Thunk

Thunk (pronounced thunk)

(1) Onomatopoeic slang for sounds such as the impressive thud when the doors close on pre-modern Mercedes-Benz; representing the dull sound of the impact of a heavy object striking another and coming to an immediate standstill, with neither object being broken by the impact.

(2) In computer programming, a delayed computation (known also as a closure routine.

(3) In computing, in the Scheme programming language, a function or procedure taking no arguments.

(4) In computing, a specialized subroutine in operating systems where one software module is used to execute code in another or inject an additional calculation into another subroutine; a mapping of machine data from one system-specific form to another, usually for compatibility reasons, to allow a 16-bit program to run on a 32-bit operating system.

(5) In computing, to execute code by means of a thunk.

(6) As “get thunked” or “go thunk yourself”, an affectionate insult among the nerdiest of programmers.

(7) In colloquial use, a past tense form of think (the standard form being "thought").  Usually it's used humorously but, if erroneous, it's polite not to correct the mistake.

1876: The first documented instance as incorrect English is from 1876 but doubtlessly it had been used before and there’s speculation it may have be a dialectical form in one or more places before dying out.  There being no oral records and with nothing in writing prior to 1876, the history is unknown.  As an echoic of the sound of impact, it’s attested from 1952.  Although occasionally heard in jocular form, except in computing, thunk is non-standard English, used as a past tense or past participle of think.  The mistake is understandable given the existence of drink/drunk, sink/sunk etc so perhaps it’s a shame (like brung from bring) that it’s not a standard form except in computing.  The plural is thunks, the present participle thunking and the simple past and past participle thunked.  The numerical value of thunk in Chaldean Numerology is 4; the value in Pythagorean Numerology is 2.  Thunk & thunking are nouns & verbs, thunker is a noun and thunked is a verb; the noun plural is thunks.  The adjective thunkish is non-standard but is used in engineering and programming circles.

Getting thunked

The origin of the word to describe a number of variations of tricks in programming is contested, the earliest dating from 1961 as onomatopoeic abstractions of computer programming.  One holds a thunk is the (virtual) sound of data hitting the stack (some say hitting the accumulator).  Another suggestion is that it’s the sound of the expression being unfrozen at argument-evaluation time. The most inventive in that it was said to have been coined during an after-midnight programming session when it was realized a type of an argument in Algol 60 could be figured out in advance with a little compile-time thought, simplifying the evaluation machinery.  In other words, it had "already been thought of"; thus it was christened a "thunk", which is “the past tense of ‘think’ at two in the morning when most good programming is done on a diet of Coca-Cola and pizza”.

Door closing on 1967 Mercedes-Benz 230 S.  Until the 1990s, the quality of even the low-end Mercedes-Benz models was outstanding and the doors closed with a satisfying thunk.

Thunking as a programming concept does seem to have been invented in 1961 as “a chunk of code which provides an address”, a way of binding parameters to their formal definitions in procedure calls.  If a procedure is called with an expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler generates a thunk which computes the expression and leaves the address of the result in some standard location.  It usefulness was such it was soon generalised into: an expression, frozen with its environment for later evaluation if and when needed (that point being the closure), the process of unfreezing thunks called forcing.  As operating systems evolved into overlay-rich environments, the thunk became a vital stub-routine to load and jump to the correct overlay, Microsoft and IBM both defining the mapping of the 16-bit Intel environment with segment registers and 64K address limits whereas 32 & 64-bit systems had flat addressing and semi-real memory management.  Thunking permits multiple environments to run on the same computer and operating system and to achieve this, there’s the universal thunk, the generic thunk and the flat thunk, the fine distinctions of which only programmers get.  In another example of nerd humor, a person can be said to have their activities scheduled in a thunk-like manner, the idea being they need “frequently to be forced to completion”, especially if the task is boring.

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

So it’s a bit nerdy but modern operating systems need thunking because 8, 16, 32 and 64-bit routines can need to run both concurrently and interactively on the same machine (real or virtual).  If a 32-bit application sends something with precision data types to a 64-bit handler, without thunking, the call will fail because the precise address can’t be resolved.  Although not literally true, it’s easiest to visualise thunking as a translation layer.

IBM OS/2 2.0 in shrink-wrap, 1992.

Thunking first entered consumer computing at scale with IBM’s OS/2 in 1987, an operating system still in surprisingly wide use and supported by IBM until early in the century.  Interestingly, although both OS/2 (and its successor eCom) have been unavailable for years, in August 2017, a private project released ArcaOS, an x86 operating system derived from OS/2 and, for personal use, it retails at US$129.00.  Like OS/2, it has some features which are truly unique such as, for the handful of souls on the planet who either need or wish simultaneously to run multiple 8, 16 and 32-bit text-mode sessions, (including those internally booting different operating systems in segregated memory) in their hundreds on the one physical machine.  First done in 1992 on OS/2 2.0, it’s still quite a trick and the on-line OS/2 Museum hosts an active community, development continuing.

Taciturn

Taciturn (pronounced tas-i-turn)

(1) Inclined to silence; reserved in speech; reluctant to join in conversation.

(2) Dour, stern, reticent, quiet and silent in expression and manner.

1765-1775: A back formation from from taciturnity (a tendency habitually to be silent; reserved in speech) or from the fifteenth century French taciturne, from the Latin taciturnus (not talkative; noiseless, quiet, maintaining silence), from tacitus (silent) & tacēre (to be silent).  The Modern French form is taciturne (feminine taciturna, masculine plural taciturns, feminine plural taciturnes).  Taciturn is an adjective, taciturnity is a noun and taciturnly is an adverb; the noun plural is taciturnities.

Silent Cal

Not all US presidents have been as voluble as Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021): Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933; US president 1923-1929) was famously taciturn and widely known as silent Cal.  When news of his death was announced, Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) is said to have remarked, "How can they tell?"  Still, when he did speak, what he said could be pithy.  Having unexpectedly been chosen by the Republican National Convention as Warren Harding's (1865–1923; US president 1921-1923) running mate in 1920, he assumed the presidency upon Harding death and in 1924 declined to nominate his own running mate, again leaving it to the convention on that basis that in 1920 they'd "...picked a durned good man".  At one dinner he was seated next to a woman who told him she'd made a bet with her friend who'd told her she'd not be able to get more than two words from him  He answered: "You lose" and returned to his soup.

Silent Cal, silent (left) and listening (right).  The White House was an early adopter of the telephone, the first device installed in the telegraph room in 1877 during the administration of Rutherford Hayes (1822–1893; US president 1877-1881).  The handset was moved to the Oval Office during his presidency.

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

There is some some support for Silent Cal's approach; in politics, it’s been observed more men talked themselves into trouble than ever talked their way out.  Perhaps the exemplar was a certain Mr WM Jack, the member for North Sydney in the Australian parliament between 1949-1966.  A rarity among talkative politicians, during his long and undistinguished career he became known as “the silent one”, in seventeen years delivering five speeches, one of which was “I move that the motion be put”.  It’s not known if William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) Polonius (from Hamlet (circa 1600)) was in his mind when he began his penultimate address to the house with the words “I can remain silent no longer”.  His constituents rewarded his taciturnity: he retired undefeated having increased his majority on most of the six occasions he sought re-election and in gratitude, in the New Year Honours List (1968) he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the parliament and the community.  Of course, if one has no need to seek votes, one may with few restraints tend to the loquacious.  Fidel Castro (1926–2016; leader of Cuba 1959-2011) delivered infamously long speeches, his address to the 872nd plenary meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) on 26 September 1960 lasting 4 hours & 29 minutes, a record which still stands.  Given the United Nations (UN) General Assembly vies with the European Parliament for the title of the world’s most pointless deliberative body, it’s not impossible the record will one day be broken.

Parmesan

Parmesan (pronounced pahr-muh-zahn, pahr-muh-zan, pahr-muh-zuhn; pahr-muh-zahn, or pahr-muh-zan).

(1) Of or from Parma, in northern Italy.

(2) A hard, dry variety of Italian cheese made from skim milk, often grated and sprinkled over pasta dishes and soups.  It’s known also as Parmesan cheese and it appears with and without the initial capital.

(3) By extension, a similar cheese produced in places other than Parma.

(4) In slang, money in the sense of physical cash.

1510–1520: From the Middle French parmesan, from the Italian parmigiano (of Parma; pertaining to Parma), from an earlier Vulgar Latin parmēsānus, a restructuring of the Classical Latin parmēnsis (from Parma).  Parma is a province of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, the locality name thought to be of Etruscan origin.  In the Romance languages the related forms include the Italian parmigiano, the Catalan parmesà, the Portuguese parmesão, the Sicilian parmisanu and the Spanish parmesano.  Parmesan is a noun and parmesany & parmeasnlike (also as parmesan-like) is an adjective; the noun plural is parmesans.  An initial capital is always used with the proper noun (except sometimes in advertizing).

The real parmesan: Parmigiano Reggiano, cut from a wheel.

Within the European Union (EU), the cheese called Parmigiano Reggiano has been granted legal protection (a la hermitage, champagne, cognac etc) as a protected designation of origin (PDO) although around the world, “parmesan” is widely used as a generic term for similar cheeses.  The PDO cheese Parmigiano Reggiano, made only from cow’s milk and salt, is produced in “wheels” which take at least two years to mature, each wheel sealed with a unique identity tag recording the dairy farm and the month in which it was laid down to “cure”.  It may be apocryphal but industry folklore is that when food critics and chefs were asked in a survey which they would choose if ordered to live in a world with only one cheese, most answered: Parmigiano Reggiano.  Eating cheese can be part of a healthy diet, but it depends on the type and amount consumed.   Cheese is a good source of protein, is rich in calcium and contains vitamins such as B12 and A but it tends also to be high in saturated fat, is calorie-dense and usually has a high sodium (salt) content.  One noted advantage of parmesan is it’s naturally low in lactose, making it easier to digest for people with lactose intolerance.

Wheels

Italian artistic gymnast Signorina Giorgia Villa with wheels of cheese, Parmigiano Reggiano promotional photo-shoot, 2022.

Many consumers buy their parmesan in pre-grated packs or in a powered form so may not have been aware it is, in its original form, a wheel.  That was until the publication of a set of photographs of Signorina Giorgia Villa (b 2003), an Italian artistic gymnast and member of her country’s team at the 2024 Paris Olympics.  Signorina Villa is a brand ambassador for Parmigiano Reggiano and the images from her 2022 photo-shoot featured her posing with the now famous wheels, the promotion’s original caption being: “Always together with my best friend @parmigianoreggiano, ready to start again and face new challenges!”

Wheels of cheese in cheese storehouse.

Wheels of cheese can weigh more than 40 kg (90 lb) and during the maturation process they are stored in warehouses, usually on shelves.  In August 2023, Giacomo Chiapparini, (1949-2023) from Romano di Lombardia, was killed when a shelf broke in his cheese store, the falling wheels of cheese crushing him.  According to the police report, the event was triggered by a single point of failure in a high shelf and the weight of the dislodged wheels created a “domino effect”, bringing down thousands of wheels on the unfortunate victim.  A spokesman for the Lombardy Fire Department which attended the scene reported emergency staff “had to move the wheels of cheese and the shelves by hand”, adding it “took about twelve hours” to find the deceased.  The wheels were of grana padano, a hard cheese that resembles parmesan, some 25,000 of which were in storage and Signor Chiapparini had been checking on the ripening wheels, the highest of which sat on metal shelves 10 metres (33 feet) tall.

The flaccid cheese wheel in surrealist art: La persistència de la memòria (The Persistence of Memory) is Salvador Dalí’s (1904-1989) most reproduced and best-known painting.   Completed in 1931 and first exhibited in 1932, since 1934 it hangs in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).  In popular culture, the work is often referred to as the more evocative “melting clocks”.

Surrealism’s intellectual undercoating was patchy, some of the latter output being openly imitative but with Dalí, critics seemed often ready to find something.  His "theory of softness and hardness" has been called "central to his artistic thinking" at the time The Persistence of Memory was painted and some suggested the flaccidity of the watches is an allusion to Einstein's theory of special relativity, a surreal pondering of the implications of relativity on our once-fixed notions of time and space.  Dalí was earthier, claiming the clocks were inspired not by Einstein but by imagining a wheel of camembert cheese melting in the Catalan sun.

Lindsay Lohan in Miami, Florida, clothes by Amiparism (AMI), Interview magazine photo-shoot, December 2022.  

The car is a Jaguar XJS convertible with the factory-fitted BBS basketweave (or lattice) wheels.  The BBS wheels appealed on the XJS (1975-1996 and originally XJ-S) when the last version was released in 1991, sometime after the company had been absorbed by the Ford Motor Company (FoMoCo).  There were a number of detail changes for the final run, the most notable being the enlargement in 1992 of the V12 engine from 5.3 litres (326 cubic inches) to 6.0 (366), coupled with the latest (four-speed) version of the General Motors (GM) Turbo-Hydramatic 400 which, (as a three-speed), dated from 1963.  No XJ-S with a manual transmission was built after 1976 and the 352 produced existed only because Jaguar had some 400 in their warehouse which had been intended for the Series 3 E-Types (XKE, 1971-1974).

Remarkably for a brand which has a reputation for quality and expertise in design as well as an enviable record in top-line competition, Germany’s BBS Autotechnik GmbH in July 2024 declared insolvency, the second time this has been done in the last year and the fifth time since 2007.  To borrow a phrase, one bankruptcy is unfortunate; five in the last 17 years suggests carelessness.  Analysts have suggested a number of factors have contributed to the troubled corporate history and some did note the recent practice of BBS being passed between private equity firms shouldn’t be ignored (apparently private equity firms have techniques which make bankruptcies profitable) but there were also questionable marketing practices.  What has long puzzled the supply chain is that despite BBS having one of the industry’s most desirable back-catalogs with many older designs enjoying a resurgence of popularity, that market is being supplied by other manufacturers blatantly copying the BBS originals which the company has made no attempt to re-introduce.  There was also the curious matter of “BBS Unlimited”, one of engineering’s weirdest niches: a design of a single wheel which can be fitted to a variety of cars, all wheels shipped with a 5×117.5 mm bolt pattern that nothing of the planet uses, necessitating the fitting of a special BBS adapter.  Rarely has a non-existent problem been so cleverly fixed.  The BBS name has such a cachet that analysts expect the German operation to survive in some form (BBS in the US & Japan are unaffected by what’s happening in Europe) and the suspicion is the current problems are likely linked to the rising interest rates which have seen a number of leveraged buy-outs by private equity firms flounder: in the same week BBS’s predicament was announced, the seat maker Recaro also entered bankruptcy.

Philip Ruddock Water Playground, Dundas Park, Dundas Valley, NSW, Australia.  Politicians are remembered for many things.

Ever since a former Australian minister for immigration (the Liberal Party’s Philip Ruddock (b 1943; Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs 1996-2003) asserted that the country's indigenous peoples “didn’t invent the wheel”, it’s been repeated as a racist trope in far-right (a misleading term but the one in popular use) gatherings and their social medial channels, often with the claim indigenous Australians were the only culture on Earth not to invent or discover was is humanity’s simplest machine and the one which underpinned or made possible progress in a number of fields.  However, a number of cultures did not independently develop the wheel including several in Sub-Saharan Africa, a number of the Pacific Islands and those living in the pre-Columbian Americas (although in the latter wheels were used in toys, just not for transportation or tasks such as lifting).  Anthropologists suggest that cultures which didn’t develop the wheel usually had no need for such a device, lacked the large domesticated animals needed to pull wheeled vehicles or lived in an environment which made the use of wheeled carts or trolleys impractical (dense forests, mountainous terrain etc).

Deglutition

Deglutition (pronounced dee-gloo-tish-uh)

In physiology, the act or process of swallowing, regarded in modern mdeicine as a three-part process.

1640-1650: From the sixteenth century French déglutition (act or power of swallowing) or the Late Latin dēglūtītiō, the construct the Classical Latin dēglūtīre & dēgluttīre + -tiō (the suffix forming nouns relating to actions or the results of actions).  Dēgluttīre was from dēgluttiō (to swallow down), the construct being dē- (the prefix meaning “from, off”) + gluttiō (to gulp down, swallow) from the primitive Indo-European gwel (throat).  The Classical Latin deglutitionem (nominative deglutitio) was a noun of action from the past-participle stem of deglutare (to swallow down), the construct being ," from de- (the prefix used here in the sense of "down" + glutire "to swallow".  The old synonym glutition is obsolete although in medical texts it persisted well into the twentieth century and the French spelling déglutition appears in some medical publications.  Deglutition is a noun, deglutitive, deglutitious, deglutitory & deglutible are adjectives; the noun plural is deglutitions.  It seems forms like deglutiting, deglutited, deglutitively et al don't exist.

The mechanism of deglutition.

The process of deglutition (swallowing) may in humans begin to develop in utero as early as 15 weeks gestation and the conventional wisdom now is that it happens in three stages: (1) Oral Phase, in which there’s a preparatory stage, liquids sealed in the oral cavity by the tongue & hard palate bolus (the mass of something, especially of chewed food in the mouth while solids are masticated and a propulsion stage in which the tongue moves the bolus (the mass of chewed food towards the pharynx (the opening to the canal and the back of the mouth), (2) Pharyngeal Phase, which is triggered by receptors sending messages to the brainstem’s swallowing centre, this initiating a sequence of actions which prevent preventing aspiration and pushing the bolus down into the esophagus (the pathway between pharynx & stomach) and (3) Esophageal Phase in which the bolus enters the esophagus to be moved toward the stomach by rhythmic contractions of the esophageal muscles, the final wave of which relaxes the lower sphincter (a body-part with a valve-like function) to allow the bolus to enter the stomach.

The verb swallow was from the Middle English swolowen, swolwen, swolȝen, swelwen & swelȝen, from the Old English swelgan, from the Proto-West Germanic swelgan, from the Proto-Germanic swelganą (to swallow, revel, devour), from the primitive Indo-European swelk- (to gulp).  It was cognate with the Dutch zwelgen (to revel, carouse, guzzle), the German schwelgen (to delight, indulge), the Swedish svälja (to swallow, gulp), the Icelandic svelgja (to swallow) and the Old English swillan & swilian (to swill, wash out, gargle).  The noun swallow was from the Middle English swelwe & swolwe, from the Old English swelh & swelg (gulf, chasm) and ġeswelge (gulf, chasm, abyss, whirlpool), both from the Proto-West Germanic swelg & swalgi, from the Proto-Germanic swelgaz & swalgiz. It was cognate with the Old English swiliġe (pit), the Scots swelch, swellie & swallie (an abyss in the sea, a whirlpool), the Middle Low German swelch (whirlpool, eddy), the Dutch zwelg (gorge, chasm, gullet, throat) and the Old Norse svelgr (whirlpool, current, stream).  The spellings swalow & swolow are long obsolete. Swallow & swallowing are nouns & verbs, swallower is a noun and swallowed is a verb; the noun plural is swallows.

Impending deglutition: Lindsay Lohan swallowing yogurt.

The familiar sense is “to cause (food, drink, medicine etc) to pass from the mouth into the stomach (ie to take into the stomach via the throat) emerged as early as the eleventh century.  The figurative use includes geopolitics (“to swallow another territory or population (usually by annexation or aggression) based on the thirteenth century use to mean “to take (something) in so that it disappears; to consume, to absorb” and gullibility (To accept easily or without questions; inclined to believe) which was in use by the sixteenth century.  The idiomatic uses include “bitter (or difficult) pill to swallow” (something unpleasant or unwanted which must be accepted or endured), “swallow one’s pride” (To set aside one's feelings and adopt an alternative stance for pragmatic or other reasons), “swallow one’s words” (to be forced to retract a prior statement after it has been proved wrong or inappropriate; to take back what one has said) and “swallowed a dictionary (or thesaurus) (to speak or write using long or obscure words)

A swallow in flight.

In ornithology, the swallow is a small, migratory bird of the Hirundinidae family with long, pointed, moon-shaped wings and a forked tail; it feeds on the wing by catching insects and is best known for the phrase “one swallow does not a summer make”, the idea being that just because there are sightings of the migratory swallows arriving in their summer home, it does not guarantee summer weather from that point on.  The bird’s name was from the Middle English swalwe, swalewe & swalowe, from the Old English swealwe, from the Proto-West Germanic swalwā, from the Proto-Germanic swalwǭ.  It was cognate with the Danish & Norwegian svale, the Dutch zwaluw, the German Schwalbe and the Swedish svala.  In all languages, the name is believed to be onomatopoeic, imitating the bird's twittering and chattering calls.

The Swallow Sidecar company was an English firm set up in the early inter-war years and. As the name implies, its business was building the sidecars which could be attached to a motorcycle to enable a passenger to be carried.  The “Swallow” name was chosen because the company made a conscious attempt to style their sidecars with elegant lines and they hoped buyers would associate them with the agile, graceful bird.  The business flourished but in the 1920s so did the British economy as a prosperity spread, so did the demand for motor cars and Swallow Sidecar entered this growing market, their template being to purchase relatively inexpensive chassis from mainstream manufacturers and cloak them with rakish bodies.  Because a stylish body cost about the same to produce as something more prosaic, profits were good even though Swallow Sidecars sold their machines at very attractive prices.  To reflect the new business model, the company had by 1927 changed its name to Swallow Sidecar and Coachbuilding Company but with the cars rapidly coming to absorb most of the manufacturing capacity, by 1930 it was known as Swallow Coachbuilding.

1938 SS 100 Jaguar 3½-litre roadster.

Unlike many small coach-builders, this structure survived the Great Depression and became SS Cars Limited in 1934 and the “SS” may have been (1) an allusion to the original Swallow Sidecar or (2) just an attractive pair of letters for a car manufacturer (“S” by then already associated by many with high-performance) but it had come to be widely reported as a reference to “Standard Swallow” because most of the chassis them being used were supplied by the Standard company.  It was on an SS car that the “Jaguar” name was in 1935 first used, speedy or sleek animals becoming a popular choice of name in the 1930s and it’s the SS Jaguar 100 (referred to usually as the SS 100) which is the best remembered although very few were built (198 with the 2½ litre straight-six & 116 with a 3½-litre version).  The SS 100 provided the template which in the post-war years Jaguar would use to build their reputation: speed, rakish lines and value for money.  Like Shelby American’s take on the AC Cobra, there are now many more replica SS 100s than ever were built by the factory.

In 1945, as part of the planning for the resumption of production for vehicles for the civilian market, SS Cars changed its name to Jaguar Cars Limited but despite much subsequent speculation, there seems to be nothing to suggest it had anything to do with avoiding the common used name of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (the SS (ᛋᛋ in Armanen runes) 1925-1945) which was originally a party squad to provide security at public meetings (then often rowdy and violet affairs) which evolved into a personal bodyguard for Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) before becoming first a paramilitary formation and finally a kind of parallel army (the Waffen-SS) hundreds of thousands strong).  Instead, it seems to have been that the market response to the Jaguar name had been positive and was in its field unique and would therefore not be confused with anything else.

Degrees of authenticity: 2017 Jaguar XKSS (continuation series)

In 1957, the "SS" moniker was revived for what was planned to be a run of 25 XKSSs, road-going conversions of the Le Mans-winning D-type (1954-1956); such things were possible in those happier, less regulated times.  However, nine of the cars earmarked for export to North America were lost in fire so only 16 were ever completed.  In 2016 Jaguar displayed the first of nine XKSS "continuation" models and these nine, using the serial numbers allocated in 1957 are regarded as a "continuation of the original run" to completion, Jaguar insisting it is not "cloning itself".  The project was well-received and the factory subsequently announced it would also continue the production run of the lightweight E-Types, again using the allocated but never absorbed ID numbers.  Other manufacturers, including Aston Martin, have embarked on their own continuation programmes and at a unit cost in excess of US$1 million, it's a lucrative business.  I 

Palter

Paltering (pronounced pawl-ter)

(1) Insincerely or deceitfully to talk or act; to lie or use trickery; to prevaricate or equivocate in speech or actions.

(2) To bargain with; to haggle (now rare).

(3) Carelessly to act; to trifle (now rare).

(4) To babble; to chatter (archaic).

1530–1540: The original meaning was “indistinctly to speak; to mumble”.  The origin is obscure and etymologists suggest it may have been an alteration of “falter” in (the sense of a “faltering delivery of speech” same sense, with an appended “p-“ from palsy (in pathology, a complete or partial muscle paralysis of a body part, often accompanied by a loss of feeling and uncontrolled body movements such as shaking).  The predominant meaning by the mid-seventeenth century was the use to describe the particular form of deceptive or misleading conduct that is the telling of a partial truth in such as way as to avoid a “technical lie” yet convey an untruth.  The alternative suggestion is a connection with the Middle English palter (rag, trifle, worthless thing), from Middle Low German palter (rag, cloth).  The verb has long been a mystery because it had the frequentative, but there is nothing to suggest the existence of a verb “palt”; it’s not impossible it may have been an alteration of paltry (trashy, trivial, of little value; of little monetary worth; someone despicable; contemptibly unimportant).  The suffix –ing was from the Middle English -ing, from the Old English –ing & -ung (in the sense of the modern -ing, as a suffix forming nouns from verbs), from the Proto-West Germanic –ingu & -ungu, from the Proto-Germanic –ingō & -ungō. It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian -enge, the West Frisian –ing, the Dutch –ing, The Low German –ing & -ink, the German –ung, the Swedish -ing and the Icelandic –ing; All the cognate forms were used for the same purpose as the English -ing).

Via the notion of “talk in a trifling manner, babble” came (by the 1580s) the sense of both “insincere words” or “misleading statements; “playing fast and loose" with the truth.  The sense of “trifle away, squander” was in use by the 1620s.  The now obsolete noun palterly (paulterly the alternative spelling) is unrelated.  It was a late Middle English form from palter (a rag, worthless thing), from the Middle Low German palter (rag, cloth) and was used to convey the sense of something (or someone) "mean or parsimonious".  Palter and paltered are verbs and palterer & paltering are nouns & verbs; the more common noun plural is palterings but all forms of the word are rare outside of academic use in the analysis of politics and commerce.  Palter has been used as an irregular noun and palteresque is tempting in the post-truth age.

Paltering is an old and, outside of academia, rarely used word but the practice it describes, while hardly a modern invention, seems now more prevalent in public discourse so a revival may happen.  Paltering is a term used to describe the act of deceiving someone by telling the truth, but in a misleading or incomplete way, something more devious even than the many lies of crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) (which she usually “explains” by saying she “misspoke”).  The essence of paltering was captured in the elegant phrase of former UK cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong (1927-2020; later Baron Armstrong of Ilminster) who, under cross-examination in the “Spycatcher” trial (1986), when referring to a letter, answered: “It contains a misleading impression, not a lie. It was being economical with the truth.”  Whether the old Etonian was aware of much post-Classical writing isn’t known (at Christ Church, Oxford he read the “Greats” (the history and philosophy of Ancient Greece & Rome)) but he may have been acquainted with Mark Twain’s (1835-1910) Following the Equator (1897) in which appeared: “Truth is the most valuable thing we have.  Let us economize it.” or the earlier thoughts of the Anglo-Irish Whig politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797) who in his Two Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory (1796) noted: “Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatsoever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.”  Just as likely however is that Sir Robert had been corrupted by his long service in HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) and was thinking of: “The truth is so precious, it deserves an escort of lies”, a phrase often attributed (as are many) to Sir Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955), but there’s some evidence to suggest he may have picked it up from comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) and even if it wasn’t something the old seminarian coined, it was the mantra by which he lived so he deserves some credit.  Sir Robert’s phrase entered the annals of legal folklore and was good enough to have been lifted from a script from the BBC satire Yes Minister.

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

Unlike crooked Hillaryesque blatant lying (which involves providing false information), paltering involves using truthful statements (or at least those with the quality of plausible deniability) to create a false impression or intentionally to mislead someone.  Paltering is achieved by (1) omitting crucial details, (2) emphasizing certain truths while downplaying or not disclosing others or (3) presenting information in a way that technically is correct but which leads one’s interlocutor(s) to draw erroneous conclusions.  In practice, the mechanics of paltering usually are (1) Selective Truth: (highlighting facts that support one’s position while ignoring those that do not, (2) Omission: Leaving out vital information that would correct a listener's misunderstanding(s) and (4) Context Manipulation: Presenting information out of context to alter its meaning.  The classic wording of the oath or affirmation given by witnesses in legal proceedings (“the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”) is essentially an “anti-paltering” device.

So paltering is insidious because it is the artful use of the truth to create which might be thought a “constructive lie” and the word seems first to have enjoyed its latter day revival when political scientists in the US adopted it when analyzing texts and there is qualitative research which suggests those who palter can tend to rationalize the act by expressing sentiments along the lines of “lying is worse”.  Helpfully, the Trump White House was (and may yet again be) a place where many case-studies in the “compare & contrast” of lies and paltering were created and for that we should be grateful.

An example of the “simple lie” came when Sean Spicer (b 1971; White House Press Secretary & Communications Director 2017) early in 2021 informed the White House press corps that Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) had enjoyed a greater larger live audience at his inauguration than that which had attended Barack Obama’s (b 1961; US president 2009-2017) in 2009.  All available evidence appeared to suggest Obama’s numbers were up to twice those of Trump and if Spicer hadn’t brought it up (it was hardly a great affair of church or state) probably nobody else would have mentioned it but for Trump, who borrowed for his campaign so many of the techniques he’d learned from his career in reality television, viewer numbers were professional life and death and thus the lie. 

Kellyanne Conway in hoodie: Miss January, Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute's annual Conservative Women Calendar (2009).

The Trump administration actually gave the world a linguistic gift, another term for paltering: “alternative facts”, first mentioned by Trump campaign strategist and counselor, Kellyanne Conway (b 1967; senior counselor to the president, 2017-2020).  Ms Conway used the words during a Meet the Press interview to describe the use of statistics quoted by Sean Spicer (b 1971; White House Press Secretary & Communications Director, 2017), numbers which, prima facie, seemed dubious.  She sought later to clarify “alternative facts” by defining the phrase as "additional facts and alternative information" which, when deconstructed, probably did add a layer of nuance but really didn’t help.  Journalists, not a crew always entirely truthful, decided to help and called the phrase "Orwellian", provoking a spike on the search engines as folk sought out "doublethink" and "newspeak"; sales of George Orwell’s (1903–1950) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) said overnight to have risen several-dozen fold.  The relationship between the press and the Trump White House was never likely to be friendly but “alternative facts” meant things started badly almost from day one.  That had no discernible effect on Mr Trump who committed a classic act of paltering when, in arguing he had won the 2020 presidential election and it had been “stolen” from him by the corrupt, Democratic Party controlled “deep state”, emphasized that on election day he had “won more votes that any sitting president in history”.  That was of course literally true and something to be noted by psephologists for their trivia nights (psephologists know how to have a good time) but about as relevant to the results of the election as was crooked Hillary Clinton getting three million-odd more votes than Mr Trump in 2016.

The increase in the use of "paltering" is attributed to (1) the internet which encouraged the posting of lists of rare, obscure or archaic words and (2) the use in academia, the publications of which are indexed and harvested by statistical grabbers like Google's Ngrams.  Tempting though it may be, Mr Trump being an arch palterer probably did little to boost the use of the word although he may have inspired others to adopt the technique.

Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Saturnalia

Saturnalia (pronounced sat-er-ney-lee-uh or sat-er-neyl-yuh)

(1) The festival of Saturn (in Ancient Rome a holiday to mark the winter solstice, honoring the deity Saturn), celebrated in December as a time of unrestrained merrymaking (with initial capital and used sometimes with a plural verb).

(2) Uninhibited revelry; orgy (usually without initial capital).

(3) Merrymaking.

(4) In paleontology, a taxonomic genus (Saturnalia tupiniquim) within the order Saurischia (a dinosaur of the Triassic).

1585–1595: From the Latin Sāturnālia, neuter plural of the adjective Sāturnālis (pertaining to Saturn (corresponding to the Ancient Greek Kronia)), from Saturnus, the construct being Sāturn + -ālia, neuter plural of -ālis- (the third-declension two-termination suffix (neuter -āle) used to form adjectives of relationship from nouns or numerals).  Regarding the dinosaur, etymologists interpret the word as the Latin equivalent of the Portuguese carnaval (Carnival (the period before Lent)); so called because the genus was discovered in Brazil during Carnival.  The anagram of Saturnalia (a festival much associated with the taking of strong drink) is Australian; sometimes in language, things work out well.  Saturnalia is a noun, saturnian is a noun & adjective and saturnalian is an adjective; the noun plural is plural saturnalias.  In modern practice it's common for the forms to appear uncapitalized.

The Roman festival of the winter solstice was originally celebrated for three days beginning on 17 December but was later extended to seven days.  It was a popular winter event because the revelry, drinking and the taking of mirthful license was extended to all classes, even slaves (of which the Romans had many).  In the West the word remained the preserve of classists and historians until 1782 when an extended sense of "a period of wild or noisy revelry" began to be used, the adjectival Saturnalian (soon without the initial capital) noted in 1801.  The Latin proverb nōn semper Sāturnālia erunt (literally “it will not always be the Saturnalia”) translates as “not every day can be a holiday”, one of life’s more melancholy lessons.

Les Romains de la décadence (1847) (The Romans in their Decadence) by Thomas Couture (1515-1879), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

The painting of Les Romains de la décadence absorbed three years of Thomas Couture’s life and during the process he told fellow artists that in it was a work in the tradition of the masters of ancient Greece, the Renaissance and the Flemish school.  He wanted to give fresh impetus to French painting and thought a historical work documenting human behavior during high antiquity was the way to convey his moral message.  In the catalogue printed when he exhibited the finished piece at the 1847 Paris Salon, Couture quoted a fragment of two lines by the Roman poet Juvenal, (circa 55-circa 140) in the catalogue for the 1847 Salon where the painting was exhibited: "Crueller than war, vice fell upon Rome and avenged the conquered world". 

The imagery is heavy-handed but effective, ancient statures from an austere and pure past casting condemnatory eyes upon the debauched and decadent below.  Couture, a Jacobin, republican and anti-cleric, created the work as a critique of what would now be called the “political class”, his target the moral decadence which beset the country under the July monarchy, the elite of which had been discredited or disgraced by successive scandals.  As a political statement it was a realist allegory but it was influential too in its style.  A work on a huge scale and reminiscent of Raphael, so much of the French “classic” school of the second half of the century owed some debt to Les Romains de la décadence.  Within a year of the salon, the revolution of 1848 had toppled the July monarchy and prints with the faces of politicians imposed would circulate in France during the troubled 1930s dubbed Le français de la décadence (The French of the Decadence).

In a slightly santized form, Les Romains de la décadence was in 1846 etched by Edmond Hédouin (1820-1889).  It now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

As a festival, Saturnalia faded from memory in the early medieval period because of the decline and fall of Rome and the standardization on the Christian calendar of the Christmas holiday which borrowed some of Saturnalia’s traditions and should thus be thought an absorption of the pagan event rather than its replacement, the slight change in dates not climatically significant.  Unusually in the stratified society of Rome, Saturnalia was an egalitarian event in that some of the rituals involved a reversal of social norms, an allusion to those days when Saturn ruled over the Earth as a bucolic paradise.  Under Roman law, during the first three days of Saturnalia, all schools, businesses and courts were required to close to ensure all could share in the fun.

The Saturn cocktail (1967)

Ingredients

1½ oz Gin
½ oz fresh lemon juice
¼ oz passion fruit purée
½ oz orgeat syrup
¼ oz velvet falernum

Instructions

(1) Blend all ingredients with 1 cup of crushed ice until smooth.

(2) Pour contents into a rocks glass with 4 oz of fresh crushed ice.

(3) Garnish with a lime twist wrapped around a cherry.

The start of Saturnalia was marked by priests in the temples of Saturn unwrapping from the feet of the statues of the god the woolen garments with which they were usually attired, the intended symbolism an act of liberation signifying the strictures which usually governed life were, for a few days, relaxed.  Graphically emblematic of that was that during Saturnalia, all Romans whether senators, citizens, freedmen or slaves were free to wear a pilleus, the felt cap otherwise restricted to freedmen.  Slaves too enjoyed a little more latitude in life, technically free to disobey and disrespect their masters without fear of punishment although the work of historians did make the point this was a right exercised usually with some caution and thought for the future.  The best remembered (or at least the most frequently cited) ritual of Saturnalia was the feast where masters served their slaves or even had them sit at the same table but there’s little to indicate if this was a widespread practice, some sources suggesting it was more likely that something like “staff Christmas parties” were arranged, the wine and food provided by the master or employer.

Lindsay Lohan provides a rationale for saturnalia (quoted in 2006, during her saturnalian period).  This is available as desktop wallpaper (3840 x 2160) for those needing frequently to be reminded.   

Beyond that, the rituals of Saturnalia were recognizably those of Christmas or other pagan festivals of the winter solstice, featuring festive masks, poetry readings & performances, games of chance (gambling became lawful during Saturnalia).  Most notably, there was the exchange of gifts between family, friends and loved ones, traditionally on the last day of the holiday which eventually settled on 23 December.   Many modern gift traditions can be traced back to Saturnalia, including the annual bonus employees would sometime enjoy and there were “gag gifts” too, worthless trinkets or items truly ghastly, senators and even the odd emperor recorded as having some fondness for giving these.