Scuttle

Scuttle (pronounced skuht-l)

(1) In nautical use, a small hatch or port in the deck, side, or bottom of a vessel; a cover for such a hatch; small opening in a boat or ship for draining water from open deck.

(2) A small hatch-like opening in a roof or ceiling that provides access to the roof from the interior of a building.

(3) In nautical use, deliberately to sink one's ship or boat by any means (eg by opening the sea-cocks), usually by order of the vessel's commander or owner.

(4) To abandon, withdraw from, or cause to be abandoned or destroyed (plans, hopes, rumors etc).

(5) To run with quick, hasty steps; scurry; a quick pace; a short, hurried run.

(6) A deep bucket for carrying coal.

(7) In northern British dialectal use, a broad, shallow basket, especially for carrying vegetables; a dish, platter or a trencher (sometimes called scuttle dish).

(8) The part of a motor-car body lying immediately behind the bonnet (hood), called the cowl in the US.

Pre 1050: From the Middle English scutel & scutelle (trencher) and scuttel (dish, basket, winnowing fan), from the Old English scutel (dish, trencher, platter), from the Latin scutella (serving platter; bowl), diminutive of scutra (shallow dish, pan) and (perhaps) the Latin scūtum (shield).  The Latin scutella was the source also of the French écuelle, the Spanish escudilla, the Italian scudella.  It was also a source of much Germanic borrowing, the source of the Old Norse skutill, the Middle Dutch schotel, the Old High German scuzzila and the German Schüssel (a dish).  The Meaning "basket for sifting grain" is attested from the mid-fourteenth century and as a "bucket for holding coal", use dates from 1849.

The sense of a “hole cut in a ship for some purpose” dates from 1490–1500, firstly as “skottell”: Of obscure origin, possibly from the Middle French escoutille, or from the Spanish escotar (to cut out) & escotilla (hatchway), the construct of which was escot & escote (a cutting of cloth) + -illa (a diminutive suffix of Germanic origin).  In the Gothic skaut meant “hem or seam).  Another possible link is to the Middle English scottlynge (scampering), a variant of scuddle and frequentative of scud.  The idea of hatches and holes in ships later extended to automobiles, the scuttle (cowl in the US) the space between the windscreen and bonnet (hood).  The sense of "cutting a hole in a ship to sink it" was first attested in the 1640s, an extension of use from the late-fifteenth century skottell (opening in a ship's deck), either from the French escoutille (which in Modern French is écoutille) or directly from the Spanish escotilla (hatchway), a diminutive of escota (opening in a garment), from escotar (cut out).  Scuttle & scuttling are nouns & verbs, scuttleful is a noun and scuttled is a verb; the noun plural is scuttles.

You're wrong.—He was the mildest manner'd man
That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat:
With such true breeding of a gentleman,
You never could divine his real thought;
No courtier could, and scarcely woman can
Gird more deceit within a petticoat;
Pity he loved adventurous life's variety,
He was so great a loss to good society.

Don Juan (1819–24) canto III, stanza XLI, by Lord Byron (1788–1824)

The figurative use to describe the sense of abandonment or destruction of the planning etc of something is recorded from 1888.  In military use this can be combined with the use of scuttle to describe a rapid, sometimes erratic crab-like walk suggestive of panic; the recent US evacuation from Kabul, would, in more robust times, have been called a scuttle.  The sense of "scamper; scurry" emerged in the mid-fifteenth century, probably related to the verb scud and perhaps influenced by the odd imperfect echoic.

A variation of the scuttle as a hole in the deck was scuttlebutt to describe a "cask of drinking water kept on a ship's deck, having a hole (scuttle) cut in it for a cup or dipper" is from 1805, supplanting the earlier (1777) “scuttle cask”.  Scuttlebutt is first recorded as meaning “rumor; gossip" in 1901 and was nautical slang before coming into general use late in World War I (1914-1918).  The modern corporate form, analogous with “gathering around the scuttlebutt” is the office “water-cooler” conversation.  The idea of information (accurate or otherwise) being associated with drinking water is doubtless as old as prehistoric people gathering at a drinking place and there’s the World War One era “furphy”, a descriptor of a rumor proved wrong, based on its origin being talk exchanged between soldiers having a yarn at one of the army’s Furphy brand water tanks.

Scuttle shake

The term scuttle shake is used to describe the shuddering displayed in many convertible cars, especially when traversing rough or uneven surfaces.   The vibrations happen because, without the strength provided by a fixed-roof, open-top automobiles generally are less structurally rigid than closed vehicles.  It’s called scuttle-shake because, although the scuttle (the area between the bonnet (hood) and the windscreen) is not the only place where the shuddering happens, it’s there where it’s usually most severe, often to the point where other vibrations tend not to be noticed.  The scuttle is affected because the erratic forces are generated through the tyres, to the chassis or frame to the point of the least structural rigidity: the bulkhead atop which sits the scuttle.  There is a transatlantic difference in that what most of the English-speaking world calls a scuttle is a cowl in US use.  Despite that, the term scuttle shake and cowl shake are both used in the US, probably because cars made there were always less susceptible to the phenomenon because the body-engineering standards were higher, Detroit always willing to add more bracing even at the cost of increasing overall weight.  It's speculative but perhaps it became so associated with foreign cars it was just natural to think scuttle and not cowl.

The archetypical scuttle shakers were the Triumph TR roadsters (TR2-TR6 1952-1976), the reputation gained because of the platform’s long life; although the TR6 bore no external resemblance to its earliest antecedents, much the same chassis and body structure underlay them all.  Many contemporaries of the TR2 and TR3 also suffered the problem but most manufacturers went through three or four generations in the quarter century the separate chassis TRs were produced, benefitting from the improvements in design and body engineering which passed by Triumph's aging roadster.  By the time the TR6 entered production in 1969, none of the competition still shook so much; that doesn’t mean that by the late twentieth century the problem went away but it was much ameliorated.  Notably, in the 1980s, generational shift, an improving economy and the non-appearance of the rumored US legislation which would have outlawed convertibles enticed some manufacturers back into the drop-top market so new models appears to demonstrate the difference.  Because volumes would be small, the development costs associated with new models was thought prohibitive so these were usually modified coupés.  Cutting the roof of a closed car is the classic recipe for scuttle shake but the techniques to strengthen structures had much improved over the years and the basic bodies were anyway inherently stronger because of the regulations imposed to improve crashworthiness.  Drivers could certainly tell the difference in body-rigidity but few were anything like a Triumph TR6 (unless it was a Saab 900; the Swedish car's convertible body was famously flexible).

Triumph TR2 (1953-1955).

After a similar looking prototype based on a pre-war platform was rejected, a redesign produced the TR2.  The specification was unpromising for a sports car; a hardly innovative ladder frame chassis, a two litre (122 cubic inch) engine based on one used in tractors (!), rudimentary weather protection and an already dated body but it was a success on both sides of the Atlantic.  On the road, it turned out to be greater than the sum of its parts, easily exceeding 100 mph (162 km/h) when that was something rare and, in the UK, it was the cheapest car which could make the claim.  Not delicate or in any way exquisite to drive ("agricultural" the usual description, perhaps a nod to the tractor engine), its characteristics were predictable by the standards of the time and it was soon effective in competition.  Over eight-thousand were built.

Triumph TR3 (1955-1962).

Essentially an updated TR2, the TR3 would be upgraded throughout its life in three identifiable generations although the factory regarded the changes as normal product development and never used different designations to distinguish between them (in the collector car market they're known as TR3, TR3A (1957) & TR3B (1962)).  Although still lacking many of the civilizing accruements buyers would soon expect, in its time the TR3 was a great sales hit and was campaigned successfully both by the factory teams and privateers in just about every category of competition for which it was eligible.  The advantages of using the tractor engine had become apparent in the TR2: the thing was both tuneable and close to indestructible if run by the book.  In the TR3, the usual English route to power (bigger carburetors, bigger valves, bigger ports and a more radical camshaft) was followed and 100 bhp (75 kw) was achieved.  Disk brakes, first used on the Factory Le Mans TR2s, were added to all but the earliest TR3s and the driving experience, despite the addition of rack and pinion steering, though offering nothing like the precision of the Italian competition, was rewarding if a little brutish (although the thing had gained respect and was now rarely called "agricultural").  Almost seventy-five thousand were built.

Triumph TRS with "sabrina" engine, Le Mans, 1960.

Like the TR2, the TR3 was a popular choice as a race car but by the late 1950s, the competitive cars from Britain, Italy and the US had been developed well beyond what the TR2 had tended to face earlier in the decade.  For various reasons, it wasn’t easy for European manufacturers to pursue the path to power and performance by adopting the American approach of big displacement so they chose the alternative: greater specific efficiencies & higher engine speeds.  In Italy, as early as 1954 Alfa Romeo had proved the once exotic double overhead camshaft (DOHC) configuration was viable in relatively low-cost, mass-production machines and even in England, MG’s MGA Twin Cam had been released, short-lived though it was.  Triumph’s cars had enjoyed much success, both in the marketplace and on racetracks but their engines were based on one used in a tractor and while legendary robust, it was tuneable only up to a point and that point had been reached, limiting its potential in competition.  The solution was a DOHC head atop the old tractor mill and this the factory prepared for their racing team to run in the 1959 Le Mans 24 Hour classic, naming the car in which it was installed the TR3S, suggesting some very close relationship with the road-going TR3 although it really was a prototype and a genuine racing car.  The engine used at Le Mans was called the “sabrina”.

Sabrina in some characteristic poses.

Norma Ann Sykes' (1936–2016 and better known by her stage name: Sabrina)  early career was as a model, sometimes in various stages of undress, but it was when in 1955 she was cast as a stereotypical “dumb blonde” in a television series she achieved national fame.  On stage or screen, she remained a presence into the 1970s and although without great critical acclaim although the University of Leeds did confer an honorary D.Litt (Doctor of Letters) for services to the arts so there was that.

The Le Mans campaigns with the sabrina Engine: TR3S (1959, left), TRS (1960, centre) and the TRS team crossing the line in formation for what was a "staged  photo-opportunity", none of the cars having completed the requisite number of laps to be classified a "finisher" (1960, right).  In 1961, all three went the distance, taking the "Teams Prize".  

Some resemblance in the mind's eye of an engineer: Sectional view of the sabrina.

The engine's original project code was 20X but an engineer's chance remark at the assembly bench caught on so "sabrina" it became.  Anatomically, the engineers were of course about right because the front sectional view of the sabrina engine’s internals do align with what Dr Vera Regitz-Zagrosek (b 1953; Professor of Cardiology at the University of Zurich), describes as “the bikini triangle”, that area of the female human body defined by a line between the breasts and from each breast down to the reproductive organs; it’s in this space that is found all the most obvious anatomical differences between male & female although the professor does caution that differences actually exist throughout the body, down to the cellular level.

Triumph used the sabrina engine for three consecutive years at Le Mans, encountering some problems but the reward was delivered in 1961 when all three cars completed the event with one finishing a creditable ninth, the trio winning that year’s team prize.  Satisfied the engine was now a reliable power-plant, the factory did flirt with the idea of offering it as an option in the TR sports cars but, because the differences between it and the standard engine were so great, it was decided the high cost of tooling up for mass production was unlikely to be justified, the projected sales volumes just not enough to amortize the investment.  Additionally, although much power was gained by adding the DOHC Hemi head, the characteristics of its delivery were really suited only to somewhere like Le Mans which is hardly typical of race circuits, let alone the conditions drivers encounter on the road.  As a footnote in Triumph’s history, it was the second occasion on which the factory had produced a DOHC engine which had failed to reach production.  In 1934 the company displayed a range-topping version of their Dolomite sports car (1934-1940), powered by a supercharged two litre (121 cubic inch), DOHC straight-8.  The specification was intoxicating and the lines rakish but, listed at more than ten times the price of a small family car, it was too ambitious for the troubled economy of the 1930s and only three were built.

Triumph TR4 (1962-1965).

Although the chassis and drive-train of the TR3 substantially were carried over, the TR4 received a new body, designed in Italy by Giovanni Michelotti's (1921–1980) design house, continuing what would prove a lucrative association for both the Italians and the British.  Modernised in function as well as form, the TR for the first time enjoyed wind-up windows and much improved ventilation as well as the novelty of the option of a kind of targa top, the first on the market although it was Porsche which decided to copyright the name.  To compensate for the increased weight, the engine was bored out to 2.1 litres (128 cubic inches) but the smaller version remained a factory option for those wished to run in competitions under the FIA’s 2.0 litre (122 cubic inch) rules, although, being a tractor engine and thus using wet cylinder liners, it wasn’t difficult for owners of a 2.1 to revert.

A 1965 Triumph TR4A appeared in Netflix's Lindsay Lohan film Irish Wish (2024) and the IMCDB (Internet Movie Cars Database) confirmed it was registered in Ireland (ZV5660, VIN:STC65CT17130C) as running the 2.1 litre version (17130C) of the engine.  The Triumph 2.1 is sometimes listed as a 2.2 because, despite an actual displacement of 2138 cm³, in some places the math orthodoxy is ignored and a "round up" rule applied, something done usually in jurisdictions which use displacement-based taxation or registration regimes, the "rounding up" sometimes having the effect of "pushing" a vehicle into a category which attracts a higher rate.  The lack of the "IRS" (independent rear suspension) badge on the trunk (boot) lid indicates the use of the live rear axle.

This time Triumph did create official version names as the specification changed.  In 1965, the TR4A was released, marked by a small power increase but, more significantly, independent rear suspension which necessitated a change to the rear of the chassis frame.  Improvements in tyre technology had increasingly exposed the limitations of the TR4’s live axle which, mounted on such a low chassis, offered only limited wheel travel, something disguised by the grip of the TR2-era tyres which tended predictably to slide but when fitted with modern radial-ply tyres, the loss of grip could be sudden and unexpected.  The IRS greatly improved the ride and raised the limits of adhesion, making for a safer road car but those using a TR4 in competition still opted for the live axle which offered more control in the hands of experts who preferred to steer with the throttle.  Many TR4As were actually fitted with the live axle, re-designed to accommodate the changes to the chassis.  Facing competition from much improved MG and Austin-Healy roadsters, sales suffered somewhat with around forty-thousand TR4s built.

Triumph TR5 (1967-1968 and sold in North America as the TR-250).

Visually almost identical to the TR4, the TR5 benefited from being powered by a 2.5 litre (153 cubic inch) version of Triumph’s (again almost indestructible) straight-six and in a first for a volume British manufacturer, it used Lucas mechanical fuel injection, tuned to a healthy 150 bhp (112 kw) (although even at the time many thought this seemed a little optimistic).  Again available with the clever targa (usually called the “Surrey Top” although the factory insisted the “surrey” was merely a the roof part of the whole system), the bigger engine meant the TR5 became a genuine 120 mph (195 km/h) car.

For the first time (and a harbinger of what lay ahead), TR5s built for the North American market differed significantly from most of those destined for the rest of the world.  Instead of fuel-injection, the new world cars breathed through a pair of Zenith-Stromberg carburetors and, to mark the debut of the 2.5 litre six, were named TR-250.  The combination of the loss of the fuel injection and the addition of the early anti-emissions plumbing did sacrifice power, the TR-250 rated at 111 bhp (81 kW) but performance was still slightly better than the TR4, the feeling being the US car’s official power was likely a more accurate number than the 150 bhp claimed for the TR5.  The TR5 was in production for only a short time and fewer than three-thousand were built, the importance of the US market illustrated by almost eight and a half thousand TR-250s being shipped during the same time.  The IRS was now fitted to all cars.

Triumph TR6 (1968-1976).

Like its predecessor, the TR6 was built with both fuel injection and carburetors but all were labelled TR6 regardless of destination, the US market and those with less developed infrastructure missing out on the newer system.  The car itself was almost unchanged underneath but new front and rear styling was grafted onto the TR4/TR5 centre section, styled this time by Karmann of Germany so it was English underneath, Italian in the middle and German to the front and rear.  The targa top was retired, replaced by a hardtop designed in-house and the restyle, universally praised as ruggedly handsome, was well received.

Although the factory labelled the whole run as TR6, such were the variations over the years that Triumph nerds differentiate several (informal) versions, some based on detail differences and some on significant changes in specification.  All models produced for the North-American market used carburetors (the mechanical fuel-injection system unable to comply with the more onerous emission rules), delivering 104 bhp (78 kw) and this configuration was used also in some export markets because of anticipated difficulties in servicing the Lucas equipment in countries with a less developed infrastructure.  The home market and most other export cars used fuel injection which, again rated at 150 bhp, delivered almost identical performance to the TR5.  In 1972, the fuel-injected cars were re-tuned with a milder camshaft, lower compression ratio and smaller inlet valves, the factory revising the claimed power to 125 bhp (94 kw) although performance barely suffered, hinting the new claim might be more accurate than the old.  The engine revisions suited the motoring conditions of the day, traffic volumes now much heavier and the re-tuned engine delivered its power over a wider range, the slight sacrifice in top-end performance noticed by few.

A home market 1974 TR6 in magenta, one of the more appealing of the wide range of color choices (some of the hues of brown not fondly remembered) British Leyland offered during the 1970s (left) and a 1976 US market TR6 (right).  The revised detailing at the front was a consequence of needing to install more substantial bumpers to comply with legislation, the rubber dagmars fitted also at the rear.  Unusually for the smaller British roadsters of the era, air-conditioning was sometimes fitted to the US market cars.

Compared with genuinely modern sports cars like the Datsun 240Z or even the flawed Jensen-Healy, the TR6 was antiquated but so immensely satisfying to drive, buyers seemed not to mind and sales remained strong, the end coming only because it was clear it soon would no longer be possible to modify the thing to meet upcoming US legislation.  At the end of its seven year run, it was the most successful of the traditional TRs, well over ninety-thousand made of which over eighty-three thousand were exported.  Although the TR6 was not visually recognizable as a descendent of the TR2, one thing remained constant throughout: scuttle shake.

Feminism

Feminism (pronounced fem-uh-niz-uhm)

(1) A doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.

(2) In both its structured and ad hoc forms, a movement for the attainment of such rights for women (sometimes used with initial capital letter).

(3) Feminine character (obsolete except for historic references).

1851: From the French féminisme, ultimately from the Classical Latin fēminīnus, the construct being the Latin fēmina (woman) + ism.  The first known use in French dates from 1837.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  It seems first to have been used in in English in 1851, originally as a neutral term meaning "the state of being feminine".  The sense of "advocacy of women's rights" began in 1895 ("political feminism" often traced from here although given the history that is misleading) and the word came soon to be used as a "loaded" descriptor of the female character, a kind of informal measure of the patriarchal view of femininity, often in criticism of artistic performance or literature.  Feminism & feminist are nouns, feministic is an adjective and feministically is an adverb; the most common noun plural is feminists but given the proliferation of terms created with modifiers, feminisms are often referenced even if the word is not used.  So productive has the word feminism proved that there are literally more than a hundred derived forms including the:  geographical (Afro-feminism; Euro-feminism), political (anarcho-feministic, radical feminism), humorous (femocrat; femnazi), structural (post-feminism; lipstick feminism; postmodern feminism) and contested (male-feminism; trans-feminism).

Feminism is a widely used word with an accepted definitional range but there’s no universal understanding pattern of use and, like words such as “academic” or “liberal”, the meaning conveyed widely can vary, the senses ranging from the chauvinistically aggressive to the contemptuous.  That of course transfers to “feminist” which while procedural as an adjective (relating to or in accordance with feminism), as a noun it really means what the user wants it to mean because it’s not like many other “–ist” creations (physicist, scientist et al) which are understood as simple descriptors.  Even “artist” is uncontroversial at the linguistic level (one who creates what they claim to be art) although whether what they produce can be considered “art” might be disputed.  The -ist suffix was from the Middle English -ist & -iste, from the Old French -iste and the Latin -ista, from the Ancient Greek -ιστής (-istḗs), from -ίζω (-ízō) (the -ize & -ise verbal suffix) and -τής (-tḗs) (the agent-noun suffix).  It was added to nouns to denote various senses of association such as (1) a person who studies or practices a particular discipline, (2), one who uses a device of some kind, (3) one who engages in a particular type of activity, (4) one who suffers from a specific condition or syndrome, (5) one who subscribes to a particular theological doctrine or religious denomination, (6) one who has a certain ideology or set of beliefs, (7) one who owns or manages something and (8), a person who holds very particular views (often applied to those thought most offensive).  Feminists have noted the issue, the journalist & author Rebecca West (1892–1983) once remarking: “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or prostitute.” 

Waves

The notion of feminism being not a fixed manifesto but a process in incremental waves is from a 1968 piece in the New York Times Magazine by writer Martha Lear (b 1932).  The context was to note the appearance a decade earlier of second-wave feminism, focusing now on unofficial inequalities, unlike the first wave which was essentially structuralist.  While lineal, there’s overlap between the waves and, in both popular culture and academia, some resistance to change.  Whatever it’s other implications, feminism needs to be considered a political construct and it operates, a does politics, through cross-cutting cleavages; in the same way the formation of the G8 (the Group of 8, an assembly of advanced industrial economies created when Russia was added to the G7) didn’t mean the G7 ceased to exist, the successive waves in feminism both absorbed and operated in parallel with earlier waves.

First-wave feminism (1895-1950s): In this “de jure” period, focus was on legal issues such as women's suffrage, property rights and political candidacy.

Second-wave feminism (1960s-1980s): Even before equality in legal rights was wholly achieved, the movement broadened the debate to include sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights and other de facto inequalities. Attention to first-wave issues focused on child custody and divorce law.

Third-wave feminism (1990-2000s): Although there were cultural links, the intellectual origins of 3WF lie in an article by feminist Rebecca Walker in 1992 and although never exactly defined, it was said to emphasis an interest in individualism and diversity (which hadn't yet become DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)).  Controversial even at the time, with strains of libertarianism now competing with the historic collectivist model, it sought to change the parameters of feminism.

Fourth-wave feminism (circa 2010-):  Regarded as a least partially technologically deterministic, 4WF is thought to have emerged circa 2008-2012 as social media gained critical mass.  It focuses on intersectionality and examines the interconnected systems of power that maintain the marginalized of certain groups in society.  4WF advocates for greater representation of these groups in all places within the power-elite, arguing equality for women will become possible only if policies and practices incorporate all groups.  Some have suggested the need for a 5WF but no coherent work has been published.

Fourth wave feminist: Lindsay Lohan images from a photoshoot by Terry Richardson (b 1965) for Love Magazine, 2012.

Funicular

Funicular (pronounced fyoo-nik-yuh-ler)

(1) Of or relating to a rope or cord, or its tension.

(2) Worked by a rope or the like.

(3) In physics and geometry, the curve an idealized hanging chain or cable assumes under its own weight when supported only at its ends (also known as a catenary).

(4) A type of cable car, usually described as a funicular railway which tends to be constructed on steep slopes and consist of a counterbalanced car sat either end of a cable passing round a driving wheel at the summit.

(5) Of or relating to a funicle.

(6) In medicine, of or pertaining to the umbilical cord.

(7) In botany, having a fleshy covering of the seed formed from the funiculus, the attachment point of the seed.

1655-1665: From the Latin funicle (a small cord) from the Latin funiculus (a slender rope), diminutive of funis (a cord, rope) of unknown etymology but possibly related to the Latin filum (thread), a doublet of file and (in anatomy), a filamentous anatomical structure.

The Funicular Railway

Castle Hill Funicular, Budapest, Hungary.  Opened in 1870, It ascends and descends 167 feet (51m) through a track of 312 feet (95m) in around ninety seconds.

A funicular railway employs (usually) two passenger vehicles pulled on a slope by the same cable which loops over a pulley wheel at the upper end of a track.  The vehicles are permanently attached to the ends of the cable and counterbalance each other. They move synchronously: while one is ascending, the other descends.  The use of two vehicles is what distinguishes funiculars from other types of cable railways although more complex funiculars have been built using four.  The first was built in 1874.

In 1943, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & prime-minister of Italy 1922-1943) was deposed by a meeting of the Fascist Ground Council, a kind of senate he'd made the mistake of not dissolving when he had the chance.  In farcical circumstances, the Duce was arrested and spirited away and almost immediately, Fascism in Italy "burst like a bubble", a not inaccurate assessment but one which caused some embarrassment to Colonel-General Alfred Jodl (1890–1946; Chief of the Operations Staff OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (high command of the armed forces)) 1939-1945) who made the mistake of blurting it out in the presence of  Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945).  Not wanting the contagion to spread, Hitler ordered Mussolini be rescued so he could be established as a "puppet Duce" somewhere to try to preserve the illusion the "pact of steel" between the two fascist states remained afoot.    

Seeking a place to imprison the deposed Duce secure from any rescue attempt, the new Italian government locked him up at the Hotel Campo Imperatore, a mountain resort in Abruzzo accessible only by a funicular railway, judged (correctly) by the military authorities to be easily defensible against ground troops and without the facilities to support landings by aircraft.  However, a rapidly improvised operation using glider-borne Waffen-SS troops and a STOL (short take-off & landing) airplane staged a daring raid and freed the captive though it proved a brief reprieve, the Duce and his mistress executed by a mob less than two years later.

Fieseler Fi 156 Storch, Gran Sasso d'Italia massif, Italy, during the mission to rescue Mussolini from captivity, 12 September 1943.  The Duce is sitting in the passenger compartment.

The German liaison & communications aircraft, the Fieseler Fi 156 Storch (stork) was famous for its outstanding short take-off & landing (STOL) performance and low stalling speed of 30 mph (50 km/h) which enabled it almost to hover when faced into a headwind.  It was one of the classic aircraft designs of the era and so close to perfect it remained in production for years after the end of hostilities and re-creations are still often fabricated by those attracted by its close to unique capabilities.  The Storch’s ability to land in the length of a cricket pitch (22 yards (20.12 m)) made it a useful platform for all sorts of operations and while the daring landing on for a mountain-top rescue-mission in northern Italy was the most famous, for all of the war it was an invaluable resource; it was the last Luftwaffe (German air force) aircraft to land in Berlin during the last days of the Third Reich.  In 1943, so short was the length of the strip of grass available for take-off that even for a Storch it was touch & go (especially with the Duce’s not inconsiderable weight added) but with inches to spare, the little plane safely delivered its cargo.

In one of the war's more obscure footnotes, it was the characteristics of the Fieseler Storch which led to what was may have been the first appearance (in writing) for centuries of an old piece of Middle English slang, dating from the 1590s.  In sixteenth century England, the ability of the Kestrel (a common small falcon) to hover in even a light breeze meant it came to be known (in certain circles) as "the windfucker" and the similar ability of the Storch was noted in one British wartime diary entry in which the folk-name for the bird was invoked to describe the little aircraft seemingly "hanging in the air".

Cache

Cache (pronounced kash)

(1) A hiding place (historically most associated with one in the ground) for ammunition, food, treasures etc.

(2) Anything so hidden (even if not necessarily in a cache).

(3) In computing (hardware & software), a temporary storage space or memory permitting fast access (as opposed to a call to a hard drive).  The term “cache storage” is still sometimes used.

(4) In Alaska and Northern Canada, a small shed elevated on poles above the reach of animals and used for storing food, equipment etc.

(5) To put in a cache; to conceal or hide; to store.

1585–1595: From the French cache, a noun derivative of cacher (to hide), from the unattested Vulgar Latin coācticāre (to stow away (originally, “to pack together”), frequentative of the Classical Latin coāctāre, (constrain) the construct being coāct(us) (collected) (past participle of cōgere (to collect, compel)), + -icā- (the formative verb suffix) + -re (the infinitive suffix).  Cache is a noun & verb, cacheability is a noun, cacheable is an adjective and cached & caching are verbs; the noun plural is caches.

The bottom half of a bikini can be thought of as a cache-sexe.  Lindsay Lohan demonstrates, Los Angeles, 2009.

English picked up the word from French Canadian trappers who used it in the sense of “hiding place for stores” but more pleasing still was the early twentieth century French noun cache-sexe (slight covering for a woman's genitals), the construct being cacher "to hide" + sexe (genitals).  Cache can be confused with the (unrelated though from the same Latin source) noun “cachet”.  Dating from the 1630s, in the sense of “a wax seal”, it was from the sixteenth century French cachet (seal affixed to a letter or document)", from the Old French dialectal cacher (to press, crowd), from the Latin coāctāre (constrain).  In the eighteenth century the meaning (via the French lettre de cachet (letter under seal of the king) shifted to “(letter under) personal stamp (of the king)”, thus the idea of a cachet coming by the mid-1800s to be understood as “a symbol of prestige”.  In that sense it has since the mid-twentieth century become entrenched in English though not all approved.  Henry Fowler (1858–1933) was about as fond of foreign affectations as he was of literary critics and in his A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) he maintained: (1) the only use English had for “cachet” was as the apothecaries used it to describe “a capsule containing a pharmaceutical preparation”, (2) the more common “stamp” & “seal” were preferable for stuff stuck on envelopes and (3) phrases like “a certain cachet” or “the cachet of genius” were clichés of literary criticism and the critics were welcome to them.  Interestingly, In English, cachet did find a niche as a (wholly un-etymological) variant of cache: it means “a hidden location from which one can observe birds while remaining unseen”.  The origins of this are thought to allude to such places being hiding places (thus a cache) and cramped (the irregular –et in the (cach)et a use of the suffix –et which was from the Middle English -et, from the Old French –et & its feminine variant -ette, from the Late Latin -ittus (and the other gender forms -itta & -ittum).  It was used to form diminutives, loosely construed.

Cachet is pronounced ka-shey or kash-ey (the French being ka-she) but some sites report there are those who use one of the English alternatives for cache; that’s obviously wrong but appears to be rare.  What is common (indeed it seems to have become the standard in some places) is kay-sh, something which really annoys the pedants.  However a case can be made that kash should remain the standard while kay-sh should be used of everything particular to computers (disk cache, web cache et al), rather along the lines of the US spelling “program” being adopted when referring to software in places where programme is used for all other purposes.  Both seem potentially useful points of differentiation although while there a chance for splitting the pronunciation of cache, it’s unlikely the Americans will take to programme.

Lindsay Lohan’s shoe stash.  She also has a handbag stash.

Cache may also be related to stash which is similar in meaning but conveys usually something quite disreputable, the verb dating from circa 1795 as was underworld slang meaning “to conceal or hide, the related forms being stashed & stashing.  The noun also was criminal slang meaning “hoard, cache, a collection of things stashed away” and was first observed in 1914 and, via popular literature, picked up in general English, often with the specific sense of “a reserve stock”.  The origin is unknown origin but most etymologists seem to have concluded it was a blend of either stick +‎ cache or stow +‎ cache.  Following the US use in the early 1940s (where most such adaptations began), stash is now most associated with drug slang (one’s stash of weed etc) but Urban Dictionary lists more recent co-options such as a stash being variously (1) “someone with whom one is involved but one has no intention of introducing to one’s friends or family”, (2) as “porn stash” an obscure (or even hidden) place among the directory tree on one’s computer where one keeps one’s downloaded (or created) pornography (analogous with the physical hiding places when such stuff was distributed in magazines), (3) a variety of the mechanics or consequences of sexual acts and (4) certain types of moustache (sometimes with modifiers).  Of the latter, as 'stache & stache, it’s long been one of the apheretic clippings of moustache ('tache, tache & tash the others).

So a cache is a hoard, stockpile, reserve or store of stuff, sometimes secreted from general view and often untouched for extended periods.  In modern computing, a cache is a busy place when much of what is stored is transitory and while there are now many variations of the caching idea (CPUs (Central Processing Units) & GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) have for years had multiple internal caches), the classic example remains the disk cache, a mechanism used temporarily to store frequently accessed or recently used data from a storage device, such as a HDD (Hard Disk Drive) or SSD (Solid-State Drive).  What the cache does is make things respond faster because accessing anything from the static electricity of a cache is many times faster than from a piece of physical media; fast, modern SSDs have reduced the margin but it still exists and at scale, remains measurable.

Caches started modestly enough but in the early days of PCs there were few means more effective at gaining speed unless you were a megalomaniac able to run a 4 MB (megabyte) RAMDrive (and such freaks did exist and were much admired).  However, caches grew with LANs (Local Area Networks), WANs (Wide Area Networks) and then the Web and as internet traffic proliferated, the behavior of caches could create something like the bottlenecks they were created to avoid.  Thus something of a science of cache management emerged, necessitated because unlike many aspects of computer design, the problems couldn’t always be solved by increasing size; beyond a certain point, not only did the law of diminishing returns begin to apply but if caches were too big, performance actually suffered: they are a Goldilocks device.

New problems begat new jargon and the most illustrative was the “cache stampede”, a phenomenon witnessed in massively parallel computing systems handing huge volumes of requests to cached data.  For a cache to be effective, it need to hold those pages which need most frequently to be accessed but it’s there’s an extraordinarily high demand for a single or a handful of URLs (Universal Resource Locator (the familiar address.com etc), if the requested page(s) in cache expire, as there is a “stampede” of demand, what can happen is the system becomes an internal loop as multiple servers simultaneously attempt to render the same content and in circumstances of high ambient load, congestion begins to “feed on itself”, shared resources become exhausted because they can’t be re-allocated as long as demand remain high.

Another attractive term is cache-buster, software which prevents duplication within a cache.  It’s an important part of the modern model of internet commerce which depends for much revenue flow on the alignment of the statistics between publishers and marketers.  All a cache buster does is prevent a browser from caching the same file twice so if a user “accepts cookies”, the browser will track and save them, enabling the user to access the previously cached site whenever they return which is good for speed but, it there have been changes to the site, user may not be able to see them.  The cache buster’s solution is simple brute-force: a random number appended to the ad-tag which means new ad-calls no longer have a link to the tag, compelling the browser to send a new request to the origin server.  This way, website owners can be assured the number of impressions registered by a marketing campaign will be very close to correct.

Intel i486 CPUs (left) and Asus ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 Platinum 24G GPU (right).

Progress: In 1989, Intel released the 80486 CPU (the name later standardized as i486 because pure numeric strings are almost impossible to trademark), acclaimed by the press at the time as “phenomenally faster” and while that may have been hyperbolic, in the brief history of the PC, impressionistically, few new chips “felt” so much faster.  Part of that was attributable to a Level 1 instruction cache (8-16 KB depending on the version).  By 2023, nVidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 GPU included a L1 cache with 128 KB per SM (Streaming Multiprocessor) and a L2 cache with 72 MB.

Rococo

Rococo (pronounced ruh-koh-koh or roh-kuh-koh)

(1) A style of architecture and decoration, originating in France about 1720, evolved from Baroque types and distinguished by using different materials for a delicate overall effect and by its ornament of shell-work, foliage etc.

(2) A homophonic musical style of the mid-eighteenth century, marked by a generally superficial elegance and charm and by the use of elaborate ornamentation and stereotyped devices.

(3) In fine art (with initial capital letters) noting or pertaining to a style of painting developed simultaneously with the rococo in architecture and decoration, characterized chiefly by smallness of scale, delicacy of color, freedom of brushwork, and the selection of playful subjects as thematic material.

(4) In sculpture, a corresponding style, chiefly characterized by diminutiveness of Baroque forms and playfulness of theme.

(5) Of or pertaining to, in the manner of, or suggested by rococo architecture, decoration, or music or the general atmosphere and spirit of the rococo.

(6) Ornate or florid in speech, literary style etc.

(7) In the abstract (almost always derogatory), relating to old traditions, which may be seen as foolishly outdated; archaic, old-fashioned, obsolete or backwards.

1797: From the French rococo, a blended word from rocaille (an eighteenth century artistic or architectural style of decoration characterized by elaborate ornamentation with pebbles and shells, typical of grottos and fountains from the Vulgar Latin rocca stone) and barroco, pejoratively to denote a "rock" style which fell from fashion; coined by French Neoclassical painter Pierre-Maurice Quays (1777-1803), a pupil of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825).  David and Quays, devotees of an austere neoclassical ascetic, were influential in nudging high-culture taste in the dying days of the Ancien Régime back from the frivolity of what they came to describe as the rococo.  Their efforts had little impact on the middle-class fondness for decoration and intricate ornamentation.  The adjective appears to have come into use in English in 1836, a direct borrowing from the French and was being used as a noun by 1840 and the general sense of "tastelessly florid or ornate" is from 1844, extended by abstract to just about anything by the 1860s.

Rococo has long been used as a word of disparagement.  It is a critique of stuff excessively ornate or fussy, things which rely on layers of ornamentation to conceal a poverty of elegance in the basic design.  It’s much associated with pretentiousness but that said, there’s often much to admire in the craftsmanship needed to product work of such intricacy and while the taste might be questionable, in painting, engraving, porcelain, stone-masonry etc, there can be a quaint, decorative charm.

Rococo inside and out.

Rococo fashion: Lindsay Lohan in a Gucci Porcelain Garden print gown (the list price a reputed £4,040) at the launch of the One Family NGO (non-governmental organization), Savoy Hotel, London, June 2017.  Although neither cutting-edge nor retro in the conventional sense of the word, the gown generally was well-received.  Some thought it Rococo and perhaps thematically it could have been done with just a ruffled collar, the pussy bow a detail too many, but the patterning was clever and accentuated the lines.  It was one of those designs where a color change would have been transformative, a rendering in scarlet probably would have been less aesthetically pleasing but would have been eye-catching; the blue was a good choice.

Vintage

Vintage (pronounced vin-tij)

(1) The wine from a particular harvest or crop (usually a season).

(2) Of wine, the product of a season of outstanding quality (labeled by calendar year)

(3) The annual produce of the grape harvest, especially with reference to the wine obtained (technically also recorded as the “yield of grapes during one season”).

(4) The time of gathering grapes, or of winemaking.

(5) The act or process of producing wine; winemaking.

(6) The class of a dated object with reference to era of production or use.

(7) A wine of a specified vintage:

(8) Attributively, a subset of something, representing often the most memorable or highest quality items produced (although it can apply to all associated with the designated era) such as vintage cars, vintage dresses et al.  Sometimes, what constitutes a “vintage” item (as opposed to a “veteran”, “antique” et al) is defined by various institutions (vintage watches for example said to be those dated between 1870 and 1980).

(9) Attributively, something old-fashioned or obsolete.

(10) Attributively, something the being the best of its kind.

1400-1450: From the Middle English vendage & vyndage, from the Anglo-Norman vendenge, from vinter, from the Old French vendage & vendenge (vine-harvest, yield from a vineyard (and cognate with the French vendange)), from the Latin vindēmia (a harvest of grapes, vintage), the construct being vīn(um) (grape; wine) + dēmō (take off or away, remove), the construct being de (of; from, away from) + (e)mō (acquire, obtain).  A number of European languages including Spanish, Polish and (surprisingly) France adopted “vintage from English”.  Vintage is a noun, verb & adjective, vintager is a noun, vintagey is (a non-standard) adjective and vintaged & vintaging are verbs; the noun plural is vintages.

Warrnambool Heritage "The Aged Vintage" cheese.  Very good.

The meaning shifted to “age or year of a particular wine” after 1745 with the general adjectival sense of “being of an earlier time” emerging in the early 1880s.  In the business of winemaking, the notion of “vintages” came in the twentieth century to become elastic, the term not of necessity misleading, just one which needed to be understood.  Originally, a vintage was one wine, produced with grapes grown and harvested in the one season and that system is still used but the word has long been used also as a label to denote “something of a superior quality”.  The taste of wine being a subjective thing however and something the industry (often in the small print or with a “NV” added) markets as “non-vintage” may by many buyers be preferred to a “vintage” because the “un-vintaged” drop might be a blend of wine from several years; something routinely done to ensure a particular product tastes much the same from year to year.  Even then, while the regulatory environments in many jurisdictions do specify that to qualify as a “vintage”, the fluid in the bottle must contain a minimum volume from the year on the label but the “foreign” content can be as high as a quarter and according to EU regulators, in some places special exemptions have been granted permitting a 50/50 split.  The use also proved attractive to others and there are many “vintage” cheeses and other foodstuffs, the word in this context meaning little more than being sold at a higher price.

Brass era: 1915 Stutz Bearcat Model F.  Although untrue, it was for years part of Stutz folklore than anyone who died in one merited an obituary in the New York Times.

“Vintage” has been used of cars since 1928 but in the post-war years when the idea of cars as collectables coalesced, in various places categories were created and while somewhat arbitrary, the cut-off points between one era and another tended to reflect the existence of something significant which (at least for the majority of the vehicles involved) made them in some way identifiably different from what came before.  The terms vary: The most evocative is the “brass era” used in the US and it covers essentially anything produced between the beginning of organized production in the mid 1890s and 1915, the name chosen because of the extensive use of brass for fittings such as headlamp surrounds radiators and levers, the polished metal lending the distinctiveness.  The choice of 1915 as the end of the brass era reflected the decline in the use of the material as mass production made the use of other materials more attractive but the main factor was that was the year Ford ceased use for the Model T, the car which had for years dominated the market.  In the UK (and therefore throughout most of the old British Empire), cars produced prior to 1919 were called “veteran” although there was for a time a fashion to speak of them as “Edwardian, a reference to the reign of Edward VII (1841–1910; King of the UK & Emperor of India 1901-1910), the imprecision in the dates accounted for by “Edwardian” being used as a descriptor of the fashion, architecture etc of the era rather than the reign proper.  “Vintage” cars are those made between 1919-1930 (or 1916-1930 in US use) and as an epoch that follows what was at the time called “post-war” (between the end of the World War (1914-1918) and the onset of the Great Depression.  Conveniently, it conforms (more or less also to the advances in engineering and style which made the machines of the 1920s distinct from those of the next decade.

Post-war classic: 1948 Cisitalia 202 CMM by Vignale.

So, what in political science are the “inter-war years” are divided by the collector car community into “vintage” and “pre-war”, the later epoch being 1930-1942 (US passenger car production ending early in 1942).  Most of what was produced between 1945-1948 was a continuation of what was abandoned with the onset of hostilities but nothing produced after 1945 is grouped with the “pre-war” cohort and the era is generally called “post-war classics” and depending on who is writing the classification, that period ends somewhere around 1960-1962, motoring’s beginning of “the modern” although that’s obviously inexact, some strikingly modern stuff coming from as early as the 1940s and some true relics still on sale as late as 1968.  These definitions don’t apply to stuff made outside the West and in places like the Warsaw Pact nations, the relics would endure until the 1990s; nor do they include retro devices like the Morgan or products of pure-functionalism like Jeeps and Land Rovers.  In the modern age, the labeling has changed and the tendency now is to use self-explanatory terms like “1970”s, “muscle car era” etc.

Lindsay Lohan in a vintage Herve Leger bandage dress, New York, May 2007 (left) and in a vintage-style dress, New York, February 2017.    

In fashion, “vintage” can mean a piece from decades ago or just a few seasons earlier.  Vintage items can sometimes be genuine museum pieces or simply be “old” enough to have gained some sort of respectability.  To be “vintage”, something needs to be the product of an acknowledged designer or manufacturer; items which have gained their notoriety for some other reason (who it’s associated with or the circumstances in which it was worn) can be newsworthy but they’re not “vintage”.  The word is used also of style, a “vintage look” an indicating that an outfit is something which either recalls something associated with an older style or uses known motifs to achieve the effect.  Depending on the implementation, the latter can also be treated as a “retro” whereas a “vintage look” is something where the relationship is more vague.

There is vintage and there is retro: Lindsay Lohan in an art deco mini-dress, said to be a vintage original, paired with a pair of retro Prada stilettos in burgundy.

Scientist

Scientist (pronounced sahy-uhn-tist)

A person who studies or practises any of the sciences or who uses scientific methods, especially in the physical or natural sciences.

1833: Modeled after artist, the construct was the Latin stem scientia (knowledge) +‎ -ist.  Science was from the Middle English science & scyence, from the Old French science & escience, from the Latin scientia (knowledge), from sciens, the present participle stem of scire (to know).  The -ist suffix was from the Middle English -ist & -iste, from the Old French -iste and the Latin -ista, from the Ancient Greek -ιστής (-istḗs), from -ίζω (-ízō) (the -ize & -ise verbal suffix) and -τής (-tḗs) (the agent-noun suffix).  It was added to nouns to denote various senses of association such as (1) a person who studies or practices a particular discipline, (2), one who uses a device of some kind, (3) one who engages in a particular type of activity, (4) one who suffers from a specific condition or syndrome, (5) one who subscribes to a particular theological doctrine or religious denomination, (6) one who has a certain ideology or set of beliefs, (7) one who owns or manages something and (8), a person who holds very particular views (often applied to those thought most offensive).

Natural Philosopher versus Scientist

Founded in 1831 and modelled on the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte (Society of German Researchers and Physicians), the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was formed as an organisation open to anyone interested in science, unlike the exclusive Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (usually styled as "Royal Society").  In an indication of the breadth of its attraction, at the meeting of the BAAS on 24 June 1834, unexpectedly in attendance was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834); he’d not left his home in Highgate Hill for years and would die within weeks.  That a poet should attend a meeting about science was not at the time a surprise, the division between science and the arts coming later and Taylor had previously written about the scientific method.

Scientists study all sorts of things.  Research like this can attract an Ig Nobel prize.

For most of history, those we would now think of as scientists had been called natural philosophers.  Coleridge declared true philosophers were those who sat in their armchairs and contemplated the cosmos; they did not scratch around in digs or fiddle with electrical piles.  Cambridge don, the Reverend William Whewell, an English polymath, responded by suggesting, by analogy with artist, they should be called scientists and added those studying physics could be styled physicists, the French having already applied physicien (physician) to the surgeons and etymologists once dated the word “scientist” from that meeting but it was later discovered Whewell had coined the term in 1833 and it first appeared in print a year later in his anonymous review of Mary Somerville's (1780-1872) On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences published in the Quarterly Review.  It took a while to catch on but was in wide use in the US by the late nineteenth century and the rest of the English-speaking world a few years later although as late as 1900 there were publishers which had scientist on their “not-acceptable” list.

Google Ngram: Because of the way Google harvests it data, the numbers represented by the ngrams are not of necessity accurate but, over decades they probably are broadly indicative.  While the numbers do bounce around a bit, as expected, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, there was a sharp upward trend in the use of the word "scientist" in publications in English.