Vatic

Vatic (pronounced vat-ik)

Of, relating to, or characteristic of a prophet; oracular.

1595–1605: From the Latin vātēs (seer, prophet, poet, bard), the construct being vat + -ic.  Vātēs (the alternative form was vātis) was from the Proto-Italic wātis, from the primitive Indo-European wéhtis (seer), from weht- (to be excited).  The –ic suffix (-ick an obsolete form) is from the Middle English -ik, from the Old French -ique, from the Latin -icus, from the primitive Indo-European -kos, formed with the i-stem suffix and the adjectival suffix –kos.  It was used on noun stems and carried the meaning “characteristic of, like, typical, pertaining to” and on adjectival stems acted emphatically.  In the Ancient Greek the form was -ικός (-ikós), in the Sanskrit it was -इक (-ika) and in the Old Church Slavonic, -ъкъ (-ŭkŭ).  Vatic & vatical are adjectives, vaticination is a noun, varticular is a verb and vatically is an adverb; the noun plural is vaticinations.

Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (1895–1989), known as La Pasionaria (the passionflower) for her anguished oratory, was a communist politician in the Spanish republic which, proclaimed in 1931, prompted the king (Alfonso XIII 1886–1941; King of Spain 1886-1931) to flee with a sizable chunk of the state exchequer.  The botanical reference in her moniker need not be taken literally because the passionflower (Passiflora, a genus of over five-hundred species of the family Passifloraceae) had long been used as a calmative, a folk remedy for anxiety, insomnia and stress, all conditions hardly likely to be ameliorated by listening to Señora Ibárruri’s polemics.  The allusion was wholly linguistic.

By 1936, tensions between the leftist republic and the conservative factions of the old monarchial state were hinting at war and a fascist politician, José Calvo Sotelo (1893-1936; First Duke of Calvo Sotelo), threatened the new government with a military takeover.  At this arose the black-garbed figure of La Pasionaria who, pointing her finger at Sotelo, intoned: “Ese fue tu ultimo discurso” (That was your last speech).  It proved a vatic utterance; within days Republican assault guards dragged Sotelo from his house and shot him dead, dumping the corpse at Madrid’s East Cemetery.  This was the point at which General Franco (Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975; Caudillo of Spain 1939-1975)) concluded the government could no longer govern; the Spanish Civil War became inevitable.

Official photograph of José Calvo Sotelo as leader of the Renovación Española (Spanish Renovation, a right-wing monarchist political party), 1930 (left) and his body, dumped around 4 am by his murderers, outside the cemetery in East Madrid, 13 July, 1936 (right).  Although likely apocryphal, one of the many tales told about Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015; prime minister of Singapore 1959-1990) is that he kept locked in a drawer the photograph of Sotelo's corpse, there to remind himself what would be his fate were the communists to take over in Singapore.  

Although La Pasionaria would always deny having said the words, they passed into the myths and legends of the conflict and, given it was about the bloodiest thing imaginable, of those there were plenty.  What she never disowned was another phrase, “No pasarán” (They shall not pass), one she used, with some variations, on several occasions, most famously in 1936 during the Battle for Madrid in a speech which concluded “Long live the Popular Front! Long live the union of all anti-fascists! Long live the Republic of the people! The Fascists shall not pass! THEY SHALL NOT PASS!”  This time her words proved not vatical, General Franco, upon the fall of Madrid in 1939 proclaiming "Hemos pasado" (We have passed).

It was a phrase with history, best remembered from the World War One Battle of Verdun when it was used by French General Robert Nivelle (1856-1924) and was soon adopted by other units of the French army, appearing in propaganda material after the Second Battle of the Marne (July-August 1918).  As late as 1940, it was an inscription on some uniforms worn by soldiers manning the Maginot Line but on that occasion, vatic though it was, the sense was soon ironic; the Germans didn’t pass the Maginot Line, by-passing it instead.

La Pasionaria had a feeling for a phrase.  Although on the other side, there were plenty of twentieth-century fascists who gleefully would have embraced (if not adopted) some of her epithets.  Such similarities between communists and fascists were noted by  Winston Churchill (1874-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) and Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946; Nazi foreign minister 1938-1945), for different reasons, both fair judges of such things.

Tea-towel available from the Radical Tea-Towel Company (a juxtaposition of words which can't often have been contemplated) at US$22.00, 19 x 27 inches (480 x 700mm), heavyweight, unbleached organic cotton with a hanging loop. Designed in Wales and ethically printed, cut and sewn in England.  The famous battle cry "No pasarán!" was taken up by British anti-fascists during the October 1936 Battle of Cable Street.   The Radical Tea Towel Company also offers Battle of Cable St and Spanish Civil War tea towels.

Statue of La Pasionaria, River Clyde, Glasgow. Scotland.

Emoji

Emoji (pronounced ih-moh-jee)

In digital technology, a small digital picture or pictorial symbol that represents a thing, feeling, concept etc, used in text messages and other electronic communications, now usually as part of a standardized set.  Technically an emoji is a digital graphic icon with a unique code point.

1999: From a creation in Japanese translating literally as “pictograph”, the construct being e- (picture, drawing) + moji (written character or letter).  In the original Japanese it’s 絵文字 (えもじ, emoji), the construct being 絵 (え (e, (picture)) + 文字 (もじ (moji) (character).

Proto emojis: Puck Magazine 1881.

Because of a cross-lingual phonetic coincidence, emoji is often thought related to the word emotion, a natural connection because it’s emotions that emojis are now used to convey.  That was the connection with the emoji’s predecessor, the emoticon, the concept of text-based symbols being used to replace certain instances of formal language.  The first codified form of the emoticon set was released in 1982 and used the standard ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set assembled to represent ideas as images ((*_*) being a face, : ( sadness, : (( extreme sadness etc).  The idea wasn’t new, various punctuation marks used for hundreds of years in a similar manner, including in newspapers and books, but there had never been any standardization except that which existed by agreement between regular correspondents although, in 1881, American magazine Puck published four symbols which could be used to convey joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment.  Assembled using standard shapes from mechanical type-setting, Puck probably either created or at least legitimized what came to be called typographical art.

The idea of localised conventions would later appeal to a community using a common means of communication with a closed character set: Morse Code operators who devised their own convenient shorthand, a set of numbers transmitted by a short series of dots and dashes, which all understood represented longer strings of text, commonly used messages including:

1- Wait a moment

4- Where shall I go ahead?

6- I am ready

7- Are you ready?

8- Close your key; circuit is busy

12- Do you understand?

13- I understand

24- Repeat this back

27- Priority, very important

29- Private, deliver in sealed envelope.

73- Best regards

88- Love and kisses

92- Deliver promptly

The concept is exactly the same as the part of the algorithm used by data compression programs (ZIP and others) whereby small values are used to represent (and replace) larger ones, hence the ability to compress file-size.  The pragmatic Morse operator's list was mostly business-like, focused on transmitting the most information with the fewest taps but there were a couple more romantic: 73 meant “best regards” and 88 “love and kisses”, both of which would become stalwarts in the world of emoticons and emojis.

Lindsay Lohan Emojis.

The idea of the emoticon, still a disparate thing without standards, began to coalesce in the 1990s, Microsoft bundling the wingdings truetype font with Windows and by the middle of the decade, the first SMS (short message services) products, the protocols for which had evolved as part of the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standards, were released.  Strange as it may sound in an age when SMS messages number annually in the trillions, the take-up rate was initially slow but growth was soon exponential.  Screen-focused, emoticons were always integral to SMS.

Shigetaka Kurita’s 1999 DoCoMo emoji set.

While not the first emoji set, that being a plain black collection included with the Japanese J-Phone in 1997, it’s Shigetaka Kurita’s (b 1972) release in 1999 which is the first notable landmark.  Interestingly, reflecting the intention to make communication more efficient on NTT DoCoMo's business-oriented cellular platform, apart from some hearts (intact and broken), the 176 in the set didn’t include many to convey emotion, although in the abstract, the one representing a beer glass was often used to suggest “I need a drink”.  The beginnings were modest, reflecting both the hardware and the mobile networks of the time; although bright, each was rendered in a single color and the bitmapped shape was blocky but the range and definition constantly improved to the point where, unlike emoticons, emojis really are pictures rather than typographic approximations and this has influenced the use of the word, "emoji" now sometimes applied to just about any small picture in any digital context.

A splash of vomit emojis.

In the English-speaking world, critical mass in terms of adoption was reached in 2012, the year after Apple added an official set to the iOS keyboard, Android following in 2014 when KitKat was released.  Apple had included emojis in the Japanese releases of iOS since 2008 and may have been tempted to extend availability when it became apparent how many hacks existed to gain the feature on devises using other languages.  What made that viable was emoji, in 2010, being standardized by Unicode (the non-profit consortium which maintains text standards on digital devices globally) which meant emojis could be sent and received by any device, regardless of operating system or platform.  By then, the standard set had grown to almost a thousand.  The Unicode Consortium has been busy ever since, creating an emoji subcommittee which has so much business to transact it meets at least weekly and their output has been prodigious: by September 2021, over 3,600 emojis had been approved, 112 in the last release alone.

Crooked Hillary Clinton emoji.

A character set in the thousands and growing has however changed the nature of the emoji as a language supplement, it once being possible to know them all and rely on many others also knowing most.  With so many, it’s become just another language, a system where every user has their own sub-set and analysis of traffic suggests for most this can be just a handful and even among devotees it’s rare for them regularly to display a vocabulary of more than a few dozen.  While, as a medium of meaning, the emoji does depend on an intuitive understanding of appearance, if some are too weird or mysterious, there is Emojipedia, an on-line emoji reference which documents changes and definitions and EmojiTranslate is a website where the translation of text to emoji (and vice versa) is handled.  Even that isn’t enough to satisfy the evidentiary standards of courts in some jurisdictions, accredited translators now sometimes used to translate the meaning of emojis where material using them is tendered in evidence.  Emoji is just another language and something in one cultural context can mean something else in another, the meaning the sender implied perhaps the opposite of what the receiver inferred.  On the basis of established principles such as “reasonable doubt” or “balance of probabilities”, courts must decide.

The New Yorker, 30 March 2015.

Out in the world of the emoji freaks, books have been written using nothing but emojis, a concept not new.  In the 1990s, one pop-music journalist, displeased at the quality of an interview with a singer he was about to publish, rendered the whole thing in the zaph dingbat font (which in professional typesetting had existed since the 1970s), rendering it an illegible cryptogram to all except those who had memorized the mapping of the font.  Such people do exist but they’re rare and it’s not clear if the writer succeeded in his aim to make more interesting a boring interview.  One magazine to find a novel use was the fine New Yorker which, in 2015, ran a cover featuring Crooked Hillary Clinton emojis when discussing the mail server affair, one of the many scandals attached to her although, they unfortunately resisted the temptation to integrate a delete key into one.  Perhaps inspired, in her presidential campaign, crooked Hillary tried to weaponize the emoji in a tweet aimed at a younger demographic but received quite a backlash for doing something so obviously cynical; inauthentic being the modern term.

The work of the consortium has also been cognizant of forces operating more widely.  In 2014, they began to address the lack of racial and gender DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) in the little images, the population disproportionately male and white, a distortion of reality hardly appropriate in what was to some degree one of the world’s global languages.  In this they were later than some; in 2012, the ever-woke Apple included in iOS 6 several emojis of same-sex couples.  Although all were shown holding hands, they didn’t look any happier than their more traditional predecessors but there are limitations with what can be achieved on such a tiny digital canvas.  In another sign of the times, over the years, guns morphed into less threatening water-pistols.  Perhaps strangely, the pandemic didn’t produce a flood of corona-themed images, Apple’s set still the only of the majors to include something recognizably SARS-Cov-2ish.  Still, there's plenty of time, world emoji day is 17 July and COVID-19, unlike some of us, is expected to be alive and well for many Julys to come.

Droste

Droste (pronounced dross-tee)

(1) A surname of Germanic origin.

(2) An object displaying the Droste effect.

1904: The Droset effect is named after an image of a nurse carrying a serving tray with a cup of hot chocolate and the box, the image thus replicating.  The Droste brand was from the Netherlands and was founded in 1863 by Gerardus Johannes Droste (1836-1923), the image was designed by Jan Musset (1861–1931.  The packaging of the cocoa powder was first used in 1904.  The surname’s origin was in the German province of Westphalia, the name derived from the Old German drotsete, derived from the elements truth (body of servants) and sizzen (to preside).  The surname Droste thus denotes a head servant or steward, in charge of a nobleman's household servants.  The first known instance of the name appearing in records was found in Schweinheim, Westphalia in 1335.  The variations in the spelling of the name included Droste, Drost, Droz, Drossate, Drossaerd, Drossärd, Drossart and others.  Droste is a noun and adjective; the noun plural is Drostes.

A box of Droste cocoa powder, which demonstrates the effect to which it lent the name.

In French, the equivalent term is mise-en-abyme (plural mise en abymes or mises en abyme), (literally “placement into abyss”).  Long familiar in art and advertising, it was first used as device of literary criticism by the French author André Gide (1869–1951), whose output was varied but in the field of literary criticism was usually comprehendible, unlike some of what would later emerge from Paris.  His private (in his case a relative term) life was less admired.  In literature, the expression of the idea varies from introspection to the interpolation of a version of the work into the work itself; a story within a story.  In its more arcane interpretations, it’s used in deconstructive literary criticism to explore the inter-textual consequences of language (language abstracted from the constructed “reality” of the text).

A visual representation of the original Droste in an infinite loop (choose loop option to run).  Depending on how one defines infinity, an actual Droste probably can’t exist because at some point the light reflecting to define the image would become a single photon and because light cannot be smaller than a photon, the loop must stop.  It can however be described to the point where the loop tends toward infinity because whatever the visual dimension might be, descriptively it can (as a mathematical expression) be halved.  Infinity itself, although it probably doesn’t exist, can also be described although perhaps not as an equation.

London based art design group Hipgnosis played with the idea for the album cover for Pink Floyd's Ummagumma (1969).

Album cover art was an interesting phenomenon because it came and went in little more than a generation, its very existence deterministic in that it depended on huge sales of vinyl albums in 12.375 x 12.375 inches (314.3 x 314.3 mm) cardboard sleeves.  With the advent of first the smaller CDs (compact disc) and then streaming, the industry's canvas (as it were), vanished.  The historic covers were often used when the material was re-released on CD but, being not even a quarter of the area, as pieces of art, most were less effective.   

Gide was unusually helpful (compared by later French theorists) in provide explanations which could be understood and were genuinely deconstructive in a useful way.  He made clear for example that his allusion to the Droste effect in the visual arts (infinite regression of form) did not imply a direct application of the concept to literature; he was discussing the use of the representation of a work within a work and makes the point that pure regression within something like a novel would be an absurd loop.  Instead, his conception was of structural elements of a novel appearing within the text as a way a author can construct meaning by creating or resolving conflict.

A Lindsay Lohan Droste image, rendered as a pen drawing by Vovsoft.

In computing, the mechanics of the idea is expressed as a quine (a computer with no dependence of user (or third-party) input, the only output of which is a replicated copy of its own source code).  Usually called, "a self-replicating program", quine was coined by US physicist Douglas Hofstadter (b 1945) and appeared first in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979) in honor of US philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) who wrote widely about indirect self-reference.  Hofstadter’s core concept in Gödel, Escher, Bach is elusive but is probably best understood as revolving around the interplay of loops in the mathematical structures in art, music and language.  It is not an easy read.

Quantum

Quantum (pronounced kwon-tuhm)

(1) A quantity or amount.

(2) A particular quantity or amount.

(3) A share or portion.

(4) A large quantity; something ordered, delivered or stored in bulk.

(5) In physics, the smallest quantity of some physical property, such as energy, that a system can possess according to the quantum theory; involving quanta, quantum mechanics or other aspects of quantum physics.

(6) A particle with such a unit of energy; the fundamental unit of a quantized physical magnitude, as angular momentum.

(7) Of change: (1) classically, sudden or discrete, without intermediate stages & (2) in modern adjectival use, something sudden and significant.

(8) In mathematics, a definite portion of a manifoldness, limited by a mark or by a boundary.

(9) In law, a brief document provided by the judge, elaborating on a sentencing decision (now most often used in the sub-continent); the total amount of something; the quantity.

(10) In computer operating systems, the amount of time allocated for a thread to perform its work in a multithreaded environment.

(11) In computer design, short for "quantum computing" or "quantum computer".

(12) In medicine, the minimum dose of a pathogen required to cause an infection.

1610-1620: From the Late Latin quantum, noun use of the neuter form of the Classical Latin quantus (how much).  Quantum was imported from Latin to physics by German theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) to describe the concept of the "minimum amount of a quantity which can exist".  Quantum theory is from 1912 and quantum mechanics from 1922, the latter much associated with German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) who in 1927 deduced his "uncertainty principle", declaring an electron may have a determinate position, or a determinate velocity, but not both.  In physics, the term "quantum jump" (the abrupt transition from one stationary state to another) came into use in 1954 while "quantum leap" (sudden large advance) dates from 1963 and in figurative use (by non-physicists) describes some drastic change or radical advance in some aspect of something (and is thus often synonymous with that other favorite of post-modernists, the "paradigm shift".  There are pedants (and one suspects few of them actually comprehend quantum theory) who insist “quantum leap” in the sense of “sudden & big is wrong but it’s just part of the evolution of English in its usual democratic way.  Quantum is a noun and adjective; the noun plural is quantums or quanta.

IBM quantum computer.

In an announcement little noted outside the nerd community, in late 2021 IBM introduced the CLOPS (Circuit Layer Operations per Second) performance standard for quantum computing.  As a measuring metric, CLOPS corresponds to the number of quantum circuits a QPU (quantum processing unit) can execute per unit of time, the innovation compared with previous standards such as FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second) and its variations (ranging from kiloFLOPS (KFlops:10³) to yottaFLOPS (YFlops: 10²⁴)), in that it expresses not only the actual speed at which the workload is processed and successfully completed but also adjusts to account for the latency of the interaction between the quantum and classical computing realms.  It must be noted that to date, the pure quantum computer has existed only in theory and that functions now executed in the quantum space involve an interaction, being mediated via a classical binary computer which translates workloads into a QPU-compatible format, retrieves the workload's results and presents them in an understandable form.  CLOPS thus accounts for not only the interval of time that the workload is actually being processed at the qubit (quantum bit) level, but also the time it takes for the system to translate and transfer information across both components. If written down, a yottaFLOP (10²⁴) is a number with 24 trailing zeros (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) and that's one septillion calculations per second.  It now sounds a big number and by most standards it certainly is; probably even trillionaire Elon Musk (b 1971) would be impressed (a trillion (10¹²) has twelve zeros (1,000,000,000,000).  However, advances in computing (quantum as well as bio-computers that are a blend of manufactured hardware good at many things and a biological brain better at others) will continue and beyond yotta awaits ronna (10²⁷) and quetta (10³⁰).  Numbers are infinite so if the FLOPs count ends up as something now inconceivably large, all that will be required is another tag in the lineage that began modestly enough with kilo (10³) & mega (10⁶).   

Dating back decades, IBM has published many standards which the industry has adopted ranging from specifications for memory addressing to video displays (the once-famous CGA (Color Graphics Adaptor), EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adaptor), VGA (Video Graphics Array), XGA (eXtended Graphics Array)) and had for some time discussed the need for a harmonized standard for quantum computing.  Until CLOPS was announced, the measures had usually been expressed in terms of two of quantum’s three planes: (1) scale which pertains to the number of qubits present in any given system and (2) quality which refers to the proportion of qubits that can perform usable work expressed via quantum volume.  What CLOPS does is provide a formula to express a measure of (3) speed.  IBM has published CLOPS results for some of its quantum computing systems using machines constructed with between five and 64 qubits and it was interesting to note all had a similar quantum volume score, their actual speed (expressed in CLOPS) varied between 753 and 1419 layers per second; as IBM predicted, it was latency which accounted for the difference.  Noting that, IBM also published results from their Qiskit (Quantum Information Software Kit for Quantum Computation) project which focuses on reducing the latency in the quantum-classic computing translation layer seriously via closer physical proximity between the objects, some experiments reducing run-time cycles from 45 days to nine hours.  The company expects CLOPS to be the defined measure of quantum computing in its present form as FLOPs and its variations were to super-computing.

Lindsay Lohan: Manifestation, Fame, and the Alchemy of Identity (2025) by The Universe Unveiled.  A slim volume of 70 pages (ISBN-13 979-8294189518) the book is one of the less anticipated applications of the language of quantum mechanics.

The term “quantum theatre” does not come from theoretical physics but is, a little opportunistically, a figurative form.  It’s used to refer to situations, environments or performances where there’s some felling of “instability” in reality, a perception multiple contradictory outcomes appear to be happening at the same time, one implication being the observer being able to “change reality” merely by the act of watching.  What the term adapts from quantum mechanics are the concepts superposition, entanglement and the observer effect, applying them to aspects of human behaviour: politics, art or anything performative.  So, while opportunistic, the re-purposing is compelling because “superposition” is best understood as the “illusion of choice” and that’s used to describe a situation in which all possibilities in theory exist but, at the point when a decision is made, the illusion collapses into a single reality and that can be satisfying, disappointing, chaotic, disastrous or any of the possibilities.  In a number of interviews, Ms Lohan has reflected on the consequences of those “moments of decision”.

Quantum Theatre, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

The “observer effect” is especially relevant.  The essence of reality television, social media and such, it describes the phenomenon of the behaviour of individuals changing purely because they know they are being watched.  The actions of living things are different from those of inanimate objects; a sofa does not respond to being looked at but people sitting on it might be so influenced, making a “performance” fundamentally artificial compared with what would have happened had they not become aware of being viewed.  The now well-documented “perception-driven reality” (an environment where facts matter less than how the audience perceives them) is what underpins the success of social media, the mechanisms explained decades earlier in cognitive theory, the very “theatre” shifting shape based on a viewer's bias.  Most intriguing of course is connected chaos (entanglement).  In the figurative use, that’s a narrative or situation in which two unrelated events or people are deeply linked, an act in one place instantly changing the dynamics in another. As an aspect of the understanding of the “performative”, the possibilities of that have been explored in art, stage plays or interactive exhibits that allow the audience's choices or presence physically to change the story or ending and the advances in AI (artificial intelligence) hint this may the future of on-screen entertainment, the audience becoming part of the cast and interacting with the characters.  A concept long possible in the pages of fictional texts, it may soon be coming to a screen near you.

New York City, 9/11.

German photographer Thomas Hoepker (1936–2024) was for decades attached to the Magnum Agency and on 11 September, 2001, while in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he took what became a controversial photograph of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the WTC (World Trade Center).  Herr Hoepker, for obvious reasons, was attempting to get close to southern Manhattan but he parked his car when he saw what struck him as a “strange scene” in the aftermath of the attack: A group of young people lounging on a bench as a cloud of black smoke drifted into the blue sky behind them.  Without the knowledge or consent of the subjects, He took the image from a distance, later explaining: “If you started a conversation or asked permission, you would change any authentic situation in an instant.”  Such was an old documentarian’s understanding of the “observer effect” and he also appreciated the effect the juxtaposition might have if published at the time; not until a retrospective of his work was exhibited in 2006 was the photograph publicly displayed.  As he had expected, much comment suggested there was “callousness” being shown but two of the subjects subsequently responding in a letter to a magazine: “We were in a profound state of shock and disbelief.  Had Hoepker walked 50 feet over to introduce himself, he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened.”  That would have been the “observer effect”.

Elope

Elope (pronounced ih-lohp)

(1) To run off secretly to be married, usually without the consent or knowledge of one's parents.

(2) To run away with a lover.

(3) To leave without permission or notification; escape:

(4) In the slang of geriatric medicine and mental health care (of a person with a mental disorder related to dementia or other cognitive impairment), to leave or run away from a safe area or safe premises.

1300s: From the Middle English alopen (to run away) (from which Anglo-Norman gained aloper) and perhaps influenced by the Middle Dutch lōpen (to run).  The Anglo-Norman aloper (to abduct, to run away from a husband with one’s lover) was from a Germanic source, either the Middle Dutch ontlopen (to run away) or some predecessor thereof.  It was cognate with the German entlaufen (to escape) and the Danish undløbe (to run away).  The sense of "run away in defiance of parental authority to marry secretly" became the standard meaning in the nineteenth century.  The now functionally extinct verb delope did not describe a young couple changing their minds and returning to their families unmarried.  It was unrelated to elope and was from the French déloper (throw away) and meant "to fire a gun into the air in order to end a duel".  Elope is a verb, eloper & elopement are nouns, eloping is a noun & verb and eloped & elopes are verbs; the most common noun plural is elopements.

The Middle Dutch (ont)lopen (run away), from ont- (away from) was from the Proto-Germanic und- (which also gave the first element in until) from the primitive Indo-European root ant- (front, forehead) with derivatives meaning "in front of, before" + lopen (to run) from the Proto-Germanic hlaupan (source also of Old English hleapan) and in support of this etymology, the OED compares Old English uðleapan, the technical word for the “escaping' of a thief”.  However the fourteenth century Anglo-French aloper (run away from a husband with one's lover) does seem the most compelling source.  Of note also is the oldest known Germanic word for "wedding", represented by the Old English brydlop (source also of the Old High German bruthlauft & the Old Norse bruðhlaup (literally "bride run) meaning "the conducting of the woman to her new home”.  Elope is a verb (used without object), eloped & eloping are verbs, elopement and eloper are nouns and the curious uneloped is an adjective.  Words similar in meaning include fly, abscond, skip, leave, decamp, bolt, escape, flee & disappear but, certainly as used today, elope is unique.

Elopement in England and Scotland

The Anglo-Norman aloper was originally a legal term meaning, of a wife, to run away from her husband with a paramour, a court journal from 1338 (during the reign of Edward III) among the earliest known recordings of court proceedings citing the word.  That was noted by John Rastell (circa 1475-1536) and his son, William Rastell (circa 1508-1565) in their 1636 legal textbook which translated what they called “…certaine difficult and obscure Words and Termes of the Common Lawes and Statutes of this Realme” from Old and Middle English into what is still a recognizably modern form.

Elopement they defined as “…when a married woman departeth from her husband with an adulterer, and dwelleth with the adulterer without voluntary reconcilement to her husband, by that she shall lose her dower…”.  They further noted the existence of a legal maxim of the time, in the form of verse:

The woman that her husband leaves

And in adultery leads her life

If that he dye vnreconcil’d

The Law endoweth no such wife

It changed.  From the twelfth to the early nineteenth century, “elope” was used to refer to a wife who had run off with her lover, the meaning shift changing tthe sense to "two single lovers running away to marry", the undeniably romantic act a thing which became popular after passing in England of the Marriage Act (1753) that required those "having not attained their majority" (ie not yet 21) to obtain in writing their parents’  consent.  Marriages being not infrequently arranged by parents with daughters’ opinions either ignored or un-sought, flights from undesired unions also became frequent and an unintended consequence of the act was the boost to Scottish tourism.  Scotland’s legal system was, and remains, separate from that of England and it not only waived the demand for parental consent but permitted marriage between girls of 12 and boys of 14 (clearly, youth "grew up quickly" in Scotland) so there was a happy conjunction between the push from the south and the pull from the north.  A sudden spike in young English lovers hastening over the border to marry ensued.  

Just across the English-Scottish border lay the village of Gretna Green which, improbably, became the Las Vegas of the era.  Under Scottish customary practice, village blacksmiths were known also as “anvil priests”, empowered to perform “anvil weddings” at their forge (although by the eighteenth century the ceremonies usually were conducted in quieter, cleaner surroundings).  Under pressure from both London and the Church of Scotland, in 1856, Scottish marriage laws were amended to try to stem the flow of elopements, requiring a couple to live in a parish for three weeks prior to the ceremony, twenty-one days ample time for families to reclaim runaways.  Scottish commerce however rose to the occasion, offering three-week (room & meals) packages with what hotels now call “silent bookings” (anonymity).  Business continued.

A residual of these times remains in Scottish law, a twenty-one day notice of marriage still required although the residency requirement has been repealed and bride and groom now have to be over sixteen to marry.  Still in the business after two-hundred and sixty years, the Old Blacksmith's Shop in Gretna Green village continues to conduct anvil weddings although there's apparently no guarantee the celebrant will be a genuine blacksmith, those of that profession not now so numerous.  Experiencing something of a post COVID-19 boom, bookings are essential.

It's a changing world and the traditional reasons for elopement now generally less prevalent, the word “elope” has been re-purposed.  When the site SheKnows commented on the path to Lindsay Lohan's nuptials: “They got engaged in November 2021 before eloping in July 2022.”, they appeared to vest "elope" with a very modern sense.  The implication seems to be if a pop-culture figure's wedding happens without being packaged as a photo collection and video stream sold to whichever outlet is (1) thought appropriate and (2) willing to pay the asking price, that’s an elopement.  That sounds right and reflects the wider net cast by contemporary celebrity culture, the modern apparatus of distribution meaning such folk now have millions from whom to elope.

Hatter

Hatter (pronounced hat-er)

(1) A maker or seller of hats.

(2) In Australian slang (1) a person who has become eccentric from living alone in a remote area or (2) a person who lives alone in the bush, as a herder or prospector (now archaic and dating from the 1850s, a synecdoche of “mad as a hatter”).

(3) A student or member of the athletic program at Stetson University in Florida.

(4) In dialectical South Scots, to bother; to get someone worked up (and thus related to the modern “to hassle”).

1350–1400: From the Middle English hatter, the construct being hat + -er.  Hat was from the Middle English hat (head covering), from the Old English hæt (head-covering, hat), from the Proto-Germanic hattuz (hat), from the primitive Indo-European kadh (to guard, cover, care for, protect).  It was cognate with the North Frisian hat (hat), the Danish hat (hat), the Swedish hatt (hat), the Icelandic hattur (hat), the Latin cassis (helmet), the Lithuanian kudas (bird's crest or tuft), the Avestan xaoda (hat), the Persian خود‎ (xud) (helmet) and the Welsh cadw (to provide for, ensure).  The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought usually to have been borrowed from Latin –ārius and reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant was -our), from the Latin -(ā)tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  The –er suffix was added to verbs to create a person or thing that does an action indicated by the root verb; used to form an agent noun.  If added to a noun it usually denoted an occupation.  Hatter is a noun and the rare hattering & hattered are verbs; the noun plural is hatters.

Role model Lindsay Lohan wearing hats.

The synonyms are hatmaker (or hat-maker) & milliner.  As makers of hats, the difference between a hatter and a milliner is that a milliner is a hat-maker specializing (historically bespoke headpieces) in women's headwear (and works at a millinery shop), while a hatter makes hats for men (and works at a hattery).  In the business of selling hats the distinction blurred, especially in the case of operations which dealt with hats for both men and women.  As a retailer, a hatter could deal either exclusively in hats for men for those for both sexes whereas what was sold by a millinery was (at least intended) only for women.  Milliner was from the Middle English Milener (native of Milan), the construct an irregular form of Milan + -er, the link explained by the northern Italian city being the source of many of the fine garments for women imported into England in the late Medieval age.

Depiction of the mad hatter’s tea party.  Created by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), The Hatter appears in both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and though nowhere in the text does the author make reference to a "mad hatter", that is the popular form and not an unreasonable one, given the madness of both The Hatter and the March Hare is confirmed by the Cheshire Cat.  Lewis Carroll was said to be familiar with the traits of madness and the condition suffered by hatters was well known but some literary historians have speculated The Hatter may have been based on an eccentric shop-keeper.  There’s no documentary evidence to support the claim.

Role model JR Ewing (Larry Hagman, 1931–2012) in Stetson hat.

The use of Hatter (usually in the collective Hatters) to describe students or members of the athletic program at Florida’s Stetson University comes from John B Stetson (1830-1906), otherwise famous as the hatter known for his eponymous hats.  The school was in 1883 founded as the DeLand Academy but was in 1889 renamed Stetson after the Mr Hatter joined the Board of Trustees, the change acknowledging his financial largess.  Thus were born the Hatters and the name (informally) extends to the school’s mascot (who is correctly named John B) which wears a Stetson hat, green bandana, and alligator skin boots.  The mascot is considered equal in status to all other members of the school family.

Lindsay Lohan wearing more hats.

The phrase “mad as a hatter” was first recorded in 1829 and is usually attributed to the correlation noted between those engaged in the profession of hat-making and instances of Korsakoff's syndrome induced by the frequency of them handling mercury-contaminated felt.  The nineteenth century speculation of a link with the Old English ātor (poison) or its descendant the Middle English atter (poison, venom,) lacks evidence has long been discredited.  Korsakoff's syndrome was named after the Russian neuropsychiatrist Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff (1854-1900 (his work on alcoholic psychosis still influential)) who identified the syndrome which is induced by both exposure to mercury and chronic alcohol use.  A neurological disorder of the central nervous system caused by a deficiency of thiamine, the symptoms include amnesia, deficits in explicit memory, tremors and general confabulation.  The fourteenth century variant “mad as a March hare” alludes to the crazy behavior of hares during rutting season, mistakenly thought to be only in March.

In 1888, a hydrochloride-based process which obviated the need to use mercury when processing felt was patented and in France and the UK, just before the turn of the century, laws were passed banning the use of substance in the making of hats but, as an illustration of the way things have changed, in the US, the risk was ignored by hatters and their employers alike, even trade unions making no attempt to end its use.  Only with the onset of World War II when all available mercury was needed for military production did US hat makers voluntarily agree to adopt the long available alternative process which used hydrogen peroxide.