Thursday, November 24, 2022

Tiramisu

Tiramisu (pronounced tir-uh-mee-soo)

An rich Italian semifreddo dessert made with espresso coffee-soaked layers of cake alternating with mascarpone cheese and chocolate; variations sometimes add liquor.

1972: From the Italian tiramisù, the construct being tira (pick or pull) + mi (me) + (up).  The Italian tirare (to pull, tug) is from the Medieval Latin, from the Vulgar Latin tirāre, of unknown origin but thought by most etymologists to be Germanic.  In the Italian it’s tiramisù and the alternative spelling is tirami sù.

Signor Campeol (1927-2021) with a slice of his tiramisu.

Aged ninety-three, Ado Campeol died on 31 October 2021.  Signor Campeol owned Le Beccherie, a restaurant in Treviso in the north of Italy and it was there the most celebrated modern form of tiramisu was created by his wife, Alba Di Pillo and their chef.  Constructed with espresso coffee-soaked biscuits, mascarpone and chocolate, it was added to the Le Beccherie menu in 1972 but, being never patented by the family, it became another of Italy’s many cultural gifts to the world. Around the world, there are variants of tiramisu which include different chocolates, spirits like rum or liquors but the original recipe (certified in 2010 by the Italian Academy of Cuisine) was alcohol-free because it was meant to be eaten by children too.  Quite when the concoction was first made isn't clear and there is evidence something similar may have appeared as early as the nineteenth century and there are accounts of similar dishes from the 1960s.

Lindsay Lohan with tiramisu, Terry Richardson (b 1965) photoshoot, 2012.

There has long been a dispute about the origin of tiramisu, including the tempting suggestion it was offered as an aphrodisiac in one of Trevisio’s brothels but the definitive modern version seems to be the one created at Le Beccherie, opened by the Campeol family in 1939 and managed after the end of World War II by Ado Campeol.  According to the co-inventor,  Italian chef Roberto "Loli" Linguanotto (1943-2024), the creation of tiramisu was entirely serendipitous, the result of a slip of the hand while making vanilla ice cream, some mascarpone cheese which had been spilled into a bowl of eggs and sugar proving to yield a delightful taste.  The chef and Signora Campeol experimented with combinations, perfecting the dessert by adding ladyfinger sponges soaked in coffee, and sprinkling it with cocoa.  They called it tiramisù which translates into English as "pick me up", a tribute to the refreshing sensation a serving provides.

Tiramisu recipe

This will serve 4-6, take about 30 minutes to prepare and will be ready to serve after a further two hours of chilling.  This recipe includes only Marsala wine but works well with liquors like Kahlua or Benedictine.

Ingredients

300ml espresso coffee, brewed
2 tablespoons Marsala wine
4 eggs
100g sugar
500g mascarpone
300g ladyfinger (Savoiardi) biscuits
200g shaved dark chocolate
Unsweetened cocoa powder

Instructions

(1) Brew coffee using a macchinetta.  In saucepan or other heatproof container, combine coffee and Marsala wine, stirring slowly, then set aside to cool.

(2) In a bowl, separate egg whites from yolks and whip whites until stiff.  In another bowl, whisk the yolks with the sugar until pale and smooth. This should take 3-5 minutes.

(3) Add mascarpone to the yolks and whisk slowly with an electric mixer. Add the stiffened egg whites and mix through with a wooden spoon until smooth and creamy.

(4) Dip ladyfingers into the coffee and wine. Spread a layer of the biscuits in a serving dish, add a level of shaved chocolate (depth according to taste) and spread a layer of mascarpone mixture on top. Sprinkle with cocoa powder. Repeat layers once more.

(5) Sprinkle the top with cocoa powder. Chill for 2 hours before serving.

Big-bite sized: two spoonfuls of tiramisu at 10 William Street, Paddington, Sydney, Australia.

Apparently in response to the waiters often hearing contented customers lament they were "too full for dessert", 10 William Street, a wine bar and restaurant in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, has begun offering their well-regarded tiramisu by the spoonful, the single-serve  listed at Aus$3.50 compared with a whole slice at Aus$17.00.  Whether this becomes at trend remains to be seen but for a restaurant, the economics are probably compelling because (1) it's viewed as an additional sale rather than someone choosing it over the full-sized dish and (2) preparation and presentation costs are minimal. 

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Caesura

Caesura (pronounced si-zhoor-uh, si-zoor-uh or siz-yoor-uh)

(1) In modern prosody, a break (especially a sense pause), usually near the middle of a verse, and marked in scansion by a double vertical line ( or ||).

(2) In classical prosody, a division made by the ending of a word within a foot, or sometimes at the end of a foot, especially in certain recognized places near the middle of a verse.

(3) Any break, pause, or interruption, applied to poetry, music, literature, architecture and any creative work (used even by the odd (presumably literary-minded) coder).

(4) In typography, the technical term for the caesura mark or || (as the virgule in its obsolete form), a single slash).

(5) In historiography, a measure of history and time (where one era ends and another begins).

1550-1560: From the Latin caesūra (metrical pause; cutting, hewing (literally “a cutting” from caedere (to cut))), from caesus, the perfect passive participle of caedō (I cut down, hew).  The construct was caes(us) (cut; (past participle of caedere)) + -ūra (-ure).  The suffix -ure was from the Middle English -ure, from the Old French -ure, from the Latin -tūra and was used to create a word meaning (1) a process; a condition; a result of an action or (2) an official entity or function.  In Classical Latin, the caesura was “a metrical pause” from the primitive Indo-European kae-id- (to strike), used as “the division of a metrical foot between two words, a break within a foot caused by the end of a word” as opposed to a diaeresis which was “a pause between feet”.  Technically, caesura can be used as a synonym for pause, break, rest, interval, interruption, intermission, lull interlude, hiatus and even (in certain contexts), lacuna; however, it's an obscure word and use is better restricted to its traditional purposes; as a general principle, plain, simple and well-understood words are best.  The now obsolete alternative spellings were cesura & cæsura and other languages use variations including the Catalan cesura, the Dutch cesuur and the French césure.  Caesura is a noun and caesural & caesuric are adjectives; the noun plural is caesuras or caesurae.

In historiography, a caesura is measure of history and time; where one era ends and another begins.  The word is most used of concepts which have no exact start or end date such as “the Industrial Revolution”, “the Enlightenment” or “the colonial era” and in that it differs from periods exactly defined by other events such as “the Victorian Age” (1837-1901), “the Ming dynasty” (1368-1644) or “the Third Reich”" (1933-1945).  Such use can be extended to situations in which something precisely defined (like a century) has become vested with meanings which transcend the start and end point.  Some historians like to make the point that in the “grand sweep” theory of history, the twentieth century is best understood as having begun in 1914 (with the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918)) although they seem to differ on when it can be said to have ended, some citing 1989-1991 (fall of the Berlin Wall & the dissolution of the Soviet Union) and some, 2001 (the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US).  The idea that what happened between 1901-1914 was really a continuation of nineteenth century tensions appears settled but whether that curious lacuna in history (during which, admittedly, much happened) between 1991-2001 was a coda to the twentieth century or a prelude to the twenty-first remains unresolved.

Although others have co-opted it, the usual purpose of a caesura is the technical description a pause or break in poetry, dictated by the natural rhythm of the language and enforced by punctuation (as opposed to the demands of meter although critics do complain modern poets have been inclined to impose in idiosyncratic ways).  A line may have more than one caesura or it may have none and structurally, it close to the beginning it’s called the initial caesura; if near the middle it’s the medial and if towards the end, the terminal and in English writing, the medial is by far the most common.  For those really immersed in literary theory, an accented (masculine) caesura follows an accented syllable and an unaccented (feminine) caesura an unaccented syllable.  So rigid were the conventions of use in the Old English that it was unusual for a line not to have a medial caesura as a half-line marker, the technique appearing throughout Beowulf:

þær mæg nihta gehwæm || niðwundor seon,
fyr on flode. || No þæs frod leofað
gumena bearna, || þæt þone grund wite;
ðeah þe hæðstapa || hundum geswenced,
heorot hornum trum, || holtwudu sece,

Traditionalists like William Langland (circa 1332–circa 1386), brought up in the alliterative school, maintained the model: Pier’s Ploughman (circa 1377):

Loue is leche of lyf || and nexte owre lorde selue
And also þe graith gate || þat goth in-to heuene;

Readers in English thus owe a debt to Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1344-1400) who developed the iambic pentameter which allowed set verse freely to adopt the rhythms and cadences of language as it was spoken: Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (circa 1380-1390):

With him ther was his sone, || a yong Squier
A lovyere || and a lusty bacheler,
With lokkes crulle || as they were leyd in presse.

Speak (2004) by Lindsay Lohan, pink vinyl edition, 2000 of which were in 2020 pressed for Urban Outfitters. No critic seems ever to have suggested Chaucer wouldn't have been a Lindsay Lohan fan: Anything But Me by Kara Elizabeth Dioguardi, John Shanks, Lindsey Lohan, from the album Speak by Lindsay Lohan.

Nobody told me that I'd be happy faces
Just trying to erase the traces || What came before me
A girl that I used to see somewhere buried deep
She's falling asleep and I trying to wake her set her free
 
Now is a never ending thing || One moment turns into another
Before I've had time to to run from all the other ones
And its so hard to live a dream
When the everything that they want you to be || Is anything but me
 
So much confusion circling inside my head
What this one and that one said || It's all an illusion
Cuz I'm still the same person no matter how fast I run
I'm trying to hold on to where it is I've come from

Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956.

Chaucer was of course the modernist of his time and in the later Modernist literature he might have found lines to admire; "like a terrible fish" sounds Chauceresque: Mirror (1961) by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963):

I am silver and exact. || I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, || unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, || only truthful
The eye of a little god, || four-cornered
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. || I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. || But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.


Now I am a lake. || A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, || the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. || She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, || and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day || like a terrible fish.

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Hoodoo

Hoodoo (pronounced who-do)

(1) A set of spiritual practices and traditions created and concealed from slave-owners by enslaved Africans in North America, based on traditional African beliefs.  Practiced predominantly in the south-east US, its identifiable features include folk magic, rituals of protection, herbal medicine, charming of objects, and ancestor veneration.

(2) In casual use, bad luck, or a person or thing that brings bad luck, not necessarily associated with the supernatural; to jinx, to bring bad luck or misfortune.

(3) In geology, a pillar of rock, created by various forces of erosion (also known as spires of rock, fairy chimneys, earth pyramids (and in particular formations) tent rocks).

1870: A creation of US English meaning "one who practices voodoo", apparently a variant of Voodoo.  The meaning "something that causes or brings bad luck" seems to have emerged in the 1880s and it was being used as a verb by 1886.  Interestingly, in 2002, it was documented also as a distinctly non-religious American folk magic.  Until the late twentieth century, hoodoo was spelled with & without an initial capital letter in a most inconsistent matter, both forms sometimes appearing in the one document.  The modern practice (which seems compelling) is to capitalize in when the word is used in the context of the spiritual practice or the cultural identification but to use all-lowercase when referring to the geological formations or used as casual slang (perhaps surprisingly, there’s been little apparent interest in proscribing hoodoo in this sense on the grounds of cultural appropriation).  Hoodoo is a noun & verb, hoodooed & hoodooing are verbs and hoodooism is a noun; the noun plural is hoodoos.

The first known instance of Hoodoo in English was in 1870 but the origins are wholly speculative, etymologists concluding it was probably an alteration of voodoo, a word drawn from the Ewe and Fon languages of Ghana and Benin which reference a divinity although the Akan odu (medicine) may be related and there’s also the possibility of a link to the Hausa hu'du'ba (resentment and retribution).  Less likely, but not impossible is that it’s from the variant Hudu (spirit work) in the Ewe language spoken in Ghana and Togo.  The link with Voodoo however is most convincing because Hoodoo was as early as the late nineteenth century identified as an African dialect with practices similar to the mysteries of Obi (Obeah) in the Caribbean.

Pre-production de Havilland Comet (DH 106) with the original, square windows, England, 1949 (left) and Comet 4 (Registration G-APDN) in BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation (1939-1974 which in 1974 was merged with BEA (British European Airways) and others to later become BA (British Airways)) livery, Tokyo (Haneda International (HND / RJTT)), Japan October 1960.

The term hoodoo is often attached to objects thought jinxed.  When the de Havilland Comet (DH 106; the first commercial jet airliner), within a year of its first flight in 1949, began to suffer a number of catastrophic in-flight accidents, newspapers wrote of the “Comet hoodoo”, something encouraged because, in the pre “black-box” era, analysis of aviation incidents was a less exact science than now and for some time the crashes appeared inexplicable.  It was only when extensive testing revealed the reason for the structural failures could be traced to stresses in the airframe induced aspects of the design that the hoodoo was understood to be the operation of physics.  Other manufacturers noted the findings and changed their designs, Boeing's engineers acknowledging the debt they owed to de Havilland because it was the investigation of the Comet's early problems which produced the solutions which helped the Boeing 707 (1957) and its many successors to be the successful workhorses they became.  As a footnote, by the time the Comet 4 was released in 1958 the problems had been solved but commercially, the project was doomed and reputational damage done.  Between 1949-1964, barely more than 100 were sold although many did provide reliable service until 1981 and the airframe proved adaptable, dozens of military variants produced, the most notable being the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod, a maritime patrol version which was in service with the Royal Air Force (RAF) until 2011.

It’s because of the lessons learned from the Comet hoodoo that the apertures of airliner windows have rounded edges, the traditional four-cornered openings creating four weak spots prone to failure under stress.  Lindsay Lohan demonstrates. 

Pre-dreadnought battleship, USS Texas ("Old Hoodoo"), 1898.  Note the sailors' washing hanging from the railings, a long naval tradition.   

Sailors are said to be notoriously superstitious and probably didn’t need much persuasion to call the USS Texas “Old Hoodoo”.  The US Navy’s first (pre-dreadnought) battleship, she was commissioned in response to the naval arms race which developed in the Americas in the late nineteenth century although, despite the tensions, construction was undertaken as what would seem a leisurely pace; ordered in 1886, it wasn't until 1889 the keel was laid down and when finally commissioned in 1895, although not yet obsolescent, she was hardly in the forefront of naval architecture.  The ship's accident-prone reputation was well deserved and had started early with incidents of grounding, flooding (drowning three of the crew) and a collision with a dock.  However, she rose to the occasion and provided sterling service during the Spanish–American War (1898) but, ironically, her reputation was such that the Navy decided to use the now storied name for a new dreadnought, the USS Texas (BB-35), commissioned in 1914 and later declared a national historic landmark (and now the last surviving World War I (1914-1918) era dreadnought).  As sailors know, it’s bad luck to change the name of a ship and now named the USS San Marcos, the old Texas proved it so.  Towed as a hulk to shallow waters in Chesapeake Bay, resting on the bottom, she became an increasingly battered target ship, the US Navy using her for gunnery practice until the late 1940s.  Increasing water traffic however meant the hulk had become a navigational hazard and most of the remains were removed as scrap in 1959.

Hoodoos short (left), tall (centre) and clustered (right), Arizona, south-west US.

In geology, a hoodoo (also known as spires of rock, fairy chimneys, earth pyramids (and in particular formations) tent rocks) is a tall, typically thin, spire of rock formed by the processes of erosion (wind, rain, floods) and are forms usually of a relatively soft rock (such as sandstone) topped by harder stone which better resists the forces of nature.  Mostly, they exist within sedimentary rock and volcanic rock formations.  Hoodoos can be only a few feet high or exceed the level of multi-storey buildings and the shape they assume is wholly dictated by the composition of the rocks from which they’re formed, the erosional patterns differing according to the hardness of the material.  The introduction of the word hoodoo to geology seems to have happened in the late nineteenth century at the time when it had entered the vernacular to describe both the rituals of certain folk magic and the sense of doom or bad luck.  As the more remote regions of the western US were explored, the rocky structures were noted to be of not dissimilar spiritual significance to First Nations peoples and in some cases literally to be the petrified remains of those punished by the gods for their transgressions.

In the natural environment, temperature can also create structures with a hoodoo-like appearances.  Trees in Finland (left), a frozen fountain in Shevchenko Garden, Kharkiv, Ukraine (centre) and frozen Geyser in Letchworth State Park, New York with volcano-like flow maintained at the top (right).

Monday, November 21, 2022

Piste

Piste (pronounced peest)

(1) In skiing, a downhill trail or run.

(2) In competitive fencing, the internationally recognized regulation-size strip, 2 m (6’ 6”) in width and 14 m (46’) long.

(3) A track left by somebody riding a horse (archaic).

(4) A spoor made by a wild animal.

1727: From the Old French piste (beaten track of a horse or other animal) from the Italian pista (via (a beaten track)) a variant of pesta (footprint).  Pesta was a deverbal of pistare & pestare (to pound, crush) a Vulgar Latin frequentative of the Latin pīnsere, pistus the past participle.  Other languages picked up piste from the French.  Like English, Lithuanian, Dutch and German used the same spelling (the Germans capitalizing the noun) while there’s also the Catalan pista, the Greek πίστα (písta), the Persian: پیست‎ (pist) and the Turkish pist.  The alternative spelling pist is now rare.  Piste is a noun; the noun plural is pistes.

In Dutch, a piste (diminutive pistetje) is (1) a downhill ski run, (2) a track used in competitive athletics, or (3) a ring in a circus.  In Finnish, piste was originally a synonym of pisto (sting; prick, puncture).  In examples of linguistic innovation it was used in typography to mean "period, full stop, dot", use later extending to the sense of “mark or stroke above a letter” and a “unit of font size or spacing”.  In geometry it meant "point", thus the general sense in mathematics of it being the representation of a dimensionless object in space and thus a specific location and in figurative (though obviously inaccurate) use, piste came mean “tiny; something infinitesimally small”.  The idea of small was picked up in the scoring systems of various sports, a piste being (in the familiar sense of “a point”) the smallest unit a team or player could be awarded.

In French, the phraseology provides the descriptive nuances which indicate whether piste is being used in the literal sense of physical geography or figuratively thus: Une piste automobile dans le desert (track left in the desert sand by a car); piste cyclable (a bicycle path); La police est sur la piste d’un complot (the police are following a lead in their investigation of a conspiracy); piste d’atterrissage (an airport runway); piste de danse (a dance floor).  English adds modifiers to trail, track etc in the same manner.  In the sense in which piste is used in English, the French also use it to refer to ski slopes in general but also in more elaborated forms to differentiate where necessary: piste de ski (ski slope, ski trail); piste de luge (sled or sledge track).  Use in Italian follows the French but, noting the quality of snow as a white powder, imaginatively adds piste as the street slang for a line of cocaine and it’s a word which in this sense might see a goodly amount of use because the 2019 Global Drug Survey identified Italy as the world’s second largest consumer of the narcotic.

On the Piss

Piste is pronounced peest and the usual phrase when speaking of skiing is “on the piste” so care must be taken it’s not confused with another phrase, often used in parts of the English-speaking world, the operative word there pronounced pis.

On the piss: Crooked Hillary Clinton enjoys a quick belt of Crown Royal Bourbon Whiskey, Bronko's restaurant, Crown Point, Indiana, Saturday 12 April, 2008.

On the piss: Boris Johnson enjoying champagne, port and a pint.  It's not known if these photographs were all taken the same day.

On the piste

On the piste: An assured Lindsey Vonn (b 1984), four-time World Cup alpine ski champion and Olympic gold medallist.

In pink, on the piste: A less assured Lindsay Lohan, on skis during filming of Netflix’s Falling for Christmas.  The pink jumpsuit and pink fluffy vest are available on-line.

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Lilo

Lilo (pronounced lahy-loh)

(1) The trademark for a type of inflatable plastic or rubber mattress, often used when in lakes, swimming pools etc.

(2) As a generic term, any inflatable mattress, especially those used recreationally in lakes, swimming pools etc).

(3) The portmanteau slang synonym for Li(ndsay) Lo(han); it was also applied as the name of a dance Ms Lohan performed ad-hoc on the Greek island of Mykonos in 2018.

(4) As LILO, the acronym for Li(nux) Lo(ader), an early (1991-2015) boot loader for the Linux operating system.

(5) As LILO, in computing, organizational management, accountancy and behavioral science, as the acronym for L(ast) I(n), L(ast) O(ut), a companion unit descriptor to FIFO (First In, First Out) & FILO (First in Last Out), all methods with which to organize the manipulation of data structures.  Under LILO, the last object in a queue is the last object to leave the queue.

1944: The trademark name Lilo (originally Li-Lo) registered by the company which made inflatable air-mattresses of rubberized canvas dates from the 1940s (1944 in the UK; 1947 in the US) and was a sensational spelling based on the phonetic “lie low”.  Lilo also exists in other languages: In the Philippines, in the Cebuano language a lilo is a swirling body of water or a large and violent whirlpool (a maelstrom) while in Tagalog it’s an adjective meaning disloyal; unfaithful; traitorous; treacherous (the synonyms being taksil, sukab, mapagkanulo & traydor).  In Hawaiian, Lilo is a feminine given name meaning “generous one” although in some traditions in the islands it can be translated as “lost” so the song He Mele No Lilo translates (loosely) as “Lullaby of the Lost”.  Lilo is a noun, the noun plural is lilos.

The Li-Lo Kayak, 1960.  The car depicted is a stylized rendition of an early version of one from the Rootes Group's "Audax" range (1956–1967).

The technology of the lilo was adaptable and able to assume various shapes, the LiLo company dabbling in a number of market niches including furniture, packaging and inflatable canoes.  The Kayak however was complex in construction so its production was thus labor intensive so it never sold in the numbers required to achieve the economies of scale which could have lowered the price and at Stg£25 (over Stg£500 in 2022 values) it was too expensive to succeed.  The idea has however been revived in the twenty-first century and "lilo & inflatable kayak" adventure tourism is now a thing.

The Bravissimo Lilo

The joke which buyers took seriously: the Bravissimo Lilo.

Bravissimo's Lilo appeared originally in 2018 as an April Fools' prank but such was the demand it was put into production and is now Bravissimo part-number SW571, available exclusively in hot pink.  Although there have since the 1940s been improvements in materials (lilos are made usually from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or textile-reinforced urethane plastic or rubber), the innovation on Bravissimo's is the first structural change in design in seventy-five years.  Integrating what the manufacturer calls “cup holders” the unique feature is a one-size-fits-all lacuna at the appropriate position so the breasts may comfortably rest un-squished when a woman is supine, lying face-down

Room to move: One size fits all.

Even Bravissimo, an underwear company which specializes in the niche of bigger boobs, admits they really should have thought of this before, given the discomfort suffered by lilo-using women tends to increase in direct proportion to cup-size.  It’s available in-store in some Bravissimo outlets and on-line at Stg£28 (US$45).

No longer one size fits all: Crash test dummies (CTD) now more inclusive.

Perhaps Bravissimo being nudged into making available a lilo which took account of women's unique anatomical differences inspired others because, some fifty years after they came into use, Swedish engineers have at last developed a crash-test dummy (CTD; "seat evaluation tool" the technical term) representative of the body of a typical woman.  Until now, almost all CTDs have been based on the build and weight of a typical adult male.  In most markets however, women however have long represented about half of all drivers and passengers yet the CTD manufacturers and regulators used in testing as a proxy for women was a scaled-down version of the male one, roughly the size of a typical girl of twelve and at 1.49m (4', 8") and weighing 48kg (106 lb), in accord with only the smallest 5% of women by the standards of the mid-1970s.  The new CTD is a more representative 1.62 m (5', 3") tall, weighing in at 62kg (137 lb) so it's another DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) building block. 

The need for a range of CTD with characteristics covering most of the population was discussed in the 1960s when US regulators began to write the first standards for automotive safety but industry lobbyists did their work and ensured crash-testing would be done as cheaply as possible, hence the standard, one-size-fits-all male analogue.  Despite years of convincing research which confirmed women were disproportionately injured in crashes (height rather than weight apparently the critical variable in the interaction of their smaller frames with seat-belts and air-bags), it wasn't until 2011 that US federal regulators required manufacturers to use more petite CTDs in frontal automotive crash tests.  It's hoped the new, Swedish-developed CTD will improve outcomes and the data from physical testing will soon be available for use in the increasingly important computer emulations, a field in which artificial intelligence (AI) is proving useful.

Lindsay Lohan: Studies of Lilo lying low in three aspects.

Lindsay Lohan’s moniker LiLo is a blend, the construct being Li(ndsay) + Lo(han).  Being based on proper nouns, in linguistics this would by most be regarded a pure blend, although some would list it as a portmanteau which is a special type of blend in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word (and some insist that in true portmanteaus there must be some relationship between the source words and the result).

Saturday, November 19, 2022

Slap

Slap (pronounced slap)

(1) A sharp blow or smack, especially with the open hand or with something flat; a sound made by or as if by such a blow or smack.

(2) By analogy, a sharply worded or sarcastic rebuke or comment.

(3) To put or place something promptly and sometimes haphazardly (often followed by on; if haphazard, often described as slapdash).

(4) As slap on the wrist, relatively mild criticism or censure, often used critically when more onerous punishments are available.

(5) A gap or opening, as in a fence, wall, cloud bank, or line of troops; a mountain pass; a wound or gash (now rare).

(6) As slap-sole, an additional sole affixed between the heel and sole of a high-heeled shoe. 

(7) In slang, make up (based on the notion "that which is slapped on").

(8) In slang, a poster (based on the notion "slapped onto the wall").  

Origin uncertain: It’s been linked to the (1325–1375) Middle English slop from the Middle Dutch or Middle Low German (cognate with German Schlupf (hiding place)) though with little support.  The seventeenth century Middle English slappen is of uncertain origin and probably imitative, drawing from the Low German Slapp & Slappe (slap) from which Modern German gained Schlappe (defeat).  Most suggest the verb use (in the sense of “strike with an open hand”) began in the late fifteenth century, became an adverb in the 1670s, and picked up the meanings “suddenly” or “directly” in 1829.  The noun form dates from the mid fifteenth century, again apparently of imitative origin, similar to the various German forms slappe & Schlappe.  The figurative meaning "insult, reprimand" is attested from 1736; the now probably obsolete “slap-happy” (1936) originally meant "punch-drunk and “slap on the wrist” meaning "very mild punishment" dates from 1914.  The modern acronym SLAPP is unrelated.  Slap is a noun, verb & adverb, slapping is a noun, slapper is a noun, verb & adjective, slapped is a verb and slappy is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is slaps.

Slap soles

Although they became high (and occasionally extreme) fashion items, slap soles began as a purely functional addition to men’s boots.  In the seventeenth century, men of a certain class, upon dismounting their horses, would slip a flat-soled mule over their riding boots to stop their heels sinking into the ground.  Presumably seeing a gap in the market, cobblers began to attach an additional sole, extending from tip to heel but not actually attached to the heel, a design which when walking, produced a clacking, slapping sound.  The apparently strange design existed so that riding boots would still fit securely in the stirrups and not interfere with the spurs.

Men in slap-soled boots.  Portrait of Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard Stuart (circa 1638), oil on canvas by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641).

Seventeenth century women's slap-soled shoes.

History doesn’t record whether women were attracted to the style or just the idea of being able to wear their newly fashionable high-heels without also sinking into the soil but the concept was soon extended to women’s shoes.  However, when applied to women’s shoes, although the slap-sole name stuck, there was no slapping sound when walking because the sole was this time anchored at the heel as well.  It’s essentially the same concept used on a tank or bulldozer, a self-laying track which renders a more stable surface on which to move.  So bizarre was the appearance of these shoes that they have long been a collectable and the delicate, intricate detailing on many does suggest many of them must have been created purely as pieces of high-fashion.  Doubtless there were some women of the horsey set who used the genuine slapping-soles as did the men but on the (admittedly hardly representative) basis of the surviving depictions, more seem to have worn them far from muddy stable yards.

Usage guide for “slap”:  An example of a literal “slap” is being “slapped in the face” by the mother of the children one is attempting to “rescue from traffickers” on the streets of Moscow.  A figurative “slap” is being “slapped with a parking fine” for leaving one’s Cadillac Escalade parked next to a fire hydrant.  Overlap is possible because a parking ticket is in some places still a physical slip of paper or cardboard so one literally could be “slapped with a parking ticket”.  Instances of such presumably are rare but to avoid ambiguity the correct use is “slapped with a parking fine” (figurative) or “slapped with a parking ticket” (the literal assault & battery).

Friday, November 18, 2022

Reaper

Reaper (pronounced ree-per)

(1) A machine for cutting standing grain; reaping machine; a machine used to harvest crops.

(2) One who reaps; a person employed to harvest crops from the fields by reaping; a machine operator who controls a mechanical reaper.

(3) A short form of grim reaper (often capitalized), the personification of death as a man or cloaked skeleton holding a scythe.

(4) The recluse spider (Loxosceles and Sicarius spp).

Pre 1000: From the Middle English reper, repare & repere (a harvester, one who cuts grain with a sickle or other instrument) from the Old English compound rīpere (the agent-noun from the verb reap), the construct being reap (from the Middle English repen, from the Old English rēopan & rēpan, variants of the Old English rīpan (to reap), from the Proto-Germanic rīpaną and related to the West Frisian repe, the German reifsen (to snatch) and the Norwegian ripa (to score, scratch); source was the primitive Indo-European hireyb- (to snatch)) + -er (from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, probably borrowed from Latin –ārius and later reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant was -our), from the Latin -(ā)tor, from the primitive Indo-European –tōr; the suffix was added to verbs to form an agent noun).  The agent noun meaning "a reaper" is from the 1590s whereas the sense of "a machine for cutting grain" dates from 1841 and that of a “machine for reaping and binding field crops" appeared in 1847.  Variations of the spelling including Riper, Ryper & Riper appear in pre-1000 parish records as surnames and the presumption is most would have had some sort of vocational relationship to “reap”; Repere was first noted as a surname in the early fourteenth century.  Reaper is a noun; the noun plural is reapers.

The Grim Reaper as often depicted.

The use as the name of a personification of death dates from 1818 and “grim reaper” was first attested in 1847 although the association of grim and death is document from at least the seventeenth century with actual common use probably much earlier; a Middle English expression for "have recourse to harsh measures" was “to wend the grim tooth” and has been found as early as the 1200s.  The adjective grim was from the Old English grimm (fierce, cruel, savage; severe, dire, painful), from the Proto-Germanic grimma- (source also of the Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old High German & German grimm (grim, angry, fierce), the Old Norse grimmr (stern, horrible, dire), the Swedish grym (fierce, furious), from the primitive Indo-European ghremno- (angry), thought to be imitative of the sound of rumbling thunder (and may thus be compared with the Greek khremizein (to neigh), the Old Church Slavonic vuzgrimeti (to thunder) and the Russian gremet' (thunder).  Grim by the late twelfth century had lost the worst of the earlier connotations of violence and foreboding, by then understood to impart a sense of "dreary, gloomy".  The verb form in the Old English was grimman (past tense gramm; past participle grummen), while the noun grima (goblin, specter) may also have been a proper name or attribute-name of a god, the source of its appearance as an element in so many place names.

The Grim Reaper: Public health initiative, Australia, 1987.

The Grim Reaper was a 60 second-long television advertisement, run in 1987 as part of a public health campaign to increase awareness of the danger of HIV/AIDS.  It depicted the Grim Reaper of popular imagination in a ten-pin bowling alley, using a seven foot high (2.1 m) bowling ball to knock over men, women and child "pins", each of which represented a victim of the disease.  It was part of what would later be called a multi-media campaign which included radio broadcasts and printed material and certainly provoked a reaction, more sophisticated consumers of messaging thinking it at least banal and perhaps puerile while others found it disturbing and reported it scared their children.  The public response was hardly “hysterical” as has sometimes been claimed although the even then assertive gay community didn’t like that they were explicitly mentioned, fearing scapegoating although, given the publicity which by then had been documenting the track of AIDS for some four years, that horse had already bolted.  It was by the standards of the time confronting and criticism meant the government cancelled broadcasting, three weeks into a run which was intended to be twice the duration yet the public health community was pleased with the results and the programme was praised internationally, the direct Australian approach influencing others.  Some Australian state governments subsequently used even more graphic imagery in public health initiatives around matters such as smoking and road safety but it’s notable that attempts to use similar techniques to promulgate messages during the COVID-19 pandemic were thought a failure.  With various platforms having desensitized most to all but the most horrific sights, the public’s capacity to be shocked may have moved beyond what television advertising agencies can manage.

Blue Öyster Cult (Don't Fear) The Reaper (1976) © Donald Roeser (b 1947)

All our times have come
Here but now they're gone
Seasons don't fear the reaper
Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain, we can be like they are
 
Come on baby, don't fear the reaper
Baby take my hand, don't fear the reaper
We'll be able to fly, don't fear the reaper
Baby I'm your man
 
La, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la
 
Valentine is done
Here but now they're gone
Romeo and Juliet
Are together in eternity, Romeo and Juliet
40,000 men and women everyday, Like Romeo and Juliet
40,000 men and women everyday, Redefine happiness
Another 40,000 coming everyday, We can be like they are
 
Come on baby, don't fear the reaper
Baby take my hand, don't fear the reaper
We'll be able to fly, don't fear the reaper
Baby I'm your man
 
La, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la
 
Love of two is one
Here but now they're gone
Came the last night of sadness
And it was clear she couldn't go on
Then the door was open and the wind appeared
The candles blew then disappeared
The curtains flew then he appeared, saying don't be afraid
 
Come on baby, and she had no fear
And she ran to him, then they started to fly
They looked backward and said goodbye, she had become like they are
She had taken his hand, she had become like they are
Come on baby, don't fear the reaper

Although they’d led a discursive existence since 1967, by the early 1970s, Blue Öyster Cult was in the crowded field of post-psychedelic acts blending quasi-classical motifs, mysticism, neck-snapping riffs and pop panache.  Coming from this milieu, the commercial success in 1976 of the single (Don't Fear) The Reaper was unexpected although more predictable was the controversy triggered by the lyrics being interpreted as advocating suicide.  It’s tempting to read the words that way, the eye drawn to the mention of Shakespeare's star-cross'd lovers, but the musician who wrote the lyrics claimed the song was about mortality and the inevitability of death, not its hastening and that in Romeo and Juliet he saw a couple with a faith in eternal love, not icons of a death cult.  The forty-thousand souls mentioned being taken by the reaper is way too high to refer to the daily suicide toll and actually references the total daily death take, the “forty thousand” being a bit of artistic license because the real number (125-135,000 at the time the lyrics were penned) would have too many syllables for the rhythm of the music.

Coming & going, dressed for the occasion.  Lindsay Lohan in Grim Reaper mode fulfilling a court-mandated community service order at LA County Morgue, October, 2011.