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  The old synonym glutition is obsolete although in medical texts it persisted well into the twentieth century and the French spelling déglutition appears in some medical publications.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 etc 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. 

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 (1483–1520), 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.

Chatelaine

Chatelaine (pronounced shat-l-eyn or shahtuh-len (French))

(1) The wife of a castellan; mistress of a château or castle.

(2) The mistress of an elegant or fashionable household.

(3) A hook-like clasp or a chain for suspending keys, trinkets, scissors, a watch, etc, worn at the waist by women.

(4) A woman's decorative lapel pendant or other ornament resembling this.

(5) Historic legal slang for a sub-set of acquisitive wives for whom the business of divorce is something of a calling (now less common).

1845: From the French châtelaine (a female castellan; wife of a castellan; mistress of a castle or château (country house)), the feminine form of châtelain (castle-keeper, one living in a castle) from the Old French chastelain (owner and lord of a castle, nobleman; keeper of a castle), from the Medieval Latin castellanus (occupants of a castle), the construct being castell(um) (castle, fort (chastel in French)) (diminutive of castrum (castle, fort) from the primitive Indo-European ḱes (to cut off, separate)) + -ānus (the suffix demoting “of or pertaining to”).  The use of the masculine equivalent in this context was rare because of historic social and economic structures.  In fashion, as a type of ornamental (though originally functional) piece, use dates from 1851; the idea being a piece which resembles the chain of keys a chatelaine would carry.  Chatelaine is a noun; the noun plural is chatelaines.  The French spelling does sometimes appear in English use.

Gold digging

In the slang of English divorce lawyers, chatelaine was a term for a sub-set of husband-hunting women for whom the most important criterion in their search was the quality of the house which came with the prey, the play on words based on the ancient role of the chatelaine being the "the keeper of the castle".  Applied mostly either to the impoverished gentry or aspirational young ladies seeking upward-mobility, chatelaines were famously good "housekeepers"; after the divorce they often "kept the house".  The more accessible modern form is gold-digger.  An exemplar of the type was the admirable Norah Docker (Lady Docker, formerly Callingham, formerly Collins, née Turner; 1906–1983) a dance-club hostess who was thrice-married, each husband proving more lucrative than the last.  Her most famous acquisition was Sir Bernard Docker (1896–1978), chairman of the Daimler motor company for which she helped design half a dozen cars; known as the Docker Daimlers, they were an acquired taste but certainly large and conspicuous as intended, each generating much publicity though it's doubtful they made any positive contribution to Daimler's bottom line.  Some of the more generous critics were prepared to concede some weren't as bad as the others. 

1955 Daimler DK400 Golden Zebra

The last of the Docker Daimlers, the Golden Zebra was a two-door fixed head coupé (FHC) with coachwork by Hooper, built on the existing DK400 (1954-1959) chassis.  The interior was finished with an African theme, the dashboard of ivory and the upholstery in zebra-skin while external metal trim was gold-plated.  Lady Docker personally chose the zebra skin, claiming she found mink unpleasantly hot.  It was first shown at the 1955 Paris Motor Show and it's of note this stylistic mashup of pre-war motifs and mid-century modernism appeared in the same building used for the debut of the Citroën DS which, although as ancient under the skin as the Daimler, gave the crowds a vision of the future although it would be decades before some of its implications were realized.

Sir Bernard (with cigar, left) and Lady Docker (in mink) unveiling the "Golden Daimler", Earls Court Motor Show, London, 1951.

Imposing though it was, dimensionally, being DK400-based, the Golden Zebra was actually less extravagant than some previous Docker Daimlers which had been built on the even bigger DE chassis (1946-1953) which was the last car in the UK with a straight-eight engine offered for general sale, the even more exclusive Rolls-Royce Phantom IV (1950-1956) available only to crowned royalty and heads of state.  The UK in the early 1950s was still living through a period of post-war austerity but the Docker Daimlers were surprisingly well-received by the public which seemed to enjoy the splash of color they brought to the dreariness of the time when some consumer products were still rationed.  The reaction of critics generally was less kind, the “Docker Specials” decried variously as “archaic”, “irrelevant”, vulgar or that worst of English insults: “tiresome”.  It’s thought also not a coincidence that it was during Lady Docker’s supervision of the Daimler drawing boards the royal family’s automotive allegiance switched to Rolls-Royce, the association pre-dating even the royal warrant granted in 1902 by King Edward VII (1841–1910; King of the UK & Emperor of India 1901-1910), shortly after his accession to the throne, a Daimler 6hp mail phaeton delivered to Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1900, fulfilling an order place by the king while still Prince of Wales.  So the Daimlers, in the Royal Mews since the nineteenth century, began to be relegated to secondary roles and another wouldn’t be ordered until well after The Jaguar takeover of the company in 1959.

1885 English Solid Silver Chatelaine.

The decorative belt hook or clasp worn was at the waist with a series of chains suspended from it, a design dating from antiquity when they were a convenient way of carrying useful household tools.  By the nineteenth century, in respectable households the chatelaine displayed the status of women in a household and the one with the keys to the desks and other locked cabinets was "the woman of the household".  She was the one to direct the servants and tradesmen and lock or lock the valuables of the house, possessing total authority over who had access to what.  When a woman married and moved into her father-in-law's house, the mother-in-law would often hold on to the keys but upon widowhood, they were usually passed to the oldest son's wife, status transferring with the keys.  Better to show-off this prestige, chatelaines became increasingly elaborate and expensive.  In larger houses with a full complement of servants, a similar hierarchy existed and the controller of the keys was the most senior female of the downstairs staff.

Chatelaine magazine.

Now published by St. Joseph Communications in English (as Chatelaine) and French language (as Châtelaine) editions, Chatelaine is a Canadian magazine aimed at the mid-range (5F) female market (food, feelings, family, fashion & furnishings).  It has been in continuous publication since 1928 and now exists in both print & digital formats although like many in an industry affected by declining advertising revenue and falling circulations, it has since 2017 been reduced from twelve to six editions annually.

Comet

Comet (pronounced kom-it)

(1) In astronomy, a celestial body moving about the sun, usually in a highly eccentric orbit, most thought to consist of a solid frozen nucleus, part of which vaporizes on approaching the heat from Sun (or other star) to form a gaseous, luminous coma (the envelope of dust and gas, the most dramatic part of which is the long, luminous tail which streams away from the sun (under the influence of solar winds).

(2) In astronomy, a celestial phenomenon with the appearance of such a body.

(3) Any of several species of hummingbird found in the Andes.

(4) In slang, as “vomit comet”, a reduced-gravity aircraft which, by flying in a parabolic flight path, briefly emulates a close to weightless environment.  Used to train astronauts or conduct research, the slang derived from the nausea some experience.

(5) In figurative use (often applied retrospectively and with a modifier such as “blazing comet”), someone (or, less commonly, something) who appears suddenly in the public eye, makes a significant impact and then quickly fades from view, their fleeting moment of brilliance a brief but spectacular event.

1150–1200: From the Middle English comete, partly from the Old English comēta and partly from the Anglo-French & Old French comete (which in Modern French persists as comète), all from the Latin comētēs & comēta, from the Ancient Greek κομήτης (komḗtēs) (wearing long hair; ling-haired), the construct being komē-, a variant stem of komân (to let one's hair grow), from κόμη (kómē) (hair) + -tēs (the agent suffix).  The Greek was a shortened form of ἀστὴρ κομήτης (astēr komētēs (longhaired star)), a reference to a comet’s streaming tail.  The descendants in other languages include the Malay komet, the Urdu کومٹ (komeṭ) and the Welsh comed.  Comet, cometlessness, cometography, cometographer, cometology & cometarium are nouns, cometless, cometic, cometical, cometocentric, cometary, cometographical & cometlike (also as comet-like) are adjectives, cometesimal is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is comets.

Comets orbit the Sun along an elongated path and when not near the heat, the body consists solely of its nucleus, thought to be almost always a solid core of frozen water, frozen gases, and dust.  When near the sun, the nucleus heats, eventually to boil and thus release the gaseous and luminous coma (the envelope of dust and gas), the most dramatic part of which is the long, luminous tail which streams away from the sun (under the influence of solar winds).  The path of a comet can be in the shape of an ellipse or a hyperbola; if a hyperbolic path, it enters the solar system once and then leaves forever while if it follows an ellipse, it remains in orbit around the sun.  Astronomer divide comets into (1) “short period” (those with orbital periods of less than 200 years and coming from the Kuiper belt) and (2) “long-period” (those with an orbital period greater than 200 years and coming from the Oort cloud).

Before the development of modern techniques, comets were visible only when near the sun so their appearance was sudden and, until early astronomers were able to calculate the paths of those which re-appeared, unexpected.  Superstition stepped in where science didn’t exist and comets were in many cultures regarded as omens or harbingers of doom, famine, ruin, pestilence and the overthrow of kingdoms or empires.  It was the English astronomer, mathematician and physicist Edmond Halley (1656–1742; Astronomer Royal 1720-1742) who in 1682 published the calculations which proved many comets were periodic and thus their appearance could be predicted.  Halley's Comet, named in his honor, remains the only known short-period comet consistently visible from Earth with the naked eye and remains the world’s most famous; it last appeared in 1986 and will next visit our skies in 2061.

Comet wine: Non-vintage Alois Lageder Natsch4 Vigneti Delle Dolomiti.

Halley’s findings put an end to (most) of the superstition surrounding comets but commerce still took advantage of their presence.  A comet with a famously vivid tail appeared in 1811 and in that year, Europe enjoyed a remarkably pleasant autumn (fall) which was most conducive to agriculture and became associated with the abundant and superior yield of the continental vineyards.  For that reason, the vintage was called the “comet wine” and the term became a feature in marketing the product which emerged from any year in which notable comets were seen, a superior quality alleged (and thus a premium price).  Wine buffs say any relationship between the quality of a vintage and the travel of celestial bodies is entirely coincidental.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2021) by Dr Heather Clark (b 1974).

One of things about the feminist cult which is now the construct of Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is that her mistreatment at the hands of her husband Ted Hughes (1930–1998; Poet Laureate 1984-2008) tends to obscure her work which many quite familiar with the story of her brief life will barely have read and that’s perhaps predictable, certainly for those for whom the lure of tales of tragic woman and brutish men is a siren.  As human tragedies go, her story is compelling: A precocious talent, the death of the father to whom she was devoted when only eight, the suicide attempt while a student and the burning ambition to write and be published.  Almost as soon as she met Ted Hughes she knew he was “my black marauder” and their affair was one of intense physicality as well as a devotion to their art, something which might have endured during their marriage (which produced two children) had Hughes not proved so unfaithful and neglectful.  In 1963, as an abandoned solo mother in a freezing flat during what entered history as London’s coldest winter of the century, she took her own life while her two babies slept nearby, becoming a symbol onto which people would map whatever most suited their purposes: the troubled genius, the visionary writer, a feminist pioneer and, overwhelmingly, a martyr, a victim of a man.  To his dying day, feminists would stalk literary events just to tell Hughes he had “Sylvia’s blood on his hands”.

So the story is well known and in the years since her death there have been a number of biographies, critical studies, collections of letters, academic conferences; given that, it’s seemed by the 2020s unlikely there was much more to say about one whose adult life spanned not even two decades.  For that reason the 1000-odd densely printed pages of Dr Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath was a revelation because, as the author pointed out, her life “has been subsumed by her afterlife” and what was needed was a volume which focused on what she wrote and why that output means she should be set free from the “cultural baggage of the past 50 years” and shown as “one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.”

Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956.

Red Comet is thus far this century’s outstanding biography and a feminist perspective is not required to recognize that when reading her last poems (written in obvious rage but sustaining a controlled tension few have matched) that she was a profoundly disturbed woman.  Most clinicians who have commented seem now to agree her depression of long-standing had descended to something psychotic by the time of her suicide, a progression she seems to have acknowledged, writing to one correspondent that she was composing poetry “on the edge of madness”.  This is though a biography written by a professional literary critic so it does not construct Plath as tale of tragedy and victimhood as one might if telling the story of some troubled celebrity.  Instead, the life is allowed to unfold in a way which shows how it underpins her development as a writer, the events and other glimpses of the person interpolated into the progress of a text through drafts and revisions, each word polished as the poet progresses to what gets sent to the publisher.  Red Comet is not a book for those interested in how much blame Ted Hughes should bear for his wife killing herself and in that matter it’s unlikely to change many opinions but as a study of the art of Sylvia Plath, it’s outstanding.  Unlike many figurative uses of "comet", Plath continues to blaze her trail. 

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

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

It’s because of the lessons learned from the Comet hoodoo that the apertures of airliner windows have rounded edges, the traditional four-cornered openings creating four weak spots prone to failure under stress.  In the early 1950s there was much optimism about the Comet and had it been successful, it could have given the UK’s commercial aviation industry a lead in a sector which rapidly would expand in the post war years.  One who didn’t express much faith in his country’s capacity to succeed in the field was the politician Duff Cooper (1890–1954) who, shortly before taking up his appointment as the UK’s ambassador to France, was flying on an Avro York (a transport and civil adaptation of the Lancaster heavy bomber) and he noted in his diary: “I think the designer of the York has discovered the shape of an armchair in which it is quite impossible to be comfortable, if this is typical of the civil transport plane in which were are to compete against the US, we are already beaten.”  As Lindsay Lohan’s smiles indicate, as least on private jets, the seats are now comfortable.

Not quite an Edsel, not yet a Mercury: The 1960 Comet; it was an era of imaginative (other use different adjectives) styling (and at this time they were still "stylists" and not "designers").

The Mercury Comet, built in four generations between 1960-1969 and another between 1971-1977, had a most unusual beginning.  The Ford Motor Company (“FoMoCo”, Mercury’s parent corporation) had in the mid 1950s studied the five-tier (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac) branding used by General Motors (GM) and decided it too would create a five divisional structure (which by 1955 Chrysler had also matched).  The GM model dated from the 1920s and was called the “ladder” (GM at times had as many as nine rungs) and the idea was each step on the later would take a buyer into a higher price (and at least theoretically more profitable) range of models.  There was a time when this approach made sense but even in the 1950s when Ford embarked on their restructure it was beginning to fragment, the implications of which would become apparent over the decades.  Thus Ford ended up (briefly) with five divisions: Ford, Mercury, Edsel, Lincoln and Continental.  That didn’t last long and Continental was the first to go, followed soon by the still infamous Edsel and the corporation even flirted with the idea of shuttering Lincoln.

1963 Mercury Comet S-22 Convertible.

The original plan had been for the Comet to be the “small Edsel” but by the time the release date drew close, the decision had been taken to terminate the Edsel brand so the Q&D (quick & dirty) solution was to sell the car through the Lincoln-Mercury dealer network, an expedient which lasted for the 1960 & 1961 model years before the Comet was integrated into the Mercury range and badged appropriately.  The early Comets were built on the Falcon platform (“compact” in contemporary US terms) but when the 1966 range was released, the cars became “intermediates” (ie the size between the “compact” and “full-size” platforms).  The Comet name was withdrawn from use after 1969 but was in 1971 revived for Mercury’s companion to the Maverick, Ford’s replacement for the compact Falcon which slotted above the Pinto which was smaller, requiring the industry to coin the class-designation “sub compact”.  Cheap to produce and essentially a “consumer disposable”, the Maverick and Comet proved so popular they continued in production for a season even after their nominal replacements were in showrooms.

1967 Mercury Comet Cyclone "R Code", one of 60 built that year with the 427 cubic inch (7.0 litre) FE side-oiler V8 and one of the 19 with a four-speed manual transmission.

The Mercury Comet has never attracted great interest from collectors because few were built with the more robust or exotic drive-trains found more frequently in both the competition from GM & Chrysler and the companion versions from Ford.  The mid-range performance package for the general market was the Comet Cyclone, introduced in 1964 to replace the Comet’s earlier S-22 option; neither were big sellers but they were not expensive to produce and remained profitable parts of the Mercury range.  In 1968, during the peak of the muscle car era, Mercury sought to promote the line, dropping the Comet name and promoting the machines as the “Cyclone”, now with quite potent engines although the emphasis clearly was drag racing rather than turning corners; the high performance package was now called the “Cyclone Spoiler”.  For the NASCAR circuits however, there was in 1969 the Cyclone Spoiler II, one of the so-called “aero cars”, the better known of which were the much more spectacular, be-winged Dodge Daytona (1969) and Plymouth Superbird (1970).  Chrysler’s cars looked radical to achieve what they did but the modifications which created the Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II and Ford Torino Talladega were so subtle as to be barely noticeable, the most effective being the increased slope on the lengthened nose, the flush grill and some changes which had the effect of lowering both the centre of gravity and the body.  The Ford and Mercury might have been a less spectacular sight than the Dodge or Plymouth but on the tracks the seeming slight tweaks did the job and both were among the fastest and most successful of their brief era.

1969 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II (slab-sided but slippery, left), 1970 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler (sleek but less aerodynamic than its predecessor, centre) and the aborted 1970 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II (handicapped out of contention by NASCAR, right).   

In 1970, just how aerodynamic was the 1969 Cyclone Spoiler was proved when the racing teams tried the new model which, although it looked sleek, was not as aerodynamically efficient and noticeably slower.  That might seem something of an own goal but Ford were blindsided by NASCAR’s decision to render the low-volume “aero cars” uncompetitive by restricting them to the use of 305 cubic inch (5.0 litre) engines while the conventional bodies were permitted to use the full 430 (7.0).  Thus the aerodynamic modifications planned for the 1970 Torino and Cyclone never entered production.  Of the two prototype Cyclone Spoiler IIs built, one survives revealing a nose which was in its own way as radical as those earlier seen on the Plymouth and Dodge.  In the collector market, the aero cars are much sought but the Cyclones are the least valued which may seem strange because they were on the circuits among the most successful of the era.  Market analysts attribute this to (1) the Cyclone Spoiler II (and Torino Talladega) being visually much less eye-catching than the wild-looking pair from Chrysler and (2) the Cyclone Spoiler II being sold only with a modest 351 cubic inch (5.8 litre) engine whereas the Fords ran 428s (7.0) and the Chryslers 440 (7.2) & 426 (6.9) units, the latter a version of the engine actually used in the race cars.

The highly qualified Kate Upton (b 1992) was in 2014 featured in a Sports Illustrated session filmed in a "vomit comet" (a modified Boeing 727 with a padded interior).