Teal

Teal (pronounced teel)

(1) Any of several species of small dabbling, short-necked freshwater ducks (such as the Eurasian Anas crecca (common teal)), of worldwide distribution and related to the mallard, travelling usually in tight flocks and frequenting ponds, lakes and marshes.

(2) A color, a medium to dark greenish blue, often mixed with traces of azure, beryl, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, navy, royal, sapphire, turquoise & ultramarine, also called teal blue and (rarely) tealturquoise, peacockblue or blueteal.

(3) As TEAl, the abbreviation of triethylaluminium (in organic chemistry, a volatile organometallic compound (Al₂(C₂H₅)₆ or Al₂Et₆) used in various chemical processes and as an ignitor in rockets and jet engines.)

(4) As TEAL, the (historical) initialism of Tasman Empire Airways Limited, the forerunner to Air New Zealand.

(5) A collective descriptor informally adopted to refer to certain nominally independent candidates contesting certain electorates in the 2022 Australian general election.

1275-1375: From Middle English tele (small freshwater duck), probably from the (unrecorded) Old English tǣle and cognate with the Middle Low German tēlink, from the from West Germanic taili, from the West Frisian tjilling (teal) and the Middle Dutch tēling (teal (source of the Modern Dutch taling)).  The Middle Low German tēlink, was from the Proto-Germanic tailijaz, of unknown ultimate origin, with no cognates outside of Germanic.  As the name of a shade of dark greenish-blue resembling the color patterns on the fowl's head and wings, it is attested from 1923 in clothing advertisements, thereby joining the long list of variations of descriptions of the variations in the shades of blue including: blue; Alice blue, aqua, aquamarine, azure, baby blue, beryl, bice, bice blue, blue green, blue violet, blueberry, cadet blue, Cambridge blue, cerulean, cobalt blue, Copenhagen blue, cornflower, cornflower blue, cyan, dark blue, Dodger blue, duck-egg blue, eggshell blue, electric-blue, gentian blue, ice blue, lapis lazuli, light blue, lovat, mazarine, midnight blue, navy, Nile blue, Oxford blue, peacock blue, petrol blue, powder blue, Prussian blue, robin's-egg blue, royal blue, sapphire, saxe blue, slate blue, sky blue, teal, turquoise, ultramarine, Wedgwood blue & zaffre.  Teal is a noun & adjective and tealish is an adjective; the noun plural is teal or (especially collectively), teals.  The spelling teale is obsolete.

Teal sample by Canva.

Teal’s hexadecimal code is #008080 with RGB values of R: 0, G: 50.2, B: 50.2 and CMYK values of C: 1, M: 0, Y: 0, K:0.5, a hue angle of 180^o, a saturation of 100% and a lightness of 25.1%.  According to the authoritative Canva, for Tibetan monks it was symbolic of the infinity of the sea and sky and for Egyptians, the color of truth and faith.  Discussing the color, Adobe’s editors were almost lyrical, suggesting readers “picture the warm ocean waves in Baja California, made of that color that isn’t quite blue and isn’t quite green.  The water brings in the cool side of summer.”  That’s evocative but the website goes on to note before it was a color it was the name of a bird, “teal” adopted for the blueish-green (or greenish-blue) only in 1917, the reference being to the area around the eye of the Eurasian teal duck.

Carmignano Visitation (circa 1529), oil on panel by Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci; 1494–1557), propositura dei Santi Michele e Francesco, Carmignano, Italy.

The artist’s use of a startling tealish blue for the robe is thought a deliberate choice to emphasize Mary's exalted place in Christian theology.  In Christianity, the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (clipped usually in general use to “the Visitation”), refers to the visit of Mary, the pregnant with Jesus, to Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, the story told in the Gospel of Luke (1:39–56).  Traditionally, the Christian feast day commemorating this visit appeared in ecclesiastical calendars on 2 July (Western) or 30 March (orthodox) but in some churches in the West it’s now celebrated on 31 May.

1996 Lancia Y LX-in Grigio Steel over teal Alcantara.

Historically, blue pigment was both expensive and rare; while in the natural environment sources of green were, it was difficult for chemists to create dyes and pigments in blue which did not rapidly (and often inconsistently) fade.  In commerce, because both blue and green pigment were needed to make teal, the blend came to be considered a color of elevated status (and thus price).  The special place of blue (in its time Prussian blue was revolutionary) was reprised in the electronic age when the blue LED (light emitting diode) proved an elusive target.  Although a blue LED had been created as early as 1972 (US Patent US3819974 A granted in 1974), the glow was faint because the materials used in the 1960s & 1970s for red & green LEDs (gallium arsenide (GaAs) or gallium phosphide (GaP) lacked the necessary width in bandgap (in physics the energy difference between two allowed ranges of electron energy in a solid).  Not until the early 1990s did researchers find the method of growing high-quality Gallium Nitride (GaN) at scale on sapphire substrates did the blue LED become technically and commercially viable and with it came the white LED (made possible by combining blue light with yellow phosphor).  That gained the researchers the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics and the white LED has revolutionized illumination (for birth screens and lighting) and achieved massive energy savings worldwide.

TEAL Lockheed L-188 Electra ZK-TEB 1963 (left) & 1965 (right).  The TEAL livery was retained when the corporate name was changed in 1965, the aircraft not immediately re-painted, “Air New Zealand” replacing “TEAL JET PROP” on the fuselage as required by the rules of the Convention on International Civil Aviation (1944).

The airline TEAL (Tasman Empire Airways Limited) emerged from the Tasman Sea Agreement, an intergovernmental treaty between the Australia, New Zealand and the UK, concluded in London early in 1940.  The purpose of the operation was to provide for the trans-Tasman traffic of passengers, cargo and mail, something which had been disrupted by the outbreak of hostilities in 1939.  In the manner of a number of wartime agreements, the treaty contained a sunset clause which stipulated a termination within three months of the end of the war with Germany but such was the state of post-war civil aviation that arrangements were carried over and pre-war practices did not return to the trans-Tasman route until 1954.  As part of that re-organization, the shareholdings, which previously had been spread between the New Zealand Government (20%), Union Airways (19%), BOAC (38%) and Qantas (23%), were dissolved and the two governments assumed co-ownership until 1961 when both decided to maintain separate national carriers, TEAL and Qantas, the relationship having been strained since the Australians had insisted TEAL order the turboprop Lockheed Electra to maintain fleet standardization with Qantas while the New Zealanders wanted to upgrade to jets.  In 1965, TEAL was re-named Air New Zealand.

Lindsay Lohan in teal, Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards (2004, left), publicity shot in Greece (2019, centre) & premiere of Mean Girls (2004).

Trooping the color: The teal mafia out campaigning in the Wentworth electorate, Australian general election 2022.

The so-called “teal independents” are a number of nominally independent candidates contesting certain electorates in the 2022 Australian general election.  The teal candidates on which there has been much focus are almost all professional women drawn from outside professional politics, contesting nominally “safe” Liberal Party seats in which there’s a higher than average interest in progressive issues, especially climate change.  The use of the color teal is thought an allusion to the mixing of blue and green, blue a reference either to the “blue-blood” demographic profile of the electorates or it being the traditional color associated with conservative politics and green the environmental consciousness which the teals are making a focus of their campaigns.  Former Liberal Party prime-minister John Howard (b 1939; prime-minister 1996-2007) was not impressed by the practice of styling the teals as “independents”, claiming it was misleading given the source of some of their funding and logistical support from entities which would in the US be understood as PACs (political action committees), entities which combined lobbying with activism on specific issues.  Mr Howard suggested the teals were merely “…posing as independents” and were really “…anti-Liberal groupies”, their aim being “…to hurt the Liberal party, not to represent the middle ground of their electorates” adding “They don’t represent disgruntled Liberals.  They represent a group in the community that wants to destroy the Liberal government. It’s as simple as that.”

Flags of the Liberal Party of Australian and Australian Labor Party (ALP).

Mr Howard was right in that the consequences really are simple as that: if a sufficient number of teals are successful, they will hurt the Liberal party and destroy the Liberal-National coalition government but where the teals would differ from the former prime-minister is in not conflating cause with effect.  The teal candidates have well expressed (if not especially detailed) policy objectives and are seeking to destroy the government because they wish to see alternative policies pursued and about that, voters will agree, disagree or remain indifferent.  What attracted most attention however was Mr Howard’s choice of the word “groupies” to refer to the (mostly female) teals, one critic noting an analysis of the composition of the four ministries he formed while prime-minister did suggest he was inclined to appoint women to the “touchy-feely” portfolios dealing with people while the men got the meatier appointments.

On the books of the central Arizona town of Sedona is an ordinance banning brightly colored signs or buildings, an admirable law intended to limit the jarring intrusions of commerce on the visual environment.  In Sedona, the "golden arches" of McDonalds are teal-blue.

That aside, he does have a point about the word “independent” being misleading.  Historically, in Australia, it’s been understood as meaning a candidate for or member of a parliament who is not a member of a political party (within the legally-defined meaning).  That the teals are not but, though not a conventional party, the teal thing is clearly a concept, a movement or something else beyond a mere state of mind and parts of it are a framework providing the candidates with financial and administrative assistance in a more structured way that that of local volunteers.  The teals (not all of whom use the color in their advertising, one in particular running a “pink” campaign) have also been the victims of some ambush marketing, complaining that others were now muddying the waters by sending out teal-colored flyers.  They might have some difficulty in enforcing an exclusivity of right on a color, about the only restriction enforced is on purple which can’t be used in circumstances where it might be confused with something from the Australian Electoral commission which most jealously guards its purple.  Nor is some fluidity of meaning unknown in Australian politics.  During the 1970s and 1980s, in the Victorian Labor Party, although an apparent contradiction in terms, a faction was formed called the “Independents”, a faction self-described by its members as being a faction for those “who disliked factional politics”.  It was novel then and unthinkable now but happened at a time when the Left had been neutralized by federal intervention and the Right was still obsessed with the DLP (the Democratic Labor Party, the even more right-wing Roman-Catholic breakaway which was until the emergence of One Nation the worst form of political excrement to enjoy significant electoral success) and the Cold War.  There was a gap in the market.

Flags of the Australian National Party & the Australian Greens.

Teal as blend of blue and green imparting political meaning works in Australia because the use of the colors red (of the left), blue (of the right) & green (of the greenies) is well understood.  Even the historic association of the National Party with green doesn’t cause confusion.  The National Party (originally the Country Party and briefly in some places the National-Country Party), had always used green to reflect their agrarian origins but adapted well in the 1980s to the emergence of formalized Green parties (which of course chose green for semiotic purposes).  Pragmatists, the Nationals, operating as usual like horse-traders, settled on a slightly darker shade with gold lettering, the traditional Australian sporting livery.  Briefly, the Nationals had flirted with shades of brown, the idea being to convey “the people of the soil” but the idea was quickly abandoned, not because brown was so associated with the Nazis (the Braunes Haus (Brown House)) was their early Munich headquarters and the Surmabteilung (the SA and literally "Storm Detachment" but usually called storm-troopers) were street thugs known as the “brownshirts” because of their uniform) but because brown is such an unappealing colour and difficult for graphic artists to handle.         

Crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) liked teal pantsuits and retained a fondness for the shade, even as the cut of her clothes became more accommodating.

The origin of red being associated with the politics of radicalism and revolution is generally assumed to date from the use in the French revolution where the idea was to represent the blood spilled in the overthrow of the ancien régime although the shade used should perhaps have been darkened a little in the years that followed as the revolution began “to consume its children”.  Around the planet, colors are widely used as political identifiers and, with different traditions of use and history of origin, there’s a wide divergence of meaning; what a color in one country conveys can mean the opposite in another.  There’s also the point that at one, important level, a color is just a color and the choice, even for political purposes, may be purely on aesthetic grounds:  Hitler made no secret that he choose red, white and black as for the early depictions of the swastika and other Nazi imagery because his ideological opponents, the communists, had used it with such success.  Among the best known color adoptions are orange and green in Ireland, yellow and red in Thailand and black by the so-called Islamic State (داعش, Dāʿish) and a number of Islamist and Islamic fundamentalist movements (as a symbol of jihad), saffron in India because of the traditional association with Hinduism and the Hindu nationalist movement.  The association of certain blue & red with political parties or ideologies is fairly consistent in the English-speaking world except for the curious pattern of use in the United States.

Flags of the US Republican Party (Elephants) & US Democrat Party (Donkeys).

In the US, although the idea of blue states (Democrats) and red states (Republicans) is now entrenched as part of the political lexicon, it's been that way only for two decades odd.  Red and blue had long been used to illustrate the US electoral map but there was never any consistency in how they were allotted to the parties and in some elections, different television networks might use them differently or even use different colors entirely, one of the considerations being what worked best on the then novel medium of color television.  The other influence was possibly political culture, there being in the US little tradition of a mainstream, radical party of the left so the red-blue contrast as it was understood elsewhere in the English-speaking world didn't register in the same way.  It was in the 2000 presidential election that the television networks agreed to standardize the red and blue designations for Republicans and Democrats, the incentive simply one of convenience in the reporting of the drawn-out Electoral College numbers that year.  As the red and blue imagery flowed across screens for weeks before the numbers were settled, the color associations became set in stone.

Shades of purple, the US 2004 presidential election: outcomes from Electoral College represented by state (left) and county (right). 

The idea of the US as a divided society of red states (emblematically the fly-overs) and blue states (with populations on the corrupting coastlines) is graphically illustrated when the states are colored according to the winner-takes-all system electoral college system but if the red-blue map is instead constructed county by county, a more nuanced spectrum emerges as one that is in shades of purple (purple a mix of red & blue as teal is of green & blue).  The US is a country of divisions and many of the cleavages are cross-cutting but the state by state maps do exaggerate the extent of the political polarization.

2021 McLaren GT Coupé in teal (Serpentine in the McLaren color chart).

Exorcise

Exorcise (pronounced ek-sawr-sahyz)

To seek to expel from a person or place an evil spirit by means of adjuration or solemn religious ceremonies.

1350-1400: Use of the verb predated this date but formerly it entered Middle English from the fourteenth century Old French exorciser from the Late Latin exorcizāre, derived from the Ancient Greek exorkízein (bind by oath; banish an evil spirit) and the sense "call up evil spirits to drive them out" was dominant by the sixteenth century.  In England, exorcize was actually an alternative spelling but this is now one the rare instances in English where the US adopted -ise rather than -ize which some etymologists suggest may have been because of the influence of "exercise" although why that would be compellingly persuasive seems never discussed.  What is more likely is the use of "exorcise" in so many church documents brought to the American colonies, there being more reluctance to edit "sacred" works.  Some US academic sources do suggest exorcize is "a rare but correct" alternative, a concession not extended to exercize.  The rarest of the related forms are exorcismal, exorcisory, exorcistical and the wonderful exorcistic.

The noun exorcism (a calling up or driving out of evil spirits) was a fifteenth century creation formation from the Late Latin exorcismus, from the Ancient Greek exorkismos (administration of an oath) which, in Ecclesiastical Greek existed as exorkizein (exorcise, bind by oath), the construct being ex- (out of) + horkizein (cause to swear), from horkos (oath) of uncertain origin although some have suggested there's a link to  herkos (fence), the idea being of a oath with boundaries one accepts as "restrictions, ties & obligations" or "a magical power that fences in the swearer".  It's speculative and one etymologist noted dryly that the discipline's enthusiasm to adopt the view "was restrained".  A fourteenth century form describing the ritual was spelled exorcization.

Exorcism: Vade retro satana (Step back, Satan)

Saint Francis and the Dying Impenitent (1788) by Francisco Goya (1746-1828)

Exorcism in Christianity is the practice of casting out demons from a person or place possessed by the Devil.  Although the biblical origins are dubious, depending on contested translations, by early in the second century of Christianity, the word was in general use and paintings of exorcists and their ceremonies are among the darker and more dramatic in medieval and later sacred art.

In the Roman Catholic Church, the rituals were formalized in 1614 because of Rome’s concerns about clandestine, underground exorcisms performed without their consent and the guidelines remained substantially unchanged until the Vatican’s revisions in 1999, a process necessitated by a late twentieth-century spike in demand.  Interestingly, for more than a decade after the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II (1962-65)), it was really not done for clergy to speak of Satan as if he really existed, the modernizing church preferring the language of psychology and psychiatry for those displaying symptoms which would once have been blamed on the Devil.

Exorcism of Nicole Aubry (1563), etching by unknown artist.

Popular culture, especially cinema, revived interest in the ritual, with both churches and the medical profession reporting an upsurge in claims of demonic possession and most significantly, Saint Pope John Paul II (1920–2005, pope 1978-2005) had a more robust attitude to the Devil’s role upon earth than any of his twentieth century predecessors.  In 2004, JPII again warned that occult and new age practices were raging out of control in Europe, providing gateways for evil that could result in demonic attachment and possession.

It’s been good business for the Holy See ever since.  The most recent Course on Exorcism and Prayer of Liberatio, held at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum (an educational institute under the auspices of the Congregation of the Legionaries of Christ) in Rome, attracted some two-hundred and fifty priests from fifty countries.  Until the disruption caused by COVID-19, the week-long course, entitled Exorcism and the Prayer of Liberation had been held every year since 2005, attendance more than doubling over the years.  Cost per head was €300,  (Stg£252, US$315); bookings were essential and an entry-ticket included discounts on rooms and food & beverage in several Rome hotels.

The Exorcism of Charles II of Spain

Charles II of Spain (Carlos Segundo 1661–1700), was the last king of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, sovereign of the Spanish Empire which stretched from Mexico to the Philippines.  The only surviving son of his predecessor, Philip IV (1605-1665) and his second wife, Mariana of Austria (1634-1696), his birth was greeted with enthusiasm by the Spanish people because, as was the fashion of the time, had the old king died without a male heir, a war of succession would have ensued.

However, Charles was physically disabled, disfigured, mentally retarded and found later to be impotent, usually a drawback for any king but a disovery which brought relief to many courtiers.  He uttered no words until the age of four, didn’t take his first step before he was almost nine, suffering throughout childhood a range of diseases including measles, varicella, rubella, and smallpox.  Left almost uneducated because of his frailty, his mother was regent most of his reign and he came to be known to history as El Hechizado (the Bewitched), the name applied because both court and country believed his mental and physical incapacities were due to an act of witchcraft.  Modern science suggests otherwise, the condition actually the consequence of the strong preference for endogamy within the Spanish branch of the Habsburg royal family which led to its segregation toward neighbor communities and the emergence of consanguinity.  In short, Charles II was inbred: his grandparents were at the same time his great-grandparents; her father, who was married to her sister's daughter, was also her great-uncle, and her mother happened to be her cousin as well.  One could see how things might not have turned out well and the condition was well-known in Europe and not restricted to aristocracy and royalty.  The slack enforcement of marriage laws on much of the continent was one of the reasons there were so many victims of the Nazi euthanasia (Aktion T4, 1939-1945) programme and the scandal of Byzantine Emperor Heraclius (circa 575–641; emperor 610-641) marrying his niece Martina (circa 590-circa 644) had been made still worse by the condition of some of the children the union produced.

However, to speak of incest in the royal family was just not done so the feeling at the time was to blame witches or the Devil and the court sought the advice of Fray Antonio Álvarez Argüelles, vicar of the Encarnación de Cangas del Narcea convent and a noted Asturian exorcist who advised “…last night the demon told me that the King is evilly bewitched to rule and to beget. When he was 14 years old, he was enchanted with a chocolate in which the brains of a dead man were dissolved to take away his health, corrupt his semen and prevent his generation”.

Exorcism of Charles II of Spain, engraving by Lechard, circa 1840.

That must have been convincing because soon after the king was subjected to what was, even by the standards of the time, a most macabre exorcism.  By coincidence, the remains of his ancestors were being transferred to a new pantheon at the Royal Seat of San Lorenzo de El Escorial and the exorcist had their coffins opened, conducting a ceremony in which the corpses of his relatives and, in an advanced state of putrefaction, that of their his beloved first wife (María Luisa de Orleans (1662-1689)), were exhibited, the hope being the array of the dead would drive off the demons so tormenting the king.

It was in vain and the suffering continued.  Ill his whole life and king since the age of three, he lingered until 1700, dying at thirty-nine, the announcement one of the more eagerly awaited events in the courts and chancelleries of Europe, such was the anticipation of the struggles which would erupt to decide the succession.  Summarizing a sad life in Carlos, the Bewitched (1962, published in the US as Carlos: The King who would Not Die), his English biographer John Langdon-Davies (1897–1971) wrote: "Of no man is it more true to say that in his beginning was his end; from the day of his birth, they were waiting for his death".  On his deathbed, his last words were: "Everything hurts".

Diagnosis & Prognosis

Diagnosis (pronounced dahy-uhg-noh-sis)

(1) In clinical medicine, the process of determining by examination the nature and circumstances of a diseased condition.

(2) The decision reached from such an examination; the abbreviation is Dx.

(3) In general use, a determining or analysis of the cause or nature of a problem or situation; an answer or solution to a problematic situation.

(4) In taxonomy (particularly in biology), a written description of a species or other taxon serving to distinguish that species from all others.  Historically, this was applied especially to a description written in Latin and published.

1675–85: A borrowing from the New Latin diagnōsis, from the Ancient Greek διάγνωσις (diágnōsis) (a distinguishing, means or power of discernment), from διαγιγνώσκω (diagignṓskō or diagignōskein (to distinguish; to discern (literally "to know thoroughly" or "know apart (from another)”)) from gignōskein (inquiry, investigation, knowing; come to know).  The construct was διά (diá) (through) + γιγνώσκω (gignṓskō) (to know).

The early precise meaning in medical Latin was “pre-scientific discrimination" applied especially in pathology, soon becoming a general "recognition of a disease from its symptoms".  The noun plural is diagnoses and derived forms include the nouns diagnostician & the rare (technical use only) prediagnosis (now more often as pre-diagnosis) and the adjective diagnostic.  One that probably should be more common than it appears, given the frequency with which it happens, is misdiagnosis.

Prognosis (pronounced prog-noh-sis)

(1) In clinical medicine, forecasting of the probable course and outcome of a disease, especially of the chances of recovery.

(2) In general use, a forecast or prognostication.

1645-1655: A borrowing from the Late Latin prognōsis, from the Ancient Greek πρόγνωσις (prógnōsis) (foreknowledge, perceiving beforehand, prediction), the construct being προ- (pro-) (before) + γνῶσις (gnôsis (gignōskein)) (inquiry, investigation, knowing; come to know), from γιγνώσκω (gignṓskō) (to know); the primitive Indo-European root was gno- (to know).  The general (non-medical) use in English dates from 1706 and there were (now rare) back-formations, the verb prognose noted in 1837 and the adjective prognostical as early as the 1680s.  In the Classical Latin prognostica meant "sign to forecast weather".

Prognostic (prognostick the obsolete spelling) & prognostication are nouns, prognosticable is an adjective, prognosticate is a verb.  From the Latin root English gained prognosis, French pronostic, German Prognose, Italian prognosi, Norman prog'nose (Jersey), Spanish pronóstico & Hungarian prognózis; in the invented international language of Esperanto, it is prognozo.

Clinical use

Prognosis is the companion word to diagnosis and the two are sometimes confused.  A diagnosis is an identification of a disease via examination or the result of some diagnostic test.  What follows is a prognosis, which is a prediction of the course of the disease as well as the treatment and results.  The schoolbook trick to remember the difference is (1) that a diagnosis comes before a prognosis, and diagnosis is before prognosis alphabetically and (2) diagnosis and detection both start with "d" whereas prognosis and prediction both start with "p".

Former US President Donald Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 after a positive result to a test.  His prognosis was based on (1) what’s known generally about COVID-19 and (2) risk-factors specific to his case.  His risk factors included:

(1) Old: (74).

(2) Overweight (BMI 30+).

(3) Male (varies between countries but male death rate tends to be higher).

(4) He is sub-Human although, as a risk-factor, this remains speculative.  It’s mostly only some black Africans who are pure Humans; the rest of the world’s population is a sub-human mongrel blend, descendants of inter-breeding between humans and Neanderthals thousands of years ago.  It’s being hypnotized the unexpectedly good outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa during pandemic suggest some genetic advantage in being a pure Human; the research is not complete and there may be other factors (or some statistical quirk) but it is possible a genetic risk-factor related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus was inherited from archaic Neanderthals some sixty-thousand years ago.

Isolation

Isolation (pronounced ahy-suh-ley-shuhn)

(1) An act or instance of isolating; the state of being isolated.

(2) In medicine, the complete separation from others of a person suffering from contagious or infectious disease; quarantine.

(3) In diplomacy, the separation, as a deliberate choice by government, of a nation from other nations by nonparticipation in or withdrawal from international relations and institutions.

(4) In psychoanalysis, a process whereby an idea or memory is divested of its emotional component.

(5) In social psychology, the failure of an individual to maintain contact with others or genuine communication where interaction with others persists.

(6) In linguistics and other fields, to consider matters without regard to context.

(7) In chemistry, obtaining an element from one of its compounds, or of a compound from a mixture

(8) In computing, a database property that determines when and how changes made in one transaction are visible to other concurrent transactions.

1830s: A compound word, isolate + -ion.  A modern English borrowing from the French isolé (placed on an island (thus away from other people)).  Isolé was from the Italian isolato, past participle of isolare, the root of which was the Latin insulātus & insulātes (made into an island), from insula (island).  From circa 1740, English at first used the French isolé (rendered as isole) which appeared also as isole'd in the 1750s, isolate the verb emerging in the 1830s; isolated the past participle.  Isolation is now the most familiar form, the suffix –ion is from the Latin -iō (genitive -iōnis), appended to a perfect passive participle to form a noun of action.  Words with similar meanings, often varying by context, includes solitude, desolation, confinement, segregation, remoteness, privacy, quarantine, sequestration, aloofness, detachment, withdrawal, exile, aloneness, concealment, retreat, hiding, reclusion, monkhood, and seclusion.

Isolation, Social Phobia and Social Anxiety Disorder

As long ago as 400 BC, Greek physician Hippocrates (circa 460–c 370 BC) noted there were people who sought social isolation, describing them as those who "love darkness as life" adding, in a hint at later understandings of mental illness, they tended also to "think every man observes them."  Such folk doubtless pre-dated antiquity, being always part of organized societies but it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century when psychiatry emerged as a distinct field that the particular human condition came to be known as social phobia or social neurosis, then thought of as a descriptor of extremely shy patients who sought isolation by choice.

Desolate: an emo in isolation.

Despite the increasing medicalization of the spectrum of the human condition, it wasn’t until 1968, in the second edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), that social isolation was described as a specific phobia of social situations or excessive fear of being observed or scrutinized by others but at this point the definition of social phobia was very narrow.  With the release in 1980 of the DSM-III, social phobia was included as an official psychiatric diagnosis although it restricted the criteria, noting those who sought social isolation did so because of a fear of “performance situations” and did not include fears of less formal encounters such as casual conversations.  Those with such broad fears were instead to be diagnosed with “avoidant personality disorder” which, for technical reasons defined within the DSM-III, could not be co-diagnosed as social phobia, an attitude reflecting the editors’ view that phobias and neuroses needed specifically to be codified rather than acknowledging there existed in some a “general anxiety” disorder.  This neglect was addressed in the 1987 revision to the DSM-III (DSM-III-R) which changed the diagnostic criteria, making it possible to diagnose social phobia and avoidant personality disorder in the same patient.  In this revision, the term "generalized social phobia" was introduced.  DSM-IV was published in 1994 and the term “social anxiety disorder” (SAD) replaced social phobia, this reflecting how broad and generalized fears are in the condition although the diagnostic criteria differed only slightly from those in the DSM-III-R.  The DSM-IV position remains essentially current; the modifications in the DSM-5 (2013) not substantively changing the diagnosis, altering little more than the wording of the time frame although the emphasis on recognizing whether the experience of anxiety is unreasonable or excessive was shifted from patient to clinician.

For some, COVID-19 isolation was a business opportunity.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and panic disorder (PD) were formalized when DSM-III was released in 1980 although among clinicians, GAD had for some years been a noted thread in the literature but what was done in DSM-III was to map GAD onto the usual pattern of diagnostic criteria.  In practice, because of the high degree of co-morbidity with other disorders, the utility of GAD as defined was soon a regular topic of discussion at conferences and the DSM’s editors responded, the parameters of GAD refined in subsequent releases between 1987-1994 when GAD’s diagnostic criteria emerged in its recognizably modern form.  By the time the terminology for mental disorders began in the nineteenth century to be codified, the word anxiety had for hundreds of years been used in English to describe feelings of disquiet or apprehension and in the seventeenth century there was even a school of thought it was a pathological condition.  It was thus unsurprising that “anxiety” was so often an element in the psychiatry’s early diagnostic descriptors such as “pantophobia” and “anxiety neurosis”, terms which designated paroxysmal manifestations (panic attacks) as well as “interparoxysmal phenomenology” (the apprehensive mental state).  The notion of “generalized anxiety”, although not then in itself a diagnosis, was also one of the symptoms of many conditions including the vaguely defined neurasthenia which was probably understood by many clinicians as something similar to what would later be formalized as GAD.  As a distinct diagnostic category however, it wasn’t until the DSM-III was released in 1980 that GAD appeared, anxiety neurosis split into (1) panic disorder and (2) GAD.  When the change was made, the editors noted it was a response to comments from clinicians, something emphasised when DSM-III was in 1987 revised (DSM-III-R), in effect to acknowledge there was a class of patient naturally anxious (who might once have been called neurotic or pantophobic) quite distinct from those for whom a source of anxiety could be deduced.  Thus, the cognitive aspect of anxiety became the critical criterion but within the profession, some scepticism about the validity of GAD as a distinct diagnostic category emerged, the most common concern being the difficulty in determining clear boundaries between GAD, other anxiety-spectrum disorders and certain manifestations of depression.

The modern label aside, GAD has a really long lineage and elements of the diagnosis found in case histories written by doctors over the centuries would have seemed familiar to those working in the early nineteenth century, tales of concern or apprehension about the vicissitudes of life a common thing.  As psychiatry in those years began to coalesce as a speciality and papers increasingly published, it was clear the behaviour of those suffering chronic anxiety could culminate in paroxysmal attacks, thus it was that GAD and panic attacks came to be so associated.  In English, the term panophobia (sometimes as pantaphobia, pantophobia or panphobia) dates from 1871, the word from the Late Latin pantŏphŏbŏs, from the Ancient Greek παντοφόβος (all-fearing (literally “anxiety about everything”)).  It appears in the surviving works of medieval physicians and it seems clear there were plenty of “pantophobic patients” who allegedly were afraid of everything and it was not a product of the Dark Ages, Aristotle (384-322 BC) in the seventh book of his Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC) writing there were men “…by nature apt to fear everything, even the squeak of a mouse”.

The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I (1952) comprised what seems now a modest 130 pages.  The latest edition (DSM-5-TR (2022)) has 991 pages.  The growth is said to be the result of advances in science and a measure of the increasing comprehensiveness of the manual, not an indication that madness in the Western world is increasing.  The editors of the DSM would never use the word "madness" but for non-clinicians it's a handy term which can be applied to those beyond some point on the spectrum of instability.

Between Aristotle and the publication of the first edition of the DSM in 1952, physicians (and others) pondered, treated and discussed the nature of anxiety and theories of its origin and recommendations for treatment came and went.  The DSM (retrospectively labelled DSM-I) was by later standards a remarkably slim document but unsurprisingly, anxiety was included and discussed in the chapter called “Psychoneurotic Disorders”, the orthodoxy of the time that anxiety was a kind of trigger perceived by the conscious part of the personality and produced by a threat from within; how the patient reacted to this resulted in their reaction(s).  There was in the profession a structural determinism to this approach, the concept of defined “reaction patterns” at the time one of the benchmarks in US psychiatry.  When DSM-II was released in 1968, the category “anxiety reaction” was diagnosed when the anxiety was diffuse and neither restricted to specific situations or objects (ie the phobic reactions) nor controlled by any specific psychological defense mechanism as was the case in dissociative, conversion or obsessive-compulsive reactions. Anxiety reaction was characterized by anxious expectation and differentiated from normal apprehensiveness or fear.  Significantly, in DSM-II the reactions were re-named as “neuroses” and it was held anxiety was the chief characteristic of “neuroses”, something which could be felt or controlled unconsciously by various symptoms.  This had the effect that the diagnostic category “anxiety neurosis” encompassed what would later be expressed as panic attacks and GAD.

A: Excessive anxiety and worry (apprehensive expectation), occurring more days than not for at least 6 months, about a number of events or activities (such as work or matters relating to educational institutions).

B: The patient finds it difficult to control the worry.

C: The anxiety and worry are associated with three (or more) of the following six symptoms:

(1) Restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge.

(2) Being easily fatigued.

(3) Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank.

(4) Irritability.

(5) Muscle tension.

(6) Sleep disturbance (difficulty falling or staying asleep, or restless, unsatisfying sleep).

The key change really was for the criteria for GAD requiring fewer symptoms. Whereas with the DSM-IV-TR (2000) individuals needed to exhibit at least three physical and three cognitive symptoms for a diagnosis of GAD, under DSM-5 (2013), only one of each was required so not only was the accuracy and consistency of diagnosis (by definition) improved, the obvious practical effect was better to differentiate GAD from other anxiety disorders and (importantly) the usual worries and concerns endemic to the human condition.  The final significant aspect of the evolution was that by the time of DSM-5, GAD had become effectively a exclusionary diagnosis in that it cannot be diagnosed if the anxiety is better explained by other anxiety disorders and nor can GAD be caused directly by stressors or trauma.