Comet

Comet (pronounced kom-it)

(1) In astronomy, a celestial body moving about the sun, usually in a highly eccentric orbit, most thought to consist of a solid frozen nucleus, part of which vaporizes on approaching the heat from Sun (or other star) to form a gaseous, luminous coma (the envelope of dust and gas, the most dramatic part of which is the long, luminous tail which streams away from the sun (under the influence of solar winds).

(2) In astronomy, a celestial phenomenon with the appearance of such a body.

(3) Any of several species of hummingbird found in the Andes.

(4) In slang, as “vomit comet”, a reduced-gravity aircraft which, by flying in a parabolic flight path, briefly emulates a close to weightless environment.  Used to train astronauts or conduct research, the slang derived from the nausea some experience.

(5) In figurative use (often applied retrospectively and with a modifier such as “blazing comet”), someone (or, less commonly, something) who appears suddenly in the public eye, makes a significant impact and then quickly fades from view, their fleeting moment of brilliance a brief but spectacular event.

1150–1200: From the Middle English comete, partly from the Old English comēta and partly from the Anglo-French & Old French comete (which in Modern French persists as comète), all from the Latin comētēs & comēta, from the Ancient Greek κομήτης (komḗtēs) (wearing long hair; ling-haired), the construct being komē-, a variant stem of komân (to let one's hair grow), from κόμη (kómē) (hair) + -tēs (the agent suffix).  The Greek was a shortened form of ἀστὴρ κομήτης (astēr komētēs (longhaired star)), a reference to a comet’s streaming tail.  The descendants in other languages include the Malay komet, the Urdu کومٹ (komeṭ) and the Welsh comed.  Comet, cometlessness, cometography, cometographer, cometology & cometarium are nouns, cometless, cometic, cometical, cometocentric, cometary, cometographical & cometlike (also as comet-like) are adjectives, cometesimal is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is comets.

Comets orbit the Sun along an elongated path and when not near the heat, the body consists solely of its nucleus, thought to be almost always a solid core of frozen water, frozen gases, and dust.  When near the sun, the nucleus heats, eventually to boil and thus release the gaseous and luminous coma (the envelope of dust and gas), the most dramatic part of which is the long, luminous tail which streams away from the sun (under the influence of solar winds).  The path of a comet can be in the shape of an ellipse or a hyperbola; if a hyperbolic path, it enters the solar system once and then leaves forever while if it follows an ellipse, it remains in orbit around the sun.  Astronomer divide comets into (1) “short period” (those with orbital periods of less than 200 years and coming from the Kuiper belt) and (2) “long-period” (those with an orbital period greater than 200 years and coming from the Oort cloud).

Before the development of modern techniques, comets were visible only when near the sun so their appearance was sudden and, until early astronomers were able to calculate the paths of those which re-appeared, unexpected.  Superstition stepped in where science didn’t exist and comets were in many cultures regarded as omens or harbingers of doom, famine, ruin, pestilence and the overthrow of kingdoms or empires.  It was the English astronomer, mathematician and physicist Edmond Halley (1656–1742; Astronomer Royal 1720-1742) who in 1682 published the calculations which proved many comets were periodic and thus their appearance could be predicted.  Halley's Comet, named in his honor, remains the only known short-period comet consistently visible from Earth with the naked eye and remains the world’s most famous; it last appeared in 1986 and will next visit our skies in 2061.

Comet wine: Non-vintage Alois Lageder Natsch4 Vigneti Delle Dolomiti.

Halley’s findings put an end to (most) of the superstition surrounding comets but commerce still took advantage of their presence.  A comet with a famously vivid tail appeared in 1811 and in that year, Europe enjoyed a remarkably pleasant autumn (fall) which was most conducive to agriculture and became associated with the abundant and superior yield of the continental vineyards.  For that reason, the vintage was called the “comet wine” and the term became a feature in marketing the product which emerged from any year in which notable comets were seen, a superior quality alleged (and thus a premium price).  Wine buffs say any relationship between the quality of a vintage and the travel of celestial bodies is entirely coincidental.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2021) by Dr Heather Clark (b 1974).

One of things about the feminist cult which is now the construct of Sylvia Path (1932-1963) is that her mistreatment at the hands of her husband Ted Hughes (1930–1998; Poet Laureate 1984-2008) tends to obscure her work which many quite familiar with the story of her brief life will barely have read and that’s perhaps predictable, certainly for those for whom the lure of tales of tragic woman and brutish men is a siren.  As human tragedies go, her story is compelling: A precocious talent, the death of the father to whom she was devoted when only eight, the suicide attempt while a student and the burning ambition to write and be published.  Almost as soon as she met Ted Hughes she knew he was “my black marauder” and their affair was one of intense physicality as well as a devotion to their art, something which might have endured during their marriage (which produced two children) had Hughes not proved so unfaithful and neglectful.  In 1963, as an abandoned solo mother in a freezing flat during what entered history as London’s coldest winter of the century, she took her own life while her two babies slept nearby, becoming a symbol onto which people would map whatever most suited their purposes: the troubled genius, the visionary writer, a feminist pioneer and, overwhelmingly, a martyr, a victim of a man.  To his dying day, feminists would stalk literary events just to tell Hughes he had “Sylvia’s blood on his hands”.

So the story is well known and in the years since her death there have been a number of biographies, critical studies, collections of letters, academic conferences; given that, it’s seemed by the 2020s unlikely there was much more to say about one whose adult life spanned not even two decades.  For that reason the 1000-odd densely printed pages of Dr Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath was a revelation because, as the author pointed out, her life “has been subsumed by her afterlife” and what was needed was a volume which focused on what she wrote and why that output means she should be set free from the “cultural baggage of the past 50 years” and shown as “one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.”

Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956.

Red Comet is thus far this century’s outstanding biography and a feminist perspective is not required to recognize that when reading her last poems (written in obvious rage but sustaining a controlled tension few have matched) that she was a profoundly disturbed woman.  Most clinicians who have commented seem now to agree her depression of long-standing had descended to something psychotic by the time of her suicide, a progression she seems to have acknowledged, writing to one correspondent that she was composing poetry “on the edge of madness”.  This is though a biography written by a professional literary critic so it does not construct Plath as tale of tragedy and victimhood as one might if telling the story of some troubled celebrity.  Instead, the life is allowed to unfold in a way which shows how it underpins her development as a writer, the events and other glimpses of the person interpolated into the progress of a text through drafts and revisions, each word polished as the poet progresses to what gets sent to the publisher.  Red Comet is not a book for those interested in how much blame Ted Hughes should bear for his wife killing herself and in that matter it’s unlikely to change many opinions but as a study of the art of Sylvia Plath, it’s outstanding.  Unlike many figurative uses of "comet", Plath continues to blaze her trail. 

Pre-production de Havilland Comet (DH 106) with the original, square windows, England, 1949 (left) and Comet 4 (Registration G-APDN) in BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation (1939-1974 which in 1974 was merged with BEA (British European Airways) and others to later become BA (British Airways)) livery, Tokyo (Haneda International (HND / RJTT)), Japan October 1960.

The term hoodoo is often attached to objects thought jinxed.  When the de Havilland Comet (DH 106; the first commercial jet airliner), within a year of its first flight in 1949, began to suffer a number of catastrophic in-flight accidents, newspapers wrote of the “Comet hoodoo”, something encouraged because, in the pre “black-box” era, analysis of aviation incidents was a less exact science than now and for some time the crashes appeared inexplicable.  It was only when extensive testing revealed the reason for the structural failures could be traced to stresses in the airframe induced aspects of the design that the hoodoo was understood to be the operation of physics.  Other manufacturers noted the findings and changed their designs, Boeing's engineers acknowledging the debt they owed to de Havilland because it was the investigation of the Comet's early problems which produced the solutions which helped the Boeing 707 (1957) and its many successors to be the successful workhorses they became.  As a footnote, by the time the Comet 4 was released in 1958 the problems had been solved but commercially, the project was doomed and reputational damage done.  Between 1949-1964, barely more than 100 were sold although many did provide reliable service until 1981 and the airframe proved adaptable, dozens of military variants produced, the most notable being the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod, a maritime patrol version which was in service with the Royal Air Force (RAF) until 2011.

It’s because of the lessons learned from the Comet hoodoo that the apertures of airliner windows have rounded edges, the traditional four-cornered openings creating four weak spots prone to failure under stress.  In the early 1950s there was much optimism about the Comet and had it been successful, it could have given the UK’s commercial aviation industry a lead in a sector which rapidly would expand in the post war years.  One who didn’t express much faith in his country’s capacity to succeed in the field was the politician Duff Cooper (1890–1954) who, shortly before taking up his appointment as the UK’s ambassador to France, was flying on an Avro York (a transport and civil adaptation of the Lancaster heavy bomber) and he noted in his diary: “I think the designer of the York has discovered the shape of an armchair in which it is quite impossible to be comfortable, if this is typical of the civil transport plane in which were are to compete against the US, we are already beaten.”  As Lindsay Lohan’s smiles indicate, as least on private jets, the seats are now comfortable.

Not quite an Edsel, not yet a Mercury: The 1960 Comet; it was an era of imaginative (other use different adjectives) styling (and at this time they were still "stylists" and not "designers").

The Mercury Comet, built in four generations between 1960-1969 and another between 1971-1977, had a most unusual beginning.  The Ford Motor Company (“FoMoCo”, Mercury’s parent corporation) had in the mid 1950s studied the five-tier (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac) branding used by General Motors (GM) and decided it too would create a five divisional structure (which by 1955 Chrysler had also matched).  The GM model dated from the 1920s and was called the “ladder” (GM at times had more than five rungs) and the idea was each step on the later would take a buyer into a higher price (and at least theoretically more profitable) range of models.  There was a time when this approach made sense but even in the 1950s when Ford embarked on their restructure it was beginning to fragment, the implications of which would become apparent over the decades.  Thus Ford ended up (firefly) with five divisions: Ford, Mercury, Edsel, Lincoln and Continental.  That didn’t last long and Continental was the first to go, followed soon by the still infamous Edsel and the corporation even flirted with the idea of shuttering Lincoln.

1963 Mercury Comet S-22 Convertible.

The original plan had been for the Comet to be the “small Edsel” but by the time the release date drew close, the decision had been taken to terminate the Edsel brand so the Q&D (quick & dirty) solution was to sell the car through the Lincoln-Mercury dealer network, an expedient which lasted for the 1960 & 1961 model years before the Comet was integrated into the Mercury range and badged appropriately.  The early Comets were built on the Falcon platform (“compact” in contemporary US terms) but when the 1966 range was released, the cars became “intermediates” (ie the size between the “compact” and “full-size” platforms) but the Comet name was withdrawn from use after 1969.  It was in 1971 revived for Mercury’s companion to the Maverick, Ford’s replacement for the compact Falcon which slotted above the Pinto which was in a domestic class so compact the industry coined the class-designation “sub compact”.  Cheap to produce and essentially “disposable”, the Maverick and Comet proved so popular they continued in production for a season even after their nominal replacements were in showrooms.

1967 Mercury Comet Cyclone "R Code", one of 60 built that year with the 427 cubic inch (7.0 litre) FE side-oiler V8 and one of the 19 with a four-speed manual transmission.

The Mercury Comet has never attracted great interest from collectors because few were built with the more robust or exotic drive-trains found more frequently in both the competition from GM & Chrysler and the companion versions from Ford.  The mid-range performance package for the general market was the Comet Cyclone, introduced in 1964 to replace the Comet’s earlier S-22 option; neither were big sellers but they were not expensive to produce and remained profitable parts of the Mercury range.  In 1968, during the peak of the muscle car era, Mercury sought to promote the line, dropping the Comet name and promoting the machines as the “Cyclone”, now with quite potent engines although the emphasis clearly was drag racing rather than turning corners; the high performance package was now called the “Cyclone Spoiler”.  For the NASCAR circuits however, there was in 1969 the Cyclone Spoiler II, one of the so-called “aero cars”, the better known of which were the much more spectacular, be-winged Dodge Daytona (1969) and Plymouth Superbird (1970).  Chrysler’s cars looked radical to achieve what they did but the modifications which created the Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II and Ford Torino Talladega were so subtle as to be barely noticeable, the most effective being the increased slope on the lengthened nose, the flush grill and some changes which had the effect of lowering both the centre of gravity and the body.  The Ford and Mercury might have been a less spectacular sight than the Dodge or Plymouth but on the tracks the seeming slight tweaks did the job and both were among the fastest and most successful of their brief era.

1969 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II (slab-sided but slippery, left), 1970 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler (sleek but less aerodynamic than its predecessor, centre) and the aborted 1970 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II (handicapped out of contention by NASCAR, right).   

In 1970, just how aerodynamic was the 1969 Cyclone Spoiler was proved when the racing teams tried the new model which, although it looked sleek, was not as aerodynamically efficient and noticeably slower.  That might seem something of an own goal but Ford were blindsided by NASCAR’s decision to render the low-volume “aero cars” uncompetitive by restricting them to the use of 305 cubic inch (5.0 litre) engines while the conventional bodies were permitted to use the full 430 (7.0).  Thus the aerodynamic modifications planned for the 1970 Torino and Cyclone never entered production.  Of the two prototype Cyclone Spoiler IIs built, one survives revealing a nose which was in its own way as radical as those earlier seen on the Plymouth and Dodge.  In the collector market, the aero cars are much sought but the Cyclones are the least valued which may seem strange because they were on the circuits among the most successful of the era.  Market analysts attribute this to (1) the Cyclone Spoiler II (and Torino Talladega) being visually much less eye-catching than the wild-looking pair from Chrysler and (2) the Cyclone Spoiler II being sold only with a modest 351 cubic inch (5.8 litre) engine whereas the Fords ran 428s (7.0) and the Chryslers 440 (7.2) & 426 (6.9) units, the latter a version of the engine actually used in the race cars.

The highly qualified Kate Upton (b 1992) was in 2014 featured in a Sports Illustrated session filmed in a "vomit comet" (a modified Boeing 727 with a padded interior). 

Oiler

Oiler (pronounced oi-ler)

(1) A person or device that which is some way delivers oil.

(2) A worker employed to oil machinery.

(3) Any of several devices, other than pressure devices, for feeding lubricating oil to a bearing.

(4) In oil exploration, a productive well.

(5) An oilcan.

(6) An oilskin garment, especially a coat.

(7) A ship which uses oil as fuel (archaic).

(8) In admiralty slang, an oil tanker used to refuel other vessels.

(9) In admiralty slang, an assistant in the engine room of a ship, senior only to a wiper, mainly responsible for keeping machinery lubricated (archaic).

(10) In the cleaning kits of firearms, a small (typically thumb-sized) metal container of oil, often containing an integral brush.

(11) As an ethnic slur (mostly southern US), a Mexican (sometimes extended to other of Latino appearance.

Circa 1290: The construct was oil + -er.  Oil was from the Middle English olyer, oyller & oyellere (the later alternative spellings included oylle, olie, oli, eoli, eoyle, olige, oyll, uile, oile & oyl.  Oyler was from the Anglo-Norman olie and the Old French oile, from the Latin oleum (olive oil), from the Ancient Greek ἔλαιον (élaion) (olive oil).  The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought most likely to have been borrowed from the Latin –ārius where, as a suffix, it was used to form adjectives from nouns or numerals.  In English, the –er suffix, when added to a verb, created an agent noun: the person or thing that doing the action indicated by the root verb.   The use in English was reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  When appended to a noun, it created the noun denoting an occupation or describing the person whose occupation is the noun.  The meaning “an appliance for distributing oil in machines" was in use by 1861 and was adopted by the British Admiralty in 1916 to describe "navy vessels carrying oil for use by other ships"; although such vessels had been in use for some years, the Royal Navy having begun the conversion from coal to oil a decade earlier, by 1911 only the submarine fleet ran exclusive on oil and coal (sometimes sprayed with oil) still fuelled most of the navy’s vessels.

Evolution of the Ford 427 side-oiler

The side valve (usually called “the flathead”, an allusion to the almost flat plate covering the combustion chambers) Ford V8 of 1932 is remembered for its vices as well as the many things which made it one of the great engines of the mid-century.  In the 1930s, those vices could be both forgiven and worked-around but by 1953, it was still in production and outdated (though in overseas production it would continue, in French Simca cars until 1961, in Brazilian Fords until 1964 and remarkably, until 1990 in the Simca Unic Marmon Bocquet military truck.  For 1954, Ford responded to the modern overhead valve (OHV) V8s others had introduced with the debut of two new engines, essentially (by the standards of the time) small and big block versions of the same design.  Known as the Y-Blocks because of the shape of the castings, they were sturdy pieces of machinery and addressed many of the problems identified in the flathead over two decades of production but neither was suited to the evolutionary path the American automobile would follow during the 1950s.

1962 Ford 406 FE V8 with 3 x 2 barrel carburetors.

That path was not one which anyone in Detroit was likely to foresee in the late 1940s when the design work on the Y-Blocks began but by 1954, it was at least competitive with the competition.  However, in 1955, Chevrolet introduced their small-block V8 which was light, compact and free-breathing, not something which could be said of the Y-Blocks and more importantly, the design afforded a potential for development which would play out over decades.  By contrast, the Y-Blocks’ potential in both capacity and power output soon plateaued and Ford was forced to resort to exotic solutions like supercharging, something not practical for low-cost mass-manufacturing.  Ford’s solution was not one new V8 but three.  All released during 1958, the SD (Super Duty, a large, low revving truck engine), the MEL (a big block for what were now very large Lincolns and Mercurys) and the FE (thought at the time a big-block but subsequently listed by pedants as a mid-block because later castings would out-weigh it by so much).  The durable SD would remain in the catalogue until 1980, its demise prompted only by the implications of the second oil-shock in 1979, the sole complaint about it being its prodigious thirst.  The MEL would last a decade, early attempts to use it on the race-tracks abandoned because of the penalty imposed by excessive weight although it did enjoy some success in powerboat racing where it’s capacity to run reliably at full throttle for sustained periods was much admired.

Lubrication systems: 1964 Ford 427 FE V8 top oiler (left) & Ford 427 FE V8 side oiler (right).

By their bolts they shall be known.  By convention a "four bolter" was one with the four all into the boss while in a "cross bolter" two were in the boss and two into the block.  "Six bolters" (with four in the boss, two in the block) are now common.

Although it would quickly earn a stellar reputation which endures to this day, Ford’s FE V8 engine didn’t enjoy a wholly auspicious start, associated as it was with the ill-fated Edsel (FE really did stand for “Ford-Edsel” despite some post-debacle attempts to suggest “Ford Engine” (the contemporary MEL stood for Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln)).  However, whatever the problems of the Edsel, the use of the FE is some was not one.  Offered initially in several displacements, the most produced in the 1960s would be the 352 & 390 cubic inch (5.8 & 6.5 litre) versions, both of which briefly were offered in high-performance versions until the decision was taken to develop such engines as a separate FE branch, the first fruit of which was the 406 (6.6 litre) which debuted in 1962.  The 406 had performed well on Ford’s test-rigs, its output slightly exceeding the engineers’ projections and when installed in the new, slippery bodies offered that year, proved fast on the track.  The power and speed however came at the cost of reliability and the increasing speeds on the circuits had exposed weaknesses in the bottom-end, the main bearing caps “walking” when the vibrations reached a certain resonance.  The solution was to “cross-bolt” the caps; an addition two securing bolts (installed sideways through the block) per cap augmenting the pairs mounted in the conventional vertical position.  This approach, still widely used to this day, proved successful and was carried over when in 1963 the FE was further enlarged to 425 cubic inches (7.0 litre), Ford labelling the new mill the 427 to align it with the displacement limit used by both NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) and the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (the International Automobile Federation and world sport’s dopiest regulatory body)).  However, greater capacity meant more power, higher speeds and increased heat and the 427 began to also to suffer, the higher internal pressures meaning lubrication to the now cross-bolted main bearings had become marginal.  Ford’s solution was to reverse the priority with which oil was delivered.  The original design (subsequently known as the “top-oiler”) lubricated first the valve-train at the top of the engine, then the main bearings which supported the crankshaft.  The new process reversed this order and the design became known as the side-oiler.

1966 Ford 427 FE V8 side oiler with tunnel-port cylinder heads and Kar-Kraft transaxle, the specification used in the GT40s which recorded a 1-2--3 finish at that year's 24 Le Mans 24 hour classic. 

Introduced in 1965, the side-oiling proved the final solution and the 427 became a paragon of reliability, powering even the Le Mans 24 hour winning GT40s in 1966 & 1967.  Today the 427 is perhaps best remembered as the power-plant in the 427 AC Shelby Cobra (although some of those actually used the rather more tame FE 428) but in those happy days when one could tick a box and have what was essentially a racing engine installed in a road car, it was available also in full-sized machines (the Galaxie), intermediates (the Fairlane) and, at the tail-end of production, a few (by then somewhat toned down) were even put in the Cougar, Mercury’s Mustang-based take on the pony-car.  By then however, the side-oiler’s days were numbered because not only was it noisy, apt to be cantankerous and a bit of an oil-burner, the complex lubrication and cross bolting made it quite expensive to build, added to which the big bore was at close to the limit the FE block could accommodate so during the manufacturing process, even a slight shift in the casting cores meant a scrapped block.  Thus the attraction for most purposes of the 428 with its smaller bore.

Cutaway schematics: The pushrod 427 FE (left) and the 427 SOHC (right).

As supplied ex-factory: Ford 427 SOHC on stand.

The side oiler also provided the basis for one engine which wasn’t quite mythical because quite a few were built but remains mysterious because nobody seems quite sure how many but the consensus is it was somewhere in three figures.  This was the 427 SOHC (single overhead camshaft (the “sock” in the slang of some)) which for all sorts of reasons never made it onto the circuits for which it was intended nor into even one road car, despite the wishes of many.  Popularly known as “the cammer”, even some sixty years on there’s still a mystique surrounding the cammer and if one can’t find an original for sale (one sold at auction in 2021 for US$60,000), from a variety of manufacturers it’s possible still to buy all the bits and pieces needed to build one.

An oiler: To remove what she describes as "crazy mascara", Lindsay Lohan posted on Instagram details of her technique which is to apply organic coconut oil to the whole face, rubbing in well.  Then she uses a damp towel to remove the oil which takes with it the dissolved mascara.  It actually removes most forms of makeup and has the added benefit of leaving the skin clean and soft.

Bolter

Bolter (pronounced bol-tah)

(1) A person or animal (most especially a horse) that bolts or is prone to running away.  The phrase (applied to HWAGs (horses, wives and girlfriends)) is usually “a bit of a bolter” and historically was never applied to unreliable men; for them, women have many other epithets.

(2) In Australian colonial slang, an escaped convict or absconder.

(3) In botany and horticulture, a plant that grows larger and more rapidly than usual.

(4) In flour milling, a machine or mechanism that automatically sifts milled flour; a person who sifts flour or meal; to sift or filter through a sieve or bolter.

(5) In petroleum refining, a filter mechanism.

(6) In the slang of engine builders, to distinguish between the means used to secure the main bearings supporting a crankshaft (2-bolter, 4-bolter, cross-bolter) which is rare except in the US, where it's most common south of the Mason-Dixon line.

(7) In sport, an obscure athlete who wins an unexpected victory or is a surprise selection in a team (Australia & New Zealand).

(8) In horse racing, a horse which wins at long odds (Australia & New Zealand).

(9) In politics, a member of a political party who does not support the party's nominee or (US archaic).

(10) In naval aviation, a missed landing on an aircraft carrier; an aircraft that has made a missed landing.

(11) As the homophone boulter, a kind of fishing line.

(12) In archaic dialectal use, to smear or become smeared with a grimy substance (later by blood).

(13) In zoology (cetology; the study of whales), to swim or turn sideways while eating.

(14) In the design of retail haberdashery outlets, the shafts supporting bolts of fabric for purposes of display and facilitation of cutting (UK).

From the Middle English bolt (verb) and the Old English (noun); it was cognate with the Dutch bout and the German Boltz.  The Old English bolt (short, stout arrow with a heavy head; crossbow for throwing bolts) was from the Proto-Germanic bultas, source also of the Old Norse bolti, the Danish bolt, the Dutch bout & the German Bolzen.  The original meaning may have been or connected in some sense with "arrow, missile" and therefore derived from the primitive Indo-European bheld- (to knock, strike), source also of the Lithuanian beldžiu (I knock) & baldas (pole for striking).  The word has since Middle English been applied to short metal rods (especially those with knobbed ends) meaning variously "stout pin for fastening objects together" and "part of a lock which springs out" both from circa 1400. A bolt of canvas or (circa 1400 and later applied to other fabrics) was so called for its shape.  The adverbial phrase bolt upright (like a bolt or arrow) is from the late fourteenth century.  The sense of a "sliding metal rod that thrusts the cartridge into the chamber of a firearm" is from 1859.  From the notion of an arrow's flight comes the bolt of lightning (1530s) and the sense of "a sudden spring or start" is attested from the 1540s.

The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought usually to have been borrowed from Latin –ārius and reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant was -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  As an abbreviation (or sometimes following a number), it’s written sometimes as -'er.  The suffix was added to verbs, forming an agent noun to describe a person or thing that does an action indicated by the root verb.  The antonym suffix was –ee which was added to nouns to denote an occupation, hobby etc and to numbers to denote a quantified set.  The related forms were the present participle bolting and the simple past and past participle bolted.  In one sense, the use by Shakespeare in Macbeth (1623) made specific what was once more general.  In Middle English, it meant “to smear or be smeared with a grimy substance” and was applied usually to farm animals getting wet with sweat, rain etc and then "boltering" with mud, hair etc.  However, the Shakespearian purloin popularized the term as means to describe getting covered in blood and that became the most common use in that context.  Bolter is a noun; the noun plural is bolters.

Cross bolters

By their bolts they shall be known.  By convention a "four bolter" was one with the four all into the boss while in a "cross bolter" two were in the boss and two into the block.  "Six bolters" (with four in the boss, two in the block) are now common.

Cross bolters (sometimes hyphenated) is engine-builder slang for the main bearing caps in an internal combustion engine (ICE) being secured by bolts which are screwed into ribs in the block as well as the traditional pair (now often four) into bolt bosses.  The bolt sets are thus mounted at 90^o to each other, a diagram of which would form a + shape when viewed from the front of the engine, hence the idea of “cross-bolted”.  The general effect of cross-bolting is to make a crankcase stiffer by reducing the tendency to twist, something made inherent by the the reciprocating motion of the crankshaft.  The additional bolts limit the movement of the bearings (which engine-builders call "walking"), the purpose being to reduce component failure because a break anywhere in the crankcase area can destroy an engine.  Six-bolt arrangements are now common and some specialists even sometimes install the bolts into the bosses at slightly differing angles on the basis that computer modelling confirms this confers a (slight) benefit in torsional rigidity under certain conditions.  Although not unique to the line and far from novel when added, the best known of the cross-bolters were those in two iterations of the Ford FE range (1958-1976) produced between 1962-1968.  Although it would quickly earn a stellar reputation which endures to this day, Ford’s FE V8 engine didn’t enjoy a wholly auspicious start, associated as it was with the ill-fated Edsel (FE really did stand for “Ford-Edsel” despite some post-debacle attempts to suggest “Ford Engine” (the contemporary MEL stood for Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln)).  However, whatever the problems of the Edsel, the use of the FE is some was not one.

The Ford FE 427: Top vs side oiling.

Offered initially in several displacements, the most produced in the 1960s would be the 352 & 390 cubic inch (5.8 & 6.5 litre) versions, both of which briefly were offered in high-performance versions until the decision was taken to develop such engines as a separate FE branch, the first fruit of which was the 406 (6.6 litre) which debuted in 1962.  The 406 had performed well on Ford’s test-rigs, its output slightly exceeding the engineers’ projections and when installed in the new, slippery bodies offered that year, proved fast on the track.  The power and speed however came at the cost of reliability and the increasing speeds on the circuits had exposed weaknesses in the bottom-end, the main bearing caps “walking” when the vibrations reached a certain resonance.  The solution was to “cross-bolt” the caps; an addition two securing bolts (installed sideways through the block) per cap augmenting the pairs mounted in the conventional vertical position.  This approach, still widely used to this day, proved successful and was carried over when in 1963 the FE was further enlarged to 425 cubic inches (7.0 litre), Ford labelling the new mill the 427 to align it with the displacement limit used by both NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) and the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (the International Automobile Federation and world sport’s dopiest regulatory body)).  However, greater capacity meant more power, higher speeds and increased heat and the 427 began to also to suffer, the higher internal pressures meaning lubrication to the now cross-bolted main bearings had become marginal.  Ford’s solution was to reverse the priority with which oil was delivered.  The original design (retrospectively dubbed the “top-oiler”) lubricated first the valve-train at the top of the engine, then the main bearings which supported the crankshaft.  The new process reversed this order and the design became known as the "side-oiler" so all FE 427s are "cross-bolted" but only some are "side oilers". 

The Bolter

"The Bolter" entered popular culture after the publication in 1945 of Nancy Mitford’s (1904-1973) The Pursuit of Love (1945) in which one character, (the bolter) was so named because of her many marriages, a consequence of her tendency to bolt from one relationship to another; throughout the novel, the bolter is never named and is referred to by all as “the bolter”.  Love in a Cold Climate (1949) was a companion volume to The Pursuit of Love, the title a direct quotation from George Orwell's (1903-1950) Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).  The usual form of expression is: “she’s a bit of a bolter”, borrowed from the use to refer to a flighty horse and historically, was applied only to wives and girlfriends; for unreliable men, women have many other epithets.  Mitford based the character on Lady Myra Idina Sackville (1893-1955), daughter of the eighth Earl De La Warr (1869-1915) and Lady Muriel Agnes Brassey (1872-1930).  Known always by her middle name, Idina, she led what many considered a scandalous life and married and divorced five times, her other connection with unconventionality that she was the cousin of the writer Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), remembered for many things including her long marriage to the writer Harold Nicholson (1886-1968) and being the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of her lovers.  A modern version of the phrase "a bit of a bolter" is "I'm going to Meghan Markle" meaning (in this context) "I'm leaving".  It must be used with care because as the entries in Urban Dictionary suggest, "to Meghan Markle" can mean many things.

Usage guide: The meaning of "to bolt" from somewhere differs from "to leave" the place in that the former indicates the departure was either (or a combination of) rapid, unexpected, unauthorized or sudden.