Trench

Trench (pronounced trensh)

(1) In military (usually army (infantry)) use, an elongated pit for protection of soldiers and or equipment, usually perpendicular to the line of sight toward the enemy.

(2) A system of such excavations, with their embankments etc (usually in the plural).

(3) To dig or construct such a structure; to form a furrow, ditch, etc by cutting into or through something.

(4) In archaeology, a pit, usually rectangular with smooth walls and floor, excavated during an archaeological investigation; any deep furrow, ditch, or cut.

(5) In oceanography, a long, steep-sided, narrow depression in the ocean floor.

(6) To invade, especially with regard to the rights or the exclusive authority of another; to tend towards or encroach upon.

(7) A type of over coat.

(8) To have direction; to aim or tend.

(9) To cut; to form or shape by cutting; to make by incision, hewing, etc.

(10) In (mostly historic military) medicine, as trench foot, a type of foot damage caused by prolonged exposure to moisture.  Those most associated with the trench warfare of the First World War (from which it gained the name), the condition was first described by physicians attached to Napoleon Bonaparte's army during the retreat from Russia in the winter of 1812.

1350-1400: From the Middle English trenche (track cut through a wood or path made by cutting (later long, narrow ditch)) from the Old French trenche (a slice, cut, gash, slash; defensive ditch), from the verb trecncier (to cut, carve, slice), possibly from the Vulgar Latin trincāre (cut into three parts), from the Classical Latin was truncāre (to maim, mutilate, cut off), from truncus (maimed, mutilated).  Truncus also had the meaning "trunk of a tree, trunk of the body" and is of uncertain origin, perhaps from the primitive Indo-European root tere (cross over, pass through, overcome).  The first use by the military for trench in the modern sense was noted circa 1500 with trench foot mentioned in reports in 1915 although the condition had been documented since 1812 and doubtlessly had been long existed.  The trench coat dates from 1916 and, perhaps surprisingly, "trench warfare" didn’t appear in print until 1918.  Trench is a noun & verb, trenching is a noun, verb & adjective and trenched is a verb; the noun plural is trenches.  Forms such as detrench, retrench, entrench et al are coined as needed.  The adjective trenchant once had the meaning "fitted to trench or cut; gutting; sharp" but this is long obsolete; in figurative use it now conveys "keen; biting; vigorously articulate and effective; severe".

The trench coat

Winston Churchill (1875-1965, right), commanding the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers, with his deputy, Sir Archie Sinclair (1890–1970, right), Armentieres 11 February 1916.  Both are wearing trench coats, Churchill in a French M15 Adrian helmet.

One often-repeated story of the origin of the trench coat is it was created as a khaki-colored overcoat to offer protection to soldiers suffering in the muddy, sometimes water-logged trenches on the western front during the First World War.  That was certainly where it picked up the name but, (like the medical condition trench food which had been known to army physicians for over a hundred years) the garment long pre-existed the conflict.  It was descended from waterproof coats created by Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh (1766–1843) and self-taught English engineer Thomas Hancock (1786–1865) in the early 1820s.

Macintosh and Hancock’s rain-repellent garment was called the “mac” or “macintosh" names which became generic for the type of product, a usage which, in parts of the UK endures to this day.  Created from a rubberized cotton, the mac was outerwear offering protection from rain or the elements in general, the target market wide in the age of horse-drawn transport and included anyone for whom outdoor activities were a part of the day.  The mac proved popular among those in horse racing, farming and the whole hunting, fishing and shooting set as well as the military officers with which it would later be so associated.  Macintosh continued to refine the material, the fabric by mid-century breathable, and more water-resistant and in 1853, Regent Street tailor John Emary (b circa 1810, his date of death unknown), designed an improved raincoat, which he produced under the name of his company, Aquascutum (from the Latin aqua (water) + scutum (shield).  Aquascutum’s success attracted the attention of Hampshire draper Thomas Burberry (1835–1926) who would, in 1856, found his eponymous company.  Burberry’s innovation in 1879 was the weatherproofing of individual strands of cotton and wool fibres using a coating of lanolin, rather than something applied to a finished textile, Burberry’s gabardine (a borrowing of a word from the 1590s which described a number of garments, all variations of protective, enveloping cloaks) fabric so superior to anything else available that it was instantly successful.

Lindsay Lohan in trench coat, out shopping.

Over the years, both the recently much-troubled Aquascutum and Burberry have taken credit for having invented the trench coat but both were popularisers of a pre-existing product, Burberry’s re-writing of history more successful to the point where the Burberry Trench Coat is definitive of the type, most others imitative even in variation.  The style too remains class-associative, worn during the Great War only by the officer class and thus gentlemen (though as the death-toll of them rose, it came to be worn also by “temporary gentlemen” a wartime necessity of the British class-system).  The genuine Burberry and Aquascutum trench coats were expensive, but their image and utility attracted other manufacturers which soon had more affordable imitations on the shelves; that remains the market segmentation today.

Burberry Long Chelsea Heritage Trench Coat (US$2450.00).

The variation Burberry created for military use was released in 1912, the term “trench coat” appearing in print first in 1916 in a tailoring trade journal.  The classic wartime trench coat was double-breasted, tailored to the waist, and flared to a below-the-knee hemline, the belt equipped with D-rings for hooking accessories.  It was a functional design with a caped back so water to drip off while the storm flap at the shoulder provided ventilation, the pockets were deep, cuffs could be tightened, and the buttons at the neck, although there for traditional reasons, provided valuable protect against poison gas when that began to be used in 1915.  Some coats even came with a warm, removable liner, which could be used as bedding and the emblematic shade of khaki so identified with the Burberry Trench was part of the War Office specification, just a standard British Army color.  According to Burberry, although advances in technology and the introduction of new machinery has meant the patterns for their trench coats have been changed, some stitching methods have been updated and metric dimensions are now used, were a garment now to be fashioned from the originals, it would be visually indistinguishable for the current range.      

Lindsay Lohan in sheer trench coat from DKNY's anniversary collection, Esquire DKNY official opening party, One Embankment, London, June 2014.

The coats became especially popular after the Second World War.  Although the price differential for the genuine article is striking (it can be ten times the cost of a knock-off), the difference is certainly discernible, each coat made from gabardine in Castleford and said to take some three weeks to complete.  A Burberry check, a signature combination of camel, ivory, red and black has lined the coats since the 1920s.  A fashion convention emerged in the late 1960s: Whereas the military tradition was always to use the buckle to secure the belt, true fashionistas prefer to tie.

Legion

Legion (pronounced lee-juhn)

(1) In the army of Ancient Rome, a military formation which numbered between 3000-6000 soldiers, made up of infantry with supporting cavalry.

(2) A description applied to some large military and paramilitary forces.

(3) Any great number of things or (especially) as persons; a multitude; very great in number (usually postpositive).

(4) A description applied to some associations of ex-servicemen (usually initial capital).

(5) In biology, a taxonomic rank; a group of orders inferior to a class; in scientific classification, a term occasionally used to express an assemblage of objects intermediate between an order and a class.

1175–1225: From the Middle English legi(o)un, from the Old French legion (squad, band, company, Roman military unit), from the Latin legiōnem & legiōn- (nominative legiō) (picked body of soldiers; a levy of troops), the construct being leg(ere) (to gather, choose, read; pick out, select), from the primitive Indo-European root leg- (to gather; to collect) + -iōn   The suffix –ion was from the Middle English -ioun, from the Old French -ion, from the Latin -iō (genitive iōnis).  It was appended to a perfect passive participle to form a noun of action or process, or the result of an action or process.  Legion is a nou, adjective & verb and legionnaire & legionary are nouns; the noun plural is legions.

The generalized sense of "a large number of persons" emerged circa 1300 as a consequence of its use of legion in some translations of the Bible (my name is Legion: for we are many (Mark 5:9; KJV)).  It was used to describe various European military formations since the 1590s and had been applied to some associations of ex-servicemen since the American Legion was established in 1919.  The French légion d'honneur (Legion of Honor) is an order of distinction founded by Napoleon in 1802, the légion étrangère (French Foreign Legion) was originally a unit of the French army officially made up of foreign volunteers (Polish, Belgian etc) which traditionally served in colonies or on distant expeditions although French nations soon appeared in Foreign Legion colours “for a number of reasons”.  The noun legionnaire from the French légionnaire dates from 1818.  The most famous modern association is Legionnaires' Disease, caused by Legionella pneumophilia, named after the lethal outbreak in July 1976 at the American Legion convention in Philadelphia's Bellevue Stratford Hotel, Legionella thus becoming the name of the bacterium.  The cause of the outbreak was traced to water used in the building’s air-conditioning systems.

The Bellevue Stratford and Legionella pneumophilia

The origin of Legionnaires’ disease (Legionella pneumophilia) was in the bacterium resident in the air-conditioning cooling towers of the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia which in July 1976 was hosting the Bicentennial convention of the American Legion, an association of service veterans; the bacterium was subsequently named Legionella.

The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, 1905.

The Legionella bacterium occurs naturally and there had before been outbreaks of what came to be called Legionella pneumophilia,(a pneumonia-like condition) most notably in 1968 but what made the 1976 event different was the scale and severity which attracted investigation and a review of the records which suggested the first known case in the United States dated from 1957.  Like HIV/AIDS, it was only when critical mass was reached that it became identified as something specific and there’s little doubt there may have been instances of Legionella pneumophilia for decades or even centuries prior to 1957.  The increasing instance of the condition in the late twentieth century is most associated with the growth in deployment of a particular vector of transmission: large, distributed air-conditioning systems.  Until the Philadelphia outbreak, the cleaning routines required to maintain these systems wasn’t well-understood and indeed, the 1976 event wasn’t even the first time the Bellevue Stratford had been the source two years earlier when it was the site of a meeting of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows but in that case, fewer than two-dozen were infected and only two fatalities whereas over two-hundred Legionnaires became ill thirty-four died.  Had the 1976 outbreak claimed only a handful, it’s quite likely it too would have passed unnoticed.

Winter Evening, Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, circa 1910 by Charles Cushing (b 1959).

That the 1976 outbreak was on the scale it was certainly affected the Bellevue-Stratford.  Built in the Philadelphia CBD on the corner of Broad and Walnut Streets in 1904, it was enlarged in 1912 and, at the time, was among the most impressive and luxurious hotels in the world.  Noted especially for a splendid ballroom and the fine fittings in its thousand-odd guest rooms, it instantly became the city’s leading hotel and a centre for the cultural and social interactions of its richer citizens.  Its eminence continued until during the depression of the 1930s, it suffered the fate of many institutions associated with wealth and conspicuous consumption, its elaborate form not appropriate in a more austere age.  As business suffered, the lack of revenue meant it was no longer possible to maintain the building and the tarnish began to overtake the glittering structure.

The Bellevue Hotel Ballroom.

Although the ostentation of old never quite returned, in the post-war years, the Bellevue-Stratford did continue to operate as a profitable hotel until an international notoriety was gained in July 1976 with the outbreak of the disease which would afflict over two-hundred and, ultimately, strike down almost three dozen of the conventioneers who had been guests.  Once the association with the hotel’s air-conditioning became known, bookings plummeted precipitously and before the year was out, the Stratford ceased operations although there was a nod to the architectural significance, the now deserted building was in 1977 listed on the US National Register of Historic Places.

The Bellevue Hotel XIX Restaurant.

The lure of past glories was however strong and in 1978-1979, after being sold, a programme described as a restoration rather than a refurbishment was undertaken, reputedly costing a then impressive US$25 million, the press releases at the time emphasizing the attention devoted to the air-conditioning system.  The guest rooms were entirely re-created, the re-configuration of the floors reducing their number to under six-hundred and the public areas were restored to their original appearance.  However, for a number of reasons, business never reached the projected volume and not in one year since re-opening did the place prove profitable, the long-delayed but inevitable closure finally happening in March 1986.

The Bellevue Hotel Lobby.

But, either because or in spite of the building being listed as a historic place, it still attracted interest and, after being bought at a knock-down price, another re-configuration was commenced, this time to convert it to the now fashionable multi-function space, a mix of retail, hotel and office space, now with the inevitable fitness centre and food court.  Tellingly, the number of hotel rooms was reduced fewer than two-hundred but even this proved a challenge for operators profitably to run and in 1996, Hyatt took over.  Hyatt, although for internal reasons shuffling the property within their divisions and rebranding it to avoid any reference to the now troublesome Stratford name, benefited from the decision by the city administration to re-locate Philadelphia’s convention centre from the outskirts to the centre and, like other hotels in the region, enjoyed a notable, and profitable, increase in demand.  It’s now called simply: The Bellevue Hotel.

The Bellevue Hotel.

Understandably, the Bellevue’s page on Hyatt’s website, although discussing some aspects of the building’s history such as having enjoyed a visit from every president since Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; US president 1901-1909) and the exquisitely intricate lighting system designed by Thomas Edison (1847-1931) himself, neglects even to allude to the two outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease in the 1970s, the sale in 1976 noted on the time-line without comment.  In a nice touch, guests may check in with up to two dogs, provided they don't exceed the weight limit 50 lb (22.67 kg) pounds individually or 75 lb (34 kg) combined.  Part of the deal includes a “Dog on Vacation” sign which will be provided when registering; it's to hang on the doorknob so staff know what's inside and there's a dog run at Seger Park, a green space about a ½ mile (¾ km) from the hotel.  Three days notice is required if staying with one or two dogs and, if on a leash, they can tour the Bellevue's halls but they're not allowed on either the ballroom level or the 19^th floor where the XIX restaurant is located.  A cleaning fee (US$100) is added for stays of up to six nights, with an additional deep-cleaning charge applicable for 7-30 nights.

Lindsay Lohan with some of the legion of paparazzi who, despite technical progress which has disrupted the primacy of their role as content providers in the celebrity ecosystem, remain still significant players in what is a symbiotic process.

Conjunction

Conjunction (pronounced kuhn-juhngk-shuhn)

(1) In grammar, any member of a small class of words distinguished in many languages by their function as connectors between words, phrases, clauses, or sentences, as and, because, but, however.

(2) Any other word or expression of similar function, as in any case.

(3) The act of conjoining; combination.

(4) The state of being conjoined; union; association.

(5) A combination of events or circumstances.

(6) In formal logic, a compound proposition that is true if and only if all of its component propositions are true.

(7) In formal logic, the relation among the components of such a proposition, usually expressed by the ∧ (∧) operator.

(8) Sexual intercourse (obsolete except for historic or poetic use).

(8) In astronomy, the coincidence of two or more heavenly bodies at the same celestial longitude; also called solar conjunction (the position of a planet or the moon when it is in line with the sun as seen from the earth. The inner planets are in inferior conjunction when the planet is between the earth and the sun and in superior conjunction when the sun lies between the earth and the planet).

(9) The state of two or more such coinciding heavenly bodies.

(10) In astrology, the coincidence of two or more heavenly bodies at the same celestial longitude, characterized by a unification of the planetary energies; an astrological aspect (an exact aspect of 0° between two planets, etc, an orb of 8° being allowed).

1350–1400: From the Middle English conjunccio(u)n, a borrowing from the Anglo-French and Old French conjonction, from the Latin conjunctiōn- (stem of conjunctiō (joining) from coniungere (to join), the second-person singular future passive indicative of coniungō.  Conjunction is a noun, conjunctive is a noun & adjective and conjugate is a noun, verb & adjective; the noun plural is conjunctions.

Beginning a sentence with a conjunction

Unlike French, which has the Académie Française, English has no central authority; assessments of correctness can be made by anyone, judgments of whom others can make of what they will; it's something like the concept of the fatwa in Islam and from this linguistic free-for-all emerged the “rule” a sentence shouldn’t begin with a conjunction.  In English, there’s actually no rule against a sentence beginning with a coordinating conjunction like and, but or yet but the mistaken belief in some sort of prohibition is widespread.  In the literature, thoughts on the origin of this are all conjecture but the theme of most suggestions is the practice is somehow inelegant (although harsher critics describe it as lazy and sloppy) and with a little effort, a more complex and pleasing construction might emerge.  That said, the prohibition has no historical or grammatical foundation and examples exist in the Magna Carta (1215), the United States Constitution (1787), judgments from the US Supreme Court (since at least 1803) and Abraham Lincoln's (1809–1865; US president 1861-1865) Gettysburg Address (1863) and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage traced instances of use even in Old English.  That one is allowed to do something doesn’t mean one should do something and even then, it can be done too often.  A work like however doesn’t have the same feel as but; it’s in a higher register so the choice of which to use to start a sentence may be dictated by style as much as meaning.  So while beginning a sentence with and is permissible English, if overused it makes for dull and repetitive text.

The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, 21 December 2021.

In an alignment dubbed the “Christmas Star”, Jupiter and Saturn, the solar system’s two largest planets, appeared on 21 December 2021 to be closer together than they have in nearly 400 years.  From the earth, the giant planets appeared a tenth of a degree apart although they are hundreds of millions of miles apart.  Also, as NASA confirmed, it’s been some 800 years since the planets aligned at night, timing that gave almost everyone on planet Earth the chance to observe the astronomical event known as a “Great Conjunction”, a similar alignment not due until 2080, with the next close conjunction following 337 years later, in 2417.  The event was unusual also because it fell on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, a “rare coincidence,” NASA advised because “the date of the conjunction is determined by the positions of Jupiter, Saturn, and the Earth in their paths around the Sun, while the date of the solstice is determined by the tilt of Earth’s axis.”

Lindsay Lohan (2011).

Screened in conjunction with the 54^th international exhibition of the Venice Biennale (June 2011), Lindsay Lohan was a short film the director said represented a “new kind of portraiture.”  Filmed in Malibu, California, the piece was included in the Commercial Break series, presented by Venice’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and although the promotional notes indicated it would include footage of the ankle monitor she helped make famous, the device doesn't appear in the final cut.

Directed by: Richard Phillips & Taylor Steele
Director of Photography: Todd Heater
Costume Designer: Ellen Mirojnick
Creative Director: Dominic Sidhu
Art Director: Kyra Griffin
Editor: Haines Hall
Color mastering: Pascal Dangin for Boxmotion
Music: Tamaryn & Rex John Shelverton

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.