Erwartangsborizont

Erwartangsborizont (pronounced eah-wah-tum-swar-eh-sont)

(1) In English use, as “horizon of expectations”, a term from literary theory to denote the criteria readers use to judge texts in any given period.

(2) The conceivable content of a literary work or text based on the context of the time of publication (German).

(3) In formal education, the specified performance required in an examination situation (German).

Circa 1944: German determinative compound using the nouns Erwartung (expectation) and Horizont (horizon) with the connecting element “s”.  In German use, in the context of formal education, while not exactly synonymous, (1) solution expectation, (2) solution proposal & (3) sample solution impart a similar meaning.  Erwartangsborizont is a masculine noun; the noun plural is Erwartungshorizonte.  In German, both the spelling of the word and the article preceding the word can change depending on whether it is in the nominative, accusative, genitive, or dative case, thus the declension (in grammar the categorization of nouns, pronouns, or adjectives according to the inflections they receive) is:

Erwartangsborizont: a word which rose with post-modernism.

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.

The German compound noun term Erwartangsborizont was popularized in the 1960s by Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997) and he used it to denote the criteria which readers use to judge literary texts in any given period; he first fully explained the term in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft (Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory (1967)).  Jauss was a German academic who worked in the field of Rezeptionsästhetik (reception theory) as well as medieval and modern French literature; Erwartangsborizont (his concept of “horizon of expectation”) was his most enduring contribution to literary theory and his pre-scholarly background could in itself be used as something of a case study in his readers’ “horizon of expectation”: During World War II (1939-1945), Jauss served in both the SS and Waffen-SS.

Hans Robert Jauß: Youth, War and Internment (2016) by Jens Westemeier (b 1966), pp 367, Konstanz University Press (ISBN-13: 978-3835390829).

The SS (ᛋᛋ in Armanen runes; Schutzstaffel (literally “protection squadron” but translated variously as “protection squad”, “security section" etc)) was formed (under different names) in 1923 as a Nazi party squad to provide security at public meetings (then often rowdy and violet affairs), later evolving into a personal bodyguard for Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945).  The SS name was adopted in 1925 and during the Third Reich the institution evolved into a vast economic, industrial and military apparatus (more than two million strong), to the point where some historians (and contemporaries) regarded it as a kind of “state within a state”.  The Waffen-SS (armed SS (ie equipped with heavy weapons)) existed on a small scale as early as 1933 before Hitler’s agreement was secured to create a formation at divisional strength and growth was gradual even after the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 until the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 triggered an expansion into a multi-national armoured force with over 900,000 men under arms deployed in a variety of theatres.  As well as the SS’s role in the administration of the many concentration and extermination camps, the Waffen-SS in particular was widely implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

His service in the SS and Waffen-SS included two winters spent on the Russian Front with all that implies but it wouldn’t be until 1995 the documents relating to his conduct in the occupied territories were published and historians used the papers to prove the persona he’d created during the post-war years had been constructed with obfuscation, lies and probably much dissembling.  Despite that, Jauss had been dead for almost two decades before an investigation revealed he’d falsified documents from the era as was probably implicated in war crimes committed by the SS & Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front.

Portrait of Martin Heidegger, oil on canvas by Michael Newton (b 1970).

Although the influence of philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) has attracted much comment because of his flirtation with the Nazis, the most significant intellectual impact on Jauss was the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) who, although he lived to an impressive 102, was precluded by ill heath from serving in the military in either of the world wars.  Gadamer's most notable contribution to philosophy was to build on Heidegger’s concept of “philosophical hermeneutics” (an embryonic collection of theories about the interpretation of certain texts) and these Gardamer expanded and developed in Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method (1960)).  The title was significant because Gadamer argued “truth” and “method” (as both were understood within the social sciences) were oppositional forces because what came to be called truth came to be dictated by whichever method of analysis was applied to a text: “Is there to be no knowledge in art? Does not the experience of art contain a claim to truth which is certainly different from that of science, but just as certainly is not inferior to it? And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that the experience of art is a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from that sensory knowledge which provides science with the ultimate data from which it constructs the knowledge of nature, and certainly different from all moral rational knowledge, and indeed from all conceptual knowledge — but still knowledge, i.e., conveying truth?”

Portrait of Hans-Georg Gadamer, oil on canvas by Dora Mittenzwei (b 1955).

The aspect of what Heidegger and Gardamer built which most interested Jauss was what he came to call the “aesthetics of reception” a term which designates the shared set of assumptions which can be attributed to any given generation of readers and these criteria can be used to assist “in a trans-subjective way”, the formation of a judgment of a text.  The point was that over time (which, depending on circumstances, can mean over decades or overnight), for both individuals and societies, horizons of expectation change.  In other words, the judgment which at one time was an accepted orthodoxy may later come to be seem a quaint or inappropriate; the view of one generation does not of necessity become something definitive and unchanging.  Jauss explained this by saying: “A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period.  It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue.”  He may or may not have been thinking about German society’s changing view of his military career (and his post-war representation of it was itself something of a literary work) but the point was that people reinterpret texts in the light of their own knowledge and experience (their “cultural environment”).

That set of processes he described as constructing a literary value measured according to “aesthetic distance”, the degree to which a work departs from the Erwartangsborizont (horizon of expectations) of earlier readers.  One reviewer summarized things by suggesting the horizon of expectations was “detectable through the textual strategies (genre, literary allusion, the nature of fiction and of poetical language) which confirm, modify, subvert or ironize the expectations of readers” while aesthetic distance becomes a measure of literary value, “creating creating a spectrum on one end of which lies 'culinary' (totally consumable) reading, and, on the other, works which have a radical effect on their readers.”.  In the arcane world of literary theory, more than one commentator described that contribution as: “helpful”.  Opinions may differ.

The term “horizon of expectations” obviously is related to the familiar concept of the “cultural context”, both concepts dealing with the ways in which texts are understood within a specific time, place, and cultural framework.  To academics in the field, they are not wholly synonymous but for general readers of texts they certainly appear so.  The elements of the models are the sets of norms, values, conventions, and assumptions that a particular audience brings to a text at a given moment in time and space, expectations shaped by cultural, historical, and literary contexts but in academia the focus specifically is on the audience's interpretive framework.  The processes are dynamic in that although what happens externally can contribute to determining how a work is received and understood by its audience, if a work conforms to or challenges these expectations, it influences its reception and the potential for the work to reshape those horizons; it’s not exactly symbiotic but certainly it’s interactive.

Cady's Map by Janis Ian.

A film is just another piece of text and what is variously acceptable, funny, confronting or shocking to one generation might be viewed entirely differently by those which follow.  The faction names of the cliques at North Shore High School (Mean Girls, Paramount Pictures 2004)) were Actual Human Beings, Anti-Plastics, The Art Freaks, Asexual Band Geeks, Asian Nerds, Burnouts, Cheerleaders, Cool Asians, Desperate Wannabes, Freshmen, Girls Who Eat Their Feelings, J.V. Cheerleaders, J.V. Jocks, Junior Plastics, Preps, ROTC Guys, Sexually Active Band Geeks, The Plastics, Unfriendly Black Hotties, Unnamed Girls Who Don't Eat Anything & Varsity Jocks and given the way sensitivities have evolved, it’s predictable some of those names wouldn’t today be used; the factions' membership rosters might be much the same but some terms are now proscribed in this context, the threshold test for racism now its mere mention, racialism banished to places like epidemiological research papers tracking the distribution of obesity, various morbidities and such. 

Floccinaucinihilipilification

Floccinaucinihilipilification (pronounced flok-suh-naw-suh-nahy-hil-uh-pil-uh-fi-key-shuhn)

(1) The estimation of something as valueless.

(2) The act or habit of describing or regarding something as unimportant, of having no value or being worthless.

1735–1745: Apparently a coinage by pupils of Latin at England’s Eton College (a public (ie private)), the intent jocular but also something of an exercise in the pleonastic and tautological, the construct built (with the odd phonetic substitution or insertion) from the Latin words floccus (a wisp) + naucum (a trifle) +‎ nihilum (nothing) +‎ pilus (a hair) + -fication.  The elements (floccī + naucī + nihilī + pilī) all conveyed the notion “of little or no value, trifling”.  The -fication suffix was an alternative form of -ification, from the Middle English -ificacioun (ending on words generally borrowed whole from Old French), from the Old French -ification, from the Latin -ficātiō, a noun ending which appears on action nouns formed using the suffix -tiō (the English -tion) from verbs ending in -ficō (English -ify).   It was used to convey the idea of “the process of becoming” and was used in words of French or Latin origin, but in the last half-century the forms have become highly productive in English and the choice between -fication & -ification tends to be dictated by the resultant ease of pronunciation although when applying the suffix -ation to a verb ending in -ify, -ification is used instead of the expected -ifiation.  Modern forms like nerdification (the process of making or becoming nerdy) and hipsterfication (the process of making or becoming a hipster or characteristic of hipsters) have proliferated.  Floccinaucinihilipilification is a noun, floccinaucinihilipilificatious is an adjective and floccinaucinihilipilificate, floccinaucinihilipilificated & floccinaucinihilipilificating are verbs; the noun plural is floccinaucinihilipilifications (which some deny exists).

Modern reprint of the Eton Latin Grammar (1887) by Arthur Campbell Ainger (1841-1919).

Bored or baffled pupils in Latin class presumably coined many fake Latin words and it’s the longest, funniest or most vulgar which tended to survive.  At a hefty (by the conventions of English and most languages) 29 letters, floccinaucinihilipilification certainly is long and also enjoys the distinction of being the longest “non-technical” (ie not from medicine, physics etc) word in English although as something used to convey meaning (the very purpose of language), knowing the word does in itself seem floccinaucinihilipilificatious and for those who want more, that adjectival back-formation is lengthier still at a 30 character count.  Both trump that other schoolboy favorite antidisestablishmentarianism (opposition to the withdrawal of state support or recognition from an established (state) church) which manages with 28 and attempts to claim the noun antidisestablishmentarianismist (31) exists have always been dismissed.  Etymologists believe the inventive pupils were inspired by a line which appears in various editions of William Lily's (circa 1468–1522) Latin grammars, one of which was the Eton Latin Grammar in which was listed a number of nouns commonly used in the genitive case with some verbs like pendo and facio expressing the idea of evaluating something as worthless.

Floccinaucinihilipilification: Trends of use.

To say the word is rare is stating the obvious but statistically, use spiked after the spread of the internet and that’s because of all the lists of long, bizarre or obscure words, Google’s ngrams increasing the count every time another one was created or shared.  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.

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

Despite appearing on all those lists, by the twenty-first century, actual (ie “real”) use had been so infrequent that to call it “archaic” was misleading but indisputably it was old and that had much appeal for Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (b 1969) an English politician who between 2010-2024 sat in the House of Commons, rising to become Lord President of the Council and later a member of cabinet in the memorable administration of Boris Johnson (b 1964; UK prime-minister 2019-2022).  As one who deliberately affects an archaic style, Sir Jacob’s amused colleagues soon dubbed him “the honourable member for the eighteenth century” and he made plain his disdain for much of what modernity has delivered (the EU (European Union), the Labour Party, working class people with ideas above their station, pop music etc) and in gratitude for his stellar service, Sir Jacob was created a Knight Bachelor in Mr Johnson’s resignation honours list (which was as entertaining as any in living memory).  Because the Knight Bachelor is the most ancient of the UK’s many classes of knighthood, that would have pleased him but it’s also low in the pecking order (the “order of precedence” which dictates critical things like where one gets to sit (and, more to the point, next to whom) at certain dinners, church services and such) so that would not.  It ranks below all the knighthoods which are part of the organized orders of chivalry (the Garter, the Thistle, the Bath, the Star of India et al) and unlike the chivalric orders, does not confer any entitlement to the use of post-nominal letters, the form “KB” not used (except in historic reference) after 1815 when knighthoods in the order of the Bath (1725) were reorganized as Knight Grand Cross (GCB) & Knight Commander (KCB).  Still, he picked up the right to be styled “the honorable” when his father (William Rees-Mogg, 1928-2012) was in 1988 created a life peer and when in 2019 he was appointed to the Privy Council, he gained for life the style “The Right Honourable” so there was that.

The Right Honourable Sir Jacob Rees Mogg PC, attending the funeral of Elizabeth II (1926-2022; Queen of the UK and other places, 1952-2022), London, 19 September 2019.

In 2012, Sir Jacob spoke the word “floccinaucinihilipilification” in a debate in the House of Commons, his topic being what he asserted was in the nation a common opinion of the EU and, helpfully, told the house it meant “the habit of regarding something as worthless”.  The 29 letter monster remains the longest word ever to appear in Hansard (a record of parliamentary proceedings) although someone did manage to use pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (a factitious 45 letter creation said to mean “a lung disease caused by inhalation of very fine silica dust usually found in volcanos”) when appearing before a select committee (not being on the floor of the house it didn’t make the Hansard).  An opportunist extension of the medical term pneumonoconiosis, it was coined during the proceedings of the National Puzzlers' League convention in 1935 in an attempt to create English’s longest word but was dismissed by dictionaries as fake, clinicians and textbooks still referring to the disease as pneumonoconiosis, pneumoconiosis, or silicosis.  British dictionaries may feel compelled to include antidisestablishmentarianism but many overseas publications do not, on the basis there’s hardly any record of its use except in lists of long words which some editors treat as lexicographical freak shows.  Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary lists the longest as electroencephalographically, also from the physician’s diagnostic tool box.

Choke & Choker

Choke (pronounced chohk)

(1) To be unable to breathe because of obstruction of the windpipe (solid & semi-solid objects such as food or fumes or particles in the air which cause the throat to constrict); asphyxiate, strangle, suffocate, throttle.

(2) Full to the point of obstruction (usually as “choked with”); block up, bung up, clog, congest, jam, obstruct, stop up.

(3) In forestry, to seize a log, felled tree etc with a chain, cable, or the like, so as to facilitate removal.

(4) In engineering, any mechanism which, by narrowing or blocking a passage, regulates the flow of air, gas etc.

(5) In fluid mechanics (of a duct), to reach a condition of maximum flow-rate (immediately before the choke-point), due to the flow at the narrowest point of the duct becoming sonic.

(6) In electronics, an inductor having a relatively high impedance, used to prevent the passage of high frequencies or to smooth the output of a rectifier (also called the choke-coil.

(7) In combat sports (wrestling, karate etc), a type of hold (of the throat) which can result in strangulation.

(8) A constriction at the muzzle end of a shotgun barrel which varies the spread of the shot.

(9) To enrich the fuel mixture of an ICE (internal-combustion engine) by diminishing the air supply to the carburetor (a choke a specific component of a carburetor althouh the term is used loosely).

(10) To make or install a choke in a device.

(11) To stop by or as if by strangling or stifling:

(12) To stop by filling; obstruct; clog

(13) To suppress a feeling, emotion, etc (often as “choke up”, choke down” or “choke back”).

(14) In sport, to grip a bat, racket, club etc) farther than usual from the end of the handle (to shorten the grip).

(15) To suffer from or as from strangling or suffocating.

(16) To become obstructed, clogged, or otherwise stopped.

(17) To become too tense or nervous to perform well (used most often in competitive sport, specifically in the sense losing by performing badly at a critical point, when in a winning position).

(18) In slang, the inedible centre of the head of an artichoke.

1150–1200: From the Middle English choken & cheken, a variant of achoken & acheken, from the Old English ācēocian (to suffocate), from the Old English ċēoce & ċēace (jaw, cheek) and cognate with the Old Norse kōk (gullet) and the Icelandic kok (throat) & koka (to gulp).  The transitive verb emerged in the late thirteenth century and by the late 1300s was being used in the sense of “to stop the breath by preventing air from entering the windpipe”; “to make to suffocate, deprive of the power of drawing breath” and that was used of persons as well as swallowed objects.  In that. It was a shortened form of the twelfth century acheken, from Old English ācēocian, probably from the root of ċēoce & ċēace (the spelling ceoke was also used).  In the narrow technical sense “choking” has been the cause of death of a number of rock stars including the guitarist Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970), Led Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham (1948-1980) and AC/DC’s vocalist Bon Scott (1946-1980) although in all cases the critical “inhalation of vomit” which induced them to choke to death was caused by substance abuse.  In the same vein, the singer Janis Joplin suffered a fatal head injury in a fall while affected by drugs and alcohol; all these deaths may be regarded as “death by misadventure”.  The alternative forms choak & choake are obsolete; chock is dialectal.  Choke is a noun & verb, chokage & choker are nouns, choking is a noun & verb, chokeable is an adjective and choked is a verb & adjective; the noun plural is chokes.

The intransitive verb dates from the early fifteenth century when it was used to mean “gasp for breath”, in line with the figurative use in agriculture & horticulture (the Biblical notion of weeds stifling the growth of useful plants a Biblical image).  The term “choked up” (overcome with emotion and unable to speak) seems first to have been documented in 1896, the use possibly related to the earlier use of the word (choke-pear (1530s), crab-apple (1610s), choke-cherry (1785)) of fruits with an untypical degree of astringency and it’s thought the botanical link inspired Dr Johnson (Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)) to define the figurative use as “any aspersion or sarcasm, by which another person is put to silence”.  The noun chokage emerged in the 1840s while the term chokehold (tight grip around a person's neck to restrict breathing) was first used in 1962. The idea of a “choke” in sport in the sense of “losing by performing badly at a critical point, when in a winning position” dates from 1907 and comes from baseball where it referred to a “clutch hitter” (the hitter at the plate upon whom winning depended) “choking up” and failing to perform; the phrase “to fail in the clutch” similar in meaning.

Interchangeable choke for shotgun.

Although (except in the odd, curious niche), rendered obsolete by fuel injection, the carburetor is a device which continues to exert a fascination in those with a fondness for mechanical intricacy and an inclination to tinker.  Carburetors are devices used on ICEs (internal combustion engine) to produce the mix of fuel (typically petrol (gas)) & air required for combustion and in mainstream use they lasted into the twenty-first century.  Most carburetor were fitted with a choke, an instrument controlled by the driver and what the choke did was provide an enriched mixture (ie more fuel, less air) to make starting easier from cold.  The term “choke” was already known in engineering but the most direct comparison was probably from ballistics, chokes (some types described as “adjustable chokes”) fitted to shotguns as early as 1875.  A shotgun’s choke is a device (or constriction) at the muzzle end of the barrel which controls the spread (or pattern) of the shot as it exits the barrel.  By altering the spread, chokes allow shooters to customize their gun's performance for different purposes (ie hunting, target shooting, home defense et al).  When a shotgun cartridge is discharged, the begin to spread out immediately upon leaving the barrel (in slang they’re sometimes called “scatter guns” and a choke modifies this spread by narrowing or widening the diameter of the barrel at the muzzle.  This affects the density and size of the shot pattern at different distances.

Pellet field streams using various chokes.

In the industry, the classification of chokes is determined by the extent to which they narrow the barrel and the most common types are: (1) Cylinder: these are not fitted with a choke and thus there’s no constriction; they’re most suitable for short-range shooting. (2) Improved Cylinder: These have a slight constriction, thereby offering a moderately wide spread suitable for short and medium range targets. (3) Modified: A variation of the Improved with more constriction, lengthening the effective range.  (4) Full: Thos provides a narrow bore, creating a tight pattern for long-range accuracy, (5) Extra full: As the name implies, an even smaller bore, popular for turkey hunting or precision shooting.  There are also (1) fixed chokes (integral with the barrel and thus unchangeable) and (2) interchangeable chokes which are detachable inserts a shooter can swap according to the shooting to be done.

1971 Chrysler (Australia) Valiant Charger R/T E38 (choke knob arrowed). On the Australian 1973 Ford Falcon XA GT, a choke knob was a driver's only clue the car was fitted with RPO (Regular Production Option) 83, a (variable) collection of parts which needed to be installed on series production cars to permit their use in competition.   

Confusingly, although it was almost always the case a choke would be part of a carburetor (cable activated by a control in the driver’s cabin), the word “choke” was also used of carburetors in a different context and potentially more confusingly still, when used thus, it was often synonymous (and sometimes used interchangeably) with “throat”, “barrel” and “venturi”.  In the now arcane world of carburetors inhabited by those familiar with the things, this casual use isn’t a problem because the four words are known to refer to different components, although even experts rarely dwell on the details: (1) The throat is the main passage (there can be as many as four in a single carburetor, not necessarily all of the same bore (although if there are four they are usually sized in pairs)) through which air flows and a throat encompasses the entire internal air pathway.  (2) The barrel is the cylindrical tube that houses the throat, venturi and in many cases the throttle valve; the barrel is the structural element through which the air and fuel are mixed and delivered.

Weber-style IDF twin choke downdraft carburettor with chrome ram tubes (left), pair of Weber 40 IDA triple barrel carburetors (centre) and Holley Dominator 4500 1150 CFM Square Bore four barrel carburetor with fitting kit.

In US use, “barrel” is the most common way of describing carburetors (two barrel, four barrel) and the standard abbreviation is “bbl”.  That seems inexplicable by the usual conventions of English but is a historic legacy from the petroleum industry where it was used to denote a barrel of oil.  The specification and paint scheme of early oil barrels were standardized by Standard Oil, and the abbreviation “bbl” became widely used to signify a “standardized blue barrel”, hence the apparently superfluous “b”; over time, “bbl”, became the universal shorthand for barrel, even outside the oil industry. (3) The venturi is a specific narrowing of a carburetor's throat or barrel, the primary purpose of which is to create a pressure drop due to the “venturi effect” (a phenomenon of fluid dynamics) in which as air flows through the narrowed section, its velocity increases and its pressure decreases (surface friction at this scale not significant).  The pressure drop induced by the venturi effect draws fuel from the fuel bowl into the air stream for mixing and atomization.  (4) Choke in this context is simply another way of saying “barrel” and the choice is dictated by local conventions of use; In Europe it was common to speak of a “two choke” carburetor whereas if used by a US manufacturer this would be a “two barrel”.  There was trans-Atlantic respect for this tradition and in both communities tend to use the correct terminology of each other’s devices although hot-rodders in the US did like slang such as the evocative “four-holer”.  Despite that, Ford did for a while muddy the waters by using the terms to 2V and 4V (ie 2 venturi & 4 venturi) to refer both to two & four barrel carburetors but also the two different cylinder heads designed for each.  People got used to that but it did latter induce confusion elsewhere when 2V & 4V came to be understood as “two valve” & “four valve” (ie per cylinder).

Model Tessa Fowler (b 1992) wearing fabric chokers.

Choker (pronounced choh-ker)

(1) In fashion, a piece of jewelry or ornamental fabric, worn as a necklace or neckerchief, snug around the throat (use based on the “choker chain” used to restrain dogs).

(2) One who, or that which, chokes or strangles.

(3) A person administering a choking device (depending on context, either a class or machine operator or a murderous strangler).

(4) A neckcloth or high collar.

(5) As choker chain, a dog collar designed to pinch or squeeze the dog or other animal when the leash is pulled.

(6) In forestry, a chain or cable used to haul logs to a transportation point.

(7) In slang, any disappointing or upsetting circumstance.

(8) In slang, the traditional clerical collar worn by Christian clergy.

(9) In slang, a cigarette.

(10) A person who pratices autoerotic asphyxiation or paraphilia, a practice where someone temporarily cuts off their own air supply by means of a ligature or some other sort of self-asphyxiation device during sex or masturbation.

(11) In sport, one who “chokes” (losing by performing badly at a critical point, when in a winning position).

1550s: The construct was choke + -er.  The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought most likely to have been borrowed from the Latin –ārius where, as a suffix, it was used to form adjectives from nouns or numerals.  In English, the –er suffix, when added to a verb, created an agent noun: the person or thing that doing the action indicated by the root verb.   The use in English was reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  When appended to a noun, it created the noun denoting an occupation or describing the person whose occupation is the noun.  The noun emerged in the 1550s in the sense of “one who chokes” an agent noun from the verb and from 1848 it was used to mean “large neckerchief”.  The use to mean “a kind of necklace worn against the throat” dates from 1928.  Choker is a noun; the noun plural is chokers.

Lindsay Lohan with choker at Moschino Fashion Show, London, June 2014.  A choker is a decorative accessory worn around the neck and differs from a necklace in that it sits higher (typically mid-way up the neck) and fits snugly.

In fashion, choker is a clipping of “choker chain”, a dog collar designed to pinch or squeeze the dog or other animal when the leash is pulled.  Chokers can be for any material (fabric, leather (studded varieties popular), metal etc), and are sometimes adorned with jewels or logos.  There are also chokers with LED (light-emitting diodes) displays in a variety of colors which are powered by a small button-battery, rechargeable via a USB (universal serial bus) port.  According to a normally reliable source (Urban Dictionary), a choker is (1) a symbol used by emos to convey a desire to engage in self-harm or even suicide or (2) a way certain young ladies advertise their especial fondness for and skill in performing fellatio (this should be treated as a gaboso (Generalized Association Based On Single-Observation).  In the BDSM (Bondage, Discipline (or Dominance) & Submission (or Sadomasochism) community, chokers are sometimes used as the “submissive collar”, given by dominants as a symbol of possession and sometimes augmented with a leash for purpose of public display.

Anna Teshu (b 1994, right), in choker and on leash with ex-boyfriend Nathan Riely (b 1988, left) while role-playing as a dog and handler.  If consensual, the "leashed partner" thing is a kink and a genuine ALC (alternative lifestyle choice), albeit one which has attracted some criticism, some suggesting the "leashed" are suffering from "false consciousness", an idea explored in other contexts by both Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).

Ferrule

Ferrule (pronounced fer-uhl or fer-ool)

(1) A ring or cap, traditionally of metal, put around the end of a post, cane, or the like, to prevent splitting.

(2) A short (still usually metal) sleeve for strengthening a tool handle at the end holding the tool.

(3) In engineering, a bushing or adapter holding the end of a tube and inserted into a hole in a plate in order to make a tight fit, used in boilers, condensers etc.

(4) In engineering, a bush, gland, small length of tube etc, especially one used for making a joint.

(5) In electrical engineering, a band crimped as part of a cable terminal.

(6) In bladesmithing, a fitting (often of brass) where the blade joins to the handle.

(7) A short ring for reinforcing or decreasing the interior diameter of the end of a tube.

(8) A short plumbing fitting, covered at its outer end and caulked or otherwise fixed to a branch from a pipe so that it can be removed to give access to the interior of the pipe.

(9) In angling, (1) either of two fittings on the end of a section of a sectional fishing rod, one fitting serving as a plug and the other as a socket for fastening the sections together or (2) one of two or more small rings spaced along the top of a casting rod to hold and guide the line.

(10) In mountaineering, the metal spike at the end of the shaft of an ice axe.

(11) In billiards, the plastic band attaching the tip to the cue.

(12) The pinched metal band which holds the bristles of a paintbrush.

(13) The pinched metal band which holds in place on the shaft the eraser of a pencil.

(14) To furnish or equip a device with a ferrule.

1605-1615: From the Middle English verel, virel, virole (ferrule; metal pivot on the end of an axle), altered under the influence of the Latin ferrum (iron), from the Old French virole (ferrule; collar), from the Latin viriola (little bracelet), diminutive of viria (bracelet worn by men) (influenced by the Latin ferrum (iron)), from the Gaulish, from the Proto-Celtic weiros (crooked) (which may be compared with the Middle Irish fiar (bent, crooked), the Welsh gŵyr and the Breton gwar (curved)), from the primitive Indo-European weyhros (threaded, turned, twisted), from weyh- (to turn, twist, weave).  The alternative spelling is ferule.  Ferrule is a noun and ferruled is a verb & adjective and ferruling is a verb; the noun plural is ferrules.

Comrade Stalin (left), diagram of an ice axe (centre) and comrade Trotsky (right).

Comrade Leon Trotsky (1879-1940; founder of the Fourth International) in The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1936) had a feeling for the political phrase and labelled the state created by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) a “Soviet Thermidor” because although Tsarist era capitalism wasn’t re-created (a la the monarchy in France not being restored in the 1790s), the combination of a bureaucracy supporting a personality cult (even if the latter was in 1936 still somewhat disguised) was “a counterrevolutionary regression” which betrayed what was achieved by comrade Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924; head of government of Russia or Soviet Union 1917-1924).  The phrase caught the imagination of many, notably those in the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (The POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), a non-communist Marxist party (a surprisingly populated fork of left-wing thought) which comrade Stalin correctly associated with Trotskyism.  The POUM was highly productive in thought but drifted increasingly far from the moorings of political reality although rhetoric which included polemics like “Stalinist Thermidorians have established in Russia the bureaucratic regime of a poisoned dictator.”  Agents of the Narodný komissariat vnutrennih del (NKVD, The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs and one of the many predecessors to the KGB), answerable only to comrade Stalin, killed dozens of POUM’s Central Committee which ended the organization’s effectiveness for a generation. In his prodigious memory, comrade Stalin filed away annoying phrases and in 1940 he had comrade Trotsky murdered in Mexico.  The murder weapon was an ice-axe.  Ferrules are used on ice-axes as to absorb and distribute stresses, reducing the tendency of the timber handles to split or fragment.

The ferrule also played a role in the assassination by the Bulgarian Secret Service of comrade Georgi Ivanov Markov (1929–1978), a troublesome dissident writer who had annoyed the communist regime in the People's Republic of Bulgaria.  In 1969, comrade Markov defected to the West and gained political asylum in England where, based in London, he worked as a journalist and broadcaster for the BBC World Service, the US-funded Radio Free Europe and West Germany's Deutsche Welle.  On these platforms, his critique of the ruling party in Sofia became increasingly vitriolic which-obviously, annoyed the politburo even more.  Accordingly, they arranged his murder and the weapon was that ubiquitous feature of London life: the umbrella.

Replica of “Umbrella gun” produced by the KGB’s Moscow laboratory, 1978, International museum of spying.

The Soviet Union’s (USSR) KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), which translates literally at the “Committee for State Security” is better understood as “political secret police”.  It was the last of an alphabet-soup of similar agencies (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, SMERSH & MGB) which, building on the models of the many secret police forces maintained by Tsarist Russia (1547-1917), was responsible for the USSR’s internal security and beyond its borders, espionage, counter espionage and a range of activities conducted in support of Soviet foreign policy (including that not disclosed and that sometimes denied).  In post-Soviet Russia, the KGB evolved into the Federal Security Service (FSB), comrade Vladimir Putin (b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999) honing his skills in the institution he apparently joined in 1975.

Mean Girls themed pencils, the ferrule securing the eraser.

The “umbrella gun” used a hollow ferrule which housed a tiny (1.7 mm (.067 inch) in diameter), discharge triggered by a button on the handle used usually to raise the canopy.  Spring-loaded and powered from a small cylinder of compressed air, the pellet was projected at sufficient velocity to penetrate the victim’s clothing & skin and as soon as it became lodged, it began to warm; that was significant because a substance covering two holes in the pellet began melt at body temperature, releasing the poison.  It’s never been clear what the poison was but most authorities suspect it was probably Ricin, a highly potent toxin produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant.

Bourse

Bourse (pronounced boors)

(1) A stock exchange, the term used variously (depending on context): (1) as a synecdoche for “stock exchange”, (2) collectively of the stock exchanges of continental Europe and (3) specifically the Paris stock exchange (the Bourse de Paris, known usually in English as the “Paris Bourse”).

(2) Figuratively, any place, real, virtual or imaginary where (1) something of value is traded or (2) the value of something tradable is set or settled.

(3) In philately, a meeting of stamp collectors and or dealers where stamps and covers are sold or exchanged.

(4) In botany, the swollen basal part of an inflorescence axis at the onset of fruit development; it bears leaves whose axillary buds differentiate and may grow out as shoots.

1590s: From the mid sixteenth century French burse (meeting place of merchants), from the French bourse (meeting place of merchants (literally “purse”)), from the twelfth century Old French borse (money bag, purse), from the Medieval Latin bursa (a bag), from the Late Latin bursa (oxhide, animal skin and a variant of variant of byrsa (hide)), from the Ancient Greek βύρσα (búrsa or býrsa), (hide, wine-skin) of unknown origin.  Linked terms are used for other European stock exchanges including the Danish børs, the Swedish börs and the German Börse with the roots evident in Modern English words including bursar and reimburse.  Bursa in Late Latin meant “oxhide, animal skin” (reflecting the origins in the Greek) but, by association with use, in Medieval Latin came to mean “purse made of leather” and that meant it came also to mean “supply of money, cash, funds”, extending later to “pension”.  The modern sense of “exchange where stocks are registered and exchanged” dates from 1845, taken directly from the Bourse de Paris (Paris stock exchange).  In one legend, the use of the word “bourse” for such places was said to be derived from the House of Van der Buerse, a family in Bruges, Belgium.  There, merchants and bankers would gather to conduct financial transactions and the a variant of the name “Buerse” came to be used.  The alternative history relates how there was a sign on the front of the Buerse’s house adorned with a painting of three burses (purses).  Bourse is a noun; the noun plural is bourses.

A modern bull scrotum purse.

In French, bourse is also a slang term (usually in the plural) for the scrotum and from gift-shops and street markets around the world, one can buy coin purses (various with clasps, zips and tie-strings) made from the scrotums of various slaughtered creatures.  It appears also in the (usually affectionate) French vulgarity: “Ça remonte à quand, la dernière fois que tu t’es vidé les bourses?” (When was the last time you emptied your balls?  In more polite use, there the bourse d’études (educational scholarship, stipend, student allowance), bourse d’excellence (merit scholarship; fellowship) and boursicaut (small coin purse (mostly archaic though still a favorite among antique dealers).

A bull scrotum purse in a traditional style.

One linguistic development in French might explain something about why the fluctuations in financial markets came increasingly to send ripples throughout economies: In the sixteenth century the verb boursicoter meant “to set money aside” (ie keep it in one’s purse) but by the mid-nineteenth century (under the influence of bourse coming to mean “stock exchange”, it had shifted to mean “having a flutter on the markets; dabbling in the stock market”.  In a similar vein, a boursier (feminine boursière, masculine plural boursiers, feminine plural boursières) could be (1) a scholarship beneficiary, a recipient of a bursary or grant, (2) a stockbroker or trader or (3) one who makes purses and handbags.  In idiomatic use (which survives as a literary device there was sans bourse délier (literally “without opening one's purse”) which is English aligns with “without spending a penny” or “not spending a dime”.

The Modern English purse was from the Middle English purse, from Old English pursa (little bag or pouch made of leather, especially for carrying money), partly from pusa (wallet, bag, scrip) and partly from burse.  The Old English pusa was from the Proto-West Germanic pusō, from the Proto-Germanic pusô (bag, sack, scrip), from the primitive Indo-European būs- (to swell, stuff) and was cognate with the Old High German pfoso (pouch, purse), the Low German pūse (purse, bag), the Old Norse posi (purse, bag), the Danish pose (purse, bag) and the Dutch beurs (purse, bag).  The Old English burse was from the same source as the French bourse.  “Purse” (as a synecdoche for “financial matters generally” is widely used in idiomatic English and persists in the UK persists in the office of Keeper of the Privy Purse, a member of the royal household who manages the financial affairs of the sovereign.  The office dates from the early sixteenth century (things in the palace don’t often change) and can be understood as something like a CFO (chief financial officer) or FC (financial controller (comptroller the historic use)).  Purse had been used in the sense of “the royal treasury” as early as the late thirteenth century and the figurative sense of “money, means, resources, funds” emerged by the mid-1300s, this extending to specific defined instances (such as “prize for winning a horse race etc”) by the 1640s.  The thirteenth century use in Middle English to mean “scrotum” was indicative of the shape and size of the leather pouches used to carry coins.

Lindsay Lohan illustrates the purse and the handbag: The clutch purse (left) would everywhere be understood as “a purse” but in the US such a thing commonly would be called “a clutch” because “purse” is used also of larger items.  The red one (centre) would often be called a purse in the US but elsewhere in the English-speaking world it is certainly a handbag.  By the time something assumes the dimensions of a Louis Vuitton Doctor's Bag (right), it is definitely a handbag, tote or something beyond a purse.

Purse was first used of a “woman's handbag” in the late 1870s.  Originally a purse was “a small bag for carrying money” and that use persisted even after purses became less scrotum-like but in the US it came to be used also of what would in the UK be called a “handbag” (a small bag carried usually by women and typically containing personal items (lipsticks, other makeup and often a “purse” (in the original sense)).  Not infrequently, in trans-Atlantic use, the terms “purse” and “handbag” are used interchangeably, but confusion can arise if there’s no accompanying visual clue which is why the term “clutch purse” has proved so useful.  A clutch purse is a small, often rectangular bag designed conveniently to be carried in one hand (although many are supplied with an (often detachable) chain or strap which can be slung over the shoulder or used in cross-body style.  In the industry, not only is there no set of parameters which defines where a purse ends and a handbag begins and shamelessly manufacturers will use the labels indiscriminately if they suspect it will stimulate sales.  The US usage has infected the rest of the world including places like the UK where once there was a clear distinction and now it’s something really in the eye of the beholder, perhaps recalling the judgment Potter Stewart (1915–1985; associate justice of the US Supreme Court 1958-1981) handed down (in another context) in Jacobellis v Ohio (378 U.S. 184 (1964)): “I shall not today attempt further to define… and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so.  But I know it when I see it…”

Bear & bull statues outside the Börse Frankfurt (Frankfurt Stock Exchange, formerly known as the Frankfurter Wertpapierbörse), the world's third oldest stock exchange.  Located in the German state of Hesse, Frankfurt is the country's financial centre.

About the only thing which can be guaranteed of a stock market is it will fluctuate and the most famous terms used of bourses are “bear market” & “bull market”, describing respectively the market conditions as they respond to the central dynamics of the business: fear & greed, both of which tend to manifest in waves because of what is known as the “herd mentality” of investors (gamblers as some prefer to describe themselves).  The collective noun for a group of bulls is a herd (less commonly a gang while bears assemble (a less common behavior for them) in a sloth (or sleuth).  The bull & bear metaphors have been in use since the early eighteenth century and the origin of the “bull” is uncontested and refers to the habit aggressive bulls display in pushing forward and tossing their heads upward, the idea being a herd of “bullish investors” will drive up the prices of the stocks they’re pursuing, thus creating a “bull market”.  The math of these terms is not precisely defined but, as a general principle, the view seems to be they are used of a market in which prices rise (bull) of fall (bear) 20% or more from a recent trough or peak, usually over a period or weeks or months depending on the state of an economy.  The labels can be applied to a single asset, an asset class, a group of securities, or a market as a whole and if the trends are mild or seem tentative, things can be called “bullish” or “bearish”.

One of several bull statues, DPRR (Democratic People's Republic of Rockhampton), Queensland, Australia.

The origin of the bestial analogy of the bear is contested.  The oldest story concerns the London trader who sold a shipment of Canadian bearskins sometime before they had come into his possession, his strategy being a gamble the market would fall and he’d just have to pay less for something he’s already sold at a higher price, thus gaining from “the spread” (the difference between the cost and selling prices and a variation on the mechanism used today by the “short sellers”).  These traders came to be known as “bearskin jobbers”.  The alternative history is more directly from behavioral zoology: the way bears with their powerful limbs and big, sharp claws will, if in the mood “claw stuff down”.

Lindsay Lohan with Valentine’s Day stuffed teddy bear.

The use may also have been influenced by the unfortunate history in England of bull and bear-baiting, gruesome, fight-to-the-death contests between the beasts which seem first to have been held during the thirteenth century and reaching an apex of popularity during the reign of Elizabeth I (1533–1603; Queen of England & Ireland 1558-1603).  An audience would bet on the outcome and the link with stock exchanges is that while markets may percolate for sometimes long periods, there will always be battles between “the bears” and “the bulls” and it’s during these events that great fortunes are made and lost.  The language appealed to writers and was used by the English poet & satirist Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in Book II of The Dunciad (1728), a work mocking the greed and folly of investors (gamblers) associated with the South Sea Bubble, a financial scandal of the early eighteenth century and one of many examples of herd mentality and “irrational exuberance”:

Come fill the South Sea goblet full;
The gods shall of our stock take care:
Europa pleased accepts the Bull,
And Jove with joy puts off the Bear.