extroversion; a person concerned primarily with the physical and social environment, thus the usual presentation as a person with a disposition energized through social engagement who tends to languish or chafe in solitude.  The word extrovert (the alternative spelling extravert (an example of the influence of German on psychology) is now rare) also emerged in the 1660s, the construct being extro- + vert.  In this case, extro- was a pseudo-Latinism prefix based upon the Latin extra- (outside, beyond), under the influence of the distinction between the Latin intro- (inwards) & intra- (inside; within).  In English, formations using the prefix tend to be restricted to words formed as antonyms of terms formed with intro-.

Introvert & extrovert (in their literal senses) were since the late seventeenth century used in science and medicine but both in the twentieth century entered general use when certain works by the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875–1961) were translated from German into English.  What seems to have given the words their greatest impetus was the appearance of commentaries on Jung written for a general audience and for these purposes binary concepts like “introvert” and “extrovert” were useful devices to encapsulate layers of meaning although the trigger may have been the 1918 paper Psycho-Analytic Study of August Comte [1798-1857; a seminal figure in sociology] by psychologist Dr Phyllis Blanchard (1895-1986).  Being a woman, Dr Blanchard has been neglected by history but, like the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Jung became what would now be called a “celebrity” psychoanalyst and that happened because advances in their field (and neurology) had made the public fascinated with the human mind and its processes (especially dreams).  Reflecting what may possibly be a professional distaste at their jargon ending up in pop-psychology texts, technical papers often use the spelling “extravert”, following Jung and his contemporaries.

The Gift of Not Belonging (2025) by Dr Rami Kaminski (b 1954).  Psychiatrist Dr Kaminski is the founder and director of the Institute for Integrative Psychiatry in New York City.

Dr Kaminski describes The Gift of Not Belonging as “…the first book to explore the distinct personality style of the otrovert - someone who lacks the communal impulse and does not fit in with any social group, regardless of its members - and to reveal all the advantages of being an otrovert and how otroverts contribute to the world.”  He explained that while otroverts enjoy deep and fulfilling one-on-one relationships, within groups they feel alienated, uncomfortable, and alone.  Unlike introverts, who crave solitude and are easily drained by social interactions, otroverts can be quite gregarious and rarely tire from one-on-one socialising; unlike loners, or people who have been marginalised based on their identity, otroverts are socially embraced and often popular - yet are unable to conform with what the group collectively thinks or cares about.  Dr Kaminski positions all this as “the great gifts of being an otrovert” by which he means someone with no affinity for a particular group is not constrained by their sense of self-worth being conditioned on the group's approval.  A champion of the otrovert, Dr Kaminski suggests they “must not be harassed to take part, but allowed to revel in their glorious difference.”

Despite vying with “psychopath” for the title of “most popular” words from psychology, neither introvert and extrovert have ever been used as diagnostic terms in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); that doesn’t mean they’re not used by clinicians, just that they’re not part of the formal jargon.  That might seem curious given their not infrequent appearances in the published history of personality psychology including Jung’s original typology (codified in their most refined form in the 1920s), the ubiquitous MBTI (Myers–Briggs Type Indicator) and the Big Five model, where Extraversion is one of the five major personality traits.  These frameworks are however psychological, not psychiatric.  The DSM does of course have an extensive section on personality disorders and many of the traits related to introversion & extraversion appear including in (1) Avoidant Personality Disorder (social inhibition—links superficially to introversion but is not the same thing) and Histrionic or Narcissistic Personality Disorders (social boldness—superficially “extraverted” traits).

However, what the DSM’s editors have in recent decades done is to avoid the use of potentially ambiguous labels and focus instead on behavioural criteria that may indicate impairment or pathology.  Especially since the 1970s, the DSM has acknowledged (even championed) the idea that many “things” once classified as deviant are really part of the “normal” human condition; reflecting that paradigm, introversion & extraversion came to be understood as “normal-range” personality traits, not indicators of disorder.  As a general principle, the DSM appears to restrict the use of terms to instances where they relate to clinically significant impairment (the emphasis on the effect on the patient rather than the mechanics of process).  This approach was institutionalized with the release of DSM-5 (2013) in which the model clearly had become one of trait-based personality assessment.

To make the point, there exists in DSM-5 & DSM-5-TR (2022) the “Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders, Section III” which describes personality traits that (more or less) correspond to what popular culture calls extraversion and introversion.  The editors however avoid the two popular words and instead breaks personality into trait domains with pathological versions of ordinary traits.  What general readers think of a “introversion” now appears in the DSM as “Detachment” although this is not pathologized unless it manifests in maladaptive extremes (chronic or persistent withdrawal; avoidance of social interaction; intimacy avoidance; a reluctance to form close relationships; anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure); mistrust of others; restricted affectivity (limited emotional expression)).  So, introverts can to some degree be “happy” with their state and just prefer frequent solitude and what the DSM calls “detachment” is invoked only when the trait is causing significant impairment or distress.

In the popular imagination, “extraversion” is associated with sociability, talkativeness, outgoing behaviour, enthusiasm (ie someone who is the “life of the party”).  That’s also obviously a “spectrum condition” and the DSM has never listed a single domain which could be classed as “high extraversion” which is good because high sociability isn’t intrinsically pathological.  Rather, should extraversion becomes maladaptive or extreme, the DSM classifies it across several domains:

(1) Attention-seeking (a facet of Antagonism) which manifests especially in Histrionic Personality Disorder.  Symptoms include an excessive need for approval, dramatic or provocative behaviour and an Intense desire to be the centre of attention.

(2) Grandiosity (a facet of Antagonism) which is characteristic of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the symptoms including social boldness (masking fragile self-esteem) and entitlement and arrogance (which, in many cases, doesn’t manifest)

(3) Impulsivity & Risk Taking (a facet of disinhibition).  This is outgoing, sensation-seeking behaviour in its pathological form and is associated with thrill-seeking, poor impulse control and a tendency to act without considering the consequences

(4) Low Detachment: This is acknowledged as the “adaptive end of Detachment” but the editors seem to list it only to “close the circle”; it’s there because logically it has to be but is certainly not treated as a disorder.

So the DSM intentionally avoids the introvert/extrovert dichotomy which is how starkly it’s understood in popular use.  This “either-or” approach obviously doesn’t map onto the way the DSM treats personality traits as spectrums with only the margins (ie the dysfunctional extremes) described.  What that does is acknowledge there is introversion & extraversion which part of the “normal” human condition and not pathological.  Additionally it’s acknowledged the behavior which in one subject may indicate “significant impairment or distress” might in another not be of concern.

Crunning & Cromiting

Crunning (pronounced khrun-ing)

In high-performance sports training, simultaneously running and crying.

Circa 2020: the construct was cr(y) + (r)unning.

Cromiting (pronounced krom-et-ing)

In high-performance sports training, simultaneously running, crying & vomiting.

Circa 2020: the construct was cr(y) + (v)omit + (runn)ing.

The verb cry was from the thirteenth century Middle English crien, from the Old French crier (to announce publicly, proclaim, scream, shout) (from which Medieval Latin gained crīdō (to cry out, shout, publish, proclaim)). The noun is from Middle English crie, from the Old French cri & crïee.  The origin of the Old French & Middle Latin word is uncertain.  It may be of Germanic origin, from the Frankish krītan (to cry, cry out, publish), from the Proto-Germanic krītaną (to cry out, shout), from the primitive Indo-European greyd- (to shout) and thus cognate with the Saterland Frisian kriete (to cry), the Dutch krijten (to cry) & krijsen (to shriek), the Low German krieten (to cry, call out, shriek”), the German kreißen (to cry loudly, wail, groan) and the Gothic kreitan (to cry, scream, call out) and related to the Latin gingrītus (the cackling of geese), the Middle Irish grith (a cry), the Welsh gryd (a scream), the Persian گریه‎ (gerye) (to cry) and the Sanskrit क्रन्दन (krandana) (cry, lamentation).  Some etymologists however suggest a connection with the Medieval Latin quiritō (to wail, shriek), also of uncertain origin, possibly from the Latin queror (to complain) through the form although the phonetic and semantic developments have proved elusive; the alternative Latin source is thought to be a variant of quirritare (to squeal like a pig), from quis, an onomatopoeic rendition of squeaking.  An ancient folk etymology understood it as "to call for the help of the Quirites (the Roman policemen).  In the thirteenth century, the meaning extended to encompass "shed tears", previously described as “weeping”, “to weep” etc and by the sixteenth century cry had displace weep in the conversational vernacular, under the influence of the notion of "utter a loud, vehement, inarticulate sound".  The phrase “to cry (one's) eyes out” (weep inordinately) is documented since 1704 but weep, wept etc remained a favorite of poets and writers.

Vomit as a verb (the early fifteenth century Middle English vomiten) was an adoption from the Latin vomitus (past participle of vomitāre) and was developed from the fourteenth century noun vomit (act of expelling contents of the stomach through the mouth), from the Anglo-French vomit, from the Old French vomite, from the Latin vomitus, from vomō & vomitare (to vomit often), frequentative of vomere (to puke, spew forth, discharge), from the primitive Indo-European root wemh & weme- (to spit, vomit), source also of the Ancient Greek emein (to vomit) & emetikos (provoking sickness), the Sanskrit vamati (he vomits), the Avestan vam- (to spit), the Lithuanian vemti (to vomit) and the Old Norse væma (seasickness).  It was cognate with the Old Norse váma (nausea, malaise) and the Old English wemman (to defile).  The use of the noun to describe the matter disgorged during vomiting dates from the late fourteenth century and is in common use in the English-speaking world although Nancy Mitford (1904–1973 and the oldest of the Mitford sisters) in the slim volume Noblesse Oblige: an Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (1956) noted “vomit” was “non-U” and the “U” word was “sick”, something perhaps to bear in mind after, if not during, vomiting. 

Run was from the Middle English runnen & rennen (to run), an alteration (influenced by the past participle runne, runnen & yronne) of the Middle English rinnen (to run), from the Old English rinnan & iernan (to run) and the Old Norse rinna (to run), both from the Proto-Germanic rinnaną (to run) and related to rannijaną (to make run), from the Proto-Indo-European hreyh- (to boil, churn”.  It was cognate with the Scots rin (to run), the West Frisian rinne (to walk, march), the Dutch rennen (to run, race), the Alemannic German ränne (to run), the German rennen (to run, race) & rinnen (to flow), the Danish rende (to run), the Swedish ränna (to run) and the Icelandic renna (to flow).  The non-Germanic cognates includes the Albanian rend (to run, run after).  The alternative spelling in Old English was ærning (act of one who or that which runs, rapid motion on foot) and that endured as a literary form until the seventeenth century.  The adjective running (that runs, capable of moving quickly) was from the fourteenth century and was from rennynge; as the present-participle adjective from the verb run, it replaced the earlier erninde, from the Old English eornende from ærning.  The meaning "rapid, hasty, done on the run" dates from circa 1300 while the sense of "continuous, carried on continually" was from the late fifteenth century.  The language is replete with phrases including “run” & “running” and run has had a most productive history: according to one source the verb alone has 645 meanings and while that definitional net may be widely cast, all agree the count is well into three figures.  The suffix –ing was from the Middle English -ing, from the Old English –ing & -ung (in the sense of the modern -ing, as a suffix forming nouns from verbs), from the Proto-West Germanic –ingu & -ungu, from the Proto-Germanic –ingō & -ungō. It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian -enge, the West Frisian –ing, the Dutch –ing, The Low German –ing & -ink, the German –ung, the Swedish -ing and the Icelandic –ing; All the cognate forms were used for the same purpose as the English -ing).

Lilly Dick (b 1999) of the Australian Women’s Rugby Sevens.

The portmanteau words crunning (simultaneously running and crying) & cromiting (simultaneously running, crying & vomiting) are techniques used in strength and conditioning training by athletes seeking to improve endurance.  The basis of the idea is that at points where the mind usually persuades a runner or other athlete to pause or stop, the body is still capable of continuing and thus signals like crying or vomiting should be ignored in the manner of the phrase “passing through the pain barrier”.  The idea is “just keep going no matter what” and that is potentially dangerous so such extreme approaches should be pursued only under professional supervision.  Earlier (circa 2015), crunning was a blend of crawl + running, a type of physical training which was certainly self-descriptive and presumably best practiced on other than hard surfaces; it seems not to have caught on.  Crunning & cromiting came to wider attention when discussed by members of the Australian Women’s Rugby Sevens team which won gold at the Commonwealth Games (Birmingham, UK, July-August 2022).  When interviewed, a squad member admitted crunning & cromiting were “brutal” methods of training but admitted both were a vital part of the process by which they achieved the level of strength & fitness (mental & physical) which allowed them to succeed.

The perils of weed.

Although visually similar (spelling & symptoms), crunning & cromiting should not be confused with "scromiting" (a portmanteau of “screaming” and “vomiting”) a word coined in the early twenty-first century as verbal shorthand for cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS).  Hyperemesis is extreme, persistent nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, a kind of acute morning sickness and CHS presents in much the same way.  The recreational use of cannabis was hardly new but CHS was novel and the medical community initially speculated the reaction (induced only in some users) may be caused either by specific genetic differences or something added to or bred into certain strains of weed although the condition appeared to be both rare and geographically distributed.  The long-term effects are unknown except for damage to tooth enamel caused by the stomach acid in the vomit.  In October 2025, a new layer of institutional respectability was gained by the concept of scromiting when the WHO (World Health Organization) announced it had added CHS to its diagnostic manual, the first time the disorder had been granted a dedicated code.  In the US, the existence of the code meant easily it could be adopted by the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and interpolated into their reporting databases, meaning physicians nationwide could identify, track and study the condition rather than listing it in the broader vomiting or gastrointestinal categories.  Although a dangerous syndrome which for generations has been suffered by a sub-set of (mostly chronic) cannabis users, despite CHS causing severe nausea, repeated vomiting, abdominal pain, dehydration, weight loss and (in rare cases), heart rhythm problems, seizures, kidney failure and death, it was only after use of the drug was made lawful in many places that increasing incidences were noted.   The data suggests in the US CHS-related vists to hospital ERs (Emergency Room) have spiked by an impressive 650% since 2016 although it’s not known to what extent this reflects the extent of the increase in use or a willingness for patients to present now there is no potential legal jeopardy.

One theory is that since “legalization” (the term somewhat misleading because on a strict constitutional interpretation the substance remains proscribed) commercial growers (some of which operate on an industrial scale) have been “improving the breed” to gain market share and historically high levels of THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol, the cannabinoid which is the most active of the psychoactive constituents) are now common in “over the counter weed, this increasing both the instance and severity of scromiting.  Intriguingly, studies of the available ER data suggested a sharp elevation in cases of CHS during the COVID-19 pandemic and that seems to have established a new baseline, vists remaining high since.  The working assumption among clinicians is the combination of stress (induced by isolation and other factors) and the access to high-potency weed (THC levels well over 20% now often detected, compared with the 5% typically during the 1990s) may have contributed to the rise.  That however remains speculative and the alternative theory is heavy, long-term cannabis use overstimulates the body's cannabinoid system, triggering the opposite of the drug’s usual anti-nausea effect.  Ceasing use is the obvious cure (strictly speaking a preventative) but one as yet not understood amelioration is a long, hot shower and although it’s wholly anecdotal, there does seem to be a link with warming the body’s surface area because those who have experimented with “breathing in steam” report no helpful effect.

Male role model: The legendary Corey Bellemore.

An athletic pursuit probably sometimes not dissimilar to the exacting business of crunning & cromiting is the Beer Mile, conducted usually on a standard 400 m (¼ mile) track as a 1 mile (1.6 km) contest of both running & drinking speed.  Each of the four laps begins with the competitor drinking one can (12 fl oz (US) (355 ml)) of beer, followed by a full lap, the process repeated three times.  The rules have been defined by the governing body which also publishes the results, including the aggregates of miles covered and beers drunk.  Now a sporting institution, it has encouraged imitators and there are a number of variations, each with its own rules.  The holder of this most illustrious world record is Canadian Corey Bellemore (b 1994), a five-time champion, who, at the Beer Mile World Classic in Portugal in July 2025, broke his own world record, re-setting the mark to 4:27.1.  That may be compared with the absolute world record for the mile, held by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj (b 1974) who in 1999 ran the distance in 3:43.13, his additional pace made possible by not being delayed by having to down four beers.

University of Otago Medical School.

Some variations of the beer mile simply increase the volume or strength of the beer consumed and a few of these are dubbed Chunder Mile (“chunder” being circa 1950s Australia & New Zealand slang for vomiting and of disputed origin) on the basis that vomiting is more likely the more alcohol is consumed.  For some however, even this wasn’t sufficiently debauched and there were events which demanded a (cold) meat pie be enjoyed with a jug of (un-chilled) beer (a jug typically 1140 ml (38.5 fl oz (US)) at the start of each of the four laps.  Predictably, these events were most associated with orientation weeks at universities, a number still conducted as late as the 1970s and the best documented seems to have been those at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.  Helpfully, at this time, it was the site of the country’s medical school, thereby providing students with practical experience of both symptoms and treatments for the inevitable consequences.  Whether the event was invented in Dunedin isn’t known but, given the nature of males aged 17-21 probably hasn’t much changed over the millennia, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn similar competitions, localized to suit culinary tastes, have been contested by the drunken youth of many places in centuries past.  As it was, even in Dunedin, times were changing and in 1972, the Chunder Mile was banned “…because of the dangers of asphyxiation and ruptured esophaguses.”

Mile

Mile (pronounced mahyl)

(1) A unit of a unit of distance on land, derived from the 1593 English statute mile (equal to 8 furlongs) and still in use in some English-speaking countries.  In 1959, in a treaty established by a number of Anglophone nations (and subsequently ratified by most), it was defined as distance equal to 5,280 feet (1,760 yards; 1.609.344 metres).

(2) Any of many customary units of length derived from the Roman mile (mille passus) of 8 stades (5,000 Roman feet).

(3) Any of a variety of other units of distance or length, used at different times in different countries.

(4) In athletics and horse racing (as “the mile”), a race run over that distance.

(5) In idiomatic use (in both the singular and plural), a notable distance or margin.

(6) As “air miles”, a unit in an airline’s frequent flyer program.

Pre 1000: From the Middle English myle & mile, from the Old English mīl, from the Proto-West Germanic mīliju, from the Latin mīlia & mīllia (plural of mīle & mīlle (mile)) which translates literally as “thousand” but was a commonly used short-form of mīlle passus (a thousand paces), thus the derived mīlia passuum (thousands of steps), duo milia passuum (two thousand paces (ie “two miles’) etc).  The origin of the Latin word is unknown and was the source also of the French mille, the Italian miglio and the Spanish milla whereas the Scandinavian forms (the Old Norse mila etc) came from English.  The West Germanic word was the source also of the Middle Dutch mile, the Dutch mijl, the Old High German mila and the German Meile.  The spelling of the German forms came about because the Latin milia (a neuter plural) was mistakenly thought a feminine singular.  Mile & mileage are nouns and miles is an adverb; the noun plural is miles.

Fuel economy for the 2017 Dodge Viper GTC, estimated according the the method mandated by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).  The 14 mpg (miles per gallon) was calculated using a weighted formula on the basis of 12 city; 19 highway and isn't as thirsty as it may sound because a US gallon (3.785412 litres) is smaller than an imperial gallon (4.546092 litres).  The inclusion of a “gallons per 100 miles” number is unique to the US.  How many Viper owners achieved this level of economy isn't known and if one is at the controls of an 8.4 litre (513 cubic inch) V10 generating 645 horsepower (HP), the temptation exists to drive in a manner Greta Thunberg (b 2003 and not a Viper owner) would condemn; the Viper GTC was fitted with a speedometer graduated to 220 mph (355 km/h).  With the governor disabled (a simple and popular task), the top speed of a 2017 Viper GTC was 196 mph (315 km/h) but for use in competition (or on the street by the lunatic fringe), modified versions could be made to exceed 220 mph ("wind the needle off the dial" in the accepted slang).  In the matter of fuel economy, at all times it's a matter of YMMV (your mileage many vary) but once a Viper was travelling much beyond 100 mph, the EPA's 14 mpg average was a distant memory.  

YMMV: 2014 SRT Viper TA 1.0 in TA Orange over TA Black leather and cloth.

The noun mileage (which appeared also as milage and although the “mute e” rule would suggest this was correct it never caught on) was in use by at least 1754 in the sense of “allowance or compensation for travel or conveyance reckoned by the mile” and that was so politicians in the North American colonies could calculate how much they could claim for travel undertaken in the course of their word.  To this day, “travel allowances” remain the “entitlements” most valued by politicians looking to “rort the system”.  From the mid 1830s, the idea of mileage as “a fixed rate per mile” came into use in railroad system charging.  The meaning “a total number of miles” (of a way made, used, or traversed) was from the 1860s while the figurative use (usefulness, derived benefit) emerged at much the same time.  The long familiar mpg (miles per gallon) was a measure of fuel economy (miles driven per gallon of fuel consumed) and came into use between 1910-1912.  When the metric system was introduced to jurisdictions previously using imperial measurement, instead of replacing mpg with kpl (kilometres per litre), the measure used was L/100 km (litres per 100 km).  According to engineers, L/100 km was preferable because it emphasised consumption and thus aligned with other measures expressed to consumers (such as electricity or emissions), the argument being the psychology of “the lower the number the better” would be standardized.  So, whereas the higher the MPG the lower was the fuel consumption whereas with L/100, greater efficiency was implied by a lower number.  In a practical sense, because Continental Europe adopted L/100 km long before widespread metrication in English-speaking countries, a convention had been established so it would not have been logical to create another expression; thus except in the US & UK, consumption follows the industry’s preferred “input per output” method.

The phrase “she's got a few miles on the clock” referred either to (1) a machine which was old or had been much used or (2) a woman either (2a) older than she represented herself to be or (2b) with a past including many sexual partners.  The “few” in this phrase is used ironically whereas if a dealer in second-hard hand cars claims a vehicle “has done only a few miles”, the clear implication is “low mileage” and the “few” must be read literally.  A car’s mileage is recorded on its odometer which historically was a mechanical device unscrupulous second-hand car salesmen (an often tautological text-string) were notorious for “tampering with” so a vehicle could be represented as “less used” and thus sold for a higher price.  Odometers are now electronic so while the tampering methods have changed, the motivations have not.  A classic example of the legal principles involved in such matters is Dick Bentley Productions Ltd v Harold Smith (Motors) Ltd [1965] EWCA Civ 2, an English contract law case concerning the purchase by the Australian-born comedian Charles Walter "Dick" Bentley (1907–1995) of a used Bentley motor car.

1939 Bentley 4¼-Litre Sedanca Coupé in the style of French coachbuilder Henri Chapron (1886-1978).

This is not the car involved in the Dick Bentley v Harold Smith case which was a 1939 Bentley 4¼-Litre DHC (Drophead Coupé) by Park Ward which had anyway been re-bodied by the time of the sale which became a matter of dispute.  At any time a 1939 Bentley DHC would have been a genuine rarity.  The pre-war production records which remain extant are fragmentary and don't detail the builds down to body-type by year but marque specialists believe Park Ward in 1939 may have built as few as four DHCs (the then usual English term for as Cabriolet) and it's known two survive. 

Dick Bentley Productions had informed Harold Smith (Motors) Ltd (a dealer in “prestige” used cars) the company wished to buy a “well vetted” Bentley and the dealer offered one they represented as “having done only 20,000 miles [32,000 km]” since a replacement engine had been fitted.  However, after purchase, it was discovered the Bentley had “done some 100,000 miles [160,000 km]” since the engine and gearbox had been replaced.  Dick Bentley sued Harold Smith for a breach of warranty and succeeded on the basis of the difference between “a representation” and “an essential term of a contract”.  Because the dealer was trading on the basis of possessing expertise in the matter of such cars, representations made by the dealer about critical matters (such as mileage) constitute “a warranty” and a bona fide consumer purchasing the product for fair value is entitled to rely on the word of such a dealer.  Dick Bentley succeeded at first instance and the case went on appeal where the dealer was found to be liable because (1) given they were in the business of trading in such vehicles and represented themselves as “experts”, either (1) they knew the mileage claim was false, (2) should have determined the claim was false or (3) were anyway in a better position than the consumer to make that determination.  The dealer thus either possessed or should have possessed “superior knowledge” compared to any non-expert consumer.  What this means is a dealer would likely always be held to have offered “a warranty” if making such a claim but the proverbial “little old lady” knowing nothing of engines and gearboxes making the same claim on the basis of what she’d been told would not be held to the same standard.  Her statement would, prima facie, be “an innocent misrepresentation”.

The terms milepost and milestone were from the mid eighteenth century and described respectively (1) a post permanently set in the ground next to a roadway to mark the distance to or from a locality and (2) a stone permanently set in the ground and engraved for the same purpose.  The now obsolete adjective milliary (of or relating to a mile, or to distance by miles; denoting a mile or miles) dates from the 1640s and was from the Latin milliarius, from mille.  The blended noun kilomile (on the model of kilometre) was a unit of length equal to 1,000 miles and seems to have existed because it could be done; it has no known use.  In physics, the light-mile is the time taken for light to travel one mile (approximately five microseconds).  The light mile has never been part of the standard set of measures in physics and probably it also was calculated by someone because it could be done; it is of no known practical use although it may have some utility in comparative tables.

Gatefold cover of Miles of Aisles.

Miles of Aisles was the first live concert album released by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (b 1943).  Released in 1974 on the Asylum label, it was a double album in the usual gatefold sleeve, the recordings from a number of concerts which were part of her tour promoting the recently released Court and Spark (1974) album.  The performances on Miles of Aisles came variously from three venues in Los Angeles: the Universal Amphitheatre, the Los Angeles Music Center and the Berkeley Community Theater.  The album’s cover art was a photograph of the Pine Knob Music Theater in Clarkston, Michigan.  While Miles of Aisles was a thoughtful title for a live concert album, the most famous Miles in music was the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (1926–1991); his output was prolific but his albums Kind of Blue (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960) were his finest and two seminal moments in the evolution of jazz.

The “Chinese mile” was the li, a traditional Chinese unit of distance equal to 1500 Chinese feet or 150 zhangs; sensibly, under the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), the li was standardized as a half-kilometre (500 metres).  The “Scandinavian mile” began in 1649 as the “Swedish mile” and was set at a distance of 10,688.54 metres before in 1889 being defined as 10 kilometres.  The “Irish mile” was equal to 2240 yards (2048.256 metres; 1.272727 miles).  The “Italian Mile” (sometimes left untranslated as miglio (miglia the plural)) was a calque of the Italian miglio (mile), with the qualifier appended to distinguish it from other miles.  Although the best remembered from the peninsular (assisted by an appearance in the diaries of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)), the miglio was one of many such regionalisms including the Genovese and Roman miles.  Italy’s shift from traditional “Italian miles” to the metric system happened gradually and unevenly over the nineteenth century, the process beginning in the period 1806-1814 as a consequence of the Kingdom of Italy being a client state of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821; leader of the French Republic 1799-1804 & Emperor of the French from 1804-1814 & 1815)).  That however proved abortive because after Napoleon’s fall in 1814, many Italian states reverted to their traditional local units (miles, braccia, libbre etc) and not until after Italian unification in 1861 was the metric system officially adopted throughout the kingdom, becoming the legally mandated system of weights and measures.  In a act of administrative efficiency which might astonish observers of the modern Italian state, a definitive law of enforcement was passed in 1862 and, by the 1870s, successfully metrics had become the standard for administration, trade, and education.

However, this was Italy and among parts of the population, the “Italian mile” remained in informal use well into the twentieth century and although the miglio generally was around 1.85 km (1.15 miles), there were many regional variants including (1) the Florentine (Tuscany) Miglio Fiorentino (1.74 km (1.08 miles)) used in Galileo’s era, (2) the Venetian Miglio Veneto (almost identical to the Florentine, (3) the Roman Miglio Romano (1.48 km (.92 miles) which was essentially the old “Roman mile”, (4) the Neapolitan Miglio Napoletano (1.852 km (1.15 miles) which was the Mediterranean state’s contribution to the development of the nautical mile and (5) the Milanese Miglio Milanese which, at 1.85 km (1.495 miles) was close to the English nautical mile.  What also remained was the nostalgic, romantic attraction of the old words and although in 1927 when the Mille Miglia (Thousand Miles) road race was established, Italy had for decades fully “been metric”, the name was used to evoke the idea of a long tradition of endurance.  The memorable phrase “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” is the opening line in the novel The Go-Between (1953) by the English writer L. P. Hartley (1895–1972) and to illustrate his point there is the old Mille Miglia, still in living memory.

The Mille Miglia was a round trip from Rome to Brescia and back and by the mid 1950s the cars had become very fast (speeds of 180 mph (290 km/h) were recorded and the 1955 race was won by a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR (W196S) with an average speed close to 100 mph (160 km/h)).  At the time, that was dangerous enough even on a purpose-built circuit but the Mille Miglia was an event run on public roads which, while closed for the occasion, were poorly supervised and crowd control was in many places non-existent, people forming along the roadside to ensure the best view, literally inches from cars travelling at high speed.  Over thirty years, the race had claimed the lives of 30 souls but the eleven in 1957 would be the last because within days, the Italian government banned all motor racing on Italian public roads although since 1977 an event of the same name over much the same course has been run for historic vehicles which competed in the event in period (or were accepted and registered).  Now very much a social occasion for the rich, it's not a high-speed event.  The original event had been one of the classic events on the calendar in an era in which top-line drivers counted on attending a couple of funerals a year (possibly their own) and it’s the 1955 race to which a particular aura still lingers.

300 SLR (Moss & Jenkinson), Mille Migla, 1955.

Won by Stirling Moss (1929-2020) and Denis Jenkinson (1920-1996), their Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR technically complied with the sports car regulations but it was really the factory's formula one machine (W196R) with a bigger engine and a streamlined body with seats for two.  It wasn't exactly a "grand prix car with headlights" as some claimed but wasn't that far off; officially the W196S (Sports) in the factory register, for marketing purposes it was dubbed (and badged) as the 300 SLR to add lustre to the 300SL Gullwing coupé then on sale.  The race was completed in 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds, a average speed of 157.650 km/h (97.96 mph) (the course was never exactly 1000 miles and that year was 1,597 km (992 miles) and at times, the 300 SLR touched almost 180 mph which enabled Moss to cover the last 340 km (211 miles) at an average speed of 265.7 km/h (165.1) mph.  The record set in 1955 will stand for all time because such a race will never happen again, the Italy which then existed now truly a “foreign country” in which things were done differently

Falstaff (Campanadas a medianoche (Chimes at Midnight, 1966) in the original Spanish) was a film written and directed by Orson Welles (1915–1985) who starred as the eponymous character.  Falstaff is a classic “miles gloriosus” and Welles considered him Shakespeare's finest creation; scholars will debate that but of all of the all, there was probably no role more suited to Welles the larger.

In literary use, the term “miles gloriosus” originated in a comedy by Plaurus (254-184 BC).  The miles gloriosus was a braggart soldier who, although a coward on the battlefield, boasts of heroic deeds in combat; he was the prototype of a stock character comic drama, the one whose true character is either notorious or discovered and is thus in the cast to be made a fool of by other players.  In English drama he first appeared eponymously in the five act play Ralph Roister Doister (circa 1552 although not published until 1567) by the English cleric & schoolmaster Nicholas Udall (1504-1556).  The play was something of a landmark in literature because it was one of the first works written in English which could be classed as a “comedy” in the accepted meaning of the word.  As a text it was of interest to the proto-structuralists because it blended the conventions of Greek & Roman comedies with the traditions of the English mediaeval theatre but the great innovation was the appearance of recognizably “middle class” characters as protagonists rather than the “supporting cast role” of doctors & lawyers who had played “second fiddle” to the mostly royal or aristocratic players.  That the “growth market” in theatre audiences came from this newly burgeoning class may at least in part accounted for the literary novelty and its development clearly is identifiable in some of the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616).  Bobadill in Ben Jonson's (circa 1572-1637) Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Captain Brazen in George Farquhar's (1677-1707) The Recruiting Officer (1706) were exemplars of the playwrights’ depictions of a braggart but just in case people didn’t get it, in his epic-length fantastical allegory The Faerie Queene (1590), the English poet Edmund Spenser (circa 1552-1599) called his creation Braggadochio.  The epitome of the breed was Shakespeare's Falstaff.  Sir John Falstaff was useful to Shakespeare who had him appear in Henry IV, Part 1 (circa 1596), Henry IV, Part 2 (circa 1598) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602).  He was also granted a posthumous reference in Henry V (circa 1599), in which it's reported he has died off-stage.

The “last mile” is a concept in urban planning, transport logistics and telecommunications.  In urban planning, it refers to the final leg of an individual’s journey (traditionally Monday-Friday) from their residence to their place of word in a city’s CBD (central business district).  In modern cities, it’s a matter of great significance because while it is possible for a great number of people to park their cars at train stations or other transport interchanges a mile or more from the CBD, it would be impossible to accommodate all these vehicles in the CBD.  In transport logistics, it describes the final stage of delivery of goods, etc, from a distribution centre to the consumer, often involving greater effort or expense.  In telecommunications, it’s a conceptual term assigned to those components of the infrastructure carrying communication signals from the main system to the end user's business or home, often involving greater expense to install and maintain, and lower transmission speeds.  The terms “final mile”, “last kilometre” etc are synonymous.  The companion term “first mile” is from transport logistics and refers to the initial stage of delivery of goods etc, from the seller or producer to a distribution centre, often involving greater effort or expense.  A “middle mile” is a piece of jargon from the IT industry and refers to the segment of a telecommunications network linking an operator's core network to the local network plant.  Real nerds like to explain it as something like the “middleware layer” between software and hardware but the analogy is weak.

A “nautical mile” is a unit of length corresponding approximately to one minute of arc of latitude along any meridian.  By international agreement it is exactly 1,852 metres (approximately 6,076 feet or 1.151 of a statute mile; the abbreviations variously used are NM, M, nmi & nm (the latter conflicting with nanometre symbol although confusion is unlikely).  The term “sea mile” is now rarely used but in its odd appearance it’s either (1) a synonym for “nautical mile” or (2) (usually as “sea miles”) a reference to the age of a ship or experience of a sailor.  The original “sea mile” was a now obsolete Scandinavian unit of distance (about 4 nautical miles), a calque of the Danish sømil, the Norwegian Bokmål sjømil and the Swedish sjömil, the construct being the Danish sø (sea, nautical, maritime) + mil (the Danish mile or league).  The geographical mile (a unit of length corresponding to exactly one minute of arc (1/60 of a degree) along the Earth's equator (about 1855.4 meters, 2029.1 yards, or roughly 8/7 international miles) was also used as (an inexact) synonym of “nautical mile”.

Eight Miles High, the Byrds (CBS EP (Extended Play).

Many critics list Eight Miles High (1966) by The Byrds as the first true psychedelic rock song and the band's claim it had nothing to do with drug use was about as creditable as the Beatles asserting their song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (1967) was not a thinly veiled reference to LSD (the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as “acid”).  The lyrics from Eight Miles High genuinely were inspired by the band's flight to London in 1965 but “eight” was chosen because it best suited the music, even though commercial airliners didn't fly at quite that altitude.  At the time, the typical flight paths for the New York-London route involved a ceiling somewhat lower: Boeing 707, 33,000-37,000 feet (6.25-7.00 miles); Douglas DC-8, 32,000-39,000 feet (6.06-7.39 miles); Vickers VC10, 33,000-40,000 feet (6.25-7.58 miles).  In the context of artistic licence, eight was “close enough for rock 'n' roll”.  The song by the Byrds was not an allusion to the “mile-high club”, an institution one (informally) becomes a member of by having sex while aboard an aircraft in flight.  Although now most associated with those who contrive to do the act(s) on a commercial flight, “membership” has been claimed by those who managed the feat in both private and military aviation and the first known reference to the concept dates from 1785, early in the age of the hot-air balloon although the threshold then was set to a more modest 1,000 feet (0.1893939 of a mile).

The “international mile” is the same as the “land mile” & “modern mile” (ie the internationally agreed definition of 1.609344 kilometres) and the rarely used terms were coined simply to remove ambiguity in legal or other documents because over the centuries “mile” had in different places described distances greatly differing in length.  The mysterious “US survey mile” (1609.347 metres) is slightly longer than the now almost universal “international mile” and that’s a product of it being 5,280 US “survey feet” (0.30480061 metres) in length, the latter also slightly longer than the familiar 12 inch (304.8 mm) “international foot”).  To make things really murky, in the US, in formal use, a “statute mile” refers to a “survey mile” despite the lengths being slightly different.  Because the variation is less than ⅛ inch (3.2 mm), for most purposes this is something of no significance but over very long distances, it can matter if things like boundaries or target vectors are being documented, thus the need for precision in certain aspects of mapping.  Being a federal system with a long tradition of “states rights”, even when in 1983 the revised North American Datum (NAD83) was compiled and published by the NGS (National Geodetic Survey, a part of the NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration under the Department of Commerce)), the states retained the right to determine which (if any) definitions of distance they would use.  So, despite all State Plane Coordinate Systems being expressed in metric measurements, eight of the 50 states opted out of the metre-based system, seven using “US survey feet” and one “international feet”.

A “sporting” pursuit which merges the traditions of athletic track & field competition with the drunken antics of university students, the “Beer Mile” is conducted usually on a standard 400 m (¼ mile) track as a 1 mile (1.6 km) contest of both running & drinking speed.  Each of the four laps begins with the competitor drinking one can (12 fl oz (US) (355 ml)) of beer, followed by a full lap, the process repeated three times.  The rules have been defined by the governing body which also publishes the results, including the aggregates of miles covered and beers drunk.  Now a sporting institution, it has encouraged imitators and there are a number of variations, each with its own rules.  The holder of this most prestigious world record is Canadian Corey Bellemore (b 1994), a five-time champion, who, at the Beer Mile World Classic in Portugal in July 2025, broke his own world record, re-setting setting the mark to 4:27.1.  That may be compared with the absolute world record for the mile, held by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj (b 1974) who in 1999 ran the distance in 3:43.13, his additional pace made possible by not being delayed by having to down four beers.

The respectable face of the University of Otago's Medical School, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Some variations of the beer mile simply increase the volume or strength of the beer consumed but in Australia & New Zealand, some were dubbed “Chunder Mile” (chunder being circa 1950s antipodean slang for vomiting and of disputed origin) on the not unreasonable basis that vomiting becomes increasingly more likely and frequent the more alcohol is consumed.  For some however, even this wasn’t sufficiently debauched and there were events which demanded a (cold) meat pie be enjoyed with a jug of (un-chilled) beer (a jug typically 1140 ml (38.5 fl oz (US)) at the start of each of the four laps.  Predictably, these events were most associated with orientation weeks at universities, a number still conducted as late as the 1970s and the best documented seems to have been those at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.  Even by the standards of a country producing abundant supplies of strong beer and weed, the students at Otago were notorious for retreating from civilized ways although, it was at the time the site of the country’s medical school, thereby providing students with practical experience of both symptoms and treatments for the inevitable consequences.  Whether the event was invented in Dunedin isn’t known but, given the nature of males aged 17-25 probably hasn’t much changed over the millennia, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn similar competitions, localized to suit culinary tastes, have been contested by the drunken youth of many places in centuries past.  As it was, even in Dunedin, times were changing and in 1972, the Chunder Mile was banned “…because of the dangers of asphyxiation and ruptured esophaguses.”  Undetred, the students found other amusements.

In idiomatic use, to say “a mile wide and an inch deep” suggests someone or something covering a wide array of topics but on only a very shallow level (thus analogous with “jack of all trades and master of none”.  Despite the negative connotations, the “mile wide, inch deep” model can in many fields be useful.  In informal use, a “neg mile” is a unit of “saved travel” (ie an expression of a distance not having to be travelled).  A “mile-a-minute” means literally “60 mph” but was an expression used generally to mean “fast”, dating on a time where such a pace really was fast and although the World’s LSR (land speed record) was in 1899 set at 65.79 mph (105.88 km/h) and cars capable of the speed were in volume production by the 1920s, until the development of freeway systems (which, at scale, really began only in the 1950s), a sustained 60 mph wasn’t an everyday reality for most.  Indeed, in 1957 the admittedly hardly state-of-the-art British railway system was described as offering “mile-a-minute” journeys and then, in most cases, point-to-point, it would have been the quickest method.

Lindsay Lohan and Herbie: promotional poster for Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005).  In the film, Herbie went faster than a “mile-a-minute”.

Although Herr Professor Ferdinand Porsche (1875–1951) wouldn’t have used the expression “mile-a-minute” when explaining to Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) the dynamics of his KdF-Wagen, one of his claims was its ability to cruise “all day at 100 km/h” (ie a mile-a-minute) and that was true, the car unusual in being able to cruise at what was about its maximum speed.  That wouldn’t much have mattered were it not for the existence of the vast network of Autobahns Hitler was having constructed for a variety of reasons (job creation, military logistics, propaganda etc) but all those long roads and the KdF-Wagen were a perfect match.  The KdF-wagen (Kdf car) was notionally the product of the Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude (KdF, “Strength Through Joy”), the state-controlled organization which was under the auspices of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front) which replaced the independent labor unions.  The car was soon renamed the Volkswagen Type 1 (people’s car) and it became better known in the post-war years as the “Beetle”, 21,529,464 of which left assembly lines between 1938-2003.  In the spirit of the KdF, in 1938 a scheme was announced whereby Germans could buy a Type 1 for 990 RM (Reichsmark) on the basis of depositing 5 RM per week.  The 990 RM was a number unrelated to economic reality and just an example of the regime’s propaganda but as things turned out, during the Third Reich (1933-1945) not one Type 1 was delivered to a civilian customer with the factory’s entire output allocated to the military or the Nazi Party.  It wasn’t until the early 1960s there were settlements in the last of the cases brought by those Germans who dutifully had for years continued to make their 5 RM deposits.

Since the 1580s the word had been used generically to mean “a great distance” and it’s used also as an intensifier, sometimes rather loosely and an expression like “the new beer tastes miles better than the old” is along the lines of a well understood phrase like “heaps of water”.  Although in idiomatic use, “mile” tends to imply something large, if an actual distance is being referenced, context matters because something said to have “missed by a mile” might literally have “missed by an inch”.  Related to that is the expression “a miss is a good as a mile” which means if one misses the target, often it matters not whether one missed by a fraction of an inch or a thousand miles..  If it’s said “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” that means if someone is granted some slight right or concession, they will exploit that to take more.  In Middle English the word also was a unit of time, reckoned usually to mean “about 20 minutes”, reflecting how long it would take the typical, fit male to walk the distance.  The term "country mile" is an allusion to those those living in rural areas being allegedly prone to understating distances: when an inhabitant of somewhere remote referred to a place being "a few miles away", that could mean it was close by their standards of travel but it may well be twenty or more miles distant.  Phrases like "a couple of miles" or "a mile or two" were more encouraging but unlikely to suggest the "two miles" use in a city would imply.  Thus, "missed by a country mile" suggests being even more off target than "missed by a mile.   

A Chrysler Hemi-powered front-engined rail on California's Carlsbad Raceway's quarter-mile drag strip, 1964.  Operating between 1964-2004, the track was located six miles (10 km) inland from the Pacific Ocean in Carlsbad, on Palomar Airport Road at what is now Melrose Avenue.

The “quarter-mile” is literally one quarter of a statute mile (440 yards; 1,320 feet; 402.336 metres).  The emergence in the post-war United States of the sport of drag racing was a product of (1) dotted around the country there were a large number of tarmac airstrips which had become surplus with the end of World War II (1939-1945), (2) a large number of young men returned from service in the armed forces with sufficient disposable income to race cars and (3) a stocks of cars suitable to be “hotted-up” for use in acceleration tests.  The quarter-mile became the sport’s “standard distance” because of a mixture of cultural precedent and technical determinism (of the machines and the surfaces).  In the 1930s, even before “hot rodding” became a thing in the post-war years, young men were “street racing”, competing against each either from “light-to-light” or on semi-rural roads straight enough to be (1) suitable for purpose and (2) offering enough visibility to allow competitors to escape upon sighting a police car.  Many were informally measured (“tree-to-tree” for example) but some were better organized (air-strips even then used) and the quarter-mile was ideal because in the era a typical “well-set up” car could attain speed high enough to demonstrate its power and acceleration yet still be within the limits of safety imposed by most straight sections of road.  When the NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) was founded in 1951 to provide an organizational structure to street racing (and “get it off the streets” where it was becoming controversial), there was no debate about the default distance: a ¼ mile it was because that’s what just about everybody had been doing.

AC Shelby American Cobra 289 CSX2357 with parachute deployed at the end of test ¼ mile (400 m) run.  In drag racing circles, this is called “dumping the laundry”.

The object in drag racing was, from a standing start, to beat one’s competitor (classically drag races were conducted on two parallel lanes) by reaching the end of the quarter mile is less time and the winner was the one with the lowest ET (elapsed time); it didn’t matter if one’s opponent was travelling faster when crossing the line; it was all decided by the ET.  The TS (terminal speed) was of interest and sometimes an indication gearing was too high (ie a differential ratio numerically too low) meaning initial acceleration was suffering.  The sport produced sometimes shockingly single-purpose machines which did little very well except the quarter mile sprint, the ability to turn corners something of an abstraction and while good brakes were required, the fastest cars needed to be fitted with parachutes because if relying on conventional brakes, there was often not enough space to slow down before encountering a fence, tree or other solid object; even runways were only so long.  So drag racing was a balancing act between performance and safety and as it evolved into a multi-classification sport with categories ranging from genuine, stock-standard road cars to purpose built “rails” which looked like no car which had ever before existed.  Speeds began to rise and while in the 1930s 100 mph (160 km/h) at the end of the quarter mile was rarely attained, within decades, going beyond 300 mph (480 km/h) became common so for the fastest classes in top-flight competition the distance was reduced to 1000 feet (304.8 metres, 0.19 miles) and ⅛ mile (201 metres, 660 feet) racing has also formed a niche.