Grief

Grief (pronounced greef)

(1) Acute mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss; sharp sorrow; painful regret; deep or intense sorrow or distress, associated especially with the death of someone.

(2) A cause or occasion of keen distress or sorrow.

(3) In online use (especially in gaming and dating from the late 1990s), to behave in an un-sportsmanlike way or take pleasure in antagonizing other players (used as “to grief”, “griefing” or “be griefed” etc (and vaguely similar to the verb sense of troll)); to exploit a glitch or execute an online prank that diminishes or ruins a website or other online experience for other users.

(4) In idiomatic use, as “come to grief”, to suffer disappointment, misfortune, or other trouble; to fail:

(5) In idiomatic use as “good grief”, an exclamation of dismay, surprise or relief which can be used also to convey approval or disapproval, depending on context, verbal & non-verbal.

(6) In idiomatic use, as “giving me grief”, an expression of (usually mild) annoyance.

1175-1225: From the Middle English greef & gref (hardship, suffering, pain, bodily affliction), from the Anglo-French gref, from the verb grever (afflict, burden, oppress), from the Old French grief (grave, heavy, grievous, sad), from the Vulgar Latin grevis & gravare (make heavy; cause grief), from the Latin gravis (weighty, heavy, grievous, sad) (later influenced by its antonym levis) and ultimately from primitive Indo-European gréhus, gwere & gwerə- (heavy).  The general sense of “suffering or hardship” (Emotional pain, generally arising from misfortune, significant personal loss, bereavement, misconduct of oneself or others, etc.; sorrow; sadness) evolved between the early thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; a doublet of grave.  The alternative forms were greefe & griefe, both long obsolete.  The expression “good grief” appears to date only from 1912 but has been used in historical fiction which long pre-dates the twentieth century.

The circa 1300 adjective grievous was from the Anglo-French grevous, from the Old French grevos (heavy, large, weighty; hard, difficult, toilsome) and was formed directly from grief.  The term grievous bodily harm (the famous GBH) was first used in English criminal law in 1803.  The circa 1300 noun grievance (state of being aggrieved) was from the Old French grevance (harm, injury, misfortune; trouble, suffering, agony, sorrow) from grever (to harm, to burden, be harmful to) and was first used in reference to a cause of such a condition from the late fifteenth century.  The verb is now most commonly found in the gerund-participle griefing and the derived noun griefer; the past participle is griefed and the noun plural griefs.  The related terms include grievance, grieve & grievous and grief is sometimes used as a modifier (grief-striken, grief-tourism et al).  Words which often overlap with grief include agony, anguish, bereavement, despair, discomfort, gloom, heartache, heartbreak, melancholy, misery, moroseness, mourning, pain, regret, remorse, sadness, sorrow, trouble, unhappiness, woe & worry.

The DSM-5-TR, ICD codes and Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD)

In March 2022, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) released a revision to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5 (2013)).  DSM-5-TR (text revision) includes some updated text and new references, clarifications to diagnostic criteria and updates to the ICD-10-CM (International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification) codes which have changed since the DSM-5 was published in 2013.  A text revision to an edition of the DSM is released when a number of changes to the text that accompanies the description of disorders and their criteria are warranted by new evidence or the need for more clarity.  The text of the DSM-5 had since 2013 received some minor corrections but DSM-5-TR is a systematic text revision based on a review of the literature of the last decade (and some re-evaluation of some earlier material).  By contrast, a new edition of the DSM is released when there are thought to have been sufficient advances in the field to support the creation, substantive revisions, and elimination of multiple diagnostic criteria sets or disorders.  There has within the profession been some discussion of the implications of this and some have suggested there’s no indication of support for the need for a DSM-6, some speculation the APA might adopt the conventions of the software industry and work instead towards a version 5.1, the first number indicating a major release, the second the agglomeration of minor revisions, a format well suited to digital editions.

New ICD-10-CM codes have been added to flag and monitor suicidal behavior and non-suicidal self-injury and these can be used without the requirement of another diagnosis and in total there are over 50 coding updates for substance intoxication, withdrawal and other disorders.  The innovation in the use of the ICD-10-CM codes relation to suicidal behavior is interesting.  It’s long been understood suicidal behavior can be a useful tracking mechanism or flag for clinical attention and these codes are now available to all clinicians without the need for a mental disorder diagnosis.  The suicidal behavior codes can be applied to individuals who have engaged in potentially self-injurious behavior with at least some intent to die as a result of the act and the evidence of intent can be explicit or inferred from the behavior or circumstances.  Many suicide attempts don’t result self-injury and the changes reflect the analysis of the statistical data which indicated the previous focus on self-harm and injury meant the extent of the disorder was in many ways underestimated.  It should mean the always interesting phenomenon of “suicide attempts” undertaken in the in absence of suicidal intent becomes better understood or at least quantified.

The new diagnosis of Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) has been added to the trauma- and stressor-related disorders chapter.  Noted for centuries, much recent research and clinical experience has indicated there are those who experience a persistent inability to overcome their grief for the loss of a loved one for at least a year or more, with intense yearning or preoccupation with thoughts or memories of the deceased person almost every day since the death (and it’s noted that in children and adolescents, this preoccupation may focus on the circumstances of the death), symptoms severe enough to impair day-to-day functioning.  As part of the diagnosis, the duration and severity of the bereavement reaction must clearly exceed what is expected based on standards related to the individual’s social, cultural, or religious background. This does not imply people feeling grief periodically one year or more after the loss of a loved one have the disorder but those with intense and impairing grief after one year may be considered for the diagnosis.  Prior to the fifth edition, the DSM did not distinguish between “normal” and prolonged grief but PGD may be considered an evolution given the DSM-5 did include a category of persistent complex bereavement disorder (known also as traumatic grief (TG) & complicated grief (CG)) as a “condition for further study” and the first draft of a proposal was in 2018 submitted to the DSM Steering Committee and the Review Committee on Internalizing Disorders, a white paper circulated for discussion before being approved by the Board of Trustees.

The DSM editors clearly were sensitive to suggestions the creation of prolonged grief disorder might have the effect of pathologizing grief and there has long be the criticism that psychiatry increasingly has attempted to list as disorders much that has for centuries been considered part of the “normal” human condition.  To clarity things, the editors note the diagnosis is not a medicalization of grief and the diagnosis is intended only for those individuals who meet the criteria: something dramatically different from the grief normally experienced by anyone who loses a loved one; a grief intractable and disabling in a way that typical grieving is not.  Grief continues to be thought of as something healthy but not if ongoing and it's dealt with in different ways.  In 2013 Lindsay Lohan revealed her 19 year old Maltese dog Gucci (which gained the name after chewing up a pair of prized Gucci boots) had died and to feel a form of grief is thought to be a natural reaction to the event but it shouldn't persist and in many cases it seems the best therapy to to replace the pet with another/

One internally significant technical change is also noted: there are now no unique DSM codes.  The codes that appear in DSM-5-TR are the ICD codes that are equivalent to the DSM diagnoses given the version of the manual and only ICD-10-CM codes are used because this is the version of ICD that is in effect in the United States.  Although based on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ICD-10 codes, ICD-10-CM codes in DSM-5 (and thus DSM-5-TR) have been modified from ICD-10 for clinical use by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and provide the only permissible diagnostic codes for mental disorders for clinical use in the United States. In the United States, the use of ICD-10-CM codes for disorders in DSM-5-TR has been mandated by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) for purposes of reimbursement under the Medicare system. Although it sounds nerdy, it’s an important advance in standardization which should improve record keeping, data collection, retrieval, and compilation of statistical information.

One change which was expected was the update to the terminology to describe gender dysphoria based on updated and more culturally sensitive language.  (1) desired gender is now experienced gender, (2) cross-sex medical procedure is now gender-affirming medical procedure” and (4)  the companion terms natal male / natal female are now individual assigned male / female at birth.  Whether these changes prove to be final remains to be seen; the whole area is one of shifting linguistic sand but what’s in DSM-5-TR reflects current thinking and the entire text of the Gender Dysphoria chapter has also been updated based on a review of the literature.

Also expected was the restructuring (again) of the diagnostic criteria of Autism, reflecting the view that Autism seems to be over diagnosed, a problem inherent in spectrum conditions.  Less anticipated was the creation of Unspecified Mood Disorder (UMD) which, ominously, does sound like the criminal charge of “unspecified offences” used in the justice systems of places like the DPRK (North Korea) but which seems to have been coined to permit clinicians some flexibility so that patients presenting with irritability, agitation and sadness (and for whom some diagnosis is clearly appropriate), don’t have to be labeled as “bipolar unspecified” or “depressive disorder unspecified’, both stigmatizing conditions, the presence of which in a medical record may have implications which last a lifetime.  It’s thus a legitimate diagnosis (which really is important to patients) to be applied until a more specific disorder is found but does raise two interesting technical points: (1) can any emo not be diagnosed UMD and (2) should all emos be diagnosed UMD?

Pile

Pile (pronounced pahyl)

(1) An assemblage of things laid or lying one upon the other.

(2) Slang for a large number, quantity, or amount of anything.

(3) A heap of wood on which a dead body, a living person, or a sacrifice is burned; pyre the more common form.

(4) Slang term for a lofty or large building or group of buildings.

(5) In metallurgy, a bundle of pieces of iron ready to be welded and drawn out into bars; fagot.

(6) In electricity, slang for a voltaic pile.

(7) To gather, accumulate, or rise in a pile or piles (often followed by up).

(8) In construction, a long column of timber, concrete, or steel that is driven into the ground to provide a foundation for a vertical load (a bearing pile) or a group of such columns to resist a horizontal load from earth or water pressure (a sheet pile)

(9) In heraldry, an ordinary in the form of a wedge or triangle coming from one edge of the escutcheon, from the chief unless otherwise specified.

(10) In archery, the sharp head or striking end of an arrow, usually of metal and of the form of a wedge or conical nub.

(11) A fabric with a surface of upright yarns, cut or looped, as corduroy, Turkish toweling, velvet, and velveteen.

(12) In nuclear physics, a structure of uranium and a moderator used for producing atomic energy; nuclear reactor.

Pre 1000: Middle English pile from Old English pīl (shaft) derived from the Latin pīlum (javelin) and pīla (pillar or mole of stone).  Variations emerged in Late Middle English, pyles from 1375–1425 was a plural of the Latin pilae (literally, balls) and from 1300–50 piles (hair, plumage) from the Latin pilus (hair), the -i- short in Latin but long in Anglicized school pronunciation.  The Middle English pyl (reverse of a coin) was a special use of the Medieval Latin pīla.  Word actually passed to English from the Old French pyle. 

The meaning "mass or heap" was universal by the early fifteenth century, originally "pillar, pier of a bridge," from Middle French pile and directly from Latin pila "stone barrier, pillar, pier"; the development in Latin from "pier, harbor wall of stones," to "something heaped up" and the meaning "large building", common by the fourteenth century is probably the same word.  The "heavy pointed beam" is from the Old English pil (stake), as "arrow" is from the Latin pilum (heavy javelin of the Roman foot soldier, literally pestle), source of the Old Norse pila, the Old High German pfil, and the German pfeil (arrow).  Of all these, origin is uncertain.  The meanings as applied to fabrics and downy plumage are from the Anglo-French pyle or the Middle Dutch pijl, both from Latin pilus (a hair), source of the Italian pelo and Old French pel.  Phonological evidence rules out transmission of the English word via the Old French cognate peil and poil; meaning "nap upon cloth" emerged in the 1560s.  The most familiar modern meeting (to heap up) is from the mid fourteenth century while the figurative verbal expression “pile on” (attack vigorously, attack en masse) is an Americanism from 1894.

Chicago Pile-1

The atomic pile was the original name for a nuclear reactor, a device used to initiate and control a self-sustained nuclear chain reaction.  Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the world's first nuclear reactor and on 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated.

Chicago Pile-1, 1942                          

CP-1 was built with 45,000 graphite blocks weighing 360 tons used as neutron moderators, fueled by 5 tons of uranium metal and 45 tons of uranium oxide which, despite the bulk, produced only a tiny amount of power, about one-half watt. The original design intended the shape to be spherical but, during construction, it was calculated the critical mass required for a chain-reaction could be achieved with a smaller pile.  Disassembled in 1943, CP-1 was reconfigured to become Chicago Pile-2 (CP-2) and it operated in that form until 1954 when it was dismantled and buried.

A pile of granite blocks (left) and Lindsay Lohan with several stacks of pregnancy books (right), out-take from Labor Pains (2009).

The term "atomic pile" is a historic artefact from the early years of the science but essentially they were the first nuclear reactors, the term derived from what the physicists at the time visualized as a "pile" of the graphite blocks used to moderate the nuclear reaction.  Why the word "pile" was chosen as a descriptor doesn't seem to have been recorded but it must at the time have seen an obvious choice although, the convention in English would have been to use "stack" because although "pile" and "stack" both refer to agglomerations of objects (although can figuratively also be used of the non-physical), the two have slightly different connotations.  A pile tends to be an unordered heap of items, placed without much care to produce a random or shape ("pile of clothes on the floor", "pile of leaves in the yard" etc).  By contrast, a stack is a more orderly arrangement of items placed atop each other ("stack of books on a table", "stack of plates in a cupboard" etc), suggesting something and structured (although the stuff in the stack could in some ways be quite haphazard (ie not in alphabetical order etc).   So, a pile tends to appear to be disordered or unstructured, while a stack suggest some sense of deliberate organization.  None of that suggest the early, pioneering theorists and researchers were wrong in their choice of word.  The first nuclear reactors were called a pile to reflect the basic, rather unrefined way the components were "piled together"; these really were scientific experiments and not without risk, a number of scientists and engineers who worked in close proximity to Chicago Pile-1 dying prematurely from internal cancers, including Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), the device's designer & builder.

Slime

Slime (pronounced slahym)

(1) Soft, moist earth or clay, having an adhesive quality; thin, glutinous, viscous mud; any substance of a dirty nature that is moist, soft, and adhesive; bitumen; mud containing metallic ore, obtained in the preparatory dressing.

(2) Any mucilaginous substance; or a mucus-like substance which exudes from the bodies of certain animals (typically fish, snails or slugs) or vegetable (eg fungi); any ropy or viscous liquid matter, especially of a foul kind.

(3) In slang, as slimeball, an informal, derogatory term for a sneaky, unethical, repulsive or otherwise despicable person.

(4) In video gaming, a monster appearing as a slimy blob or in some other way slimy.

(5) Human flesh, seen disparagingly (an obsolete figurative use).

(6) In slang as “Jew’s slime”, bitumen (offensive and obsolete).

(7) In the African-American vernacular (more recently adopted in MTE (my thoughts exactly) slang)), a friend; “a homie”.

(8) In biology, as the acronym SLIMEs (also as abbreviated SLMEs & SLiMEs), subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems, a type of endolithic ecosystems which manifest as agglomerations of bacteria and fungi which inhabit pores in the interlocking mineral grains of igneous rock beneath Earth's surface.

(9) In biology, as slime-mold, a broad term often referring to roughly six groups of Eukaryotes (organisms the cells of which contain a nucleus).

(10) In computing, as the acronym SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs), an Emacs mode for developing Common Lisp applications.

(11) To cover or smear with or as if with slime.

(12) In industrial processing, to remove slime from, as fish for canning (technically a clipping from de-slime so slime can be both a synonym and antonym of de-slime).

Pre 1000: From the Middle English slime, slyme, slim & slym from the Old English slīm.  The Old English slīm may be from the Old English lim (birdlime; sticky substance) but is probably from the Proto-Germanic slīmą, from the primitive Indo-European sley- (smooth; slick; sticky; slimy), the source slao of the Old Norse slim.  The English forms were related to a remarkable number of similar words in many languages including the Dutch slijm (phlegm), the Danish slim, the Old Frisian slym, the Old Norse slīm, the German Schleim (mucus, slime), the Saterland Frisian Sliem, the Latin limus (alime, mud or mire), the Sanskrit linati (sticks, stays, adheres to; slips into, disappears), the Russian slimak (snail), the Ancient Greek λίμνη (límnē) (marsh), the Old Church Slavonic slina (spittle), the Old Irish sligim (to smear) & leinam (I follow (literally "I stick to")), the Welsh llyfn (smooth), the Greek leimax (snail), limne (marsh, pool, lake) & alinein (to anoint, besmear), the Old High German slīmen (to smooth), and the Latin līmax (snail).  The main influence on the changes in spellings noted in the Medieval period is thought to have been the Latin limus (slime, mud or mire) & linere (to daub, besmear, rub out, erase).  Slime & sliming are nouns and verbs, slimed is a verb, slimy is a noun & adjective and slimily is an adverb and slimier & slimish are adjectives; the noun plural is slimes.

Slime is available in designer colors.

Slime was used as an insult to a person from the early-fifteenth century when the phrase “to cover with slime" appeared (apparently the first use of slime as a verb) although slimeball appears not to have appeared until the twentieth and, unusually in English, hyphenation is rare.  Similar words in English include sludge, mud, goo, gunk, mucus, mire, scum, ooze, fungus & glop and, ever inventive, English has a wide range of alternatives for slimeball as an insult.  In biology, the slime-mold dates from 1880 and those with a morbid fear of slime are said to be suffering from blennophobia, from the Ancient Greek βλέννος (blénnos) (mucus, slime) + -phobia.  The suffix -phobia (fear of a specific thing; hate, dislike, or repression of a specific thing) was from the New Latin, from the Classical Latin, from the Ancient Greek -φοβία (-phobía) and was used to form nouns meaning fear of a specific thing (the idea of a hatred came later).

Slime is a popular motif in political satire, used here by Glenn McCoy (b 1965) to sum up crooked Hillary Clinton's (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) past and the 2016 presidential campaign between her and Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021).  The use of "slime" in this context plays on the almost universal human revulsion to such substances.  

An unverified representation of the Earth’s human population as a slimeball, plonked in New York’s Central Park (a place that’s seen not a few slimeballs).  This is actually a revival of the word "slime" in the now obsolete way it was used as a disparaging reference to human flesh.  At the time it was rendered, total population was some 7.88 billion souls and the calculation used was a human density of 985 kg/m³ (2172 lb/35 cubic foot) at an average human body mass of 62 kg (137 lb).  This would create a slimeball just under 1 km (820 yards) wide but the Earth’s population may just have reached 8 billion so the slimeball’s mass will have increased by 0.010152%.

Slimeballs are where one finds them:  Crooked Hillary Clinton with Harvey Weinstein.  In some places, “slimebucket” is used to convey the same meaning.

A depiction of Laura Croft, of Tomb Raider fame, being slimed.

Zombie

Zombie (pronounced zom-bee)

(1) In voodoo, the body of a dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose.

(2) The supernatural force itself.

(3) In informal use, a person whose behavior or responses are wooden, listless, or seemingly rote; automaton.

(4) In informal use, an eccentric or peculiar person.

(5) A snake god of African origin, worshiped in West Indian and Brazilian religious practices.

(6) A cocktail made typically with several kinds of rum, citrus juice, and often apricot liqueur.

(7) In financial market slang, a financial institution which continues to exist barely trades and has an asset book and balance sheet of zero value or less.

(8) In computing, a piece of code that instructs an infected computer to send a virus or other infection to other systems.

(9) In fiction, a deceased person who becomes reanimated to attack the living.

(10) In industrial relations, a worker who has signed a nondisclosure agreement.

(11) In computing, a process or task which has terminated but has not been removed from the list of processes, typically because it has an unresponsive parent process.

(12) In WWII Canadian military slang, a conscripted member of the military assigned to home defense rather than to combat in Europe.

(13) A slang term for various illegal narcotics in several markets.

(14) In philosophy, a hypothetical being indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.

(15) In the slang white collar crime, fake (invented, departed, deceased etc) employees maintained on a payroll for purpose of fraud.

1819 (in wider use after 1871): From a Bantu language, derived from either the Kongo zumbi (good-luck, fetish) or the Kimbundu nzambi (god).  It was originally the name of a snake god, the meaning "reanimated corpse" came later following the adoption by voodoo cults.  The familiar form is directly from Caribbean folklore's jumbee (a spirit or demon) and in this likely influenced by a Louisiana Creole French word meaning "phantom or ghost" and related to the Spanish sombra (shade; ghost).  

Artist’s depiction of Lindsay Lohan as a zombie.

The sense of "slow-witted person" is recorded from 1936, influenced by the depictions of zombies in cult literature during the decade, a use that was widespread in film and other popular culture by the 1950s.  However, although in Haitian folklore, a zombie (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi) is an animated corpse raised by means of witchcraft and the concept has been popularly associated with the religion of voodoo, academic research has made clear it’s not part of the faith's formal practices.  In the theological sense, when practiced in the region, it’s a thing of cults and the relationship to voodoo is akin to that between Satanism and Christianity.

As far as is known, the first appearance in English of what became the word “zombie” was in the essay History of Brazil (1819) by the English Romantic poet Robert Southey (1774–1843), noted both for his troubled life and his introduction into English of many novel forms, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) listing him as the earliest known author of some 400 words.  Few have survived except as linguistic curiosities in the many lists of such things the internet has encouraged many to compile.  In The Doctor (1834), Southey included the passage: “For indeed upon the agathokakological globe there are opposite qualities always to be found.” but agathokakological suffers from being as unwieldy a way of saying “composed of both good and evil” as his epistolization was of “letter writing” and batrachophagous of frog-eating.  Although the latter usefully existed to distinguish between those who enjoyed the delicacy cuisses de grenouilles (frog legs) and those who digested the whole unfortunate amphibian, it never caught on.  Zombie certainly has caught on, Southey using the Haitian French zombi, noting it was a term the Brazilian natives used to mean “chief” and it could be traced to an Angolan word for “god” and the popular meaning of “living death” was not associated with “zombie” until the US occultist, explorer & author William Seabrook (1884–1945) published The Magic Island (1929).  So while now one of the less remembered Romantic poets, Southey did leave a legacy of a kind in words and was apparently the first (in 1809) to use “autobiography” with its modern meaning and another of his coinings which would seem to deserver wider use is futilitarian (a person devoted to futility).

Prussia

Prussia (pronounced pruhsh-uh)

(1) A geographical area on the Baltic coast of northeastern Europe (historic references only).

(2) A Baltic country located in this area, conquered by the Teutonic Order and later part of the Holy Roman Empire (retrospectively labeled the First Reich) and subsequently the former German state.

(3) A former German state (Preussen in German) in north and central Germany, extending from the borders of France and the Low Countries to those of Lithuania and Poland.  It developed into the most powerful military power on the Continent (said at the time to be “an army with a country” rather than “a country with an army”), leading the North German Confederation between 1867–1871 when a German Empire (retrospectively labeled the Second Reich) was created by Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898; Chancellor of the German Empire 1871-1890).  Associated with the militarism which led to the First World War and tainted by association with the Nazis (the Third Reich), pursuant to discussions at the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences  of World War II, the Western allies sought the abolition of Prussia.  Comrade Stalin, influenced by Imperial Russia’s historic relationship with Prussia, was initially sanguine about the name remaining but later agreed to its dissolution and the Allied Control Council issued a law on 25 February 1947.  On that day, Prussia was officially proclaimed dissolved

Pre 1100: From the Medieval Latin Borussi & Prusi (Prūssia in the New Latin), Latinized forms of the native name of the Lithuanian people who lived in the bend of the Baltic before being conquered in the twelfth century and exterminated by the (mostly) German crusaders who replaced them as the inhabitants.  It’s perhaps from the Slavic Po-Rus ((the land) near the Rusi (Russians)) but the New Latin Prūssia was a Latinization used by Peter of Dusburg of a Baltic (Old Prussian, or perhaps Lithuanian or Latvian) autonym. The primitive Indo-European source of the name is unclear but the root may be the one used in the very name of Prusa (Prussia), for which an earlier Brus existed on an early Bavarian map.  In Tacitus' Germania, the Lugii Buri were said to dwell within the eastern range of the Germans and, while speculative, Lugi may descend from Pokorny's leug (black, swamp), while Buri is perhaps the root of “Prussia”.

Although the documentary evidence is sparse, etymologists note the Proto-Balto-Slavic prus-sk which was cognate with the Sanskrit प्रुष्णोति (pruṣṇóti) (sprinkle), the Czech prskat (splutter, sizzle) and the Serbo-Croatian prskati (splash), thus signifying "watery land", interesting because the tribes of the Baltic Prussian region all adopted names reflecting the natural environment, many alluding to water, something not unexpected in lands with thousands of lakes, streams, and swamps.  The first pre-Baltic settlers tended to name their villages after the streams, lakes, seas, or forests by which they settled and the tribes or clans into which they coalesced then took these names.  The Middle English designation for the region, Pruce, derives from the same Latinization and is the source of the terms pruce and spruce.

Prussian Blue

Famous for being among the first modern synthetic pigments created, Prussian blue was a serendipitous discovery in 1704 by Berlin-based color-maker Johann Jacob Diesbach (circa 1970-1748).  He was mixing a red lake pigment to use as a dye, made with iron sulfate and potash but unknown to him, the potash was contaminated with impurities (animal oil) so instead of a vivid red, a purple emerged, which when concentrated, transformed to a deep blue.  This accidental discovery provided an inexpensive alternative to the only permanent blue pigment then available, ultramarine (lapiz lazuli) which, being mined only in tiny quantities in Afghanistan, was ruinously expensive.  Prussian blue revolutionized both art and industrial production because, except for the rare aquamarine, blue dyes obtained from rocks and plants were unstable and unreliably color-fast.

Lindsay Lohan in Prussian blue bikini with high-waist brief and halter-style top.

Its manufacture escaped regulation by painters’ guilds since it was considered a chemical and not paint so use quickly spread. Cezanne’s mustache was stained with it, Ruskin hoarded it, it was Wordsworth’s favorite color and both EE Cummings & Baudelaire wrote of it.  Van Gogh told other artists his Starry Night (1889) wouldn't have been possible without Prussian blue and it's the most remembered shade from Picasso's blue period.

On the Street to Prussian Blue, Oil on Canvas by Victoria Kloch, 2017.

It’s also one of the creations of inorganic chemistry on the World Health Organization's (WHO) List of Essential Medicines because it can be useful as a sequestering agent and therefore an antidote for certain kinds of heavy metal poisoning such as those caused by thallium and radioactive isotopes of caesium.

Epitaph

Epitaph (pronounced ep-i-taf or ep-i-tahf)

(1) A commemorative inscription on a tomb or mortuary monument about the person buried at that site.

(2) A brief poem or written passage composed in commemoration of a dead person.

(3) A final judgment on a person or thing.

(4) To commemorate in or with an epitaph.

(5) To write or speak after the manner of an epitaph. 

1350–1400: From the Middle English epitaphe (inscription on a tomb or monument), from the Old French epitafe, from the twelfth century Old French epitaphe, from the Latin epitaphium (funeral oration, eulogy), from the Ancient Greek epitáphion (over or at a tomb; a funeral oration), (noun use of neuter of ἐπιτάφιος (epitáphios) ((words) spoken on the occasion of a funeral), the construct being epi- (From the Ancient Greek ἐπί (epí) (at, over; on top of; in addition to (in a special use in chemistry, it denotes an epimeric form))) + τάφος (táph(os)) (tomb) + -ion (the noun-adjectival suffix).  Táphos (tomb, burial, funeral) was related to taphē (interment) & thaptō (to bury) of uncertain origin.  It has long been thought derived (like the Armenian damban (tomb)) from the primitive Indo-European root dhembh- (to dig, bury) but recent scholarship has cast doubts and some etymologists suggest both the Armenian and Greek could be borrowings.  There were equivalent words in the Old English and regional variations were many; the one which survived longest was byrgelsleoð.

The companion words, which differ not only in nuance but in convention of use, include eulogy (an oration about the dead, delivered usually at a funeral or memorial service), obituary (something in written form published soon after death which provides a potted biography and epigraph (a quote engraved on a tombstone, variously plaintive, humorous or barbed).  Not quite the same but very to the point is the Latin hic jacet (literally “here lies”).  Epitaph is a noun or verb (used with object), epitaphic, epitaphial, epitaphed & epitaphless are adjectives, epitaphically is an adverb and epitaphist is a noun.  The noun plural is epitaphs.

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Jonathan Swift's marble memorial, St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

One of the most celebrated epitaphs in English was saeva indignatio (literally “savage indignation”) which appeared on the tomb of the delightfully wicked Anglo-Irish satirist & poet Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), expressing a resigned contempt at human folly.  Swift is probably best remembered for Gulliver's Travels (1726) but it was A Modest Proposal (1729) which defined the genre of satire and work in this vein is often still labeled "Swiftian".  Swift started his political life as a Whig but ended it a Tory, becoming an Anglican cleric who was appointed Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

Swift not only wrote his own epitaph but left instructions also for the stonemason and the authorities of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, the memorial to be rendered in black marble, mounted seven feet from the ground, the large letters to be deeply cut and strongly gilded.  His specifications were followed but the stridency of Swift's Latin displeased a few who, finding it harsh or inelegant, didn't always reproduce it with complete fidelity.  The translation into modern English is Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift.....where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart. Depart, wayfarer, and imitate if you can a man who to his utmost strenuously championed liberty.  Fellow Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) rendered it as the punchier Swift has sailed into his rest; savage indignation there cannot lacerate his breast.  Imitate him if you dare, world-besotted traveller; he served human liberty.

Epitaph (1990) by Charles Mingus (CBS–466631 2).

Charles Mingus (1922–1979) was an American double bassist, pianist, composer and bandleader and one of the seminal figures in jazz.  Although lauded for the way his bands would interpolate passages of collective improvisation into performance pieces, he was influential also in his structured compositions, some of which were, by the standards of the genre, unusually long.  None however matched his Epitaph, comprising over four-thousand measures (a grouping of beats, which indicates the meter of a particular piece of music) and demanding more than two hours to perform, ranking with epic-length pieces such as Wynton Marsalis’s (b 1961) Blood On The Fields (1997) and Carla Bley’s (b 1936) Escalator Over The Hill (1968-1971); only Wadada Leo Smith’s (b 1941) sprawling Ten Freedom Summers (2012), unfolding over five hours, runs longer.

It’s not clear how long Mingus worked on Epitaph and its gestation may have absorbed as long as Ten Freedom Summers (thirty-four years in the making) because fragments of Epitaph were performed as early as 1962 although whether it was then envisaged as what it became is unknown.  It was only after his death, while Mingus’s work was being catalogued, that the whole of Epitaph was assembled and the score compiled.  This enabled the piece to be performed in 1989 by a thirty-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther Schuller (1925-2015) and produced by Mingus's widow, Sue Graham Mingus (b circa 1933).  It has since had a number of performances, several in 2007, and the complete score has been published.

Lindsay Lohan reading the epitaphs, graveyard scene in I know who killed me (2007).

Epitaph, full of melodies, is rewarding and not entirely unfamiliar because Mingus over the years included several snatches in live recordings and concerts preformed with smaller bands, playfully sampling the music of a few others in sections although that’s not typical of Epitaph, a work all have noted for its originality.  A two-hour suite for thirty-one musicians is not necessarily unwieldy but Epitaph is complicated and really demands a band both familiar with each-other and well-rehearsed.  It’s not the sort of piece suited to an ensemble, however virtuosic, assembled for a one-off performance and the definitive performance which one day will be released will likely have been carefully edited and polished from any number of studio sessions.  Technically, it’s challenging for a conductor, there are shifts between melodic strains which sometimes are sudden and sometimes overlap, parts apparently unresolved skid to a stop, tempos pick-up at various paces and there’s an underlying cross-talking between extreme-register instruments; doubtlessly it's no less difficult for the musicians, two pianists, two bassists, a drummer and two percussionists needing peacefully to co-exist although, this is Mingus and that means creative tension is lives between the notes.  Even once détente was established however, there's still the piece itself to conquer, not all of it in the familiar language of jazz for there are vertiginous jumps in register, fast phrases slurring effortlessly to the languid and the jar sometimes of the polytonality of which American composers of the twentieth century were so fond.  Critics and other aficionados of the art were enchanted but it’s suspected there were those who dipped in and out of their CD and listened just to the bits they liked.

Whig

Whig (pronounced wig)

(1) To move along briskly (obsolete except in Scotland).

(2) A political party in Great Britain and the United Kingdom between 1679-circa 1860 and in the and US circa 1834-1855 (initial capital).

(3) Slang for a conservative member of the Liberal Party in Great Britain (used both with and without initial capital).

(4) Slang for certain factions in the US Republican Party (used both with and without initial capital).

(5) A (rarely used) historical term for a seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterian, especially one in rebellion against the Crown (used both with and without initial capital).

(6) In Northern English dialectal use, acidulated whey, sometimes mixed with buttermilk and sweet herbs, used as a cooling beverage (obsolete).

(7) Buttermilk (now rare)

Circa 1657: The British political movement later called Whig began to emerge in the mid-1650s, (“emerged” is a better expression than “was formed”), in part perhaps a disparaging use of the 1640s whigg (a country bumpkin) but the greater influence was the 1649 Whiggamaire (later Whiggamore) (the Covenanters, adherents of the Presbyterian cause in western Scotland who marched on Edinburgh in 1648 to oppose Charles I)  The sense, from circa 1635, of a country bumpkin may have been linked to "a horse drover," from the dialectal verb whig "to urge forward" + mare (in the sense of a horse).  In 1689 the name was first used in reference to members of the British political party opposed to the Tories.  The American Revolution era sense of "colonist who opposes Crown policies" is from 1768 and, as early as 1825, was applied to opponents of Andrew Jackson and taken as the name of a political party (1834), most of the factions of which were absorbed by the Republican Party between 1854-1856.  The adjective whiggish (used usually as a disparaging way of describing the tendencies of some towards the philosophies of the Whigs while claiming alignment with another political faction) is from the 1670s, the noun whiggery (principles or practices of the Whigs) noted during the next decade.  Whig, Whiggishness & Wiggery are nouns, Wiggish is an adjective; the noun plural is Whigs.

Portrait of Lord Shelburne (1776), oil on canvas, by Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792).

The Whigs were a faction of the Tory party which later became a party in its own right.  In its varied forms, the Whigs operated between 1679 and the late nineteenth-century, their philosophy based on a defense of constitutional monarchism and an opposition to absolutism, the part the Whigs played in British politics later absorbed by Tory factions and the Liberal Party although strains of its philosophy can sometimes be seen still in the Labour Party (depending on which faction is in the ascendant).  Structurally, the morphing of a Tory faction into a formalized party had far-reaching consequences which continue to this day; no prime-minister since Lord Shelburne (1737-1805; UK prime-minister 1782–1783) has attempted to govern without the support of a party.

In the US, a Whig Party was active in the mid-nineteenth-century and four US presidents belonged to the party while in office.  Formed originally in opposition to the policies of Democratic President Andrew Jackson, the Whigs supported the supremacy of the congress over the presidency and favored a program of modernization, banking, and economic protectionism to stimulate manufacturing.  Not directly related to the British Whigs, party founders chose the name to echo those of the eighteenth-century who fought for independence, nodding also in the direction of the earlier Federalist Party but would later dissolve because of internal tensions over the expansion of slavery to the territories.  Charmingly, many joined the short-lived Know Nothing Party; most eventually drifted back to the Democrats or Republicans although the name is revived from time-to-time but without much electoral success.  Of late, some belonging to the more conservative factions in the Republican Party are labeled Whigs and this can be either in disparagement or self-referentially.

The term “Whig historian” was first recorded in 1924.  Despite the temptation, it really can’t be used in any neutral sense because of the legacy of the words of Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979; Regius Professor of Modern History and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge) who, early in life, published the book for which he is still remembered: The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).  In that slim volume, he defined Whig history as "the tendency in many historians... to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present."  Both "Whig historian" and the "Whig interpretation of history" are thus loaded terms.  Sir Herbert, it was clear, was thinking of the English tradition of historiography but his critique has been widely adopted, the idea of the retrospective creation of a line of progress toward the glorious present a theme now explored not only by the odd Whig but also the post-modernists.

Lindsay Lohan in blonde wig (asymmetric bob) on the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show, New York, November 2012.

The word wig (a head of real or synthetic hair worn on the head for various reasons) is unrelated to Whig.  Dating from the 1660s, it was a clipping of the French periwig (a wig, especially the large, stylised constructions worn by both men & women) which was an alteration of the Middle French perruque (wig).  The word “wig” in 1730s England was adapted to created the informal “bigwig” (an important person), based on the fashion at the time for those in authority to wear large, elaborate wig, the idea (presumably not without foundation) that the more important the person, the bigger the wig.  The same linkage explains the military slang “brass hat” (a high-ranking officer), based on the brass embellishments or insignia applied to the hats of the upper ranks.  The term persists (even outside the military) even though the metal is now rare even on the hats of dress uniforms but there's still often gold braid to justify the connection.