Interrobang

Interrobang (pronounced in-ter-uh-bang)

A punctuation mark (‽) which merges the question mark (?) and the exclamation mark (!) to indicate a query made as an interjection.

1962: A blended word and an invention of US English, the construct being the Latin Latin interro(gātiō) (examination, inquiry, interrogation, questioning) + bang (in this context typesetters’ slang for the exclamation mark (exclamation point in US use), the glyph a ligature of these two marks (the unicode is U+203d).  The even more rare alternative spelling is interabang.  The companion term is gnaborretni (interrotbang reversed, the plural being gnaborretnis) which uses the a symbol (⸘) (an inverted interrobang) to replace the ¡¿ used in Spanish, Galician, and Leonese, just as in English the interrobang can replace !? or ?! (the unicode is U+2E18).  Interrobang is a noun, the noun plural interrobangs.  All other forms are non-standard but interrobanged, interrobanger & interrobanging will presumably be deployed as circumstances seem to dictate and UrbanDictionary users noted the possibilities with predictable suggestions.

Variations on the theme.

Now sixty years old, interrobang was coined in 1962 by US American advertising executive Martin K Speckter (1915–1988) who suggested it in an article written for the printing trade journal TYPEtalks.  As a commodity, the interrobang was an example of a slightly better mousetrap which required more effort to use and achieved exactly the same thing, thus the lack of market penetration.  A few publications did adopt it but adoption was never widespread and it was clear it was less understood than the common “!?”, “????” etc although it did find a niche in chess where an interrobang is a legal move of questionable merit.

The interrobang is used to convey in pure text those layers of meanings provided by non-verbal clues such as facial expressions or tonal variations. 

Most punctuation marks are ancient but the interrobang is novel in being relatively new.  Mr Speckter’s idea was that what was needed in pure text advertisements was a symbol which could convey the feeling implicit in a surprised rhetorical question (the classic example of which is probably (really‽).  In TV or print advertising using images this was transmitted using facial expressions or vocal intonations but in pure text, this wasn’t always immediately clear.  For centuries, people had been using work-arounds like “?!”, “!?” or “????” but what he wanted was something more elegant.  His interrobang was certainly that and some academics acknowledged its utility but adoption was patchy because it was never integrated into the standard character-set of the typewriter keyboards of the era.  There were a few supporting gestures, most notably in 1967 when ATF (American Type Founders) included it in Richard Isbell’s (1924-2009) Americana typeface (the company’s last type cut in metal) and the next year it was available on some Remington typewriters, followed some years later by Smith-Corona typewriters but generally the industry ignored the innovation.  Crucially, IBM declined to add the interrobang to the golfballs used on their then dominant Selectric range of typewriters or their then embryonic word-processing programs.

Interestingly, nor was it included when a digital version of the Americana typeface was released and nor did it make it to the standard keyboards which IBM, Apple and others began to offer from the late 1970s although for nerds who did their own keyboard mappings, such things were sometimes possible.  Adoption has been limited and will remain so until included on standard physical keyboards (which seems unlikely) and there’s no evident demand for the symbol to be added to virtual implementations.  That said, it is in a number of fonts including Amplitude Wide Bold, Fritz Robusto, Constantia and Fontesque Sans so it’s there to be used although, as any form of communication relies on both parties sharing the same understanding of what a symbol denotes, it’s useful only of the recipient knows what it means.

There are interrobang emojis which makes perfect sense but using the glyph is possible on most platforms if not effortless.  In Microsoft Office for example, using the TrueType font Wingdings 2 it’s invoked by pressing the key marked with a tilde.  That’s not too bad but under iOS you have to edit the keyboard so you really (really‽) have to want to make the point:

(1) Copy an interrobang symbol of choice

(2) Launch the Settings app and choose General

(3) Tap Keyboard

(4) Select Keyboard

(5) Tap Text Replacement

(6) Tap the + symbol in the upper right corner

(7) Paste the interrobang symbol in the phrase field

(8) Type ?! in shortcut field

(9) Tap Save

Mungbean

Mung bean (pronounced mung–been)

(1) A plant, Vigna radiata, of the legume family, cultivated for its edible seeds, pods, and young sprouts.

(2) The seed or pod of this plant.

1905-1910: The English form is from the earlier moong (from the Hindi mū̃g, variant of mūg and the Prakrit mugga and Sanskrit mudga).  The traditional form is mung bean, mungbean is an accepted alternative and it’s never been hyphenated.

A plant species in the legume family, the mungbean (Vigna radiata) is known also as the green gram, in Persian as maash (ماش‎), in Sanskrit as moong (मुद्ग (Romanized as mudga)) and in the Philippines as monggo, or munggo.  Technically, it’s the mung bean but mugbean emerged as an alternative form as early as the 1970s.  Used as an ingredient in both savory and sweet dishes, it’s grown in many countries but the largest areas in cultivation are in India, China, and Southeast Asia.

Vegan Mung Bean Stew

Ingredients

½ cup raw mung beans

5 potatoes, peeled and quartered

¼ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon canola oil

1 onion, peeled and chopped

2 carrots, sliced

2 stalks celery, sliced

5 button mushrooms, sliced

4 small tomatoes, quartered

2 cups vegetable stock

Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

(1) Preheat oven to 400^o F (200^o C).

(2) Place mung beans in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, and cook for 10 minutes. Lower heat to medium, and simmer until soft, about 10 minutes. Drain beans into a strainer and rinse under cold water. Set aside.

(3) Meanwhile, place the potatoes in saucepan, cover with water, and stir in ¼ teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, and cook just until potatoes begin to soften when pierced with a fork, about 10 minutes. Drain, and set aside.

(4) Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion; cook and stir until transparent, about 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes, carrots, celery, and mushrooms. Cook and stir until the vegetables are tender, about 5 minutes. Pour in the stock, and add salt and pepper to taste. Cook vegetable mixture 5 minutes more. Combine with the mung beans and potatoes in an oven-proof casserole. Cover with a lid.

(5) Bake in pre-heated oven until mixture bubbles which will typically take about 30 minutes.

Reverend

Reverend (pronounced rev-ruhnd (U) or rev-er-uhnd (non-U))

(1) A title of respect applied or prefixed to the name of a member of the clergy or a religious order (initial capital letter).

(2) Worthy to be revered; entitled to reverence.

(3) Pertaining to or characteristic of the clergy.

(4) In informal use, a member of the Christian clergy; a minister.

1400–1450: From the late Middle English reverend (also as reverent) (worthy of deep respect, worthy to be revered (due to age, character etc)), from the Middle French révérend, from the Old French, from the Latin future passive participle reverendus (he who is worthy of being revered; that is to be respected), gerundive of reverērī (to stand in awe of, respect, honor, fear, be afraid of), from the deponent verb revereor (I honor, revere).  The construct of reverērī was re- (in this case used probably as an intensive prefix) + vereri (stand in awe of, fear, respect) from the primitive Indo-European root wer- (perceive, watch out for).

As a courteous or respectful form of address for clergymen, it has been in use since the late fifteenth century, a variation of the earlier reverent which had been used in this sense since the later fourteenth century; it was prefixed to names by the 1640s and the abbreviation Rev. was introduced in the 1690s, becoming accepted and common by the 1720s.  One historical quirk is that the vice-chancellor of the University of University is formally styled The Reverend the Vice-Chancellor even if not a member of the clergy, a relic of the days when the appointee always held some ecclesiastical office.

The Roman Catholic Church

Cardinal George Pell (b 1941).  When appointed bishop and subsequently archbishop, he was styled The Most Reverend but upon becoming a cardinal, although remaining an archbishop, a cardinal's form of address prevailed and he was instead styled His Eminence.

Religious sisters can be styled Reverend Sister although this is now rare outside Italy unless the order to which the sister is attached is under the authority of the Vatican and not the local bishop.  Abbesses of convents are styled The Reverend Mother Superior.  Deacons are styled The Reverend Deacon if ordained permanently to the diaconate.  Seminiarians are styled The Reverend Mister if ordained to the diaconate and prior to being ordained presbyters.  Priests are styled variously The Reverend or The Reverend Father according to tradition whether diocesan, in an order of canon regulars, in a monastic or a mendicant order or clerics regular.  Priests appointed to grades of jurisdiction above pastor are styled The Very Reverend (there are appointments such as  vicars general, judicial vicars, ecclesiastical judges, episcopal vicars, provincials of religious orders of priests, rectors or presidents of colleges and universities, priors of monasteries, deans, vicars forane, archpriests etc).  Certain appointments such as Protonotaries Apostolic, Prelates of Honour and Chaplains of His Holiness are styled The Reverend Monsignor.  Abbots of monasteries are styled The Right Reverend.  Bishops and archbishops are styled The Most Reverend (In some countries of the British Commonwealth, only archbishops are styled The Most Reverend while bishops are styled The Right Reverend).  The word is not used in relation to cardinals or the pope.

In the Roman Catholic Church, Reverend (and its variations) appears only in writing; in oral use other titles and styles of address are used except in the rare cases of ceremonies where the entire style of an individual is recited.

The Orthodox Church

Lindsay Lohan as a Reverend Sister in Machete (2010).

Deacons are styled The Reverend Deacon (traditionally only in writing and not universally applied).  A married priest is The Reverend Father; a monastic priest is The Reverend Hieromonk; a protopresbyter is The Very Reverend Father; and an archimandrite is either The Very Reverend Father (Greek practice) or The Right Reverend Father (Russian practice).  For most purposes all may be addressed as Father and the most comprehensive (and multi-lingual) style guide is that published by the office of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.  Abbots and abbesses are styled The Very Reverend Abbot or Abbess and are addressed as Father and Mother respectively.  A bishop is referred to as The Right Reverend Bishop and addressed as Your Grace (or Your Excellency).  An archbishop or metropolitan, whether or not he is the head of an autocephalous or autonomous church, is styled The Most Reverend Archbishop or Metropolitan and addressed as Your Eminence.  Heads of autocephalous and autonomous churches with the title Patriarch are styled differently and the word reverend shouldn’t be used; the actual use varies according to the customs of their respective churches and is always Beatitude but sometimes also Holiness and, exceptionally, All-Holiness (if reverend appears by error, it’s not considered offensive).

The Anglican Communion (including the Episcopalian churches)

Deacons are styled as The Reverend, The Reverend Deacon, or The Reverend Mr, Mrs or Miss (and Ms has been added to the style guides of the more liberal branches).  Priests (vicars padres, rectors and curates et al) are usually styled as The Reverend, The Reverend Father or Mother (even if not a religious) or The Reverend Mr, Mrs, Miss or Ms.  Heads of some women's religious orders are styled as The Reverend Mother (even if not ordained).  Canons are often styled as The Reverend Canon.  Deans are usually styled as The Very Reverend (although this can vary for those attached to larger cathedrals).  Archdeacons are usually styled as The Venerable.  Priors of monasteries may be styled as The Very Reverend.  Abbots of monasteries may be styled as The Right Reverend.  Bishops are styled as The Right Reverend.  Archbishops and primates and (for historical reasons) the Bishop of Meath and Kildare are styled as The Most Revered and there is no difference in the style afforded to the twenty-six bishops of the old bishoprics with seats in the House of Lords.

The first and second women in the Anglican Church to be appointed as Most Reverend Archbishops Kay Goldsworthy (b 1956; Archbishop of Perth in the Province of Western Australia since 2018) (left) & Melissa Skelton (b 1951; Metropolitan and Archbishop in the Anglican Church of Canada since 2018) (right).

Vatic

Vatic (pronounced vat-ik)

Of, relating to, or characteristic of a prophet; oracular.

1595–1605: From the Latin vātēs (seer, prophet, poet, bard), the construct being vat + -ic.  Vātēs (the alternative form was vātis) was from the Proto-Italic wātis, from the primitive Indo-European wéhtis (seer), from weht- (to be excited).  The –ic suffix (-ick an obsolete form) is from the Middle English -ik, from the Old French -ique, from the Latin -icus, from the primitive Indo-European -kos, formed with the i-stem suffix and the adjectival suffix –kos.  It was used on noun stems and carried the meaning “characteristic of, like, typical, pertaining to” and on adjectival stems acted emphatically.  In the Ancient Greek the form was -ικός (-ikós), in the Sanskrit it was -इक (-ika) and in the Old Church Slavonic, -ъкъ (-ŭkŭ).  Vatic & vatical are adjectives, vaticination is a noun, varticular is a verb and vatically is an adverb; the noun plural is vaticinations.

Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (1895–1989), known as La Pasionaria (the passionflower) for her anguished oratory, was a communist politician in the Spanish republic which, proclaimed in 1931, prompted the king (Alfonso XIII 1886–1941; King of Spain 1886-1931) to flee with a sizable chunk of the state exchequer.  The botanical reference in her moniker need not be taken literally because the passionflower (Passiflora, a genus of over five-hundred species of the family Passifloraceae) had long been used as a calmative, a folk remedy for anxiety, insomnia and stress, all conditions hardly likely to be ameliorated by listening to Señora Ibárruri’s polemics.  The allusion was wholly linguistic.

By 1936, tensions between the leftist republic and the conservative factions of the old monarchial state were hinting at war and a fascist politician, José Calvo Sotelo (1893-1936; First Duke of Calvo Sotelo), threatened the new government with a military takeover.  At this arose the black-garbed figure of La Pasionaria who, pointing her finger at Sotelo, intoned: “Ese fue tu ultimo discurso” (That was your last speech).  It proved a vatic utterance; within days Republican assault guards dragged Sotelo from his house and shot him dead, dumping the corpse at Madrid’s East Cemetery.  This was the point at which General Franco (Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975; Caudillo of Spain 1939-1975)) concluded the government could no longer govern; the Spanish Civil War became inevitable.

Official photograph of José Calvo Sotelo as leader of the Renovación Española (Spanish Renovation, a right-wing monarchist political party), 1930 (left) and his body, dumped around 4 am by his murderers, outside the cemetery in East Madrid, 13 July, 1936 (right).  Although likely apocryphal, one of the many tales told about Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015; prime minister of Singapore 1959-1990) is that he kept locked in a drawer the photograph of Sotelo's corpse, there to remind himself what would be his fate were the communists to take over in Singapore.  

Although La Pasionaria would always deny having said the words, they passed into the myths and legends of the conflict and, given it was about the bloodiest thing imaginable, of those there were plenty.  What she never disowned was another phrase, “No pasarán” (They shall not pass), one she used, with some variations, on several occasions, most famously in 1936 during the Battle for Madrid in a speech which concluded “Long live the Popular Front! Long live the union of all anti-fascists! Long live the Republic of the people! The Fascists shall not pass! THEY SHALL NOT PASS!”  This time her words proved not vatical, General Franco, upon the fall of Madrid in 1939 proclaiming "Hemos pasado" (We have passed).

It was a phrase with history, best remembered from the World War One Battle of Verdun when it was used by French General Robert Nivelle (1856-1924) and was soon adopted by other units of the French army, appearing in propaganda material after the Second Battle of the Marne (July-August 1918).  As late as 1940, it was an inscription on some uniforms worn by soldiers manning the Maginot Line but on that occasion, vatic though it was, the sense was soon ironic; the Germans didn’t pass the Maginot Line, by-passing it instead.

La Pasionaria had a feeling for a phrase.  Although on the other side, there were plenty of twentieth-century fascists who gleefully would have embraced (if not adopted) some of her epithets.  Such similarities between communists and fascists were noted by  Winston Churchill (1874-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) and Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946; Nazi foreign minister 1938-1945), for different reasons, both fair judges of such things.

Tea-towel available from the Radical Tea-Towel Company (a juxtaposition of words which can't often have been contemplated) at US$22.00, 19 x 27 inches (480 x 700mm), heavyweight, unbleached organic cotton with a hanging loop. Designed in Wales and ethically printed, cut and sewn in England.  The famous battle cry "No pasarán!" was taken up by British anti-fascists during the October 1936 Battle of Cable Street.   The Radical Tea Towel Company also offers Battle of Cable St and Spanish Civil War tea towels.

Statue of La Pasionaria, River Clyde, Glasgow. Scotland.

Emoji

Emoji (pronounced ih-moh-jee)

In digital technology, a small digital picture or pictorial symbol that represents a thing, feeling, concept etc, used in text messages and other electronic communications, now usually as part of a standardized set.  Technically an emoji is a digital graphic icon with a unique code point.

1999: From a creation in Japanese translating literally as “pictograph”, the construct being e- (picture, drawing) + moji (written character or letter).  In the original Japanese it’s 絵文字 (えもじ, emoji), the construct being 絵 (え (e, (picture)) + 文字 (もじ (moji) (character).

Proto emojis: Puck Magazine 1881.

Because of a cross-lingual phonetic coincidence, emoji is often thought related to the word emotion, a natural connection because it’s emotions that emojis are now used to convey.  That was the connection with the emoji’s predecessor, the emoticon, the concept of text-based symbols being used to replace certain instances of formal language.  The first codified form of the emoticon set was released in 1982 and used the standard ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set assembled to represent ideas as images ((*_*) being a face, : ( sadness, : (( extreme sadness etc).  The idea wasn’t new, various punctuation marks used for hundreds of years in a similar manner, including in newspapers and books, but there had never been any standardization except that which existed by agreement between regular correspondents although, in 1881, American magazine Puck published four symbols which could be used to convey joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment.  Assembled using standard shapes from mechanical type-setting, Puck probably either created or at least legitimized what came to be called typographical art.

The idea of localised conventions would later appeal to a community using a common means of communication with a closed character set: Morse Code operators who devised their own convenient shorthand, a set of numbers transmitted by a short series of dots and dashes, which all understood represented longer strings of text, commonly used messages including:

1- Wait a moment

4- Where shall I go ahead?

6- I am ready

7- Are you ready?

8- Close your key; circuit is busy

12- Do you understand?

13- I understand

24- Repeat this back

27- Priority, very important

29- Private, deliver in sealed envelope.

73- Best regards

88- Love and kisses

92- Deliver promptly

The concept is exactly the same as the part of the algorithm used by data compression programs (ZIP and others) whereby small values are used to represent (and replace) larger ones, hence the ability to compress file-size.  The pragmatic Morse operator's list was mostly business-like, focused on transmitting the most information with the fewest taps but there were a couple more romantic: 73 meant “best regards” and 88 “love and kisses”, both of which would become stalwarts in the world of emoticons and emojis.

Lindsay Lohan Emojis.

The idea of the emoticon, still a disparate thing without standards, began to coalesce in the 1990s, Microsoft bundling the wingdings truetype font with Windows and by the middle of the decade, the first SMS (short message services) products, the protocols for which had evolved as part of the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standards, were released.  Strange as it may sound in an age when SMS messages number annually in the trillions, the take-up rate was initially slow but growth was soon exponential.  Screen-focused, emoticons were always integral to SMS.

Shigetaka Kurita’s 1999 DoCoMo emoji set.

While not the first emoji set, that being a plain black collection included with the Japanese J-Phone in 1997, it’s Shigetaka Kurita’s (b 1972) release in 1999 which is the first notable landmark.  Interestingly, reflecting the intention to make communication more efficient on NTT DoCoMo's business-oriented cellular platform, apart from some hearts (intact and broken), the 176 in the set didn’t include many to convey emotion, although in the abstract, the one representing a beer glass was often used to suggest “I need a drink”.  The beginnings were modest, reflecting both the hardware and the mobile networks of the time; although bright, each was rendered in a single color and the bitmapped shape was blocky but the range and definition constantly improved to the point where, unlike emoticons, emojis really are pictures rather than typographic approximations and this has influenced the use of the word, "emoji" now sometimes applied to just about any small picture in any digital context.

A splash of vomit emojis.

In the English-speaking world, critical mass in terms of adoption was reached in 2012, the year after Apple added an official set to the iOS keyboard, Android following in 2014 when KitKat was released.  Apple had included emojis in the Japanese releases of iOS since 2008 and may have been tempted to extend availability when it became apparent how many hacks existed to gain the feature on devises using other languages.  What made that viable was emoji, in 2010, being standardized by Unicode (the non-profit consortium which maintains text standards on digital devices globally) which meant emojis could be sent and received by any device, regardless of operating system or platform.  By then, the standard set had grown to almost a thousand.  The Unicode Consortium has been busy ever since, creating an emoji subcommittee which has so much business to transact it meets at least weekly and their output has been prodigious: by September 2021, over 3,600 emojis had been approved, 112 in the last release alone.

Crooked Hillary Clinton emoji.

A character set in the thousands and growing has however changed the nature of the emoji as a language supplement, it once being possible to know them all and rely on many others also knowing most.  With so many, it’s become just another language, a system where every user has their own sub-set and analysis of traffic suggests for most this can be just a handful and even among devotees it’s rare for them regularly to display a vocabulary of more than a few dozen.  While, as a medium of meaning, the emoji does depend on an intuitive understanding of appearance, if some are too weird or mysterious, there is Emojipedia, an on-line emoji reference which documents changes and definitions and EmojiTranslate is a website where the translation of text to emoji (and vice versa) is handled.  Even that isn’t enough to satisfy the evidentiary standards of courts in some jurisdictions, accredited translators now sometimes used to translate the meaning of emojis where material using them is tendered in evidence.  Emoji is just another language and something in one cultural context can mean something else in another, the meaning the sender implied perhaps the opposite of what the receiver inferred.  On the basis of established principles such as “reasonable doubt” or “balance of probabilities”, courts must decide.

The New Yorker, 30 March 2015.

Out in the world of the emoji freaks, books have been written using nothing but emojis, a concept not new.  In the 1990s, one pop-music journalist, displeased at the quality of an interview with a singer he was about to publish, rendered the whole thing in the zaph dingbat font (which in professional typesetting had existed since the 1970s), rendering it an illegible cryptogram to all except those who had memorized the mapping of the font.  Such people do exist but they’re rare and it’s not clear if the writer succeeded in his aim to make more interesting a boring interview.  One magazine to find a novel use was the fine New Yorker which, in 2015, ran a cover featuring Crooked Hillary Clinton emojis when discussing the mail server affair, one of the many scandals attached to her although, they unfortunately resisted the temptation to integrate a delete key into one.  Perhaps inspired, in her presidential campaign, crooked Hillary tried to weaponize the emoji in a tweet aimed at a younger demographic but received quite a backlash for doing something so obviously cynical; inauthentic being the modern term.

The work of the consortium has also been cognizant of forces operating more widely.  In 2014, they began to address the lack of racial and gender DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) in the little images, the population disproportionately male and white, a distortion of reality hardly appropriate in what was to some degree one of the world’s global languages.  In this they were later than some; in 2012, the ever-woke Apple included in iOS 6 several emojis of same-sex couples.  Although all were shown holding hands, they didn’t look any happier than their more traditional predecessors but there are limitations with what can be achieved on such a tiny digital canvas.  In another sign of the times, over the years, guns morphed into less threatening water-pistols.  Perhaps strangely, the pandemic didn’t produce a flood of corona-themed images, Apple’s set still the only of the majors to include something recognizably SARS-Cov-2ish.  Still, there's plenty of time, world emoji day is 17 July and COVID-19, unlike some of us, is expected to be alive and well for many Julys to come.

Droste

Droste (pronounced dross-tee)

(1) A surname of Germanic origin.

(2) An object displaying the Droste effect.

1904: The Droset effect is named after an image of a nurse carrying a serving tray with a cup of hot chocolate and the box, the image thus replicating.  The Droste brand was from the Netherlands and was founded in 1863 by Gerardus Johannes Droste (1836-1923), the image was designed by Jan Musset (1861–1931.  The packaging of the cocoa powder was first used in 1904.  The surname’s origin was in the German province of Westphalia, the name derived from the Old German drotsete, derived from the elements truth (body of servants) and sizzen (to preside).  The surname Droste thus denotes a head servant or steward, in charge of a nobleman's household servants.  The first known instance of the name appearing in records was found in Schweinheim, Westphalia in 1335.  The variations in the spelling of the name included Droste, Drost, Droz, Drossate, Drossaerd, Drossärd, Drossart and others.  Droste is a noun and adjective; the noun plural is Drostes.

A box of Droste cocoa powder, which demonstrates the effect to which it lent the name.

In French, the equivalent term is mise-en-abyme (plural mise en abymes or mises en abyme), (literally “placement into abyss”).  Long familiar in art and advertising, it was first used as device of literary criticism by the French author André Gide (1869–1951), whose output was varied but in the field of literary criticism was usually comprehendible, unlike some of what would later emerge from Paris.  His private (in his case a relative term) life was less admired.  In literature, the expression of the idea varies from introspection to the interpolation of a version of the work into the work itself; a story within a story.  In its more arcane interpretations, it’s used in deconstructive literary criticism to explore the inter-textual consequences of language (language abstracted from the constructed “reality” of the text).

A visual representation of the original Droste in an infinite loop (choose loop option to run).  Depending on how one defines infinity, an actual Droste probably can’t exist because at some point the light reflecting to define the image would become a single photon and because light cannot be smaller than a photon, the loop must stop.  It can however be described to the point where the loop tends toward infinity because whatever the visual dimension might be, descriptively it can (as a mathematical expression) be halved.  Infinity itself, although it probably doesn’t exist, can also be described although perhaps not as an equation.

London based art design group Hipgnosis played with the idea for the album cover for Pink Floyd's Ummagumma (1969).

Album cover art was an interesting phenomenon because it came and went in little more than a generation, its very existence deterministic in that it depended on huge sales of vinyl albums in 12.375 x 12.375 inches (314.3 x 314.3 mm) cardboard sleeves.  With the advent of first the smaller CDs (compact disc) and then streaming, the industry's canvas (as it were), vanished.  The historic covers were often used when the material was re-released on CD but, being not even a quarter of the area, as pieces of art, most were less effective.   

Gide was unusually helpful (compared by later French theorists) in provide explanations which could be understood and were genuinely deconstructive in a useful way.  He made clear for example that his allusion to the Droste effect in the visual arts (infinite regression of form) did not imply a direct application of the concept to literature; he was discussing the use of the representation of a work within a work and makes the point that pure regression within something like a novel would be an absurd loop.  Instead, his conception was of structural elements of a novel appearing within the text as a way a author can construct meaning by creating or resolving conflict.

A Lindsay Lohan Droste image, rendered as a pen drawing by Vovsoft.

In computing, the mechanics of the idea is expressed as a quine (a computer with no dependence of user (or third-party) input, the only output of which is a replicated copy of its own source code).  Usually called, "a self-replicating program", quine was coined by US physicist Douglas Hofstadter (b 1945) and appeared first in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979) in honor of US philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) who wrote widely about indirect self-reference.  Hofstadter’s core concept in Gödel, Escher, Bach is elusive but is probably best understood as revolving around the interplay of loops in the mathematical structures in art, music and language.  It is not an easy read.

Quantum

Quantum (pronounced kwon-tuhm)

(1) A quantity or amount.

(2) A particular quantity or amount.

(3) A share or portion.

(4) A large quantity; something ordered, delivered or stored in bulk.

(5) In physics, the smallest quantity of some physical property, such as energy, that a system can possess according to the quantum theory; involving quanta, quantum mechanics or other aspects of quantum physics.

(6) A particle with such a unit of energy; the fundamental unit of a quantized physical magnitude, as angular momentum.

(7) Of change: (1) classically, sudden or discrete, without intermediate stages & (2) in modern adjectival use, something sudden and significant.

(8) In mathematics, a definite portion of a manifoldness, limited by a mark or by a boundary.

(9) In law, a brief document provided by the judge, elaborating on a sentencing decision (now most often used in the subcontinent); the total amount of something; the quantity.

(10) In computer operating systems, the amount of time allocated for a thread to perform its work in a multithreaded environment.

(11) In computer design, short for quantum computing.

(12) In medicine, the minimum dose of a pathogen required to cause an infection.

1610-1620: From the Late Latin quantum, noun use of the neuter form of the Classical Latin quantus (how much).

Quantum imported from Latin to physics directly by German theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) to describe the concept of the "minimum amount of a quantity which can exist".  Quantum theory is from 1912 and quantum mechanics from 1922, the latter much associated with German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) who in 1927 deduced his "uncertainty principle" which declares an electron may have a determinate position, or a determinate velocity, but not both.  In physics, the term quantum jump (the abrupt transition from one stationary state to another) came into use in 1954 while quantum leap (sudden large advance) dates from 1963 and in figurative use (by non-physicists) describes some drastic change or radical advance in some aspect of something (and is thus often synonymous with that other favorite of post-modernists, the paradigm shift.  There are pedants (and one suspects few of them actually comprehend quantum theory) who insist “quantum leap” in the sense of “sudden & big is wrong but it’s just part of the evolution of English in its usual democratic way.  Quantum is a noun and adjective; the noun plural is quantums or quanta.

IBM quantum computer.

In an announcement little noted outside the nerd community, in late 2021 IBM introduced the Circuit Layer Operations per Second (CLOPS) performance standard for quantum computing.  As a measuring metric, CLOPS corresponds to the number of quantum circuits a quantum processing unit (QPU) can execute per unit of time, the innovation compared with previous standards such as FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second) and its variations (ranging from kiloFLOPS (KFlops:10³) to yottaFLOPS (YFlops: 10²⁴)), in that it expresses not only the actual speed at which the workload is processed and successfully completed but also adjusts to account for the latency of the interaction between the quantum and classical computing realms.

It must be noted that to date, the pure quantum computer has existed only in theory and that functions now executed in the quantum space involve an interaction, being mediated via a classical binary computer which translates workloads into a QPU-compatible format, retrieves the workload's results and presents them in an understandable form.  CLOPS thus accounts for not only the interval of time that the workload is actually being processed at the qubit (quantum bit) level, but also the time it takes for the system to translate and transfer information across both components.

Dating back decades, IBM has published many standards which the industry has adopted ranging from specifications for memory addressing to video displays (the famous CGA, EGA, VGA, XGA etc) and had for some time discussed the need for a harmonized standard for quantum computing.  Until CLOPS was announced, the measures had usually been expressed in terms of two of quantum’s three planes: (1) scale which pertains to the number of qubits present in any given system and (2) quality which refers to the proportion of qubits that can perform usable work expressed via quantum volume.  What CLOPS does is provide a formula to express a measure of (3) speed.

IBM has published CLOPS results for some of its quantum computing systems using machines constructed with between five and 64 qubits and it was interesting to note all had a similar quantum volume score, their actual speed (expressed in CLOPS) varied between 753 and 1419 layers per second; as IBM predicted, it was latency which accounted for the difference.  Noting that, IBM also published results from their Qiskit (Quantum Information Software Kit for Quantum Computation) project which focuses on reducing the latency in the quantum-classic computing translation layer seriously via closer physical proximity between the objects, some experiments reducing run-time cycles from 45 days to nine hours.  The company expects CLOPS to be the defined measure of quantum computing in its present form as FLOPs and its variations were to super-computing.