Rabbit

Rabbit (pronounced rab-it)

(1) Any of several soft-furred, large-eared, rodentlike burrowing mammals of the family Leporidae, allied with the hares and pikas in the order Lagomorpha, having a divided upper lip and long hind legs, usually smaller than the hares and mainly distinguished from them by bearing blind and furless young in nests rather than fully developed young in the open.

(2) Any of various small hares.

(3) The fur of a rabbit or hare, often processed to imitate another fur.

(4) A runner in a distance race whose goal is chiefly to set a fast pace, either to exhaust a particular rival so that a teammate can win or to help another entrant break a record; pacesetter.

(5) In sport, a person poor at a sport; in cricket specifically, an unskilled batter (also as “batting bunny”, usually clipped to bunny).

(5) As Welsh rabbit, an alternative form of Welsh rarebit & Welsh ribbit (A snack made of cheese melted with a little ale and served on toast).  Welsh rabbit was the original form but was erroneously marked as a corruption in a dictionary published in 1785 although it’s not clear if the editor made the assumption or drew the conclusion from oral evidence.

(6) In nuclear engineering, a pneumatically-controlled tool used to insert small samples of material inside the core of a nuclear reactor.

(7) In computing theory, a large element at the beginning of a list of items to be bubble sorted, and thus tending to be quickly swapped into the correct position.

(8) In northern English regional slang, as “rabbit catcher”, a midwife or one who by force of circumstance assists in the delivery of a baby.

(9) As “rabbit ears”, the indoor dipole television antenna which typically sat atop the early analogue sets which received a terrestrial signal.

(10) Incessantly or nonsensically to talk.

(11) To hunt rabbits.

(12) In US slang, to flee.

1375-1425: From the late Middle English rabet & rabette, from the Anglo-Latin rabettus, from the Middle French rabouillet (baby rabbit), from the dialectal Old North French rabotte, probably a diminutive of Middle Dutch or West Flemish robbe (rabbit, seal), of uncertain origin but which may be an imitative verb (perhaps robben or rubben (to rub)) and used to allude to a characteristic of the animal.  The related forms include the French rabot (plane), the Middle Dutch robbe (rabbit; seal (from which Modern Dutch gained rob (seal (also “rabbit”), the Middle Low German robbe & rubbe (rabbit), the later Low German Rubbe (seal), the West Frisian robbe (seal), the Saterland Frisian Rubbe (seal) and the North Frisian rob (“seal”) eventually borrowed as the German Robbe (seal).  Early dictionary editors thus described the word as “a Germanic noun with a French suffix”.  Rabbit is a noun & verb, rabbitiness is a noun, rabbited is a verb, rabbitlike & rabbity are adjectives and rabbiting is a noun & verb; the noun plural is rabbits and (especially in the collective) rab·bit.

Lindsay Lohan with rabbit.

Until the late nineteenth century, the meaning was exclusively what would now be understood as “a young rabbit” but it came to be used of the whole species, replacing the original coney, owing to the latter's resemblance to and use as a euphemism for cunny (“vulva” and linked obviously with “cunt” although despite that the preferred slang with some zoological allusion came to include “beaver”, “camel toe” and (especially) “pussy”, rather than “bunny”).  The noun coney dates from the early thirteenth century and was abstracted from the Anglo-French conis and the Old French coniz, (plurals of conil (long-eared rabbit; (Lepus cunicula)) from the Latin cuniculus, the source also of the Spanish conejo, the Portuguese coelho and the Italian coniglio), the small, Spanish variant of the Italian hare (Latin lepus).  The word may ultimately be from the Iberian Celtic although classical writers said it was Hispanic.  In Middle English the two forms were cony & conny (the derivations including coning, cunin & conyng) while the Old French had conil alongside conin.  The evolution seems to be that the plural form conis (from conil, with the -l- elided) was taken into English and regularly single-ized as cony.  The Old French form was borrowed in the Dutch konijn and the German Kaninchen (a diminutive), and is preserved in the surname Cunningham (from a place-name in Ayrshire).  Rabbits not being native to northern Europe, there was no Germanic word for them.  In the fourteenth century “rabbit” came to describe the young of the species and over the centuries came to supplant coney, a process complete by the early nineteenth.  It was another of those exercises in sanitization because in English & Welsh slang, coney had been adopted as a punning synonym for cunny (cunt).  That was complicated by it appearing in the Book of Proverbs in the King James Version of the Bible (KJV, 1611) so the work-around was to change the pronunciation of the original short vowel (rhyming with honey, money) to rhyme with bony, stony.  In the Old Testament, the word translates the Hebrew shaphan (rock-badger).

When Volkswagen in 1974 introduced the Golf in the North American market, it was named the Rabbit, apparently because it would thought the name would suggest qualities such as “agility, speed & playfulness” which were positive attributes in what was then (by US standards) a very small car, much smaller than the more recent versions.  Because of the international success of the Golf, when the revised model was released in 1983, the North American cars switched to that name and it’s been marketed that way since except between 2003-2008 when the Rabbit badge was revived.  The revival was in retrospect a curious choice given the obvious advantages offered by using the one name globally but at the time VW America had a rationalization: “We think we have some opportunities to do something creative with the Rabbit nameplate and recognizes the Golf nameplate has never really caught on with North American consumers as it was overshadowed by the Jetta sedan and wagon.  Volkswagen customers want a relationship with their cars and names like The Thing, Beetle, Fox and Rabbit support this."  Whatever the opportunities may have been, the linguistic experiment wasn’t continued and since 2009, it’s been Golfs all the way.

US market VW Golfs: 1974 Rabbit L (Generation 1)  (left) and 2007 Rabbit TSI (Generation 5).

There was some linguistic irony in VW’s choice because as the US satirist & critic HL Mencken (1880–1956) pointed out in The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (1919): “Zoologically speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit.”

The White Rabbit was a character in Lewis Carroll’s (1832–1898) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and one which appears often, always in a waistcoat with pocket watch and in a hurry, fearful always of the impending fury the duchess will visit upon him should he be a moment late.  It’s the white rabbit which Alice follows down the rabbit hole, leading to the bizarre adventures recounted.  One of popular culture’s best-known rabbits gave rise to the phrase “bunny boiler”, a reference to the scene in the film Fatal Attraction (1987) in which a scorned woman revenged herself upon her adulterous ex-lover by tossing his daughter’s pet rabbit into a pot of boiling water; he arrives home to discover a boiled bunny.  The Warner Brother cartoon character Bugs Bunny first appeared on the screen in 1938 and is often described by his shotgun wielding antagonist, the lisping Elmer Fudd, as "that wascally wabbit".

In idiomatic use there’s “pull a rabbit out of the hat” (to find or obtain a sudden solution to a problem), “rabbit-hearted” (someone timid or inclined to be flighty), “rabbit food” (a disapproving view of vegetables held by some meat-eaters), “the rabbit test” (an early pregnancy test involving the injection of the tested woman's urine into a female rabbit, then examining the rabbit's ovaries a few days later for changes in response to a hormone (“the rabbit died” the phrase indicating a positive test or an admission of one’s pregnancy)), “breed like rabbits” (slang for an individual, family, or sub-group of a population with a high birth-rate), “down the rabbit hole” (a time-consuming tangent or detour, often one from which it’s psychologically difficult to extricate oneself), “lucky rabbit’s foot”, (the carrying of a luckless bunny’s preserved rabbit’s foot as a lucky charm), “like a rabbit warren” (a confusingly labyrinthine environment (used literally & figuratively)), “rabbit in the headlights” (an allusion to the way rabbits (like some other wildlife) sometimes “freeze” when caught in the light of an oncoming vehicle’s headlamps) and the inevitable “rabbit fucker” (a general term of disparagement (although it could be applied literally in the right circumstances)).

The “earless” rabbit with “eared” companions.

In May 2011, some weeks after the meltdown at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant which suffered severe damage in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, a video of an “earless rabbit” began to circulate, purportedly captured in an area just beyond the crippled plant’s exclusion area.  The immediate speculation was of course the creature’s unusual state was a result of a radiation-induced genetic mutation.  Geneticists however had a less troubling explanation.  Although there’s no doubt the radiation emitting from Fukushima Dai-ichi (some 225 kilometres (140 miles) north-east of Tokyo) represents a major risk to health and the long-term environmental effects remain unclear, the scientists say not only is it unlikely to be linked with the earless rabbit, such creatures are far from unusual.  According to a  statement issued from Colorado State University's Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences: “…radiation can cause mutations that can be occasionally expressed as obvious birth defects, such as shown in the video.  However, to say this is the result of contamination from the Fukushima accident is a stretch, because natural radiation, as well as many other chemical substances in the environment and other factors, can also be mutagenic.  In most cases, the cause of congenital birth defects in humans and other animals cannot be determined and as far as science has shown, there have never been mutations produced by ionizing radiations that do not occur spontaneously as well.”

Rabbits used in nuclear reactors: Polyethylene 1-inch (25 mm) rabbit (left), Polyethylene 2-inch (50 mm) rabbit (centre) and Titanium 2-inch (50 mm) rabbit.

The rabbit does though have a place in nuclear engineering.  In the industry, the term “rabbit” is used to describe a range of pneumatically controlled tools which are used remotely to insert or retrieve items from a nuclear reactor or other radioactive environments.  The name is thought to come from the devices being tubular (on the model of the rabbit borrow) which allows samples rapidly to be injected into the periphery of a reactor core, the injectables moving “with the speed of startled rabbits” although there may also be the implication of rabbits as expendable creatures, the tool essential for maintenance, inspection, and repair tasks in nuclear facilities, where direct human intervention is either dangerous or impossible because of high radiation levels.

Winston Churchill inspecting the progress of project White Rabbit No, 6, Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, England, November 1941.

The World War II (1939-1945) era White Rabbit No. 6 was an engineering project by the British Admiralty although as a security measure the official code-name was changed to Cultivator No. 6 to make it sound less mysterious and more like a piece of agricultural equipment.  It was a military trench-digging machine and an example of the adage that “generals are always preparing to fight the last war” and although designed exclusively for army use on (and at least partially under) land, it came under the auspices of the Royal Navy because it was a brainchild (one of many) of Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) who, between the outbreak of war in 1939 and his assumption of the premiership some months later, served as First Lord of the Admiralty (the service’s civilian head).  Trenches and artillery had been the two dominant features of World War I (1914-1918) and Churchill had spent some months (1915-1916) in one of the former while under fire from the latter while commanding a battalion; before the implications of mechanization and the German’s Blitzkrieg (lightning war) tactics were apparent, he assumed the new war in France would unfold something like the old, thus the interest in something which would “revolutionize trench warfare”.  Trench warfare however wasn’t repeated so White Rabbit No.6 was soon realized to be already obsolete and the project was abandoned and although the most fully developed of the prototypes did perform according to the design parameters, whether it would have been effective remains doubtful; remarkably, work on these things wasn’t wholly abandoned until 1942.  The “White Rabbit” project codes came from Churchill’s sense of humor, his ideas coming, as he said: “like rabbits I pull from my hat” and he supported many, some of which were of great military value while others, like the “floating runways” (artificial icebergs made with a mixture of shards of timber & frozen water), were quixotic.

White Rabbit © Copperpenny Music, Mole Music Co

Surrealistic Pillow album cover, 1967.

White Rabbit was a song by Grace Slick (b 1939) and released on the album Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane.  The lyrics were inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871).  It was the psychedelic era and drug references were common in popular music and in the case of White Rabbit it may have been appropriate if the speculation the books been written while the author was under the influence of Laudanum (a then widely-available opiate-infused drug) is true (there's no evidence beyond the circumstantial).  Given the imagery in the text, it’s not difficult to believe he may have been on something and among authors and poets it was a popular way to stimulate the imagination, inspiring at least some of one of the most beloved fragments of English verse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834) Kubla Khan (1797) which ends abruptly at 54 lines.  According to Coleridge, he was unable to recall the rest of the 300-odd which had come to him in an opium-laced dream (the original publication was sub-titled “A Vision in a Dream”) because he was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock” (a nearby Somerset village).  Grace Slick would have sympathized with an artist being intruded on by commerce.

White Rabbit lyrics:

One pill makes you larger

And one pill makes you small

And the ones that mother gives you

Don't do anything at all

Go ask Alice

When she's ten feet tall

 

And if you go chasing rabbits

And you know you're going to fall

Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar

Has given you the call

Call Alice

When she was just small

 

When the men on the chessboard

Get up and tell you where to go

And you've just had some kind of mushroom

And your mind is moving low

Go ask Alice

I think she'll know

 

When logic and proportion

Have fallen sloppy dead

And the White Knight is talking backwards

And the Red Queen's off with her head

Remember what the dormouse said

Feed your head

Belladonna

Belladonna (pronounced bel-uh-don-uh)

(1) In botany, a poisonous Eurasian perennial herb, Atropa belladonna, of the nightshade family, having purplish-red flowers and poisonous black berries (sometimes also called deadly nightshade).

(2) In clinical pharmacology, a drug from the leaves and root of this plant, containing atropine or hyoscyamine and related alkaloids; used in medicine to check secretions and spasms, to relieve pain or dizziness, and as a cardiac and respiratory stimulant; the alkaloids affect the nervous system by blocking the effects of acetylcholine.

(3) A female given name (now rare).

1590-1600: A compound word, from the Italian belladonna, from the Medieval Latin blādōna (nightshade) which may have been of Gaulish origin.  The construct was bella (a stantivization of the singular feminine form of the adjective bello (beautiful)), from the Latin bellus (beautiful, pretty, handsome, pleasant, agreeable, charming) + donna, from the Late Latin domna, a shortened variant of the Latin domina (lady, mistress of an estate or household), from dominus (master), from domus (home) and a doublet of dama (dame).  Belladonna is a noun and is capitalized if used as given name or as the taxonomic genus within the family Solanaceae–Atropa (this largely archaic except as a historic reference).

Vesicaire rempant: A print of Henbane-Belladonna, woodcut on laid paper by an unknown illustrator in Commentaires de M. Pierre Andre Matthiole medecin senois sur les six livres de Pedacion Dioscoride Anazarbeen de la matière médicinale (1572) by Dr Pietre Andrea Mattioli, published by Guillaume Roville of Lyon.

The belladonna plant seems first to have been so described by Italian physician Andrea Mattioli (1501–circa 1577) who used the form herba bella donna.  Dr Mattioli was a pioneer in botanical classification and a diligent scientist who admitted (and corrected) his errors although some of his research methods would today shock, the data he published documenting the effects of poisonous plants gained by testing them on prisoners languishing in various royal dungeons.  Apart from the value to botanists and students of medical history, his texts and the high quality artwork they included have provided much source material for social historians interested in matters as diverse as the dyes used in clothing and the produce regionally available to chefs; his texts contain the first documented evidence of tomatoes being grown in Europe.

Belladonna: Lindsay Lohan in "deadly nightshade" print fabric.

The term belladonna introduced to English by the London-based botanist John Gerarde (circa 1545-1612) who almost certainly acquired from one of Mattioli’s textbooks and quickly it seems largely to have displaced the native English forms used for the plant including dwale, (from the Old English dwola (connected with the Modern English “dull”)) & morelle (from the Old French morele, from the Latin morella (black nightshade)).  Gerarde’s epic-length (1484 page) Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), was one of the standard texts in English until well into the seventeenth century although it was later found substantially to be a plagiarised translation of Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597) by the Flemish physician Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585), a work translated into several languages in continental Europe.

Amaryllis Belladonna.

In eighteenth century Italian use, belladonna (literally "fair lady"), was understood to convey the meaning "beautiful woman" and, supposedly, the use in botany came from the cosmetic eye-drops women made from the juice (atropic acid) of the plant known in English as "deadly nightshade", the desired quality the property of dilating the pupils to create the alluring look young ladies desired.  The mid-nineteenth century explanation that it gained the nomenclature because it was used to poison beautiful women appears to have no basis in any European legal records and was likely a folk etymology alteration.  The Italian belladonna was certainly altered by folk etymology to bella donna (beautiful lady)) the original Medieval Latin being blādōna ("nightshade" and written variously as besulidus, belbulidus, belulidus or belhulidus), the meaning shift again motivated by the cosmetic use of nightshade for dilating the eyes and the authoritative German-Austrian Romanist and linguist Ernst Gamillscheg (1887-1971) suggested it was ultimately of Gaulish origin, the Italian botanist Luigi Anguillara (actually Luigi Squalermo, circa 1512-1570) using the spelling biasola.

Pulchra domina sed tribulation: (the Latin for "a beautiful woman but trouble").

In modern use, Italian men note the legend that the more beautiful the flower of a belladonna, the more deadly its poison although this has no documented basis in botanical study it's never been disproved (were such research possible) so, according to the scientific method, it's not impossible there may be a link.  Attracted by the logic of this, the folk tradition in Italy was more beautiful a woman, the more problems she’s likely to cause, nulla altro che guai (nothing but trouble) the common vernacular form although one probably often uttered in hindsight.  Belladonna is known to have been used for medicinal purposes since Antiquity although it was the use to enlarge the pupils by women in Renaissance Italy for which lent it the romance.  The more sinister name (deadly nightshade) hints at its other chemical role and the dark berries the plant yields were known variously as “murderer’s berries”, “devil’s berries” & sorcerer’s berries, many suggesting it was the poison in William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Romeo and Juliet (1596) which made Juliet appear dead.  Things of course ended badly for the star-cross'd lovers but despite that belladonna remains in use as an ingredient in a number of medications, sold as a supplement and best known still for being in the drops used to dilate the eyes.

Romeo (Leonard Whiting (b 1950)) finds Juliet (Olivia Hussey (b 1951)) lying in a death-like coma after taking a potion, Franco Zeffirelli’s (1923–2019) production of Romeo and Juliet (1968).

Although so toxic that ingesting even a small quantity of its leaves or berries can be fatal (just a touch of the plant can irritate the skin), the medicinal benefits are real if the active chemicals (atropine & scopolamine) are correctly prepared and while there’s some overlap in their use, atropine as a muscle relaxant is more effective and useful also in regulating the heart rate.  In industrial applications it’s used as an antidote for insecticide poisoning and in chemical warfare agents.  Scopolamine has many sources apart from belladonna and is helpful in reducing body secretions, such as stomach acid and is an ancient sea-sickness treatment, thus the application to help with motion sickness, available in convenient skin patches.  Lethal though it can be, belladonna products are widely available as over-the-counter nutritional supplements in pump-sprays, ointments, tablets, and tincture (liquid).

Deracinate

Deracinate (pronounced dih-ras-uh-neyt)

(1) To pull up by the roots; uproot; extirpate; eradicate.

(2) To isolate or alienate (a person) from a native or customary culture or environment (especially to expel people from their native land and into exile).

(3) To liberate or be liberated from a culture or its norms. 

1590s: A calque of the French déraciner, from the Old French desraciner (uproot, dig out, pull up by the roots), the construct being dé- +‎ racine +‎ -er.  The de- prefix was from the Latin dē-, from the preposition dē (of, from (the Old English æf- was a similar prefix).  It imparted the sense of (1) reversal, undoing, removing, (2) intensification and (3) from, off.  In French the dé- prefix was used to make antonyms (as un- & dis- function in English) and was partially inherited from the Old and Middle French des-, from the Latin dis- (part), the ultimate source being the primitive Indo-European dwís and partially borrowed from Latin dē-..  Racine was from the Old French, from the Late Latin radicīna (a little root), from the Classical Latin radix & radicis (root), from the Proto-Italic wrādī, from the primitive Indo-European wréhds & wrād- (branch, root).  The prefix –er was used to form infinitives of first-conjugation verbs and was from the Latin –are, from the Middle High German –ære & -er, from the Old High German -āri, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, from Latin -arius.  The -ate suffix -ate used in the English formation was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate).  Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel.  It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate).  Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee.  Deracinate, deracinates, deracinating & deracinated are verbs and deracination is a noun; the noun plural is deracinations.  The noun deracinater (or deracinator) is non-standard.

In English, deracinate is used mostly as a decorative alternative to the descriptive but brutish "uproot" and is probably one of those words which has survived to enjoy it's infrequent appearances because it appears in the Duke of Burgundy's speech in William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) Henry V (circa 1599); the Shakespeare connection has headed-off a few linguistic extinctions.  Use in agriculture and horticulture appears to be rare (the punchier alternatives better understood) although it might be expected when gardening is a part of a literary novel.  In figurative use, the inferences tend to be negative and focus on isolation, alienation, deportation and the cultural separation sometimes felt by diasporic communities.  In English, since 1921 it has been used to mean "uprooted from one's national or social environment" (especially to expel people from their native land and into exile).

Lindsay Lohan gardening with a lopper, decapitation a less demanding path to destruction than deracination, New York City, May 2015.  She appears to be relishing the task. 

However, in figurative form deracinate can carry a positive connotation.  It can mean "to liberate or be liberated from a culture or its norms" and in that sense sometimes appears in right-wing commentaries on certain aspects of the culture wars,  There the point being made relates to the different ways "cultural alienations" are treated, depending on who is being alienated from what.  Someone who is a white, middle class Christian and rejects the beliefs and cultural traditions of their church to emerge as a materialist atheist tied to Enlightenment values is not regarded as "culturally alienated" or a victim of "cultural oppression", indeed, if their transformation is noted at all it may be to call them a "rational" or "an intellectual".  Some might call them "a heretic" but gleefully a rationalist would anyway agree.  For others however, it's argued they can only ever be seen as "a victim".  This seems especially to apply to those from indigenous populations who, if they reject belief in or adherence to the sorts of things Christians are entitled to dismiss as "superstitions", they're treated as "oppressed" and "alienated".  In that sense, the critics say, being something like indigenous (or another ethnic or cultural minority) is "compulsory", some of the very intellectuals who are themselves proudly (and by choice) alienated from a cultural inherence of perhaps centuries declaring those from minorities similarly separated must be victims of hegemonic cultural oppression.  In this sense the critique is something like that made of Western anthropologists who opposed modernizing influences being allowed to "infect" traditional cultures, presumably so they could be preserved in their "unspoiled state" for anthropological study.

Although right-wing politics might seem an unusual source for such arguments, it is intellectually consistent and the internal logic conforms with their hierarchy of priorities.  Although usually they decry post-modernism and most flavors of critical studies (critical race studies (CRT) a particular target) as little more than glossings of nihilism, the right to adopt a world-view at variance with one imposed by cultural tradition has a long history and the importance of defending it well explained by the French philosopher Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778) and more succinctly still by the Anglo-Irish Whig statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797).  In the prevailing climate, minority ethnic & cultural identities do seem to remain compulsory (though it may be the converts to post-modernism wisely keep quite about it) but in the the culture wars, no truce has been declared.

Duke of Burgundy's speech (Shakespeare, Henry V Act 5, Scene 2)

My duty to you both, on equal love,
Great kings of France and England. That I have labored
With all my wits, my pains, and strong endeavors,
To bring your most imperial Majesties
Unto this bar and royal interview,
Your mightiness on both parts best can witness.
Since, then, my office hath so far prevailed
That face to face and royal eye to eye
You have congreeted. Let it not disgrace me
If I demand before this royal view
What rub or what impediment there is
Why that the naked, poor, and mangled peace,
Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births,
Should not in this best garden of the world,
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Alas, she hath from France too long been chased,
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in its own fertility.
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unprunèd, dies. Her hedges, even-pleached,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disordered twigs. Her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery.
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, withal uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country,
But grow like savages, as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood,
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire,
And everything that seems unnatural.
Which to reduce into our former favor
You are assembled, and my speech entreats
That I may know the let why gentle peace
Should not expel these inconveniences
And bless us with her former qualities.

MRDA

MRDA (pronounced emm-ahr-dee-ey)

The abbreviation of “Mandy Rice-Davies Applies”, an aphorism used in law and politics to refer to any denial which is transparently self-interested.

1963: An allusion to the statement “Well he would, wouldn't he?”, said by Welsh model Mandy Rice-Davies (1944-2004) during cross-examination in a trial at the Old Bailey (the central criminal court for England & Wales) associated with the Profumo affair.

Lord Astor, Mandy Rice-Davies and the Profumo Affair

The context of Ms Rice-Davies’s answer was the question: “Are you aware that Lord Astor denies any impropriety in his relationship with you?” and the answer “Well he would, wouldn't he?” elicited from those in the court “some amusement”.  MDRA (Mandy Rice-Davies Applies) thus became in law and politics an aphorism used as “verbal shorthand” to refer to any denial which is transparently self-interested although it doesn’t of necessity imply a denial is untrue.  In general use, the fragment from the trial is often misquoted as “Well he would say that, wouldn't he?” because that better encapsulates the meaning without being misleading.

Mandy Rice-Davies (left) and Christine Keeler (right), London, 1963.  Note the leopard-print seat covers.

The Profumo affair was one of those fits of morality which from time-to-time would afflict English society in the twentieth century and was a marvellous mix of class, sex, spying & money, all things which make a good scandal especially juicy.  John Profumo (1915-2006) was the UK’s Minister for War (the UK cabinet retained the position until 1964 although it was disestablished in the US in 1947) who, then 46, was found to be conducting an adulterous affair with 19 year old topless model Christine Keeler (1942-2017) at the same time she was also enjoying trysts with a Russian spy, attached to the Soviet embassy with the cover of naval attaché.  Although there are to this day differing interpretations of the scandal, there have never been any doubts this potential Cold-War conduit between a KGB spy and Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War represented at least a potential conflict of interest.

Dr Evatt (left), comrade Molotov (centre) and Soviet translator Alexei Pavlov, exchanging MRDAs in Russian & English, London, 1942.

MRDAs are common in courtrooms and among politicians but some became legends.  In 1954, Dr HV Evatt (1894–1965; Australian attorney-general & foreign minister 1941-1949, and leader of opposition 1951-1960), in the midst of a particularly febrile period during the Cold War, wrote a letter to comrade Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986; Soviet foreign minister 1939-1949 & 1953-1956) asking if allegations of Soviet espionage in Australia were true.  Comrade Molotov of course wrote back, politely denying the USSR engaged in spying anywhere.  Assured, Evatt read the letter to the parliament and the members sat for a moment stunned until, on both sides, loudly laughing.  It was a MRDA before there were MRDAs.

The Profumo affair is noted also for being at least an influence in the end of the “age of deference” in England and while that’s often probably overstated, the immediate reaction and the aftermath proved it wasn’t only across colonial Africa that a “wind of change” was blowing.  The second Lord Astor (1907–1966) was emblematic of the upper classes of England who once would have expected deference from someone like Ms Rice-Davies, someone “not of the better classes” as his lordship might have put it.  Although what came to be known as the “swinging sixties” didn’t really begin until a couple of years after the Profumo affair when the baby-boomers began to come of age, the generational shift had by then become apparent and it was something surprisingly sudden as the interest of the young switched from pop music to politics.  As recently as the 1959 election campaign, the patrician Harold Macmillan (1894–1986; UK prime-minister 1957-1963) had told the working classes “most of you have never had it so good” and for the last time they would express their gratitude to their betters, delivering the Tories an increased majority, an impressive achievement for "the last of the old Edwardians" who, upon assuming the premiership in 1957 in the wake of the Suez debacle, had told the Queen he doubted his administration would last six weeks.

In the matter of Lehrmann v Network Ten Pty Limited [2024] FCA 369

Mr Justice Lee.

Justice Michael Lee (b 1965) in April 2024 handed down one of the more anticipated judgments of recent years, finding Bruce Lehrmann (b 1995), on the civil law test of the balance of probabilities, had raped Brittany Higgins (b 1993) on the sofa in a ministerial suite in Parliament House while the victim was affected by strong drink.  Apart from the heightened public interest in the verdict, lawyers were watching closely to see if there would be encouragement for those defending themselves in defamation cases, something which had been lent unexpected strength by an earlier judgment; although the matter of rape was central to the facts, Lehrmann v Network Ten was a defamation case.  However, for those who appreciate judicial findings for their use of language, Justice Lee didn’t disappoint and although neither Ms Rice-Davies nor MRDA were mentioned in his text, as he assessed the conduct and evidence of Mr Lehrmann, they may have come to mind.

Janet Albrechtsen in her study.

In his opening remarks, the judge acknowledged the case had become a cause celebre for many and that it was best described as “an omnishambles”, the construct being the Latin omni(s) (all) + shambles, from the Middle English schamels (plural of schamel), from the Old English sċeamol & sċamul (bench, stool), from the Proto-West Germanic skamul & skamil (stool, bench), from the Vulgar Latin scamellum, from the Classical Latin scamillum (little bench, ridge), from scamnum (bench, ridge, breadth of a field).  In English, shambles enjoyed a number of meanings including “a scene of great disorder or ruin”, “a cluttered or disorganized mess”, “a scene of bloodshed, carnage or devastation” or (most evocatively), “a slaughterhouse”.  As one read the judgement one could see why the judge was drawn to the word although, in the quiet of his chambers, “clusterfuck” may have been in his thoughts as he pondered the best euphemism.  Helpfully, one of the Murdoch press’s legal commentators, The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen (b 1966; by Barry Goldwater out of Ayn Rand) who had been one of the journalists most interested in the case, informed the word nerds omnishambles (1) dated from 2009 when it was coined for the BBC political satire The Thick Of It and (2) had endured well enough to be named the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) 2021 Word of the Year.  The judge's linguistic flourish was a hint of things to come in what was one of the more readable recent judgments.

Noting Mr Lehrmann’s original criminal trial on the rape charge had been aborted (after having already been delayed for reasons related to the defamation matter) because of jury misconduct with a subsequent retrial not pursued because of the prosecution’s concern about the fragile mental state of the complainant, the judge observed “Having escaped the lion’s den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of coming back for his hat.”  In other words, Mr Lehrmann who could have walked away with no findings against him, lured by the millions of dollars to be gained, rolled the legal dice and was found to have committed rape.  He is of course not the first to fall victim to suffer self-inflicted legal injury in not dissimilar circumstances; the writers (from different literary traditions) Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and Jeffrey Archer (b 1940) both were convicted and imprisoned as a consequence of them having initiated libel actions.  Whether Mr Lehrmann will now face a retrial in the matter of rape is in the hands of the Australian Capital Territory’s (ACT) Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).  In such a case, it would be necessary to prove the event happened under the usual test in criminal law: beyond reasonable doubt.  Even if that isn’t pursued by the DPP, his time in courtrooms may not be over because it’s possible he may face action because of his conduct in this trial with the handling of certain documents and another unrelated matter is pending in Queensland.

In considering the evidence offered by Mr Lehrmann, the judge appears to have found some great moments in the history of MRDAs:

Commenting on his claim to having returned (after midnight following Friday evening’s hours of convivial drinking) to his Parliament House office to write papers about the French submarines and related government matters, he observed Mr Lehrmann “…hitherto had demonstrated no outward signs of being a workaholic.”  “To remark that Mr Lehrmann was a poor witness is an exercise in understatement.”

Regarding the claim Mr Lehrmann had made to someone to whom he’d just been introduced that he was “…waiting on a clearance to come through so that he could go and work at Asis.” (the Australian Security Intelligence Service; the external intelligence service al la the UK SIS (MI6) or the US CIA (although without the assassinations… as far as is known)), the judge observed she “…kept her well-founded incredulity to herself.”, such “Walter Mitty-like imaginings” demonstrating he “…had no compunction about departing from the truth if he thought it expedient.”

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.

The reading of the judgement was live-streamed and the passage which got the loudest chuckle was in the discussion of Mr Lehrmann’s deciding whether he found Ms Higgins attractive.  In an interview on commercial television broadcast in 2023, he’d denied finding the young lady attractive, despite the existence of comments dating from 2019 indicating the opposite.  Pausing only briefly, Justice Lee delivered this news with an arched eyebrow:  “When confronted by this inconsistency, his attempt to explain it away by suggesting the attraction he felt for Ms Higgins was ‘just like [the attraction] I can find [in] anybody else in this [court]room, irrespective of gender’ was as disconcerting as it was unconvincing.”  The judge ordered to audience to suppress their laughter.

Even regarding submarines as a likely topic over drinks, his honour was sceptical: “With the exception of Mr Lehrmann, no one who gave evidence as to their time at The Dock could recall discussing Australia’s submarine contracts with France at either table. The lack of recollection of any discussion of this topic is intuitively unsurprising.  Declaiming on the topics of who was building submarines and where they were being built was not quite the repartee one would usually expect to hear over a convivial drink on a Friday night between 20 [something]-year-olds out for a good time – even if (with respect) one would not expect the badinage of the Algonquin Round Table.” (an early twentieth century, shifting aggregation of men & women of letters who met over lunch in New York’s Algonquin Hotel, their barbs and thoughts often appearing in their newspaper & magazine columns; they dubbed themselves “The Vicious Circle” and were a sort of Cliveden set without the politics.  Cliveden was a stately home in Buckinghamshire, the country seat of Lord Astor and the scene of many of the events central to the Profumo affair).

The judge was forensic in his deconstruction of Mt Lehrmann’s MRDA he returned to Parliament House after being out drinking with Ms Higgins and others in order to retrieve his keys: “If the reason Mr Lehrmann needed to return to Parliament House was to collect his keys, he could have texted his girlfriend to have her meet him at the door or called her.  Mr Lehrmann asks me to accept the proposition that it was ‘a process to get in’ to his shared flat and that to avoid this complication, he preferred to: (a) go out of his way to go back to work in the early hours; (b) lie to Parliament House security; (c) sign the necessary register; (d) be issued with a pass; (e) go through a metal detector; (f) be escorted by a security guard to his office; (g) obtain his keys from his office; (h) book another Uber; (i) go back through a Parliamentary exit; (j) meet the ride-share car; and then (k) ride home.”

Bruce Lehrmann leaving the court after the verdict was delivered.

In psychiatry, distinction is made between the “habitual” and “compulsive” liar and while this wasn’t something Justice Lee explored, he did in one passage sum up his assessment of the likely relationship to truth in anything Mr Lehrmann might say: “I do not think Mr Lehrmann is a compulsive liar, and some of the untruths he told during his evidence may sometimes have been due to carelessness and confusion, but I am satisfied that in important respects he told deliberate lies. I would not accept anything he said except where it amounted to an admission, accorded with the inherent probabilities, or was corroborated by a contemporaneous document or a witness whose evidence I accept.”

One fun footnote from the case was a non-substantive matter, Ms Lisa Wilkinson (b 1959), the Network 10 journalist at the centre of the defamation claim, objecting to being characterized as a “tabloid journalist”.  It transpired her employment history included stints with Dolly, the Australian Women’s Weekly and commercial television including the Beauty & the Beast show.  Unfortunately, she wasn’t asked to define what she thought “tabloid journalism” meant; perhaps Justice Lee decided he’d heard enough MRDAs that day.

On the basis that, on the balance of probabilities, Mr Lehrmann did rape Ms Higgins, his claim for damages against Network Ten for defamatory material earlier broadcast was dismissed.  The judge found the material indeed had the capacity to defame but because the imputations substantially were true, their defense was sustained.  So, the only millions of dollars now to be discussed concern the legal costs: who is to pay whom, the judge asking the party’s submission be handed to the court by 22 April.  Mr Lehrmann’s legal team has not indicated if they’re contemplating an appeal.

Despite many opportunities, Peter Dutton (b 1970; leader of the opposition and leader of the Australian Liberal Party since May 2022) has never denied being a Freemason.

MADD

MADD, Madd & MaDD (pronounced mad)

(1) The acronym (as MADD) for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a non-profit education and lobbying operation founded in California in 1982 with a remit to campaign against driving while drink or drug-affected.

(2) The acronym (as MADD) for Myoadenylate deaminase deficiency or Adenosine monophosphate deaminase.

(3) The acronym (as MADD) for multiple acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (known also as the genetic disorder Glutaric acidemia type 2).

(4) In computing (as MADD), the acronym for Multiple-Antenna Differential Decoding (a technique used in wireless comms using multiple antennas for both transmit & receive which improves performance by exploiting spatial diversity & multipath propagation of the wireless channel).

(5) As the gene MADD (or MAP kinase), an activating death domain protein.

(6) As Madd, the fruit of Saba senegalensis (a fruit-producing plant of the Apocynaceae family, native to the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa).

(7) As madd, a clipping of maddah (from the From Arabic مَدَّة (madda)), the English form of the Arabic diacritic (a distinguishing mark applied to a letter or character) used in both the Arabic & Persian.

(8) The acronym (as MaDD), Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder.

(9) The acronym (as MADD), for mutually assured digital destruction: a theory of cyber-warfare whereby each participant demonstrates to the other their capacity to inflict equal or more severe damage in retaliation, thereby deterring a cyber-attack (based on the earlier MAD (mutually assured destruction), a description of nuclear warfare deterrence).

From AD to MAD, 1962-1965

The period between the addition of nuclear weapons to the US arsenal in 1945 and 1949 when the USSR detonated their first atomic bomb was unique, a brief anomaly in the history of great-power conflict.  It's possible to find periods in history when one power has possessed an overwhelming preponderance of military strength that would have enabled them easily to defeat any enemy or possible coalition but never was the imbalance of force so asymmetric as it was between 1945-1949.   Once both the US and USSR possessed strategic nuclear arsenals, the underlying metric of Cold War became the two sides sitting in their bunkers counting warheads and the centrality of that lasted as long as the bombs were gravity devices delivered by aircraft which needed to get to a point above the target.  At this point, the military’s view was that nuclear war was possible and the only deterrent was to maintain a creditable threat of retaliation and, still in the age of the “bomber will always get through” doctrine, both sides literally kept squadrons of nuclear-armed bombers in the air 24/7.  Once ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and (especially) submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBMs) were deployed, the calculation of nuclear war changed from damage assessment to an acknowledgement that, in the worse case scenarios made possible by the preservation of large-scale second-strike retaliatory capacity, although the "total mutual annihilation" of the popular imagination was never likely, the damage inflicted would have been many times worse and more extensive than in any previous conflict and, although the climatarian implications weren't at the time well-understood, the consequences would have been global and lasted to one degree or another for centuries.

It was thus politically and technologically deterministic that the idea of mutually assured destruction (MAD) would evolve and it was a modification of a deterrence doctrine known as AD (assured destruction) which appeared in Pentagon documents as early as 1962.  AD was intended as a way to deter the USSR from staging a first-strike against the US, the notion being that the engineering and geographical deployment of the US's retaliatory capacity was such that whatever was achieved by a Soviet attack, their territory would suffer something much worse.  To the Pentagon planners in their bunker, the internal logic of AD was compelling and was coined as a description of the prevailing situation rather than a theoretical doctrine.  To the general population, it obviously meant MAD (mutually assured destruction) and while as a doctrine of deterrence, the metrics remained the same, after 1966 when the term gained currency, it began to be used as an argument against the mere possession of nuclear arsenals, the paradox being the same acronym was also used to underpin the standard explanation of the structural reason nuclear warfare was avoided.  Just as paradoxically, while serving to prevent their use, MAD also fueled the arms race because the stalemate created its own inertia and it would be almost a decade before the cost and absurdity of maintaining the huge number of useless warheads was addressed.  MAD probably also contributed to both sides indulging in conflict by proxy, supporting wars and political movements which served as surrogate battles made too dangerous by the implications of MAD to be contested between the two big protagonists.

Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder

There are those who criticize the existence of MADD (Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder) as an example of the trend to “medicalize” aspects of human behaviour which have for millennia been regarded as “normal”, the implication being the sudden creation of a cohort of customers for psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry, the suspicion being MADD is of such interest to the medical-industrial complex because the catchment is of the “worried well”, those with sufficient disposable income to make the condition worthwhile, the poor too busy working to ensure food and shelter for their families for there to be much time to daydream.

Still, the consequences of MADD are known to be real and while daydreaming is a common and untroubling experience for many, in cases where it’s intrusive and frequent, it can cause real problems with everyday activities such as study or employment as well as being genuinely dangerous if associated with tasks such as driving or the use of heavy machinery.  The condition was first defined by Professor Eli Somer (b 1951; a former President of both the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) and the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation (ESTD)) who described one manifestation as possibly an “escape or coping mechanism from trauma or abuse”, noting it may “involve long periods of structured fantasy”.  Specific research into MADD has been limited but small-scale studies have found some similarities to behavioral addictions, the commonality being a compulsion to engage in activities despite negative impacts on a person’s mental or physical health or ability to function various aspects of life. 

Despite the suggestion of similarities to diagnosable conditions, latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR, 2022) did not add an entry for MADD and the debate among those in the profession interested in the matter is between those arguing it represents an unidentified clinical syndrome which demands a specific diagnosis and those who think either it fits within the rubric of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or is a dissociative condition.  Accordingly, in the absence of formal recognition of MADD, while a psychiatrist may decline to acknowledge the condition as a specific syndrome, some may assess the described symptoms and choose to prescribe the drugs used to treat anxiety or OCD or refer the patient to sessions of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) or the mysterious mindfulness meditation.

Mutually Assured Digital Destruction

Authors in 2021 suggested MADD (mutually assured digital destruction) as the term to describe the strategic stalemate achieved by the major powers infecting each other’s critical (civilian & military) digital infrastructure with crippleware, logic-bombs and other latent tools of control or destruction.  The core the idea was based on old notion of “the bomber always gets through”, a recognition it’s neither possible to protect these systems from infiltration nor clean up what’s likely there and still undiscovered.  So, rather than being entirely covert, MADD instead makes clear to the other side its systems are also infected and there will be retaliation in kind to any cyber attack with consequences perhaps even worse than any suffered in the first strike.  Like the nuclear submarines with their multiple SLBMs silently which cruise the world's oceans, the strategic charm of the latent penetration of digital environments is that detection of all such devices is currently impossible; one knows they (and their SLMBs) are somewhere in firing range but not exactly where.  Oceans are big places but so is analogously is the digital environment and a threat may be in the hardware, software or the mysterious middleware and sometimes a treat can actually be observed yet not understood as such.

For individuals, groups and corporations, there's also the lure of unilateral destruction, something quite common in the social media age.  For a variety of reasons, an individual may choose to "delete" their history of postings and while it's true this means what once was viewable no longer is, it does not mean one's thoughts and images are "forever gone" in the sense one can use the phrase as one watches one's diary burn.  That was possible (with the right techniques or a power drill) when a PC sat on one's desk and was connected to nothing beyond but as soon as a connection with a network (most obviously the internet) is made and data is transferred, whatever is sent is in some sense "in the wild".  That was always true but in the modern age it's now effectively impossible to know where one's data may exist, such are the number of "pass-through" devices which may exist between sender and receiver.  On the internet, even if the path of the data packets can be traced and each device identified, there is no way to know where things have been copied (backup tapes, replica servers et al) and that's even before one wonders what copies one's followers have taken.  There may often be good reasons to curate one's social media presence to the point of deletion but that shouldn't be thought of as destruction.