Ayatollah

Ayatollah (pronounced ah-yuh-toh-luh)

In Shiʿite Islam, a high title in the religious hierarchy achieved by scholars who have demonstrated advanced knowledge of Islamic law and religion.

1300s: A Persian word from the Arabic āyat (sign, testimony, miracle, verses of the Qurʿān) and allāh (God).  The Arabic ayatu-llah is literally "miraculous sign of God", the word Ayatollah (āyatullāh) best translated as “sign of God” although there are variations.  Word originates from passage 51:20–21 in the Qurʿān which the Shi'a, unlike the Sunni, interpret to mean human beings can be regarded as “signs” or “evidence” of God.  It’s most familiar now from the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Persian آیت‌الل romanized as āyatollāh where it’s an honorific title for high-ranking Twelver Shia clergy in Iran (and now also Iraq) that came into widespread use in the mid-late twentieth century.  There are variants: āyatallāh fī al-anām (آية الله في الأنعام), literally “Sign of God among mankind”, āyatallāh fī al-ʿālamayn (آية الله في العالمَین‎), literally “Sign of God in the two worlds”, fī al-ʿālamīn (في العالمین‎), literally “in the worlds” and āyatallāh fī al-warā (آية الل في الوراء), literally “Sign of God among mortals”.

Ayatollah (āyatullāh) is an honorific title in the clerical hierarchy in Twelver Imamite Shiism, bestowed by popular usage on those who have demonstrated outstanding scholarship both in Islamic jurisprudence and the holy Qur’ān.  Although the title had existed since medieval times, until well into the twentieth century, use was restricted to senior clerics (mujtahids) of Persian origin.  An imitation of the title ẓill Allāh (shadow of God) was traditionally applied to Persian Islamic rulers, which was confirmed by the use of āyat Allāh zādah (son of ayatollah), a counterpart of shāh zādah (son of the shah).  The first reputed bearer, Ibn al-Muṭahhar al-Ḥillī (d 1374), was styled Ayatollah in the twelfth century but it remained rare and didn’t come into general use until the late Qājār period (1796-1925) when, in 1922, Abd al-Karīm Ḥāʿirī-Yazdī founded the new theological centre of Qom.

Besides being a fully qualified mujtahid, the scholarship and theological authority of an aspiring ayatollah must be acknowledged by both his peers and followers.  In the period between the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 and the 1979 Iranian revolution, the title ayatollah became (although rare until the 1940s) clerically more ubiquitous, extended even (against their own traditions) to Sunnī religious dignitaries although, in Iran, the Sunni community does not use the title and it remains rare outside of Iran although in Iraq, is remains available to clerics of Iranian origin.  After the 1979 Iranian revolution, there were significant changes.  The title became more exclusive and a seven tier hierarchy was codified, including the role of nāyib-i imām (lieutenant of the imam), reflecting the assumption of both temporal and spiritual power by Ayatollah Khomeini who anyway removed any suggestion of collective theocratic rule with his adoption of the title imām, something historically unusual in Twelver Shīʿī.  Until then, the concept of niyābat (general vicegerency of the Hidden Imam) was purely theoretical.

Thoughts of Ayatollahs

"An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious."

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900-1989; Supreme Leader, Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979-1989).

"The Victorian government must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Victoria. There is no humor in Victoria. There is no fun in Victoria. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious."

Grand Ayatollah Daniel Andrews (b 1972), premier of the Australian state of Victoria since 2014.

The title Grand Ayatollah (Ayatollah al-Uzma) (Great Sign of God) is sometimes misunderstood and in none of the strains of Islam does a defined hierarchical clerical structure exist in the manner of the classical theocratic model employed in the Roman Catholic Church.  Being a Grand Ayatollah is not necessarily an indication of a place of high authority in any administrative structure.  Grand Ayatollah was a (historically rarely granted) honor and one afforded to an Ayatollah whose contribution to learning and knowledge of the holy Koran is such they are considered Marja'-e-Taqlid, (Grand Ayatollah now the usual form).  Although, practices have varied, for the title to be conferred, an Ayatollah would have been expected to have produced a substantial body of Islamic scholarship but analysts have concluded the favored works have tended to be those reflecting Koranic orthodoxy and of practical application rather than abstract explorations of the esoteric.  Again, because it’s not a centralized system, the number of active Grand Ayatollahs in Iran isn’t clear but they’re said to number in the dozens.

As a formal prelude to achieving the status, a treatise (risalah-yi'amaliyyah) (practical law treatise) is usually published, almost always a work which draws on and reinforces earlier traditions rather than anything new or controversial.  In this it’s more like the modern Western PhD dissertation, many of which appear not a genuinely new contribution to much.  The convention however works in conjunction with the political structures of state which in 1979 were absorbed by the revolution.  Upon assuming office as Supreme Leader in 1989, Ali Khamenei (b 1939) was granted the title Ayatollah although there appears to be no great history of Koranic scholarship and certainly not the customary risalah-yi'amaliyyah.  In recent years, there seems also to have been a bit of a nudge by the state-controlled media which sometimes refer to him as Grand Ayatollah or even Imam.  Foreign monitoring agencies however have reported the Iranian people seem unresponsive to the prodding and use of “Imam” seems still a historic reference only to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

There has been a bit clerical inflation since the death of the Imam.  Although there exists in Shia Islam no codified hierarchical structure of ecclesiastical offices, observers have identified shifting conventions which move with the political climate of the day.  Possession of the more exalted titles used to depend on popular assent, granted only to the most prominent religious figures and those who were of necessity a Mujtahid, an important pre-condition being a demonstrable superiority in learning (aʿlamīyat) and authority (riyāsat) the latter definitely demanding popular support.  Not unrelated too, as structuralists like to point out, it helped if one was good at raising religious taxes (Khums).  Plus ça change...

Some presumably un-intended mission-creep resulted from the Imam’s educational reforms intended to secure the primacy to Koranic teaching.  The restructuring of the Shia seminaries created four layers of structured scholarship, those clerics attaining the highest qualification styled as Dars-e-Kharej (beyond the text) and thus assuming the title of Ayatollah.  Being an Islamic state, bureaucratic progression in the state bureaucracy was assisted by the qualification and the numbers graduating increased, the dynamic driven also by (1) a worsening economy which made state-sector employment increasingly attractive and (2) the unlimited ability of the seminaries to offer course to fee-paying students.  By 2017, it was estimated over three thousand clerics in Iran were calling themselves Ayatollah.

To mark “Mean Girls Day” on 3 October 2019, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) took to X (the app then known as Twitter) and trolled Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (b 1960) and then Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani (1957-2020), photoshopping the trio into a well-known scene from the film, labeling the image “There’s no one meaner than the mean girls of the Middle East” and advising the twitterati: “Don’t sit with them”.  It wasn’t the first time the Jewish state had deployed the movie against the ayatollahs: In 2018, in response to Ayatollah Khamenei calling the Jewish state a “cancerous tumor” which “must be eradicated,” the Israeli embassy in Washington posted a Mean Girls GIF asking “Why are you so obsessed with me?”  On both occasions, the ayatollahs ignored the IDF's provocations.

Fathom

Fathom (probounced fath-uhm)

(1) A unit of length equal to six feet (1.8288 m): used chiefly in nautical measurements and Admiralty papers.

(2) To measure the depth of by means of a sounding line; sound.

(3) In mining, a unit of volume usually equal to six cubic feet, used in measuring ore bodies (largely obsolete).

(4) In forestry, a unit of volume equal to six cubic feet, used for measuring timber (largely obsolete).

(5) To penetrate to the truth of; comprehend; understand.

Pre 900: From the Old English fæðm (length of the outstretched arm (a measure of about six feet), and figuratively, "power") from the Proto-Germanic fathmaz (embrace), related to the Old Norse faðmr (embrace) and the Old Saxon fathmos (the outstretched arms) and the Dutch vadem (a measure of six feet (1.8 m)).  The Middle English was fathme, cognate with the German Faden (a six-foot measure) and related to the Old English fæðmian (to embrace, surround, envelop), most forms at least influenced by the primitive Indo-European pot(ə)-mo-, a suffixed form of the root pete- (to spread).  Probable cognates included the Old Frisian fethem and the German faden (thread), the connection said to be the sense of "spreading out."  As a unit of measure, in an early gloss it appears for the Latin passus, which was about 5 feet (1.5 m).  The meaning "take soundings" is from circa 1600; its figurative sense of "get to the bottom of, understand" came some twenty years later.  The verb fathom was from the Old English fæðmian (to embrace, surround, envelop), from a Proto-Germanic verb derived from the source of the noun fathom, the cognates including the Old High German fademon and the Old Norse faþma.  The admiralty term fathomless (an adjective meaning literally "bottomless") is from the 1640s, later extended to figurative use (not to be comprehended).  Fathom is a noun and verb, fathomer & fathometer are nouns and fathomable, fathomless & (the predictably common) unfathomable are adjectives; the noun plural is fathoms.

The One-Hundred Fathom Line

UK Admiralty chart of the hundred fathom line, circa 1911.

The one-hundred fathom line is an Admiralty term for marking sea charts to delineate where the seabed lies at depths less or greater than 100 fathoms; it can thus be thought a particular expression of the continental shelf (though defined for military rather than geographical purposes).  Thus the distance from the coastlines of each land mass varies and it's related not at all to other boundaries established by the United Nation's (UN) Law of the Sea or other conventions such as territorial waters (historically 3 miles (5 km) and now 12 (20) or a state's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (200 (320)).  The hundred fathom line is now of little military significance (although it remains of interest to submariners) but it was cited as recently as 1952 in negotiations between the post-war Churchill (1951-1955) and Truman administrations (1945-1953) in defining the areas of preponderant operations for the Royal Navy and US Navy.

Lindsay Lohan GIF from A Beautiful Life (music video).  Although often photographed in the water, there's no evidence to suggest Ms Lohan has ever descended deeper than a a couple of fathoms.

Fag

Fag (pronounced fag)

(1) Something hanging loose, a flap (mostly archaic except in US technical use in industrial production of textiles where, in the process of quality inspections, a fag is a rough or coarse defect in the woven fabric).

(2) Slang for a boring or wearisome task (archaic).

(3) The worst part or end of a thing (mostly UK, now archaic).

(4) Offensive slang for a contemptible or dislikable person (archaic).

(5) Offensive slang for a homosexual male, applied most often to an obvious, especially effeminate or “unusual” one (now regarded generally as especially disparaging and contemptuous although within the LGBTQQIAAOP communities it can be neutral or even endearing).

(6) To tire or weary by labor; to be exhausted (usually in the phrase “fagged out”).

(7) One allocated to do menial chores for an older school pupil (mostly in the English public school system but said to be extinct since the late 1990s although apparently still practiced in some Commonwealth countries with public (private) schools based on the old English model).

(8) Slang for a cigarette (now rare, especially in North America); the Cockney rhyming slang was “oily rag”.

(9) As "fag-end" (as in the last un-smoked end of a cigarette), a remnant of something once larger, longer etc such as the frayed end of a length of cloth or rope.

(10) As "fag-end administration", the last months or weeks of a government prior to an election.

1425–1475: From the late Middle English fagge (flap; broken thread in cloth, loose end (of obscure origin)), the later sense-development to the intransitive verb meaning “to droop, to tire, to make weary; drudgery” apparently based on the idea of “a drooping end” or “something limply hanging” dating from the 1520s.  The transitive sense of "to make (someone or something) fatigued, tire by labor" was first noted in 1826.  Those fagged-out fatiguing labor were in the 1850s said to have been engaged in “faggery” and from the same era “brain-fag described "mental fatigue."  Fag is a noun and verb, fagging or fagged are verbs and faggish & fagged are adjectives.  Apparently un-fagged is a correct construction which may be used to describe the process of cutting the ties binding a bundle of sticks.  Functional forms (fag butt, fag lighter, fag grave (an ashtray) are created as required. Fag is a noun & verb; the noun plural is fags.   

A GIF of Lindsay Lohan enjoying a fag.

The meaning “cigarette” dates only from 1888 and was derived from fag-end (applied to many things and attested since the 1610s) and thus a cigarette butt was one of many fag-ends but “fag” (and the plural “fags”) came much to be associated with cigarettes.  Fag may be variant of the verb “flag” in the sense of “droop, tire” and related (perhaps remotely) to the Dutch vaak (sleepiness).  The use of the term to refer to cigarettes is still heard in parts of the English-speaking world but is almost unknown in the US where use is not advised because there, almost exclusively, it's exclusively a gay slur.

Inhaling a known carcinogen is of course a bad idea and not recommended but Lindsay Lohan did make smoking look sexy.

Faggery (or faggotry) was the system in English public schools in which the younger students acted as servants (there were sometimes other purposes) for the older.  It was part of public school environment which Harold Macmillan (1894–1986; UK prime-minister 1957-1963) said was designed primarily to teach pupils life was “inherently unfair”.  Still, he valued the process and described any chap who hadn't benefited from the experience as having "no background".  The use in English public schools to describe a junior student who performs "certain duties" for a senior seems first to have been used in 1785 although the practice is documented from the seventeenth century.  The schoolboy slang describing the offices of the institution as “fagdom” & “fagmaster” dates from 1902.  In modern use, faggery (less so faggotry but like faggotness, faggotize & faggotism) is used as a gay slur.  The term "faggot voter" was a historic term in the UK & Ireland used when there was a property qualification attached to the electoral franchise.  A legal loophole, it described someone entitled to vote by virtue of holding some form of property title short of freehold, typically to a subdivision.  The origin of the term was based on the idea of “faggot” in the sense of the sticks gathered together and bound to make a whole (ie one property with one title fragmented for electoral purposes while not diminishing the quality of the ultimate ownership).  The “loophole” was one of those things which began as an “unintended consequence” of changes to the rules of real property but it wasn’t reformed until the late 1800s because so many land-owners and members of parliament made use of it to “stack their constituencies” with voters.

As a shortening of faggot, “fag” is documented as being applied as a term of disparagement to homosexual males from 1914, an invention of American English slang, though related to the earlier (1590s) contemptuous term for a woman, especially an old and unpleasant one, in reference to faggot in the sense of "bundle of sticks", ie something awkward that has to be carried in the sense of "worthless baggage” (and therefore “worthless woman").  More speculatively, there may be a link with the Yiddish פֿייגעלע‎ (feygele) (literally "little bird” but used (1) as a term of endearment for a loved one, especially a man's wife and (2) in a derogatory manner: a faggot homosexual man).  There may also have been some connection with the English public school slang noun fag which even then carried the suggestion of catamite (From the Latin catamītus (boy kept as a sexual partner), from Catamītus, from the Etruscan catmite, from the Ancient Greek Γανυμήδης (Ganumḗdēs) (Ganymede), in Greek mythology an attractive Trojan boy abducted by Zeus and taken to Mount Olympus to become his cupbearer and lover (and Ganymede endures as a doublet in that sense)).  The term “faggot marriage” was not a synonym of “lavender marriage” (an arrangement in which a gay man would marry a lesbian for purposes of social or professional respectability) but a disparaging reference to gay marriage.

In the same way the infamous N-word has been re-claimed by certain sub-sets of people of color and is, in context, an acceptable use by or between them, “faggot” similarly, although now regarded generally as especially disparaging and contemptuous, within the LGBTQQIAAOP communities it can be neutral or even endearing.  Two inventive variations were “fag hag” (a heterosexual woman who socializes with homosexual men (1969)) and “fag stag” (a heterosexual man who socializes with homosexual men (circa 1995)).  The less common companion slang for men who have many lesbian friends was “dutch boy”, “lesbro” or “dyke tyke”.  Covering all bases, it transpires that those of both sexes who associate with lesbian, gay and bisexual people are “fruit flies”.  The story that male homosexuals were called faggots because they were burned at the stake as punishment is an urban legend with no etymological or historical basis. Burning sometimes was a punishment meted out to homosexuals in Christian Europe (which relied on the scriptural suggestion invoked as the Biblical fate of Sodom and Gomorrah), but in England, although parliament had declared homosexuality a capital crime in 1533, the prescribed method of execution was to be hanged.  While the inquisitorial and judicial organs of the Roman Catholic Church may over the centuries have burned at the stake a good many homosexuals, that really was incidental to the process (sort of the "collateral damage" of the day), the actual sentence imposed usually for other offences.

Faggot was from the Middle English fagot, from the Middle French fagot (bundle of sticks), from the Medieval Latin and Italian fagotto and related to the Old Occitan fagot, the Italian fagotto & fangotto and the Spanish fajo (bundle, wad).  In Italian a fagotto was (1) a bundle or sack, (2), (figuratively) a clumsy or awkward person; a klutz or (3), in music, a bassoon and was probably from the Italian fagotto (diminutive of Vulgar Latin facus, from the Classical Latin fascis (bundle of wood), or perhaps the Ancient Greek φάκελος (phákelos) (bundle).  The senses relating to persons, though possibly originating as an extension of the sense "bundle of sticks", could have been reinforced by Yiddish פֿייגעלע‎ (feygele) (literally "little bird” but used (1) as a term of endearment for a loved one, especially a man's wife and (2) in a derogatory manner: a homosexual man).  In English, “fagot” was long the alternative spelling.

A sincere form of flattery: North American F-86 Sabre (first flown October 1947, left) and Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 (first flown December 1947, right).

A well-crafted amalgam of technology stolen from the West (the airframe construction techniques from the US, the jet-engine a blatant copy of the British Rolls-Royce Nene and the aerodynamics the result of wartime German research), the USSR’s Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 was a short-range interceptor, the appearance of which in the skies of the Korean War (1950-1953) theatre was such a shock to the UN forces that the US Air Force (USAF) had to scramble to assemble squadrons of North American F-86 Sabres for deployment.  Made in both the USSR and by licensed overseas constructors, the MiG-15 was produced in extraordinary numbers (some sources suggest as many as 17,700) and equipped not only Warsaw Pact militaries, some three dozen air forces eventually using the type and it was widely used in front-line service well into the 1960s.  Simple, robust and economical to operate, many still fly in private hands and some continue to be used as jet-trainers, ideal for the role because of their predictable characteristics and good handling.

The MiG-15’s NATO reporting name was Fagot.  NATO reporting names have no linguistic or etymological significance, being chosen (1) with an initial letter indicating type (B=bomber; F=fighter; C=commercial & cargo; H=helicopter; M= miscellaneous) and (2) a one-syllable name for propeller aircraft and a two-syllable name for jets.  Fagot was just another reporting name picked from NATO’s list of the possible for allocation to fighters:

Fairytale of New York (1987) is a song by the Irish pop-band The Pogues, augmented for the occasion by the late Kirsty MacColl (1959-2000).  One stanza includes the lines:

You're a bum

You're a punk

You're an old slut on junk

Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed

You scumbag, you maggot

You cheap lousy faggot

Happy Christmas your arse

I pray God it's our last

The offending line quickly became: "You cheap lousy faggot" and for many years, every Christmas, there was in England an almost ritualistic argument about whether it was appropriate to play the piece on radio, a matter of some interest because Fairytale of New York was frequently voted the nation’s most popular Christmas song.

In the late 1980s the BBC seemed unconcerned at the possibility of a gay slur being thought at least implied but found the anatomical slang offensive, asking that "arse" be replaced with “ass” which was a liberal approach compared with the old BBC tradition of outright bans but sensitivities shifted to gender in the 1990s and in subsequent live performances MacColl sometimes adjusted the lyrics further, singing "You're cheap and you're haggard".  Since then broadcasts have varied in the version carried, the BBC even permitting all or some of “arse”, “slut” & “faggot” on some of their stations but not others.  There’s was also use of the old practice “bleeping out” (actually scrambling) “arse”, “slut” & “faggot” as required and it’s now fairly unpredictable just which version will be played.  It did seem one of the more improbable battlefields of the culture wars but was emblematic of the new censorship.  Although, in the context of the song, it was obvious “faggot” was being used in the old sense of meaning “someone worthless” rather than “someone a bit of a homosexual”, the objection was to the very word which many activists demand should be proscribed, the same fate suffered by "niggardly" a form with an etymology as unrelated to the infamous "N-word" as the meaning.

Gif

Gif (originally GIF) (pronounced gif or jif)

(1) A set of standards and file format for storage of digital color images and short animations; technically, a bitmap image format for pictures with support for animations and up to 256 distinct colors per frame, including fully transparent color.

(2) A file or image stored in this format.

(3) To create a static or animated GIF from (an image or set of images) (the verb forms (used with object) being giffed, or giffing (sometimes, usually in a technical context, written as GIFFed of GIFFing).

1987: Originally an acronym (Graphic Interchange Format), a bitmap image specification created by CompuServe to provide a format for image files which easily could be transferred between devices using different hardware and operating systems.  GIFs can be animated and use a lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality.  Being a TLA (three letter acronym), the GIF didn't suffer the truncation of the True Image File Format which which became known as the TIF because the MS & PC-DOS operating systems used an 8.3 file naming system and TIFFs were thus named filename.tif.  Being uncontested and homophonic, TIFF and TIF happily co-existed and under operating systems not constrained by the 8.3 file system, they were often named filename.tiff.  Many GIFs are loops but some are constructed.

A Lindsay Lohan GIF.

This is an example of a GIF which looks like a loop but is constructed with closely connected images all from within a brief period of time and techs call these cinemagraphic (the name a deliberate point of differentiation from cinematographic) GIFs, a still shot-animation hybrid.   The viewer's experience is not one event in a loop but one event progressing continuously through time, the effect achieved by a focus on just the elements in motion while the rest remain static.  

The first dispute involving the gif was over the licensing of the LZW compression technique used.  Patented in 1985, the controversy lasted until 2004 when the final patent expired.  What endured was the debate over how to pronounce Gif; it’s either gif with a hard-G (of gift, got, and gate) or jif with the soft-G (of gin, gym, or gem).  The head of the CompuServe development team which invented the GIF has always insisted it should be jif but English evolves through use and those who see the word without knowledge of the programmer’s edict tend to use the hard-G because they wouldn’t pronounce “graphics” as jraphics.  Even the Obama White House intervened, indicating a preference for the hard-G and seems it's mostly only hard-core nerds, anxious to display reverence for the author, who adhere to the soft-G.

A Lindsay Lohan GIF.

This construct is built with a technique known as as Technical GIF, used typically to animate static content, such as PowerPoint slideshows, to render a moving image.  Unlike the visually similar morphing technique in which images merge to transform into something static, the technical GIF is a series of related images with sufficient similarity in aspect and size to create a animation with the visual integrity for the viewer to grasp the implication.

One could derive a “rule” (or at least a guide) from previous use which would be something like {G before the letters E, I or Y is realized as soft-G and elsewhere is hard-G}.  That supports the author’s dictate of jif but many exceptions exist, especially foreign borrowings like the Japanese geisha or the French margarine.  The authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was non-committal, noting both pronunciations and an uneasy state of peaceful co-existence has since prevailed.