Coffin

Coffin (pronounced kof-in (U) or kaw-fin (non-U))

(1) The box or case in which the body of a dead person is placed for burial; in US use, usually called a casket.

(2) In veterinary science, the hollow crust or hoof of a horse's foot, below the coronet, in which is the coffin bone.

(3) In printing, the bed of a platen press; the wooden frame around the bed of an early wooden press.

(4) In cooking, a casing or crust, or a mold, of pastry, as for a pie (archaic).

(5) In fingernail art, one of the standard shapes.

(6) In cartomancy, the eighth Lenormand card.

(7) A type of basket (obsolete).

(8) Industry slang for a storage container for nuclear waste.

(9) A conical paper bag, used by grocers (obsolete).

(10) In engineering, an alternative name for a flask or casting mold, especially those used in sand casting.

1300-1350: From the Middle English cofin, from the Old Northern French cofin (sarcophagus (and earlier basket & coffer) from the Latin cophinus (basket, hamper), a loanword from the Ancient Greek κόφινος (kóphinos) (a kind of basket) of uncertain origin, the Latin the source also of the Italian cofano and the Spanish cuebano (basket).  The original meaning in fourteenth century Middle English was "chest or box for valuables", preserved in the modern coffer (see most frequently in the plural form coffers), meaning, inter alia, a specialized type of container for storing money or other valuables.  The funereal sense, "chest or box in which the dead human body is placed for burial" is from 1520s; before that the main secondary sense in English was "pie crust, a mold or casing of pastry for a pie" (late 14c.). The meaning "vehicle regarded as unsafe" is from 1830s; coffin nail (cigarette) is slang from 1880; the phrase "nail in (one's) coffin" (a thing that hastens or contributes to one's death) has been in use since 1792.

Shapes of boxes

Pope Francis (b 1936; pope since 2013) at the funeral of Cardinal George Pell (1941-2023), St Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican, January 2023.  The expression "nail down the lid" is a reference to the lid of a coffin (casket), the implication being one wants to make doubly certain anyone within can't possible "return from the dead". 

A coffin is a funerary box used for viewing or keeping a corpse, either for burial or cremation, although it’s increasingly common for elaborate and expensive coffins to be used only for the funeral ceremony with the dead actually buried or cremated in simple boxes made from cheaper timber or even reinforced cardboard.  Use for burial became two-pronged.  The Old French cofin, (basket), evolved into coffin in English whereas the modern French form, couffin, means cradle.  Within the English-speaking world, coffin is rare in the US where the preferred form is usually casket; elsewhere the words are used interchangeably.  However, some undertakers (now often gentrified as "funeral directors") do note detail differences between the two, a casket denoting a four or eight-sided (almost always a rectangular or long octagonal) shape, while a coffin tends to be six or twelve-sided (almost always an elongated hexagonal or elongated dodecagonal).

1937 Cord 812 Phaeton.

Probably because of the morbid association, the coffin has never been widely used as a design metaphor except where adoption is dictated by functional need.  It was however the most famous feature of the Cord 810/812 (1936-1937), known from its debut as the “coffin nose” and probably still the most memorable car of the art deco period.  Despite the elongated hood (bonnet) and coming from an era during which the configuration was widely used, the Cords were fitted not with straight-eight engines but used a 289 cubic inch (4.7 litre) Lycoming V8, the generous length necessitated by something unusual for the time: front wheel drive.  This demanded additional space to achieve the desired lines so the semi-automatic four-speed gearbox was mounted in front of the engine.  In the improving economy of the mid-1930s sales were initially brisk but reliability problems dampened demand and the rectification programme proved so expensive production ceased in 1937, the recession of 1938 dooming hopes of any revival although the body dies were purchased in a fire-sale by two other troubled operations,  Graham-Paige and Hupmobile.  Making the distinctive lines rather more conventional in appearance, the companies created two substantially identical four-door sedans with an emphasis on ease of production and that meant the Cord's radical engineering was abandoned for something as conventional as the new look.  Now using Graham-Page's reliable but uninspiring straight-six engine driving the rear wheels, the cars were competent enough but the market was still difficult and there was insufficient capital to sustain the operations during the inevitable delays caused by teething troubles early in the production process.  With fewer than 2000 having been built by late 1940, neither manufacturer's assembly lines lasted long enough to see passenger vehicle stopped after war was declared in 1941 but the plants were in 1942 re-opened for military production.  

Coffin-shaped fingernails painted in Dior 999 (left) and gloss-black (right).  With a distinctive curve which tapers to an obtuse end, the elegant and much-admired coffin is one of the standard shapes in fingernail art.  The name is also sometimes misapplied: If the tapering is more severe, the nail should properly be called an almond and if rounded, it’s an oval or squoval (although some manicurists list those variations as a pipe).  The alternative name for the coffin is "ballerina", a reference to the shape of the shoes in which the dancers perform.

Lindsay Lohan in coffin during vampire-themed photo-shoot by Tyler Shields (b 1982).  The Life Is Not A Fairytale session, Los Angeles, May 2011.

Absquatulate

Absquatulate (pronounced ab-skwoch-uh-leyt)

To flee; abscond; decamp; run away.

1840: Absquatulate replaced the earlier absquotilate (attested from 1837), both being facetious coinages of pseudo-Latin: blendings of abscond +‎ squat +‎ perambulate with the middle portion probably influenced by -le (frequentative) and the dialectal term squattle (depart).  The source is contested.  It’s said to have been used on the London stage in the lines of the comical American character Nimrod Wildfire in the play The Kentuckian as edited by British author William Bayle Bernard (1807–1875) although there are references to it being in some editions of James Kirke Paulding’s (1778- 1860; US Secretary of the Navy 1838-1841) original script.  In an example of the language displacement caused by war (which would become more prevalent in the twentieth century), the US Civil War slang skedaddle replaced it; other synonyms in the sense of “quickly to leave” include abscond, decamp and the unfortunately rare vamoose.

Lunch aftermath: Lindsay Lohan in chunky platforms, absquatulating from the Café de Paris, Monte Carlo, June 2015.

Although absquatulate is wholly facetious, all agree the meaning has always been "to flee; abscond; decamp; run away" but the use to which it was put does hint that there was often some suggestion those absquatulating were doing so after stealing something or committing some other crime.  The word become sufficiently Latinized for a family of relations to emerge including absquatulation, absquatulated, absquatulater and absquatulative.  The latter-day creation abscotchalter was criminal-class slang describing someone hiding from the police; it seems now extinct except as a humorous literary device.

Election aftermath: Crooked Hillary Clinton in blue pantsuit absquatulates early, Washington DC, November 2016.

Psychosis

Psychosis (pronounced sahy-koh-sis)

In psychiatry, a severe mental disorder (sometimes with physical damage to the brain), more serious than neurosis, characterized by disorganized thought processes, disorientation in time and space, hallucinations, delusions and a disconnection from reality.  Paranoia, manic depression, megalomania, and schizophrenia are all psychoses.

1847: From the New Latin & Late Greek psȳ́chōsis, the construct being psycho- + -osis, the source being the Ancient Greek ψύχωσις (psúkhōsis) (animation, principle of life), psych from the Ancient Greek ψυχή (psukhḗ or psykhē) (mind, life, soul).  The suffix –osis is from the Ancient Greek -ωσις (-ōsis) (state, abnormal condition or action), from -όω (-óō) (stem verbs) + -σις (-sis); -oses was the plural form and corresponding adjectives are formed using –otic, thus respectively producing psychoses and psychotic.  The Ancient Greek psykhosis meant "a giving of life; animation; principle of life".  In English, the original 1847 construction meant "mental affection or derangement" while the adjective psychotic (of or pertaining to psychosis) dates from 1889, coined from psychosis, on the model of neurotic/neurosis and ultimately from the Ancient Greek psykhē (understanding, the mind (as the seat of thought), faculty of reason).  The adverb was psychotically, the comparative of which is more psychotically and the superlative most psychotically, both occasionally useful.

Psychosis and the DSM

The word psychosis was a mid-nineteenth century creation necessitated by early psychiatry’s separation of psychiatric conditions from neurological disorders.  Originally a generalized concept to refer to psychiatric disorders, gradually it became one of the major classes of mental illness, assumed to be the result of a disease process, and, more recently, to a symptom present in many psychiatric disorders.  During this evolution, the diagnostic criteria shifted from the severity of the clinical manifestations and the degree of impairment in social functioning to the presence of one or more symptoms in a set of psychopathological symptoms.  By the early twentieth century, the concept of neurosis (which once embraced both the psychiatric and the neurological disorders), became restricted to one major class of psychiatric disease whereas psychosis (which once embraced all psychiatric disorders) became restricted to the other.

The first consensus-based classification with a description of diagnostic terms was in the first edition of the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I (1952)) in which mental disorders were divided into two classes of illness: (1) organic disorders, caused by or associated with impairment of brain tissue function; and (2) disorders of psychogenic origin without clearly defined physical cause or structural changes in the brain.  When DSM-II was released in 1968, the classifications were revised with mental disorders now classed as (1) psychoses and (2) neuroses, personality disorders, and other non-psychotic mental disorders.  Psychosis was defined as a mental disorder in which mental functioning is impaired to the degree that it interferes with the patient's ability to meet the ordinary demands of life and recognize reality.

Advances in both neurology and psychiatry led to an extensive revision in DSM-III (1980).  Radically, all traditional dichotomies (organic versus functional, psychotic versus neurotic et al) were discarded with psychiatric syndromes assigned to one of fifteen categories of disease.  At the labelling level, the term psychotic was used to describe a patient at a given time, or a mental disorder in which at some time during its course, all patients evaluate incorrectly the accuracy of their perceptions and thoughts but the editors emphasized it should not be applied to patients suffering only minor distortions of reality, regardless of how exactly they might fulfil the clinical criteria.  The revisions in DSM-III-R (1987) extended only to slight changes in terminology.

Mirroring the changes in diagnostic criteria published by the WHO, DSM-IV (1994) noted the diagnosis of psychosis should no longer be based on the severity of the functional impairment but rather on the presence of certain symptoms which included delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior.  This emphasis on psychoses being spectrum conditions was continued in DSM-5 (2013) with schizoid (personality) disorder and schizophrenia defining its mild and severe ends.  Additionally, a more precise diagnostic framework was defined in which patients were assessed in terms both of symptoms and duration of suffering.

Two examples of schizophrenia in art.

My Eyes in the Time of Apparition (1913) by August Natterer.

The life of German artist August Natterer (1868-1938) began innocuously enough, studying engineering, travelling extensively, marrying and building a successful career as an electrician.  However, in his thirties, he began to experience anxiety attacks and delusions and in 1907 suffered a hallucination in which thousands of images flashed before his eyes in little more than thirty minutes.  So affected by the experience that he attempted suicide, he was admitted to an asylum and would spend the remaining quarter-century of his life in and out of institutes for the insane.  In the literature, Natterer is referred to as Neter, a pseudonym used by his psychiatrist to protect patient and family from the social stigma then associated with mental illness.  He described the 1907 hallucination as a vision of the Last Judgment which he described as:

"...10,000 images flashed by in half an hour.  I saw a white spot in the clouds absolutely close – all the clouds paused – then the white spot departed and stood all the time like a board in the sky. On the same board or the screen or stage now images as quick as a flash followed each other, about 10,000 in half an hour… God himself occurred, the witch, who created the world – in between worldly visions: images of war, continents, memorials, castles, beautiful castles, just the glory of the world – but all of this to see in supernal images. They were at least twenty meters big, clear to observe, almost without color like photographs… The images were epiphanies of the Last Judgment. Christ couldn't fulfil the salvation because he was crucified early... God revealed them to me to accomplish the salvation."

After his suicide attempt and committal to the first of what would be several mental asylums, Natterer thereafter maintained that he was the illegitimate child of Emperor Napoleon I and "Redeemer of the World".  The vision inspired Natterer to a prolific production of drawings, all documenting images and ideas seen in the vision, one especially interesting to those studying psychosis and schizophrenia being My Eyes in the Time of Apparition (1913), two eyes bloodshot and wide-open eyes staring from the page.  The irises of the eyes do not match.

The Scream (1893) by Edvard Munch.

Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was one of a number of artists modern psychiatrists have written of as having both genetic and environmental predispositions to mental illness, schizophrenia in particular; one of Munch’s sisters had schizophrenia, his father suffered from depression, his mother and another sister dying from tuberculosis when he was young.  Munch though was a realist, once telling an interviewer, “I cannot get rid of my illnesses, for there is a lot in my art that exists only because of them.”

His was a troubled life and in 1908, following a psychotic break exacerbated by alcoholism, Munch was admitted to a mental health clinic, later diagnosed with neurasthenia, a clinical condition now known to be closely associated with hypochondria and hysteria.  Adding to his problems, the Nazis labelled Munch’s work as “degenerate art” and in 1937 confiscated many of his works but their disapprobation had less of an influence on his painting than his schizophrenia, his output continuing to feature figures obviously tortured by anguish and despair.  The apparently frantic strokes of the brush and his seemingly chaotic pallet of colors have long intrigued both critics and clinicians seeing insight into his state of mind, the idea being his paintings provide something of a visual representation of how schizophrenia might lead individuals to see the world.

Lindsay Lohan in a theme of blue, following Edvard Munch.

Endlessly reproduced, the subject of numerous memes and the inspiration for many re-interpretations, The Scream is easily Munch’s most famous work and probably the most emblematic of what now is called “schizophrenic art”.  For decades it has been the chosen artistic representation for what is regarded as the angst-ridden modern human condition and when discussing it, Munch once described walking with two friends when the sky suddenly turned blood red, causing him to “tremble with pain and angst”, and he felt he heard his “…scream passing endlessly through the world.”

Immiserate

Immiserate (pronounced ih-mis-uh-reyt)

(1) To cause to become impoverished.

(2) To make miserable (a contested meaning).

Circa 1656: A translation of the German Verelendung (to sink into misery), the origin being the New Latin immiserāre & immiserāt- (both derived from miser (wreched), the construct in German being ver- (the causative prefix) + Elend (poverty).  Although it appeared in words concerned with the state of the working class during the industrial revolution, the word surged in use (as both immiseration & immiserate) during the 1950s although it had appeared in papers published in journals of economics as early as 1940, use noted especially in critiques of the European colonial empires, then in their early stages of dissolution although this was at the time by many either not realized or ignored.  The paradox of use increasing during the 1950s (a time when, in the West, real-wage outcomes for workers were (unusually) tending to improve) is thought a function of the vast increase in the publication rate of books and periodicals concerned with economics.  Im- was from the Middle English in- from the Old English in- (in, into (prefix)), from the Proto-Germanic in, from the primitive Indo-European en.  Misery was borrowed from the Old French miserie (from which Modern French gained misère), from the Latin miseria (from miser).  The suffix –ation was from the Middle English –acioun & -acion, from the Old French acion & -ation, from the Latin -ātiō, an alternative form of -tiō (from whence –tion).  Immiserate, immiserating, immiserates & immiserated are verbs and immiseration is a noun; the noun plural is immiserations.  Perhaps surprisingly, neither economists nor political scientists seem to have been tempted to coin immiserative. 

Wage growth and the money supply

David Ricardo (circa 1821), oil on canvas by Thomas Phillips (1770–1845), National Portrait Gallery, London.

In Marxist theory, the immiseration thesis (emiseration thesis in some translations) suggests the nature of capitalist production tends to stabilizes real wages, flattening wage growth relative to the money supply (however measured) in the economy, thus sustaining the ever-increasing power of capital over labour.  The theory has been refined in recent years to reflect also the way technological innovation has lowered demand for labor relative to plant and other capital equipment.  Karl Marx's (1818-1883) early (1840s) work reflected the influence of English economist David Ricardo's (1772–1823) wage theory which held wages will tend towards a subsistence minimum.  Marx however was an empiricist and his observations of industrial societies noted the working class didn’t necessarily suffer an absolute decline in living standards and by the 1850s was suggesting instead the most important metric was the relative immiseration of workers vis-à-vis capital.

Until the twenty-first century, the most innovative work on the thesis concerned the implications of technological change (the displacement of labor by machines) but in recent years, there’s been much attention to the ownership of assets and capital in an era which has seen an extraordinary rise in the money supply, induced firstly by the so-called Greenspan put (1987 on) and later, in the wake of the (2008-2011) global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing quantitative easing by many central banks.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, 2011.

Dictionaries are divided on whether immiserate really has the alternative meaning "to make miserable".  Some list the meaning without comment while others suggest the use (which must be rare) began as a mistake which was repeated.  There are dictionaries which are prescriptive (stating what the language should be) and those which are descriptive (recording how the language actually is used) but there seems no correlation between this and views of immiserate's allegedly alternative meaning.  The idea that there is some connection between poverty and misery does seem uncontroversial and while the dreary phrase "money doesn't buy happiness" is often repeated, a probably more helpful observation was that attributed to George Bernard Shaw (GBS, 1856-1950): "Money might not buy happiness but given the choice, one would rather be rich and miserable than poor and miserable".    

Obelus

Obelus (pronounced ob-uh-luhs)

(1) A mark (− or ÷) used in ancient manuscripts to point out spurious, corrupt, doubtful, or superfluous words or passages.

(2) Another name for dagger (obsolete).

(3) As a dagger mark (†),used as a reference mark in printed matter, or (historically) to indicate that a person is deceased; now most often used to indicate a footnote.

(4) A mark (÷) used to represent division in mathematics.

1350–1400: A Middle English borrowing from the Late Latin from the Ancient Greek ὀβελός (obelós) (spit; pointed pillar).  The origin is something of a mystery, thought possibly an alteration of βέλος (bélos) but the initial vocal cannot be accounted for.  Etymologists agree the word is pre-Greek but there’s never been any evidence to suggest the source.  Obelus is a noun; the noun plural is obeli.

Said to be a creation of the Homeric scholar Zenodotus, the obelus was one of a system of editorial symbols used to enhance the meaning of documents.  The original use was twofold, a horizontal line indicating a critical mark to point out that a passage was spurious, but with one point below and one above (÷) (ὀβελὸς περιστιγμένος (obelòs peristigménos)) it denoted superfluous passages; these device were used especially in philosophical texts.  The original Zenodotuian set was expanded, firstly by Aristophanes of Byzantium (who invented the asterisk) and, in their most systematized form, by Aristarchus, thus the usually applied term Aristarchian symbols.  The dagger symbol, a later variant of the obelus, depicted an iron roasting spit, a dart, or the sharp end of a javelin, the symbolism suggesting a cutting-out of dubious material and remains common in modern typography.

Dagger obeli

In mathematics, the obelus is still used throughout the English-speaking world as the division sign, a use dating from an appearance in Teutsche Algebra (1659) by Swiss mathematician Johann Rahn.  That was accepted for centuries and endured even after the onset of modernity because the early mechanical adding-machines and electronic calculators included ÷ as the division key but, from the early-1980s, when IBM (more or less) standardized computer keyboards, a ÷ wasn’t included and software instead used the slash (/) for division.  Interestingly, although the asterisk (*) was used to perform the multiplication function, the necessary survival of the x on keyboards has meant the * has tended to be restricted to multiplication in software formulae and x is used in general text and equations.  The ISO 80000-2 standard for mathematical notation recommends only the slash (solidus or fraction bar) for division.  There is however a faction of mathematicians who have use neither for the ÷ or the -.  These purists insist there’s no such thing as division or subtraction, the operations respectively actually multiplication by fractions and the addition of negatives.   

Camembert & Brie

Camembert (pronounced kam-uhm-bair or ka-mahn-ber (French))

(1) A village in the Normandy region of France.

(2) A mellow, soft cheese, the center of which is creamy and of a golden cream color, made from cow's milk.

1867: The cheese is named after Camembert, the village near Argentan, Normandy where it originated.  The village name was from the Medieval Latin Maimberti (field of Maimbert), a West Germanic personal name derived from the Proto-Germanic maginą (strength, power, might) and the Proto-Germanic berhtaz (bright).  A rich, sweet, yellowish cream-cheese with the name Camembert was first sold in 1867, but the familiar, modern form of the cheese dates from 1792).  Camembert is a masculine form; the strong, genitive Camembertes or Camemberts and there is no plural.  The hobby of collecting camembert cheese labels is known as tyrosemiophily which is obviously a specialist niche in the collector world but among those who cast a wider net, the world's largest collection of cheese labels said to number over a quarter-million.  

Brie (pronounced bree)

(1) A mainly agricultural region in north-east France, between the Seine and the Marne, noted especially for its cheese.

(2) A salted, creamy, white, soft cheese, ripened with bacterial action, originating in Brie and made from cow's milk.

(3) A female given name (with the spelling variant Bree), from the French geographical region but also as a truncation of Brianna.

1848 (the cheese): The name of the cheese is derived from the name of the district in department Seine-et-Marne, southeast of Paris, the source being the Gaulish briga (hill, height).  The English brier (a type of tobacco pipe introduced circa 1859) is unrelated to the cheese or the region in France which shares the name.  The pipes were made from the root of the Erica arborea shrub from the south of France and Corsica, from the French bruyère (heath plant) from the twelfth century Old French bruiere (heather, briar, heathland, moor), from the Gallo-Roman brucaria, from the Late Latin brucus (heather), from the Gaulish bruko- (thought linked with the Breton brug (heath), the Welsh brwg and the Old Irish froech).  The noun plural is bries.

Before the French crown assumed full-control in the thirteenth century, the region of Brie was from the ninth century divided into three sections ruled by different feudal lords, (1) the western Brie française (controlled by the King of France), corresponding approximately to the modern department of Seine-et-Marne in the Île-de-France region, (2) the eastern Brie champenoise (controlled by the duke of Champagne), forming a portion of the modern department of Marne in the historic region of Champagne (part of modern-day Grand Est) and (3) the northern Brie pouilleuse, forming part of the modern department of Aisne in Picardy.  As well as the cheese, Brie is noted for the culturing of roses, introduced circa 1795 by the French explorer Admiral Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville (1729–1811).  Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Bougainville Island and the Bougainvillea flower were both named after him.

Whipped brie dip.

A trick of commercial caterers, wedding planners and others who have to gain the maximum visual value from the food budget is whipped brie dip.  Often a feature of charcuterie boards or a flourish at wine & cheese events, apart from the taste, the main attraction is that aerating brie almost doubles its volume, making it a cost-effective component.  Technically, the reason the technique works so well as a base is the aeration increases the surface area of the material which comes into contact with the taste receptors.  There are few rules about what goes into a whipped brie dip although honey, salty bacon & lemon-infused thyme tend often to be used, some including crushed walnuts.  Timing has to be managed because it’s at its best just after being prepared and served at room temperature; if it’s chilled it sets hard and becomes difficult to spread and will break any cracker being dipped.  So, it can be a last-minute task but preparation time is brief and it’s worth it.

Brie & Camembert

Wheel of camembert.

Both thought delicious by cheese fiends, brie & camembert are often confused because the appearance is so similar, both soft, creamy cheeses with an edible white rind and tending to be sold in wheels (squat little cylinders) though it’s easier to tell the difference with cheeses made in France because there they usually maintain the convention that a camembert will be smaller (unless it’s a baby brie or petit brie which will be indicated on the label).  Because most brie is matured in larger wheels, it’s often sold in wedges, rare among camembert because the wheels are so small.  However, in the barbaric English-speaking world where anything goes, brie is sometimes sold in smaller sizes.  Traditionally, like most, they were farmhouse cheeses, but have long been produced mostly in larger artisanal cheeseries or on an industrial scale.

Wheel of Brie.

Both originally created using unpasteurized cow's milk, thanks to the dictatorial ways of humorless EU eurocrats and their vendetta against raw milk, they’re now almost always made with pasteurized milk although there remain two AOP (Appellation d'origine protégée (Protected designation of origin)) unpasteurised bries, brie de Meaux & brie de Melun and one AOP camembert, camembert de Normandie, said best to be enjoyed with French cider.  As a cheese, brie is characterized as being refined, polite and smooth whereas a camembert is more rustic, the taste and texture earthier (food critics like to say it has more of a “mushroomy taste”), cream being added to the curd of brie which lends it a milder, more buttery finish and double and triple brie are even more so.  To ensure the integrity of the brand, French agricultural law demands that a double-cream cheese must contain 60-70% butterfat (which results a fat content around 30%+ in the finished product.  Although variations exist, according to calorieking.com.au, brie contains 30.5g fat and 18.5g protein per 100g and the same amount of camembert, 25g fat and 19.5g protein.

Visually, if left for a while at room temperature, it’s easier to tell the difference because a camembert will melt whereas brie will retain its structure.  Because of the marked propensity to melt into something truly gooey, camembert is often used in cooking, sometimes baked and paired with cranberry sauce or walnuts but. Like brie, is also a staple of cheese plates, served with things like grapes or figs and eaten with crackers, crusty bread and just about any variety of wine.  One local tradition in the Brie region was the Brie Noir (a type of longer-ripened brie) which villagers dipped into their café au lait over breakfast.

Salvador Dalí’s (1904-1989) most reproduced and best-known painting, La persistència de la memòria (The persistence of memory (1931), left) is best known by the more evocative title “Melting clocks”.  Amused at the suggestion the flaccidity of the watches was a surreal pondering of the implications of Albert Einstein's (1879-1955) theory of special relativity (1905), Dalí provided an earthier explanation, saying his inspiration came from imagining a wheel of camembert melting in a Catalan summer sun.  Dali's distortions were of course a deliberate device.  Celebrities who manage inadvertently to produce their own (right) by not quite mastering Photoshop or other image-editing software quickly find the internet an unforgiving critic.  For better or worse, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has now reached the point where such manipulation is often close to undetectable.

Turkey, camembert and cranberry pizza (serves 4)

Ingredients

4 medium pita breads
Olive oil spray
120ml cranberry sauce
1 small garlic clove, minced
80g camembert, sliced and torn
200g lean shaved turkey breast
8 table spoons parmesan cheese
1 cup rocket leaves

Instructions

(1) Heat oven to 390°F (200°C) conventional or 360°F (180°C) fan-forced and line 2 oven trays with baking paper.

(2) Place pita bread on trays and spray lightly with olive oil.

(3) Mix cranberry sauce with garlic and smear onto the pita bread.

(4) Top with camembert, shaved turkey and finish with a sprinkling of parmesan.

(5) Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes until golden and the cheese has melted.

(6) Remove from the oven, sprinkle over rocket leaves and serve.

Phyllo-Wrapped Brie With Hot Honey and Anchovies (serves 10-12)

Ingredients

¼ cup chopped roasted red bell pepper (pre-packaged is fine as well as fresh)
3 oil-packed anchovy fillets, minced
1 garlic clove, finely grated or minced
¾ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1 pound phyllo (or filo) dough (must be thawed if bought frozen)
10 tablespoons (1¼ sticks) unsalted butter, melted
1 large (about 26 ounces (750 grams)) wheel of Brie
Hot honey (or regular honey (see below)) for serving
Crackers and/or sliced bread, for serving

Instructions

(1) Heat the oven to 425°F (220°F). In a small bowl, stir together the roasted bell pepper, anchovies, garlic, and lemon zest. Set aside.

(2) On a clean work surface, lay out the phyllo dough and cover it with a barely damp kitchen towel to keep it from drying out. Take 2 phyllo sheets and lay them in an 11 × 17-inch rimmed baking sheet. Brush the top sheet generously with melted butter, then lay another 2 phyllo sheets on top the opposite way, so they cross in the center and are perpendicular to the first two (like making a plus sign). Brush the top sheet with butter. Repeat the layers, reserving 4 sheets of phyllo.

(3) Using a long sharp kitchen knife, halve the Brie horizontally and lay one half, cut-side up, in the center of the phyllo (you will probably need another set of hands to help lift off the top layer of cheese). Then spread the red pepper mixture all over the top. Cover with the other half of Brie, cut-side down, and then fold the phyllo pieces up around the Brie. There will be a space in the center on top where the Brie is uncovered, and that’s okay.

(4) Lightly crumple one of the remaining sheets of phyllo and place it on top of the phyllo/Brie package to cover up that space. Drizzle a little butter on top, then repeat with the remaining phyllo sheets, scattering them over the top of the pastry and drizzling a little butter each time. It may look messy but will bake up into gorgeous golden waves of pastry, so fear not.

(5) Bake until the phyllo is golden, 20 to 25 minutes. Remove it from the oven and let it rest for about 15 minutes before drizzling it with the hot honey. Slice (it will be runny) and serve with crackers or bread, and with more hot honey as needed.

Most baked Bries tend to the sweet with layers of jam or chutney beneath the crust but this is a savoury variation using anchovies, garlic, and roasted bell peppers.  A drizzle of honey and the pinch of lemon zest lends the dish a complexity and for the best effect it should be served straight from the oven because that’s when the brie is at its most seductively gooey.  It’s ideal with crisp crackers or crusty bread for crunch.  The hot honey is a bit of a novelty and those who want to enhance or tone-down the effect can create their own by stirring a pinch or more of cayenne into any mild honey.

Diatessaron

Diatessaron (pronounced dahy-uh-tes-er-uhn)

(1) In theology, a conflation of the four Gospels of the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) into a single narrative.

(2) In the musical notation of Ancient Greek music, the interval of a fourth (obsolete).

(3) An electuary compounded of four medicines (obsolete).

1375-1400: From the Late Latin, from the Ancient Greek dia tessarōn khordōn sumphōnia (concord through four notes), the construct being διά (diá) (composed of (literally through)) + τεσσάρων (tessárōn) (every fourth).  Tessárōn was the genitive plural of τέσσαρες (téssares) (four).  Diatessaron is a noun; the noun plural is diatessara or diatessarons.

In Europe, the word was for centuries used as a technical term in music meaning "interval of a fourth" and in 1803 it was adopted in theological publishing to describe the harmonizing of the four biblical gospels, something done informally for centuries.  The use in the early medicinal preparations began with apothecaries defining certain electuaries as diatessarons if they were made from four base ingredients but the use soon faded.  An electuary is any medicine mixed with honey or other sweetener in order to make it more palatable to swallow and is from the Late Latin electuarium (of unknown origin but likely a corruption of the Ancient Greek ἐκλεικτόν (ekleiktón) (medicine that melts in the mouth; medicine which can be licked-up; lozenge, jujube) from ἐκλείχω (ekleíkhō) (to lick up; I lick up), the construct being ἐκ (ek) (out, from) + λείχω (leíkhō) (I lick)).

Folio 4v of the Rabula Gospels (Florence, Biblioteca Mediceo Laurenziana) Canon Tables.

The Christian New Testament begins with the story of Jesus rendered as  four versions of the story of Jesus, each more or less complete. These accounts of Jesus’ life, the gospels (meaning “good story”), are each named after its purported author, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and each relates a narrative of the life of  Jesus and his ministry, all in in theological terms. Three of these gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are very similar, and are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels; John is quite different.  In academic theology, The Diatessaron is described as “a harmonized gospel”, a text created by taking the four “standard gospels” and weaving them into one story.  Medieval scholars believed there was one original Diatessaron written during the second century by an individual named Tatian but it’s long been thought most probable that several gospel harmonies (or Diatessarons were) created between the second and fourth centuries and in one form or another, the Diatessaron was one of the pre-eminent Gospel texts in the Syriac-speaking churches of the east until the fifth century when, under the influence of the western church which maintained the tradition of four separate gospels, the harmonized versions began to be supplanted by the four.

Despite that change (which spread with typical efficiency in the institutional Church), the Diatessaron remained for centuries a document of importance to individual Christians and even some clerics, despite the loss of canonical status.  Speculation has long surrounded to origin of the Diatessarons for there exists no documentary evidence.  Most scholars seem to believe the motives of the early authors were pragmatic, a single text more suitable to use a teaching device to a population which was substantially unschooled and often illiterate.  There was also some sensitivity to the criticism from Christianity’s early enemies which focused often on the inconsistencies between the gospels, each difference in detail seized upon as might a barrister in cross-examination highlight contradictions in the evidence offered by a witness.  As a literary device, the concept of harmonization was anyway accepted and known since Antiquity and scholars had even then known the four individual gospels had themselves been harmonized from earlier texts.  Moreover, the Gospels are interpretive texts, drawing and editing passages from the Hebrew Bible to support the veracity of their narrative, citing those texts as required so structurally, harmonization is a form of interpretation.  To understand the extent to which the Diatessarons might be thought of as cross-cutting interpolations (and certainly not deconstructions) of the four gospels, they're best viewed in tabular form, the columns arranged spreadsheet-like.  Dr Naomi Koltun-Fromm (b 1964) of Haverford College, Pennsylvania has written a fine piece using this format.