Surreal

Surreal (pronounced suh-ree-uhl (U) or sur-reel (non-U))

(1) Of, relating to, or characteristic of surrealism, an artistic and literary style; surrealistic.

(2) Having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic & and incongruous.

(3) As surrealism, an artistic movement and an aesthetic philosophy that, inter alia, explored the “liberation of the mind” by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the subconscious.

(4) In mathematics as surreal numbers, a collection of numbers which includes both the real numbers and the infinite ordinal numbers, each real number surrounded by surreals, which are closer to it than any real number.

1936: A back formation from surrealism, the construct being ; sur- +‎ realism, from the French surréalisme, the construct being sur- (beyond) +‎ réalisme (realism).  Sur- ((over in the sense of “on top of” & over- in the sense of “excessive; excessively; too much”)) was from the Old French sur-, sour-, sor- & soure-, from a syncopation of the Latin super- (above, on top, over; upwards; moreover, in addition, besides) from the Proto-Italic super, from the primitive Indo-European upér (over, above (and cognate with the Ancient Greek ὑπέρ (hupér) (above) and the Proto-Germanic uber (which in English became “over”)).  The English sur- was from the Middle English sur-, from the Old French sur-, sour-, sor- & soure-, a syncopic form of the Latin super.  Sur is a doublet of super-, over- and hyper-.  Real was from the Middle English real, from the Old French reel, from the Late Latin reālis (actual), from the Latin rēs (matter, thing), from the primitive Indo-European rehís (wealth, goods).  Surreal is a noun & adjective, surreally is an adverb, surrealism & surreality are nouns and surrealistic is an adjective; the noun plural is surreals.

Lobster Telephone (1936) by Salvador Dali, one of a dozen-odd originals (in colors and shades of cream created by the artist).

In French, the noun surréalisme appeared first in the preface to Guillaume Apollinaire's (1880-1918) play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1916-1917 and first performed in 1917).  The word was taken up in the 1920s by French intellectuals who created a number of (competing) Manifeste de Surréalisme (Surrealist manifesto) which were documents exploring the nature of human psychology and the way the radical imagination could produce transformative art.  Such was the nature of their texts, inspiration was offered to groups as diverse as landscape painters and anarchists and anyone else attracted to the idea (if not the business) of revolution.  The English form of the word appeared first in 1931, the French spelling having been in use since 1927.  Surrealist as an adjective and noun (from the 1917 French surréaliste) has been in use since 1925 while the adjective surrealistic dates from 1930.

La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) (1929), oil on canvas, by Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The French text Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe) is an act of deconstruction, a statement that a painting is a representation of something, not the object itself.  It’s a statement of the obvious but is both in the artistic tradition of opposition to oppressive rationalism and an influential strand in the history of Surrealism and Pop Art.

Mama, papa is wounded! (1927) by Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

One of the motifs of surrealist painters was a deliberate disconnection between the title of a work and any immediately obvious meaning. Tanguy’s Mama, papa is wounded! was a painting in one of the recognized surrealist styles: a landscape of wide vista littered with abstract shapes, the title taken from a case-study in a psychiatry textbook.  Beyond mentioning he’d imagined the whole canvas before lifting a brush, Tangay gave no clue about the meaning, but coming so soon after Great War, many focused on a link with the many French causalities of the conflict, the depiction of their horrific injuries also part of an artistic movement in the post-war years.

Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937), oil on canvas by Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

Salvador Dali remains the best-known surrealist painter and Swans Reflecting Elephants is an example of his paranoiac-critical method, which attempted to use art to represent how subconscious thought might summon the irrational imagery when in a state of psychosis or paranoia.  The work is interesting too in that it’s the most perfect example of a double image, the trees and swans reflected in the mirror-like surface of the water as lake as elephants.  Dali himself would sometimes discuss the usefulness of the mirror as a device to explore the divergence between conscious reality and the world of the subconscious.

Jean-Martin Charcot, documentary photographs of hysteria patients at La Salpêtrière Asylum 1878, printed in Le Cinquantenaire de L’hystérie (La Révolution Surréaliste (1928)) by André Breton (1896–1966) & Louis Aragon (1897–1982).  Breton & Aragon lamented that hysteria (which they called "the greatest poetic discovery of the late nineteenth century") was being redefined by the new discipline of psychiatry as merely a symptom of mental illness which could be eliminated by suggestion alone.

The link between surrealist art and madness long intrigued the medical community and the interest later extended to the relationship with modernism in general.  Remarkably, it wasn’t until 1980 with the publication of the third edition (DSM-III) that the diagnosis “hysteria” was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  Hysteria had for centuries been a kind of omnibus diagnosis, applied to those (almost always women) displaying an extraordinary array of mental and physical symptoms, the gendered hysteria derived from the Ancient Greek word for uterus.  To many Surrealists, hysteria was the state in which a poetic expression of the mind’s wilder impulses could be unleashed, meaning that instead of being silenced, this fundamental condition of being female could usefully be objectified.  History and art met in the decade of the surrealists because the 1930s was a time to be hysterical, less about what was happening than the fear of what was to come but the reaction to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, an exhibition by surrealist artists held in Paris in January-February 1938 was not despair or shock but indifference, the novelty of the form having passed, the claim the exhibition needed to be understood as a single installation convincing few.  In the history of the movement, the peak had actually passed and although surrealist works would continue to be produced (and actually mass-produced as wildly popular prints) in the post-war world, the output was repetitive.  The avant-garde having plundered from surrealism what could be carried off, explored other directions.

Woman’s Dinner Dress (February 1937) by Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973), printed silk organza and synthetic horsehair, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The fragments however endure.  Elsa Schiaparelli was an Italian fashion designer who took the objects made famous by the Futurists, Dadaists, & Surrealists and integrated them into clothing, her most memorable piece a white evening gown adorned with a large Daliesque lobster.  A design which would now attract little attention, at the time it was a sensation, its audacity a contrast with the solid pastels and other subdued hues with which Coco Chanel (1883-1971) had defined Parisian sophistication.  The playful designs she adopted (a telephone-shaped handbag, buttons in the shape of lollipops, fingernail gloves and hats in shapes borrowed from industry and agriculture) were not always original but she lent them a respectability in the world of high-fashion. 

In the surreal style: Salvador Dali (2021) by Javier Peña and Lindsay Lohan by Mohamad Helmi on Displate.

Lollipop

Lollipop (pronounced lol-ee-pop)

(1) A (usually disc-shaped) piece of hard candy attached to the end of a small stick, held in the hand while the candy is sucked or licked.

(2) In computer networking, a routing protocol using sequence numbering starting at a negative value, increasing until zero, at which point it switches indefinitely to cycle through a finite set of positive numbers.

(3) In the labeling of the Android operating system, v5.0 to 5.1.1.

(4) In the slang of fashion and related photography, a term for very thin models whose heads appear disproportionately large.

(5) In the slang of musical criticism, a short, entertaining, but undemanding piece of classical music.

1784: A creation of Modern English of uncertain origin.  It simply be the construct of lolly + pop, lolly from the Northern English dialect loll (dangle the tongue) and pop an alternative name for “slap”.  It was essentially a toffee-apple without the apple or the stick; a stick dipped in toffee. 

Lindsay Lohan enjoying giant lollipop.

The alternative theory is it’s borrowed from Angloromani (literally "English Romani"), the language combining aspects of English and Romani, which was the language spoken by the Romani (gypsy, traveler, Roma et al) people in England and Wales.  Displaced by English in the early twentieth century, its traces remain in the English used by modern Romani.  Theory is that root is the Angloromani loli phabai or lollipobbul (red or candy apple), from the Middle Indic lohita (from Sanskrit) and loha (red), drawn from reudh with Indo-European roots.  Among etymologists, the Angloromani connection has most support.Originally, lollipop seems to have referred just to the boiled sweet with the meaning "hard candy on a stick" not noted until the 1920s.  In commerce, the spelling varies including lollipop, lollypop, loli-pop, lollypopp and lolly-pop.

Defilade & Enfilade

Defilade (pronounced def-uh-leyd or def-fuh-lahd)

(1) In military tactical planning and battlefield practice, the protection from hostile ground observation and flat projecting fire provided by an artificial or natural obstacle such as a hill.

(2) The disposition of defensive fortifications to produce this protection.

(3) A fortification having such protection.

1828: From the French défil (to unthread), the construct being dé (remove) + filer (thread), from the Latin fīlum (thread).  The -ade suffix was a borrowing of the Spanish -ado, from the Latin -ata (feminine -atum) used to create adjectives, nouns, and sometimes verbs from words ending in -a.  The suffix was used to form nouns denoting action, or a person performing said action.  The Old French verb was borrowed by Middle English as défiler (to slip away or off), use apparently restricted to the nobility.  The related forms are defiladed & defilading.

Enfilade (pronounced en-fuh-leyd or en-fuh-lahd)

(1) In military tactical planning and battlefield practice, a position of works, troops and matériel which permits sweeping fire from along the length of a line of troops, a trench, a battery etc.

(2) The fire thus directed.

(3) In architecture, an axial arrangement of doorways connecting a suite of rooms with a vista extending the entire length of the suite.

(4) In interior decorating, an axial arrangement of mirrors on opposite sides of a room so as to give an effect of an infinitely long vista.

1697: From the French enfil (to thread), the construct being, en (put on) + filer (thread), from the Latin fīlum (thread).  The -ade suffix was a borrowing of the Spanish -ado, from the Latin -ata (feminine -atum) used to create adjectives, nouns, and sometimes verbs from words ending in -a.  The suffix was used to form nouns denoting action, or a person performing said action.  The Old French verb was borrowed by Middle English as enfile (to put (something) on a thread or string), use apparently restricted to the nobility.

The use in architecture (mostly to describe rows of apartments) and forestry (referencing rows of trees) predated the military sense which now predominates, the original definition in that context printed in military manuals as “rake with shot through the full length”.  The use in architecture persists though it’s long tended to be used loosely to refer to just about anything in a straight line.  Used as a verb since 1706, the related forms are enfiladed & enfilading. 

Known also by the more helpful expression “terrain shielding”, enfilade and defilade are concepts in military tactical theory used to describe a formation's exposure to enemy fire.  A static position is said to be "in enfilade" if an opponent can direct continuous fire along its longest axis.  A static position is "in defilade" if formed with natural or artificial obstacles to shield or conceal the formation from enfilade.  The military picked up the terms from two Old English borrowings from the French: enfiler to put (something) on a thread or string) and défiler (to slip away or off) used (seemingly exclusively) by the English nobility.  In gunnery, enfilade fire (gunfire directed against an enfiladed formation or position) is known also as "flanking fire"; the preferred Admiralty terms for naval fire being raking fire (although the advent of long-range missiles as the warship’s standard armament (big guns now quite rare) means the concept is at sea, now essentially historic.  Strafing, the firing on ground targets from a flying platform, should be done with enfilade fire, the recommendation being (if possible) to maneuver into an enfiladed position prior to attack.  In just about any situation, the enfiladed position is the most advantageous, and thus most sought, for the attacking force.

NATO defines the parameters of the defilade as (1) protection from hostile observation and fire provided by an obstacle such as a hill, ridge, or bank, (2) a vertical distance by which a position is concealed from enemy observation and (3), to shield from enemy fire or observation by using natural or artificial obstacles.  However, the standard definition reflects the origin of the concept in the pre-mechanical age.  In anti-tank (or other armored vehicle) operations, it can be advantageous to generate enfilade fire with anti-armor weapons, from a defilade position, armor tending to be weaker on the sides and rear of armored vehicles so side shots (enfilade) offer greater penetrative potential.

The practical employment of the defilade position need not require construction and may be achieved by taking advantage of a favorable feature of the natural environment such as a ditch, the tactical significance being the enemy is engaged not from the front but from the flank using enfilade fire, the font being protected with hard cover. Used thus, ground to the front will be covered by mutually supporting positions firing from defilade, both sides firing across the front.

Catharsis

Catharsis (pronounced kuh-thahr-sis)

(1) The purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music.

(2) In psychiatry, a form of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy that encourages or permits the discharge of repressed, pent-up, socially unacceptable affects.

(3) The discharge of pent-up emotions so as to result in the alleviation of symptoms or the permanent relief of the condition.

(4) In Aristotelian literary criticism, the purging or purification of the emotions through the evocation of pity and fear, as in tragedy.

(5) In medicine, purgation, especially of the bowels.

1770: From the New Latin catharsis, from the Ancient Greek kátharsis (a cleansing) equivalent to kathar, variant stem of kathaírein (to cleanse, purge, purify), from katharós (pure, clear of dirt, clean, spotless, open, free, clear of shame or guilt, purified) + sis.    Root was the Medieval Latin Catharī (the Pure), from the Byzantine Greek καθαροί or katharoí (the Pure), plural of καθαρός (katharós) (pure).  Most of the extended senses found in Modern English are of unknown origin, the original sense from 1770 being "a bodily purging" (especially of the bowels), then an important aspect of medical practice.  After 1872 it came to be applied to emotions when it was referred to as "a purging through vicarious experience"; the psychotherapy sense first recorded in 1909 in Abraham Brill's (1874–1948) translation of Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) Selected Papers on Hysteria  (Dr Brill’s translation the first of Freud into English).  The alternative spelling cathartick went extinct in the mid-nineteenth century.  The adjective cathartic dates from its use in medical literature in the 1610s in the sense of preparations claimed to be "purgative; purifying"; more general use noted by the 1670s.  Presumably, the cures proved efficacious because the adjective cathartical soon emerged, existing also in the plural as the noun catharticals (laxatives).

Cathar (religious puritan (implied in Catharism)), dates from the 1570s and was from the Medieval Latin Cathari (the Pure), the name taken by the Novatians and other Christian sects, from the New Testament Greek katharizein (to make clean), from the Ancient Greek katharós (pure).  It was applied particularly to the twelfth century sects (Albigenses et al) in Languedoc and the Piedmont which denied and defied the authority of the pope.  The feminine proper name Catherine is from the French Catherine, from the Medieval Latin Katerina, from the Classical Latin Ecaterina, from the Ancient Greek Aikaterine.  The -h- was introduced in the sixteenth century, probably a tribute in folk etymology from the Greek katharos (pure).  Familiar in Modern English also as Katherine, Kate, Cate and other variations, the initial Greek vowel preserved in the Russian form Ekaterina.  For reasons unknown, Catherine began to be used as a type of pear in the 1640s.

The term “Catherine wheel” was originally from the early thirteenth century and described a torture device, the spiked wheel on which (according to some versions of what is thought to be a most dubious tale) the legendary virgin Saint Catherine of Alexandria was in 307 tortured and martyred by the pagan Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maxentius (circa 283–312; a Roman emperor, 306-312), thus becoming, in the associative way the Church did these things, patron saint of spinners.  She was a most popular saint in medieval times and popularized the name Catherine (and its variations), the favor enduring to this day.  It was applied from 1760 to a kind of firework which shot flame from a revolving spiral tube, creating the shape of a spinning wheel.

Of the Cathars: Catharism

With origins in Persia and the Byzantine Empire, Catharism was a dualist (or Gnostic revival) fork of Christianity, the movement most active during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in what is now northern Italy and southern France.  It was not a good time to be promoting the notion of two Gods, one good, the other evil; this dualism was however the essential core of Cathar beliefs.  The good God was the God of the New Testament and the creator of the spiritual realm, contrasted with the evil Old Testament God, creator of the physical world whom many Cathars, and not a few of their persecutors, identified as Satan.  It was an exacting creed which meant all visible matter, including the human body, was created by the evil god and therefore tainted with sin.  Taint might be an understatement; Cathars thought human spirits were the lost spirits of angels trapped within the physical creation of the evil god, destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through what they called the consolamentum, a highly ritualized form of baptism.

The Holy See's foreign policy when the pope did have a few divisions: The papal army, the Cathars & the Albigensian Crusade.

All this was heresy to the monotheistic Roman Catholic Church, founded on the fundamental principle of one God, the creator of all things temporal and spiritual.  The Church’s crackdown got serious during the pontificate of Innocent III (circa 1160-1216; pope 1198-1216), initially by means of political and theological persuasion but with the assassination of his emissary, Innocent abandoned diplomacy, declared his dead ambassador a martyr and launched a military operation, the twenty-year (1209-1229) Albigensian Crusade.  It was the beginning of the end of Catharism.  After 1244 when the great fortress of Montsegur near the Pyrenees was razed, the Cathars became an underground movement, many fleeing to Italy where the persecution was milder.  The hierarchy faded but the heresy lingered until it finally it vanished early in the fifteenth century.

Simone Weil.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a French philosopher and political activist who, in a manner unusual among left-leaning intellectuals of the era, returned to the religion ignored in her youth and became attracted to the mystical.  Remembered for her political writings and active service in both the Spanish Civil War and occupied France, she died tragically young in the self-sacrificial manner she had lived her life.  Among the more delicate historians, (typified by Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975)), there’s often an undisguised preference for Greek over Roman but few went as far as Weil who could find no virtue in the latter and was barely less dismissive of the medieval Church.  By contrast, in the Cathars, she found exemplars of goodness although she offered few reasons and fewer still shreds of evidence for this.  Most convincing is the notion that what Weil called affliction (malheur) goes beyond merely describing suffering and makes of it, if not a fetish, then certainly a calling.  Weil felt there were only some able truly to experience affliction: those least deserving of suffering.  Seduced by the lure of the tragic and having trawled history, she found in the Cathars the doomed victims with whom she could identify, drawn to them as Sylvia Plath was to Ted Hughes.

Simone Weil Agitprop.

Although her readership remains substantially limited to those clustered around a number of academic and feminist circles, Weil’s influence on literature has been profound.  She wrote neither fiction nor poetry but in her prolific output, existing mostly in letters and notebooks which in her lifetime were almost entirely unseen and edited for publication only posthumously, lay an extraordinary exploration of the contradictions and confusion of the modern world.  One gains much from reading Weil for despite her tone there’s pleasure in enjoying the lucidity and discovering an uncompromising critique of a world poisoned by the exclusivity of Christianity and its damnation of progress as heresy.  But guilt tinges the pleasure.  This tortured soul lived and died in anguish and dark despair because she knew she deserved no more in a world of where injustice had triumphed and probably forever would.  One fears that in all her brief years, she may never have felt a moment’s joy.

The modern catharsis is a public event, best enjoyed after emerging from rehab.  Lindsay Lohan (b 1986) and Oprah Winfrey (b 1954), 2013.  

Callipygian

Callipygian (pronounced kal-uh-pij-ee-uhn)

Of, pertaining to, or having beautiful buttocks.

Circa 1800: A Latinized form from the Ancient Greek καλλίπυγος (kallípugos) (of, pertaining to, or having beautiful buttocks), the epithet of a statue of Aphrodite at Syracuse, the construct being calli (kalli) (from the Ancient Greek κάλλος (kállos) (beauty)) + πυγή (pugē) (tail; buttocks; rump) + -ian (the adjectival suffix).

Despite the classical association, there were serious critics who deplored the word pygē, dismissing it as mere slang “…completely avoided in epic poetry and higher literature” with “…no convincing etymology" although etymologists trace it back to the primitive Indo-European spugeh with cognates including the Latin pūga, the Old High German fochen, and Old Church Slavonic паоуга (pauga), пѫга (pǫga).  The objection may be because it was used also in the figurative to mean "fat, swelling" but the combinging form  pyg- exists in many technical (often medical) words including pygalgia (pain in the buttocks) and dasypygal (having hairy buttocks).  The lingustic snobbery didn't extend to the taxonomy and systematics of penguins, the Adélie penguin named Pygoscelis adeliae, the construct of the genus Pygoscelis being pygē + skelos (leg").  For those who might think it an anyway handy adjective, the comparative is more callipygian and the superlative most callipygian, applied as appropriate although the TikToK generation has a more accessible lexicon for such purposes.

Vénus callipyge (First century BC) in white marble by an unknown sculptor, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

The Ἀφροδίτη Καλλίπυγος (Aphrodite Kallipygos), known also as the Venus Callipyge or Callipygian Venus (all translating literally as “Venus (or Aphrodite) of the beautiful buttocks”, is a marble statue, carved in Ancient Rome and assumed to be a copy of a Greek original.  It’s one of the most famous examples of a sculptor’s interpretation of the device ἀνάσυρμα (anasyrma, the construct being ἀνά (ana) (up, against, back) + σύρμα (syrma) (skirt) (ἀνασύρματα & ἀνασυρμός (anasyrmata & anasyrmos) the plural), the gesture of lifting the skirt or kilt.  Known also from religious rituals, eroticism and vulgar humor, the technique in art pre-dates antiquity.  The statue depicts a partially draped woman, raising her light peplos (a woman’s ankle-length gown) to uncover the hips and buttocks, her gaze cast back down her shoulder.  Although most often identified as being of Venus (Aphrodite), this has never been certain.

The dates from the first century BC, the lost Greek original thought to have been rendered in bronze and executed around 300 BC, very early in the classical Hellenistic era although nothing is known of its history until it was rediscovered, missing its head, during The Renaissance.  The head was recreated, first in the sixteenth century and later the eighteenth when the sculptor closely followed the earlier restoration, the head made to look over the shoulder which had the effect further to draw attention to the bare buttocks, something thought greatly to enhance its popularity and certainly influence those who would later reprise the work.  This would not be the only time the artists of the high Renaissance would modify reality a bit to so construct an idealized vision of the classical world of Antiquity.  It was in the seventeenth century the statue was identified as Venus and associated with a temple to Aphrodite Kallipygos at Syracuse.

Lindsay Lohan displaying callipygian qualities with feet nicely juxtaposed, Playboy Magazine shoot, 2011.

That association is however tenuous because it was discussed by the (third century AD) writer Athenaeus of Naucratis in his fifteen-volume Deipnosophists (dinner-table philosophers).  According to Athenaeus, two beautiful sisters from a farm near Syracuse argued over which of them had the shapelier buttocks, and accosted a passer-by, asking him to judge.  The young man, the son of a rich local merchant voted for the older sister and found himself quite smitten with her, quickly falling in love.  In one of the fortunate coincidences which pepper myths ancient and modern, the man’s younger brother heard of this and went to see the girls for himself and, as much of an emo as his sibling, fell in love with the younger sister.  The brothers refused to consider other brides, so their father arranged the marriages.  The citizens dubbed the sisters Kallipugoi (the women with beautiful asses) and dedicated a temple to Aphrodite, calling her Kallipygos.  The cult of Aphrodite attracted other writers, the Christian author Clement of Alexandria (circa 150-215) included it in his table of the erotic manifestations of paganism and variations of Athenaeus’s tale circulated in copies of Vincenzo Cartari’s (1531-1590) retelling in Le Imagini con la sposizione dei dei de gli antichi (The Images of the Gods of the Ancients and their Explanations (1556)) some of the stories from classical mythology.

Vénus callipyge (1683-1686) in white marble by François Barois (1656–1726), Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The Venus Callipyge in the Louvre Museum in Paris is one of several copies of the Roman version of the Venus from the Farnese Collection.  Then as now, the taste of the public ebbed and flowed and what was declared to be obscene moved in the arc of a pendulum, this rendition modified with additional marble layers which, as historians of art note, were draped across the eponymous feature “so as not to offend an increasingly prudish public taste”.  After the French Revolution, it was displayed in the Jardin des Tuileries (the public garden between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde), reflecting the politics of 1789.  That a statue in in a French museum has the buttocks depicted in swirling fabric while those on show in Italy are bare is mere coincidence and no inferences about national character should be drawn.

The adjective callipygian need not be restricted to the human form and can be applied anthropomorphically.  In different ways, stylists can apply to machinery the motifs of the baroque, the sensuous the athletic or the muscular.

1 1974 Dino 246 GTS (C&F) by Ferrari.

2 1958 De Soto Firesweep convertible by Chrysler.

3 1965 Jaguar E-Type (modified as Eagle Speedster 4.7).

4 1971 Chevrolet Corvette Coupé LS6 by General Motors.

5 1967 Alfa Romeo Spider 1600 (Duetto).

6 1971 Mercedes-Benz W111 (280SE 3.5 Coupé).

7 1973 BMW E9 (3.0 CSi).

8 1971 Lamborghini Miura P400SV.

9 1966 AC Shelby Cobra 427 S/C.

Demon

Demon (pronounced dee-muhn (U) or dee-mon (non-U))

(1) An evil supernatural spirit; devil or fiend; an evil spirit resident in or working for Hell; a devil; a false god or idol; a Satanic divinity.

(2) An evil passion or influence.

(3) A most wicked, cruel or malevolent person; also (in weakened sense) a mischievous person, especially a child.

(4) A person who is extremely skillful in, energetic at, or devoted to a given activity, especially a sport.

(5) Of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or noting a demon.

(6) In computing, a part of a computer program, such as a help facility, that can run in the background behind the current task or application, and which will only begin to work when certain conditions are met or when it is specifically invoked; often styled daemon.

(7) A person's fears or anxieties (always in the plural and usually in the form “haunted by their demons” or “facing their demons”).

(8) In Greek mythology, a tutelary deity or spirit intermediate between the major Olympian gods and mankind, especially a deified hero or the entity which supposedly guided Socrates, telling him what not to do.

(9) In the thought experiments of both physics and philosophy, a hypothetical entity with special abilities postulated for the purposes required.

(10) A person's inner spirit or genius; a guiding or creative impulse (archaic).

(11) In card games, a type of patience or solitaire played in the UK & US.

(12) Any of various hesperiid butterflies of the genera Notocrypta and Udaspes.

Circa 1200-1250: From the Middle English demon (an evil spirit, malignant supernatural being, an incubus, a devil), from the Medieval Latin dēmōn, daemōn & daemoniumm (lar, familiar spirit, guardian spirit), from the Ancient Greek daimónion (thing of divine nature (though when used by Jewish and Christian writers: “evil spirit”)), neuter of daimónios, from δαίμων (daímōn) (deity, divine power; lesser god; guiding spirit, tutelary deity) and in both the Greek and Latin, the meanings sometime extended to souls of the dead and “one's genius, lot, or fortune”.  Ultimate root was the primitive Indo-European dai-mon (divider, provider (of fortunes or destinies)) from the root da (to divide).  The alternative spellings daemon & daimon was used in specialized senses and remain a favourite of the modern gaming industry; daimon was a transliteration of the Greek daimōn which was deployed to avoid the post-classical associations of demon (often in the adjectival form daimonic).  The demoness (female demon) dates from the 1630s.  Demon is a noun; the noun plural is demons.

Crooked Hillary Clinton depicted as a demon (believed to be digitally-altered image).

The malignant sense existed in English from the start because the Greek word was used (with daimonion) in Christian Greek translations and the Vulgate (the principal Latin version of the Bible, prepared mainly by the theologian Saint Jerome (circa 344-Circa 420) in the late fourth century, and (as revised in 1592) adopted as the official text for the Roman Catholic Church) for "god of the heathen, heathen idol" and also for "unclean spirit".  This was also part of the Jewish tradition where authors had used the Greek word in this sense, using it to render shedim (lords, idols) in the Septuagint and in Matthew 8:31 there appears daimones, translated as deofol in the Old English & feend or deuil in the Middle English.  A more evocative word in the Old English word was hellcniht (literally "hell-knight").  The inherited sense from the Ancient Greek (supernatural agent or intelligence lower than a god; a ministering spirit) appeared in English from the 1560s, written variously as daemon or daimon.  The meaning "destructive or hideous person" is from the 1610s and as "an evil agency personified" (ie the demon drink), from 1712.  In another sense in late fourteenth century English, the “Demon of Socrates” was a daimonion (a divine principle or inward oracle) although his accusers (and later the Church Fathers) represented this otherwise.  The Demon Star (1895) is Algol (variable star (Beta Persei)) in the constellation Perseus, documented in the late fourteenth century, which translates literally as "the Demon" from the Arabic al-ghul (the demon), from which is derived the modern ghoul.  It corresponds, in modern representations of the constellation, to the gorgon's head Perseus holds, but probably it was so called because it visibly varies in brightness every three days, which sets it apart from other bright stars.  In one of the most famous fragments of English verse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834) Kubla Khan (1798), there are the lines:

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

The noun demonarchy (rule or dominion of demons) first appeared in the 1640s while the noun demonology (the study of demons or beliefs about demons) had appeared in both secular and church documents as early as the 1590s, the related terms of the discipline being demonologer & demonological.  The adjective demonic (also daemonic) (devilish, of the nature of or pertaining to a demon), from the Latin daemonicus dates from the 1660s while demonical (from the Old English glossed daemonicus with deofelseoc (devil-sick) was from later in the century.  The adjective demoniac (possessed by a demon, insane) was from circa 1400 but several decades earlier there had been the noun demoniak, (one who is possessed, a lunatic), from the Late Latin daemoniacus, from the Greek daimoniakos (possessed by a demon), from diamond.  From the 1640s the adjective was used in the sense of "of or pertaining to demons or spirits" while by 1820 this had extended to a rather softened "devilish"; the related forms were demoniacal & demoniacally.

Lindsay Lohan in demonic pose to celebrate her twenty-third birthday, 2009.

The verb demonize (also demonise) (to make into a demon (literally or figuratively)) dates from 1778, either as a construct built from the noun or from the Medieval Latin daemonizare, all influenced by the Greek daimonizesthai (to be under the power of a tutelary deity) and the sense in the New Testament of "to be possessed by a demon”, the related forms demonized, demonizing & demonization all in use by the late eighteenth century.  The noun Pandæmonium (pandemonium the modern form) was in 1667 coined by John Milton (1608-1674) in Paradise Lost as the name of the palace built in the middle of Hell (the high capital of Satan and all his peers and the abode of all the demons), the construct being the Greek pan- (all) + the Late Latin daemonium (evil spirit) from the Greek daimonion (inferior divine power) from daimōn (in the sense of lesser god).

The Dodge Demons

The 1969 Dodge Swinger 340 (left), a platform familiar in Australia where it was produced (1969-1971) in a variety of configurations including a two-door hardtop (a 1971 VG Regal 770 (centre)) and four-door sedans (a 1971 long-wheelbase VIP (right)).

The Dodge Dart of the mid 1960s was a compact (in US terms) economy car which fulfilled its role well, lasting indeed until the late 1970s when it turned out to be in many ways superior to its ill-fated replacements.  However, an unusual conjunction of economic, legislative and demographic factors in the late 1960s made the Dart an ideal platform for a cheap muscle car which could easily and quickly be built from the corporate parts bin.  Its humble origins were never entirely disguised and it always lurked behind the sturm und drang of the bigger, more illustrious models like the Charger, Challenger and Daytona but as a bargain-priced muscle car, it deserved success.  Dodge had tentatively dipped the Dart’s toe into the muscle car waters in 1967 when it introduced the Dart GTS which, fitted with a 273 cubic inch (4.4 litre) V8 performed admirably given its modest specification but it the next year it became available with a new 340 cubic inch (5.5 litre) V8 which, thought under-rated at 275 (gross) horsepower, was one of the best units of the era.  Able in most cases to match the performance offered by much of the bigger-engined competition, reviews were positive and in 1969 a separate line called the Swinger 340 was released, a package which convinced Dodge to abandon its brief flirtation with overkill, not renewing the availability of the 383 & 440 cubic inch (6.3 & 7.2 litre) V8 engines in the platform.  The big-block engines were really suitable only for a drag strip, the lighter 340 a better idea.

1971 Dodge Demon 340.

Demon decal with demonic pitchfork.

In 1971, the Dart received an additional body style, borrowed from their corporate companion Plymouth which had added the Duster coupé as a stylish addition to the Valiant line, their equivalent of the compact Dart.  However, Dodge’s marketing people in the early 1970s either smoked too much weed or didn’t get out enough because shortly after flirting with the idea of adding statutory grape to their paint colour charts, they decided to call their new high-performance compact the Demon.  That upset the Christian lobby, influential even then but remarkably, the marketing department was going to use the name Beaver until more worldly types told them about its use in slang.  The churches weren’t best pleased about Demon but, given the scriptural basis, they relented despite the cartoon devil on a decal stuck to the fenders.  The churches, not impressed with a marketing strategy which seemed to support the Antichrist weren’t convinced by the explanation that it was all about a play on words (Come in for a Demon-stration) and continued to protest.  Dodge persisted and although denied statutory grape, buyers could choose lurid colors like Go-Green and Citron Yella while for those intent on building the quickest version possible, there was the Demon Sizzler package which bundled a number of dress-up and high performance options.  It was a good combination at a low price but it was out-sold by the mechanically identical Plymouth Duster 340s possibly because the Christian lobby had actually organized the preaching of sermons condemning Dodge as doing the Devil’s work so in 1973 the Demon nomenclature (and the offending cartoon) was dropped, the thing re-branded to the bland Dart Sport, a line which ran for three years (although the once virile 340 would be detuned and then replaced with a much milder 360 cubic inch (5.9 litre) unit.  The Christian lobby thus claimed the demon’s scalp although they never managed to veto Dodge’s use of Swinger and today, the 1971 & 1972 Demon 340s are sought-after.  Production numbers were never high (10,098 & 8,700 respectively) and give its cheap, disposable nature, and the buyers attracted to such things over the decades, attrition rates were high and survivors are few although, as just about everywhere in the muscle car ecosystem, there’s a minor industry in creating clones.

Demon redux: 2018 Dodge Challenger Demon.  The yellow plastic guard on the leading edge of the front splitter was attached at the factory to deter damage during transport to dealerships.  The instruction was to remove them prior to sale but they picked up a cult following and many buyers insisted they be retained.

Chrysler reprised the Dodge Demon name in 2018 (and Swinger in 2022) apparently with little theological opposition.  The engine used in the new Demon was an evolution of the 376 cubic inch (6.2 litre) Hemi V8 which, in 2017’s Challenger Hellcat, was rated at 707 horsepower.  With production limited to 3300 units, the 2018 Demon used a supercharged Hemi which produced 808 hp but an optional package boosted that to 840.  So equipped, the Demon would cover a standing quarter-mile (400m) in 9.65 seconds at 140 mph (225 km/h) and cost was a remarkably modest US$86,091 including the optional package which, while not entirely suitable for driving on public roads, was completely street-legal.  It included a number of features which hinted at its real purpose, including the passenger and rear seats being no-cost options and, most intriguingly, a high-output mode which both increased power and disabled the cabin air-conditioning, routing its cooling flow instead to the induction system, a device that lowered the intake temperature by 18-odd degrees, thereby gaining a few more horsepower.  Although tuned for quarter-mile sprints and thus limiting top-speed to about 170 mph (270 km/h), it could be geared for top end performance and would easily exceed 200 mph (320 km/h).