Lunch

Lunch (pronounced luhnch)

(1) A light midday meal between breakfast and dinner; luncheon.

(2) Any light meal or snack.

(3) To eat lunch.

(4) In slang, as “out to lunch”, dim, vague, uselessly ineffectual.

(5) In slang as “lunchy”, old-fashioned; passé; out of style (obsolete).

(6) In slang as “eating their lunch”, outwitting an opponent.

(7) In Caribbean slang (among older folk), mid afternoon tea.

(8) In first-class cricket, the break in play between the first and second sessions (confusingly for those new to cricket, although the first session is often called the "pre-lunch session", the second is known as the "lunch session" and not the "post lunch session").

(9) In Minnesota, USA, any small meal, especially one eaten at a social gathering.

1580:  It’s never been clear which came first: lunch or luncheon.  Origin of both is thought to lie in a dissimilated variant of nuncheon, the Middle English nonechenche (noon ling meal and drink), equivalent to none (noon) + schench (from the Old English scenc or scencan (to pour out, give drink)), cognate with the Dutch and German schenken.  Apparent unrelated, Old English had nonmete (afternoon meal, literally "noon-meat").  Nonechenche was possibly altered by the northern English dialect lunch (hunk of bread or cheese) from 1590 which may be from lump or the Spanish lonja (slice, literally “loin”).  Because dinner in the sense of the biggest or main meal of the day) could be eaten either at around noon, in the evening or at night, there was a need for a meal to fill the gap between breakfast and dinner.  Lunch is a noun & verb, luncher is a noun, lunching is a noun & verb and lunched is a verb; the noun plural is lunches.

A montage of a languid Lindsay Lohan lingering over lunch.

The idea of lunch as it’s now understood took a long time to evolve, to “take a lunch” in 1786 is recorded as eating a chunk of something (perhaps evolved from lump), carved sufficiently large to constitute a filling meal and as late as 1817, the US Webster’s Dictionary offered as the only definition of lunch "a large piece of food", a meaning long obsolete and in the 1820s, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) thought it either “a vulgarism or a fashionable affectation".   Nevertheless, lunch’s intrusion into the language in the nineteenth century does suggest some sort of social change was afoot, either in the type, style or timing of meals or at least the words used to describe them.  Lunch-money was attested from 1868; lunch-time from 1821; lunch hour from 1840 and the lunch-break from 1960.  The slang phrase out to lunch in the sense of “a bit vague, dim, clueless (but some way short of actually insane) was first recorded in recorded 1955, the notion of being "not there" and instead at lunch.  The luncheon voucher was a public health measure, introduced in 1946 by the UK’s post-war Labour government (1945-1951).  It was literally a paper voucher which represented the mechanism by which the government would subsidize midday meals taken in private restaurants by employees in workplaces where there was no staff canteen.  Luncheon vouchers were an attempt to improve the national diet by encouraging the consumption of healthy, nutritious food at a time when so many basic items were still subject to the rationing imposed during wartime (indeed, some foodstuffs were subject to rationing only after the conflict ceased).  In an example of bureaucratic inertia, the scheme existed to an extent until 2013 by which time the effects of inflation had made the by then trivial subsidy inconsequential.

Receptacles in which to store one’s lunch for transport have a history.  The lunch-box is documented from 1864, the lunch-pail from 1891.  Those were descriptive nouns whereas lunch-bucket emerged in the 1990s as an adjective indicating working-class men or values, bucket presumably the best word because it was universally understood in the English-speaking world to an extent pail was not.  Lunch-bag seems never to have become a common form despite being widely used but in the 1970s, the verb brown-bag (and the related brown-bagging) referring to bringing lunch or liquor in a brown paper bag.  A long-time staple of a lunch-pail’s contents, lunch-meat (a processed form of meat-based protein produced in a size which, when sliced, was aligned with the slices of standard loaves of bread and thus convenient for making sandwiches) was first documented in 1931.  The lunch-counter (a long, elevated table or bench where customers eat standing or sitting on high stools) is an 1854 invention of US English.

The possible future of lunch: Grilled jellyfish.  Although many fish species are in decline, jellyfish numbers are growing.  The part eaten for lunch is called the umbrella. 

The portmanteau word brunch dates from circa 1890, a British student slang merging of breakfast and lunch, according to the magazine Punch (1 August 1896).  It appeared in 1895 in the defunct Hunter's Weekly, but two years earlier, at the University of Oxford, the students had drawn what must at the time have seemed an important distinction: The combination-meal, when nearer the usual breakfast hour, is "brunch" and, when nearer luncheon, is "blunch".  That’s a linguistic curiosity in that the brunch survived while blunch did not yet the modern understanding of a brunch appears to be something taken closer to the time of lunch than breakfast.  It may be that brunch was just the more pleasingly attractive word, blunch not so well rolling off the tongue.  Several spellings of luncheon were noted in the decades after the 1640s, the now standardised form not widespread until 1706.  Of uncertain origin, in the 1580s was used to describe something like the northern English dialectal lunch (hunk of bread or cheese), though influenced by the Spanish lonja (a slice, literally "loin"), blended with or influenced by nuncheon, from the mid-fourteenth century Middle English nonechenche, (light mid-day meal), from none (noon) + schench (drink), from the Old English scenc, from scencan (pour out).

The possible future of lunch: Fishcakes.  Fishcakes are a way by-products of the industrial processing of seafood can be sold as a protein source (ie make use of what would be otherwise used for agricultural feed, the pet-food business or end up a waste product.

The etymology of all these words is tangled and there are reasons to suspect the similar forms arose independently in different place rather than as forks of anything vaguely lineal, the OED discounting the notion of lunching, which dates from the 1650s, being derived from the verb lunch because that wasn’t to be attested for another century, the OED suggesting there may be some connection (by analogy) with words like truncheon etc to simulate a French origin which is speculative but such things are not unknown in ever class-conscious England.  Whatever the origin, it does seem to have been used to describe an early afternoon meal eaten by those who take dinner at noon.

Sepia

Sepia (pronounced see-pee-uh)

(1) A dark brown pigment obtained from the ink-like secretion of various cuttlefish, often used with brush or pen in drawing.

(2) A drawing made with this pigment.

(3) A photograph or digital image in the tone recognized as “sepia”.

(4) A specific range of shades of brown, which tend to a reddish tincture.

(5) In photography, a print or photograph rendered within this color range, associated especially with early types such as calotype.  Now easily replicated in software, when using physical film stock it can be produced by first bleaching a print (after fixing), then immersing it for a short time in a solution of sodium sulphide or of alkaline thiourea.

(6) Any of several cuttlefish of the genus Sepia, producing a dark fluid used naturally for defense and, by humans, in various mixes of ink (mostly archaic but still used in technical literature).

1821: From the Italian seppia (cuttlefish), from the Latin sēpia, from the Ancient Greek σηπία (sēpía) (cuttlefish (and its secretion)), the origin of which is uncertain, the orthodox explanation being it was from the Ancient Greek σήπειν (sḗpein) (to make rotten) but there are etymologists who suggest while that’s “semantically possible” (on the basis of the “rotten:” smelling ink), it’s may be from a pre-Greek source.  The Greek sḗpein was related to σήψ (sḗps) (a kind of lizard; also a serpent, the bite of which was alleged to cause putrefaction”).  The Greek sēpía was akin to sepsis.  Sepia & sepian are nouns & adjectives and sepialike (also as sepia-like) is an adjectives; the noun plural is sepias.

The use of the word to describe the brown pigment extracted from the secretions of cuttlefish dates from the 1820s and the “brownish” meaning as applied to drawings was first recorded in English in 1863 (originally as “sepia drawing”); it was extended later to photography and film and it remains a motif in “retro” art and verisimilitude in film & television.  Reflecting the influence of Classical & Medieval Latin in the formation of zoological taxonomy, sepia had been used of the cuttlefish as early as the late-fourteenth century but today such use is rare.  The Latin was also the source of words in a number of languages including the Bulgarian се́пия (sépija), the Catalan sèpia, the Esperanto sepio, the Finnish seepia, the French sépia, the Galician sepia, the German Sepia, the Hungarian szépia, the Japanese: セピア色 (sepiairo), the Portuguese sépia, the Romanian sepia, the Russian се́пия (sépija), the Spanish sepia, the Swedish sepia, the Tagalog sepia and the Turkish sepia.  

The noun sepiolite (in mineralogy, a hydrated magnesium silicate, clay mineral used for carving into decorative articles and smoking pipes (known also as meerschaum), from the same etymological origin as sepia, picked up the name because of the resemblance to cuttlebone.  The -lite suffix (when used formally) was a representation of the Ancient Greek λίθος (líthos) (stone) and was appended to form the names of rocks and minerals.  In informal use (in commerce or humorously (and in politics often disparagingly)) it's a phonetic version of “light” in the sense of “smaller, lesser, reduced in weight”; it's used often for cut-down (sometimes free) versions of software, diet drinks etc.

Montage of Lindsay Lohan red-carpet stills, rendered in vintage calotype sepia.

As an adjective sepian (the comparative more sepian, the superlative most sepian) began life meaning (1) of or pertaining to the sepia (in the sense of the cuttlefish or its dark pigment) and (2) of the color (not of necessity produced with the derived ink).  In the post-war Unites States, sepia was adopted to refer to some of those with darker pigmentation of the skin, specifically applied to black Americans or African Americans.  The emergence was because in many parts of the US, use of most offensive of the N-words had become socially less acceptable in many circles and as this disapprobation trickled down the social spectrum, new slurs were created, sepian presumably attractive because of the history as a description of colors of paint, fabrics etc.  It was thus separated from ethnic identity and could thus be defended as wholly neutral in use.  As a term, it was neither sufficiently widely adopted nor endured in use for long enough for any pejorative association to become attached so it never became part of the linguistic treadmill.

Bridget Bardot (b 1934) in sepia, on set in Viva Maria! (1965).

As an artistic device, sepia is sometimes used in film.  In The Wizard of Oz (1939), one of the most famous uses was to contrast the bleak, sepia-toned scenes in Kansas with the vibrant (techni-) color in the Land of Oz.  A different effect was achieved in The Shape of Water (2017) (which is either a fantasy or science fiction (SF) film depending on who is writing the review), the sepia-toned sequences depicting the protagonist's memories and dreams.  Presumably, directors find sepia a useful device because black & white (the other obvious alternative) has through use become vested with connotations, gained not only from of the association with film noir.

Montage

Montage (pronounced mon-tahzh (mawn-tazh in French))

(1) The technique of combining in a single composition, pictorial elements from various sources, as parts of different photographs or fragments of printing, either to give the illusion that the elements belonged together originally or to allow each element to retain its separate identity as a means of adding interest or meaning to the composition; the composition itself.

(2) By analogy, the creation of a thing or concept by combining a number of related elements; any combination of disparate elements that forms or is felt to form a unified whole.

(3) In photography, as photomontage, a juxtaposition or partial superimposition of several shots to form a single image.

(4) In film & television etc, a technique of editing used to present an idea or set of interconnected ideas.

1929: A borrowing from the French montage (assembly, set-up), the construct being mont(er) (to mount; to put up) + -age.  Monter was from the Vulgar Latin montāre, the present active infinitive of monto (to climb, mount, go up), from mōns & montem (mountain), from the primitive Indo-European men- (mountain).  The suffix -age was from the Middle English -age, from the Old French -age, from the Latin -āticum.  Cognates include the French -age, the Italian -aggio, the Portuguese -agem, the Spanish -aje & Romanian -aj.  It was used to form nouns (1) with the sense of collection or appurtenance, (2) indicating a process, action, or a result, (3) of a state or relationship, (4) indicating a place, (5) indicating a charge, toll, or fee, (6) indicating a rate & (7) of a unit of measure.  The French suffix -age was from the Middle & Old French -age, from the Latin -āticum, (greatly) extended from words like rivage and voyage.  It was used usually to form nouns with the sense of (1) "action or result of Xing" or (more rarely), "action related to X" or (2) "state of being (a or an) X".  A less common use was the formation of collective nouns.  Historically, there were many applications (family relationships, locations et al) but use has long tended to be restricted to the sense of "action of Xing".  Many older terms now have little to no connection with their most common modern uses, something particularly notable of those descended from actual Latin words (fromage, voyage et al).

A montage of Lindsay Lohan as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) might have rendered.

Montage, although now most associated with photography, painting and other static installations, was originally a term in cinematography, first attested in 1929.  The use was extended in 1931 (as photomontage) to the use of photographs or photographic negatives to make art or illustrations.  The technique can, in many fields, be used to add a veneer of intellectual gloss to what is really an elaborated form of plagiarism.  More helpfully, photomontages have been a vital aspect of the techniques of producing large scale imagery and the first were literally assembled on large tables by technicians armed with scissors, magnifying glasses and adhesive tape, the most prolific of the early adopters being the military who used the small images taken during photo-reconnaissance (PR) missions.  As camera technology improved, definition increased and more detail was captured but this was counted somewhat by increased anti-surveillance measures which forced the PR missions to operate at higher altitude.  Interestingly, the Allied military in World War II (1939-1945) found women much more efficient in both analysing PR and assembling montages.

A montage of Lindsay Lohan as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) might have rendered.

The techniques honed in wartime proved valuable in peacetime for creating large-scale maps and renderings from sometimes even thousands of small fragments.  This was the way big areas on the surface of the earth were able to be visualized as if a single photograph and in the 1950s work began on the task of mapping the ocean floor, something of interest not only oceanographers & nautical geographers but also to navies, commercial shipping companies and miners, the oil & gas industry long aware that vast untapped resources lay under the waves.  The concept of mapping the seabed is simple in that all that is required is to have the images in the form of a grid which could then be assembled in a single montage (the world’s biggest).  However, while the scale in terms of the surface area proved manageable, obtaining the data at depths in which pressures are immense and darkness total proved as challenging as predicted and although the maps are in a sense complete, the deepest parts of the oceans remain to some extent mysterious.  The available montages (which scientists call bathymetric data sets) include the GEBCO (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans which is an international project), Seabed 2030 (a collaborative project between GEBCO and the Japanese Nippon Foundation which plans to have a comprehensive map of the entire ocean floor by 2030), the EMODnet (European Marine Observation and Data Network which publishes highly detailed bathymetric maps for European waters) and the US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which offers maps of US waters and contributes to global programmes, their material available through the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

A montage of Lindsay Lohan as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) might have rendered.

The difference between collage and montage is that while a collage weaves together things of difference to create a unified whole, a montage uses complete things of some similarity to create something visually coherent although, with some modern artists, coherence can prove elusive, however cohesive a whole the glue might produce.  At the definitional margins however, the distinctions can be significant in the production but be undetectable in the result.  To create what appeared to be the montage of the seabed, what was done was technically a collage, the assembled components including photographs, renderings from ship-based sonar measurements and satellite altimetry as well as some enhancement in software.  However big might have been the ambition to create a unified montage of the ocean floor, cosmologists & astronomers thought bigger still and as space-based cameras and wandering craft became available, montages were assemble of objects such as the moon and the lovely rings of Saturn.  Aiming to produce the grandest montage of all is the European Space Agency which (ESA), using observations from their Euclid space mission (launched in July 2023) will explore dark matter and dark energy; over time billions of galaxies will be viewed.  What makes Euclid different from the Hubble Telescope and JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) is it can survey large parts of the sky at once, the agency describing the difference as between looking through a window compared with a keyhole.  In time, all the known objects in the universe might be photographed which will permit quite a montage but what really interests the cosmologists is the dark matter (which may actually be dark energy or a combination of the two) so it’s a quest for the known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

Sickle

Sickle (pronounced sik-uhl)

(1) In agriculture, an implement for cutting grain, grass, etc., consisting of a curved, hook-like blade mounted in a short handle.

(2) In astronomy, a group of stars in the constellation Leo, likened to this implement in formation (initial capital letter).

(3) In veterinary anatomy, any of the sickle-shaped middle feathers of the domestic cock.

(4) In pathology, as sickle-cell anemia, a severe hereditary condition in which mutated haemoglobin distorts red blood cells into a crescent shape, causing the cells to become stuck in capillaries; historically known as drepanocytosis.  The deformation of red blood cells into an abnormal crescent shape is called sickling and in medical slang a patient with the condition is a sickler.  

(5) As a stylized graphic, crossed with a hammer, used as a symbol of communism and the USSR and adopted by communist parties in many countries; metonymically, Socialism or communism itself.

Pre-1000: From the Middle English sikel (also assibilated in sichel), from the Old English sicol & siċel, the origin of which is uncertain, the most supported suggestion being it was a borrowing from Latin sēcula (sickle) or sīcīlis (sickle)”, cognate with the Dutch zikkel and the German Sichel.  The construct of the Latin sēcula was sec(āre) (to cut) + -ula or –ule (the diminutive suffix used to form taxonomic names, usually of genera).  The alternative explanation is it was a diminutive of the Proto-Germanic sikilō (ploughshare) from the primitive Indo-European seg-, a variant of sek- (to cut).  It was cognate with West Frisian systel, sisel & sizel (sickle), the Dutch sikkel (sickle) and the German Sichel (sickle).  It was related also to West Frisian sichte (sickle), the Dutch zicht (sickle), the Low German Sichte & Sicht (sickle) & Sech (blade of a sickle or scythe).  Sickle is a noun, verb & adjective, sickler & sickleman (sicklewomoman seem never to have been a thing although there must have been many and one would presumably now use sickleperson) are nouns, sickled is a verb and sickling is a noun & verb; the noun plural is sickles.

One of the standards used by the USSR after 1922.

The hammer and sickle (available on PCs as the Unicode symbol ☭ long before emojis) was created in 1917 to symbolise proletarian solidarity: the hammer representing the workers, the sickle the peasants (the intelligentsia ignored for representational purposes by the journalists, school-teachers and lawyers who would come to dominate the later dictatorship).  The design, formerly adopted as the USSR’s national symbol in 1922, was by Yevgeny Ivanovich Kamzolkin (1885–1957), his winning entry in a competition.  During the decades when the USSR enjoyed a better image than during the cold war, the hammer and sickle became widely used as a symbol both for communist parties and international proletarian unity even though the Soviet state had long been the dictatorship of the party elite rather than of the proletariat as Karl Marx (1818-1883) had predicted in his Communist Manifesto (1848).

Hammer and Sickle Set, (1977) by Andy Warhol (1928–1987), screen-printed montage on paper.

It remains a familiar sight in Russia and states like China, Laos and Vietnam which are, even if only nominally, still communist.  It’s less welcome in many former communist countries, some of which make public display a criminal offence, mirroring German legislation banning the swastika.  Even the French Communist Party, for much of its existence the most cravenly Stalinist and Moscow-centric of operations, abandoned the hammer and sickle in favour of a five-pointed star although the painful step wasn’t taken until 2014.  The British Labour Party, wimpier than the French, once used a crossed shovel and quill which, to some critics, came respectively to symbolise the workers who founded the party and the bourgeoisie who staged a hostile takeover a process which afflicted also the Australian Labor Party (ALP), described by one disillusioned veteran as "the cream of the working class overthrown by the dregs of the middle class".  By the the 1980s, the British Labour party had adopted a rose which meant everything in general and nothing in particular so the "New Labour" of the 1990s was, if not inevitable, at least anticipated.  In the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin (b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999) wasn’t going to let anything like that happen and in 2007 he intervened to stop modernisers among his own supporters removing the hammer and sickle from reproductions of the most hallowed relic of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), the Victory Banner, the flag Soviet troops raised over the Reichstag building in Berlin on 1 May 1945.  Mr Putin wasn't at all nostalgic about the Soviet economic model but he liked everything else and has tried to recreate as much of it as possible.

No sickle required: Lindsay Lohan with hammer used to attack a Volvo as part of a promotional stunt, New York City, March 2014.  Who hasn't wanted to attack a Volvo with a big hammer?

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.

Hammer & sickle pencil & mini-skirts.

Rorschach

Rorschach (pronounced raw-shack)

(1) A canton and town in Switzerland.

(2) A personality test using ink-blots

1927: The ink-blot based personality analysis was first published in codified form in 1927, the genesis of which was a 1921 paper by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1885-1922).  Rorschach (Wahlkreis) is a constituency of the canton of Saint Gallen, Switzerland and Rorschach is its largest town.  The town lies on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, the construct of the name an early form of the German Röhr (reeds) + Schachen (lakeside).

The Rorschach test was for some time a standard clinical diagnostic tool in psychology & psychiatry.  It was a collection of ten “ink blots”, five rendered in grey scale, two in grey & red and three in color, all printed on separate cards and presented to the subjects who were asked (1) What might this mean? & (2) What parts of the card made you say that?  The usual protocol was to provide a pencil and have the subject write their responses in the space underneath the image although, depending on the circumstances, a clinician might engage with the subject and obtain more of their thoughts or the tests could immediately be taken for analysis.  Fond of jargon, the profession even took the opportunity to coin a word to describe specific responses, a subject thought to be especially demonstrative in their response to a Rorschach ink blot said to be exhibiting "extratensive" tendencies.  As an adjective it was thus a synonym of "extroverted" and is occasionally seen outside of psychology where it probably adds little but confusion.  It served also as a noun, the relevant subjects being labelled "extratensives".

Lindsay Lohan in Rorschach Ink-Blot Test inspired gold beaded cocktail dress at the Source Code premiere, Crosby Street Hotel, New York City, March 2011.  The dress was paired with black patent ankle strap platform pumps shoes and matching opaque tights.

The idea of using indeterminate and ambiguous shapes as a way of assessing an individual's personality had been around for centuries before Dr Rorschach began his research and in the nineteenth century there were even popular parlor games which used the idea although they were designed to amuse rather than analyze.  What made Dr Rorschach’s work different was the sheer quantity of the data with with he worked, his research encompassing some 300 patients in mental institutions (with a control group of 100 “normal” subjects) to whom to he exposed over 400 ink-blots before selecting the ten which had proved to be of the greatest diagnostic utility.  Although the method was not greatly different from the games, the Rorschach test was genuinely scientific in its design and the systematic approach linking impressionistic responses to ambiguous shapes, this producing evidence of certain tendencies.  Within the still embryonic psychiatric profession, his approach was thought novel and initially received little support.  His book (a 174-page monograph Psychodiagnostik (Psychodiagnostics)), when eventually published in 1921 contained the structure of the ink-blot tests and the results of the 300 patient survey yet it attracted more interest from intrigued literary reviewers than the medical journals and he died little more than a year after its release.  Even the appearance of reviews in the odd literary magazine however did little to stimulate appeal because the book was very much a work by a scientist for other scientists and Dr Rorschach had made no attempt to make his findings accessible to a general audience.  It wasn’t until the work was republished and others began to refine the methodology that others saw potential, especially after professional mathematicians added rigor to the statistical models used to generate the scores from which conclusions were drawn.

The Rorschach cards.

However, those who inherited the work also shifted the goal posts.  While Dr Rorschach had always intended the ink-blots to be only a helpful tool in the diagnosis of schizophrenia, such was the expansion of the profession in the inter-war years that many became interested and, by 1938, the test had been adapted and was being promoted as a kind of “personality testing kit”.  It was quite a departure from Dr Rorschach’s original vision which had been designed deliberately to maintain some ambiguity in the images, his belief that the diagnosis of schizophrenia lay in the margins between the possible responses whereas when used as a personality testing tool, the answers took on the character of a parameter which, when collectively assessed with the provided statistical tool, placed patients in categories.  The test in that form proved highly successful, its proliferation assisted by the demands of wartime and the military’s need for psychological testing, the Rorschach kit easily produced, more popular with subjects than many other methods and, as a piece of mathematics, able easily to be collated into the big data sets electronic machines were beginning to make possible.  It had that those qualities the military so adore: Speed, standardization and simplicity.  It was therefore by the mid 1940s a standard part of psychological testing, used in everything from job applications to assessing an inmate’s eligibility for parole so it was perhaps inevitable it would be applied to the defendants in the Nuremberg trial (1945-1946).  Even before the International Military Tribunal (IMT; which would conduct the trial) assembled, the authorities in charge of the Nazis in custody insisted on psychiatrists and psychologists being available as soon as the prisoners had been assembled.  There were a number of reasons for this, notably that they wanted to ensure the prisoners had the support necessary to dissuade them from attempting suicide and there was the need also to ensure all were mentally competent to stand trial.  Additionally, there was genuine curiosity about the Nazis because never had there been such an opportunity to subject to tests two-dozen odd who were responsible for what was becoming clear were the greatest crimes in history.  The question then, as now was: Are “normal ordinary people” able to be drawn to commit evil acts or are some people evil.

The famous astrophotograph of The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula of the Serpens constellation (taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on 1 April 1995) imagined as four Rorschach ink-blot cards.  The original is at the top, below is a rendering in greyscale and the lower two have different filters applied.

In 2022, the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) was used to obtain a more detailed image of what was happening there some 7000 years ago and while the consensus among cosmologists was comething like “not much has appears to have changed in 27 years”, because the JWST captures in infrared, it was able to penetrate the dense dust, revealing embedded stars and internal structures Hubble (which captured only visible light) couldn’t see.  So much more detailed was the later image that the sharper edges of the clouds could be studied, providing insights into the interplay between the gas and stellar winds.

There is significance in some Rorschach inkblot plates including color while others are black-and-white and the use of color was a deliberate design choice by Hermann Rorschach as part of the “interpretative tool-set” used to assess a subject's responses.  Of the ten plate, cards 1, 4, 5, 6 & 7 are black & white, cards 2 & 3 include red & black while cards 8, 9 & 10 feature multiple colors, including pastels.  The notion was that color introduces emotional and affective complexity and it must be remembered that in this context, “black” & “white” also are “colors”.  According to Dr Rorschach, (1) black & white blots tend to elicit more structured, form-based, and cognitive responses, (2) red is often interpreted as a prompt for more emotional, aggressive, or stimulus-bound reactions and (3) the multi-colored blots test the subject's ability to integrate complex stimuli, including emotional nuance, conflict, or ambiguity.  The theory thus was color could be used to help assess (1) emotional responses, (2) impulsivity, (3) affective regulation and (4) cognitive integration.  What all that of course implied is that were the plates to be rendered in black (and thus rely on shape alone), outcomes and the validity of the test would be affected, most obviously because of the removal of stimuli which would make responses more form-focused, diminishing the utility of the test in differentiating certain traits, notably the interpretation of ambiguous affective signals.  This has been tested and researchers reported results became less rich and less diagnostic when color was removed.

PapaLeoArts take on the Rorschach in water colors.  This array should probably be thought a montage but there might be critics who would find definitional reasons why it's a collage.

In the ink-blots, Dr Rorschach used color selectively with some plates wholly black shapes on a white background, the allocation as critical to the integrity of the process as the shapes but once the test became well known, the ink-blots became pop-culture artefacts, reproduced on posters, T-Shirts, coffee mugs and anything else which might be packaged for sale.  Sometimes the color mix was retained in the original while others applied just about everything from the motifs of psychedelia to polka-dots.     

The Rorschach tests were of course only one of the tools the clinicians assigned to Nuremberg used and the conclusion drawn was that all defendants were sane in the sense they were "legally" sane and thus mentally competent to stand trial even if they were depressed psychopaths (that seemed to be the most common phrase).  Quite what part the tests played in this isn’t clear but the test results themselves assumed a life independent of the trial because of a dispute between the two clinicians most involved in the testing and it wasn’t until the 1990s they were (almost) all published.  This psychological time capsule proved irresistibly tempting for one of the US’s foremost Rorschach experts who over the years had assembled records which could be used as an extraordinarily diverse control group which included (in the hundreds) medical students, Unitarian ministers, psychology students, criminals, business executives and random patients from private practice.  From this were selected the clerics and psychiatric outpatients, the purpose of a comparison with the Nuremberg Nazis being a critique of a recently published analysis of the test results which had concluded the defendants (as individuals and a representatives of the whole Nazi hierarchy) were “cursed beyond redemption” and thus profoundly of “the other”.  Their work was not entirely conventional by accepted scientific standards and they tacitly acknowledged some of the long acknowledged limitations of the test but never wavered from their finding “…the Nazis were not psychologically normal or healthy individuals”.

Defendants in the dock, Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, 1945-1946.  The defendant in the front row at the far right of the photograph was Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht (1877–1970; president of the Reichsbank 1923-1930 & 1933-1939, general plenipotentiary for war economy 1935–1937 and Reichsminister without portfolio 1937-1943) and he secured an acquittal, which might seem surprising given the extent of his complicity in the Nazi re-armament programme but it did reflect the historic difficulties in securing the convictions of enablers of crime (accountants, lawyers, financiers etc) who are a step or more removed from the act(s) being prosecuted, a phenomenon which manifests still in many jurisdictions.  Of the accused, Dr Schacht was the only confessed Freemason but there's never been anything to suggest any of the IMT's eight judges had any connection with the cult.

The notion  “…the Nazis were not psychologically normal or healthy individuals” was as controversial a view in the 1990s as it had been fifty years earlier and if a blind test could not distinguish of the Nazi’s data from the two control groups, at least some doubt would be cast.  Accordingly, ten Rorschach experts were assembled and asked to assemble them into three groups.  All that did was identify the high, medium and low-functioning of each group but there was nothing in them which separated the Nazis.  That was interesting but what was probably definitive was that even when told the nature of the data, the experts were unable to discern any difference between the responses which would enable the Nazis to be identified.  Perhaps sadly, the Nazis may have been as ordinary as they appeared in the dock, the implication being we're all capable of evil, given the right temptation, a nod to an earlier memorable phrase spoken of them: "The banality of evil".  

As that might indicate, like many tests in psychology, the Rorschach is probably useful if its limitations are recognized and the interpretations thought valid decades ago are no longer treated as proven science.  For example there may be something which can be deduced from a subject assessing the whole image in their response which is different for one who picks just a section or who finds something different in different parts but whether there’s anything substantive in the difference between seeing moth and a butterfly may be dubious.  The test is still widely used although many have abandoned it though it’s famously a cult in Japan where it’s one of the profession’s standard tools.  Elsewhere use is mixed.  Interestingly, while the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV (1994) did not endorse or recommend the use of any particular projective test, it did note many were used in clinical practice but cautioned that the validity and reliability of these tests had not been firmly established, urging caution.  Neither the DSM-5 (2013) nor DSM-5-TR (2022) make any reference to the Rorschach test.

Collage

Collage (pronounced kuh-lahzh or koh-lahzh)

(1) The technique, most associated with visual abstract art, of composing a work of art by pasting on a single surface various materials not normally associated with one another, as newspaper clippings, parts of photographs, theater tickets, and fragments of an envelope.

(2) A work of art produced by this technique.

(3) An assemblage or occurrence of diverse elements or fragments in (1) and unlikely or unexpected juxtaposition or (2) a coherent result.

(4) In film, a series of seemingly unrelated scenes or images or shifts from one scene or image to another suddenly and without transition.

(5) Any work created by combining unrelated (or at least definably different) styles; in literature, a combination of styles within the one work; in music a combinations of genres.

1915–1920: From the French collage, the construct being coll(er) (paste, glue) + -age.  Coller was from the Ancient Greek κόλλα (kólla) (glue) of uncertain origin but may ultimately be from the primitive Indo-European kol- and cognates included the Russian кле́й (kléj) and the Middle Dutch helen. The –age suffix was from the Middle French -age, from Old French -age, from the Latin –āticum (influential in words like rivage and voyage) which was used to form nouns or collective nouns in the sense of "action or state of being (a) X, result of Xing" or (more rarely), "action related to X".  Although the historical suffix has had many applications (eg family relationships or locations), it’s now almost wholly restricted to the sense of "action of Xing", and many terms now have little to no connection with the most common uses something especially notable in forms descended from actual Latin words such as fromage and voyage.  Collage & Collagist are nouns, collaged & collaging are verbs (used with object); the noun plural is collages.

Of the accidental & intentional

It not certain exactly when collage was first used in the sense its modern meaning.  It's sometimes credited to English painter and critic, Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) who used the term in a 1919 publication but that’s contested given the word had appeared earlier though there’s some doubt whether that was in reference to the mechanical technique or the final product.  What became known as collage certainly long pre-dates 1919; papier collé was used by both Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963) early in the century and artists, authors & painters had for centuries been producing work from disparate components.  In the digital age, the somewhat misleadingly named software eCollage (and many others) allowed collages to be created on screen although, technically, these programs were as often used to render photomontage as collage.  The opportunistically named iCollage is an image-assembly app for iOS.

A montage of Che Guevara collages.  The difference between collage and montage is that while a collage weaves together things of difference to create a unified whole, a montage uses complete things of some similarity to create something visually coherent although, with some modern artists, coherence can prove elusive.

Colleges by Giuseppe Arcimboldi; Left to right: Four Seasons in One Head, oil on canvas, (circa 1590), Fire, oil on wood, (1566), Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor painted as Vertumnus, Roman god of the seasons, oil on canvas, (circa 1591), The Librarian, oil on canvas, (1566) & Summer, oil on canvas, (1563).

In Western portraiture, the collage is not a recent form.  Although also a conventional court painter of portraits and sacred art, Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1527–1593) was noted for his portraits rendered as collages, the heads fashioned from objects such as vegetables, fruits, flowers & fish.  Very much the modern art of his day, his fanciful work seems to have been well received and critics have linked his work to the tradition of Mannerism.  Examples of collage have been found which pre-date Antiquity and the idea of assembling some representation of something from whatever items fall to hand is thought likely to have been one of the earliest forms of human artistic expression. 

Colleges by Jason Mecier; Left to right: Sigmund Freud, Frida Kahlo, Barack Obama, Lindsay Lohan & Donald Trump.

Los Angeles based pop artist Jason Mecier (b 1968) operates in a particular niche of the collage world, his mosaic portraits fabricated from unconventional materials, sometimes thematic (Sigmund Freud rendered in pills) and most famously, trash.  Perhaps surprisingly, Mr Mecier seems never to have fashioned a likeness of crooked Hillary Clinton; even when working with trash, presumably one has to draw the line somewhere.

Teenage & Teen-age

Teenage (pronounced teen-ige)

In boundary-line construction, a technique of weaving which interleaves brushwood to produce a type of fencing called wattle.  The weave is usually effected horizontally around vertical uprights planted in the ground.

Circa 1700.  The construct was teen + age.  Teen was from the dialectical Kentish variation of tine (enclose within a wattle fence; brushwood for fences and hedges)), from the Middle Dutch tene & teene (plural tenen, diminutive teentje) from the Old Dutch tein & tēn from the Proto-Germanic tainaz, also ultimately the source of twig, which existed in Dutch as twigg.  The –age suffix was from the Middle English -age, from the Old French –age, from the Latin –āticum.  It was used, inter alia, to form nouns with the sense of collection or appurtenance. It was cognate with the French -age, the Italian -aggio, the Portuguese -agem, the Spanish –aje & the Romanian -aj.

Wattle fences built with the teenage method.

Teen-age (pronounced teen-age).

(1) A person aged between thirteen and nineteen.

(2) Of or relating to the characteristics of a teenager.

1911: Used originally in reference to Sunday school classes, the adjectival form teen-aged first noted 1922.  The construct was teen + age.  Teen is from the Middle English -tene, from the Anglian Old English -tēne (a variant was –tīene in West Saxon), from an inflected form of Proto-Germanic tehun (ten).  As a suffix, -teen was used to form the cardinal numbers from thirteen to nineteen, the model being n + ten so, for example, fourteen (4+10) was from the Middle English fourtene, from the Old English fēowertīene, from the Proto-Germanic fedurtehun. It was cognate with the West Frisian fjirtjin, the Dutch veertien, the German vierzehn & the Danish fjorten.  Used in this context as a functional suffix, age (sometimes –age), was from the Middle English age (lifetime, measure of the years), borrowed from the Anglo-Norman age, from the Old French aage & eage (which exists in Modern French as âge), from the (assumed but unattested) Vulgar Latin aetāticum, from the Latin aetātem, accusative form of aetās, from aevum (lifetime), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European hueyu- (vital force).  It displaced the native Middle English elde (age) and the Old English ieldu, eldo & ieldo (age).

Montage of teen-aged Lindsay Lohan photos.

There’s a paucity of material about the specialized form of fence-building called teenage.  Most will go through their lives never reading of the field and thus be never troubled by the distinction between the technique and those of teen-age years.  Usually then it matters not if the word is hyphenated to refer to the latter and even when some possibility of confusion might exist, readers can probably be relied upon to pick up the meaning from context.  Purists still, when writing of the young, the New Yorker magazine continues to insist on a hyphen though whether that's to entice subscriptions from fencing contractors or suggests some concern for baffled readers, isn’t known.