Combat

 Combat (pronounced kuhm-bat or kom-bat (verb); kom-bat (noun))

(1) To fight or contend against; vigorously to oppose.

(2) In military matters, certain parts of branches of the services which engage in armed conflict with enemy forces.

(3) An action fought between two military forces.

(4) As a descriptor (in the military and of weapos and weapons systems), a means to distinguish between an item design specifically for use in combat as oppose to one intended for other purpose.

1535-1540: From the Middle English intransitive verb combat (to fight, struggle, contend), from the sixteenth century French combat, from the twelfth century Old French combattre, from the Late Latin combattere, the construct being com (with (each other) (an an archaic form of cum)) + battuere (to beat, fight) (source of the modern English verb "batter").  The transitive sense dates from the 1580s; the figurative use from the 1620s.  The noun combat (a fight (originally especially "a fight between two armed persons" and later distinguished as single combat in the 1620s)), emerged in the 1560s and soon was applied in a general sense to "any struggle or fight between opposing forces".  Combat is a noun, verb & adjective, combater & combatant are nouns, combatted & combatting are verbs and combative is an adjective; the noun plural is combats.

Combative and dressed for combat: Lindsay Lohan in boxing gloves.

The phrase hors de combat (out of action; disabled; no longer able to fight (literally "out of combat")) was constructed from hors (out, beyond), from the Latin foris (outside (literally "out of doors")) + de (of) + combat.  It dates from 1757 and was related originally to battlefield conduct (the principle of which which would later be interpolated into the the rules of war) and is now a literary and rhetorical device.  It shouldn't be confused with the French expression hors concours (out of competition) which, dating from 1884, is applied to works of art in an exhibition but not eligible to be awarded a prize.  Given the sometimes nasty battles waged in galleries, perhaps hors de combat might sometimes be as appropriate but in exhibitions it's most often used of works which have either already won a prize or have been awarded the maximum number provided for in the competition rules.  Other sporting competitions sometimes use hors concours to describe entries which don't conform with the rules of the event but are for a variety of reasons permitted to run (notably in motorsport).  The adjective combative (pugnacious, disposed to fight) is from 1819 and by the mid nineteenth century had become much associated with the long discredited pseudo-science of phrenology, the related forms being combatively and the earlier (1815) combativeness.  Combatant (contending, disposed to combat) was an adjective by the mid fifteenth century and a noun (one who engages in battle) by circa 1855, both from the Old French combatant (which survives in Modern French as combattant) (skilled at fighting, warlike) where it had also been a noun.    The adjective combative (pugnacious, aggressive; disposed to engage in conflict (though not necessarily violence)) seems not pleasing to some because the incorrect spelling combatative is not uncommon.  

The Norton Commando 750 Combat

1968 Kawasaki 500 Mach III (H1).

British manufacturers once regarded competition from the far-east with little concern but by the late 1960s, Japanese motorcycles had become serious machines enjoying commercial success.  Kawasaki’s 500cm³ (H1, Mach III) two-stroke triple debuted in 1968 while Honda’s 750-Four was released a year later, the former fast but lethally unstable, the latter more refined.  Three years on, the release of Kawasaki’s z900 confirmed the maturity of the Japanese product and the era of British complacency was over though the realization was too late to save the industry.

Nothing ever quite matched the rawness of the original Kawasaki Mach III.  Riders of high performance machines had for decades distinguished between fast, well-balanced motorcycles and those which, while rapid, needed to be handled with caution if used in anything but a straight line and on a billiard table smooth surface but even in those circumstances the Mach III could be a handful, the engine's power band narrow and the entry to it sudden and explosive.  Many were soon noting that while rear tyre life was short, the front lasted well because it spent so little time in contact with the road.  Adding to the trickiness, lacking the rigidity needed to cope with such stresses, the frame design meant there was something of a gyroscopic tendency under hard acceleration which could at least be disquieting and the consequences were often worse.  Still, nobody denied they were quick.  Clearly, only crazy people would buy such a thing but fortunately for Kawasaki (and presumably this was part of their product planning), by 1968 the Western world was populated as never before with males aged 17-25 (peak craziness years) with sufficient credit or disposable income to indulge the madness of youth.  It helped that under the Bretton Woods system (1944) of fixed exchange rates, at ¥360 to the US$, the Mach III was quite a bargain; on cost breakdown, nothing on two wheels or four came close.

1973 Kawasaki 750 Mach IV (H2).

As a design, the Mach III obviously had its flaws but as a piece of engineering, it exhibited typical Japanese soundness and attention to detail.  They borrowed much and while little was genuinely innovative, they had started with a clean sheet of paper and buyers found, unlike the British bikes, electrics were reliable and mechanical parts were not subject to the oil-leaks which the British had for decades claimed were endemic to the breed; far-eastern engineering was now mass-producing bikes a generation or more advanced.  However, the British industry was chronically under-capitalized so, lacking resources to develop new models, resorted to "improving" existing models.  While they were doing that, the Japanese manufacturers moved on and Kawasaki were planning something which would match the Mach III for performance but deliver it in a more civilized (and safer) manner.  This project was a four-stroke, four cylinder 750, developed while the Mach III was being toned down (a little) while the good idea of a broader power band and a (slightly) stiffer frame was used on the Mach IV (750 H2), the ultimate evolution of the two-stroke triple which delivered best of the the Mach III experience while (somewhat) taming the worst of its characteristics.

1969 Honda 750-Four (the crankcases of the early 750s are (a little misleadingly) referred to as the "sandcast"; they were actually gravity cast).

However, in 1969 Honda, the largest in the Japanese industry and the company which in 1964 had stunned Formula One community when their 1.5 litre V12 car won a Grand Prix, released the motorcycle which threatened the very existence of the new big Kawasaki and the four-stroke Honda 750-Four was for a generation to set the template for its genre, as influential for big motorcycles as the Boeing 707 had in 1957 been for commercial airliners.  Kawasaki reviewed this disturbing intrusion on their planning, concluding the Honda was a touring machine and that the Mach III had proved there was demand machines orientated more to high-performance.  The board looked at the demographic charts and decided to proceed, enlarging their project to 900cm³ which, with double overhead camshafts (DOHC) was tuned more for top-end power than the more relaxed, single cam (SOHC) Honda.  Released in 1972, almost a year after the Mach IV, the z900 attracted praise for its quality and performance, all delivered while offering a stability the charismatic but occasionally lethal triples never approached.

1972 Kawasaki z900

The big Nortons, named Commando since 1967, had long been a benchmark for high-performance motorcycles and although the Mach III had (on paper) matched its speed, its handling characteristics were such that it could really be enjoyed only in a straight line and even then, was best handled by cautious experts.  The Honda 750-Four and Kawasaki z900 were both vastly better as road machines and clearly the future of the breed.  The long-serving big British twins, while their handling was still impeccable, were now outdated, no longer offered a performance premium and still leaked oil.  Norton’s response in 1972 was the hastily concocted Commando Combat, the engine tweaked in the usual British manner with a high compression ratio, bigger carburetors, larger ports and a high-lift, long-duration camshaft.  These modifications, quite usual for racing engines, are not suitable for the road and the “peaky” Combat’s only advantage was great top-end power though it was noted the clever isolastic engine mounting did work well to limit the extent to which the greater vibration transmitted through the frame.  Unfortunately, the gains high in the rev-range compromised the low and mid-range performance, just where a road-bike most often operates.  Indeed, at points, the torque-curve actually went the wrong way and the only obvious way to disguise this was to lower the gearing which (1) restricted the top-speed to something embarrassing low and (2) meant even cruising speeds demanded high engine revolutions.  Sadly, it wasn’t possible for many long to enjoy the pleasures of all that power because the Combat's specification exposed weaknesses in pistons, bearings and crankshafts.  Main bearing life could be as little as 4000 miles (7000 km) but plenty of engines succumbed to other failures long before.  As a consolation, even if the Combat wouldn’t keep going, it was easy to stop, the disk brake was the best in the industry.

1972 Norton Commando 750 Combat.

So the most of the things that were changed made things worse.  Other things stayed the same including the oil leaks (the joke being seals existed to keep the dirt out, not the fluids in) and the absence of electric starting, the right legs of Norton owners reputedly more muscular than the left.  For the engine's problems the solution lay in engineering and metallurgy, a combination of a self-aligning spherical roller bearing called a superblend and un-slotted pistons.  But, by the time things were fixed, the fiasco had had triggered irreparable damage to market perceptions and Norton quietly dropped the Combat, applying the improvements to their mainstream engines without trying to match its top-end power.  Norton went bankrupt within a few years but the name has been revived several times over the past decades.

Esquire

Esquire (pronounced es-kwahyuhr or e-skwahyuhr)

(1) An unofficial title of respect (usually with no precise definition or significance and sometimes self-conferred), placed (often in its abbreviated form), after a man's surname in formal written address (used with initial capital letter).

(2) In the US, an informal honorific used by lawyers (male & female).

(3) In the UK, a term applied to a commoner considered to have gained the social position of a gentleman (historically a man belonging to the order of English gentry ranking immediately below a knight).

(4) An alternative form for squire when that was used to mean “a youth who in the hopes of becoming a knight attends upon a knight” (obsolete).

(5) To raise to the rank of esquire; in medieval use the attendant and shield bearer of a knight (and subsequently sometimes knighted themselves), one practical significance of the title being it conferred the right to bear arms.

(6) In heraldry, a bearing similar in form to a gyron, but extending across the field so that the point touches the opposite edge of the escutcheon.

(7) To address as Esquire.

(8) A gentleman who attends or escorts a lady in public; a male escort (rare and long archaic except when applied humorously or euphemistically (as a sanitized alternative to “tame cat”, “rent boy” et al).

1425–1475: From the late Middle English esquier, from the Middle French escuyer & escuier (shield bearer; an attendant young man in training to be a knight), from the Old French esquiere, esquierre & esquarre (square), from the Latin scūtārius (“shield bearer”, “guardsman”, the construct being scūt(um) (shield) + -ārius (-ary).  The suffix -aris was a form of -ālis with dissimilation of -l- to -r- after roots containing an l (the alternative forms were -ālis, -ēlis, -īlis & -ūlis); it was used to form adjectives, usually from noun, indicating a relationship or a "pertaining to").  The form reached modern French as écuyer (shield-bearer, armor-bearer, squire of a knight, esquire, equerry, rider, horseman).  Rather (as some might reasonably suppose) than esquire being formed as e- + - squire, the word squire was a product of apheresis (the suppression or complete loss of a letter or sound (syllable) from the beginning of a word) from the earlier French & English.  Esquire is a noun & verb and esquired & esquiring are verbs; the noun plural is esquires.

Esquire began as a feudal rank ranking below a knight, the origin of the word in the role of a squire who attended upon a knight as a kind of combination of personal assistant, apprentice and servant.  For those not from established families, it was one of the few available paths to knighthood.  As the historic role of knights receded in the sixteenth century, the use broadened to encompass (1) the educated or professional class (especially those practicing in law) & (2) members of the gentry and their sons not otherwise entitled to some title.  In the US, esquire became attached to lawyers (both male & female), probably as an identifier to align in some way with the “Dr” granted to physicians because by convention, those with vocational doctorates (Doctor of Jurisprudence (J.D., JD, D.Jur., or DJur) don’t use the “Dr” like those with higher or research doctorates (Ph.D, D.Sc, DCL et al).  Reflecting the shared origin with lawyers as “men of letters” (the lawyers more anxious to acknowledge their past than the surgeons are to recall they came out of the barber shops) writers and journalists also long liked to adopt an “esq” though much derision means it’s now less common.

Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax KCB.

In England, for historic reasons, the history and current usage is complicated.  The title is granted to the eldest sons of knights, the elder sons of the younger sons of peers and their eldest sons in succession, officers of the king's courts and of the royal household, barristers, justices of the peace while in commission & sheriffs and is available to gentlemen who have held commissions in the military.  It thus enjoys a wide vista but even now a definitive listing of the correct use has never been codified and some view it as pretentious even when technically correct.  Littered in the history of honors are also curiosities like the right of a Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath to appoint three esquires at the time of his installation, something which seems of ancient origin but was formalized in 1815 when the old order of knighthood (KB) was re-organized into three classes: Knight Grand Cross (GCB), Knight Commander (KCB) & Companion (CB).  One task a KCB’s helpful esquire might have performed was to assist translators in formal ceremonies.  In 1939, when Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, KCB, DSO, JP, DL (1880-1967) was introduced at a ceremony in Moscow, diplomatic protocol required his honors be read out in full, the Russian translator rendering his KCB as рыцарь умывальник (rytsar' umyval'nik) (Knight of the Wash Tub).  The Russians couldn’t help but laugh and fortunately, the admiral shared their amusement.  In legal documents and in uses deemed formal, Esquire is usually written in full after the names of those using the designation.  It’s otherwise abbreviated to Esq or (the now less common) Esqr.  Those conventions should in theory be observed also when adding an address to an envelope and American lawyers settled on a post-nominal Esq. (almost always with the needless period (full-stop)) in their e-mail signature blocks.

Lindsay Lohan attending the Esquire and DKNY fashion show, London, June 2014.

Squire was a truncation of esquire, the process known technically linguistics as apheresis (the suppression or complete loss of a letter or sound (syllable) from the beginning of a word).  It too was thus from the Old French escuier, from the Late Latin scutarius (shield bearer) which is Old English was spelled scutifer.  The equivalent in the Classical Latin was armiger (arms bearer).  The early meanings of squire were essentially the same as those attached to esquire but it evolved in England by the mid seventeenth century also to describe (with some variations) “a substantial landholder in a town or village who is a landlord to most or many inhabitants”.  The less formal term “lord of the manor” was essentially analogous and given the nature of the class system and economic relations in England, the role of squire often overlapped with offices such as that or mayor or magistrate and that (linguistic) tradition continues in contemporary American use, “squire” the title used for justices of the peace or similar local dignitaries.  Although the attractive slang forms squirearchy & squiress seem not to have survived, in UK working class slang, “squire” is used in a respectful and friendly way between men, a democratic re-purposing of the earlier sense of “country gentlemen”, dating from 1828.  The meaning “a ruler; a carpenter's square; a measure” was derived from the Middle French esquierre (rule, carpenter's square) or the Old French esquire (another form of esquarre (square)) and is long obsolete.

Ford Country Squires: 1951 (with genuine wood, left), 1959 (centre) and 1971 (right).

Long replaced in public favor by even more commodious SUVs, vans and people-movers, mass-market station wagons were a post-war phenomenon and in the US popular until the late 1980s.  Consistently the best-selling of the full-sized breed were the big Fords, the top-of-the-range being the Country Squire which was available between 1950-1991.  Its most distinctive feature was the “woodgrain” Appliqué which adorned the sides and for most of the Country Squire’s life it was rendered in DI-NOC, (Diurno Nocturna, from the Spanish, literally “daytime-nighttime” and translated for marketing purposes as “beautiful day & night”), an embossed vinyl or polyolefin material with a pressure-sensitive adhesive backing produced since the 1930s and perfected by Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing (3M).  The early cars (1950-1951) though actually used genuine timber in a nod to earlier coach-building traditions which were actually an economic imperative, station wagons (until the suburban developments of the post-war years made them popular) never produced in sufficient volume to make viable tooling factories for production in metal.  Much cheaper, the plastic DI-NOC replaced the timber in 1952 (although the perimeter moldings remained timber until 1953, after which 3M produced an emulation) and other manufacturers copied the idea which eventually spread beyond station wagons.  It was very much a thing which suited US tastes, Ford’s attempt to tempt UK & Australian buyers short-lived.

One-off 1967 Ford Country Squire with Q-Code 428 V8 and four-speed manual transmission.

Like most big station wagons, almost all the Country Squires were built for function and although the engines might sometimes be large (in the 1970s they were available with 429 & 460 cubic inch (7.0 & 7.5 litre) V8s), they were configured to carry or tow heavy loads and were thus sold almost always with heavy-duty automatic transmissions.  In 1967 however, there was a one-off Country Squire built with the combination of a 428 cubic inch (7.0 litre) V8 in Q-Code configuration, the “Q” a reference to the four-barrel (quad) carburetor, the most powerful offered that year in full-sized Fords (except for 12 Ford XLs with the 427 cubic inch V8 built mostly for competition).  Such vehicles are usually unicorns, often discussed and sometimes even created as latter-day “tributes” and are thus rarely "real" but the 1967 Country Squire is a genuine one-off and as a type may be unique not only among Fords but also the entire full-size ecosystem of the era.  The tale is sometimes still repeated that Plymouth built a special order Belvedere station wagon at the request of Bill Harrah (1911–1978) of Harrah's Hotel and Casinos in Nevada (now part of Caesars Entertainment) with the 426 cubic inch (7.0 litre) HEMI V8 for the rapid transport of cash across the desert but that is a myth and the coda (that Harrah decided instead to build his own) is just as unverified.  So the 1967 Country Squire is a curious period piece and a collectors’ item; despite its dilapidated appearance, in 2020 it sold at auction in the US for almost US$50,000.

Lindsay Lohan in Esquire (Middle East).

Erase

Erase (pronounced ih-reys)

(1) To rub or scrape out, as letters or characters written, engraved etc; efface.

(2) Completely to eliminate.

(3) To remove material recorded on magnetic tape or magnetic disk; synonymous for most purposes in this context with delete although technically, in computing, an erasure is the substitution of data with characters representing a null value whereas a deletion is the removal of an pointer entry in an index.

1595–1605: From the Middle English arasen & aracen (to eradicate, remove), from the Latin ērāsus, past participle of ērādere (scrape out, scrape off, shave, abolish, remove, to abrade), the construct being ex (out of) + radere (to scratch, scrape).  The use in the context of data on magnetic storage media (tapes, disks) dates from 1945, the technical distinction between erase and delete defined in computer science theory as early as 1947 though, to this day, the distinction escapes most users.  The adjective erasable dates from 1829.  Eraser (thing that erases writing) is attested from 1790, an invention of American English, agent noun from erase.  Originally, the product was a knife with which to scraping off ink, the first rubber devices for removing pencil marks not available until from 1858.

Erasure, Comrade Stalin and Lindsay Lohan

Evil dictators (like those running beach clubs or Greek islands) have their problems too and they like them to go away.  Where problems exist, they like them to be erased or is some other way to disappear.  Sometimes, the technical term is “unpersoned”.

The Erased

Not best pleased at images of the pleasingly pneumatic Karolina Palazi appearing on the official Lohan Beach Club Mykonos Beach Club Instagram account, Lindsay Lohan quickly responded with a post demanding her staff “Erase this random person at my beach”.  In the digital age, it can be difficult entirely to erase anything which appears on the internet and probably impossible for anything distributed on the big-data social media platforms.  That said, there is unpredictability to the fate of anything ever on-line.  There is (1) material which genuinely vanishes forever, (2) stuff which proves impossible to eradicate despite best efforts, and (3) things which were thought lost, only to re-appear.  Noted for some time, the issue will be of increasing interest in the future, the internet being a distributed system with no centralised repository indicating what is held where, by whom and whether it is accessible (by someone) on or off-line or in storage.

The Disappeared

General Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006; military dictator of Chile 1973-1990).

This is the relatively new name for the centuries-old practice of secretly kidnapping or arresting people, then imprisoning or killing them, all without due process of law.  It’s most associated with the late twentieth-century military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Brazil but is used to describe the practice in many South and Central American republics and of late, others, sometimes at scale.  Although the practice probably pre-dates even modern humans, the word, in this context appears first to have been used by Joseph Heller (1923–1999) in the satirical Catch-22 (1961) when describing how the US military dealt with malcontents.  However it’s done, the person disappears without trace.

The Unpersoned

Unpersoning wasn’t invented in the Soviet Union but it was under comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) it was undertaken at scale, although, like later attempts on the internet, the process wasn’t always perfect because it was performed on extant physical material, some of which inevitably escaped attention.  The process interested critics in the West; in George Orwell's (1903–1950), dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), protagonist Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth where his job is to alter historical records to conform to the state's ever-changing version of history.  Done in the USSR mostly between 1928-1953, unpersoning was the physical modification of existing text and imagery, modified to erase from history those who had fallen from favor and it’s thought the most extensively unpersoned figure in the USSR was comrade Leon Trotsky (1879-1940).  Comrade Stalin had him murdered in Mexico, the assassin's choice of weapon an ice axe.

Erased from history: Before & after being unpersoned, Comrades Molotov (1890-1986) & Stalin with Comrade Nikolai Yezhov (1895-1940), head of the NKVD (one of the predecessors of the KGB); Comrade Stalin had him shot.

In the Soviet Union, the process was essentially as Orwell described and even in the age of digital editing it's probably often still done in a similar manner.  A photograph would be passed to the party's technicians with the comrade(s) to be unpersoned marked in some obvious way, the preferred technique apparently a black crayon.

Succeeding where others failed: Erasing crooked Hillary Clinton

The White House situation room, 2 May 2011 (official WH photo; left) and as depicted in Di Tzeitung (right).

Unpersoning can also be sex-specific (gender-based the currently preferred term).  In May 2011, the Orthodox Jewish news paper Di Tzeitung (a Brooklyn-based weekly) was forced to apologize after unpersoning the women in the photograph released by the White House showing President Barack Obama (b 1961; US president 2009-2017) and his staff monitoring the raid by US Navy Seals in which Osama bin Laden (1957-2011) was killed while in his Pakistani compound.  Unpersoned were then counterterrorism director, Audrey Tomason (b circa 1977) and then secretary of state, crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013).  Di Tzeitung's subsequent apologia was somewhat nuanced.  The publication reiterated it did not publish images of women and thus sent its “regrets and apologies” to the White House and the State Department, not because it had unpersoned women but because their photo editor had not read the “fine print” in the text issued by the White House (which accompanied the photograph) which forbid any changes.  Di Tzeitung further explained it has a “long standing editorial policy” of not publishing images of women because its readers “believe that women should be appreciated for who they are and what they do, not for what they look like and the Jewish laws of modesty are an expression of respect for women, not the opposite”.  They added that Di Tzeitung regarded crooked Hillary Clinton (a former US senator (Democrat) for New York who secured overwhelming majorities in the Orthodox Jewish communities) highly and “appreciated her unique capabilities, talents and compassion for all”.  It concluded by acknowledging it “should not have published the altered picture”.  Commentators noted the practice is not unusual in some ultra-Orthodox Jewish publications which regard depictions of the female form as “immodest”.  Neither the White House nor the State Department responded to the apology although there were cynics who wondered if the president wished it were that easy to get rid of crooked Hillary.

The Watergate tapes and the erased 18½ minutes

Looking over his shoulder: Richard Nixon and HR Halderman in the White House.

Tapes, audio and video, have played a part in many political downfalls but none is more famous than the “smoking gun” tape which compelled the resignation of Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974) after it revealed he was involved in the attempt to cover-up the involvement in the Watergate break-in of some connected to his administration.  Recording conversations in the White House had been going on for years and Nixon initially had the equipment removed, the apparatus re-installed two years later after it was found there was no other way to ensure an accurate record of discussions was maintained.  Few outside a handful of the president’s inner circle knew of the tapes and they became public knowledge only in mid-1973 when, under oath before a congressional hearing, a White House official confirmed their existence.  That was the point at which Nixon should have destroyed the tapes and for the rest of his life he must sometimes have reflected that but for that mistake, his presidency might have survived because, although by then the Watergate scandal had been a destabilizing distraction, there was at that point no “smoking gun”, nothing which linked Nixon himself to any wrongdoing.  As it was, he didn’t and within days subpoenas were served on the White House demanding the tapes and that made them evidence; the moment for destruction had passed.  Nixon resisted the subpoenas, claiming executive privilege and thus ensued the tussle between the White House and Watergate affair prosecutors which would see the “Saturday Night Massacre” during which two attorneys-general were fired, the matter ultimately brought before the US Supreme Court which ruled against the president.  Finally, the subpoenaed tapes were surrendered on 5 August 1973, the “smoking gun” tape revealing Nixon and his chief of staff (HR Haldeman, 1926–1993; White House chief of staff 1969-1973) discussing a cover-up plan and at that point, political support in the congress began to evaporate and the president was advised that impeachment was certain and even Republican senators would vote to convict.  On 8 August, Nixon announced his resignation, leaving office the next day.

Uher 5000 reel-to-reel tape recorder used by a White House secretary to create the tape (20 June 1972) with the 18½ minute gap.  (Government Exhibit #60: Records of District Courts of the United States, Record Group 21. National Archives Identifier: 595593).

To this day, mystery surrounds one tape in particular, a recording of a discussion between Nixon and Halderman on 20 June 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in.  Of obviously great interest, when reviewed, there was found to be a gap of 18½ minutes, the explanations offered of how, why or by whom the erasure was effected ranging from the humorously accidental to the darkly conspiratorial but half a century on, it remains a mystery.  Taking advantage of new data-recovery technology, the US government did in subsequent decades make several attempts to “un-delete” the gap but without success and it may be, given the nature of magnetic tape, that there is literally nothing left to find.  However, the tape is stored in a secure, climate-controlled facility in case technical means emerge and while it’s unlikely the contents would reveal anything not already known or assumed, it would be of great interest to historians.  What would be even more interesting is the identity of who it was that erased the famous 18½ minutes but that will likely never be known; after fifty years, it’s thought that were there to be any death-bed confessions, they should by now have been heard.  Some have their lists of names of those who might have "pressed the erase button" and while mostly sub-sets of Watergate's "usual suspects", one who tends not to appear is Nixon himself, the usual consensus being he was technically too inept to operate a tape machine though it's not impossible he ordered someone to do the deed.  However it happened, the suspects most often mentioned as having had their "finger on the button" (which may have been a foot-pedal) are Nixon's secretary and his chief of staff.

Basketweave

Basketweave (pronounced bah-skit-weev (U) or bas-kit-weev (non-U))

(1) A plain woven pattern with two or more groups of warp and weft threads are interlaced to render a checkerboard appearance resembling that of a woven basket; historically applied especially (in garment & fabric production) to wool & linen items and (in furniture, flooring etc), fibres such as cane, bamboo etc.

(2) Any constructed item assembled in this pattern.

(4) In the natural environment, any structure (animal, vegetable or mineral) in this pattern.

(5) In automotive use, a stylized wheel, constructed usually in an alloy predominately of aluminum and designed loosely in emulation of the older spooked (wire) wheels.   

1920–1925: The construct was basket + weave (and used variously as basketweave, basket-weave & basket weave depending on industry, product, material etc).  Basket was from the thirteenth century Middle English basket (vessel made of thin strips of wood, or other flexible materials, interwoven in a great variety of forms, and used for many purposes), from the Anglo-Norman bascat, of obscure origin.  Bascat has attracted much interest from etymologists but despite generations of research, its source has remained elusive.  One theory is it’s from the Late Latin bascauda (kettle, table-vessel), from the Proto-Brythonic (in Breton baskodenn), from the Proto-Celtic baskis (bundle, load), from the primitive Indo-European bhask- (bundle) and presumably related to the Latin fascis (bundle, faggot, package, load) and a doublet of fasces.  In ancient Rome, the bundle was a material symbol of a Roman magistrate's full civil and military power, known as imperium and it was adopted as the symbol of National Fascist Party in Italy; it’s thus the source of the term “fascism”.  Not all are convinced, the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED) noting there is no evidence of such a word in Celtic unless later words in Irish and Welsh (sometimes counted as borrowings from English) are original.  However, if the theory is accepted, the implication is the original meaning was something like “wicker basket”, wicker one of the oldest known methods of construction.  The word was first used to mean “a goal in the game of basketball” in 1892, the use extended to “a score in basketball” by 1898.  In the 1980s, as operating systems evolved, programmers would have had the choice of “basket” or “bucket” to describe the concept of a “place where files are stored or reference prior to processing” and they choose the latter, thus creating the “download bucket”, “handler bucket” etc.  On what basis the choice was made isn’t known but it may be that baskets, being often woven, are prone to leak while non-porous buckets are not.  Programmers hate leaks.

A classic basketweave pattern.

Weave was from the Middle English weven (to weave), from the Old English wefan (to weave), from the Proto-West Germanic weban, from the Proto-Germanic webaną, from the primitive Indo-European webh (to weave, braid).  The sense of weave as “to wander around; not travel in a straight line” was also in the early fourteenth century absorbed by the Middle English weven and was probably from the Old Norse veifa (move around, wave), related to the Latin vibrare, from vibrō (to vibrate, to rattle, to twang; to deliver or deal (a blow)), from the  Proto-Italic wibrāō, denominative of wibros, from the primitive Indo-European weyp- (to oscillate, swing) or weyb-.  The root-final consonant has never been clear and reflexes of both are found across Indo-European languages.  The verb sense of “something woven” dates from the 1580s while the meaning “method or pattern of weaving” was from 1888.  The notion of “to move from one place to another” has been traced to the twelfth century and was presumably derived from the movements involved in the act of weaving and while it’s uncertain quite how the meaning evolved, it’s documented from early fourteenth century as conveying “move to and fro” and in the 1590s as “move side to side”,  In pugilism it would have been a natural technique from the moment the first punch was thrown but formally it entered the language of boxing (as “duck & weave”) in 1918, often as weaved or weaving.  By analogy, the phrase “duck & weave” came to be used of politicians attempting to avoid answering questions.  In the military, weave was also used to describe evasive maneuvers undertaken on land or in the air but not at sea, the Admiralty preferring zig-zag, as the pattern would appear on charts.  The fencing method known as teenage is a kind of basketweave.  Basketweave is a noun & adjective and (in irregular use) a verb and basketweaver is a noun; the noun plural is basketweaves.

Attentive basketweavers: Students in a lecture  (B.A. (Peace Studies)) at Whitworth University, Spokane, Washington, USA.

A basketweaver is of course “one who weaves baskets” but in idiomatic use, basketweaver is used also to mean “one whose skills have been rendered redundant by automation or other changes in technology”.  The term “underwater basketweaving” is used of university course thought useless (in the sense of not being directly applicable to anything vocational) and is applied especially to the “studies” genre (gender studies, peace studies, women’s studies et al).  Beyond education, it can be used of anything thought “lame, pointless, useless, worthless, a waste of time etc”.  Basketweaving is also a descriptor of a long and interlinked narrative of lies, distinguished from an ad-hoc lie in that in a basketweave of lies, there are dependencies between the untruths and, done with sufficient care, each can act to reinforce another, enabling an entire persona to be constructed.  It’s the most elaborate version of a “basket of lies” and can work but, like a woven basket, if one strand becomes lose and separates from the structure, under stress, the entire basket can unravel, spilling asunder the contents.

Official portrait of Representative the honorable George Santos.

A classic basketweaver is George Anthony Devolder Santos (b 1988) who, in the 2022 mid-term elections for the US Congress, was elected as a representative (Republican) for New York's 3rd congressional district.  Although he seems to have passed untroubled through the Republican Party’s candidate vetting process, after his election a number of media outlets investigated and found his public persona was almost wholly untrue and contained many dubious or blatantly false claims about, inter-alia, his mother, personal biography, education, criminal record, work history, financial status, ancestry, ethnicity, sexual orientation & religion.  When confronted, Mr Santos did admit to lying about certain matters, was vague about some and ducked and weaved to avoid discussing others, especially the fraud charges in Brazil he avoided by fleeing the country.  Although a life-long Roman Catholic, Mr Santos on a number of occasions claimed to be Jewish, even fabricating stories about his family suffering losses during the Holocaust.  Later, after the lies were exposed, he told a newspaper “I never claimed to be Jewish.  I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.”  In the right circumstances, delivered on-stage by a Jewish comedian, it might have been a good punch-line.

Few are laughing however and Mr Santos is under investigation by both Brazilian and US authorities.  However, despite many calls (from Republicans and Democrats alike) that he resign from Congress, Mr Santos has refused and the Republican house leadership, working with an unexpectedly paper-thin majority, has shown no enthusiasm to pursue the matter.  What Mr Santos has done is expose the limitations of the basketweaving technique.  While a carefully built construct can work, it relies on no loose threads being exposed and while this can be manageable for those not public figures, for anyone exposed to investigation, in the twenty-first century such deceptions are probably close to impossible to achieve and Mr Santos was probably lured into excessive self-confidence because, in relative anonymity, he had for years managed to deceive, fooling many including the Republican Party and perhaps even himself.  In retrospect, he might one day ponder how he ever thought he’s get away with it.  One thing that remains unclear is how he should be addressed.  Members of the House of Representatives typically are addressed as "the honorable" in formal use but this is merely a courtesy title and is not a requirement.  The use is left to individual members and as far as is known, Mr Santos has not yet indicated whether he wishes people to address him as “the honorable George Santos”.

Borrani wire wheels on 1972 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 (Daytona) coupé (far left), “Hotwire” wheels on 1974 Holden Torana SL/R 5000 (centre left), “Basketweave” wheels on 1990 Jaguar XJS coupé (centre right) & 1986 Holden Piazza (far right).

Basketweave wheels remain popular (although some feelings may be strained when it comes time to clean the things) but the use of “basketweave” to describe the construction was a bit of a stretch and some prefer “lattice” which seems architecturally closer.  Were the motif of the classic basketweave to be applied to a wheel it would look something those used on the Holden Piazza, briefly (1986-1989) available on the Australian market.  Because it’s not easy successfully to integrate something inherently square or rectangular into a small, circular object, such designs never caught on although variations were tried.  The “basketweave” wheels which did endure owed little to the classic basketweave patters although there are identifiable hints in the construction so people understand the connection and rather than thought of as a continuation of the design elements drawn from the traditions of weaving, the wheels really established a fork of the meaning.  As a design, they were an evolution of the “hotwire” style popular in the 1970s when was a deliberate attempt to echo the style of the classic spoked (wire) wheels which, being lighter and offering better brake cooling properties than steel disk wheels, were for decades the wheel of choice for high performance vehicles.  That changed in the 1960s as speeds & vehicle weight rose and tyres became wider and stickier, a combination of factors which meant wire wheels were no longer strong enough to endure the rising stresses.  Additionally, the wire wheel was labor intensive to make in an era when that beginning to matter, wheels cast from an alloy predominately of aluminum were cheaper to produce as well as stronger.

Lindsay Lohan in Miami, clothes by Amiparism, Interview Magazine, December 2022.  The car is a Jaguar XJS convertible with the factory-fitted basketweave (or lattice) wheels.

1988 Porsche 911 (930) Turbo Cabriolet (left) and Hans Stuck (1900–1978) in Auto Union Type C (6.0 litre V16), Shelsley Walsh hill climb, Worcestershire, England, June 1936 (right).

The Porsche is fitted with three-piece, 15 inch BBS RS basketweave wheels with satin lips: The rear units are 11 inches in width (running 345/35 tyres) while at the front the wheels are 9 inches wide (mounted with 225/50 tyres).  Although advances in electronics since 1988 have made the behaviour of the most powerful rear-engined Porsches easier to tame, in 1988, the best way to ameliorate the inherent idiosyncrasies of the configuration was to fit wider wheels, increasing the rubber’s contact area with the road.  The idea was not new, both the straight-eight Mercedes-Benz W125 and the V16 Type C Auto-Union Grand Prix cars of 1937 using twin rear tyres when run in hill climbs.  The Porsche 930 (1975-1989) quickly gained the nickname “widow maker” but the Auto Union, which combined 520 horsepower and a notable rearward weight bias with tyres narrower than are these days used on delivery vans, deserved the moniker more.  Fitting the second set of rear wheels did help but the handling characteristics could never be made wholly benign and it wasn’t until the late 1950s that mid-engined Grand Prix cars became manageable and notably, they had about half the power of the German machines of the 1930s.

Rorschach

Rorschach (pronounced raw-shack)

(1) A canton and town in Switzerland.

(2) A personality test using ink-blots

1927: The ink-blot based personality analysis was first published in codified form in 1927, the genesis of which was a 1921 paper by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1885-1922).  Rorschach (Wahlkreis) is a constituency of the canton of Saint Gallen, Switzerland and Rorschach is its largest town.  The town lies on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, the construct of the name an early form of the German Röhr (reeds) + Schachen (lakeside).

The Rorschach test was for some time a standard clinical diagnostic tool in psychology & psychiatry.  It was a collection of ten “ink blots”, five rendered in grey scale, two in grey & red and three in color, all printed on separate cards and presented to the subjects who were asked (1) What might this mean? & (2) What parts of the card made you say that?  The usual protocol was to provide a pencil and have the subject write their responses in the space underneath the image although, depending on the circumstances, a clinician might engage with the subject and obtain more of their thoughts or the tests could immediately be taken for analysis.  Fond of jargon, the profession even took the opportunity to coin a word to describe specific responses, a subject thought to be especially demonstrative in their response to a Rorschach ink blot said to be exhibiting "extratensive" tendencies.  As an adjective it was thus a synonym of "extroverted" and is occasionally seen outside of psychology where it probably adds little but confusion.  It served also as a noun, the relevant subjects being labelled "extratensives".

Lindsay Lohan in Rorschach Ink-Blot Test inspired gold beaded cocktail dress at the Source Code premiere, Crosby Street Hotel, New York City, March 2011.  The dress was paired with black patent ankle strap platform pumps shoes and matching opaque tights.

The idea of using indeterminate and ambiguous shapes as a way of assessing an individual's personality had been around for centuries before Dr Rorschach began his research and in the nineteenth century there were even popular parlor games which used the idea although they were designed to amuse rather than analyze.  What made Dr Rorschach’s work different was the sheer quantity of the data with with he worked, his research encompassing some 300 patients in mental institutions (with a control group of 100 “normal” subjects) to whom to he exposed over 400 ink-blots before selecting the ten which had proved to be of the greatest diagnostic utility.  Although the method was not greatly different from the games, the Rorschach test was genuinely scientific in its design and the systematic approach linking impressionistic responses to ambiguous shapes, this producing evidence of certain tendencies.  Within the still embryonic psychiatric profession, his approach was thought novel and initially received little support.  His book (a 174-page monograph Psychodiagnostik (Psychodiagnostics)), when eventually published in 1921 contained the structure of the ink-blot tests and the results of the 300 patient survey yet it attracted more interest from intrigued literary reviewers than the medical journals and he died little more than a year after its release.  Even the appearance of reviews in the odd literary magazine however did little to stimulate appeal because the book was very much a work by a scientist for other scientists and Dr Rorschach had made no attempt to make his findings accessible to a general audience.  It wasn’t until the work was republished and others began to refine the methodology that others saw potential, especially after professional mathematicians added rigor to the statistical models used to generate the scores from which conclusions were drawn.

However, those who inherited the work also shifted the goal posts.  While Dr Rorschach had always intended the ink-blots to be only a helpful tool in the diagnosis of schizophrenia, such was the expansion of the profession in the inter-war years that many became interested and, by 1938, the test had been adapted and was being promoted as a kind of “personality testing kit”.  It was quite a departure from Dr Rorschach’s original vision which had been designed deliberately to maintain some ambiguity in the images, his belief that the diagnosis of schizophrenia lay in the margins between the possible responses whereas when used as a personality testing tool, the answers took on the character of a parameter which, when collectively assessed with the provided statistical tool, placed patients in categories.

The Rorschach cards

The test in that form proved highly successful, its proliferation assisted by the demands of wartime and the military’s need for psychological testing, the Rorschach kit easily produced, more popular with subjects than many other methods and, as a piece of mathematics, able easily to be collated into the big data sets electronic machines were beginning to make possible.  It had that those qualities the military so adore: Speed, standardization and simplicity.  It was therefore by the mid 1940s a standard part of psychological testing, used in everything from job applications to assessing an inmate’s eligibility for parole so it was perhaps inevitable it would be applied to the defendants in the Nuremberg trial (1945-1946).  Even before the International Military Tribunal (IMT; which would conduct the trial) assembled, the authorities in charge of the Nazis in custody insisted on psychiatrists and psychologists being available as soon as the prisoners had been assembled.  There were a number of reasons for this, notably that they wanted to ensure the prisoners had the support necessary to dissuade them from attempting suicide and there was the need also to ensure all were mentally competent to stand trial.  Additionally, there was genuine curiosity about the Nazis because never had there been such an opportunity to subject to tests two-dozen odd who were responsible for what was becoming clear were the greatest crimes in history.  The question then, as now was: Are “normal ordinary people” able to be drawn to commit evil acts or are some people evil.

The Rorschach tests were of course only one of the tools the clinicians assigned to Nuremberg used and the conclusion drawn was that all defendants were sane in the sense they were legally sane and thus mentally competent to stand trial even if they were depressed psychopaths (that seemed to be the most common phrase).  Quite what part the tests played in this isn’t clear but the test results themselves assumed a life independent of the trial because of a dispute between the two clinicians most involved in the testing and it wasn’t until the 1990s they were (almost) all published.  This psychological time capsule proved irresistibly tempting for one of the US’s foremost Rorschach experts who over the years had assembled records which could be used as an extraordinarily diverse control group which included (in the hundreds) medical students, Unitarian ministers, psychology students, criminals, business executives and random patients from private practice.  From this were selected the clerics and psychiatric outpatients, the purpose of a comparison with the Nuremberg Nazis being a critique of a recently published analysis of the test results which had concluded the defendants (as individuals and a representatives of the whole Nazi hierarchy) were “cursed beyond redemption” and thus profoundly of “the other”.  Their work was not entirely conventional by accepted scientific standards and they tacitly acknowledged some of the long acknowledged limitations of the test but never wavered from their finding “…the Nazis were not psychologically normal or healthy individuals”.

Defendants in the dock, Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, 1945-1946.

That was as controversial a view in the 1990s as it had been fifty years earlier and if a blind test could not distinguish of the Nazi’s data from the two control groups, at least some doubt would be cast.  Accordingly, ten Rorschach experts were assembled and asked to assemble them into three groups.  All that did was identify the high, medium and low-functioning of each group but there was nothing in them which separated the Nazis.  That was interesting but what was probably definitive was that even when told the nature of the data, the experts were unable to discern any difference between the responses which would enable the Nazis to be identified.  Perhaps sadly, the Nazis may have been as ordinary as they appeared in the dock, the implication being we're all capable of evil, given the right temptation, a nod to an earlier memorable phrase spoken of them: "The banality of evil".  

As that might indicate, like many tests in psychology, the Rorschach is probably useful if its limitations are recognized and the interpretations thought valid decades ago are no longer treated as proven science.  For example there may be something which can be deduced from a subject assessing the whole image in their response which is different for one who picks just a section or who finds something different in different parts but whether there’s anything substantive in the difference between seeing moth and a butterfly may be dubious.  The test is still widely used although many have abandoned it though it’s famously a cult in Japan where it’s one of the profession’s standard tools.  Elsewhere use is mixed.  Interestingly, while the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV (1994) did not endorse or recommend the use of any particular projective test, it did note many were used in clinical practice but cautioned that the validity and reliability of these tests had not been firmly established, urging caution.  Neither the DSM-5 (2013) nor DSM-5-TR (2022) make any reference to the Rorschach test.