Edition

Edition (pronounced ih-dish-uhn)

(1) One of a series of printings of the same publication, each issued at a different time and differing from another by alterations, additions etc (historically sometimes referred to as impressions).

(2) The format in which a work is published (single volume edition, abridged edition, leather-bound edition, French language edition etc).

(3) In newspaper production, a form of differentiation between different versions of the “same” issue (late edition, city edition etc) and used in a similar manner in radio & television broadcasting.

(4) In book collecting, as “first edition”, a copy of a book from its first release or print run.

(5) The whole number of impressions or copies of a book, newspaper etc, printed from one set of type at one time.

(6) A version of anything (physical and not), often (sometimes misleadingly) in forms such as “limited edition”, “special edition” etc).

1545–1555: From the French édition, from the Middle French, from the Latin ēditiōn- (publication), the stem of ēditiō (a bringing forth, publishing), the construct being ēdit, the past participle of ēdere (to give out; bring forth, produce) + -iōn (the suffix appended to a perfect passive participle to form a noun of action or process, or the result of an action or process).  When the word entered English in the sense of “version, translation, a form of a literary work” (and later “act of publishing”) the dominant linguistic influence was probably the Latin editionem (a bringing forth, producing (although in specialized use it also carried the meaning “a statement, an account rendered”, from the past-participle stem of ēdere, the construct being e(x) (in the sense of “out”) + -dere, a combining form of dare (to give), from the primitive Indo-European root do- (to give).  Edition is a noun; the noun plural is editions.  The adjective editionism is non-standard and was coined to describe the practice in commerce in which different “editions” of essentially the same product are brought to market in an effort to induce customers to purchase multiple items even though the difference between them may be little more than the packaging.  It's a cynically profitable approach (the additional production & distribution costs marginal) which works especially well for those with a dedicated (hopefully obsessional) following.

More Issues Than Vogue sweatshirt from Impressions.

In publishing and (sometimes vaguely) related fields, the terms “issue”, “edition” and “version” have come to be used so loosely that they sometimes function interchangeably but within the publishing industry, there are conventions of use: Issue traditionally was used to refer to a specific release of a recurring publication (magazine, journal, newspaper etc) and tended to be tied to the release sequence (“October 2024 Issue”, “Fall 2024 Issue”, “Issue No. 215” etc).  Issue can however be used also as “re-issue” which refers usually to a “re-print” of a previous edition although it’s not uncommon for blurbs like “re-issued with new foreword” or “re-issued in large print” to appear, the implication being the substantive content remains the same.  Edition was used of a particular form or version of a publication that might differ from previous ones in significant ways which might include text corrections, foreign language translations, or updates, thus descriptions like “German Language Edition”, “Second Edition” or “Abridged Edition.  Some editions (especially those which appear in an irregular sequence) actually give in their title some hint of the nature of what distinguishes them from what came before such as the convention adopted by the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic for their Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).  What the APA does is change the number if a DSM is regarded as a “new edition” but retain the number with an appended “R” (revised) or “TR” (text revision) if it’s an “updated edition”.  Thus has appeared the DSM-III-R (1987), the DSM-IV-TR (2000) and the DSM-5-TR (2022).  There’s some overlap in use for version and this perhaps reflects the influence of technology because it tends to be used of a specific form or variant of a publication such as language (eg Spanish version), format (eg audio version) or materials used in the construction (eg e-book version) rather than an implication of a chronological or iterative update (which in publishing tends to be called an “edition”.  In that the industry differs from IT where version numbers are almost always sequential although the convention widely used in the 1980s in which something like “version 2.4.3” could be interpreted as 2=major release, 4=update and 3=bug fix has long fallen into disuse.

Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (RSV), 1952 limited edition, first printing by Thomas Nelson & Sons, brown full leather binding with inlaid gold lettering, silk end paper and green cardboard slip case, custom bound by the Chicago Bible Society.  US$750 from Abe Books.

There are also special uses which assume a life of their own, notably the Revised Standard Version (RSV), an English translation of the Bible published in 1952 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the US.  The RSV was a revision of the American Standard Version (ASV, 1901) and was published to render the text into the modern English which readily would be understood by a contemporary reader of modest education.  The object was not to change the meaning of the text but to preserve it and paradoxically this required editing the classic verses written by William Tyndale (circa 1494–1536) or in the King James Version (KJV, 1611) because the over hundreds of years the language had evolved and the much of what was in the original needed to be interpreted for a general audience and the controversy of clerical gatekeepers between God and his people had for centuries been a thing.  The RSV however has not been the last word and those who track novel initializms will have been delighted by the appearance of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV, released in 1989 by the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue), published in 2021.  Students of such things aren’t expecting the next update for at least a decade but finding a name might prove more of a challenge than editing the Old Testament’s Book of Leviticus for a modern audience although those who have worked in biblical forks have found alpha-numeric solutions such as RSV-2CE (Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (2006))

First Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, "Copy No 1", held in the National Library of Ireland.  It contains in Joyce's hand an inscription to the English political activist Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961) who was for decades his patron.

A first edition of Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce (1882–1941) in 2009 sold on the opening day of an antiquarian book fair London for Stg£275,000, at the time a record for a twentieth century first edition.  Ulysses is regarded in the industry as the most collectable modern novel and the first editions, printed on hand-made Dutch fine-paper, are well-catalogued and this was number 45 of the first edition print run (all signed by the author) of 100, one of four not previously accounted for.  It had been sold originally by the Manhattan’s obviously subversive Sunwise Turn bookshop (Ulysses at the times banned in the US) and remained in the possession of the same family, stored in its original box and thus not exposed to light, accounting for the preservation of the construction.  Proving that dealers in literary circles can gush with the finest used car salesmen, the dealer who arranged the sale explained: “The color is amazing – this lovely Aegean Sea, Greek flag blue which would normally have darkened into a more dirty blue but because it has been in a box it is a complete thing of beauty.”  The almost pristine condition was a product also of its history of use, an inspection suggesting it was seemingly unread except for the well-thumbed final chapter where the most salacious passages can be found.  The existence of unread copies of well-known books is not unusual and those notorious for sitting neglected on the bookshelf include “challenging” texts such as A Theory of Justice (1971) by John Rawls (1921–2002), A Brief History of Time (1988) by Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) and Joyce’s own, bafflingly difficult Finnegans Wake (1939).  Intriguingly, the antiquarian book business also includes the category “pre-first edition” (any limited run copy of a book printed before the “first edition” is published).  The apparent oxymoron is explained by “first edition” being an industry definition rather than a literal description; pre-first editions thus analogous with “pre-production” or “final prototype” cars which (if they’ve survive the crusher which claims many) can be prized by collectors.

Among special editions there are, inter alia, “Collector's Editions”, “Anniversary Editions” and even, in one instance, the “So Fetch Edition”.

In commerce, “special editions” have become notable income generators for content providers and the movie business has embraced the concept with editions such as “the making of”, “bloopers & out-takes”, “director’s cut” and others and the idea isn’t new.  Led Zeppelin's eighth studio album (In Through the Out Door (1979)) originally was sold with an outer sleeve of plain brown paper, stamped with nothing more than the while the cardboard sleeve proper within was released with six different versions of the artwork.  Buyers would thus not know which sleeve they were selecting.  There’s nothing to suggest it was anything but a gimmick and neither the band nor the record company were expecting many to keep buying copies in the plain brown wrapped until they’d scored all six covers but there were press reports at the time of “Led Heads”, doing exactly that.  The industry took note.

Taylor Swift's The Anthology, one of 34 available editions of The Tortured Poets Department.

The attraction of releasing multiple versions of essentially the same product with variations restricted to some added content or detail differences in the packaging is that the additional costs in production and distribution are marginal yet there’s sometimes it’s possible to charge a premium for the “non-standard editions”.  The practice had for decades been quite a thing with car manufacturers but the music business came also to like the idea because, unlike with the cars where customers tended to buy one at a time, obsessive fans of musicians might be persuaded they needed several copies of what was essentially the same thing.  Leftist UK student site The Tab noted few music fans were as obsessive as Taylor Swift’s (b 1989) Swifties and, more significantly, they were also impressively numerous and thus an irresistible catchment of disposable income.  What The TAB noted was the almost simultaneous release of a remarkable (and apparently unprecedented) 34 versions of Ms Swift’s eleventh album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024), something which as well as generating revenue has the statistical benefit of afforcing her presence on the charts, every sale counting as a 1.0.  Some were technologically deterministic in than four were released as audio cassettes and nine were exclusively digital but most were essentially the same product except for the inclusion of a bonus track and some were available only through the retailer Target.  The most obsessive Swifties obviously could buy all 34 editions but for those which want just an exhaustive collection of the music, it appeared all was included on the accurately named The Anthology so there was that.  One day, all 34, still (where appropriate) unopened in their original packaging, will begin to appear on auction sites.  The approach attracted some adverse comment (which the Swifties doubtless ignored) and probably confirmed in the mind of J.D. Vance (b 1984; US vice president since 2025) that childless cat ladies are evil.

All editions: The Tab’s The Tortured Poets Department discography:

1. Collector’s Edition Deluxe with The Manuscript
2. Collector’s Edition Deluxe with The Albatross
3. Collector’s Edition Deluxe with The Bolter
4. Collector’s Edition Deluxe with The Black Dog
5. Standard album and The Manuscript
6. Standard and The Manuscript (signed)
7. Standard and But Daddy I Love Him (Acoustic)
8. Standard and Guilty As Sin? (Acoustic)
9. Standard and Down Bad (Acoustic)
10. Standard and Fortnight (Acoustic)
11. Standard and Fresh Out The Slammer (Acoustic)
12. Target exclusive with The Albatross
13. Target exclusive with The Bolter
14. Target exclusive with The Black Dog
15. Target exclusive vinyl
16. The Manuscript vinyl (pressing one)
17. The Manuscript vinyl (pressing two)
18. The Albatross vinyl
19. The Bolter vinyl
20. The Black Dog vinyl
21. The Manuscript vinyl
22. The Anthology
23. Standard and The Black Dog ‘voice memo’
24. Standard album and Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me voice memo
25. Standard album and Cassandra voice memo
26. Standard album (digital)
27. Standard album and Daddy I Love Him (Acoustic)
28. Standard album and loml (live from Paris)
29. Standard album and My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys (live from Paris)
30. Standard album and The Alchemy / Treacherous mashup (live from Paris)
31. The Manuscript cassette
32. The Bolter cassette
33. The Albatross cassette
34. The Black Dog cassette

1976 Lincoln Continental Mark IV, Lipstick edition.  The shade of red appears to be close to Dior's lipstick #744 (Party Red).

The car manufacturers have produced at least hundreds of “special editions” and while many of them really weren't “especially special”, they kept returning to the concept because it was lucrative, the things usually profitable to an extent exceeding greatly the nominal sum of their parts.  Quite how many have existed over the years is difficult to estimate because, in addition to the well-documented examples from manufacturers which were sold nationally or even globally, some were offered only briefly or regionally and barely advertised.  Additionally, dealers or sometimes an agglomeration of them would also conjure up their own "special editions" so the total of such things is probably in the thousands.  Sometimes, fashion houses were paid to lend their name, AMC teaming with Pierre Cardin, Levi Strauss (Volkswagen also had a denim-trimmed Beetle though without a specific brand attribution) & Oleg Cassini while the Lincoln Continental at times was offered with themes by Emilio Pucci, Cartier, Bill Blass and de Givenchy although the most memorable were the reputed 500 “Lipstick editions”, a study in red & white, quite a sight given the expanse of sheet metal and leather.

1969 Dodge Charger R/T SE (left), 1972 Chrysler VH Valiant Charger 770SE E55 (centre left), 1976 Holden HX LE (centre right) and 2002 Mazda Miata Special Edition (MX-5 in some markets) (right).

In most of the “special” editions, offered over the decades, it was only in the advertising or press kits that terms like “special edition” or “limited edition” appeared.  Sometimes though, such physical badges did appear on the vehicles. In the US, on the 1969 Dodge Chargers with the SE option, the badge included both “SE” & “Special Edition” while in Australia, only “SE” appeared on the 1972 Chrysler VH Valiant Charger 770SE E55 (one of the industry’s longer model names) although the marketing material called it a “Special Edition”, a usage borrowed from the parent corporation in the US and even the badge used was the same part as that which had been stuck on the 1970 Dodge Challenger SE.  Holden’s frankly cynical (but most profitable) 1976 LE spelled out “Limited Edition” under a “LE” (in a larger font) while Mazda used only the full term for the Miata (MX-5) Special Edition models.

Last Call: 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 (with two-piece “underwire”).

Dodge in 2023 embarked on a run of “special editions” on a grand scale, their “Last Call” programme a series of Dodge Challengers & Chargers packaged in a variety of ways but all distinguished by the inclusion of some flavor of Chrysler's third generation HEMI V8 (2003-), the significance of last call being the engine was being withdrawn from use in passenger-cars, a victim of government regulations intended to reduce vehicle emissions.  The programme yielded an array of Chargers & Challengers with specifications (ie horsepower and such) varying from “impressive” to “bonkers” and they were produced in batches of between 100 and 3,300.  The customers responded well with most editions soon “sold out” and, judging from the number with minimal mileage and still in “as delivered” condition which appeared rapidly on auction sites, many had been bought by those expected to “flip” them for profit.  Some did realise gains from the transactions but the market soon cooled, especially for the editions produced in the thousands but how many have been “stashed away” in the hope that years from now there will be those who will pay much, isn't known.

Last Call: 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Black Ghost Special Edition (with one-piece “underwire”).  As well as the impressive engineering, the Last Call programme yielded some unusually long model names.

That strategy may play out well for those speculating on a surge in value in the years to come when, for a certain class of customer, the specifications of a Last Call Dodge will seem intoxicating in a world in which such things have long been extinct.  That was for many the plan but the future has been clouded by Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021 and since 2025), his second administration releasing plans to “roll-back” vehicle emission standards and Chrysler, thus encouraged, announced in 2025 the HEMI V8 would re-appear in passenger vehicles, a decision which wouldn't have much troubled the board because the market has greeted the replacement straight-six engines with restrained enthusiasm.  Doubtless there will be those who noted Chrysler's announcement and, contemplating the thought of their carefully stored Challenger(s) becoming a depreciating asset, will have consulted lawyers to find if grounds for redress exist, the argument being they were “induced” to purchase on the promise of a “last call” being exactly that.  Unfortunately, there is a precedent and it's not encouraging.

Another “last call”: The “last American convertible” ceremony, Cadillac Clark Street Assembly Plant, Detroit, Michigan, 21 April 1976.

In the US, by the late 1960s, sale of convertibles had for years been declining and with the growing volume of government regulations about vehicle safety (which included “roll-over standards”, the industry was working on the assumption the body-style would soon be banned.  Given the declining demand for such things the manufacturers were sanguine about this and even pleased to have something to have to use to “trade off” against regulations they definitely did not want imposed.  By 1975 the Cadillac Eldorado was the only one of the few big US convertibles still available selling in reasonable numbers but the platform was in its final years and with no guarantee a version based on the new, smaller Eldorado (to debut in 1978) would enjoy similar success, General Motors (GM) decided it wasn’t worth the trouble but, sensing a “market opportunity”, promoted the 1976 model as the “Last American convertible”.  Sales spiked, some to buyers who purchased the things as investments, assuming in years to come they’d have a collectable and book a tidy profit on-selling to those who wanted a (no longer available) big drop-top.  Not only did GM use the phrase as a marketing hook; when the last of the 1976 run rolled off the Detroit production line on 21 April, the PR department, having recognized a photo opportunity, conducted a ceremony, complete with a “THE END OF AN ERA 1916-1976”) banner and a “LAST” Michigan license plate.  The final 200 Fleetwood Eldorado convertibles were “white on white on white”, identically finished in white with white soft-tops, white leather seat trim with red piping, white wheel covers, red carpeting & a red instrument panel; red and blue hood (bonnet) accent stripes marked the nation’s bicentennial year.

The “last American convertible” ceremony, Cadillac Clark Street Assembly Plant, Detroit, Michigan, 21 April 1976.

Of course in 1984 a convertible returned to the Cadillac catalogue so some of those who had stashed away their 1976 models under wraps in climate controlled garages weren’t best pleased and litigation ensued, a class action filed against GM alleging the use of the (now clearly incorrect) phrase “Last American Convertible” had been “deceptive or misleading” in that it induced the plaintiffs to enter a contract which they’d not otherwise have undertaken.  The suit was dismissed on the basis of there being insufficient legal grounds to support the claim, the court ruling the phrase was a “non-actionable opinion” rather than a “factual claim”, supporting GM's contention it had been a creative expression rather than a strict statement of fact and thus did not fulfil the criteria for a “deceptive advertising” violation.  Additionally, the court found there was no actual harm caused to the class of plaintiffs as they failed to show they had suffered economic loss or that the advertisement had led them to make a purchase they would not otherwise have made.  That aspect of the judgment has since been criticized with dark hints it was one of those “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country” moments but the documentary evidence did suggest GM at the time genuinely believed the statement to be true and no action was possible against the government on several grounds, including the doctrines of remoteness and unforeseeability.  If HEMI V8 powered coupés and sedans soon re-appear in Dodge's showrooms, it may not be only Greta Thunberg (b 2003) who will be upset.

Limited Edition, less limited profit: The Holden LE

1976 HX Holden LE

By the mid 1970s, the market had come to prefer the cheaper, smaller and easier to use cassette tapes which meant warehouses were soon full of the once desirable 8-track players and buyers were scarce.  In Australia, GMH (General Motor Holden) by 1975 had nearly a thousand in the inventory which also bulged with 600-odd Monaro body-shells, neither of which were attracting customers; fashions change and both had become unfashionable.  Fortunately, GMH was well-acquainted with the concept of the "parts-bin special edition" whereby old, unsaleable items are bundled together and sold at what appears a discount, based for advertising purposes on a book-value retail price there’s no longer any chance of realizing.  Thus created was the high-priced, limited edition LE (which stood for "Limited Edition", the Monaro name appearing nowhere although all seem still to use the name), in metallic crimson with gold pin striping, golf "honeycomb" aluminium wheels, fake (plastic) burl walnut trim and crushed velour (polyester) upholstery; in the 1970s, this was tasteful.  Not designed for the purpose, the eight-track cartridge player crudely was bolted to the console but five-hundred and eighty LEs were made, GMH pleasantly surprised at how quickly they sold with no need to resort to discounting.  When new, they listed at Aus$11,500, a pleasingly profitable premium of some 35% above the unwanted vehicle on which it was based; these days, examples are advertised for sale for (Aus$) six-figure sums and anyone who now buys a LE does so for reasons other than specific-performance.  Although of compact size (in US terms) and fitted with a 308 cubic inch (5.0 litre) V8, it could achieve barely 110 mph (175 km/h), acceleration was lethargic by earlier and (much) later standards yet fuel consumption was high; slow and thirsty the price to be paid for the early implementations of the emission control plumbing bolted to engines designed during more toxic times.      

1971 Holden HQ Monaro LS 350

The overwrought and bling-laden Holden HX typified the tendency during the 1970s and of US manufacturers and their colonial off-shoots to take a fundamentally elegant design and, with a heavy-handed re-style, distort it into something ugly.  A preview of the later “malaise era” , it was rare for a facelift to improve the original.  The 1971 HQ Holden was admired for an austerity of line and fine detailing; what followed over three subsequent generations lacked that restraint.  The HX LE was one of a number of "special" and "limited" editions offered during the era and it remains one of the few remembered.

In English, malaise was an unadapted loanword from the French malaise (ill ease), the construct being mal- (bad, badly) + aise (ease).  It was used to describe (1) a feeling of general bodily discomfort, fatigue or unpleasantness (sometimes associated with the onset of illness), (2) an ambiguous feeling of mental or moral depression (the sense tending more to “melancholy” than “angst”) and (3) ill will or hurtful feelings for others.  The US cars of the years between 1974-1984 (some say it went on a bit longer) came to be called “malaise era” cars, the name from the thoughtful but perhaps unfortunate “Crisis of Confidence” address Jimmy Carter (1924-2024; US president 1977-1981) delivered in July 1979.  Carter’s years of malaise remains emblematic the America of the late 1970s (a time of stagflation, oil-shock induced energy price-rises & shortages, high interest rates and general gloom) but the details have become blurred.  The use of the word “malaise” emerged from a retreat the president had convened at the Camp David retreat after concluding neither he, his advisors or the entire machinery of government could come up with solution to the nation’s many problems.  Attended by notables from the clergy, academia and other realms including the governor of Arkansas, BillClinton (b 1946; US president 1993-2001), the curious event prompted one historian to describe it as “…the most remarkable exercise in presidential navel-gazing in American history…” but what did lodge in Carter’s memory was an observation by the pollster Patrick Caddell (1950–2019) that after some fifteen years of trauma including assassinations, race riots, the war in Vietnam and Watergate, the nation was experiencing a “malaise” and the president decided this notion would be the centrepiece of his address to the people.

Malaise: 1978 Ford Mustang II King Cobra.

An emblematic malaise era machine, twenty-first century viewers would be surprised to learn it was possible for a relatively small, light car with a 302 cubic inch (4.9 litre) V8 to deliver such anaemic performance.  However, the Mustang II (1973-1978) was the the right car for the right car (debuting some weeks before the first oil shock) and was a great success.

The word “malaise” wasn’t included in the text of Carter’s speech but, replete with phrases like “…strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will…” & “…crisis of confidence…”, the tone was clear and almost universally the press called it the “malaise speech”.  Despite what has long been the popular perception, at the time the speech was not a political disaster and was well-received, Carter’s approval ratings surging; it was only as the year unfolded he came to be damned by his own words and if any single term is now associated with his unhappy single term, it's “malaise”.  As was customary for presidential addresses of this nature, the speech was nationally televised live by the three major commercial networks (ABC (American Broadcasting Company), CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) & NBC (National Broadcasting Company)) and simultaneously broadcast by many radio stations, the total audience estimated at some 65 million (there was then no FoxNews but it's not difficult to predict what the nature of that commentary would have been).  Given the coverage, it’s certain the address contributed greatly to the eventual public disillusionment with the president and may thus have been an example of videomalaise (a term from late 1990s political science which linked voters’ decreasing trust in politicians with depictions of the latter on televised news).

Honorable exception: 1973 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am SD-455.

Available only on the Firebird (Formula or Trans-AM) in 1973 & 1974, the SD-455 was one of the few bright spots of the malaise era although it did need slightly to be detuned for commercial release, its original 310 (HP) horsepower configuration able to pass the EPA's (Environmental Protection Authority) emission tests only if a devious "cheater" device was installed (shades of Volkswagen's later "dieselgate" although Pontiac got off with nothing more than a "slap on the wrist" rather than the billions it cost the equally guilty Germans).  The production version was rated at 290 HP which was still enough to make it the powerful US car of its time.

The "malaise era" cars were so named because compared with the previous generations, they were heavier, slower, thirstier and less pleasant to drive, a collection of characteristics which weren't the fault of President Carter but he had the misfortune to be in the White House at the same time.  They were of course safer and less polluting but those advantages were hidden while the ugliness of the battering-ram bumper-bars, reduced power and sometimes tiresome driving characteristics were obvious.  When speaking of these mostly unlamented machines, the phrase “Malaise Era” is believed to have been coined by writer Murilee Martin (the pen name of Phil Greden) who used it first in 2007 on the website Jalopnik.

Grammatology

Grammatology (pronounced gram-uh-tol-uh-jee)

(1) Historically, the scientific study of systems of writing.

(2) In latter-day use, a critique of orthodox linguistics.

Early 1800s (in its original sense): The construct was gramma(r) + -t- + -ology; the modern (some would say post-modern) re-purposing was first used in 1967.  Dating from the mid fourteenth century, grammar was from the Middle English gramery & gramere, from the Old French gramaire (classical learning), from the unattested Vulgar Latin grammāria, an alteration of the Classical Latin grammatica, from the Ancient Greek γραμματική (grammatikḗ) (skilled in writing), from γράμμα (gramma) (line of writing), from γράφω (gráphō) (write), from the primitive Indo-European gerbh (to carve, to scratch).  It displaced the native Old English stæfcræft; a doublet of glamour, glamoury, gramarye & grimoire.  In English, grammar is used to describe the system of rules and principles for the structure of a language (or of languages in general) but in colloquial use it’s applied also to morpology (the internal structure of words) and syntax (the structure of phrases and sentences of a language).  In English, generative grammar (the body of rules producing all the sentences permissible in a given language, while excluding all those not permissible) has for centuries been shifting and it’s now something policed by the so-called “grammar Nazis”, some of whom insist on enforcing “rules” regarded by most as defunct as early as the nineteenth century.

The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +‎ -logy.  The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century.  French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).  Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story).  In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie).  Within a few decades of the intrusion of modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology (1820); hatology (1837)).  In this evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al).  Grammatology & grammatologist are nous, grammatological is an adjective and grammatologically is an adverb; the noun plural is grammatologies.

Google ngram (a quantitative and not qualitative measure): 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.

Grammatology in its re-purposed sense was from the French grammatologie, introduced to the world by French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in his book De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology (1967)).  It may be unfair to treat Derrida’s use as a “re-purposing” because although the word grammatology (literally “the study of writing”) had existed since the early nineteenth century, it was a neologism, one of an expanding class of “-ology” words (some of them coined merely for ironic or humorous effect) and there was prior to 1967 scant evidence of use, those studying languages, literature or linguistics able satisfactorily to undertake their work without much needing “grammatology”.  On the basis of the documents thus far digitized, “grammatology” was never an accepted or even commonly used term in academia and although it seems occasionally to have been used variously in fields related to “the study of writing systems” (apparently as a synonym for paleography, epigraphy, writing-system classification or orthographic description) it was only in passing.  Until the modern era, words “going viral” happened relatively infrequently and certainly slowly and, as used prior to 1967, “grammatology” was attached to no theoretical construct or school of thought and described no defined discipline, the word indicative, empirical and neutral.  If “pre-modern” grammatology could be summed up (a probably dubious exercise), it would be thought a technical term for those concerned with scripts, alphabets, symbols and the historical development of writing systems.  Tempting though it may seem, it cannot be thought of as proto-structuralism.

The novelty Derrida introduced was to argue the need for a discipline examining the history, structure and philosophical implications of writing, his particular contention that writing is not secondary to speech, a notion at odds with centuries of Western metaphysics.  At the time, it was seen as a radical departure from orthodoxy, Derrida exploring (in the broadest imaginable way), the possibilities of writing, not simply the familiar physical inscriptions, but anything that functions as “trace,” “differance,” or symbolic marking, the core argument being writing is not secondary to speech (although in the narrow technical sense it may be consequent); rather, it reveals the instability and “constructedness” of language and thereby meaning.

De la grammatologie (First edition, 1967) by Jacques Derrida.

Ambitiously, what Derrida embarked upon was to do to the study something like what Karl Marx (1818-1883) claimed to have done to the theories of Hegel (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)): “turn things on their head”, a process that can be classified under four themes: (1) Writing as prior to speech (as opposed to the earlier “Writing is derivative of speech”).  What this meant was writing had to be considered as “originary”, implying structures of difference could precede both writing and speech. (2) Writing (the act as opposed to the content) as a philosophical concept rather than a finite collection of technical objects to be interpreted or catalogued on the basis of their form of assembly.  (3) Grammatology becomes a critique (as opposed to the earlier descriptive tool) of science, reimagining it as a critical discipline exposing the logocentrism of Western thought.  Logocentrism describes the tendency to prioritize “logos” (in academic use a word encompassing words, speech or reason), as the ultimate foundation for truth and meaning (with speech often privileged over writing).  Logocentrism was at the core of the Western philosophical tradition that assumed language accurately and directly can express an external reality, the companion notion being rational thought represents the highest form of knowledge.  Derrida labelled this a false hierarchy that devalued writing and other non-verbal forms of communication and feeling. (4) Writing is expanded beyond literal inscriptions.  Whereas the traditional Western view had been that writing was simply the use of an alphabet, cuneiform, hieroglyphs and such, what Derrida suggested was the concept of writing should be extended to any system of differences, traces, or marks; the condition for meaning itself.

So Derrida took grammatology from an dusty corner of the academy where it meant (for the small number of souls involved) something like “a hypothetical technical study of writing systems” and re-invented it as a philosophical discipline analysing the deeper structures that make any representation or meaning possible.  The notion of it as a tool of analysis is important because deconstruction, the word Derrida and other “celebrity philosophers” made famous (or infamous depending on one’s stance on things postmodern) is often misunderstood as something like “destruction” when really it is a form of analysis.  If Derrida’s subversive idea been presented thirty years earlier (had the author been able to find a publisher), it’s possible it would have been ignored or dismissed by relative few who then read such material.  However, in the post-war years there was an enormous expansion in both the number of universities and the cohorts of academics and students studying in fields which would come to be called “critical theory” so there was a receptive base for ideas overturning orthodoxy, thus the remarkable path deconstruction and postmodernism for decades tracked.

Deconstruction in art, Girl With Balloon by street artist Banksy, before, during & after a (successful) test deconstruction (left) and in its final form (right), London, October 2018.

There is an ephemeral art movement but usually it involves works which wholly are destroyed or entirely disappear.  Banksy’s Girl With Balloon belonged to a sub-category where (1) the deconstruction process was part of the art and (2) the residual elements were “the artwork”.  Banksy’s trick with this one was as the auctioneer’s hammer fell (at Stg£1m), an electric shredder concealed at the base of the frame was activated, the plan being to reduce the work “to shreds” in a pile below.  However, it’s claimed there was a technical glitch and the shredder stopped mid-shred, meaning half remained untouched and half, neatly sliced, hung from the bottom.  As a headline grabbing stunt it worked well but the alleged glitch worked better still, art experts mostly in agreement the work as “half shredded” was more valuable than had it been “wholly shredded” and certainly more than had it remained untouched in the frame.  Thus: “meaning is just another construct which emerges only through differences and deferrals”.

From a distance of sixty-odd years, in the milieu of the strands of thought which are in a sense part of a “new orthodoxy”, it can be hard to understand just what an impact Derrida and his fellow travellers (and, just as significantly, his critics) had and what an extraordinary contribution deconstruction made to the development in thought of so many fields.  Derrida in 1967 of course did not anticipate the revolutionary movement he was about to trigger, hinted at by his book starting life as a doctoral thesis entitled: De la grammatologie: Essai sur la permanence de concepts platonicien, aristotélicien et scolastique de signe écrit. (Of Grammatology: Essay on the Permanence of Platonic, Aristotelian and Scholastic Concepts of the Written Sign).  A typically indigestible title of the type beloved by academics, the clipping for wider distribution was on the same basis as Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) publisher deciding Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was snappier than Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit (Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice).  There’s a reasons authors usually don’t have the final say on titles and cover art.

Derrida acknowledged linguistics in the twentieth century had become a sophisticated form of study but maintained the discipline was failing to examine its most fundamental assumptions; indeed his point was those core values couldn’t be re-evaluated because they provided the framework by which language was understood.  What Derrida indentified as the superstructure which supported all was the commitment to the primacy of speech and presence and because the prevailing position in linguistics was that speech was primary, the assumption worked to shape all that followed.  It was the influence of the Swiss philosopher & semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) which was profound in positioning speech as the natural, original, living form of language with writing as a secondary, derivative (and, in a sense, artificial although this was never wholly convincing) representation of speech.  What made the Saussureian position seem compelling was it sounded logical, given the consensus it was human speech which predated the development of writing, the latter thus the product of the former and so persuasive was the thesis the hierarchy came to provide the framework for other disciplines within linguistics including phonology (the study of the way sounds function in languages) and morphology (the study of the internal structure of morphemes (the smallest linguistic unit within a word able to support a meaning)that can carry a meaning.  What this meant was syntax was also defined by speech (writing a mere convenient means of exchange) with phonetics (the study of the physical sounds of human speech) the true source of the material language.  Thus for generations, in academic discourse, historical linguistics were documented primarily by an analysis of changes in sound with orthography (the methods by which a language or its sounds are represented by written symbols); a mechanical by-product.

Deconstruction in fashion.  Lindsay Lohan in Theia gown, amfAR gala, New York City, February 2013 (left) and after “deconstruction by scissors” (right).

All gowns are “constructed” (some 3D printed or even “sprayed-on”) but sometimes circumstances demand they be “deconstructed”.  On the night, the shimmering nude and silver bugle-beaded fringe gown from Theia’s spring 2011 collection was much admired but there was an “unfortunate incident” (ie the fabric was torn) and, apparently using a pair of scissors, there was some ad-hoc seamstressery to transform the piece into something described as a “mullet minidress”.  That turned out to be controversial because the gown was on loan for the night but such things are just part of the cost of doing business and, with its Lohanic re-imagining, it’s now an artefact.

Derrida didn’t dispute the historic timelines; his point was that in defining linguistics based on this hierarchy, it became impossible to question the orthodoxy from within.  In a classic example of how deconstruction works, he argued the hierarchy was based not on the historical sequence of events (ie writing coming after speech) but was a culturally defined attachment to the idea of presence, voice and authentic meaning; with speech entrenched in its primacy, no discipline within linguistics was able fully to study writing because of this structural prejudice positioning writing as an auxiliary system, a mere notation of sounds encoding the pre-existing spoken language.  That didn’t mean writing couldn’t be studied (as for centuries it had been) but that it could be considered only a tool or artefact used to record speech and never a primary object of meaning.  While there were all sorts of reasons to be interested in writing, for the reductionists who needed to get to the essence of meaning, writing could only ever be thought something mechanistic and thus was philosophically uninteresting.  So, if linguistics was unable to analyse writing as (1) a structure independent of speech, (2) a fundamental element of thought processes, (3) a source of new or changed meanings or (4) a construct where cultural and philosophical assumptions are revealed, that would imply only speech could create meaning with writing a mere form of its expression.  Daringly thus, what Derrida demanded was for writing to be seen as conceptually prior to speech, even if as a physical phenomenon it came later.  In 1967, linguistics couldn’t do that while maintaining the very foundations on which it was built.

Never has there been published a "Grammatology for Dummies" but there is The Complete Idiot's Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2013) by Dr Steven J. Venturino.

At this point things became more technical but Derrida did provide a simplified model, explaining linguistics existed as the study of signs and not of traces, his work depending ultimately on certain distinctions: (1) Signs assume stable signifieds and (2) traces imply meaning is always deferred but never present.  For orthodox linguistics to work, the assumption had to be that signs enjoy a stability of meaning within a system; this Derrida dismissed as illusory arguing (1) meaning is just another construct which emerges only through differences and deferrals, (2) no signified is ever (or can ever fully be) “present” and (3) speech is no closer to meaning than writing.  By its own definitions in 1967, linguistics could not accommodate that because (1) its methods depended on systematic relations sufficiently stable to permit analysis, (2) it needed constant objects (definable units such as phonemes, morphemes and rules of syntax), syntactic structures) and (3) it relied on signs which could be described with the required consistency (ie “scientifically”).  Any approach grounding in trace and difference lay beyond the boundaries of orthodox linguistics.

So the conflict would seem irreconcilable but that’s true only if viewed through the lens of a particular method; really, linguistics was empirical and grammatology was philosophical and in that were alternative rather than competing or even parallel paths.  If linguistics was a system of codification, then grammatology was a critique of the foundations of linguistics and Derrida made clear he was not attempting to reform linguistics simply because that couldn’t be done; any attempt to interpolate his ideas into the discipline would have meant it ceased to be linguistics.  He wanted a new discipline, one which rather than empirically describing and categorising language and its elements, stood back and asked what in the first place made such systems possible.  That meant it was a transcendental rather than empirical process, one studying the conditions of representation and the metaphysics implicit in the idea of signification.  Writing thus was not merely marks on a surface but a marker of a difference in being.

The twist in the tale is that although De la grammatologie was highly influential (especially after an Edition appeared in English in 1976), grammatology never became a defined, institutionalised academic field in the way Derrida envisioned it at least supplementing departments of linguistics, anthropology and philosophy.  That was due less to the well-documented phenomenon of institutional inertia than it proving impossible for any consensus to be reached about what exactly “grammatological analysis” was or what constituted “grammatological research”.  Pleasingly, it was the structuralists who could account for that by explaining grammatology was a critique of the metaphysics underlying other disciplines rather than a method for generating new empirical knowledge.  Fields, they noted, were likely organically to grow as the tools produced were picked up by others to be applied to tasks; grammatology was a toolbox for dismantling tools.

Jacques Derrida with pipe, deconstructing some tobacco.

Even if Derrida’s concepts proved sometimes too vague even for academics the influence was profound and, whether as a reaction or something deterministic (advances in computer modelling, neurology and such), the discipline of linguistics became more rather than less scientific, the refinements in the field of generative grammar in particular seen as something of a “doubling down” of resistance to Derrida’s critique, something reflected too in anthropology which came even more to value fieldwork and political economy, philosophical critiques of writing thought less helpful.  So the specialists not only clung to their speciality but made it more specialized still.  Grammatology did however help create genuinely new movements in literary theory, the most celebrated (and subsequently derided) being deconstruction where Derrida’s ideas such as interpretation being an infinite play of differences and the meaning of texts being inherently unstable created one of the more radical schools of thought in the post-war West, introducing to study concepts such as paratext (how academics “read between and beyond the lines) the trace (the mark of something absent, a concept that disrupts the idea of pure presence and self-contained meaning) and marginalia (used here as an abstract extension of what an author may have “written in the margins” to encompass that which may seem secondary to the main point but is actually crucial to understanding the entire structure of thought, blurring the (literal) line between what lies inside and outside a text).

Derrida for Beginners (2007) by Jim Powell (illustrated by Van Howell).  On has to start somewhere.

The movement became embedded in many English and Comparative Literature departments as well as in post-structuralism and Continental philosophy.  Modern beasts like media studies & cultural theory are (in their understood form) unthinkable without deconstruction and if grammatology didn’t become “a thing”, its core elements (difference, trace etc) for decades flourished (sometimes to the point of (published) absurdity) and although not all agree, some do argue it was Derrida’s subversion in 1967 which saw the field of semiotics emerge to “plug the gaps” left by the rigidity of traditional linguistics.  Of course, even if grammatology proved something of a cul-de-sac, Derrida’s most famous fragment: “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (literally “there is no outside-text”) endured to underpin deconstruction and postmodernism generally.  Intriguingly for a concept from linguistics, the phrase took on a new life in the English-speaking world where it came to be understood as “everything is text”, an interpretation which created a minor publishing industry.  In English, it’s a marvellously literalist use and while it does to an extent overlap with the author’s original intention, Derrida meant there is (1) no access to pure, unmediated presence and (2) no meaning outside interpretation and no experience outside context.  In using texte he was referring to the interplay of differences, traces, relations, and contexts that make meaning possible (ie not literally the words as they appear on a page).  What that meant was all acts were “textual” in that they must be interpreted and are intelligible only within systems of meaning; the phrase a philosophical statement about signification and mediation, not characters printed on page.

Fiveable's diagram of what we need to know to understand literature.  Hope this helps.

However, demonstrating (in another way) the power of language, the “everything is text”) movement (“cult” may once have been a better word) in English came to be understood as meaning no reality could exist beyond language; everything (literally!) is text because it is words and discourse which both construct and describe reality.  That notion might have remained in an obscure .ivory tower were it not for the delicious implication that values such as right & wrong and true & false are also pieces of text with meanings able to be constructed and deconstructed.  That meant there was no stable “truth” and nothing objectively was “wrong”; everything just a construct determined by time, place and circumstances.  That Derrida never endorsed this shocking relativism was noted by some but academics and students found so intoxicating the notion of right & wrong being variables that “everything is text” took on a life of its own as a kind of selective nihilism which is, of course, quite postmodern.  Again, language was responsible because the French texte was from the Latin textus, from texō (weave) and while in French it can mean “text” (in the English sense), among philosophers it was used metaphorically to suggest “weave together”; “an interconnected structure” in the sense of the Latin textus (woven fabric); it was this meaning Derrida used.  Had the English-speaking world remained true to the original spirit of Il n'y a pas de hors-texte it would have entered the textbooks as something like “There is nothing outside the interplay of signs and contexts; There is no meaning outside systems of interpretation” and perhaps have been forgotten but “everything is text” defined and seduced a movement.  Thus, it can be argued things either were “lost in translation” or “transformed by translation” but for the neo- Derridaists there’s the satisfaction of knowing the meaning shift was an example of “grammatology in action”.

Giallo

Giallo (pronounced jah-loh (often pronounced in English-speaking use as gee-ah-lo)

(1) The industry (and later the public) term for a series of Italian mystery, crime and suspense novels, first published by Mondadori in 1929 and so-dubbed because of the giallo (yellow) hue used for the covers.  They were known as Mistero giallo (yellow mystery) and collectively as the racconti gialli “yellow tales”.  The term “giallo” is a clipping of Il Giallo Mondadori (Mondadori Yellow).

(2) By extension, an unsolved mystery or scandal (historic Italian use).

(3) By later extension, a genre of Italian cinema mixing mystery and thriller with psychological elements and, increasingly, violence.

(4) A film in this genre.

(5) In Italian, yellow. 

1930s (in English use): From the Italian giallo (yellow (although now used also of amber traffic signals)), from the Old French jalne (a variant of jaune), from the Latin galbinus (greenish-yellow, yellowish, chartreuse; effeminate (of men)) of unknown origin but possibly from galbanum, from the Ancient Greek χαλβάνη (khalbánē) (galbanum) (the resinous juice produced by plants of the genus Ferula), from the Hebrew חֶלְבְּנָה (ḥelbənāh), from the root ח־ל־ב (ḥ-l-b) (related to milk), from the Proto-Semitic ḥalīb- (milk; fat).  Over time, the term evolved in Italian language, undergoing phonetic and semantic shifts to become giallo.  As an adjective the form is giallo (feminine gialla, masculine plural gialli, feminine plural gialle, diminutive giallìno or giallétto) and as a noun it refers also to a (1) “a sweet yellow flour roll with raisins” in the Veneto) and (2) “Naples yellow”; the augmentative is giallóne, the pejorative giallàccio and the derogatory giallùccio.  The derived adjectives are nuanced: giallastro (yellowish but used also (of the appearance of someone sickly) to mean sallow); giallognolo (of a yellowish hue) & giallorosa (romantic (of movies)).  The yellow-covered books of the 1930s produced giallista (crime writer which is masculine or feminine by sense (giallisti the masculine plural, gialliste the feminine plural).  The verb ingiallire means “to turn yellow).  Giallo is a noun; the noun plural is giallos or gialli (the latter listed as rare).

In print: A Mondadori Edition.

Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (the Mondadori publishing house, founded in 1907 and still extant) first published their mystery, crime and suspense novels in editions with distinctive yellow covers in 1929.  Few were Italian works, almost all were translations into Italian of books written originally in English by US and British authors and not all were all of recent origin, some having appeared (in English) decades earlier.  Produced in a cheap paperback format, the giallos were instantly successful (triggering a vibrant secondary industry of swap & exchange between readers, sometimes through an intermediary) and other publishing houses emulated the idea, down even to the yellow covers.  Thus “giallo” entered the language as a synonym for “crime or mystery novel” and it spread to become slang meaning “unsolved mystery or scandal”.  The use as a literary genre has endured and it now casts a wide net, giallos encompassing mystery, crime (especially murders, gruesome and otherwise), thrillers with psychological elements and, increasingly, violence.

In film: The modern understanding of the giallo movie is something like "horror with a psychological theme" and, depending things like the director's intent or the  target market, one or other element may dominate.  Historically, among critics there was a "hierarchy of respectability" in the genre with the psychological thriller tending to be preferred but in recent decades the have been landmark "horror movies" which have made the genre not exactly fashionable but certainly more accepted. 

The paperbacks were often best-sellers and film adaptations quickly followed, the new techniques of cinema (with sound) ideally suited to the thriller genre and these films too came to be called “giallos”, a use which in the English-speaking world tends to be applied to thriller-horror films, especially if there’s some bizarre psychological twist.  The film purists (an obsessive lot) will point out (1) the authentic Italian productions are properly known as giallo all'italiana and (2) a giallo is not of necessity any crime or mystery film and there’s much overlap with other sub-genres (the ones built about action, car-chases and big explosions usually not giallos although a giallo can include these elements).

Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed Me (2007).  Neglected upon its release, IKWKM has since been re-evaluated as a modern giallo and has acquired a cult following, sometimes seen on the playbill of late-night screenings of the bizarre and disturbing.

IKWKM may at times have been seriously weird but as a piece of film it was mild compared to the most notorious giallo: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom) an Italian production directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) whose talents (and tastes) straddled many fields.  Often referred to as “Pasolini’s Salò”, it’s a film people relate to in the way they choose or the work imposes on them; at one level, it can be enjoyed as a “horror movie” and its depiction of violent sexual depravity is such that of the many strands of pornography which exist, Salò contains elements of many.  As a piece of art it’s polarizing with the “love it” faction praising it as a Pasolini’s piercing critique of consumerism and populist right-wing politics while the “hate it” group condemn it as two hours-odd of depictions of depravity so removed from any socio-political meaning as to be merely repetitiously gratuitous.

Salò poster.

The title Salò is a reference to the film being set in 1944 in Republic di Salò (Republic of Salò (1943-1945)), the commonly used name for the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic), a fascist enclave set-up in Nazi-occupied northern Italy under the nominal dictatorship of Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & Prime-Minister of Italy 1922-1943) who Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) had ordered rescued from imprisonment after being deposed as fascist prime-minister.  As a piece of legal fiction befitting its self-imposed role as Italy’s “government in exile”, Mussolini’s hurriedly concocted state declared Rome its capital but the administration never ventured beyond the region where security was provided by the Wehrmacht (the German military forces, 1935-1945) and the de facto capital was Salò (small town on Lake Garda, near Brescia).

Salò poster.

Although not in the usual filmic sense an adaptation, Pasolini’s inspiration was Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage (The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage), an unfinished novel by the libertine French aristocrat Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) although the director changed the time and location of the setting (shifting the critique from monarchical France to Fascist Italy) and structurally, arranged the work into four segments with intertitles (static text displays spliced between scenes to give the audience contextual information), following the model of Dante’s (Dante Alighieri (circa 1265–1321)) Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321)).  In little more than a month in 1785, the marquis wrote the text during his imprisonment in the Bastille and while the introduction and first part are in a form recognizably close to what they may be been prior to editing, the remaining three parts exist only as fragmentary notes.  After the revolutionary mob in 1789 stormed the Bastille (and was disappointed to find the Ancien Régime had so few prisoners) it was thought the manuscript had been lost or destroyed but, without the author’s knowledge, it was secreted away, eventually (in severely redacted form) to be published in 1904.

Salò poster.

The work describes the antics of four rich libertine men who spend 120 days in a remote castle where, attended by servants, they inflict on 20 victims (mostly adolescents and young women) 600 of their “passions”, enacted in an orgy of violence and sexual acts as depraved as the author could imagine; it’s not clear how much of what he documented came from his imagination or recollections (the documentary evidence of what he did as opposed to what he thought or wrote is vanishing sparse).  Like Pasolini’s film, as a piece of literature it divides opinion on the same “love it” or “hate it” basis and when in the post-war years it began to appear in unexpurgated form (over the decades many jurisdictions would gradually would overturn their ban on its sale) it attained great notoriety, both as “forbidden fruit” and for a capacity genuinely to shock or appal.  The stated purpose of the 1904 publication by a German psychiatrist and sexologist was that the work had a utility as a kind of “source document” for the profession, helping them to understand what might be in the minds of their more troubled (or troublesome) patients.  It’s value to clinicians was it constituted a roll-call of the worst of man’s unbridled sexual fantasies and impulses to inflict cruelty, allowing a “filling-in of the gaps” between what a patient admitted and what a psychiatrist suspected, a process something like Rebecca West’s (1892–1983) vivid impression of Rudolf Hess (1894–1987; Nazi Deputy Führer 1933-1941) after observing him in the dock during the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946): “He looked as if his mind had no surface, as if every part of it had been blasted away except the depth where the nightmares live.”

Salò poster.

So for the profession it was a helpful document because uniquely (as far as is known), it documented the thoughts and desires which most repress or at least leave unstated although the awful implication of that was that wider publication may not be a good idea because it might “give men ideas and unleash the beast within”.  Certainly, it was one of literature’s purest expressions of a desire for a freedom to act unrestricted by notions such as morality or decency and while those possibilities would seduce some, most likely would agree with the very clever and deliciously wicked English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who in Leviathan (1651) described life in such a world being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  De Sade was reportedly most upset at the loss of the manuscript he’d hidden within the Bastille but resumed writing and political activism under the First Republic (1789–1799) and in Napoleonic France (1799–1815) but his pornographic novels attracted the attention of the authorities which again imprisoned him but, after sexually assaulting youthful inmates he was diagnosed with libertine dementia and confined to lunatic asylums where, until his death in 1814, he continued to write and even stage dramatic productions, some of which were attended by respectable parts of Parisian society.

Salò poster.

Passolini followed De Sade in having his four central characters represent the centres of authority (the Church, the law, finance and the state) in Italy (and, by extension, Western capitalist states generally) and Salò genuinely can be interpreted as a critique of modern consumerism, the exploitative nature of capitalism and right-wing populism.  In setting it in the rather squalid vassal state Hitler set up to try to maintain the illusion of an ally being retained, Passolini made fascism a particular focus of his attack but the allegorical nature of the film, politely noted by most critics and historians has always been secondary to the violence and depravity depicted.  For some amateur psychologists, Salò was there to reinforce their worst instincts about Pasolini, their suspicion being it was an enactment of his personal fantasies and imaginings, a record in cellulose acetate of what he’d have done had he “been able to get away with it”.  Whether or not that’s though fair will depend on one’s background and the extent to which one is prepared to separate art from artist; as an artist, Pasolini to this day had many admirers and defenders.

Salò poster.

Three weeks before Salò’s predictably controversial premiere, at the age of 53, Pasolini was murdered, his brutally beaten body found on a beach; a 17 year old rent-boy (one of many who had passed through Passolini’s life) confessed to being the killer but decades later would retract that statement.  The truth behind the murder still isn’t known and there are several theories, some sordid and some revolving around the right-wing terrorism which in Italy claimed many lives during the 1970s.  What the director’s death did mean was he never had a chance to make a film more explicit than Salò and in may be that in the Giallo genre such a thing would not have been possible because the only thing more shocking would have been actual “snuff” scenes in which people really did die, such productions legends of the darkest corners of the Dark Web although there seems no evidence any have ever been seen.  What Pasolini would have done had he lived can’t be known but he may not have returned to Giallo because, in the vein, after Salò, there was really nowhere to go.

Yellow as a color

Lamborghinis in Giallo Fly, clockwise from top left: 1969 Miura P400 S, 1973 Jarama 400 GT, 1988 Jalpa and 1976 Countach LP400 Periscopio,  A solid yellow color first offered by Lamborghini on the Miura in 1968, Giallo Fly translates literally as "yellow fly" but is best understood in English as “Fly Yellow” with the “fly” element used not as a noun (ie the annoying insect) but in the way Italians use the English adjective “fly” with the sense of “fast, flashy, stylish, eye-catching”.  That sentiment must have been in the mind of the Jalpa owner who had the wheels also finished in Giallo Fly, the factory never that committed to monochromaticity. 

Publicity shot for Lamborghini LP500 Countach, 1971.

The Lamborghini LP500 Countach prototype which, on debut, made such an impact at the 1971 Geneva Show Salon, is sometimes listed as being painted in Giallo Fly but it was really a different mix, listed in the factory archives as Giallo Fly Speciale.  The lines are now essentially "supercar orthodoxy" but in 1971, although not wholly novel, they seemed other-worldly.  In 1974, the car was destroyed in a crash test at England’s MIRA (Motor Industry Research Association) facility but in 2021 an almost exact replica was built by Polo Storico (the factory’s historical centre), the paint exactly re-created.  Despite the impression which lingered into the 1980s, giallo was never the “official” color of Lamborghini, but variations of the shade have become much associated with the brand and in the public imagination, the factory’s Giallo Orion probably has become something of a signature shade.  When Lamborghini first started making cars in the early 1960s (it was a manufacturer of tractors!) no official color was designated but the decision was taken to use bold, striking colors (yellow, orange, and a strikingly lurid green) to differentiate them from Ferraris which then were almost twice as likely than today to be some shade of red.

Lamborghini factory yellows, 2024.

Over the years, the factory’s palette would change but the emphasis on bright “energetic” hues remained.  Customers are no longer limited to what’s in the brochure and, for a fee, one’s Lamborghini can be finished in any preferred shade, a service offered also by many manufacturers although Ferrari apparently refuse to “do pink”.  An industry legend is that according to Enzo Ferrari’s (1898-1988) mistress (Fiamma Breschi (1934-2015)), when the original Ferrari 275 GTB (1964-1968) appeared in a bright yellow, it was to be called Fiamma Giallo (Flame Yellow) but Commendatore Ferrari himself renamed it to Giallo Fly (used in the sense of “flying”) which he thought would be easier to market and he wanted to keep a word starting with “F”.  Both Ferrari and Lamborghini have at times had Giallo Fly in their color charts.

Ferrari Enzo (Tipo F140, named after the company's founder: Commendatore Enzo Ferrari (1898-1988)) in Giallo Modena.

Not everybody is fond of yellow cars but there are those who either overlook or like the hue because in January 2026 a 2003 Ferrari Enzo in Giallo Modena realized at auction almost US$18 Million, making it the most expensive Enzo ever across the block.  Record-setting prices for Ferraris are far from unusual but this Enzo nearly tripled the model’s previous mark of US$6.26 million set in 2023.  The sale was achieved at the Mecum Kissimmee event and although observers noted the thing “ticked every box” on the collector car clipboard, the price exceeded all expectations.  Among the many boxes ticked were:

Low mileage (649 miles (1044 km).
Matching numbers: (Serial # 135262; Engine # 79700; Gearbox # 280; Body # 108).
1 of 400 built (2002-2004), 127 of which were delivered in the US.
1 of 36 finished Giallo Modena (paint code DS 4305) 11 of which were delivered in the US.
Factory custom Rosso and Giallo “Daytona style” seats in leather with stitched Enzo Ferrari signature.
Schedoni luggage set.
Ferrari Classiche certified with Red Book.
A number of unique features installed by the factory including polished engine bay braces and body-color lower trim & rear diffuser panel (rather than the usual black) with all original paperwork including window sticker, books, manuals & tools along with a binder of photographs, supplementary documentation and a car cover.

1962 Ferrari 250 GTO in Bianco Speciale.

Only time will tell whether the Enzo's sale price will be an outlier or prove part of what’s claimed to be “a trend” in which was part of a larger trend in which the rarest and most desirable of the later model “analog” Ferraris are beginning to rival the historical dominance of the pre-modern (pre 1973) cars.  It can be hard to pick a “trend” from “a phase the market is going through” and what was interesting was the sale at the same auction for US$38.5 million of the most analog of all Ferraris: a 1962 250 GTO.  The GTO was notable for being the only one of the three-dozen odd made (there a different ways of calculating the build but most NRS (normally reliable sources) quote 36) finished in Bianco Speciale and thus “the only white 250 GTO”; while US$38.5 million is a lot of money, expectation had been it may be bid well over US$50 million.  The car had a solid but not exceptional period history and it was thought the genuine uniqueness of the paint may nudge things quite high (a 250 GTO has sold for over US$70 million) but as well as the vagaries of the supply & demand, factors influencing the result were thought to be (1) the non-original engine and (2) it being RHD (right-hand drive).  Still, it’s a 250 GTO and at that price may yet prove a bargain.

Although distortions in the collector-car market are a classic “first world problem” the market should be of interest to economists because as well as the case studies of certain models, collectively, movements in the industry’s outcomes likely function as a kind of litmus paper test for blips in the broader physical economy and while that’s of interest, it may prove especially interesting if the chartists (a breed of analysts who perfected their craft by mapping movements in the futures markets against other metrics, producing charts which were striking in their predictive power) start running the numbers.  The increase in the money supply in the 21^st century has been extraordinary.  Billionaires used to be a rarity but the term is now common (although often misleading) and depending on how Elon Musk’s (b 1971) latest venture goes, he may become the world’s first “trillionaire”.  It all began with the so-called “Greenspan put” (named after Dr Alan Greenspan (b 1926; chairman of the US Federal Reserve (the Fed) 1987-2006 who became one of that rare species, the “celebrity economist”) which in 2001 “provided liquidity” in an attempt to prevent a recession.  Then there was the “sub-prime crisis” in 2007-2008 which created the GFC (Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2012) and because the rich lost a lot of money that had to be fixed, the solution essentially being governments and central banks giving them money.  The system works.  On paper that should have had had an inflationary effect but because the money ended up in the hands only of the rich, the inflationary effect tended to be sector specific (though there was a bit of trickle down), thus the rising prices of vintage Ferraris, works of art, already expensive real estate etc.  Next there was the COVID-19 pandemic and this did provoke more generalized inflation because governments (most unwillingly) were compelled to spread the extra money more widely (ie to the poor).

The old measures of the money supply (M1, M2 etc) have ceased to be relevant because the model of the Regan-Thatcher (Ronald Reagan (1911-2004; POTUS 1981-1989) & Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; UK prime-minister 1979-1990)) era (drive up asset prices while restricting the money supply) is over.  In parts of the libertarian right, there’s long been an argument the US government didn’t need to levy taxes because it could just issue whatever was required for its functions and that’s a variant of what’s now being done.  The banks turn up at the Fed’s discount window and borrow xx billions which they then lend to the government, “clipping the coupon” by virtue of the charging government a higher interest rate than the Fed charges them.  When loans fall due, the banks clip another coupon and lend the government more money.  Thus the US national debt of US$38 trillion-odd (in excess of 120% of GDP (gross domestic product)) and despite predictions in the past there may be “psychological thresholds” (US$10 trillion, US$20 trillion etc), things continued and it may be a debt number of US$50 or US$100 trillion attracts a similar reaction.  There was a time when a US$38 trillion national debt would have been thought at least a “problem” and probably a “crisis” but now it seems accepted as the “new normal” and as well as the US, the whole world economy now depends on this method of operation, the rationale apparently that, if need be, the US Treasury could mint a single US$40 trillion coin and declare a “net debt-free” status.  Economists seem divided on the implications of such a minting but the lawyers are at one in declaring it constitutional.

1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 NART Spider (Chassis #09437) in Giallo Solare (left), Lady Gaga (the stage-name of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (b 1986)) in Rodarte dress at the Elton John AIDS Foundation Academy Awards Viewing Party, Los Angeles, March 2022 (centre) and 2010 Ferrari 599 SA Aperta (chassis #181257) in Giallo Lady Gaga (right).

Factory paint tag: Giallo Lady Gaga.

Ferrari over the decades have offered many shades of yellow including Ardilla Amarillo, Ardilla Amarillo Opaco, Giallo Dino, Giallo Fly, Giallo Kuramochi, Giallo Lady Gaga, Giallo Libano, Giallo Modena, Giallo Montecarlo, Giallo Montecarlo Opaco, Giallo My Swallow, Giallo Nancy, Giallo Senape, Giallo Solare, Giallo Triplo Strato & Yellow Olive Magno Opaco and one suspects the job of mixing the shades might be easier than coming up with an appropriately evocative name.  One color upon which the factory seems never to have commented is Giallo Lady Gaga which seems to have been a genuine one-off, applied to a 599 SA Aperta, one of 80 built in 2010.  The car is seen usually in Gstaad, Switzerland and the consensus is it was a special order from someone although quite how Lady Gaga inspired the shade isn’t known.  As a color, it looks very close to Giallo Solare, the shade the factory applied to the 275 GTB/4 NART Spider used in the Hollywood film The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) which was re-painted in burgundy because the darker shade worked better for the cinematographer.  The car had come second in class in the 1967 Sebring 12 Hours (with two female drivers, Denise McCluggage (1927–2015) & Marianne "Pinkie" Rollo (b 1933)) and was one of only two of the ten NART Spiders will aluminium coachwork.

Coat of arms of the municipality of Modena in the in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy (left), cloisonné shield on 1971 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Berlinetta in Giallo Dino (centre) (the band of silver paint across the nose appears on the early-build Daytonas fitted with the revised frontal styling (the acrylic headlight glass covers used between 1968-1970 were banned by US regulations) and stick-on badge on 1975 Dino 308 GT4 in Rosso Corsa (right).  Not all approve of the stickers (unless applied by the factory) and although they seem to be dying off, there are pedants who insist they should never appear on Dinos made between 1967-1975 (which were never badged as Ferraris).

Lindsay Lohan in a yellow piece from Stella McCartney's (b 1971) Spring 2025, the New York Post's Alexa magazine, 5 December, 2024.  The closest match to this color on Lamborghini's chart would be Giallo Spica.

Just as yellow came to be associated with Lamborghini, red is synonymous with Ferraris and in 2024, some 40% are built in some shade of red, a rate about half of what was prevalent during the 1960s.  The most famous of Ferrari’s many reds remains Rosso Corsa (racing red) and that’s a legacy from the early days of motor sport when countries were allocated colors (thus “Italian Racing Red”, “British Racing Green” etc) and yellow was designated for Belgium and Brazil.  On the road and the circuits, there have been many yellow Ferraris, the first believed to been one run in 1951 by Chico Landi (1907-1989) a Brazilian privateer who won a number of events in his home country and the Belgium teams Ecurie Nationale Belge and Ecurie Francorchamps both used yellow Ferraris on a number of occasions.  If anything, yellow is at least “an” official Ferrari color because it has for decades been the usual background on the Ferrari shield and that was chosen because it is an official color of Modena, the closest city to the Ferrari factory, hence the existence of Giallo Modena.