Prosaic

Prosaic (pronounced proh-zey-ik)

(1) Of writing or speaking, straightforward; matter-of-fact; lacking the feeling or elegance of poetry.

(2) Something commonplace or dull; matter-of-fact or unimaginative; overly plain, simple or commonplace, to the point of being boring.

(3) Of or having the character or form of prose, the ordinary form of spoken or written language, rather than of poetry (now of technical use only).

1650-1660: From the fifteenth century Middle French prosaïque and directly from the sixteenth century Medieval Latin prōsaicus (in prose), from the Classical Latin prōsa (prose), from prorsus (straightforward, in prose), from the Old Latin provorus (straight ahead), the construct being pro- (forward) + vorsus (turned), from vertō (to turn), from the primitive Indo-European wer- (to turn, to bend).  The original meaning was technical, distinguishing text as prose rather than poetry and in this sense was usually written as prosaicus (in prose).  The first hints of literary hierarchy were first noted in French in 1746 when used to contrast the “character” of prose in contrast to the “feeling” of poetry.  The sense of describing something ordinary or mundane first seen in French in 1813, a meaning soon adopted in English.  Prosaic & prosaical are adjectives, prosify is a verb, prosified & prosifying are verbs & adjectives, prosaicness is a noun and prosaically is an adverb.

Figurative use of poetic & prosaic:  Jaguar E-Type (XK-E, 1961-1974) (left) & Jaguar XJ-S (1975-1996) (right).  "Poetry in motion" is a cliché but when the E-Type first was seen, that was the phrase some journalists chose.

Whether Enzo Ferrari (1898-1988) ever called the E-Type "the most beautiful car in the world" remains uncertain (though he certainly never issued a denial) but over the decades plenty have echoed the sentiment, sometimes using the phrase "poetry in motion".  By 1975, the world had changed and there were now rules with which to comply and although the XJ-S (later XJS) wasn't really a replacement for the E-Type, because of the timing, that was the basis on may of the early reports based at least some of their critique.  Dynamically, on about any objective measure, it was a better car than the E-Type but nobody is known to have claimed it was better looking and in some contemporary reviews, the styling was described as "prosaic".  It might have been more accurate to use the word "pragmatic" and the lines perhaps aged better than many at the time anticipated, the car in (almost) continuous production for over twenty years and the platform endured until 2006, providing the underpinnings for the first generation of Jaguar's XK8 (1996-2005) and the Aston Martin DB7 (1997-2004), both of which looked better than the XJ-S although neither matched the timeless E-Type.  Upon release, there was much comment about the styling lacking the appeal of the E-Type but the XJ-S was less a replacement than an entry into a new market segment, the anyway declining sports car segment abandoned.  Regarding its capabilities, the press were fair, one publication noting it was smooth, quiet and luxurious yet "capable of speeds that would have won a grand prix not 15 years ago".  That comparison was admittedly with Formula One's voiturette (1.5 litre, naturally aspirated) era but it was an indication that even in the troubled 1970s, there had been progress.   

1983 Jaguar XJ-S Lynx Eventer shooting brake.

What many regard as the best-looking XJS version were the "shooting brakes" (a kind of station wagon) made by specialist coach-builders, the best-known of which was the Lynx Eventer, 67 of which were made.  Critics at the time noted the rear treatment rendered a better balanced shape and much the same observation was made of the convertible (1988-1996) version (less so the SC "cabriolet" (1983-1988)).  Although the pre-war shooting brakes often were built for the HFS (hunting, fishing & shooting) set who needed space for shotguns, fishing rods, hunting hounds and such, in the 1980s they emerged in the niche of the "horsey" set although there was obviously appeal for those who liked the image even if they never sat in a saddle.  In naming the Eventer, Lynx may have had in mind the sport of "eventing", an equestrian sport in which a single horse & rider compete against others across the three disciplines of dressage, cross-country, and show jumping, the roots in the drills European armies conducted to ensure officers seeking a commission in the cavalry possessed the requisite skills.  Eventing has a reasonably impressive death toll of both riders and beasts but it continues to exert a pull with women especially drawn; that's not surprising because some girls fall in love with horses at pony club and never quite recover.

1986 "Daimler S Design Study".

The shooting brake coachwork eliminated the buttresses that were the design's most distinctive feature and interestingly, they were sacrificed also when the factory in 1986 undertook a “design-study” for a proposed "luxury version", to be sold as the “Daimler S”.  The shape was judged most pleasing, unlike the “Coupé” version of the Jensen Interceptor (1966-1976), a reputed 60 of which were built in 1975-1976.  Without the dramatically expansive rear window (nicknamed "the fishbowl"), the design didn't please many and it was later revealed that, struggling to recover from the mid-1970s recession and collapse in demand for big, thirsty cars (both a consequence of the first oil shock), the company had exhausted their supply of closed body shells so "cobbled together" a top to be attached to some of remaining convertible (1974-1976) bodies awaiting completion.  That's may account for why it looked like something of a design college project that may (generously) have been graded a "C-" but, approaching bankruptcy, Jensen was in its death throes.

The original Jensen Interceptor (1966-1976, left) "saloon" and the hastily improvised Coupé (1975-1976, right).  The vinyl glued to the roof didn't help and it was a difficult time for the dying company but Jaguar's execution of the same concept (add a roof to a convertible) on the one-off Daimler S was more accomplished.  Verging on the brutish, nobody ever called the Interceptor's lines "poetic" but the appeal has endured and even today there are companies offering "refurbishment packages" including modern power-trains and electronics.

One thing the Daimler S had in common with the unfortunate Interceptor Coupé was the project being relatively cheap to execute because much of the engineering work had already been done in creating open versions (a full convertible by Jensen; the “SC” version of the XJS with a Triumph Stag-like fixture atop).  Sales of the XJ-S SC were sufficiently encouraging for a team to be formed to produce a conventional convertible, one aspect of the project a removable hard-top (always a factory option for the smaller E-Type).  Because of the sheer size (and consequently weight) of such a structure, that proved unviable but, the styling done, the idea of a “notchback coupé” was explored, the “Daimler” brand available to enable the thing to be sold at a higher price.  The prototype Daimler S required more than welding on the aborted hard-top but not much more, the main differences the different rear-side windows and fluted fittings on the grill & trunk (boot) lid trim.  The planned interior fit-out (a more lavish use of timber veneers, carpet & leather) was never fitted to the prototype and wilder thoughts in the engineering office included AWD (all-wheel drive) but none of the speculation ever even reached the drawing boards.  The one-off Daimler S did get as far as US focus groups for "market reaction" to be assessed but it had the misfortune of being displayed with a prototype XJ-S convertible and while the response to the coupé was polite, the convertible was received with an enthusiasm matched by the US dealer network, none of whom needed a focus group to tell them where demand lay.  While the lines of neither the Lynx Eventer or Daimler S would be likely to attract the epithet "poetic", both shapes improved on the original.  

Prosaic is an example of the figurative adoption of a word with a precise technical meaning assuming such popularity that the original sense became relegated to specialists.  Once, any text not poetic was “prosaic” (ie “written in prose”), and this description denoted nothing negative; it was just a way of distinguishing between written forms, reflecting prosaic’s origins in the Latin prosa (prose).  However, by the seventeen century, poetry had come to be regarded as a most superior form of expression, considered more beautiful, imaginative, and emotional, prose relegated to the status of the mundane and procedural.  The figurative use evolved from this and prosaic came to be used to refer to anything thought ordinary or unimaginative including music, ideas, architecture, Jaguars etc.  The adjective thus transformed into a synonym for "colorless, drab, lifeless, lacklustre, humdrum, dull, pedestrian, unimaginative" etc and this resulted in phrases which once would have been thought bizarre or tautological: “prosaic poetry” & “prosaic prose”.  In its original technical sense (distinguishing the style of writing used for poetry from other literature), the word is now rarely used other than by those somewhere in the "literature business" and, even there, use can be challenging because of the implications of the modern sense(s).  Still, for those who wish to emphasise certain bad texts are worse even than others, the comparative is "more prosaic" and the superlative, "most prosaic".

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953, left) and his wife Caitlin Thomas (née Macnamara; 1913-1994, right) in the bar of Brown’s Hotel, Laugharne, Wales, 1938.

As the origin in the Latin prosa or pronersa oratio (straightforward discourse) suggests, “prose” is the language in its direct, unadorned form, flowing in the way of style(s) written or spoken in everyday life.  It differs from poetry or verse in not being restricted in rhythm, measure or rhyme although, in literary theory, there exists also “poetic prose” and the “prose poem”.  Literary theory however has, in the last sixty years-odd, constructed a large and sometimes bewildering array of technical terms and categories and the possible number of distinct prose forms may be close to limitless.  Poetic prose is prose which approximates to verse in the use of rhythm (perhaps even a kind of meter) in the elaborate and ornate use of language, and especially in the use of figurative devices like onomatopoeia, assonance and metaphor.  Except in experimental form, poetic prose usually is deployed only as a literary device, appearing in short works or in brief passages in longer pieces in order to achieve a (not always entirely clear) specific effect although the common element seems to be something like “an elevation of the emotional temperature”.  Authors interpolating passages of poetic prose have included Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)), Herman Melville (1819–1891), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), James Joyce (1882–1941, whose use of poetic prose wasn’t always immediately accessible), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and William Faulkner (1897–1962).  Classic examples of the “hybrid form” are sectionsof the narrator’s narrative in the radio play Under Milk Wood (1952) by Dylan Thomas (1914–1953).

The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot (2024), in four volumes, edited by Archie Burnett.

A prose poem is a composition printed as prose but distinguished by elements common in poetry, such as often elaborately contrived rhythms, figures of speech, rhyme, internal rhyme, assonance, consonance and startling imagery.  In academic use, it’s the tragic and only posthumously recognized French proto-symbolist Aloysius Bertrand (pen name of Louis Jacques Napoléon Bertrand, 1807-1841) who is acknowledged as having introduced prose poetry to French writing and, more that others, it was him who (retrospectively) made it a fashionable sub-genre among the avant-garde, the seminal work being Gaspard de la Nuit-Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot (Gaspard of the Night-Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot, 1842), a collection of fantasies in the manner of the Dutch painter Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn; 1606-1669) and Jacques Callot (circa 1592–1635, a printmaker in the baroque style, born in the then independent Duchy of Lorraine).  Although it was the intricacy of the ornate and rhythmical language that contributed to the recognition of the prose poem as a literary form, upon publication, it made little impact and only later became influential though for more than a century it remained neglected in English.  When French critics finally took notice, the initial spread of the work owed much to the dazzling images, a number of which were, by the standards of the age, monumentally grotesque.  The influence on the French poet, essayist, translator and art critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was obvious in his Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen, 1869 and better known by its subsequent title Petits Poèmes en prose (Little Poems in Prose)), a collection of 50 short prose poems and one of the building blocks of literary modernism.  The symbolist poets and surrealists also acknowledged a debt, as did T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) although his fork of modernism was so striking it seems almost unfair much to dwell on the precursors.

Lindsay Lohan, a poem by Amber Tambling, from the collection Dark Sparkler (2015).

Actress and author Amber Tamblyn (b 1983) solved the writer's dilemma about whether to handle the subject of Lindsay Lohan in prose or poetry by using no text at all.  The publisher HarperCollins described her third collection Dark Sparkler (2015) as a “…hybrid of poetry and art exploring the lives and deaths of actresses who began their careers as child stars.”  The book, which included original artwork by a number of artists, was well received, critically and commercially.  The title was well-chosen because Dark Sparkler was a catalogue of murder and suicide but what attracted much comment was the inclusion of one living soul: Lindsay Lohan, her entry (on page 47) blank but for her name as the title.  An author’s relationship ultimately is with their readers but first it’s with their critics and the response to that one proved it’s possible to deconstruct text even when it doesn’t appear.  As the postmodernists explained, even a blank page is "text" to be deconstructed to find meaning and should the conclusion be there is "no meaning", that too is "a meaning".  Whether fashionable or not, postmodernism made a contribution to literary criticism and remains available for readers to take from it what they will.  Some of the critical reaction to Ms Tambling's Lindsay Lohan was something in vein of those who approached John Cage’s (1912–1992) 4:33 (1952) in that, without much with which to work, the only obvious question seemed to be “What did you mean?”  Ms Tamblyn did say she found it “upsetting” when, after reading several of the poems dedicated to starlets who died young, she spoke the words “Lindsay Lohan” and the audience laughed; perhaps, in the age of the TikTokers she’d not now be surprised.  The poet claimed the inclusion of the piece in its unusual form was not to say “you’re next” but explicitly to avoid writing anything about a life in progress, the idea being Ms Lohan’s life was her own story to write.  Like any work of prose or poetry, page 47 was there for people to take from it what they found but presumably, the interpretative range might be wider than for those reading something like John Keats’ (1795-1821) ode To Autumn (1820).

The Tay Bridge Disaster

William Topaz McGonagall (circa 1825–1902) was a Scottish poet of Irish ancestry, now acknowledged as perhaps the worst poet ever to have been published in English, a fair achievement given the wealth of modern competition.  His best known work remains The Tay Bridge Disaster (1880), lamenting the disaster of 28 December, 1879 when, during a severe gale, the central section of Dundee's Tay Rail Bridge collapsed, sending to their deaths in the freezing water the 80-odd souls aboard the Wormit-Dundee train passing at the time.  Regarded during its brief existence as a triumph of Victorian (1837-1901) engineering, the Tay Rail Bridge was nearly two miles (3.2 km) long and then the longest in the world but it had been built with an insufficient allowance for lateral wind-load, the structure that night succumbing to the gale-force winds estimated at 80 mph (130 km/h, 70 knots).  An enquiry was conducted and the designer, Sir Thomas Bouch (1822-1880) (dubbed a Knight Bachelor at Windsor Castle on 26 June, 1879 by Victoria (1819–1901; Queen of the UK 1837-1901) in recognition of the quick and economic construction of the bridge) was found for primarily responsible for the disaster.  His health suffered as a consequence of the event and within a year of the collapse, he was dead.

The Tay Bridge after the collapse (National Library of Scotland image).

Whether the The Tay Bridge Disaster can be said to be prosaic is debatable because there are probably better adjectives but critics have long been united that it's a very bad piece of poetry and it's doubtful a re-rendering in prose would be much of an improvement, one writing of it that McGonagall was “deaf to poetic metaphor, employing inappropriate rhythms that resulted in unintentionally amusing poetry.”  Said to be wholly oblivious to the invective almost universally directed to his oeuvre of over two-hundred pieces of verse, his sheer awfulness and tenacity caused him to be remembered to this day for at least something while countless poets who were merely earnest and competent are long forgotten.  Whether The Tay Bridge Disaster is the "worst ever" poem is up to readers but the problem with poetry is that its appreciation is a specific skill-set and not all possess the skill.  Were the critics to have praised the piece as a work or rare genius and pronounced it a masterpiece, many of us would have taken their word for it.

The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
 
’Twas about seven o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-
“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”
 
When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,
But Boreas blew a terrific gale,
Which made their hearts for to quail,
And many of the passengers with fear did say-
“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.”
 
But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,
Boreas he did loud and angry bray,
And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
 
So the train sped on with all its might,
And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,
And the passengers’ hearts felt light,
Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,
With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,
And wish them all a happy New Year.
 
So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
 
As soon as the catastrophe came to be known
The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,
And the cry rang out all o’er the town,
Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,
And a passenger train from Edinburgh,
Which fill’d all the peoples hearts with sorrow,
And made them for to turn pale,
Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell the tale
How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
 
It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

Laurel

Laurel (pronounced lawruhl or lor-uhl)

(1) A small European evergreen tree, Laurus nobilis, of the Lauraceae family, having dark, glossy green leaves (known also as the bay tree or sweet bay).  Trees & shrubs belonging to (or resembling) the natural order Lauraceae are said to be lauraceous.  When used as an adjective (not in the strict botanical sense), the comparative is more lauraceous, the superlative most lauraceous.

(2) Any tree of the genus Laurus.

(3) In general use, any of various similar trees or shrubs, as the mountain laurel or the great rhododendron.

(4) The foliage of the laurel as an emblem of victory or distinction.

(5) A branch or wreath of laurel foliage.

(6) In the plural (laurels or victory laurels), an award conferred (literally or figuratively) as an honor for achievement in some field or activity.

(7) An English gold coin minted in 1619, so called because the king's head was crowned with laurel.

(8) In many color charts, a green of a darker hue.

(9) To adorn or enwreathe with laurel.

(10) To honor with marks of distinction.

(11) A female given name (there have been rare instances of male use, including as a "second name" referencing some relative).

1250–1300: A dissimilated variant of the Middle English laurer (laurel), from the Anglo-Norman, from the twelfth century Old French laurier & lorier (bay tree; laurel tree), the construct being lor (bay) + -ier, from the Medieval Latin laurārius, from the Latin laurus (laurel tree), thought related to the Greek daphne (laurel), probably from a pre-Indo-European Mediterranean language.  The French suffix -ier was from the Middle French -ier & -er, from the Old French, from the Latin -ārium, the accusative of -ārius.  It was used to form the names of trees, ships, jobs etc.  The second -r- in the Middle English laurer changed to -l- by process of dissimilation.  Laurel & laureate are nouns & verbs, laureateship & laurustinus are nouns, laureled & laurelled are verbs & adjectives and lauriferous & lauraceous are adjectives; the noun plural is laurels.

Lindsay Lohan fridge magnet by Alexanton.  Laurel Hollow is an incorporated village in Nassau County on the North Shore of Long Island, New York, within the Town of Oyster Bay (where Theodore Roosevelt (TR, 1858–1919; POTUS 1901-1909) died).

The use to describe an emblem of victory or of distinction (hence the phrase “to rest on one’s laurels” (the original form was “repose upon”)) dates from 1831.  The phrase is now used used in the cautionary sense “don’t rest on your laurels”, a warning not to rely on a reputation gained through past successes but instead continue to strive and improve.  The companion phrase “look to your laurels” is an idiomatic expression (known in Antiquity) meaning one needs to be vigilant and attentive to one's accomplishments, skills or position because there will be those eager to surpass or outshine you.  Like “don’t rest on your laurels”, it stresses the importance of maintaining one’s competitive edge.  It was a bay leaf from a laurel shrub that Πυθία (Pythia, priestess of Pythian Apollo at Delphi) chewed during her prophetic trances.

Sirens and the Night (1865) by William Edward Frost (1810-1877).

Although most associated with women (the feminine variants including Laura, Lauren, Lori and Lorraine), Laurel is a unisex given name.  It was related to the German Lorelie and in Germanic mythology there were several tales of the lovely maiden Lorelei (luring rock) who lived upon a rock in the River Rhine.  She lured fishermen to their deaths by singing songs of such beauty they couldn't resist, a variation of the stories of the Sirens in Greek mythology.  The Sirens were legendarily beautiful but deadly creatures who used their lyrical and earthly charms to lure sailors to their death.  Attracted by their enchanting music and voices, the intrigued seafarers would sail too close to the rocky coast of the Siren’s island and be shipwrecked, there to suffer a worse fate still at the hands of the hungry Sirens.  In Homer's Odyssey (an epic poem from perhaps as long ago as the eighth century BC), it was Odysseus who most famously escaped the sirens.  Longing to hear their songs but, forewarned by Circe and having no wish to be shipwrecked and devoured, he had his sailors fill their ears with beeswax, rendering them deaf.  Then, he ordered he be tied to the mast, telling his crew that whatever he said, they were not to release him but instead tighten the knots, not cutting the bonds until the ship had sailed far from the coast.  Of course, approaching the rocks, he heard the lovely voices and implored the crew to release him but they followed their skipper’s orders, not setting him free until the danger had passed.  Some writers claimed the Sirens were doomed to die if a man heard their singing and escaped and, as Odysseus sailed off, they flung themselves into the waters and drowned but, among the myths, that was not always their fate.  Not untypically for the myths of Antiquity, the Sirens are said to have had many homes.  The Romans said they lived on some small islands called Sirenum scopuli while later authors place them variously on the islands of Anthemoessa, on Cape Pelorum, on the islands of the Sirenuse, near Paestum, or in Capreae.  All were places with rocky coasts and tall cliffs and thus for ships potentially lethal places although the fate of sailors was more gruesome, the Sirens devouring them.  The Argonauts sailed close to the Sirens, but, using the same principle as “radio jamming” in the twentieth century, Orpheus sang as long as the crew was within earshot of them (“drowning out their signal”), so none were lured (except the unfortunate Butes, carried away by Aphrodite after he fell victim).

#metoo: Apolo persiguiendo a Dafne (Apollo chasing Daphne (circa 1637)), oil on canvas by Theodoor van Thulden (1606–1669) after Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The feminine proper name Daphne was from the Greek daphne (laurel, bay tree) and in mythology was the name of a nymph.  Etymologists conclude the word is related to the Latin laurus (laurel) although the mechanism has been lost in time.  In Greek mythology, Δάφνη (Daphne), daughter of the River Ladon (and sometimes of the Thessalian River Peneus), was a nymph with whom the God Apollo fell in love; he was provoked by Cupid, having disputed with him the power of his darts which Apollo, the recent conqueror of the Python, belittled.  When he pursued her to the banks of the Peneus, she was saved from being ravished by the god who transformed her into a Laurel tree, the origin of Apollo being so often depicted crowned with laurel leaves.  None of the writers from Antiquity seem ever to have pondered whether the nymph, had she been offered time to consider the choice between being ravished by a Greek god or becoming eternally arboreous, might have preferred to permit a slice be cut from the loaf.  While at the time not of much consolation to the unfortunate Daphne, Apollo ordained that the laurels should be the prize for poets and victors and, being, at least briefly, a sentimental chap, Apollo adopted the laurel as his favorite tree so there’s that.  The site of temples and a stadium, the Grove of Daphne was a pleasure resort of renowned natural beauty, dedicated to Apollo and located near Antioch.  

Apollo and Daphne (1622-1625), sculpture in white Carrara marble by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Galleria Borghese, Rome.

Being a Greek myth, there are of course variants in the tales and in a Laconian version, Daphne was the daughter of Amyclas who spent her days among the mountains where she was a favourite of Artemis.  From afar, Leucippus fell in love with her and, disguising himself as a girl, joined her companions.  Daphne became fond of him (thinking him a her), but Apollo became jealous and vowing to expose his trickery, inspired Daphne and her companions with a wish to bathe.  Leucippus, obviously, hesitated to remove his clothing, but his companions forcibly undressed him and, feeling betrayed upon discovering his identity, they attacked him, his life saved only by the gods rendering him invisible.  At this point, Apollo dashed to try to seize Daphne but she ran off and in answer to her prayer, Zeus turned her into a laurel.  Latter-day interpretations of Daphne's fate have differed.  While her name lives on as a tragic hero (the girl who gave up her life rather than succumb to a sexual assault) some feminists have criticized the notion that a victim of such a crime should be transformed into something silent and thus uncomplaining.

Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993) in a “laurel leaves” hat designed by Hubert de Givenchy (1927–2018), photograph by Howell Conant (1916–1999), Switzerland, February 1962.

As an adjective, laureate (crowned with laurels as a mark of distinction) dates from the late fourteenth century and the earliest reference was to poets of particular distinction, from the Latin laureatus (crowned with laurel), from laurea (laurel crown; emblematic of victory or distinction in poetry), from the feminine laureus (of laurel).  The first known use of Laureat poete is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s (circa 1344-1400) Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) in reference to Scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), and it was used in Middle English of Greek fabulist Aesop (circa 620–564 BC) and, by the early fifteenth century of Chaucer himself.

In English the inverted form “poet laureate” was in imitation of Latin word order and although used informally since the early 1400s, the evidence suggests the first appointed by the state was probably (and perhaps posthumously) Ben Jonson (circa 1572–circa 1637) in 1638 although the first for whom the letters patent remain extant was John Dryden (1631–1700).  In the UK, the position of poet laureate is an honorary office in the gift of the sovereign but in these days, appointed on the advice of the prime minister; because few prime-ministers know much of poetry, they too take advice on the matter; in that, it's similar to the appointment of bishops, most prime ministers knowing as little of religion.  Curiously, although the office is not un-remunerated, the government describes it still as an “honorary appointment”, the advantage of that being summary dismissal is a simpler process should the poet start writing material unpleasing to the party in power.  It may be more correct to call it a kind of sinecure because while the expectation is the appointee will compose verse to mark moments of national significance, such things are not defined and nor are aspects such as frequency or length.  So it’s one of those “gentlemen’s agreements” which, as late as the 1950s was still a feature of the way the establishment ran the UK.  That would have extended also to Dame Carol Ann Duffy (b 1955, poet laureate 2009-2019), thus far the only woman appointed (she had the benefit of ticking several boxes for Gordon Brown (b 1951; prime minister of the UK 2007-2010): Scottish; female; lesbian).  Just for once, Gordon's stars aligned.

Opportunity missed: Dylan Thomas (1914–1953, left) and his wife Caitlin Thomas (née Macnamara; 1913-1994, right) in the bar of Brown’s Hotel, Laugharne, Wales, 1938.

For his laureateship, Dryden's was paid an annual fee of Stg£200, the inclusion in 1630 by the doomed Charles I (1600–1649; King of England, Scotland & Ireland 1625-1649) of an annual “butt of Canary wine”, later converted into the monetary equivalent.  A butt of wine (known also as “a pipe”) had a volume of 105 imperial gallons (126 US gallons, 477 litres) and was part of the English standardized “Cask Measurement System” regulating trade in liquids between brewers, distillers, merchants and shippers.  All graduations of the defined sizes of wooden barrels were fractions of the largest standard cask (the “tun” (210 imperial gallons (252 US gallons, 954 litres)) with a butt a half-tun and a “hogshead” half a butt (52 imperial gallons (63 US gallons, 238 litres)).  However, being English, the system was complicated by a butt of ale or beer being defined as 108 imperial gallons (130 US gallons, 491 litres).  As a unit of measurement the butt was the origin of the slang term “buttload”.  The tradition of the “butt of Canary wine” was revived on the request of Ted Hughes (1930–1998; poet laureate 1984-1998) who received 720 bottles of sherry.  Being Irish, the poet Brendan Behan (1923-1964) wouldn't have been created poet laureate but the government avoided a significant charges against the exchequer by not appointing Dylan Thomas for whom 720 bottles of anything would likely not have proved sufficient.

Barack Obama (b 1961; POTUS 2009-2017, Nobel Peace Prize laureate 2009).  The peace prize is awarded by a committee elected by the Norwegian Stortinget (parliament); it summarized the basis of their decision being President Obama's: “...extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”  Those skilled in deconstruction concluded the true rationale was “He is not George W. Bush” (George XLIII, b 1946; POTUS 2001-2009)).

The poet laureate's annual payment is now “Stg£5,750 and a barrel of sherry” so it’s good gig considering there are no set hours and only the vaguest KPIs (key performance indicators).  There was a time when a poet laureate was an exalted figure but these days there’s less interest and the best remembered probably still is Ted Hughes (1930–1998; poet laureate 1984-2008) and that less for his oeuvre than calls by feminists to boycott his works because he had Sylvia Plath’s (1932-1963) “blood on his quill”.  The noun laureate came into existence in the 1520s, either as an evolution from the adjective or through a mistaken reading and laureateship has been in use since 1732.  In modern use, laureate is most frequently applied to Nobel prize winners, a use that began in 1947; while many of the Nobel laureates have been outstanding figures in their field, there have been a few about as undeserving as some of the less distinguished British poets laureate.  Of the 21 who have held the office, serious critics seem to rate only Dryden, William Wordsworth (1770–1850; poet laureate 1843-1850) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892; poet laureate 1850-1892) as first-rate poets.

The laurel appeared in Hymn to Proserpine (1866), a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) exploring atheism, a theme to which he would on occasion return as he developed in verse his increasingly strident opposition to Christianity in general and stifling Victorian morality particularly.  Nominated every year between 1903 and 1909 for the Nobel Prize in Literature, his name was on the list in 1893 presented to Victoria (1819–1901; Queen of the UK 1837-1901) as the replacement for Tennyson as Poet Laureate but the queen vetoed him “on moral grounds” although it’s not known if she’d read or merely been told about his works discussing sado-masochism and lesbian longings.  Swinburne was of a figure of the post-Romantic disillusionment and a part of the sceptical tradition that would emerge in the nineteenth century to grow to a critical mass in the twentieth; even if not familiar with his most “disturbing” verse, Hymn to Proserpine, an address to Proserpina (in Rome, the goddess of the Underworld), lamenting that the rise of Christianity had displaced the pagan goddess and her pantheon, would alone have been enough to incur royal disapprobation.

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has
   grown grey from Thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the
   fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives
   not May.

The meaning is that both romantic love and artistic fame are fleeting, fragile, and bound to fade, the work a pagan perspective rejecting the idea of eternal life or permanent earthly glory.  In saying “Laurel is green for a season”, the leaves exist in their traditional symbolic role celebrating poetic glory, victory and cultural achievement but as “Love is sweet for a day”, while human affection can briefly be thrillingly intense, notoriously is it brief and transitory.  Just as “love grows bitter with treason” with relationships easily and often turned toxic by a betrayal or shift in faith, the “laurel outlives not May” and like spring flowers, fame dies quickly when the cultural season shifts and fashions change.  Nothing lasts forever and even the highest artistic achievements will one day dissolve into nothingness: Man can write his will across the heavens but those stars will soon dim and fall.  Swinburne found comfort not in an afterlife, but in the total, final darkness granted by Proserpine, the goddess of death.  Charmingly, Christians and pagans alike would both concur with the scriptural “Vanity, vanity, vanity of vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2) although each would draw different conclusions, the former in eternal life, the latter in peaceful oblivion.  As a footnote, Hymn to Proserpine includes cross-rhyme (known also as an interlaced rhyme) a device occurring in long couplets, the device operating on words in the middle of each line (here “season” and “treason”).

Microaggression

Microaggression (pronounced mahy-kroh-uh-gresh-uhn)

(1) A casual comment or action directed at a marginalized, minority or other non-dominant group that (often) unintentionally but unconsciously reinforces a stereotype and can be construed as offensive.

(2) The act of discriminating against a non-dominant group by means of such comments or actions.

1970: The construct was micro- + aggression.  The word was coined by African-American Chester Middlebrook Pierce (1927-2016), a former Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.  Micro (small, microscopic; magnifying; one millionth) was a word-forming element from the New Latin micro- (small), from the Ancient Greek μικρός (mikrós) (small).  The origin is disputed between etymologists, the traditional view being it was from the primitive Indo-European (s)meyg- & (s)mēyg- (small, thin, delicate) and was cognate with the Old English smicor (beauteous, beautiful, elegant, fair, fine, tasteful), source also of the Modern English smicker and related to the German mickrig.   However, there’s a highly technical discussion within the profession, hinged around the unexplained “k” in the Greek and there’s the suggestion of pre-Greek origin on the basis of variation between initial /m/ and /sm/, as well as the variant forms μικός (mikós) and μικκός (mikkós).  Aggression, dating from 1605–1615, was from the French aggression, from the Latin aggressionem (nominative aggressio (a going to, an attack)), a noun of action from past participle stem of aggredi (to approach; attack) the construct being ad (to) + gradi (past participle gressus (to step)) from gradus (a step).  The Classical Latin aggressiōn (stem of aggressiō), was equivalent to aggress(us) + iōn derived from aggrēdi (to attack).  The psychological sense of "hostile or destructive behavior" had its origin in early psychiatry, first noted in English in 1912 in a translation of work by the Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).  While not exactly synonymous, microassault and microinequity are similar concepts, the most closely related verb being microinvalidate (to engage in microinvalidation, to make a relatively small statement or action (microaggression) that negates another person's experience, thoughts or feelings).  Microaggression, microaggressiveness, microaggressor & microaggressee are nouns, microaggress, microaggressed & microaggressing are verbs, microaggressive is an adjective and microaggressively is an adverb; the noun plural is microaggressions. 

Dr Chester Middlebrook Pierce (1927-2016).

Microaggression is an adaptable and possibly infinitely variable concept that probably most belongs in sociology; typically, it's defined as any of the small-scale verbal or physical interactions between those of different races, cultures, beliefs, or genders that are (perhaps sometimes generously) assumed to carry no malicious intent but which can be interpreted as revealing an underlying (and often unconscious) bias.  The criteria can be both objective and subjective and it’s noted compliments or comments intended to be positive can be defined as microaggressions if interpreted as patronizing or perpetuating stereotypes (racial, gender, sexual orientation, class, occupational, geographical etc).  Probably, the only "safe" identity-based categorizations are now those purely statistical: average heights by nationality and such although such is the sensitivity, the recommendation of many is now wholly to avoid anything that possibly could be construed as a microaggression, the only exceptions being those directed at groups defined as "privileged" (white people, Christians, cisgender, heterosexual males etc).  Very much a "spectrum" word, microaggression began life as a defensive shield but has in recent years attracted criticism (from both left and right) because it was able to be weaponized in "cancellation culture".  The standard psychology texts suggest the behavior manifests in three forms:

Microassault: An explicit racial derogation which can be verbal or nonverbal which can include labelling, avoidant behavior and purposeful discriminatory actions.

Microinsult: Communications that convey rudeness or insensitivity and demean a person's racial heritage or identity; subtle snubs which may be unknown to the perpetrator; hidden insulting messages to the recipient of color.

Microinvalidation: Communications that exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of a person belonging to a particular group.

The concept emerged to address the underlying racism that endured even after overt, deliberate expressions of racism (at least against defined minorities) had become unacceptable in polite society.  It held that microaggressions generally happened below the level of awareness of well-intentioned members of the dominant culture and were different from acts of intentional bigotry (such as the use of racist epithets) because the those committing microaggressions often intend no offense and are unaware they are causing harm.  That wasn't exactly a Golgothaesque "forgive them for they know not what they do" but in the abstract did position the dominant (and not of necessity majority) culture as normal with minorities treated as aberrant or pathological.

Although the word’s origin lay in the politics of race and ethnicity, it proved readily adaptable to other areas such as gender, sexual orientation, mental illness, disability and age.  Within academic sociology, there’s a (typically) highly technical debate about the nature of microaggression and intersectionality at the cross-cutting cleavages of non-dominant groups.  As regards the media, the discipline had a well-refined model to describe how microaggressions were either reinforced or encouraged by a news and entertainment industry that both reflected and was controlled by the hegemony of the dominant culture.  The sudden shock of the emergence of social media has changed things (diversity of source and content) but the main effect has been to balkanize: While there are places where microaggressions will not be tolerated, there are others where such things are routine and some where microaggressions are about the mildest forms of racism and such.  To date, much work in exploring this area has been impressionistic and it’s not clear if the analytical metrics, where they exist, are sufficiently robust for theories to be coherent beyond the sense of constant "mission creep".  In a sense, social media and the development of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) are synergistic with the maintenance and critique of microaggressions one of many elements in the culture wars.

As an indication of the how things have changed, in 1939 the terms “paleface” and “redskin” were in 1939 appropriated for use in literary criticism by Russian-born (in modern-day Ukraine) Jewish-American literary critic and essayist Philip Rahv (1908–1973).  What in retrospect makes that most interesting was Rahv was not a kind of “proto-MAGA” (Make America Great Again) figure from the Republican Party’s far-right (a faction that definitely existed in 1939 although different labels were applied) but was of the “left”, emphasizing the virtues of cosmopolitanism and Marxist analysis, one irony in his casual use of “paleface” and “redskin” being his advocacy of “breaking down” ethnic and racial barriers.  He was in the early 1930s a member of the ACP (American Communist Party) but, trans-nationally, long-suppressed fissiparous forces had been unleashed by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) and Rahv in 1937 was expelled from the ACP by the dominant Stalinist Popular Front faction, condemned as a “Trotskyite” (a follower the exiled Russian comrade Leon Trotsky (1879-1940; founder in 1938 of the Fourth International).  His political activities in the US for a while continued but by the 1950s he’d become one of “The God that Failed” ex-communists and, after a brief flirtation with the “New Left” (or rather what he thought the New Left should have been), he retreated to literature to wage a low-intensity campaign against structuralism.

One of General LeMay’s “civilizing influences”, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay that delivered the first of the two nuclear weapons (thus far) used in conflicts.  It’s now on display in the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, Dulles International Airport, Chantilly, Virginia.

The splicing of the planet's “races” into “civilized”, “barbarian” and “savages” was very much a thing of nineteenth century European thought (although the notion existed also in Imperial China, the definitely very civilized mandarins there appalled by “barbarians” such as the British).  While the terms in this context probably originated in casual use, as the “scientific methods” of the Enlightenment became more generally applied, the notion was taken up, systematized and in some cases codified (with anatomical illustrations) by ethnographers, anthropologists, academic physicians, palaeontologists and others, the most notorious application probably the use in the pseudo-science of eugenics, a “discipline” to some so persuasive its echo continues on both sides of the Atlantic to be heard in the twenty-first century.  The concept of civilization (very much equated with “Western”) has long been a great concern of white supremacists and although the composition of “threats to its survival” does shift, it’s perceived always to be under assault.  Some have offered solutions.  US General Curtis LeMay (1906–1990; Chief of Staff of the USAF (US Air Force) 1961-1965) once remarked to a colleague: “Empirical evidence suggests the most successful way to civilize a nation is to A-bomb it…twice.”  It was said in making the observation he seemed “at least half-serious” and it had been Boeing B-29 Superfortresses under his command that in August 1946 had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki so the general likely felt entitled to be proud of his contribution to that civilizing influence.  A confessed Freemason, (a cult that can hardly be said much to have improved civilization), General LeMay was vice-presidential running mate on the 1968 ticket of notorious racist and segregationist George Wallace (1919-1998; governor (Democratic Party) of Alabama 1963–1967, 1971–1979 & 1983–1987) and, by historic standards, the duo enjoyed success, the AIP (American Independent Party) ticket gaining 13.5% of the popular vote, carrying five states for 46 votes in the Electoral College.

Allen's "Red Skins" and "Chicos": On supermarket shelves in Australia until 2020.

It is of course now unthinkable a figure of the left (liberals, progressives etc), Trotskyites or otherwise, would be so casually microaggressive as to take terms so vested with racism as “paleface” and “redskin” so they could, with no acknowledgment of the history, be re-purposed as devices in literary criticism.  However, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” and in the US in 1939, to do such a thing was unremarkable, an indication of the cultural currents underpinning society with the use of language both a product and part of the construct.  Paleface (the construct being pale +‎ face) came from US English and appeared in the anthropological record as early as 1797 (the origin uncertain) but seems not to have entered general use until the early 1920s.  The origin is uncertain but it was supposedly a calque from a Native American language; the form presumably coined when those of the first nations encountered Europeans.  The earliest verified use of the word redskin (the construct being red + skin) dates from 1769 although despite documents from the 1580s referring to the skin-tone of indigenous Americans as “red”, that use by European explorers and settlers was not consistent and in some instances may have been a reference to the use of red “paint” used to adorn the face and upper-body.  “Paleface” has been used as an intended slur against white people (with little apparent effect) but “redskin” definitely is an ethnic slur offensive to Native Americans although the record suggest than until around the mid-nineteenth century it was neutral and merely descriptive before ascending the “linguistic treadmill”.  Use puts it now well beyond being a microaggression.

The re-brand, 2020.

Allen's "Red Skins" and "Chicos" were in 2020 re-named "Red Rippers" and "Cheekies" respectively.  In the US, it was in 2020 the NFL (National Football League) team the Washington Redskins retired the name used since 1933, adopting Washington Football Team before in 2022 settling on a re-branding as Commanders.  The team's administration, when announcing the name-change, made no mention of the preceding controversy, nor the pressure from corporations, something most analysts suggested prompted the change more than any of the representations by Native American communities.  According to the Allen's, the recipes for the lollies remained “unchanged” and thus far Streets’ Golden Gaytime (sold in New Zealand as the Cookie Crumble) ice cream snack has survived the linguistic treadmill.

  

Gaytime meme.

The meme features Eric Abetz (b 1958; Liberal Party senator for Tasmania, Australia 1994-2022, Treasurer of Tasmania since 2024).  A student of Leviticus, Mr Abetz does not approve of any form of gaynessness.  First sold in 1970, and in general use clipped usually “Gaytime”, the confectionery is a toffee and vanilla ice cream, dipped in compound chocolate with a heavy sprinkling of large “crumbs” of vanilla biscuit, all on a wooden paddlepop-stick.  Although by 1970 “gay” was in use in the context of “male homosexuals”, it had not in Australian society gained critical mass and there’s nothing to suggest the name was then chosen for reasons other than the historic association of “gay” with “happy” and certainly the connotations later attached to “golden” by the gay community would have been unknown to most.  The company in the 1980s anyway embraced the possibilities with advertising tag lines such as “It's hard to have a Gaytime on your own” and complaints about the name in the new century received scant support from even gay-rights activists.

In 1939, Rahv used “paleface” and “redskin” to distinguish between what he called “two poles”; his sense was of the diametrically opposed “north & south” but his model was stylistic and thematic rather than geographic (and really not quite an antinomy as some have suggested).  The polarization as defined by Rahv had him group writers according to their attitude, style, subject matter and such, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Herman Melville (1819–1891) and Henry James (1843-1916) classified as “palefaces” while Walt Whitman (1819–1892), and Mark Twain (1835-1910) were “redskins”.  In Rahv’s literary world view, palefaces had cultured and patrician attitudes, wrote in a mannered style using symbolism and explored “lofty” themes with great complexity.  The redskins wrote works of the rugged men of frontier life or the working class, criminals and “low lifes” in the unpleasant parts of towns and cities.  He didn’t seem to suggest writing in a colloquial and naturalistic way couldn’t be interpolated into thematically complex literary texts, just that it was inevitable a “down market” cast of characters and places they frequented would shape the work.  So Rahv saw palefaces as “civilized” and redskins as “barbarians”; presumably he’d have thought “savages” to be “non-literary” and thus “beyond the pale” as it were.  Of those Americans who came later, categorization must be speculative but can be fun.

Use of "Eskimo" definitely can be deemed microaggressive. While ice-cream lovers can still buy "Gaytimes", they had to adjust to the "Eskimo Pie" being renamed (variously "Edy's Pie" or "Polar Pie").  It remains to be seen if the use of polar bears in some of the new packaging triggers controversy.  The creatures do appear in aspects of Inuit culture and religion and it's not clear if permission for use has been sought.

William Faulkner (1897–1962) and Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) both seem redskins and Norman Mailer (1923–2007) clearly was no paleface though he might have thought being filed with the barbarians an effete slight on his savagery.  Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was a redskin who really wanted to be a paleface (and never stopped trying) while Philip Roth (1933–2018) was such a paleface he never quite mastered the “redskin mode” despite the occasional heroic attempt.  John Updike (1932–2009) was a paleface but the problem inherent in assigning writers with a hefty oeuvre to polarized categories is that at the margins their writing can “straddle” and sometimes those margins are wide.  That’s why plausible cases can be made arguing both Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) and Saul Bellow (1915–2005) at times at least “tended” to either pole.  What Rahv would have made of Faulkner in 1949 and Bellow in 1976 being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature while Updike and Roth were ignored (despite the latter engaging in self-promotion not far short of Donald Trump’s (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) auto-advocacy to be the Peace Prize laureate) would be interesting to know but safely can it be imagined he’d have thought the entire Nobel Committee redskins after in 2016 they conferred the honor in literature on musician Bob Dylan (b 1941).  Maybe it was women of the Swedish Academy (the body that chooses the Literature laureates) who vetoed Roth; in all he wrote of women (and it was a lot), Roth revealed much about himself but little about them, despite the usually elegant internal logic.  Rahv was anyway appalled literature appeared to exist in such a dichotomy and, being an old Trotskyite who never quite stopped taking seriously Karl Marx’s (1818-1883) politics, longed for a world where folk wrote like Marcel Proust (1871-1922) or Thomas Mann (1875–1955), the latter at least acknowledged in 1929 by the Nobel Committee.

1958 Studebaker Scotsman advertisement.

There was in 1957 nothing unusual or offensive in Studebaker naming a car “Scotsman” and it would have been well-understood as a reference to the car’s low purchase price and (alleged) TCO (total cost of ownership).  Scotsman buyers could even save a little more were they prepared to forgo the extravagance of chrome bumpers and choose the "delete option" of painted units; Mercedes-Benz also once offered that on taxi versions of a number of utilitarian sedans, the most produced the W115s (1968-1976). Other manufacturers used the same concept as Studebaker: Citroën ID vs DS, Cadillac Calais vs de Ville etc, some including fewer features and simpler trim, some also changing the mechanical specification but the principle was always: same size, less stuff, lower price.  The name "Scotsman" was picking up on the reputation of the Scots for frugality and it would have been thought something neutral at worst and more likely positive, thriftiness in the early post-war US still generally thought a virtue despite the best attempts of capitalism to encourage consumer gluttony; as fat overtook the land, things would change.  Technically, such use would now fulfil the criteria of a “microaggression” even if deployed in a way making clear it’s being intended as a compliment.  Scots can of course use the trope of themselves and even if used by others, as race-based microaggressions go, it’s probably at the "lower range" of offensiveness, those applied to “white people”, rarely noticed and certainly not grounds for cancellation.  Still, by the 2020s, it’s highly unlikely a car company would now name a car a “Scotsman” and certainly not if it was a “stripper” (ie a low-cost model with minimal standard equipment).

The “Scotsman’s supercar”: 1968 Plymouth Road Runner, Car Life magazine, May 1968.

Quite when the term "stripper" (in that context) vanished from commercial use can’t be certain but it would have occurred later in the twentieth century and certainly after 1968 when Car Life magazine, reviewing the new Plymouth Road Runner, called the stripped-down, low-priced muscle car: “a sort of Scotsman’s supercar”.  As well as a relic of linguistic use, Car Life’s test was interesting because unlike many of its contemporaries that often conducted tests using vehicles tweaked by manufacturers or dealers for optimal performance, they used the genuine, stock-standard articles, bought from the showroom floor, that being a more realistic path to discovering if thing did "what it said on the tin".  What Car Life revealed was the Road Runner (when equipped with the standard 383 cubic inch (6.3 litre) V8)) was quicker than a typical 383 powered car using the same body (as would be expected given the lower weight and modifications to the 383 used in the model) but was unable to match the sub-15 second ¼-mile (402 metre) runs reported by many.  The basic Road Runner was actually representative of the performance of most of the era’s “muscle car ecosystem” while the storied cars that “out of the box” were able consistently to log ¼-mile ETs (elapsed time) in the 13 or 14 second bracket were relatively rare and a tiny sliver of what came to be classified as "muscle cars", some of which just "looked the part" although that did prove a lucrative market.  Of course, to solve any perception of inadequacy, a buyer could tick the box for the optional 426 (7.0) Street Hemi V8 and while that was expensive, as well a fixing any performance deficit, putting one in a Road Runner was the cheapest path to Hemi ownership, a compelling case at a time when a thousand dollars was a lot of money.

Channeling her inner Scotsperson: Lindsay Lohan in Royal Stewart tartan, Freaky Friday (2003), costume test photo (Walt Disney Pictures).

Despite the perception of many (encouraged bydepictions in popular culture), tartan in the sense of specific color & pattern combinations attached to specific clans is something of recent origin.  Tartan (breacan (pɾʲɛxkən) in Scots Gaelic) is a patterned cloth consisting of criss-crossed, horizontal and vertical bands in multiple colours.  The word plaid is now often used interchangeably with tartan (particularly in North America and when not associated with anything Scottish (especially kilts)), but technically (and always in Scotland), a plaid is a large piece of tartan cloth, worn as a type of kilt or large shawl although it’s used also to describe a blanket.  During the disputes between England and Scotland, the wearing of tartan became a political expression and the Dress Act (1746) was part of the campaign to suppress the warrior clans north of the border; it banned tartan and other aspects of Gaelic culture. The law was repealed in 1782 and tartan was soon adopted as both the symbolic national dress of Scotland and in imagery more generally.

The Royal Stewart was the personal tartan of Elizabeth II (1926-2022; Queen of the UK and other places, 1952-2022) and although historically associated with the royal house of Stewart (or Stuart), it has become one of the most widely used in commercial fashion and in that sense appears in parallel with the clan affiliation.  Commonly worn to formal events such as weddings, ceilidhs (social gatherings, the nature of which casts a wide net) or Burns Night (celebrating the life of Robert "Rabbie" Burns (1759–1796 and still in popular imagination Scotland's "national poet")), the modern trend is to pair a kilt with a Prince Charlie or Argyll jacket, traditionalists adding a Sporran (pouch), Hose (kilt socks) & flashes, Ghillie brogues (traditional shoes) and even a Sgian dubh (a small dagger tucked in the sock) although carrying the last item may be unlawful in some jurisdictions.  Lindsay Lohan in her screen test wore the dress in something of the way in the 1970s it became part of the punk sub-culture but for more conventional types there are also scarves, ties, sashes and such.  Remarkably, in the age of identity politics and sensitivity to cultural appropriation, the etiquette guides note there is no objection to non-Scots folk wearing their tartan of choice except when an event is clan-specific in which case only those in the lineage should don the fabric.  That said, even then, the consequence of a tartan faux pas will likely be less severe than wearing a Rangers shirt in a Glasgow pub filled with Celtic’s hoops.  Still, deployed with sufficient cultural insensitivity, improper use of tartan could be a microaggression.

Microaggression in Progress: A Mean Girls (2004) "mall scene".

Mean Girls was replete with instances of microaggressiveness.  We’re still (mostly) allowed (quietly) to be amused by some of these, but, a quarter-century on, there’s now a more hostile critique of subtle verbal or behavioural slights that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to marginalized groups, even if genuinely often unintentional; what seems subtle to some may to others be blatant insensitivity.  In satire, there's still some tolerance for such depictions although audiences are now expected to be as appalled as they are amused and, of course, as a satire of the gut-wrenching ecosystem that is high school social dynamics, subtle forms of relational aggression and passive-aggressive exclusion were not hard to find and can be categorized:

(1) Racial and Geographic Microaggressions: The line: “If you're from Africa, why are you white?” was an invalidation of an individual’s cultural identity on the basis of not according with another’s geographic & racial assumptions & expectations.  The school map of “the cafeteria cliques” includes “Cool Asians”, the labelling reducing individuals to their ethnicity and when paired with what is nominally a most positive teen modifier (cool), that operates as a racial micro-insult implying (1) most individuals of that ethnicity are “not cool” and (2) non-white students are in a sense monolithic and acknowledged as “acceptable sub-groups” only if they in some way adhere to “white people constructs” of “white normative standards”.  “Black hotties” operates at the same level, although “hot” (a type of “coolness”!) usually is positive, the implication here is that “hotness” inherently is a quality of certain white girls and a black girl can be deemed “hot” only compared to other black girls; she cannot, in the absolute sense, merely be a “hottie”, that descriptor operating only on white girls.  The surprised response “Oh you speak English?” when someone is introduced to a black student thought to be from Africa reveals the cultural assumption such an individual would likely lack proficiency in the language; it’s a classic micro-invalidation.

Microaggression weaponized ironically.

(2) Gender and Academic Microaggressions: When Cady expresses interest in joining the school math team, she’s told it’s “social suicide”, a pushback reinforcing gendered and social stereotypes that young women cannot be simultaneously be popular, attractive and intellectually gifted, thus the trope of intentionally failing math to gain a boy's attention.  The “I’m too pretty to do math” T-shirt plays with this and works well if worn by a pretty math nerd although, it'd be really subversive on a "not-pretty" girl.

(3) Backhanded compliments disguised as “niceness”: Such things can be the least objectionable of all microaggressions especially if there’s some equivalency in the power-relationship and the quip is witty, subtle and (ideally retrospectively) understood.  It can also be done “by proxy” such as when saying to one student “I love your skirt, where did you get it?”, only to wait until she’s out of earshot before turning to another and saying “That is the ugliest effing skirt I've ever seen.”  What this does is make an individual realize they may not be able to find sincere or truthful anything they’re told.

Aggression rather than microaggression: “Fetch” anyway likely never would have “happened”.  Although a convenient clipping of “fetching” (often in the form “quite fetching” or “most fetching” and meaning “charming; captivating; compelling” etc), by the early twenty-first century “fetching” in those senses had long since descended into the category of “dated”; it was an “old people” word, use thus “social suicide”.

(4) Image and fat-shaming: Because the social identity of the “Plastics” was so tied to rigid “beauty standards” (some group-imposed, some the prevailing norms), by use of the “Kalteen Bars manipulation” it was possible to induce weight-gain in Regina, an act of sabotage opening the possibility of subjecting her to micro-insults and non-verbal cues (staring at her body or pointing out strict dress-code rules that really can’t be adhered to by someone gaining weight) to signal there’s been a violation of group standards, requiring exclusion.  In that, the techniques are different from something like: “Gretchen, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen.”; that is pure aggression: A group’s hegemon maintaining control by suppressing another member’s attempt to assert their personal identity through something as seemingly innocuous as the introduction of a new slang term.  It was a type of linguistic imperialism, similar to the attitude of Spanish nationalist troops who occupied Catalonia and the Basque country after their victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).  Harshly they would tell those they heard talking in regional dialects: “Speak the language of the Empire, don’t bark like dogs!”