Quota

Quota (pronounced kwoh-tuh)

(1) The share or proportional part of a total that is required from, or is due or belongs to a particular district, state, person, group etc.

(2) A proportional part or share of a fixed total amount or quantity.

(3) The number or percentage of persons of a specified kind permitted (enrol in an institution, join a club, immigrate to a country, items to be imported etc).

1660–1670: From the Medieval Latin, a clipping of the Latin quota pars ((a percentage of yield owed to the authority as a form of taxation (in the New Latin, a quota, a proportional part or share; the share or proportion assigned to each in a division), from quotus ((which?; what number?; how many?, how few?)), from quat (how many?; as many as; how much?), from the Proto-Italic kwot, from the primitive Indo-European kwóti, the adverb from kwos & kwís; it was cognate with the Ancient Greek πόσος (pósos) and the Sanskrit कति (kati).  In English, until 1921 the only known uses of “quota” appear to be in the context of the Latin form, use spiking in the years after World War I (1914-1918) when “import quotas” were a quick and simply form of regulating the newly resumed international trade.  Quota is a noun, the noun plural is quotas.

Google ngram: 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.

Being something imposed by those in authority, quotas attract work-arounds and imaginative techniques of avoidance & evasion.  The terms which emerged included (1) quota-hopping (the registration of a business, vehicle, vessel etc in another jurisdiction in order to benefit from its quota), (2) quota quickie (historically, a class of low-cost films commissioned to satisfy the quota requirements of the UK’s Cinematograph Films Act (1927), a protectionist scheme imposed to stimulate the moribund local industry.  The system widely was rorted and achieved little before being repealed by in the Films Act (1960) although modern historians of film have a fondness for the quota quickies which are a recognizable genre of cultural significance with a certain period charm, (3) quota refugee (a refugee, relocated by the office of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) to a country other the one in which they sought asylum in, in accord with relevant certain UN quotas).

South Park's Eric Cartman (left) and Token (now Tolkien) Black (right).

The writers of the animated TV series South Park (1997) (made with the technique DCAS (digital cutout animation style), a computerized implementation of the original CAS (cutout animation style) in which physical paper or cardboard objects were (by hand) moved (still images later joined or the hands edited-out if filmed); the digital process deliberately emulates the jerky, 2D (two-dimensional) effect of the original CAS) had their usual fun with the idea of a DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) quota as “tokenism” with the creation of the character Token Black (ie the “token black character” among the substantially white ensemble).  However, in 2022, some 300 episodes into the series, the character was retconned to become “Tolkien Black”, the story-line being he was named after JRR Tolkien (1892–1973), author of the children’s fantasy stories The Hobbit (1937) & The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955).  Retonning (the full form being “retroactive continuity” is a literary device (widely (and sometimes carelessly) used in many forms of pop culture) in which previously-established facts in a fictional are in some way changed (to the point even of eradication or contradiction).  This is done for many reasons which can be artistic, a reaction to changing public attitudes, administrative convenience or mere commercial advantage.  What South Park’s producers did was comprehensively retrospective in that the back-catalogue was also updated, extending even to the sub-titles, something like the “unpersoning” processes under Comrade Joseph Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) or the painstaking “correcting” of the historic record undertaken by Winston Smith in George Orwell’s (1903-1950) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) .  Undertaken during the high-point of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement, the change did attract comment and most seemed to regard it as an attempt to remove a possible trigger for protest but there was also the argument there may have been concern the use of the given name “Token” might be able to be interpreted as a comment on the sometimes inventive spellings used by African-American parents.  While the use of “Token” as a comment on “white racism” was acceptable, an allusion to the racial stereotyping implicit in the spelling would be classified as at least a microaggression and probably white racism in action.

Gracious Quotes have aggregated Lindsay Lohan’s top ten quotes.

The English word quote (pronounced kwoht) was related to quota by a connection with the Latin quot.  It is used variously: (1) to repeat or use (a passage, phrase etc.) from a book, speech or such, (2) to enclose (words) within quotation marks or (3) to state a price.  It dated from the mid-fourteenth century and was from the Middle English coten & quoten (to mark a text with chapter numbers or marginal references), from the Old French coter, from the Medieval Latin quotāre (to divide into chapters and verses), from the Latin quot (how many) and related to quis (who).  The use evolved from the sense of “to give as a reference, to cite as an authority” to by the late seventeenth meaning “to copy out exact words”.  The use in commerce (“to state the price of a commodity or service” dates from the 1860s and was a revival of the etymological meaning from the Latin, the noun in this context in use by at least 1885.

In Australian politics, there have long been “informal” quotas.  Although Roman Catholics have in recent years infiltrated the Liberal Party (in numbers which suggest a “take-over” can’t be far off), there was a time when their presence in the party was rare and Sir Neil O'Sullivan (1900–1968) who between 1949-1958 sat in several cabinets under Sir Robert Menzies (1894–1978; prime-minister of Australia 1939-1941 & 1949-1966), noted wryly that as the ministry’s “designated Roman Catholic”, he: “wore the badge of his whole race.”  That was of course an “unofficial” (though for years well-enforced) quota but the concept appears to this day to persist, including in the ALP (Australian Labor Party) which, long past it’s “White Australia” days, is now more sensitive than some to DEI.  However, the subtleties of reconciling the ALP’s intricate factional arrangements with the need simultaneously to maintain (again unofficial) quotas preserving the delicate business of identity politics seem to have occasional unexpected consequences.  In the first cabinet of Anthony Albanese (b 1963; prime-minister of Australia since 2022), there was one “designated Jew” (Mark Alfred Dreyfus (b 1956).  Mark Dreyfus’s middle name is “Alfred” which is of course striking but there is no known genealogical connection between and the Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), the French Jewish army officer at the centre of the infamous Dreyfus affair (1894-1906).  The surname Dreyfus is not uncommon among European Jews and exists most frequently in families of Alsatian origin although the Australian’s father was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.  Having apparently outlived his ethnic usefulness, Dreyfus fell victim to factional axe and was dumped from the ministry, some conspiracy theorists pondering whether the ALP might have liked the “optics” of expelling a Jew while the party’s reaction to the war in Gaza was being criticized by Muslim commentators.

Smiles all round.  Official photograph of the new ALP ministry, Canberra, Australia, June 2022. 

The cabinet also had one “designated Muslim” (Edham Nurredin “Ed” Husic (b 1970)), notable for being both the first Muslim elected to federal parliament and thus the first to serve in a ministry.  That had an obviously pleasing multi-cultural symmetry but for a number of reasons the ALP achieved a remarkably successful result in the 2025 election and that complicated things because radically it changed the balance in the numbers between the party’s right-wing, the relativities between the New South Wales (NSW) and Victorian factions significantly distorted relative to their presence in the ministry.  While the ALP is often (correctly) described as “tribal”, it’s really an aggregation of tribes, split between the right, left and some notionally non-aligned members, those alliances overlaid by each individual’s dependence on their relevant state or territory branch.  The system always existed but after the 1960s became institutionalized and it’s now difficult to imagine the ALP working without the formalized (each with its own letterhead) factional framework for without it the results would be unpredictable; as all those who claimed the Lebanese state would be a better place were the influence of the Hezbollah to be eliminated or at least diminished are about to discover, such changes can make things worse.

However, the 2025 election delivered the ALP a substantial majority but what was of interest to the political junkies was that the breakdown in numbers made it obvious the NSW right-wing was over-represented in the ministry, compared to the Victorian right.  What that meant was that someone from NSW had to be sacrificed and that turned out to be Mr Husic, replaced as the cabinet’s designated Muslim by Dr Anne Aly from the Western Australia’s Labor Left.  Culturally, to many that aspect seemed culturally insensitive.  To be replaced as designated Muslim might by Mr Husic have been accepted as just a typical ALP factional power play (a reasonable view given it was the faction which put him in the ministry in the first place) had he been replaced by a man but to be replaced by a Muslim woman must have been a humiliation and one wonders if the factional power-brokers have done their “cultural awareness training”, something the party has been anxious to impose on the rest of the country.  Mr Husic’s demise to the less remunerative back-bench is said to have been engineered by Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles (b 1967) of the Victorian Right Faction and his role wasn’t ignored when Mr Husic was interviewed on national television, informing the country: “I think when people look at a deputy prime minister, they expect to see a statesman, not a factional assassin.”  Given the conduct & character of some previous holders of the office, it’s not clear why Mr Husic would believe Australians would think this but, in the circumstances, his bitterness was understandable.  Somewhat optimistically, Mr Husic added: “There will be a lot of questions put to Richard about his role.  And that's something that he will have to answer and account for.”  In an act of kindness, the interviewer didn’t trouble to tell his interlocutor: (1) Those aware of Mr Marles’ role in such matters don’t need it explained and (2) those not aware don’t care.

Richard Marles (right) assessing Ed Husic’s (left) interscapular region.

When Mr Marles was interviewed, he was asked if he thought he had “blood on his hands”, the same question which more than forty years earlier had been put to Bob Hawke (1929–2019; Prime Minister of Australia 1983-1991) who had just (on the eve of a general election) assumed the ALP leadership after the “factional assassins” had pole-axed the hapless Bill Hayden (1933–2023; ALP leader 1977-1983) after the latter’s earnest but ineffectual half decade as leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition.  Mr Hawke, not then fully house-trained by the pre-modern ALP machine, didn’t react well but to Mr Marles it seemed water of a duck’s back and he responded: “I don't accept that, these are collective processes... they are obviously difficult processes.  But, at the end of the day we need to go through the process of choosing a ministry in the context of there being a lot of talented people who can perform the role.”  Unfortunately, Mr Marles declined to discuss the secret factional manoeuvring which led to Mr Husic being sacrificed, the speculation including Dr Ally being thought better value because she could be not only cabinet’s designated woman but also boost the female numbers in the body, a matter of some sensitivity given how many women had joined the ALP caucus, many of them unexpectedly winning electorates to which they’d gain pre-selection only because the factional power-brokers considered them unwinnable.

Still, to be fair to Mr Marles, his anodyne non-answers were a master-class in composition and delivery: “There are so many people who would be able to admirably perform the role of ministers who are not ministers.  What I would say is I'm really confident about the ministry that has been chosen and the way in which it's going to perform on behalf of the Australian people.  But in the same breath, I'd also very much acknowledge the contribution that Ed Husic has made and for that matter, that Mark Dreyfus has made.  Both have made a huge contribution to this country in the time that they have served as ministers. I am grateful for that.”  Whether or not he believed his gratitude would be appreciated, Mr Marles was emphatic about his faction maintaining its Masonic-like cloak of secrecy, concluding his answer by saying: “I'm not about to go into the detail of how those processes unfold.  I've not spoken about those processes in the past obviously and I'm not about to talk about them now.”  It’s a shame politicians don’t think their parties should be as “transparent” the standard they often attempt to impose on others because Mr Marles discussing the plotting & scheming of factional machinations would be more interesting than most of what gets recited at his press conferences.

Although the most publicized barbs exchanged by politicians are inter-party, they tend to be derivative, predictable or scripted and much more fun are the spur-of-the-moment intra-party insults.  Presumably, intra-faction stuff might be juicier still but the leaks from that juicer are better sealed which is a shame because the ALP has a solid history in such things. 

Bill Hayden not having forgotten the part played in his earlier axing as party leader by Barrie Unsworth (b 1934; Premier of NSW 1986-1988) observed of him: “…were you the sort person who liked the simple pleasures in life, such as tearing the wings off butterflies, then Barrie Unsworth was the man for you.”  Hayden had not escape critiquing either, the man who deposed him (Bob Hawke) describing him in the run up to the coup as “A lying cunt with a limited future.”  Another ALP leader (Gough Whitlam (1916–2014; prime minister of Australia 1972-1975)) had a way with words, complaining to Charlie Jones (1917-2003): “You’re the transport minister, but every time you open your mouth, things go into reverse.”  Nor did Whitlam restrict his invective to individuals, once complaining of some of his colleagues: “I can only say we've just got rid of the '36 faceless men' stigma to be faced with the 12 witless men.”  The twelve were members of the ALP’s federal executive who in 1966 were poised to engineer Whitlam’s removal as deputy leader of the opposition and would have, had he not out- maneuvered them.

Sydney Daily Telegraph 22 March 1963 (left) and Liberal Party campaign pamphlet for 1963 federal election (right).

Dating from 1963, the phrase “36 faceless men” (one of whom was the token woman, the ALP having quotas even then) described the members of the ALP’s federal conference which, at the time, wrote the party platform, handing to the politicians to execute.  The term came to public attention when a photograph appeared on a newspaper’s front page showing Whitlam and Arthur Calwell (1896-1973; ALP leader 1960-1967) standing outside the hotel where the 36 were meeting, waiting to be invited in to be told what their policies were to be.  The conservative government used to great effect the claim the ALP was ruled by “36 faceless men”.  In the 2010s, there was a revival when there were several defenestrations of prime-ministers & premiers by factional operators who did their stuff, mostly in secret, through back channel deals and political thuggery.  In an untypically brief & succinct address, Dr Kevin Rudd (b 1957; Prime-Minister of Australia 2007-2010 & 2013) at the time summed up his feelings for his disloyal colleagues: “In recent days, Minister Crean [Simon Crean (1949–2023; ALP leader 2001-2003)] and a number of other faceless men have publicly attacked my integrity and therefore my fitness to serve as a minister in the government.... I deeply believe that if the Australian Labor Party, a party of which I have been a proud member for more than 30 years, is to have the best future for our nation, then it must change fundamentally its culture and to end the power of faceless men. Australia must be governed by the people, not by the factions.”  Otherwise mostly forgotten, Simon Crean and his followers are remembered as “Simon and the Creanites”, a coining by Peter Costello (b 1957; Treasurer of Australia, 1996-2007) who re-purposed “Creanites” from an earlier use by Paul Keating (b 1944; Prime Minister of Australia 1991-1996).

Bulge

Bulge (pronounced buhlj)

(1) A rounded projection, bend or protruding part; protuberance; hump; to swell or bend outward; to be protuberant.

(2) Any sudden increase, as of numbers, often used in economics or demography.

(3) In the maritime sciences, a rising in small waves on the surface of a body of water, caused by the action of a fish or fishes in pursuit of food underwater.

(4) As bulging, to describe a box or similar container, the shape of which is distorted by being filled beyond its nominal capacity.

(5) In colloquial use, the outline of male genitals visible through clothing, a form especially popular in the states & micro-states of Melanesia and used also (by analogy with the bulge caused by a wallet) as a descriptor of wealth.

1200-1250: From the Middle English bulge (leather bag; hump), from the Old Northern French boulge & bouge (leather bag), from the Late Latin bulga (leather sack), from the Gaulish bulga & bulgos, from the Proto-Celtic bolgos (sack, bag, stomach).  It was cognate with the various English forms bilge, belly, bellows & budget, the French bouge, the Irish bolg (bag) and the German Balg; a doublet of budge.  Ultimate source was the primitive Indo-European bhelgh (to swell), an extended form of the root bhel (to blow, swell).  The sense of "a swelling, a rounded protuberance" is first recorded in the 1620s and it’s likely the later bilge is a nautical variant.  The later, more familiar military meaning "bulging part of a military front" was first noted in 1916, the Admiralty variation to refer to the shape a warship’s hull assumed after the addition of anti-torpedo armor appearing in the records of naval architects a year later.  The famous phrase "battle of the bulge" has been re-purposed by the weight-loss industry.  Synonyms and related words include wart, lump, nodule, protrude, swell, sag, bloat, projection, bump, swelling, promontory, growth, excrescence, dilation, bunch, protrusion, salient, hump, sac & blob.  Bulge, bulger & bulginess are nouns, bulging & bulgy are adjectives, bulged is a verb and bulgingly is an adverb; the noun plural is bulges.

Increasing bulginess: Lindsay Lohan's baby bump.  English phrases emerge organically and women seem much to prefer "baby bump" to "baby bulge", a Google search for the former returning 33,300,000 hits against a mere 35,000 for the latter.  "Baby bulge" does however have (usually unwanted) role in the process, the "postpartum baby bulge" a description of an abdomen which stubbornly resists post-delivery inducements to return to it's pre-pregnancy shape.

The hood (bonnet) bulge

1957 Jaguar XKSS (left), 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR (W196S) Uhlenhaut coupé) (centre) and Mercedes-Benz 300 SL (W198, 1954-1963, right).

A hood (bonnet) bulge differs from a hood scoop in that the former exists purely for the purpose of providing clearance for some piece of machinery beneath.  What needs to be accommodated typically will be an inconveniently tall part of the engine, a supercharger or some other component in the induction system.  Jaguar added a bulge to the D-Type (1954-1957) because after lowering the profile of the hood in the quest for aerodynamic efficiency, the XK-six wouldn't quite fit, even with the addition of a dry sump which gained a few inches.  The bulge was carried over to the XKSS, the road-going version of the D-Type.  On the Jaguars, the bulge was centrally placed but Mercedes-Benz, adopting the same expedient for the 300 SLRs needed theirs to exist on only one side where it also acted as an air-intake for the mechanical fuel-injection, an example of a bulge doing also some scooping.  Asymmetry is common on racing cars where function rules but the factory apparently couldn't in those days bring themselves to do it on road cars.  Although the 300 SLs (both the gullwings and the roadsters) needed only the bulge on the right-hard side (the tall, dry-sumped engine canted 50^o to the left) to accommodate the fuel-injection's ram-tubes, a matching bulge was included, thus ensuring the symmetry prized by the Germans.

MG MGC-GT (1967-1969, left), Iso-Grifo Can-Am (1968-1972, centre) and Ford Falcon BA XR8 (2002-2004, right).

Mercedes-Benz may have been disturbed by asymmetry but it didn't worry the pragmatists at MG who, having shoe-horned into the MGB (1962-1980) a big iron lump of a straight-six which necessitated using a torsion bar arrangement for the front suspension, found even their first attempt at a bulge still wasn't enough.  A dry sump would have solved the problem but that would have been expensive so a "blister" was added at the offending point on the bulge; a bulging bulge as it were.  Apparently a matching blister on the right was never considered and the MGC has one of the industry's more admired bonnets although that feeling didn't extend to the rest of the car, the model not even a modest success in the market and it lasted but two seasons.  The later V8 version (1973-1976) was both a better car and one that needed no bulge at all but it fell victim to the first oil shock.  There are those who claim the rectilinear protrusion on the hood of the big-block Iso Grifos can't be called a bulge at all and many etymologists might agree but such pedantry should be agreed with and ignored.  Nicknamed the "penthouse", the neo-brutalist construction is one of the industry's great bulges and it's entirely functional, affording clearance to the induction system and providing airflow, in & out.  Not functional at all was the bulge Ford in Australia added to the XR8 Falcons when the BA model was released in 2002.  Cheerfully admitting it was unnecessary and there just for looks, the factory later took advantage of its presence to advertise things like the V8's power output, a juvenile pleasure much appreciated by the target market.

Battle of the Bulge, December 1944-January 1945

The Ardennes Offensive, (Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine) was the German code-name) popularly known in the West as the Battle of the Bulge, was the last major German strategic offensive of World War II and ironically, Watch on the Rhine was the title of a play by Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) which debuted on Broadway in 1941, the theme being the need for an international alliance to oppose the Nazis.  After many delays, it began on 16 December 1944 and lasted officially until 25 January but had been repulsed by Allied forces weeks earlier.  It wasn't the first use of "bulge" in a battlefield context, the phrase documented in June 1940 in discussions about the German offensive in France and many generals over the centuries would have seen bulges represented on their situation maps.  One especially well-known One of the best known was Unternehmen Zitadelle (Operation Citadel), the German operation conducted in July 1943 against Soviet forces in the Kursk salient although, unlike the Ardennes Offensive, the Battle of Kursk was staged along a very long front and is best understood as a series of shifting bulges and the theatre evolved rapidly into a huge, dusty, swirling mass of tanks, artillery assaults and air attacks.  It remains history's largest tank battle.  

The bulge, December 1944.

Because of the disparity in military and economic strength between the German and Allied forces, in retrospect, the Ardennes Offensive appears nonsensical but, at the time, it made strategic and political sense.  Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) knew, confronted as he was by attacks from the west, east and south, continuing to fight a defensive war could only delay the inevitable defeat.  An offensive in the east was impossible because of the strength of the Red Army and even a major battlefield victor in the south would have no strategic significance so it was only in the west that opportunities existed.

For many reasons, by late 1944 the Allied advance in the west had stalled after remarkable progress since the D-Day landings 6 June 1944) and defensive lines had been formed, the most lightly defended being those in the Ardennes Forest, the very region which had been the conduit for the German’s stunningly successful blitzkrieg campaign in 1940.  Despite that history, 1944’s rapid advance through collapsing German lines had convinced Allied intelligence their enemy was no longer capable of major offensive operations.  It was this compliancy which made the German attack possible and in military colleges this problem, created by what in the psychology literature is called "Bayesian perception" (from the probability theories developed by English statistician Thomas Bayes (circa 1700-1761)), is often more helpfully described as "top-down processing" which tends to overwhelm the inherently more accurate "bottom-up processing".  The idea is that a "Bayesian brain" will use prior knowledge and assumptions which will influence perceptions meaning we see what we expect to see and fail to observe what is not expected and the more intensely something is focused upon, the more acute becomes the tendency.  Thus, because the phrase "Paris in the spring" is so well known, a single glance will confirm the brain's perception and the duplicate "the" will remain unseen.

In the last great example of the professionalism and tactical improvisation which was a hallmark of their operations during the war, the Wehrmacht (the German military) secretly assembled a large armored force, essentially under the eyes of the Allies and staged a surprise attack through the Ardennes, aided immeasurably by the cover of heavy, low clouds which precluded both Allied reconnaissance and deployment of their overwhelming strength in air-power.  Hitler’s audacious strategic objective, which, given the forces available, none of his generals though possible, was to advance to the Belgium port of Antwerp, splitting the Allied lines in a pincer movement, destroying their four armies.  This he hoped would force the Western Allies out of the war, permitting the Germans to focus their entire strength against the Soviet Union in the east.  Initially successful, the Wehrmacht’s advance punched several holes in the line, the shape of which, when marked on a map, lent the campaign the name Battle of the Bulge.  Within days however, the weather cleared and the Allies were able to unleash almost unopposed their overwhelming superiority in air power.  This, combined with their vast military and logistical resources, doomed the Ardennes Offensive, inflicting losses from which the Wehrmacht never recovered.  From mid-January on, German forces never regained the initiative, retreating on all fronts until the inevitable defeat in May.

The IDF, Hamas and the Hezbollah, October 2023

Mr Netanyahu.  His friends, (both of them) call him "Bibi".

Already, comparisons with 1944 are being made with the apparent failure of the much vaunted Israeli intelligence machine, either to detect or act upon indications of the activities which would have been a prelude to the audacious attacks launched on 7 October 2023 by the Hamas into Israeli territory.  Although low-tech by comparison with a conventional military operation, the scale of what the Hamas managed to stage would still have demanded movements of materiel and personnel, an exercise in logistics which should have been noticed.  In an echo of the Yom Kippur War (6-25 October 1973), presumably, some activity would have been noticed but clearly it wasn't interpreted as an imminent threat so the inevitable review will have to focus on both the gathering and analysis of intelligence and one thing which will be considered is whether, as in the winter of 1944, assumptions were allowed to prevail over facts on the ground.  Any inquiry can be expected to be rigorous but only within the terms of reference the government will provide and those parameters are unlikely to allow any consideration of the consequences of the recent actions of Benjamin Netanyahu (b 1949; Israeli prime minister 1996-1999, 2009-2021 and since 2022).  Mr Netanyahu has for some time been attempting to make structural changes to Israel's courts, allegedly because he wishes to avoid any judicial scrutiny of the corruption charges which he faces.  The proposed changes to the courts are would actually align the way things are done in Israel with those used in many Western, democratic nations but it's the political context which has made them controversial and part of the widespread and long-lasting public protest has included large numbers of military reservists (on which the security of the Jewish state depends) refusing to serve while the government continues the legal manoeuvres which would have the effect of shielding the prime minister from prosecution.  Mr Netanyahu is one of the great survivors of modern politics and his longevity in office has been a remarkable achievement in one of the world's more difficult neighborhoods but it's unpredictable whether he can turn the shock of the Hamas incursion to his advantage and that is likely to depend upon managing any perception his being distracted by his own legal difficulties made Israel unusually vulnerable.

Securing any advantage will of course depend on Israel gaining what can be presented as a victory, something which in recent conflicts, north & south, has been as elusive on the battlefield as on social media.  Nor is the Hamas attack the only thing which will absorb the resources of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).  In the north, there is the even more formidable Hezbollah and few in the intelligence community have cast doubt on reports the Shi'ite militia (which out-guns the armed forces of Lebanon and has more political influence) have some hundred-thousand short & medium range rockets available for deployment south of the Litani River (the Qasimiyeh or River Leontes).  Within hours of the Sunni Hamas launching their operation, the Hezbollah targeted Israeli military positions in the disputed Shebaa Farms, announcing it was acting "in solidarity" with the Palestinian people and in response, the IDF responded with artillery barrages.  No casualties were reported and at this stage the attack in the north seems to be thought a supportive gesture rather than anything strategic and the consensus is the Hezbollah will act at scale only if the situation in Gaza evolved to offer a particularly attractive opportunity and even then it would require approval from Tehran; in an unsubtle waring directed at the Ayatollahs, the Pentagon announced the movement of an aircraft carrier into the region.  The Hamas have seemingly timed their high-risk attack with some thought.  With the war in Ukraine demanding much military, political and financial support from the West (something already beginning to fray as Moscow predicted it would in any battle of attrition), the US government in political & fiscal paralysis and Israeli support for its own government at a historic low, the Hamas will have sniffed blood.  Nor will they be unaware the most long-lasting legacy of the Yom Kippur War fifty years earlier was the Arab oil embargo and the spike in the price which ended the long post-war prosperity in the West and triggered the political and economic upheavals which would last a decade.  The structure of the world economy and the imperatives of governments are not in 2023 quite what they were in 1973 but these things will be on the minds of many in many places.

In the short term, within the Israeli intelligence establishment, there will be an admission the military specialists will have to share more of the space with the political analysts.  With a death toll on both sides already in the thousands, the focus is of course on bullets and bombs but what Hamas has also done is stake their claim for support (1) in the region, (2) among the Arab & Palestinian diaspora and (3) from those governments willing to fund proxies for their campaigns against the West.  In this sense, the Hamas is advertising themselves as a muscular resistance to Israeli (ie Western) oppression and occupation, contrasting themselves with Fatah, the faction controlling the Palestinian Authority which exercises nominal authority over what is left of the Left Bank territories.  The Hamas regard Fatah as as least accommodative while some use the slur "collaborators".  Thus positioning the contrast as something like the Marquis vs Vichy, October's assault has a political aspect and in that they identified their target market rather as the Republican Party's "House Freedom Caucus" focused on those dissatisfied with the direction of their own leadership.

What Hamas are practicing is politics with a high civilian death toll, the rationale for that being every Palestinian who is killed will have died a martyr's death with all that implies, theologically and socially.  As a tactic, what Hamas are doing is a kind of political intervention into what they see as the increasingly disturbing trend of Arab nations moving towards normalization of relations with the state of Israel without any settlement of the "Palestinian problem".  If the IDF can be induced to respond with such severity that the civilian death toll in Gaza rises to the point where the pressure from the so called "Arab street" is of such intensity that Arab states are forced to retreat from their recent rapprochements, for Hamas, that would be progress.  There was a time when the strategists in Gaza might have imagined the regional reaction would be something more tangible on the ground but as they've noticed, winds of change can blow in both directions and now it's only in Tehran there's much support for their long-standing position that the only final solution for the Palestinians is the destruction of the state of Israel.  One macabre consequence of these events is political certainty: If anyone still harbored the illusion the once much-vaunted “two state solution” was still anything more than a chimera, the Hamas assault ended that.  One way or another, that jolt of realism was only a matter of time and the advice had been there for any members of the Israeli cabinet prepared to listen.  In 2012, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer (1936-2016), a one-time IDF brigadier general and minister of defense had warned: “So far Palestinians have kept quiet, but one day they will awake and the explosion will happen. People don't accept [being] under military rule for 50 years.”

Vexillology

Vexillology (pronounced vek-suh-lol-uh-jee)

The study of and the collection of information about flags.

1957 (and in print since 1959): The construct was vexill(um) + -ology.  Vexillum (the plural vexilla) was from the Latin vēxillum (flag, banner), from the Proto-Italic wekslolom (and synchronically a diminutive form of vēlum), from the Proto-Italic wekslom, from the primitive Indo-European wegslom, from weg- (to weave, bind) and cognate with the English wick.  The Latin vexillum translated literally as “flag; banner” but in English was used to mean (1) a flag, banner, or standard, (2) in military use a formation company of troops serving under one standard, (3) the sign of the cross, (4) in botany, the upper petal of a papilionaceous flower and (5) in ornithology, the rhachis and web of a feather taken together.  The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +‎ -logy.  The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century.  French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).  Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story).  In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie).  Within a few decades of the intrusion of modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology (1820); hatology (1837)).  In this evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism etc).  Vexillology, vexillologist vexillographer, vexillophilia, vexillophile & vexillolatry are nouns, vexillological & vexillologic are adjectives; the most common noun plural is vexillologists.

A vexillographer is one who designs flags, standards & banners, a vexillophile is (1) someone who collects and displays flags and (2) one who studies flags, their history and meaning.  Although there are vexillophiles, there is in medicine no recognized condition known as vexillophilia (which would be a paraphilia describing the sexualized objectification of flags (ie flag) although following the convention established in recent revisions to the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (DSM-5 (2013) & DSM-5-TR (2022)), the correct clinical description would now be "flag partialism"; vexillophiles anyway prefer to describe themselves as "flag nerds".  Nor is there any record of there being instances of vexillophobia (a morbid fear of flags); there are those opposed to what flags represent  but that's not the same as being a vexillophobe which would be something specific about this type of bunting in general.  In political science, there is the word flagophobe (also as flagphobe), a derogatory term used usually by those on the right (and other nationalists) as a slur suggesting a want of patriotism in an opponent they’ve usually already labelled as “liberal”.  It's based on a metaphorical connection between a national flag and pride in one's country and is thus not a reference to a fear of flags in general.  To vexillize (or vexillate) can mean (1) to gather or to lead an army under a flag, (2) to organize or to lead people under a common cause or goal, (3) to make a flag (sewing, printing, digitally distributing etc), (4) to design a flag or (5) to introduce a specific depiction on a flag.

Wrapped: Vexillologist Lindsay Lohan and the stars & stripes.  The phrase “wrapping themselves self in the flag” is used of politicians who attempt to disguise their self-serving motives by presenting something as being in the national interest or being done for patriotic reasons.  The companion term is “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, a observation made in 1775 by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) of the hypocrisy of William Pitt (1708-1778 (Pitt the Elder); First Earl of Chatham & UK prime-minister 1766-1768).

Quite when the first flag was flown is not known but so simple is the concept and so minimal the technology required for fabrication that as forms of identification or communication they may have been among the earliest examples of symbolic representation.  Although the nation-state as its now understood is a relatively new creation (barely a thousand years old), prior to that there had for millennia been organized settlements with distinct identities and there is evidence from surviving works of art and drawings that something like a flag existed in the Mediterranean region as long ago as the fourth century BC and it’s possible such things were in use in China even earlier.  The familiar concept of the national flag evolved as the modern nation state emerged in Europe in the late Middle Ages and early modern period and traditionally, Denmark's Dannebrog is cited as the oldest national flag extant, having being in continuous use (though not always as the symbol of state) since the thirteenth century.

An array of Denmark's Dannebrog (usually translated as "the cloth of the Danes") on flagpoles.

The legend is that during a battle on 15 June 1219 in what is modern-day Estonia, the Danish army was on the defensive and defeat seemed imminent when suddenly, a red banner with a white cross fell from the sky.  As a result, the fortunes of war shifted, the Danish army won the battle and Denmark gained a flag.  The implication was of course the symbol was a "sign from God" and countless armies have rallied from difficult positions if soldiers can be persuaded victory can be won "with God on our side". 

Inherently, a small piece of colored glass three metres in the air can have no effect on a passing car yet the use of red, amber & green traffic lights is what makes modern road systems function as efficiently as they do.  They work because people (usually) respond as they should through the lens of semiotics, the signifier being the color of the light, the signified the instructions conveyed (green=”go”; amber=”prepare to stop or proceed with caution” & red=”stop”) and the referent the physical need to go, proceed only with caution or stop.  The power of the glass lies wholly in its symbolism and the implied consequences of ignoring its message.  Flags, mere pieces of fabric, have no inherent political or military force yet have for millennia been among the most valued and contested of symbols; men have died defending pieces of bunting which could have been replaced with a tick of a supply sergeant’s pen, simply because of the symbolism.  Because so much of the structure was fake, symbolism was integral to the appeal of Nazism (and fascism in general) and by the early summer of 1942, on a map, the military position of Nazi Germany looked impressive, its forces still maintaining a presence in North Africa, control extending to the Arctic Circle, most of Western Europe occupied from Norway to the south of France and the territorial gains from Operation Barbarossa (1941) reaching well into the Soviet Union.  However, the map substantially reflected the gains which had been made in 1941 and by mid-1942 it was clear to the German military they had under-estimated the ability of the Soviet armies to absorb losses and recover.  It was clear Germany no longer had the strength successfully to advance along the massive front created by Barbarossa and even Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) realized that, at least temporarily, more modest strategic aims would have to be pursued.

What Hitler set in train was a multi-pronged operation which would have been strategically sound had (1) the resources been available to sustain it and (2) there had not been such a gross under-estimation of the available Soviet military capacity.  Originally, the plan had been to advance on the Caucasus after the encirclement and destruction of the defending forces in the Stalingrad region and the occupation of the city itself.  This was changed, splitting the attacking force to allow the city and the Caucasus simultaneously to be conquered and the area envisaged was vast, including the eastern coast of the Black Sea, the forbidding Caucasian mountain passes and the oil fields of Grozny & Baku, far to the south.  The German generals didn’t need much more than the back of an envelope to work out it simply couldn’t be done and that rather than undertaking sound planning based on reliable intelligence, the Führer was indulging in little more than wishing & guessing.  “Wishing & guessing” was General George Marshall’s (1880–1959; US Army chief of staff 1939-1945) critique of Winston Churchill’s (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) dabblings in military matters and the comment wasn’t unjustified but the difference was that while the Allied high command was able to restrain (and if need be, veto) the prime-minister’s romantic (essentially Napoleonic) adventurism, the Wehrmacht’s generals and admirals had by 1942 long been dominated by Hitler.  The German army was however generally the most effective ground force of the war and remarkably, achieved some early tactical gains but such were the distances involved and the disparity of forces available that the offensive was not only doomed but culminated in the loss of some 230,000 troops at Stalingrad, a calamity from which the army never quite recovered and among the German people damaged the prestige of the regime to an extent no previous setback had done.

Third Reich War Flag, Mount Elbrus, August 1942.

Hitler, at least in 1942, wasn’t delusional and understood he was running a risk but his gambler’s instincts had for twenty years served him well and he still clung to the belief a strength of will could overcome many disadvantages, even on the battlefield.  Early in the war, that had worked when he was facing divided, unimaginative or weak opponents but those days were over and he was well-aware (regardless of what he told the generals) he was playing for high stakes from a position of disadvantage.  That he was under great pressure and wracked by uncertainty (whatever might have been his outward displays of confidence) was probably the cause of a celebrated over-reaction to what was one of the war’s more trivial incidents: the planting of the Nazi war flag on the peak of Mount Elbrus, at 5,642 m (18,510 feet) the highest point in Europe.  Hitler thought pursuits like mountain climbing and skiing absurd but, like any practical politician, he liked a good photo-opportunity and had in peacetime been pleased to be photographed with those who had raised the swastika on some mountain or other (something which dedicated Nazis had been doing since the 1920s, long before the party swindled their way into office gained power in 1933).  On 21 August 1942, the Third’s Reich’s war flag, along with the divisional flags of the 1st and 4th Divisions fluttered in the wind on the roof of Europe and news of the triumph was transmitted to FHQ (Führer Headquarters).

In the throes of the offensive driving towards Stalingrad and the Caucases, the alpine troops who climbed the peak to plant the flag doubtless though they were “working towards the Führer” and providing him a priceless propaganda piece.  They probably expected medals or at least thanks but Hitler was focused on his military objectives and knew he needed every available man to be devoted to his job and upon hearing two-dozen soldiers had decided to ignore their orders and instead climb up a hill of no strategic value, just to climb down again, his reaction was visceral, recalled in his memoirs by Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945), then at FHQ:

“I often saw Hitler furious but seldom did his anger erupt from him as it did when this report came in. For hours he raged as if his entire plan of the campaign had been ruined by this bit of sport. Days later he went on railing to all and sundry about “those crazy mountain climbers” who “belong before a court-martial.” They were pursuing their idiotic hobbies in the midst of a war, he exclaimed indignantly, occupying an idiotic peak even though he had commanded that all efforts must be concentrated upon Sukhumi.”

The famous (and subtlety edited) photograph of the Soviet flag being raised over the Reichstag on 30 April 1945 during the Battle of Berlin (actually a staged-shot  taken on 2 May).

The Germans never made it to Sukhumi and the high-altitude sideshow by a handful of troops of course in no way affected the campaign but the reaction at FHQ was an indication of the pressure felt by Hitler.  The planting of a symbolic flag was also though symptomatic of the arrogance which had permeated the German military under the Nazis and it anyway proved a pyrrhic act of conquest, the standard torn down and replaced by the Soviet flag within six months; that the Russian army took the trouble to do that amid the clatter of war illustrates potency of national flags as propaganda devices.  One of the most famous photographs of the conflict was that of the Soviet flag in May 1945 being placed over the Reichstag in Berlin, a symbol of defeat of Nazism.  Interestingly, so important to the Kremlin was the image that the act was actually re-staged the next day, this time with a photographer in place to shoot a roll of film so the perfect shot could be selected and the Russians are not the only ones to have re-staged famous flag raisings.

Applied vexillologist Ivana Knoll at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

Noted Instagram influencer Ivana Knoll (b 1992) was a finalist in the Miss Croatia beauty contest in 2016 and for her appearances at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, chose a number of outfits using the national symbol of the red and white checkerboard (matching the home strip worn by the team), taken from the Croatian national flag.  By the standards of Instagram, the design of the hoodie she donned for Croatia's game against Morocco at the Al-Bayat stadium wasn't particularly revealing but it certainly caught the eye.  As if Gianni Infantino (b 1970; president of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association (International Federation of Association Football) since 2016) doesn't have enough to ponder, the former Miss Croatia finalist tagged FIFA in her posts, fearing perhaps the president may not be among her 600,000 Instagram followers and her strategy seems to have had the desired effect although whether the design which, does cover her hair, shoulders and legs really was sufficiently demur to satisfy the local rules may have been contested by some imams.  The guidance provided by FIFA indicated non-Qatari women don’t need to wear the abaya (the long, black robe), tops must cover their midriff and shoulders, and skirts, dresses or trousers must cover the knees and clothing should not be tight or reveal any cleavage.  In accordance with the rules or not, Ms Knoll proved a popular accessory for Qatari men seeking selfies.

The flag of the Hezbollah (right), the public display of which is banned in some jurisdictions where both the organization's political & military wings are listed as "terrorist organizations" includes a depiction of  Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle but that of Mozambique (left) is the only national flag to feature the famous weapon and the Africans fixed a bayonet to the barrel which was a nice touch.  Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975 although the flag wasn’t officially adopted until 1983 as a modified version of what was essentially the battle flag of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front, the Marxist (later styled “democratic socialist”) resistance movement which fought a war of liberation (1964-1974) against the Portuguese colonial forces).  Artistically, just as Marxism (notably often in Stalinist form) had been politically influential in post-colonial Africa, the hammer & sickle exerted an artistic appeal.  The flag of Mozambique has an AK-47 crossed by a hoe sitting atop an open book and is the only national flag upon which appears a modern firearm, the handful of others with guns all using historic relics like muskets or muzzle-loaded cannons.  The Angolan flag has a machete crossing a half gear wheel and both these African examples follow the symbolic model of the hammer and sickle, representing variously the armed struggle against repression, the industrial workers and the peasantry.