Claw

Claw (pronounced klaw)

(1) In zoology (1) A sharp, usually curved, nail on the foot of an animal, as on a cat, dog or bird; (2) a corresponding structure in some invertebrates, such as the pincer of a crab (3) a similar curved process at the end of the leg of an insect a (4) a foot so equipped.

(2) A mechanical device either resembling a claw or with similar functionality, used for gripping or lifting.

(3) In colloquial use, a human fingernail, particularly if long (natural or extended).

(4) In botany, slender appendage or process, formed like a claw, such as the formation found at the base of petals.

(5) In juggling, the act of catching a ball overhand.

(6) To tear, scratch, seize, pull, etc, with or as if with claws.

(7) To make by or as if by scratching, digging etc, with hands or claws.

(8) To make fumbling motions.

Pre 900: From the Middle English noun clawen (sharp, hooked, horny end of the limb of a mammal, bird, reptile etc), from the Old English clawan, clāwan & clēn (claw, talon, iron hook), from the Proto-Germanic klawjaną & klawō and cognate with the Old High German kluwi, chlōa & chlō and akin to the Middle Dutch klouwe, the Dutch klauen & klauw, the Old Frisian klawe (claw, hoe), the West Frisian klau, the Sanskrit glau- (ball, sphere), the Danish, Norwegian & Swedish klo and the German Klaue (claw).  The Old English verb clawian (to scratch, claw) shared its etymology with the nouns and the developments in other Germanic languages included the Dutch klaauwen, the Old High German klawan and the German klauen.  Claw is a noun & verb, clawer is a noun. clawless is an adjective, clawed is a verb & adjective, clawing is a verb, noun & adjective and clawingly is an adverb; the noun plural is claws.

The phrase “to claw back” in the sense of "regain by great effort" sounds ancient but is documented only since 1953 as a noun; the verb (an act of this) coming into use in 1969.  The sense of antiquity comes from “clawback” which since at least the 1540s meant “one who fawns on another; a sycophant” and that was derived from the late fourteenth century “claw the back” (to flatter, to curry favor) which was different from the modern “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) which is about co-operation with a whiff of something corrupt.  The use of “claw back” expanded in the 1970s to describe a trick in politics whereby the voters were given something in the run-up to an election and after getting their votes, a government would “claw back” what was given by using some mechanism apparently unrelated to the original bribe.  The noun dew claw (also as dew-claw) describes the “"rudimentary inner toe of the foot, especially the hind foot, of some dogs” and has been documented since the 1570s but may have enjoyed long regional use and etymologists note that while the claw part is obvious, the origin of the other element is mysterious.  The verb “declaw” was from veterinary science and was used usually of a procedure applied to creatures in zoos or domestic pets to make them less dangerous to others or their environment.  It’s become controversial.  In figurative use, it’s used to describe processes which limit the effectiveness of sporting teams, political parties etc.  Phrases like “showing her claws” & “scratching her eyes out” were once applied usually to (and about) bolshie women but it’s since been embraced by various parts of the LGBTQQIAAOP community; it’s used as required.  Claw is one of those words in English with a structural duality; in zoology a claw may either be a single nail or a collection of several.

Alexander McQueen’s “Armadillo boots” with “claw heels” (left) and Lindsay Lohan out walking in New York in claw heels, 2011 (left).

Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) displayed his “Armadillo boots” as part of the spring/summer 2010 Plato’s Atlantis collection which turned out to be his final show.  Inspired by the ideas made famous in Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) On the Origin of Species (1859), the collection was an imagining of humankind evolving into a species living underwater (and thus technically a devolution) as hybrid aquatic creatures.  The boots were a blend of the shape of an Armadillo with the claw-like heel borrowed from the lobster, all finished in turquoise, sea-green and other shades evocative of oceans and coral reefs.  The combination of the 9-inch (230 mm) claw stiletto heel and the unnatural shape the foot made to assume meant the thought exercise was intended more to please fashion editors than end up on cobblers’ lasts but as Lindsay Lohan demonstrates, when combined with a more conventional fitting, the claw heel is manageable, the change in the centre of gravity induced by the forward movement of the heels point of contact presumably minimal.  While not conventionally attractive, the boots were admired by those who appreciate such things for their own sake and criticized by those who take such things too seriously.

Among his assemblages, Salvador Dalí’s (1904-1989) Lobster Telephone (1936) is the best known and probably as famous as La persistènciade la memòria (The Persistence of Memory (although often referred to as the more evocative “melting clocks”)) is among his paintings.  It tends now to be forgotten that by the 1930s the Surrealist movement had come to be seen as moribund, an idea which had worked its concepts dry but in a creative burst, Dali and his collaborators built installations both minute and at scale which, playing with conjunction of objects and spaces never before associated, managed what’s so rarely achieved in art: the genuinely new.  The lobster was also for Dali a sex object which may sound improbable until it’s remembered how influential had become the works of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and the crustacean, with its succulent white flesh promising pleasure and those menacing claws nothing but pain, was quite a motif.  To make the point he painted a large lobster for Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) who in 1937 placed it with care on an evening gown, achieving an erotic playfulness.  Dali had just a much fun with the telephone, the claws enveloping a user’s ear while the tail, home of the sexual organs, was placed directly over the mouthpiece.

Avoiding the claws: Lindsay Lohan saving a lobster from certain death in Lindsay Lohan's Beach Club (2019).  Her intentions were pure but the ultimate fate of the crustacean remains uncertain. 

The Claw of Death, Chernobyl, Ukraine.

Although the whole, vast wasteland of the restricted zone which was declared after the nuclear accident in 1986 has any number of abandoned structures and relics, there’s something about the “claw of death” which people find especially eerie.  The radioactive artifact of Soviet-era nuclear power-plant design is a hydraulically activated clawed bucket which was once attached to one of the pieces of heavy machinery used to move contaminated objects during the decontamination process and although there are contradictory reports, it seems it was used to clear concrete, uranium & graphite debris from the collapsed roof of the building which housed the destroyed reactor.

Today, and for the indefinite future, the claw is located in the yard of the Service of Special Engineering Works in Pripyat and has become a tourist attraction and is always on the itinerary of guided tours of Chernobyl, the moniker “Claw of Death” a little misleading: it’s safe to within a few metres of the thing for a short period although close, prolonged exposure would cause radiation poisoning.  As soon as the clean-up operation was complete, the claw was dumped where it now sits and things were done in such a rush it was left in the middle of a road.  Because of Moscow’s “special military operation”, Chernobyl tourism is in abeyance but there’s no suggesting the claw will be moved so when business resumes, the claw will be waiting.  It can’t be melted-down or buried because of the risk of contaminating the soil or groundwater.

Lindsay Lohan as "Carrie" meets Freddy Krueger (boxer Floyd Mayweather (b 1977)), A Night Full of Fright, Halloween party at Foxwoods Resort Casino, Connecticut, 30 October 2013 (left).  Freddy Krueger was "the bastard son of a hundred maniacs", the antagonist in the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series (of which ANoES III was the best) and portrayed most memorably by Robert Englund (b 1947) (right).  His signature device was the clawed glove.

Genius

Genius (pronounced jeen-yuhs)

(1) An exceptional natural capacity of intellect, especially as applied to creative and original work in science and art.

(2) A person having such capacity.

(3) As applied collectively, usually to a nation or period, a descriptor of characteristics said to have produced something exceptional.

(4) The guardian spirit of a place, institution etc (now rare), derived from Roman mythology, the guiding spirit who attends a person from birth to death.

(5) In Islamic (Arabic) mythology (as jinn or genie), a demon (often plural).

1350–1400 (for its adoption in English; 1640s for its modern sense): From the Middle English, from the Latin genius (inborn nature; a tutelary deity of a person or place; wit, brilliance) from gignere (to beget) or gignō (to beget, produce) from the Old Latin genō from the primitive Indo-European root ǵenh & gen(e)-yo- from gene- (give birth, beget) with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.  The sense of "characteristic disposition" of a person is from 1580s, the modern meaning "person of exalted natural mental ability" was first recorded in the 1640s.  In English, as in the French genie and the German Genius & Genie, the “talent” senses of genius were likely influenced by the Latin ingenium (innate quality, nature, character, temperament, talent, intellect).  Ingenium supplied both ingenious and engine, its stem sharing a parent in genius’s gignere.  That French derivative, genie, was used to translate the jinn in the English translation (1706-1721) of the One Thousand and One Nights (أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ‎ (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah), the collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age; this was because of its resemblance in sound and, to some extent, sense.  Genius is a noun & adjective and geniusness is a noun; the noun plural is geniuses when applied to people and genii when otherwise used.

Evolution of genius

Over two millennia the meaning of “genius” shifted from a guiding spirit which lived in everyone to a description of the intellectual brilliance known only to a few.  The idea began in Ancient Rome; a person’s “genius” dictated their unique personality and disposition but it was more than a thousand years before the word came to be used to describe not a spirit inspiring a talent but also the talent itself.  In Antiquity, every person had a genius, a kind of guardian spirit who guided them from birth to death. The male genius was a kind of incarnation of Jupiter, the chief male deity; the female, Juno.  Places (genius loci), objects, events, and institutions also had their own genii, and Romans would propitiate their genii at important moments in their lives.

A scoop from Just Jared.

When first used in English, people still spoke of “having a genius” but as more rational understandings of mental ability evolved, it became increasingly common to describe them as “being a genius”.  The two meanings ran in parallel for centuries and echoed the Christian concept of guardian angels.  The “good” spirit was called the bonus genius (1606), the bad the malus genius (1538), giving rise to the seventeenth century “evil genius”, conceived originally as a malevolent spirit which tries to make someone do evil and the evil genius persists and remains prevalent among both historians (it does seem often applied to certain figures in the Third Reich (1933-1945)) and popular culture.  In English, the early use of genius as a label tended to favor poets, the most popular writing of the age.  Poet and scholar Philip Sidney (1554-1586) wrote that poetry “…must not be drawn by the ears: it must be gently led, or rather, it must lead, which was partly the cause that made the ancient learned affirm it was a divine, and no human skill, since all other knowledges lie ready for any that have strength of wit; a poet no industry can make, if his own genius be not carried into it.”  It later became used about great composers and authors although some thought it might be too liberally applied, essayist and playwright Joseph Addison (1672–1719) noting in 1711 there “...is no character more frequently given to a writer, than that of being a genius. I have heard many a little sonneteer called a fine genius.”  Now, the best footballer, tennis player etc might often be called "a genius" although there is the occasional echo of the ancient tradition: an exceptional goal or point might be described as an "act of genius".  

Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) on Twitter 6 January 2018.

In the modern age, it’s applied to scientists, artists and, perhaps sometimes hyperbolically, to some of the better backs (though of course never the forwards) in rugby.  In 2018, Donald Trump tweeted he was not merely a genius but “…a very stable genius”.  Reaction was mixed but as a title it tempted Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker (b 1984) & Carol Leonnig (b 1966) who in 2020 published A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America.  It focused on the first three years of his presidency, a period during which things seemed at the time to be a bit erratic but was tranquil compared with what was to follow.  Three years to the day after the famous tweet, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol Building in Washington DC in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.  As a coda, Rucker & Leonnig in 2021 published I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year.

Witch

Witch (pronounced wich)

(1) A person, historically either male or female but now especially a woman, who professes or is supposed to practice magic or sorcery; a sorceress (especially popular in mythology and fiction but also associated with certain societies and historical periods and still current in parts of some countries).

(2) In the new age movement, a practitioner of a nature-based religion founded on ancient beliefs, which honors both a male and female divine principle and includes the practice of magic, especially associated with healing.

(3) An informal and derogatory term for an ugly, mean or wicked old woman; a hag.

(4) A fascinating or enchanting woman (usually in the sense of bewitching).

(5) A person who uses a divining rod; dowser (archaic).

(6) In the sense of witch-hunt, an intensive effort to discover and expose disloyalty, subversion, dishonesty, or the like, usually based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence.

(7) A flatfish, Pleuronectes (or Glyptocephalus) cynoglossus, of North Atlantic coastal waters, having a narrow greyish-brown body marked with tiny black spots.  The family group is Pleuronectidae (plaice, flounders etc)

(8) In geometry, a certain curve of the third order, also known as versiera.

(9) In entomology, the Indomalayan butterfly Araotes lapithis, of the Lycaenidae family.

Pre 900: From the Middle English wicche from the Old English wicce (sorceress, witch (female)) which were the feminine forms and existed in conjunction with wicca (witch, sorcerer, warlock, wizard), the masculine deverbative from wiccian (to practice sorcery) from the Proto-Germanic wikkōną.  Related were the West Frisian wikje, wikke (to foretell, warn), the Low German wicken (to soothsay) and the Dutch wikken, wichelen (to dowse, divine).  Root was the primitive Indo-European wik-néh, derivation of weyk- (to consecrate; separate); akin to the Latin victima (sacrificial victim), the Swedish vicka (to move to and fro), the Lithuanian viẽkas (life-force) and the Sanskrit विनक्ति (vinákti) (to set apart, separate out).  Witch, witcher & witchery are nouns; witching is a verb & adjective and witchy is an adjective, the noun plural is witches.

An obviously guilty witch before the court, lithograph of a witch trial in Salem, Massachusetts, circa 1692.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does note the generally accepted etymology is not without phonetic or semantic difficulties and suggests some connection with the Old English wigle (divination) and wig & wih (idol), the nouns representing a Proto-Germanic wikkjaz (necromancer) (one who wakes the dead) from the primitive Indo-European weg-yo from weg (to be strong, be lively).  That wicce once had a more specific sense than the later general one of "female magician, sorceress" is suggested by the presence of other words in Old English describing more specific kinds of magical craft.  In the Laws of Ælfred (circa 890), witchcraft was specifically singled out as a woman's craft, the practitioners of which were not welcome to live among the Western Saxons.

In 2015, Nylon ran the story Lindsay Lohan had taken up witchcraft and wanted to be consecrated by a coven as a white witch.  Nylon did caution the source of the story was the National Enquirer, referred to as "a normally reliable source" only ever ironically. 

The glossary of the Laws of Ælfred translates Latin necromantia (demonum invocatio) as galdre or wiccecræft and in the Anglo-Saxon poem Men's Crafts, wiccræft appears to mean "skill with horses" so the OED is right to note the contested history.  By the early 1600s, the feminine form was so dominant that the forms men-witches or he-witches began to be used.  Warlock was never a universally accepted masculine form of witch despite the notion in modern popular culture and it’s from wicca that English ultimately gained both wizard and wicked.  Even in the sixteenth century, the implications were blurred, Reginald Scot in his The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) asserting it was synonymous in the English tongue to say either “she is a witch” or “she is a wise woman”.  In the popular imagination there's still a widespread perception witches were burned at the stake and while that was the case in many places (along with many other methods of dispatch), in the English-speaking world, because witchcraft was a felony in both England and the American colonies, witches were hanged and not burned.  Witches’ bodies were burned in Scotland, though they were strangled to death first.  The confusion may have arisen because there were cases of witches being burned at the stake but that was because they'd been convicted also of heresy.

Crooked Hillary Clinton has never denied practicing witchcraft (digitally altered image).

The extended sense of "young woman or girl of bewitching aspect or manners" is first recorded 1740.  It’s said to be an echo of the biblical (Exodus 22:18) rendering of mekhashshepheh, the feminine form of the word, meaning "enchantress" and (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) the masculine form (enchanter).  However, scripture is open to interpretation and the helpful translation in the King James Version: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" has been used by some contemporary ordinary Akan Christians in Ghana to justify praying for the death and destruction of witches and wizards.  Witch doctor is from 1718; applied to African magicians from 1836 and soon became interchangeable with “medicine man”.

Sinister

Sinister (pronounced sin-uh-ster)

(1) Threatening or portending evil, harm, or trouble; ominous.

(2) Bad, evil, base, or wicked; fell; treacherous, especially in some mysterious way.

(3) Unfortunate; disastrous; unfavorable.

(4) Of or on the left side; left-handed (mostly archaic except as a literary device).

(5) In heraldry, noting the side of an escutcheon or achievement of arms that is to the left of the bearer (as opposed to dexter), ie from the bearer's point of view and therefore on the spectator's right.

(6) Wrong, as springing from indirection or obliquity; perverse; dishonest (obsolete).

1375-1425: From the Middle English sinistre (unlucky), from the Old French sinistra (left), from the Latin sinestra (left hand) from the Proto-Italic senisteros, of unknown origin, but possibly from a euphemism from the same primitive Indo-European root as the Sanskrit सनीयान् (sanīyān) (more useful, more advantageous) with the contrastive or comparative suffix -ter, (as in the Latin dexter (on the right-hand)) familiar in the modern “dexterity”.  Sinister is an adjective, sinisterly is an adverb and sinisterness is a noun.  Unlike some other adjectives applied to people, such as exquisite, sinister never evolved into a self-definitional noun.  The alternative spelling sinistre is long obsolete but those for whom historical authenticity matters should note sinister was once accented on the middle syllable by poets including Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden.

Evolution of Sinister

The now universal meanings (evil et al), emerged in the late fifteenth century, a sense inherited from the fourteenth century Old French senestre & sinistre (contrary, false; unfavorable; to the left) picked up directly from the Classical Latin sinestra (left, on the left side (opposite of dexter)).  Sinister had been used in heraldry from the 1560s to indicate "left, to the left" and left in heraldry indicated illegitimacy and in that it preserves the literal sense from Latin of "on or from the left side".  In zoology, the botanists in 1856 created the adjective sinistrorse a word to describe the direction of spiral structures in nature, from Latin sinistrorsus (toward the left side) the construct being sinist- (left) + versus (turned), past participle of vertere (to turn), from the primitive Indo-European root wer- (to turn, bend).  In the scientific literature it was paired with dextrorse but a broader adoption was doomed by confusion; it was never agreed what was the correct point of view to reckon the leftward or rightward spiraling.  

Peter Dutton (b 1970; Liberal-National Party MP for Dickson (Queensland, Australia) since 2001).  Sometimes, a sinister look is just a matter of chance, there being nothing sinister about Mr Dutton (although he has never denied being a Freemason).

The former Research Institute For Experimental Medicine, Berlin, Germany.  Built for the purpose of housing live animal testing facilities, and until 2003 known as the Central Animal Laboratories of the Free University of Berlin, its common name among Berliners (long known for their sardonic humor) the Mäusebunker (Mouse Bunker). 

Those working in visual media, photographers, cinematographers and painters use tricks of lighting and angle to convey a sense of the sinister, even buildings and landscapes, carefully framed, can invoke the feeling.  Although it can be because of a structure's historical associations, when a building is described as "sinister" it's a thing usually of subjective perception, induced often by a a dark, eerie, or foreboding appearance. There are a number of elements which may be involved:

(1) The architectural style, lighting and choice of materials can contribute to a perception of sinisterness, buildings in the Gothic or Brutalist tradition with their sharp angles, heaviness and use of slabs of dark stone noted for this.

(2) A notorious historical context can impart a meaning which transcends the actual architecture.  Buildings known to be associated with dark historical events or periods in history can gain a reputation as being sinister.  Places once the sites of suffering, torture or death gain this reputation such as the Lubyanka Building in Moscow.  Although an inoffensive Neo-Baroque structure in yellow brick, for most of its life it's been the home of one branch or other of the Russian internal agency, most famously the KGB.

(3) The surrounding environment can make an otherwise charming building seem mysterious and threatening.  Some will find a building standing alone in an isolated area or surrounded by dark and overgrown vegetation can provoke feeling of unease.

Lindsay Lohan as she would appear if left-handed, signing photographs with Sharpie (as recommended by Pippa Middleton), Rachael Ray Show, New York City, January 2019 (digitally mirrored image).  As a general principle, pink is not associated with sinisterness (although crooked Hillary Clinton in pink pantsuit would be most sinister).

A quirk from antiquity is that in matters of religion, to Romans sinister meant auspicious whereas for Greeks it meant inauspicious.  The curious duplicity arose because the Latin word was used in augury in the sense of "unlucky; unfavorable" a natural inheritance because omens, especially the flight of birds seen on the left hand were regarded as portending misfortune thus sinister acquired a sense of "harmful, adverse".  This was from the influence of Greek, reflecting the early Hellenic practice of facing north when observing omens.  In genuine Roman auspices, the augurs faced south so the left was thought good and favorable.  The Romans were a superstitious lot but seem to have managed this strange dichotomy of meaning without difficulty, sinister suggesting something bad except in the temple when it meant something good.

The salute associated with the Nazi regime (1933-1945) has long been regarded as something sinister or worse.  The pantsuit wasn't thought sinister until it became emblematic of crooked Hillary Clinton.

Muppet

Muppet (pronounced mup-it)

(1) A usually derogatory slang term for somebody conspicuously stupid (never capitalised).  Can be used affectionately and references intelligence; distinct from cultural references such as bogan, chav, redneck etc although they can (indeed sometimes should) be used in conjunction.

(2) Any puppet character so named in various TV programmes (always capitalised).

1955: The Muppets were created by puppeteer Jim Henson (1936-1990) who variously would claim the word was (1) a construct of m(arionette) + (p)uppet and (2) it had no specific etymology and was coined because he liked the sound.  The US trademark dates from 1972 with usage claimed from 1971 (and in print from 1970) and the eponymous US network TV programme was broadcast between 1976-1981.  Well-scripted and meta-referential, Muppets aren’t stereotypically stupid; the slang term apparently applied to dopy people because Muppets look stupid.  Use of the slang appears restricted to parts of the English-speaking world though not North America, having currency only in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

They are everywhere

Muppet & muppet: Kermit the frog with crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013).

The clusters are self-replicating; as one muppet departs, one or more appears and often, muppets reach critical-mass.  Think about it, at one time there must have been only a few muppets; now look how many there are.  Muppets are everywhere, seeming sometimes to populate whole streets or even suburbs.  In workplaces also they tend to cluster and there are corporations in which entire departments appear staffed by muppets.  Although low in productivity, muppet departments are harmonious workplaces and one muppet, witnessing some act of egregious stupidity by another, will playfully chide them, usually with the phrase “you muppet!”  That’s also often heard in shopping centre car-parks when muppets have locked their keys in the car or can’t remember where it’s parked.

Lindsay Lohan (left) with Telly the Muppet (right), The Letter Z Decides to Quit the Alphabet, Sesame Street (1995).

Boycott

Boycott (pronounced boi-kot)

(1) To combine in abstaining from, or preventing dealings with, as a means of intimidation or coercion; the refusal to purchase the products of an individual, corporation, or nation as a way to apply social and political pressure for change.

(2) To abstain from buying or using.

1880: (in the sense described): Named after Charles Boycott, an estate manager in Ireland, against whom nonviolent coercive tactics were used in 1880.  The surname, recorded as Boycott and Boykett, is both English and Irish, although the origins are the same.  It appears originally to have been locational from Boycott, either in Berkshire or Shropshire, derived from “Boia's cot” (Boia a pre-seventh century Old English term of personal endearment for a boy or young man).  Boycott is a proper noun, boycott is a noun & verb, boycotting is a noun & verb, boycotter, boycottism & boycottage are nouns, boycotted is a verb; the noun plural is boycotts.

Origin

Captain Charles Boycott (1832–97) was an English land agent for an absentee landlord in County Mayo, Ireland.  In 1880, after a year of bad harvests, the landlord offered his tenants what he considered a generous 10% reduction in their rents.  The tenants however thought this parsimonious and demanded a 25% reduction which was rejected and Captain Boycott was dispatched to evict the revolting tenants.  About the same time, the period which came to be known as the Irish “land war”, Irish nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), a member of the Irish Land League, had proposed dealing with landlords and land agents through a peaceful form of social ostracism rather than resorting to violence, suggesting the local community should simply ignore the land agents and conduct no business with them.

Former England cricket captain Geoffrey Boycott (b 1940), Headingley, Leeds, 1977, playing a rare defensive shot.

As news of Boycott’s evictions spread, he found himself isolated within the local community and, despite the immediate economic consequences, his workers stopped working in his fields, stables and house, local businessmen no longer traded with him and the postman refused to deliver his mail.  Because of these actions, Boycott faced financial peril because nobody would harvest the crops, forcing him to bring in fifty workers and an escort of almost a thousand armed police and soldiers to guard them, the cost of these measures exceeding the value of the harvest.  Following the harvest, the boycott on Boycott was sustained and the new use of the word spread quickly, the New York Tribune applying the term in 1880, The Spectator the following year.  It has entered other languages, being used sometimes in French, German, Spanish, Italian and even Japanese (ボイコット (Boikotto)).

The boycott can be an effective tactic which can be applied in diplomacy, commerce or politics, the boycotting of elections a widely used tactic.   

Historically and by convention, a boycott is an action by an individual or a community whereas such programmes pursued by states tend to be known as embargos or sanctions.  An interesting hybrid, designed to encourage individuals, institutions and states, is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Palestinian-led pressure group, formed in 2005, with a stated objective to force Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, removal of the separation barrier in the West Bank, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.

Hostage

Hostage (pronounced hos-tij)

(1) A person given as a pledge or security for the performance of the conditions of a treaty or similar agreement, such as to ensure the status of a vassal.

(2) A person seized in order to compel another party to act (or refrain from acting) in a certain way, because of the threat of harm to the hostage.

(3) A security or pledge (obsolete).

(4) The condition of a hostage.

(5) To give someone as a hostage (rare).

1225–1275: From the Middle English hostage & ostage, from the eleventh century Old French hostage & ostage (kindness, hospitality; residence, dwelling; rent, tribute; compensation; guarantee, pledge, bail; person given as security or hostage (and ôtage (hostage) persists in Modern French)) of uncertain origin although most etymologists favor the Vulgar Latin obsidāticum (state of being a hostage; condition of being held captive), from the Latin obsid- (stem of obses (hostage)), the construct being ob- (before) + sid- (the base of sedere (to sit)) + -āticum (the suffix used (1) to form nouns indicating pertinence to the root verb or noun & (2) to form nouns indicating a state of being resulting from an action).  There is a (less supported) alternative etymology which traces hostage back to a construct from the Old French hoste (host) + -age (the sense development from “taking someone in and offering them lodging” to “taking someone in and holding them captive”.  The initial “h” was added to the Latin obses (hostage) under some influence which may have been the Old French hoste or the Latin hostis.  The word displaced the Old English ġīsl.  In idiomatic use, the phrase “hostage” to fortune historically had different meanings on either side of the Atlantic.  In the UK it meant “an action, promise, or remark that is considered unwise because it could be difficult to later to fulfill one’s obligations (even if merely implied)”.  In North America, it conveys the idea of “a person (or institution) whose fate is seen as dependent on chance or luck”.  Hostage & hostageship are nouns and hostaged & hostaging are nouns; the noun plural is hostages.

Swapped for one of Moscow’s hostages: Viktor Bout in Thailand.

The hostage negotiator is now a recognized specialist category in law enforcement and there are also many in the private sector, engaged usually on an ad hoc basis as needed.  The taking of hostages, although use of the word spiked only in the 1970s as the hijacking of civilian airliners became a popular means of pursuing political agendas, is ago old and during certain periods was institutionalized as an accepted part of how conflicts were executed.  Nothing new then but of late, some regimes have become more blatant in the way “hostage diplomacy” is done, making only the most perfunctory gestures towards adding a veneer of legal legitimacy to what is essentially the tactic of gangsters.  Some cases have attracted some public attention such as the exchange by Moscow of one of their American hostages for Viktor Bout (b 1967) a Russian arms trader apparently of Ukrainian origin and one of the great characters who flourished in the chaos which prevailed after the breakup of the Soviet Union.  Whether it was grenade launchers, government officials subject to UN sanctions or frozen chickens, all through Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Viktor Bout’s air-freight operation gained the reputation of delivering the goods as described, on time and at the price quoted, international sanctions and embargos no obstacle.  Unfortunately, he strayed too closely to the claws of Western law enforcement agencies and ended up being extradited to the US where he was convicted of this and that and sentenced to a 25 year term, ten of which he served before he was exchanged in a swap.

Held us hostage” is now a commonly used phrase applied to the tactics or antics of trade unions, film stars, Meghan Markle, minority political parties and anyone else who proves difficult.

US diplomat and historian George Kennan (1904-2005) is best remembered for the “Long Telegram” he sent from Moscow in 1946, warning the State Department of the possible implications of Soviet policy and advocating the US adopt its own policies to contain Soviet expansion.  He also published widely on other aspects of US foreign policy including an assessment of the PRC (People’s Republic of China), early in the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and while he held the Chinese in high regard (he thought them “…probably the most intelligent, man for man, of the world’s peoples”), he thought “…no good could come of any closer relationship between the US and China” and he was little more enthusiastic about the rival Kuomintang government established by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek on the island of Formosa (Taiwan), regarded to this day by Beijing as a renegade province.  To support his views, he made four points which, some seven decades on, sound remarkably modern and probably familiar to diplomats in many chancelleries and embassies:

(1) The Chinese were, as a people, intensely xenophobic and arrogant.  Their attitude towards the foreigner and his world, based as it was on the concept of China as the “Middle Kingdom” and the view of the foreigner as a barbarian, was essentially offensive to other peoples and did not provide a basis for satisfactory international relations, other than ones of the most distant sort.

(2) He noted it seemed clear the Chinese, despite the highly civilized nature of their normal outward behavior, were capable of great ruthlessness when they considered themselves to be crossed.  How he thought in this Peking much differed from Washington & London he didn’t explore but he nevertheless found admirable many of their best qualities including industriousness, honesty in commerce, practical astuteness and political acumen.  Where he found the national character lacking was in their lack of two attributes of the Western Christian mentality: the capacity of pity and the sense of sin though intriguingly he conceded the possession of these both qualities induced weakness rather than strength in the Western character.  Presumably, he added, the Chinese were all the more formidable for their lack but this was a reason to afford them a healthy but wary respect, not to idealize them or seek intimacy in our relationship with them.

(3) His third observation was that of the pragmatic diplomat.  While the Chinese were often ready to make practical arrangements of an unwritten nature and usually ones that could at will be reversed if that suited their purposes, they were never prepared to yield on matters of principle.  Occasionally, they would consent, were sufficient pressure applied, to allow others to do certain things provided they were able to insist that there was no actual right to act in such a way.  In other words, at least in theory, China was always in the right, others in the wrong.  Kennan thought this an expression of national arrogance that augured badly for really good relations with any outside power.

(4) Finally, there was the matter of hostage taking although it’s clear from his writing that he was somewhat in awe of the skill and success in the subtlety of their gangsterism.  Over decades he noted, the Chinese had corrupted a large proportion of the Americans who had anything to do with them and the longer these visitors resided there, the greater the risk.  He was anxious to point out this corruption wasn't always, or even usually, financial, deciding it was something far more insidious, the Chinese infinitely adept at turning foreign visitors and residents (even diplomats) into hostages.  Then, with their superb combination of delicacy and ruthlessness, they would extract the maximum in the way of blackmail or ransom for giving them the privilege either of leaving the country or remaining, whichever it might be they most desired.  It all sounds remarkably modern.

Calorie

Calorie (pronounced kal-uh-ree)

(1) In thermodynamics (called also the gram calorie or small calorie), an amount of heat equal to 4.1840 or 4.1868 joules (depending on definitional table used); the standard abbreviation is cal.

(2) In physiology, a unit equal to the kilocalorie, used to express the heat output of an organism and the fuel or energy value of food.

(3) A quantity of food capable of producing such an amount of energy.

1819: From the French calorie, from the Latin calor (genitive caloris) (heat), from the primitive Indo-European kle-os- (a suffixed form of the root kele- (warm)), the construct being calor- + -ie (the noun suffix).  The suffix -ie was a variant spelling of -ee, -ey & -y and was used to form diminutive or affectionate forms of nouns or names.  It came to be used also (sometimes in a derogatory sense) to form colloquial nouns signifying the person associated with the suffixed noun or verb (eg bike: bikie, surf: surfie, hood: hoodie etc).  The now obsolete spelling was calory.  The phrase calorie-counting (or calorie-watching), describing a more “scientific” approach to weight-regulation, dates from 1908.  Calorie is a noun, caloric is a noun & adjective and calorific is an adjective; the noun plural is calories.

Rendered obsolete by experimental progress in the mid-nineteenth century, caloric theory held that the phenomenon of heat could be described as a self-repellent fluid (caloric) that flowed from hotter to colder substances or objects.  In fluid dynamics, caloric was also held to be a weightless gas able to pass in and out of pores in solids and liquids.  It was replaced by the mechanical theory of heat but didn’t completely disappear even from scientific literature until early in the twentieth century.  It’s that history which explains the duality of the meaning of the word “calorie”.  The kilogram calorie (known also as the food calorie, large calorie or dietary calorie) was originally defined as the quantity of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1000 grams (one kilogram) of water by 1^o Celsius (or one kelvin).  The gram calorie (known also as the small calorie) was the quantity of heat raise the temperature of one gram of water by the same 1^o; the relationship between the small & large calorie thus mirrors that of the gram & kilogram: 1:1000.  Both definitions of calorie are from the 1800s: the small in the early years, the large late in the century (recorded by 1866 in French & 1870 in German.

Until relatively recently, in science (mostly physics, chemistry and other fields in which fluid dynamics matter), the gram calorie was used as a unit of measurement (and in the vernacular was “the calorie”, the kilocalorie referenced when necessary) but it was never formally made part of the metric system (SI) and has for almost all purposes been rendered obsolete by the standard SI unit of energy: the joule.  For decades there were inconstancies in the way different bodies expressed the “conversion rate” between calories and joules but in both thermochemistry and nutrition, one small calorie is now held to equal to exactly 4.184 joules, one kilocalorie thus 4184 J (4.184 kJ as expressed by nerds).  Only in the industrial production of food is there still some attachment to the old (4.1840) value, reflected in product packaging although European Union (EU) legislation now insists on the use of “kilocalorie” on labels for consumer products.  In nutrition and food production, the term calorie (usually expressed with the standard abbreviation “cal”) refers almost always to the kilocalorie and is a (more-or-less) standardized expression of the energy value of foods (usually in terms of the (1) the whole packet or quantity in which it’s supplied, (2) a nominal “standard serving” or (3) a standardized metric (eg per 100 grams).  Although sometimes misunderstood, the unit is measure of the energy released by food as it is digested by the human body.

Lindsay Lohan during her early century, peak calorie-counting period.

Although it’s something of a blunt-force measure which doesn’t of necessity correlate with an ideal nutritional intake, the World Health Organization (WHO) and many national and sub-national bodies have issued guidelines for daily calorie intake based on age, sex, activity level, and other factors.  The WHO cautions their recommendations are merely part of the calculations which should be made when constructing healthy diets and calorie counts should be thought a framework for a nutritional model.  The WHO suggests that as a general principle, an average sedentary adult woman requires 1,800-2,200 while the equivalent man will need 2,200-2,700 although these approximations need to be read in conjunction with an assessment of an individual’s metabolism, body composition, and physical activity level.

Credo

Credo (pronounced kree-doh or krey-doh)

(1) The Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed (often initial capital letter).

(2) A musical setting of the creed, usually of the Nicene Creed (often initial capital letter).

(3) Any creed or formula of belief; doctrine, tenet, philosophy.

(4) Any formal or authorized statement of beliefs, principles, or opinions

1150–1200: From the Middle English credo (the Creed in the Church service), from the Latin crēdō (the first person singular present indicative of credere (to believe" (literally "I believe")), the first word of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds in Latin (Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae).  The Latin crēdō was from the Proto-Italic krezdō, from the primitive Indo-European compound kerd-dhe (literally "to place one's heart" (ie to trust, believe)), a compound phrase of oblique case form of ḱḗr (heart), also the root of the Latin cor- & deh- (to put, place, set) and the Latin faciō).  It was cognate with the Welsh credu (I believe), the Sanskrit श्रद्दधाति (śrad-dhā) (to trust, believe; faith, confidence, devotion) and the Old Irish creitid (believes (verb)).  In English the form was soon nativized as creed while the general sense of a "formula or statement of belief" emerged in the late sixteenth century.  One of the more quoted phrases from the epic poem The Aeneid (29-19 BC) by the Roman poet Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC)) was experto crede ("take it from one who knows"), the construct the dative singular of expertus + the imperative singular of credere (to believe).  Credo is a noun; the noun plural is credos.

Intended as a basic, succinct statement of the faith, the Apostles’ Creed was structured according to the fundamental belief in the Trinity and the function particular to each of the three Persons:  The Father & creation; the Son & redemption; and the Holy Spirit & sanctification.  It was relatively short and simple, able to be memorized and recited even by the illiterate, an important tradition in times of persecution when it was part of the disciplina arcana (discipline of the secret) to be remembered and passed on orally as a protection against attack.

The Nicene Creed was produced by the Council of Nicea I (325) which was convoked to combat the heresy of Arius (who denied the divinity of Christ).  The Council wished firmly to confirm Christ was consubstantial (one in being) with God, sharing the same divine nature; begotten, not made or created; and that Mary conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and through her, Jesus Christ, true God, became also true man. 

Later, at the Council of Constantinople (381), the Church again not only affirmed its condemnation of Arianism but also of the Pneumatomachi (killers of the Spirit) who not only denied the divinity of Jesus but also the divinity of the Holy Spirit.  Thus the creed was expanded to clearly define the divinity of the Holy Spirit, adapting the text written in 374 by Saint Epiphanius of Salamis (circa 310-403).  This creed, officially entitled the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol, was introduced into the Mass circa 500.

Lindsay Lohan's daily skincare credo, the meaning enhanced in the modern way with emojis.