Enclave & Exclave

Enclave (pronounced ahn-kleyv (U) or en-klave (non-U))

(1) A country or (especially), an outlying portion of a country, entirely or mostly surrounded by the territory of another country.

(2) In casual use (and as a quasi-technical term in demography and sub-strains of applied geography), any (usually) small, distinct area or group enclosed or isolated within a larger one.

(3) By extension, in politics, sociology etc, non-physically defined subsets of a whole; a group that set off from a larger population by its characteristics or behavior.    

(4) To isolate or enclose (especially territory) within a foreign or uncongenial environment; ie by an act of enclaving to created something enclaved.

(5) In pathology, a detached mass of tissue enclosed in tissue of another kind.

(6) In computer operating systems, an isolated portion of an application's address space which places certain restrictions on access by code outside the enclave (not to be confused with a sandbox (of which one or more enclaves may be a part.

(7) In geology, an aggregate of minerals or rock found inside another larger rock body.

1868: From the Middle French enclave, a noun derivative of enclaver (to enclose), from the Old French enclaver (to inclose, lock in), from the unattested Vulgar Latin inclāvāre (to lock in), the construct being in- + clave.  The prefix in- from the Proto-Italic en-, from the primitive Indo-European n̥- (not), a zero-grade form of the negative particle ne (not) and akin to ne-, nē & nī).  Clave was from clavis (key), from the Proto-Italic klāwis which was either (1) a secondary i-stem derivation of the primitive Indo-European kleu- & klēu (nail, pin, hook (the old instruments (ie bars & bolts) used to secure the doors of primitive structures)) from which Classical Latin also gained clāvus (nail), an inherited Indo-European word originally denoting an instrument for unlocking doors or (2) a loanword from the dialectal Ancient Greek κλᾱϝίς (klāwís) (in the Classical: κλείς (kleís)), from the same primitive Indo-European root.  Enclave is a noun, enclaved & enclaving are verbs and enclavish is the (rare) adjective; the noun plural is enclaves.

In political geography, the use to describe a "small portion of one country which is entirely surrounded by the territory of another" dates from 1868 in English but it had been in use in French since the mid-fifteenth century as a derivative of the thirteenth century verb enclaver which had since the late 1400s been a technical term in property law describing “a parcel of land surrounded by land owned by a another which could not be reached for its exploitation in a practical and sufficient manner without crossing the surrounding land”.  The legal mechanism to resolve this was what was called “servitude passage for the benefit of the owner of the surrounded land”, a device which was essentially a personal easement.  The word was first used in international law when the Treaty of Madrid was signed in 1526 and enclave came to be applied to just about any legally defined territory surrounded by land under other ownership, proving popular in English and many other languages although, under the Raj, "pocket" tended to be used instead and British geographical were also called detachments within the UK while the Colonial Office invented “detached dominions”.  In the Church of England, where the same concept existed as ecclesiastical districts, parishes, chapels or churches which operated outside the jurisdiction of the bishop and archdeacon of the diocese in which they were situated, the canon lawyers invented “the peculiar”.

As used to describe a segmented memory space in computer operating systems, enclaves are regarded by some as synonymous with sandboxes but the two constructs have separate purposes.  An enclave is created by an application as a memory space protected from the rest of the application yet if a call is made into the enclave, it remains able to access all memory used by the application; this is a deliberate aspect of the design.  Those requiring bi-directional exclusivity need to run their enclave (and in most cases thus the application) inside a sandbox, sonthing which obviously limits functionality in a production environment.

Enclave and exclave are distinct in legal definition and geographical consequence but in idiomatic or metaphorical use, enclave is used almost exclusively as a descriptor of anything where the idea is of something small surrounded by a larger whole.  It’s applied especially in economic and social demography (white enclave; Chinese enclave etc).   

Exclave (pronounced eks-kleyv)

(1) A portion of a country geographically separated from the main part by surrounding foreign territory.

(2) An outlying, detached portion of a gland or other part, as of the thyroid or pancreas; an accessory gland.

1885-1890: Modeled on enclave, the construct was ex- + -clave.  In Middle English, the prefix ex- was applied to words borrowed from Middle French.  It was from the Latin ex- (out of, from), from the primitive Indo-European eǵ- & eǵs- (out) and was cognate with the Ancient Greek ἐξ (out of, from), the Transalpine Gaulish ex- (out), the Old Irish ess- (out), the Old Church Slavonic изъ (izŭ) (out) and the Russian из (iz) (from, out of).  In English, the x in ex- sometimes is elided before certain constants, being reduced to e- (eg ejaculate), almost always to ensure spelling aligns with pronunciation.

In political geography, enclaves are territories (sometimes a disconnected part of a larger territory) wholly surrounded by another state or political entity and the edges need not be land borders, enclaves existing sometimes within territorial waters.  There are also semi-enclaves which differ from enclaves in that they possess (at least in part) a coastline which constitutes an un-surrounded sea border, thus providing and outlet to international waters.  Depending on historical circumstances, enclaves and semi-enclaves can be independent states or remote parts of sovereign states.

An exclave is that part of a state geographically separated from the main part by surrounding alien territory (which may be more than one foreign entity) and exclaves are in some cases also enclaves.  A pene-exclave is a part of the territory of one country that can be conveniently approached only through the territory of another country.  Pene- is from the Latin paene (almost).

At the international, national and sub-national level, there are literally hundreds of enclaves and exclaves, illustrative examples including:

Vatican City, an enclave surrounded wholly by Italy and in its modern form a creation of the Pacta Lateranensia (the Lateran Pacts of 1929), the most significant part of which is remembered as the Lateran Treaty which resolved many of the issues which had existed between Rome and the Holy See since the unification of Italy (1861-1871), one celebrated consequence of which was popes no longer living in self-imposed captivity in the Vatican.

The rather unimaginatively named  Australian Capital Territory (ACT), site of Canberra, the country’s artificially created capital, came about because during the debates in the 1890s about the idea of federating the six colonies as the Commonwealth of Australia, it became clear that the two largest states, New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria, would never accede to either becoming the national capital.  Accordingly, it was agreed the new capital would be located not less than 100 miles (160 km) from the NSW capital (Sydney) and that the Victorian capital (Melbourne), would be the seat of government until the new city was built.  Thus some sheep country was carved from NSW to become the ACT and there, Canberra was built.  It’s very hot in summer, very cold in winter and otherwise unremarkable other than having over the years soaked up extraordinary amounts of money.   

Just east of the exclave of Andorra, the little Spanish town of Llivia lies some two kilometres (1¼ miles) from Spain’s border, surrounded completely by France, thereby making it both enclave and exclave, depending on whether one views the place from Madrid or Paris.  The stranger arrangement exists by virtue of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), when Spain ceded certain territories to France but the words in the document specified that only villages were to be transferred.  Llivia had long been gazetted as a town so remained Spanish.

In the narrow technical sense Alaska is a pene-exclave because although it cannot be reached overland except by transiting through Canada, it can be reached by sea or air because its coastline leads to international waters.  Alaska ranks with the Louisiana Purchase (in which the US in 1803 purchased from the French land equivalent to about 20% the size of the modern contiguous 48 states for less than US$20 per square mile) as the greatest real estate deals of all time.  The US in 1867 purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million and during the twentieth century, there was much buyer’s remorse.

The medieval walled city of Dubrovnik sits on Croatia, Adriatic coast in the region of Dalmatia.  Laid siege to for seven months during the first of the Balkan wars which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the city was heavily shelled but in the late 1990s extensive repair work was undertaken with the assistance of overseas funding.  The southern-most part of Croatia's Dubrovnik-Neretva County, which includes Dubrovnik, is cut off from the rest of the country by a sliver of the neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, the 20-kilometre zone created in 1699 as a buffer zone between Venice and the Ottoman Empire.

Suddenly the world's most famous exclave (though many refer to it as an enclave which, in the sociological sense, it is), Kaliningrad, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, is part of Russia.  Historically, it’s best remembered as a part of Prussia but, in the way Europe for centuries did things, its national identity has often changed.  It was known as Konigsberg German rule and was the site of an extraordinarily expensive (and militarily ineffectual) propaganda film produced by the Nazis towards the end of World War II.  It became part of the USSR in 1945 where it remained until Lithuanian independence in 1991 turned it into an exclave of Russia and to most it remained obscure until the invasion of Ukraine.

Buffer

Buffer (pronounced buhf-er)

(1) A static apparatus at the end of a railroad car, railroad track etc, for absorbing shock during coupling, collisions etc with the contact section made usually from spring-loaded steel pads or (in areas of low-speed activity such as shunting yards) timber.

(2) Any device, material, or apparatus used as a shield, cushion, or bumper, especially on machinery.

(3) Any intermediate or intervening shield or device reducing the danger of interaction between two machines, chemicals, electronic components etc.

(4) A person or thing that shields and protects against annoyance, harm, hostile forces etc, or that lessens the impact of a shock or reversal.

(5) Any reserve moneys, negotiable securities, legal procedures, etc., that protect a person, organization, or country against financial ruin.

(6) In ecology, as buffer state, an animal population that becomes the prey of a predator that usually feeds on a different species.

(7) In computing, a storage device for temporarily holding data until the device is ready to receive or process the data, as when a receiving unit has an operating speed lower (eg a printer) than that of the unit (eg a computer) feeding data to it.

(8) In electronics, a circuit with a single output activated by one or more of several inputs.

(9) In chemistry, any substance or mixture of compounds that, added to a solution, is capable of neutralizing both acids and bases without appreciably changing the original acidity or alkalinity of the solution; also called a buffer solution; any solution containing such a substance.

(10) To treat with a buffer.

(11) To cushion, shield, or protect; to lessen the adverse effect of; ease:

(12) In computing, temporarily to save data before actively accessing it so it may be loaded at a rapid or uniform rate.

(13) A device for polishing or buffing, as a buff stick or buff wheel, often in the form “floor buffer” for polishing floors; a worker who uses such a device.

(14) In admiralty slang, the senior non-commissioned officer serving on a ship or boat.

(15) In (mostly UK) colloquial use, a good-humored, slow-witted fellow, usually an elderly man, thus often as “old buffer” (archaic).

(16) In medicine, a preparation designed to decrease acidity in the stomach.

(17) In geopolitics, as buffer state, a country the land mass of which physically separates two opposing potentially powers and the existence of which is intended to prevent conflict or permit an attacked state a greater time to organize its defense.

(18) In geopolitics as buffer zone, a region separating two areas, often demilitarized, to segregate antagonistic populations: based usually on regional, ethnic or religious lines.

1835: The noun buffer in the sense of "something that absorbs a blow, apparatus for deadening the concussion between a moving body and that against which it strikes" was an agent noun from the obsolete verb buff (make a dull sound when struck), from the mid-sixteenth century Old French buffe & bufe (a blow, slap, punch).  The figurative sense of "anything that prevents impact or neutralizes the shock of impact of opposing forces" is from 1858 and was adopted universally by the railroad industry.  The sense of “one who or that which polishes by buffing” dates from 1854, an agent noun from the verb.  The verb use extended to “lessen the impact of” by 1886.  The use in chemistry began in the mid-nineteenth century, borrowed by analogy from the railroads although the meaning in science was soon extended and was adopted in electrical engineering.  In geopolitics the term wasn’t used until the mid-nineteenth century, the word again picked up from the general use inspired by railroads.  However, the concept had been well-understood for centuries.  The Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) created the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (modern day Belgium & the Netherlands) to remove the means of conflict between the UK, France & Prussia and although it lasted only until the separation of Belgian in 1830, the defined land-mass continued to fulfil the same function.

The derived forms include buffering, buffered & bufferize; the noun plural is buffers.  In the nineteenth century, a number of languages picked up buffer directly from English, including Danish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese & Romansch, spread apparently by the international growth in railroad construction.

Europe 1945-1989.

The deployment of ten-odd Russian army divisions on the border with Ukraine’s revived interest in the old squabble about whether, in the last days of the USSR, politicians from the West made promises or at least provided assurances to Moscow that NATO would not expand eastwards.  The archivists have for decades been looking for any document which might clarify at least what was at the time discussed but nothing emerged until some material was declassified in 2017.  The conclusion is that the USSR was never offered any formal guarantee about NATO membership but the interpretations of what happened after 1990 vary, the view from the West that the enlargement of NATO was undertaken honorably and in accordance with the rights international law accords to sovereign states whereas Moscow’s narrative is one of Western deception and duplicity. 

Most scholars of the Cold War seem to agree the story begins in February 1990 when James Baker (b 1930; US secretary of state 1989-1992), secretary of state under George HW Bush (1924–2018; US president 1989-1993 (George XLI)) met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (b 1931; leader of the USSR 1985-1991) in Moscow.  Only three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the matter of immediate interest was whether Germany, divided since 1945 into east and west, would be reunified, something that was most feared, though for different reasons, in the Kremlin and Downing Street.  London’s concern was its traditional fear to the emergence of an overwhelmingly strong Germany; Moscow feared the specter of NATO’s missiles being stationed in the GDR (East Germany). 

What both Russian and US transcripts of the meeting reveal was that the US position was it was in everyone’s interest that a unified Germany existed within NATO's political and military structure but at no point did either side discuss any of the nations aligned with the Warsaw Pact joining NATO.  That was not on the agenda because the thought of the imminent collapse of the USSR had not then occurred to many, none of whom were prominent in the US administration.  Orthodox political thought in the US, across most of the political spectrum, was that the Soviet empire probably was doomed but it’s life was expected to extend for at least decades.  A similar spirit animated the discussion Gorbachev had the next day with the FRG’s (West Germany) Chancellor Helmut Kohl (1930–2017; Chancellor of FRG or Germany 1982 to 1998), most taken up with the matter of German unification, NATO enlargement not even mentioned.  What was agreed was that the US, France, the UK and Germany, agreed not to deploy non-German NATO forces in the former East Germany.

In casual use, a "buffer zone" can be used of any mechanism (which need not be physical) designed prevents two entities coming into contact.

However, in the great geopolitical event of the second half of the twentieth century, the USSR did in 1991 collapse, ending the perhaps unhappy but essentially stable post-war arrangement whereby east and west were separated by an array of buffer states, the cordon sanitaire which was built by Comrade Stalin (1878–1953; leader of the USSR, 1924-1953), which constituted the line of the Iron Curtain from “…Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic…”.  They were difficult years for the post-Soviet buffer states but, in 1999, NATO welcomed as members, three nations of the former Warsaw Pact: Hungary, Poland & the Czech Republic.  That sounds now like an event of great significance and of course it was but with all the social and economic disruption happening in Russia, it evoked surprisingly few complaints, the political faction in Moscow which tilted towards Europe and saw their country’s future there, much more influential than today.  Some did however dwell on things.  A decade after the first NATO expansion, Gorbachev complained that the West had tricked Moscow, claiming he’d been assured NATO would not be moving “one centimeter further east."

Gorbachev later retreated from that, in 2014 admitting that in all the discussions which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification Germany, the topic of “NATO expansion” was never raised by either side, adding that not a single Eastern European country brought up the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved 1991.  Equally sanguine seems to have been the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007; president of the Russian Federation 1991-1999).  Although hardly enthusiastic about NATO expansion, he raised no objection but did urge caution on the West, warning it was important to take into account public opinion in Russia.  In that he may have had some misplaced faith in realism of those he viewed as his new Western partners, writing later that "the spirit of the treaty on the final settlement...precludes the option of expanding the NATO zone into the East."  None of that was in writing of course, the generous interpretation being inferences were drawn where no implications were intended.  Either that or, in Washington, views changed in the post Cold-War world.

Still, for a time, tensions seemed not great and cooperative structures were created including NATO-Russia Founding Act, a kind of statement of peaceful co-existence and in 2002, a joint consultative council was established as a framework in which differences could be resolved; rather wishy-washy in detail, it was regarded by most as ineffectual but at least harmless.  The real crossing of the Rubicon came in 2004 when NATO undertook its largest expansion, admitting seven more Eastern European countries including, critically, the Baltic states Latvia, Lithuania & Estonia, Latvia, all of which had been republics, unhappily, of the USSR.  It was the closest NATO’s divisions & missiles had ever been to Moscow.

By 2007 with the oil price high and the Russian economy thus buoyant, if rather distorted by its reliance on energy exports, the new Russian president, Vladimir Putin (b 1952; Russian president or prime-minister since 1999) made the official Russian position explicit, accusing NATO (ie the US) of duplicity and threatening Russia:  “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion has no relation with the modernization of the alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”  “What happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today?"  There being no documents, it seems Mr Putin might be relying on Mr Yeltsin’s evocation of the “spirit” of the discussions which both he and Mr Gorbachev had earlier confirmed contained no discussion of NATO expansion.  Still, some sense of realism was on display at a summit in Bucharest in 2008 when NATO declined to offer Georgia and Ukraine a fast-track path to membership but assured both they would eventually join the alliance.  No date was mentioned and it seemed a quiet triumph of Realpolitik for the Kremlin.

However, four months later, Russia invaded Georgia, crushing its armed forces and occupying two regions that had already had near complete autonomy.  Then, in 2014, after seizing and then annexing the Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula, Moscow equipped, financed, and provided military support to separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine, stoking the war that continues to this day, the death toll some fourteen-thousand.  NATO and the Kremlin no longer have active anything but emergency channels of communications.

Mr Putin is quite emphatic that assurances were provided NATO would never expand beyond what was necessitated by the unification of Germany and the last US ambassador to the USSR did insist, in his testimony to a congressional enquiry, that Mr Gorbachev had received assurances that if Germany united and remained in NATO, the borders of NATO would not move eastward and declassified documents released in 2017 do suggest Mr Baker may well have said “not one inch eastward” (source or Mr Gorbachev’s “one centimetre”) but that this was subsequently vetoed by Mr Bush who had a different vision of a “new world order”.  In the West, over the years, many seemed to treat all this as hearsay evidence and prefer to cite the 1990 treaty (the 2+4 Treaty) which created the framework by which German unification would be achieved.  There was no mention of NATO enlargement.  Beyond that, also invoked in the West is an argument apparently based on the doctrine of “acceptance by acquiescence” from contract law: Russia accepted enlargement, with detailed conditions, and in writing, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was agreed.  One can see what they’re getting at but to use an analogy with domestic contract law seems a bit of a stretch but NATO expansion anyway didn’t happen in isolation.  The first expansion, in 1999, came around the time of the NATO’s bombing campaigns in the Balkans, a traditional Russian sphere of influence and aimed at their traditional allies the Serbs.  While sympathetic to the US operation in Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq raised Moscow's ire.

Mr Putin’s position has since hardened.  The massing of infantry and cavalry divisions on the border has a nineteenth century feel but the economic and cyber warfare is already being waged and what’s already being called the Ukrainian crisis has attracted speculation from military and political theorists.  All agree (1) Mr Putin wants his buffer states back, (2) this is the first time in history the timing of military action must await the end of the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics and (3), the Kremlin learned certain lessons about the nature of the Biden administration from the scuttle from Afghanistan.  There the consensus seems to end but Mr Putin's ambition, no less than a re-configuration of the architecture of European security arrangements back to the 1992 lines on the map, is breathtaking.  This is not however 1941 and the world isn't (yet) quite holding it's breath.  Mr Putin has gambled before and won and if he can emerge from this round with something tangible, like a land bridge to the Crimea, he'd take it.  He plans anyway to still be Tsar when all the Western leaders facing him are gone and believes Russia's position in the future will only strengthen.     

Hezbollah

Hezbollah (pronounced hez-buh-lah or khes-bah-lah (Arabic))

A Shiʿite Muslim political and military organization (though genuinely with cross-denomination support), based in Lebanon but involved also in various regional operations.

1985: From the Persian hezbollah and the Arabic حِزْبُ اللّٰه‎ (ḥizbu llāh) (literally "Party of God"), the alternative spellings being Hizbullah, Hizballah & Hizb Allah, the construct being hezb (hizb) (party) + Allah (God); an adherent is styled a Hezbollahi although in Western commentaries that term seems to be applied more loosely.  Hezbollah is a proper noun.  Hezbollahzation & Hezbollahization are non-standard nouns used only in political science although, like balkanize etc, if use spreads they may enter general use.

The Hezbollah

Flag of the Hezbollah (right), the public display of which is banned in some jurisdictions where both the organization's political & military wings are listed as "terrorist organizations".  The national flag of Mozambique (left) also includes a depiction of a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle although the Africans fixed a bayonet to the barrel which was a nice touch.  Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975 although the flag wasn’t officially adopted until 1983 as a modified version of what was essentially the battle flag of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front, the Marxist (later styled “democratic socialist”) resistance movement which fought a war of liberation (1964-1974) against the Portuguese colonial forces).

Although the Hezbollah began to coalesce in 1982-1983 (in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon), it wasn’t until 1985 it assumed the familiar structural arrangement with both military and political wings.  Unlike many organizations with similar pasts, although the personnel structures don't (wholly) overlap, the Hezbollah has never made any attempt to suggest there is any functional or philosophical separation between their political & military wings.  Despite that, during periods when regional tensions are more subdued, they do receive invitations usually restricted to the respectable and a Hezbollah delegation attended the coronation of Pope Benedict XVI (1927–2022; pope 2005-2013, pope emeritus 2013-2022).

Like the Hezbollah, Hamas, a militant Palestinian resistance movement also operates as an apparatus with military, political and administrative divisions but the distinctions are less defined than those of the Lebanese operation and the name of Hamas comes from a similar linguistic tradition.  Formed in 1987 after the outbreak of the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation, its roots lie in Muslim Brotherhood so, unlike the Hezbollah, it’s thus a Sunni group although the historical and theological differences haven’t prevented the two cooperating when the circumstances have appeared compelling.  The word Hamas is an acronym of the Arabic phrase حركة المقاومة الإسلامية (Ḥarakah al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah) (Islamic Resistance Movement), used originally as the initializsm HMS.  In 1988, when the The ميثاق حركة المقاومة الإسلامية حماس (Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement and better known in the West as the “Hamas Covenant” or “Hamas Charter”) was published, this was glossed by the adoption of the Arabic word (حماس) (hamās) (strength, zeal, bravery).

The very existence of the Hezbollah disturbs some but certainly not the structural-functionalists who note that for an institution to continue to exist, the niche it inhabits must remain.  Those whose fastidiousness in this & that lead them to suggest some alternative to Hezbollah would be preferable seem never to go into details and the reluctance is understandable.  There are many countries in which the substitution of one political party for another can be modelled and the implications pondered but it's scarcely possible to imagine Lebanese politics without the Hezbollah.  As far as can be foreseen, it seems something permanent and Lebanon has for decades been a troubled place, badly served by its elite; it is not going to become a liberal democratic state in the Nordic mode.  Just as the yakuza (the Japan-based transnational organized crime syndicates and usually in katakana as ヤクザ) deploy rapidly in the aftermath of disasters like the Kobe earthquake (1995) and the Fukushima “incident” (2011) to provide affected populations with food, shelter and medical aid, it was the Hezbollah’s well-resourced (compared with the Lebanese state) social welfare infrastructure which was mobilized to provide the first response after the explosion in the Port of Beirut (2020).

The Beirut Port explosion, 20 August 2020, viewed from the sea, showing the mushroom cloud and effect of the blast wave.  It was one of the most powerful non-nuclear, man-made explosions ever recorded.

Such comparisons are intriguing because the yakuza are an integral part of the Japanese nuclear industry and much money was paid to them by TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company which ran the Fukushima plant) to keep secret the existence of cracks in vital parts of the machinery.  Although much of the world seems to think the meltdown (TEPCO and the Japanese government preferred “incident”, a word with a long cultural tradition until the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) called a spade a spade) was something which “happened in 2011”, it’s an ongoing event and will be for the next 40-50 years because unless TEPCO continues to pump water into the “hot” reactor core, the meltdown will resume.  That water has to go somewhere and for those 40-50 years the plan is to continue to pump it into the Pacific Ocean; there is no immediate alternative.  The pumping project will likely demand increasing yakuza involvement because they are willing lucratively to be involved in projects others prefer to avoid.  Some allege the invaluable role fulfilled by the Hezbollah in responding to the explosion at the Port of Beirut in August 2020 has a similar quality of circularity because the triggering of some 2¾ tonnes of ammonium nitrate (an explosive equivalent in excess of 1 kiloton of TNT (similar to some small, tactical nuclear weapons)) because a Hezbollah weapons cache was held in the same facility.  No evidence has been produced to support that and most analysts believe the blast was the result of an enormous quantity of explosive being stored in a low security environment, welding work on the day said to have “lit the fuse”.  However, whether all will ever be known about the matter is unclear because the Hezbollah (and others with their own reasons) have managed to ensure investigations have been curtailed.

Lindsay Lohan's Instagram post of photographs taken while on holiday in Lebanon, June 2022. 

Hezbollah has been the name of various Islamic groups in the twentieth century, the first known reference in English being from 1960, describing an Indonesian guerilla battalion of 1945 that appears to have been either an off-shoot of or successor to Laskar Hizbullah, formed by the Japanese to give military training to young Muslims they had recruited to their cause (an aspect of which was the training to become a kamikaze (ie suicide bomber)).  Laskar Hizbullah was ostensibly national-wide but, unlike the Lebanese namesake, had little effective central organization and, given the circumstances of 1945, didn’t enjoy the ongoing support from Tokyo the Hezbollah has had from the ayatollahs in Tehran.  It was militarily ineffective but its idea (if not the actual structures) carried over to post-war anti-colonial forces and (debatably) the communist movement which in the mid-1960s the Indonesian government suppressed, the death-toll of that claimed to be close to half-a-million.

Intifada

Intifada (pronounced in-tuh-fah-duh)

(1) A historic Arabic word for a (usually violent) political uprising against the ruling or occupying power.

(2) Either of two revolts by Palestinian Arabs to protest Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (sometimes with initial capital letter).

1985: From the Arabic verb Arabic اِنْتِفَاضَة (intifāḍa)(translated variously as “a shaking off”; “a jumping up (in reaction to something)”; “tremor”; “shivering” or “shuddering”) and technically a derivative of fāḍa (to shake off) but is most rendered into English as “uprising”, “resistance” or “rebellion”.  Because of recent history, the best understood translation is now probably "Palestinian revolt".  The "problem of Palestine" is a long-standing thing: In February 1945 the Lebanese minister resident in Paris was in discussion with the British ambassador to France to whom he remarked: "Palestine should be an entirely Arab state".  The ambassador asked him about the status of Jews resident in Palestine under such an arrangement and the minister replied: "...if the British would only close their eyes for a few minutes the Arabs would soon settle the Jewish question."  The variations in spelling include intefadah, intifadah & Intifada.  Intifada & intifadists are nouns; the noun plural is intifadas.  

West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar

Although the concept dates back centuries, historians consider the 1952 left-wing revolt against the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq as the first modern instance even though it was preceded by Colonel Abdel Nasser's (1918–1970; president of Egypt 1954-1970) revolution in Egypt.  The post-war wind of change which blew through the colonial world affected Africa and the Middle East with revolts in Sudan (1964), Bahrain (1965) and the Spanish Sahara (1970) but it’s the first (1987-1996) and second (2000-2005) intifadas in the occupied Palestinian territories which have defined use of the word.

Although the spasmodic incidents of unrest in the territories in 2014-2015 are sometimes referred to as intifadas none has been of sufficient intensity or duration to be labelled a third intifada.  Nor are other events in the region such as the 1990 Bahrain uprising, the 1991 Iraqi revolt, the 1999-2005 protests in Morocco or the 2005 revolution in the Lebanon remembered as intifadas because, in the West, the word is now almost exclusively associated with the two uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza.  It is only another action in the model of the earlier actions that will become known as the third intifada.  Indeed, the revolutionary wave which began on 18 December 2010 in Tunisia attracted the label Arab Spring and although the odd journalist or academic historian wrote of an intifada (with a couple of British specialists preferring “…a series of intifadas”) the more romantic Arab Spring prevailed.

Variation

Variation (pronounced vair-ee-ey-shuhn)

(1) The act, process, or accident of varying in condition, character, or degree.

(2) Amount, rate, extent, or degree of change.

(3) A different form of something; variant.

(4) In music, the transformation of a melody or theme with changes or elaborations in harmony, rhythm, and melody.

(5) In ballet, a solo dance, especially one a section of a pas de deux.

(6) In astronomy, any deviation from the mean orbit of a heavenly body, especially of a planetary or satellite orbit.

(7) In admiralty use as applied to nautical navigation, the angular difference at the vessel between the direction of true north and magnetic north; also called magnetic declination.

(8) In biology, a difference or deviation in structure or character from others of the same species or group.

(9) In linguistics, any form of morphophonemic change, such as one involved in inflection, conjugation, or vowel mutation.

1350-1400: From the Middle English variation (difference, divergence), from the Middle French variation, from the Old French variacion (variety, diversity) and directly from the Latin variationem & variātiōn (stem of variātiō) (a difference, variation, change), from the past participle stem of variare (to change) (the source of the modern English vary).  The use in the context of musical composition wasn't common until the early nineteenth century.  Variation is a noun and the (rare) adjective is variational; the noun plural is variations.

The available synonyms themselves show an impressive variation: deviation, abnormality, diversity, variety, fluctuation, innovation, divergence, alteration, discrepancy, disparity, mutation, shift, modification, change, swerve, digression, contradistinction, aberration, novelty, diversification, mutation, alteration, difference.  Apart from the English variation, European descendants include the French variation, the Italian variazione, the Portuguese variação, the Russian вариация (variacija), the Spanish variación and Swedish variation.

Ginger, copper, auburn & chestnut are variations on the theme of red-headedness: Lindsay Lohan demonstrates the possibilities.  

Glenn Gould and the Goldberg Variations: 1955 & 1981

Published in 1741, JS Bach’s (1685-1750) Goldberg Variations consists of an aria and thirty variations.  Written for the harpsichord, it’s named after German harpsichordist & organist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756), thought to have undertaken the first performance.  The work is now thought part of the canon of Baroque music but before 1955, was an obscure piece of the Bach repertoire, a technically difficult composition for the hardly fashionable harpsichord and known mostly as a device for teachers to develop students’ keyboard skills.  Even for aficionados of the Baroque, it was rarely performed.

Glenn Gould (1932—1982) was a Canadian classical pianist, his debut album on the then novel twelve-inch vinyl LP an interpretation of the Goldberg Variations, played on the piano.  A quite extraordinary performance and a radical approach, played at a tempo Bach surely never intended and with an electrifying intensity, it was beyond mere interpretation.  The work was also his swansong, uniquely for him, re-recorded in 1981 and issued days before his death.  Eschewing the stunningly fast pace which made its predecessor famous and clearly the work of a mellower, more reflective artist, for those familiar with the original, it’s a masterpiece of controlled tension.

In 2002, Sony re-released both, the earlier essentially untouched, the later benefiting from a re-mastering which corrected some of the technical deficiencies found in many early digital releases.  Although critics could understand Gould thinking there were aspects of the 1955 performance which detracted from the whole and why he felt the second version a better piece of art, it’s still the original which thrills.

Dimorphous

Dimorphous (pronounced dahy-mawr-fuhs)

(1) Occurring or existing in two different forms.

(2) In botany, plants with roots with two distinctive forms for two separate functions.

(3) In botany, as frond dimorphism, differing forms of fern fronds between the sterile and fertile fronds.

(4) In botany, as dimorphic fungi, fungi which can exist as both mold and yeast.

(5) In cell biology, as phenotypic dimorphism, a switching between two or more cellular morphologies.

(6) In zoology, a phenotypic difference between males and females of the same species.

(7) In nuclear physics, a cell where the nuclear apparatus is composed of two structurally and functionally differentiated types of nuclei.

(8) In geology, the property of some substances to exist in two distinct crystalline forms.

1801: From the Ancient Greek dímorphos (of two forms), the construct being di + morphē (form, shape).  The suffix di- was from the Ancient Greek δῐ- (di-), from δῐά (diá) (through), from the Latin di- (two, twice or double (the synonyms were duo-, bi- & bis-)) and was an alternative form of dis-, shortened when placed before l, m, n, r, s (followed by a consonant), and v; it was also often shortened before g, and sometimes before j.  Morphe was a back-formation from morpheme, from the Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ) (form, shape); the similar German Morph is from morphem and attested since the 1940s.  In formal grammar and structural linguistics, morphe is a physical form representing some morpheme in language; a recurrent distinctive sound or sequence of sounds.  In linguistics, an allomorph is one of a set of realizations that a morpheme can have in different contexts.  The –ous suffix is from the Middle English -ous, from the Old French –ous & -eux, from the Latin -ōsus (full, full of); a doublet of -ose in an unstressed position.  It was used to form adjectives from nouns, to denote possession or presence of a quality in any degree, commonly in abundance.  In chemistry, it has a specific technical application, used in the nomenclature to name chemical compounds in which a specified chemical element has a lower oxidation number than in the equivalent compound whose name ends in the suffix -ic.  For example sulphuric acid (H₂SO₄) has more oxygen atoms per molecule than sulphurous acid (H₂SO₃).  The class of words to which dimorphous belongs originally was most often used in botany to describe plants with one (monœcious), two (diœcious) or there (trimorphic) forms.  Dimorphous & dimorphic are adjectives, dimorphism is a noun and dimorphically is an adverb; the noun plural is dimorphisms.

The asteroid Dimorphos compared with the Colosseum in Rome.

First observed in 2003, Dimorphos is a small asteroid, technically a minor-planet moon of a synchronous binary system, Didymos, discovered in 1996, the primary asteroid.  Unfortunately, after the usual committee processes of the Working Group Small Body Nomenclature (WGSBN) of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the astronomers’ preferred nickname "Didymoon" was declined, the official name Dimorphos granted on 23 June 2020.  With a diameter of 170 metres (560 feet), it’s among the smallest astronomical objects to be given a permanent name.

The LICIACube.

Dimorphos is of greater interest than most asteroids because it’s the target of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, the impact scheduled for 26 Sep 2022.  The DART project is a proof-of-concept mission to test the viability of using small-scale physical impacts as a means to divert the trajectory of asteroids or other objects likely to hit Earth.  The DART process too is dimorphous and only partially self-destructive, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids (LICIACube) travelling attached to the doomed projectile, separating ten days before impact, that mission to observe and record the impact’s consequences.  Although about the size of a small car, with the solar panel wings unfurled, DART is as big as a 32-40 seat bus while LICIACube, equipped with the LICIACube Unit Key Explorer (LUKE) and LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid (LEIA) optical cameras is a small package with a mass of about 30 pounds (14 kilograms), barely bigger than a respectable handbag.  The size and weight of the ESA’s equipment was dictated by the limits imposed by the need to restrict the volume to what could be carried by DART for the entire journey.

DART with its solar panel wings unfurled.

The name, derived from the Ancient Greek Dimorphos (having two forms) refers not to what the unsuspecting rock is but what it will become, the second of its forms emerging after DART strikes.  Dimorphos will become the first celestial body in history, the form of which will substantially be changed by human intervention and this may therefore be something unique in the universe.  The point of the experiment is to determine if impacts at speed (and therefore of greater energy, DART planned to hit at 15,000 mph (24,100 km/h)) by small objects is sufficient to deflect objects by enough to change their course.  The theory is that if undertaken at long-distance, only a tiny change in trajectory should be enough to avert an object from a collusion path with Earth.  NASA launched DART on 24 November 2021.

Point of DART and LICIA separation.

Ten days before DART strikes Dimorphos, LICIACube will be released, firing its thrusters to separate from the mother-ship, then positioning itself to be at the correct angle to optimize the viewing window while ensuring it’s remains at a distance close enough to capture the desired details yet not so close as to risk damage from whatever debris the impact may eject.  The DART images immediately prior to impact will actually be a real-time stream; travelling at the speed of light, the data will take some 38 seconds to travel the 6.8 million miles (10.9 million km) to Earth.  LICIACube will store the data and continually transmit images in the months after DART’s demise. 

DART Mission plan.

Although the target asteroid is tiny compared to the cataclysmic Chicxulub behemoth which struck Earth 66 million years ago, ending the long age of the dinosaurs, the data derived from the DART experiment should be robust enough to be scalable and mathematical models will be developed to work out how much energy will need to be deployed to gain the desired effect, hence the often speculated use of nuclear explosions if the troublesome rock is really big.  Asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system’s formation some 4.6 billion years, are not uncommon and some are already on a path to strike earth sometime during the next few million years so the threat is real, even if the timing is unpredictable.

One flavor of the dimorphic role: Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap (1998).

In fictional depictions, well known examples of dimorphic roles include (1) the one individual manifesting in two very different forms such as the protagonist(s) in Robert Louis Stevenson's (1850–1894) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), (2) one which explores aspects of duality which manifest as two characters with lives or personalities intertwined to the extent that the distinction between the two is sometimes lost (Waiting for Godot (1953) by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)) or used as a literary device (The End of the Affair (1951) by Graham Greene (1904-1991)) & (3) the one actor playing two different characters who are in some way closely related or associated (Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap (1998)).  However, where an actor plays two quite distinct roles (Peter Sellers (1925–1980) in Dr Strangelove (1964) although he actually played three) this is not thought dimorphic because the characters are connected except through the device of the plot.