Quash

Quash (pronounced kwosh)

(1) To put down or suppress completely; quell; subdue; used usually in a military or paramilitary context.

(2) To make void, annul, or set aside (a law, indictment, decision etc); to reject (an indictment, writ, etc) as invalid.

(3) To crush or dash to pieces (obsolete and thought possibly an imperfect echoic of squash).

(4) In the civil procedure rules of US courts (as motion to quash), a specific request that asks the court to render the decision of a previous lower court ruling invalid.  It is similar to a motion to dismiss, except it asks the court to nullify a previous ruling rather than the current filing.

Circa 1275: From the Middle English quaschen, quasshen, cwessen, & quassen (to smash, break, overcome, suppress) from the Old French quasser, in part from the Latin quassāre (to shake), present active infinitive of quassō, frequentative of quatere (to shake) and in part from the Late Latin cassāre (to annul), a derivative of the Latin cassus (empty, void) under the influence of the Alatin cassō (I annul), from the Latin quatiō (I shake).  Ultimate root was the primitive Indo-European kweht- (to shake), the source also of the words pasta, paste, pastiche, pastry; cognate with Spanish quejar (to complain).  Similar to some degree are suppress, squash, repress, crush, quell, invalidate, annul, revoke, reverse, veto, void, undo, vacate, squelch, repeal, overrule, rescind, scrunch, annihilate and subdue.  Regarding quash and squash, the verb quash is now used to describe the crushing of something in a nonphysical sense whereas squash is applied when an object is physically crushed but both were for hundreds of years used in both senses, quash losing its physical sense only in the twentieth century.  Urban Dictionary also lists a number of non-standard meanings.  Quash & quashed are verbs, quasher is a noun, quashing is a noun & verb and quashable is an adjective; the most common noun plural is quashings.

In the matter of Cardinal Pell

Cardinal George Pell (1941-2023): On appeal, the prosecution not having proved guilt beyond reasonable doubt, the conviction was quashed.

Quash means to nullify, void or declare invalid and is a procedure used in both criminal and civil cases when irregularities or procedural defects are found.  In a unanimous (7-0) judgment (Pell v The Queen [2020] HCA 12)) quashing Cardinal Pell’s conviction (Pell v The Queen [2019] VSCA 186), the High Court set aside the verdict and substituted an acquittal; in a legal sense it is now as if the original verdict never happened.  What the court did was declare existing law and provide what are not exactly parameters but are more than guidelines.  If nothing else, it’s likely the judgment will cause trial judges more precisely to instruct juries about reasonable doubt:

(1) The accused on trial in a serious criminal matter is presumed to be innocent.

(2) The accused may but is not obliged to offer a defense; it is incumbent upon the prosecution (almost always the state) to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, the guilt of the accused.

There’s nothing controversial about those positions, they’ve well known and have for centuries been accepted orthodoxies for the administration of criminal law in common law jurisdictions.  What the Pell judgment did was draw attention to other orthodoxies not as widely known:

(3) A jury is presumed to be comprised of reasonable people who impartially will assess the evidence (contested facts) presented; matters of contested facts are subjective and for the jury.

(4) It is the responsibility of the judge accurately and lucidly to instruct the jury on such matters of law which may be relevant to their consideration of matters of fact; matters of law are objective and for the judge.

Reasonable people on juries are thus required to decide if there is a reasonable doubt the prosecution’s case has proven guilt.  Reasonable doubt went back a long way but the phrase “reasonable person” was defined by English courts in negligence cases, an attempt to provide an example of the “the average man” or “the man in the street”.  Descriptions by judges vary but usually mean something like a “…reasonably intelligent and impartial person unversed in legal esoteric” (Jones v US, DC Court of Appeals), sketched rather more poetically by an English judge as “the man on the Clapham omnibus” (“a bloke on the Hornsby train” in Australian parlance).

(5) In exercising their subjective judgment to determine if the prosecution has proven their case beyond reasonable doubt, the jury is required to decide this on the objective basis of reasonable doubt detailed in the judge’s direction or summing up.

(6) If a court of appeal found a jury, acting reasonably, on the basis of the evidence presented, should have found reasonable doubt of guilt, the judge(s) can order the conviction quashed and verdicts of acquittal entered instead.

Not only verdicts can be quashed.  If within their jurisdiction, a judge can quash a warrant or order.

Fabulous

Fabulous (pronounced fab-yuh-luhs)

(1) Exceptionally good or unusual, wonderful or superb; fashionable, glamorous (which pedants insist is informal but it’s long been the standard meaning).

(2) Almost impossible to believe; incredible.

(3) In slang or as a euphemism, gay or pertaining to gay people; camp, effeminate ("a fabulousity" suggested as a collective noun for gay men but it never caught on) .

(4) In slang, fashionable, glamorous.

(5) Of or about fables; stories wholly or substantially of the imaginary and known of through myth or legend; something in the record known to be unhistorical.

Circa 1550: From the Late Middle English fabulous & fabulose, from the Latin fābulōsus (celebrated in fable; rich in myth), the construct being fābul(a) (a story, a tale) + -ōsus (the adjectival suffix).  The –ōsus suffix (familiar in English as –ous) was from Classical Latin from -ōnt-to-s from -o-wont-to -s, the latter form a combination of two primitive Indo-European suffixes: -went & -wont.  Related to these were –entus and the Ancient Greek -εις (-eis) and all were used to form adjectives from nouns.  In Latin, -ōsus was added to a noun to form an adjective indicating an abundance of that noun.  As a literary genre (and some fables came from oral traditions) fables were stories told usually to make some moral point or illustrate the consequences of one’s actions and while they could sometimes involve fantastical creatures like winged stallions or unicorns, sometimes they involved fictional characters who were mere flesh & blood and even a multi-volume, epic-length novel like Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes circa 1547–1616) can be thought a fable.  Fabulous is an adjective, fabulousness & fabulosity are nouns and fabulously is an adverb; the use is the plural is rare but both fabulousnesses & fabulosities exist.  There is some evidence of use in the gay community of fabulous as a (non-standard) noun, sometime in the form “uber-fabulous” although that construction is also used generally as an adjective of especial emphasis.

Looking fabulous: Lindsay Lohan Fabulous magazine, August 2010.

The original sense was “of or pertaining to fable” and dates from the 1550s.  The now familiar meaning shift began as early as the turn of the seventeenth centuries when the word was recorded to convey the sense of “incredible” which soon extended to “enormous, immense; amazing” and by the mid-twentieth century it was used almost exclusively to mean “marvelous; wonderful, superb”.  The clipping to create the slang “fab” was in used by at least 1957 and use spiked after 1963 when the alliterative “fab four” was used to describe the pop group, The Beatles.  When in 1965 revising Henry Fowler’s (1858–1933), A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Sir Ernest Gowers (1880–1966) maintained his predecessor’s disapproval of much that was a bit too modern, noting that correctly fabulous meant “…mythical, legendary, but was long ago extended to do duty as an adjective for something that is real but so astonishing that you might not think it was legendary if you did not know better.”, adding that it had “…become fabulously popular as a term of eulogy or allure.”  He seemed though to suspect it might be a “fad word”, noting it and its contracted forms “fab” & “fabs”, like “fantastic”, were perhaps the latest “…in that long list of words which boys and girls use for a time to express high commendation and then get tired of, such as, to go no farther back than the present century, topping, spiffing, ripping, wizard, super, posh, smashing.”  Decades on however, fabulous seems to have endured in its contemporary uses and even the portmanteau adjective fantabulous (the construct being fanta(stic) + (fa)bulous) has survived in its niche.  Fabulous probably gained a new lease of life when it was in the late 1960s picked up by the gay community which has used it even as a noun and it remains an essential element in the camp vocabulary.  Unless it’s between scholars, those wishing to convey the original meaning should probably use terms such as “fabled” or “mythological” rather than fabulous and even “legendary” can be ambiguous because it’s now often used to mean something like “famous” or “very well-known”.

Lindsay Lohan in an unusual cage cutout top, the lines assuming or relaxing from the orthogonal as the body moves (maybe an instance of "a shifting semiorthogonal"), The World's First Fabulous Fund Fair in aid of the Naked Heart Foundation, The Roundhouse, London, February 2015.  An opportunity was missed by not adding a sympathetic clutch purse.

George W Bush, Condoleezza Rice & Colin Powell.

The phrase “the fabulous invalid” refers to live theater & stage productions generally, the use derived from a 1938 stage play of that name by George S Kaufman (1889-1961) and Moss Hart (1904-1961) which traced the that follows the seesawing fortunes of a fictitious Broadway theater between 1900-1930.  In a touching irony, while the play was barely a modest success and not highly regarded by its authors, the title has endured as a synonym for the theatre.  George W Bush (George XLIII, b 1946; US president 2001-2009) who (admittedly unwittingly) contributed more than most to coining new words & novel grammatical structures, probably wasn’t deliberately alluding the original meaning of fabulous when he used it to describe the performance of his first foreign minister, Colin Powell (1937–2021; US secretary of state 2001-2005) but if considered thus it certainly reflected his view that the general’s favorable public image reflected more myth than reality and he’d prefer a secretary of state who both ticked a few boxes and was more attuned to his brutish world-view.  In Dr Condoleezza Rice (b 1954; US secretary of state 2005-2009) he certainly got that but in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, whatever might have been his better judgment, the general did his job because, as Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel (1882–1946; head of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the Nazi armed forces high command) put it at the Nuremberg Trial (1645-1946): “For a soldier, orders are orders.”  His flirtation with politics is a fable and story of Condoleezza Rice’s career in government even more so: a cautionary tale of what can happen when a nice young lady from a good family gets mixed up with an unsavory crowd (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al).

White House transcript of press conference assembled when the president met with Colin Powell and Richard Armitage (b 1945; US deputy secretary of state 2001-2005) at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Wednesday, 6 August 2003:

THE PRESIDENT: First, it's been my real privilege and honor to welcome the Secretary of State back to Crawford. He and Dick Armitage came, and we spent yesterday evening and this morning talking about our country's desire to promote peace and freedom, our obligations as a prosperous and strong nation to help the less fortunate. And we had a good strategy session, and now we're about to go out and brand some cows -- well, not exactly. (Laughter)

QUESTION: Sir, you've seen the report that Secretary Powell and Secretary Armitage are going to leave at the end of this administration. Do you expect them to stay on if there is a second Bush administration? Would you like them to?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first things first, we hope there is a second Bush administration. And I will work hard to convince the American people that their confidence in me is justified. And we'll deal with it at the right time.  Listen, this guy has done a fabulous job. Washington, particularly in August, is a dangerous period -- a dangerous time, because there's a lot of speculation. And all I can tell you is, the man flies to Crawford and we spend a good 24 hours talking about how we're going to work together to make the world a better place.

QUESTION: But, Mr. President, you said, we'll deal with it…

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, Elizabeth.

QUESTION: We'll deal with it at the right time. That isn't "yes".

THE PRESIDENT: Deal with what at the right time?

QUESTION: With whether Secretary Powell will serve in a second term. Is that, "yes" or "no"? I mean, are you going to offer him a spot in the second term?

SECRETARY POWELL: I don't have a term. I serve the President. (Laughter)

QUESTION: No, but the President…

THE PRESIDENT: Elizabeth, look, first things first, and that is, we've got a year-and-a-while during my first term to make the world a more peaceful place and we'll deal with it. Washington loves speculation. Clearly, you love speculation. You love it. You love to speculate about…

QUESTION: It wasn't my story. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish, please; let me finish. You love to speculate about whether so-and-so is going to be a part of the administration or not. And I understand the game. But I have got to do my job, and I'm going to do it. And I'm going to do it with the Secretary of State. And the fact that he is here in Crawford, Texas, talking about issues of importance, should say loud and clear to the American people that he's completely engaged in doing what he needs to do, and that is, serve as a great Secretary of State.

QUESTION: Do you want to serve more than four years, Mr. Secretary?

SECRETARY POWELL: I serve at the pleasure of the President, and this is all August speculation with no basis in fact. There was no basis for this story to begin with, and we're doing our jobs together.

THE PRESIDENT: All right. We're going to get a burger. Thank you.

Elector

Elector (pronounced ih-lek-ter)

(1) A person who elects or may elect, especially a qualified voter (ie one correctly enrolled).

(2) A member an electoral college (chiefly US use but rarely used except in a technical context and often with initial capital letter).

(3) One of the (mostly) German princes entitled to elect the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (usually initial capital letter).

1425–1475: From the late Middle English elector & electour, from the Late Latin ēlēctor (chooser; selector) agent noun from past-participle stem of eligere (to pick out, choose), the construct being eleg- (variant stem of ēligere, second-person singular future passive indicative of ēligō (from ex- (out of, from) +‎ legō (choose, select, appoint)) + -tor (genitive -tōris), the Latin suffix used to form a masculine agent noun.  An earlier alternative form was electour but it was obsolete by the sixteenth century; the office in court documents was often described by the noun electorship and there were feminine forms, used with an initial capital letter when grammar demanded: electress, electress consort & princess-electress.  Elector & electorship are nouns; the noun plural is electors.

Elections in the First Reich

The Holy Roman Empire (Sacrum Imperium Romanum in Latin; Heiliges Römisches Reich in German) endured from the crowing of Charlemagne (747–814) on Christmas day 800 until it was dissolved in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars although, technically, the imperial connection existed only since Otto I (912-973) proclaimed himself emperor in 962 and it wasn’t until the thirteenth century the term "Holy Roman Empire" came into use.  Prior to that, the empire was known variously as universum regnum (the whole kingdom (as opposed to the many regional kingdoms in Europe), imperium christianum (Christian empire) or Romanum imperium (Roman empire), but the Emperor's mystique, if not his constitutional legitimacy, was always underpinned by the concept of translatio imperii (that his supreme power was an inheritance from the old emperors of Classical Rome).

The Bishop Consecration of the Elector Clemens August by Benedikt XIII (1727) (in the New Castle Schleißheim), oil on panel in Rococo style by by George Desmarées (1697-1776). 

Accession to the throne of Holy Roman Emperor was sometime dynastic and sometimes political but from the thirteenth century, it was formalised as elective, the electoral college comprised mostly of German prince-electors, the high-ranking aristocrats who would meet to choose of their peers a King of the Romans to be crowned emperor (until 1530 by the Pope himself).  From then on, emperors, keen to assert the idea their authority was independent of the papacy, gained their legitimacy solely from the vote of the electors.  The prince-electors were known in German as Kurfürst; the heir apparent to a secular prince-elector a Kurprinz (electoral prince).  The German element Kur- was based on the Middle High German irregular verb kiesen and was related to the English word "choose" (from the Old English ceosan, participle coren (having been chosen)) and the Gothic kiusan.  The modern German verb küren means "to choose" in a ceremonial sense.  Fürst is German for “prince” but while German distinguishes between the head of a principality (der Fürst) and the son of a monarch (der Prinz), English uses "prince" for both concepts.  Fürst is related to the English first and is thus the “foremost” person in his realm, “prince” being derived from the Latin princeps, which carried the same meaning.

In modern democratic systems, there’s quite a variety of electoral systems and a handful of states even make voting compulsory.  Although political operatives and theorists have constructed elaborate arguments in favor of one arrangement or another, it’s remarkable how, over a number of electoral cycles, the pattern of outcomes produces results which are strikingly similar.  One thing which tends to be common across different systems is that the actual dynamic of the electoral contest is the battle for the votes of a relative handful, the base support of the established parties, although there’s be a general tendency of decline, not falling below a certain critical mass.  So, all the clatter of election campaigns exists to convince a small part of the population to vote differently and these are the famous “swing” voters, those who can be persuaded to change.  Swing voters can bring joy or despair to political parties and in tight contests they’re a particular challenge because they can’t all be nudged to change by the same carrot or stick; some need to be offered hope, some need to be made fearful and some wish simply to be bribed.  The other problem with swing voters is they can swing back so they need again and again to be massaged.  Consider Lindsay Lohan who in 2008 endorsed Barack Obama (b 1961; US president 2009-2017) only to say in 2012 she was “as of now” backing Mitt Romney (b 1947; Republican candidate for president 2012).  Once, she referred to Sarah Palin (b 1964; Republican vice presidential nominee 2008) as a “narrow minded, media obsessed homophobe” yet, presumably using the same deductive process, found Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) was “good people”, a view expressed within a year of declaring herself anti-Brexit voice, a thing Trump supported.  There is of course no reason why people have to align themselves with everything a candidate supports and it seems unknown which way Lindsay Lohan has voted or even if she votes but her seasonal shifts are indicative of the difficulties the parties face and the reason they’re so attracted to the possibilities offered by mining big data so messaging can be scoped down to individual electors.  That's merely the latest refinement in advertising which has moved in less than a century from broadcasting to all, narrowcasting to groups to now messaging to each soul what they want to hear.

Dome

Dome (pronounced dohm)

(1) In architecture, a vault, having a circular plan and usually in the form of a portion of a sphere, so constructed as to exert an equal thrust in all directions.

(2) A domical roof or ceiling; a polygonal vault, ceiling, or roof.

(3) Any covering thought to resemble the hemispherical vault of a building or room; anything shaped like a hemisphere or inverted bowl.

(4) In water management, (usually in dam design), a semidome having its convex surface toward the impounded water.

(5) In crystallography, a form having planes that intersect the vertical axis and are parallel to one of the lateral axes.

(6) In geology, an upwarp (a broad anticline (a fold with strata sloping downwards on each side) caused by local uplift).

(7) In geology, a mountain peak having a rounded summit (a structure in which rock layers slope away in all directions from a central point).

(8) As vistadome, in passenger vehicles (usually railroad cars), a raised, glass-enclosed section of the roof of, placed over an elevated section of seats to afford passengers a full view of scenery (not usually truly in the hemispherical shape of a dome).

(9) In horology, the inner cover for the works of a watch which snaps into the rim of the case.

(10) A building; a house; an edifice (obsolete except as a literary device).

(11) As heat dome, a meteorological phenomenon in which the interplay of high & low pressure atmospheric systems interact to produce static, warm air over a large area.

(12) To cover with or as if with a dome; to shape like a dome.

(13) To rise or swell as a dome.

(14) In slang, a person's head (the form chrome dome used of the bald).

(15) In slang (both military and in some criminal classes), to shoot in the head (often in the form “got domed”).

(16) In African-American slang, to perform fellatio upon.

1505–1515: From the Middle French domme & dome (a town-house; a dome, a cupola) (which persists in modern French as dôme), from the Provençal doma, from the Italian duomo (cathedral), from the Medieval Latin domus (ecclesiae; literally “house (of the church)”), a calque of the Ancient Greek οἶκος τῆς ἐκκλησίας (oîkos tês ekklēsías).  Dome is a noun & verb, domed & doming are verbs and domelike, domical, domish & domesque are adjectives; the noun plural is domes.

By the 1650s, the formalized use in architecture ensured the meaning was (more or less) standardized as “a round, vaulted roof, a hemispherical covering of a building” and thus the ultimate specialized evolution from the Greek dōma (a house, housetop (used especially of those with a roof “in the eastern style”), from domos (house), from the primitive Indo-European root dem- (house, household).  The medieval use of the German dom and Italian duomo as verbal shorthand for “cathedral” (essentially a clipping from “house of God”) was picked up in the imperfect way so many words entered English to describe architectural features in the style of hemispherical cupolas, the domes at the intersection of the nave and the transept, or over the sanctuary, characteristic architectural feature of Italian cathedrals.  The sense in English of “a building, a house” had been borrowed in English as early as the 1510s and was used mostly of stately homes and it endures but only as a literary device and it’s rarely seen outside of poetry.

The shape occurs to one degree or another in nature and is common in man-made objects and the built environment so dome is an often seen modifier (cake dome, pleasure dome, lava dome; onion dome et al) and appears in the opening lines of one of the most cherished fragments of English verse: Kubla Khan (1797) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Some of the use has also been opportunistic and not especially domical.  Vistadomes were raised, glass-enclosed sections built into the roofs of railway carriages, placed over an elevated section of seats to afford passengers a better view of the scenery.  The idea was picked up by General Motors, the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon (1964-1977), the Buick Roadmaster Estate (1991-1996) and the Scenicruiser busses (1954-1956 and made famous in the Greyhound livery some wore until the 1970s) all used raised, partially-windowed sections although none were officially described as “domes”.

The Hagia Sophia, now the main mosque in Istanbul; the minarets were added after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and there are many architectural critics who maintain visually they improve the balance of the structure.  The illustration on the right shows how the Byzantine engineers used pendentives to make the construction of domes possible.     

Domes however are most associated with grand-scale, representational architecture (although quite a few builders of McMansions found them hard to resist).  One intriguing aspect of structural engineering upon which the integrity of a dome depends on what are called pendentives (the triangular segments of the lower part of a hemispherical dome left by the penetration of the dome by two semicircular vaults intersection at right angles).  Dating from 1727, pendentive was from the mid-sixteenth century French pendentif, from the Latin pendentem (nominative pendens) (hanging and the source of the English “pendulous”), the present participle of pendere (to hang) from the primitive Indo-European roots pen & spen- (to draw, stretch, spin).  What pendentives permit is the use of a circular dome over a square void square room or an elliptical one over something rectangular room.  Pendentives, (geometrically the triangular segments of a sphere), taper to points at the bottom and spread at the top to establish the continuous circular or elliptical base as required.  As structural supports, pendentives distribute the bulk of a dome’s weight to the four corners (the strongest points) and ultimately to the piers and the foundations below.  The classic example is the Hagia Sophia, the sixth century Byzantine cathedral at Constantinople (modern day Istanbul).  It was converted into a mosque when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and, after a century-odd as a museum, is again a mosque.

Scale model of Germania.  Hitler would spend hours pondering the details but in 1945, he spent even longer looking at the model of what was planned for the Austrian city of Linz where he'd decided to have his tomb installed.

Domes have long been a favorite of emperors, dictators and those other megalomaniacs: architects.  A truly monumental one would have been the Volkshalle (People's Hall and known also as the Große Halle (Great Hall) & Ruhmeshalle (Hall of Glory), the centerpiece of Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) never realized plan to re-built Berlin as Germania, a worthy Welthauptstadt (world capital) of his “thousand year Reich”.  Although Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) was Germania’s chief architect, in some aspects he was really a glorified draftsman, correcting the technical errors in the drawings passed to him by the Führer who had be sketching parts of the design since the early 1920s.

Even by the standards of the super-dimensionality which was characteristic of the Third Reich, the domed hall would have been extraordinary.  The oculus would have been 46 m (151 feet) in diameter which would have accommodated the entire rotunda of Hadrian's Pantheon and the dome of St Peter's Basilica.  The  250 m (820 feet) diameter of the dome was (and this was a signature of Speer’s approach), bigger even than Hitler had requested and he was much displeased to learn of a rival architect’s plans for a dome 15 m (49 feet) greater in diameter to sit atop the city’s new railway station.  As things turned out, none of the grandiose structures were ever built and although a tinge of regret can be found in Speer’s post-war thoughts, even he admitted the designs were a failure because of “their lack of human scale”.

Berlin's rebuilt Reichstag with steel & glass dome.

Berlin did however eventually get a new dome, albeit it one rendered not in granite but the glass and steel the Führer thought was fine for factories and warehouses but which would have appalled him as a method of construction for public, representational architecture.  Plonked atop the rebuilt Reichstag, it was said to symbolize the reunification of Germany although quite how it managed that has never really been explained although the distinctive structure has become a city landmark and people seem to like it.  A clever design, it sits directly above the chamber of the Bundestag (the lower house of the bicameral federal parliament) and permits public observation, the clever design also reducing energy use by optimizing the input of natural light while moving shrouds minimize glare and heat-soak.

Cinerama Dome, Los Angeles in 1965, the year of its greatest commercial success.

The Cinerama Dome movie theatre sits on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard.  Opened in 1963, the Cinerama Dome introduced a new concept for film projection, a curved screen which sat inside a geodesic dome based on the design developed by US systems theorist & architect Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), one attraction of which was such things could be built at lower coast and in much less time than a conventional theatre building.  Intended to be the first of perhaps thousands around the planet, it was built in a still remarkable four months but it remains the only concrete geodesic on the planet and while it has operated intermittently since being closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, its future is uncertain and although it will probably be preserved as a historic building, it’s likely to be re-purposed as retail or restaurant space.

Lindsay Lohan at the Scary Movie V premiere, Cinerama Dome, April 2013.

The end of the line for Cinerama is another marker in the evolution of the technology which underpinned the evolution of the US economy from one based on agriculture, to one increasingly industrial to one geared around the military & entertainment.  In the 1950s, cinema’s greatest challenge came from television and the film studios fought back by creating differentiation in their products.  The venture into 3D proved a cul-de-sac for a number of reasons but one thing cinemas could do was make their big screens huge and during the 1950s the wide-screen Cinemascope enjoyed a boom.  However, there was a limit to how much screens could grow, hence the interest in Cinerama which projected onto a curved screen designed to take advantage of the way the human eye sees and processes images, the system at its best when provided by three synchronized projectors.  The idea lives on in the curved screens which have become popular among gaming freaks who enjoy the sense of “envelopment”.  It was also the era during which populations moved further from city centres into suburbs and thus, cinemas also needed to move, more of which (but often smaller) would be required.  Thus the attraction of the geodesic dome came which, largely pre-fabricated, was cheap to produce and quick to assemble.  However, Cinerama was expensive to film, to print, to produce and the sheer size and weight of the prints meant it was costly even to ship the material to venues and the conversion process to something which could be used with conventional projection.

Heat Domes

July 2023 Global heat map from the Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, USA.  For those unconvinced, Fox News continues to provide alternative facts.

The “heat dome” is a weather phenomenon, the physics of which has for decades been understood but of late the term has entered general use as much of the northern hemisphere has suffered from prolonged, unusually high temperatures, July 2023 measured as the hottest month ever recorded.  A heat dome occurs when a large, high-pressure system traps and concentrates hot air in a specific region, leading to prolonged and extremely high temperatures. Under a heat dome, the atmospheric pressure aloft prevents the hot air from rising and dissipating, effectively acting as a lid or cap over the area, thus the image of a dome sitting over the land.

The UK's Royal Meteorological Service's simple illustration of the physics of a heat dome.  Heat domes are also their own feedback loop.  A static areas of high pressure which already contains warm or hot air trapped under the high will become hotter and hotter, creating a heat dome.  Hot air will rise into the atmosphere, but high pressure acts as a lid and causes the air to subside or sink; as the air sinks, it warms by compression, and the heat builds. The ground also warms, losing moisture and making it easier to heat even more.

Probe

Probe (pronounced prohb)

(1) To search into or examine thoroughly; question closely; an investigation, especially by a legislative committee, of suspected illegal activity.

(2) To examine or explore with or as if with a probe; the act of probing.

(3) A slender surgical instrument for exploring the depth or direction of a wound, sinus, or the like.

(4) In aerospace, an unmanned exploration spacecraft.

(5) A projecting, pipe-like device on a receiving aircraft used to make connection with and receive fuel from a tanker aircraft during refuelling in flight.

(6) A device, attached by cord to an oven that can be inserted into food so the oven shuts off when the desired internal temperature of the food is reached.

(7) In biochemistry, any identifiable substance that is used to detect, isolate, or identify another substance, as a labelled strand of DNA that hybridizes with its complementary RNA or a monoclonal antibody that combines with a specific protein.

(8) In electronics, a lead connecting to or containing a measuring or monitoring circuit used for testing; a conductor inserted into a waveguide or cavity resonator to provide coupling to an external circuit

1555–1565: From the Medieval Latin proba (examination (“test” in Late Latin)), derivative of probāre (to test, examine, prove), from probus (good).  The Spanish tienta (a surgeon's probe) came from tentar (try, test).  The dual meanings in Latin ((1) instrument for exploring wounds etc and (2) an examination) persist in English.  The sense "act of probing" is from 1890, from the verb; the figurative sense of "penetrating investigation" is from 1903.  The use to describe a "small, unmanned exploratory spacecraft" is attested from 1953; unrelated to this is the curious popularity of aliens subjecting humans to examinations with anal probes in stories of alien abduction.  Probe is a noun & verb, probing & probed are verbs, probeable is an adjective and probingly is an adverb; the noun plural is probes.

The Voyager 1 space probe launched by NASA in 1977.

Originally (with companion probe Voyager 2) a twelve-year mission, it’s expected to remain a functional scientific instrument until 2025 and is now some 24 billion km (15 billion miles) away, the most distant human-made object from Earth (only our radio waves have travelled further).  There are some who claim the probes have already reached inter-stellar space while other astronomers  maintain the edge of our solar system extends much further than was once thought and they're travelling still through a sort of cosmic limbo.  The Voyager probes, even after they're long inert, may continue their journeys for thousands or millions of years because, although the universe is a violent, destructive swirl, there is vast distance between threatening stuff.

Of the many inconsistencies in English spelling, none must be seem more mystifying to anyone learning the language than those words affected by the “mute e rule”: the inflections and derivatives formed from words ending in a “silent e”.  The question always is: to e or not to e?  Deciding whether to retain or omit the last letter is easier than once it was because dictionaries seem now to be more consistent in their approach, presumably one of the benefits of their shift to becoming on-line resources although, for historic reasons, we seem stuck with what seem ancient, arbitrary decisions such as ageing and icing continuing in peaceful co-existence.  So, there are words where centuries of particular spellings have become entrenched that to suggest a change would be absurd and that means any rule would have both examples which conform and those which defy.  Henry Fowler (1858–1933) in his A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) acknowledged the impossibility of constructing a rule of absolute validity but as a guide offered (1) an indicative rule and (2) a guide to the exceptions.  The (1) rule was “when a suffix is added to a word ending in a mute e, the mute e should be dropped before a vowel but not before a consonant”.  The condition for (2) an exception was “the mute e should be kept even before a vowel if it is needed to indicate the soft sound of a preceding g or c or to distinguish a word from another with the same spelling”.  Probe is such an exception because if one has a probe, it’s helpful to know if something (or someone according to those who have been abducted by aliens) is probeable and that adjective can’t be spelled “probable” because that has another meaning.

The Mazda MX-6-based Ford Probe (1988-1997, left) and the car it was once mooted to replace, the long-serving “Fox” Mustang (1978-1993).

A competent, inoffensive coupé, the Ford Probe would probably have existed for a decade as a moderate success and then, having been discontinued without a direct replacement, been soon forgotten, had it not been for the furore which ensued when the idea surfaced it might be the company’s replacement for the Mustang.  In 1987, by means of a “controlled leak” the pro-Mustang faction (the beer drinkers) within the corporation let it be known Ford was planning to replace the Mustang with a modified version of a Mazda (championed by the chardonnay faction).  The reaction was vociferous & voluminous, Ford’s mailbox (and in 1987 mail came in envelopes with stamps attached) soon overflowing with complaints, the idea of a front-wheel-drive (FWD) Mustang anathematic, the absence of a V8 apparently beyond comprehension (although the Mustang II had suffered that fate in 1973-1975).  They also put their money where their poison pens were because the previously moribund sales of Mustangs suddenly spiked, the thought that this might be the last chance to buy a “proper” rear-wheel-drive (RWD), V8 powered Mustang enough to push the thing back up the sales chart.  The flow of letters and cash proved enough to persuade Ford and the platform was reprieved, the Mustang surviving to this day as a unique and highly profitable niche.  The Mazda co-project however was well advanced so the decision was taken to proceed and offer both and, badged as the Ford Probe, the modified Mazda lasted a decade-odd and it’s doubtful it cannibalized much of the Mustang’s market, its competition the other mid-sized, FWD Japanese coupés which had become popular.  A typical Japanese product, well engineered with a high build-quality, the Probe was a success (though it never realised Ford’s hopes in overseas markets) and when production ended, the only reason it wasn’t replaced was because the demographic buying the things had shifted to other segments, notably the sports utility vehicles (SUV) which would soon dominate.

1969 M-505 Adams Brothers Probe 16 (Durango 95)

The still controversial film A Clockwork Orange (1971) was based on the dystopian 1962 novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess (1917–1993).  At the time shocking in its depiction of violence, it's set some time in the future and as part of the verisimilitude the car used in the "driving scene" was a M-505 Adams Brothers Probe 16, one of three built.  Only 34 inches (864 mm) high (the prototype was 5 inches (125 mm) lower!), it emerged from the studios of the designers of the quirky Marcos sports cars which were idiosyncratic even by the standards of the cottage industry of low-volume sports cars which flourished in the UK until the early 1970s.  Although utterly impractical (passengers entered and exited through a sliding glass roof) it certainly looked futuristic but performance was disappointing because of the limited power. To create the mid-engined Probe, the designers used the engine and gearbox from the modest Austin 1800, moving the FWD package amidships, an approach later adopted by a number of manufacturers.  Had it been built using the mechanicals from the contemporary Cadillac Eldorado (which improbably had a 472 cubic inch (7.7 litre) V8 driving the front wheels through a chain-drive transaxle), assuming such a thing could be made to fit, it would have offered performance to match the promise of the looks.  In the film, the Probe was given the name “Durango 95” a name which seems to have chosen for no particular reason although the “95” may have been an allusion to 1995, decades away when the book was written.  Although A Clockwork Orange is perhaps not something with which manufacturers would like their products to be associated, many have since used the Durango name for a variety of purposes.

Newspaper headline writers like the word “probe”.  Within the industry, short, punchy words like “probe”, “jab”, “fix”, “bid” et al are part of a subset of English called “headline language”.

Driving scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971): 1969 M-505 Adams Brothers Probe 16 (Durango 95).

Caste

Caste (pronounced kahst)

(1) In sociology, an endogamous and hereditary social group limited to persons of the same rank, occupation, economic position, etc, and having mores distinguishing it from other such groups.

(2) Any rigid system of social distinctions.

(3) In Hinduism, any of the social divisions into which Hindu society is traditionally divided, each caste having its own privileges and limitations, transferred by inheritance from one generation to the next.

(4) In entomology, one of the distinct forms among polymorphous social insects, performing a specialized function in the colony, as queen, worker or soldier.

1545-1555: From the Portuguese & Spanish casta (race, breed, ancestry), noun use of casta, feminine of casto, from the Classical Latin castus (pure, chaste), from castus (cut off, separated; pure) the notion being "cut off" from faults and was the past participle of carere (to be cut off from (and related to castration)).  The ultimate root was the primitive Indo-European kes (to cut) from which Latin later picked-up cassus (empty, void).  It was originally spelled cast in English and later often merged with the noun cast in its secondary sense "sort, kind, style."  Many of the derived forms (half-caste, quarter-caste, castless, outcaste (actually modeled on the English outcast) et al) were coined under the Raj and reflect the concerns and prejudices of the colonialists.  Caste & casteism are nouns; the noun plural is castes.

Application to Hindu social groups was picked up by English in India in the early 1600s and the English used the Portuguese casta (the earlier casta raça (unmixed race) comes from the same Latin root)) but the spelling soon became caste.  Interestingly, the phrase "caste system" seems not to have been in use (at least in surviving documents) until the 1840s.  Caste differs from class in that caste has come to mean a group of persons set apart by economic, social, religious, legal, or political criteria, such as occupation, status, religious denomination, legal privilege, skin colour, or some other physical characteristic.  In the west, over time, wealth or other desirable characteristics can permit upward movement between classes whereas in societies with defined (even if informally) caste systems, the distinctions tended to be static and inter-generational.

The Raj and after

Although it exists in many regions and religions, the best-known caste system is that of the Hindus, probably because, under the Raj, it was well suited to the purposes of British colonial administration, run as it mostly was by the class-conscious English.  The pre-Raj historical development of caste is contested but its origins are certainly in ancient India although modified to suit the needs of the various elites, the two most recent being the Raj and the government in New Delhi.  Historically, the Hindu castes, as a codified structure, existed only as divisions within the political elite, priests, intellectuals and generals and it was only later, as the means of of communications and methods of centralized control improved, that it was extended to previously casteless social groups which became differentiated caste communities.  Under the Raj, the colonial administrators rendered rigidity to the caste organization and until 1920, permitted only those of the upper castes to be appointed to senior civil service positions.  This changed in the 1920s, not because of any sympathy by the British towards notions of social justice but because of social unrest and agitation for independence so the Raj applied the classic colonial fix which for centuries the British did better than anyone: take the side of the oppressed minority.  From then on, the Raj enacted a policy of affirmative action by reserving a certain percentage of civil service positions for the lower castes.

Despite the impression in the west, the new constitution of independent India didn’t actually abolish caste but it did outlaw discrimination against lower castes by essentially (and unsuccessfully) proscribing untouchability and central and state governments continue to use caste as a mechanism to promote positive discrimination in education and employment.  The implications of this, particularly the unintended consequences, are not without controversy.  Although there exists a bewildering number of sub-castes, the four major hereditary castes are:

Brahmins: priests, scholars and teachers.
Kshatriyas: rulers, warriors and administrators.
Vaishyas: agriculturalists and merchants.
Shudras: workers and service providers.

In the narrow technical sense, the untouchables (popularly still known as Dalits, although the government has mandated Scheduled Castes) are not part of the caste system but, by outsiders, are regarded as the caste system's lowest rung.  Dalit was from the Hindi दलित (dalit) (downtrodden, oppressed), from the Sanskrit दलित (dalita) (broken, scattered)).  Few institutions have proved as suitable for adaptation to the structured databases of the internet than the Indian marriage market which works by determining compatibility, based on matching the values in the fields; collectively, what a candidate enters into these fields constitutes their "biodata" and on the basis of this they will hope to be judged a suitable boy or girl.  In India, it's widely acknowledged that while the algorithms which underpin the sites are helpful as an exclusionary tool (and thus a great time-saver), the actual selection process of from what remains lie still with the families & individual prospective brides & grooms, the relative influence varying between households.  In contemporary India, while as a system of social stratification caste remains one of the most powerful cultural dynamics, there is now more reluctance to discuss its operation and there is some evidence of changing attitudes among younger generations, especially the urbanized.  However, in the rural areas where most of the population lives, caste seems still to be as crucial a determinate of structure as ever.

The informal social stratifications which emerge organically in an institution like a high school are interesting because they are determined by both outside influences and their interaction with the formal stratifications inherent in the educational system (age, academic & sporting achievement, the geographical catchment from which the cohort is drawn etc).  The term clique is often used and in the microcosm of a school, that's probably the best word because unlike a caste, movement between cliques is possible, depending only on group acceptance.  Clique was borrowed from the French, from the Old French cliquer which was imitative (on the idea of "click") and thought to have been influenced by claque (a group of people hired to applaud or boo (literally “a slap; a clap")).

Any review of the work of anthropologists, sociologists and behavioral zoologists would probably confirm that on planet Earth, among all groups of humans or non-humans which have been organized into any sort of collective arrangement, some form of a system of social stratification can be identified.  In human cultures, some have for centuries operated in the manner of castes in that they were unchanging and based entirely on descent with social movement either culturally or legally proscribed while some came to acknowledge wealth could permit "upward mobility".  In rare cases this could be almost instant but more commonly was something which unfolded over several generations, each becoming more refined than the last, the combination of gentility and financial largess towards their erstwhile "betters" (effectively bribes or "cash for honors") being rewarded with titles and appointments to offices within the establishment.  In the West, this lent societies an economic and cultural dynamic often lacking in places where hierarchies tended to be static.