Audacity

Audacity (pronounced aw-das-a-tee)

(1) Boldness or daring, especially with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.

(2) Effrontery or insolence; shameless boldness.

1400–1450: From the late Middle English audacite, from the Latin audacis, from audāc, stem of audāx (bold; daring, rash, foolhardy).  The –ity suffix is an import from Latin via French and is used to form a noun from an adjective, especially to form nouns referring to the state, property, or quality of conforming to the adjective's description.  The other Latin forms were audacitas (boldness) and audeō (I am bold, I dare).  In English, the meaning "presumptuous impudence", implying a contempt of moral restraint, is from 1530s.  Audacity & audaciousness are nouns, audacious is an adjective and audaciously is an adverb; the noun plural is audacities (the rarely seen audaciousnesses is a real word). 

HMS Audacity

HMS Audacity was an example of the improvisation required of the Admiralty during the early years of the Second World War when the Navy’s resources were stretched.  The first of her kind, she was originally the German merchant ship SS Hannover, which the Royal Navy captured in 1940, renaming her first Sinbad, then Empire Audacity.  Under the prize laws of war, her cargo, including twenty-nine barrels of pickled sheep pelts, was sold.

HMS Audacity at sea with her Wildcat fighter aircraft secured on the after end of the flight deck, 1940 (left) and the wreck of HMS Audacity (right).  Such was the urgency that there was no time to construct hangers so the aircraft were exposed to the elements at all times.

A minimalist conversion typical of wartime necessity, the early escort carries were true flattops, having no superstructure above the flight deck.  As HMS Empire Audacity, she was commissioned as an "Ocean Boarding Vessel" but in early 1941 was quickly converted to an “escort carrier”, a rudimentary aircraft carrier used to cover shipping vulnerable to submarine attack in the "mid-Atlantic Gap" where there was no air cover from land-based aircraft.  The navy was short of such craft and re-launched her as HMS Audacity.  Traditionally superstitious, sailors have long held that it’s bad luck to rename a ship and so it proved.  Audacity’s pilots had inflicted losses on both German submarines and aircraft and in December 1941, a U-Boat wolf-pack stalking the convoy Audacity was escorting attacked the carrier which sank in little more than an hour, the wreck lying some 500 miles (430 nautical miles; 800 km) west of Cabo Finisterre (Cape Finisterre), a rocky peninsula on Spain's Galician coast.  One notable thing Audacity's brief service did was provide to the Admiralty the needed proof of concept of the inprovised Auxiliary Aircraft Carrier (AAC).  Using very few pilots and aircraft, she proved highly successful in countering the menace of the Luftwaffe's long-range Focke-Wulf Fw 200 (Condor) aircraft and was effective also against the U-Boats.

Lindsay Lohan’s 2012 photo-shoot by Terry Richardson (b 1965) was labelled by admirers as “audacious” although many others were less approving.  A decade on it’s interesting to speculate whether the gun or the cigarette would now be more controversial.

Surreal

Surreal (pronounced suh-ree-uhl (U) or sur-reel (non-U))

(1) Of, relating to, or characteristic of surrealism, an artistic and literary style; surrealistic.

(2) Having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic & and incongruous.

(3) As surrealism, an artistic movement and an aesthetic philosophy that, inter alia, explored the “liberation of the mind” by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the subconscious.

(4) In mathematics as surreal numbers, a collection of numbers which includes both the real numbers and the infinite ordinal numbers, each real number surrounded by surreals, which are closer to it than any real number.

1936: A back formation from surrealism, the construct being ; sur- +‎ realism, from the French surréalisme, the construct being sur- (beyond) +‎ réalisme (realism).  Sur- ((over in the sense of “on top of” & over- in the sense of “excessive; excessively; too much”)) was from the Old French sur-, sour-, sor- & soure-, from a syncopation of the Latin super- (above, on top, over; upwards; moreover, in addition, besides) from the Proto-Italic super, from the primitive Indo-European upér (over, above (and cognate with the Ancient Greek ὑπέρ (hupér) (above) and the Proto-Germanic uber (which in English became “over”)).  The English sur- was from the Middle English sur-, from the Old French sur-, sour-, sor- & soure-, a syncopic form of the Latin super.  Sur is a doublet of super-, over- and hyper-.  Real was from the Middle English real, from the Old French reel, from the Late Latin reālis (actual), from the Latin rēs (matter, thing), from the primitive Indo-European rehís (wealth, goods).  Surreal is a noun & adjective, surreally is an adverb, surrealism & surreality are nouns and surrealistic is an adjective; the noun plural is surreals.

Lobster Telephone (1936) by Salvador Dali, one of a dozen-odd originals (in colors and shades of cream created by the artist).

In French, the noun surréalisme appeared first in the preface to Guillaume Apollinaire's (1880-1918) play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1916-1917 and first performed in 1917).  The word was taken up in the 1920s by French intellectuals who created a number of (competing) Manifeste de Surréalisme (Surrealist manifesto) which were documents exploring the nature of human psychology and the way the radical imagination could produce transformative art.  Such was the nature of their texts, inspiration was offered to groups as diverse as landscape painters and anarchists and anyone else attracted to the idea (if not the business) of revolution.  The English form of the word appeared first in 1931, the French spelling having been in use since 1927.  Surrealist as an adjective and noun (from the 1917 French surréaliste) has been in use since 1925 while the adjective surrealistic dates from 1930.

La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) (1929), oil on canvas, by Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The French text Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe) is an act of deconstruction, a statement that a painting is a representation of something, not the object itself.  It’s a statement of the obvious but is both in the artistic tradition of opposition to oppressive rationalism and an influential strand in the history of Surrealism and Pop Art.

Mama, papa is wounded! (1927) by Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

One of the motifs of surrealist painters was a deliberate disconnection between the title of a work and any immediately obvious meaning. Tanguy’s Mama, papa is wounded! was a painting in one of the recognized surrealist styles: a landscape of wide vista littered with abstract shapes, the title taken from a case-study in a psychiatry textbook.  Beyond mentioning he’d imagined the whole canvas before lifting a brush, Tangay gave no clue about the meaning, but coming so soon after Great War, many focused on a link with the many French causalities of the conflict, the depiction of their horrific injuries also part of an artistic movement in the post-war years.

Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937), oil on canvas by Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

Salvador Dali remains the best-known surrealist painter and Swans Reflecting Elephants is an example of his paranoiac-critical method, which attempted to use art to represent how subconscious thought might summon the irrational imagery when in a state of psychosis or paranoia.  The work is interesting too in that it’s the most perfect example of a double image, the trees and swans reflected in the mirror-like surface of the water as lake as elephants.  Dali himself would sometimes discuss the usefulness of the mirror as a device to explore the divergence between conscious reality and the world of the subconscious.

Jean-Martin Charcot, documentary photographs of hysteria patients at La Salpêtrière Asylum 1878, printed in Le Cinquantenaire de L’hystérie (La Révolution Surréaliste (1928)) by André Breton (1896–1966) & Louis Aragon (1897–1982).  Breton & Aragon lamented that hysteria (which they called "the greatest poetic discovery of the late nineteenth century") was being redefined by the new discipline of psychiatry as merely a symptom of mental illness which could be eliminated by suggestion alone.

The link between surrealist art and madness long intrigued the medical community and the interest later extended to the relationship with modernism in general.  Remarkably, it wasn’t until 1980 with the publication of the third edition (DSM-III) that the diagnosis “hysteria” was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  Hysteria had for centuries been a kind of omnibus diagnosis, applied to those (almost always women) displaying an extraordinary array of mental and physical symptoms, the gendered hysteria derived from the Ancient Greek word for uterus.  To many Surrealists, hysteria was the state in which a poetic expression of the mind’s wilder impulses could be unleashed, meaning that instead of being silenced, this fundamental condition of being female could usefully be objectified.  History and art met in the decade of the surrealists because the 1930s was a time to be hysterical, less about what was happening than the fear of what was to come but the reaction to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, an exhibition by surrealist artists held in Paris in January-February 1938 was not despair or shock but indifference, the novelty of the form having passed, the claim the exhibition needed to be understood as a single installation convincing few.  In the history of the movement, the peak had actually passed and although surrealist works would continue to be produced (and actually mass-produced as wildly popular prints) in the post-war world, the output was repetitive.  The avant-garde having plundered from surrealism what could be carried off, explored other directions.

Woman’s Dinner Dress (February 1937) by Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973), printed silk organza and synthetic horsehair, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The fragments however endure.  Elsa Schiaparelli was an Italian fashion designer who took the objects made famous by the Futurists, Dadaists, & Surrealists and integrated them into clothing, her most memorable piece a white evening gown adorned with a large Daliesque lobster.  A design which would now attract little attention, at the time it was a sensation, its audacity a contrast with the solid pastels and other subdued hues with which Coco Chanel (1883-1971) had defined Parisian sophistication.  The playful designs she adopted (a telephone-shaped handbag, buttons in the shape of lollipops, fingernail gloves and hats in shapes borrowed from industry and agriculture) were not always original but she lent them a respectability in the world of high-fashion. 

In the surreal style: Salvador Dali (2021) by Javier Peña and Lindsay Lohan by Mohamad Helmi on Displate.

Hellacious

Hellacious (pronounced he-ley-shuhs)

(1) Horrible, awful, hellish, agonizing

(2) Nasty, repellent.

(3) Formidably difficult.

(4) In slang, remarkable, astonishing, unbelievable, unusual.

1930s: US campus slang, the construct being from hell + -acious.  Hell dates from pre 900 and was from the Middle English Hell, from the Old English hel & hell (nether world, abode of the dead, infernal regions, place of torment for the wicked after death).  In the sense of “pour” it was cognate with the Old High German hella & hellia (source of the Modern German Hölle), the Icelandic hella (to pour), the Norwegian helle (to pour), the Swedish hälla (to pour), the Old Norse hel & hella and the Gothic halja.  It was related to the Old English helan (to cover, hide) and to hull.  The Old English gained hel & hell from the Proto-Germanic haljō (the underworld) & halija (one who covers up or hides something), the source also of the Old Frisian helle, the Old Saxon hellia, the Dutch hel, the Old Norse hel, the German Hölle & the Gothic halja (hell).  The meaning in the early Germanic languages was derived from the sense of a "concealed place", hence the Old Norse hellir meaning "cave or cavern", from the primitive Indo-European root kel (to cover, conceal, save).  In sacred art, Hell, whether frozen or afire, is often depicted as a cavernous place.  Hell is a noun & verb; hellman, hellcat, hellhound & hellfare are nouns and hellish, helllike, hellproof & helly are adjectives; the noun plural is hells.

In the sense of “the underworld”, it was cognate with the Saterland Frisian Hälle (hell), the West Frisian hel (hell), the Dutch hel (hell), the German Low German Hell (hell), the German Hölle (hell), the Norwegian helvete (hell) and the Icelandic hel (the abode of the dead, death). The English traditions of use were much influenced by Norse mythology and the Proto-Germanic forms.  In the Norse myths, Halija (one who covers up or hides something) was the name of the daughter of Loki who rules over the evil dead in Niflheim, the lowest of all worlds (from nifl (mist)) and it was not uncommon for pagan concepts and traditions to be grafted onto Christian rituals and idiom.  Hell was used figuratively to describe a state of misery or bad experience (of which there must have been many in the Middle Ages) since the late fourteenth century and as an expression of disgust by the 1670s.  In eighteenth century England, there were a number of Hellfire Clubs, places where members of the elite could indulge their “immoral proclivities”.  The clubs were said to attract many politicians.

The suffix –acious suffix was used to form adjectives from nouns and verb stems and produced many familiar forms (audacious from audacity, sagacious from sage, fallacious from fallacy etc).  There were also formations which became rare or were restricted to specialized fields including fumacious ((1) smoky or (2) fond of smoking tobacco), lamentacious (characterized by lamentation (sorrow, distress or regret)), marlacious (containing large quantities of marl (in geology, a mixed earthy substance, consisting of carbonate of lime, clay, and possibly sand, in very variable proportions, and accordingly designated as calcareous, clayey, or sandy), and punacious (an individual prone to punning (making puns).  The suffix was attractive also when coining fanciful terms such as quizzacious (mocking or satirical (based on the verb quiz (in the sense of “to mock”) and bodacious.  Bodacious remains probably the best known in this genre and seems to have begun as US slang, south of the Mason-Dixon Line and was (as bodaciously) documented as early as 1837 but may previously have been part of the oral tradition.  Etymologists conclude it was either (1) a blend of bold and audacious or a back-formation from bodyaciously (bodily, totally, root and branch) which seems to have been most prevalent is South Carolina where it was used in the sense of “the process of totally wrecking something”.  In the US the word evolved to mean (1) audacious and unrestrained, (2) incorrigible and insolent and (3) impressively great in size, and enormous; extraordinary.  In the early twentieth century, apparently influenced by campus use (presumably male students in this linguistic vanguard) it was a synonym for “a sexy, attractive girl” and this may have influenced users in the internet age who seem to have assumed first element came directly from “body”.

Of being hungry in the heat: Fox News, July 2006.

According to linguistic trend-setters Fox News, “hellacious” is the best word to describe the state of being “hot & hungry” so it’s not a portmanteau like “hangry” (one who is “hungry & angry”, the construct being h(ungry) + angry) but Fox News says it’s the best word so it must be true.  Hellacious was likely from the tradition of audacious, sagacious, vivacious etc and came to be a word with intensive or augmentative force.  Because it can mean something negative (horrible, awful, hellish, agonizing, nasty, repellent etc), something challenging (formidably difficult) or (used as slang) something positive (remarkable, astonishing, unbelievable, unusual), the context in which it’s used can be important in determining quite the sense intended.  Even then, if there’s not enough to work with, an author’s meaning can be ambiguous.  Fort the fastidious the comparative is “more hellacious” and the superlative “most hellacious” and the (rare) alternative spellings are helatious & hellaceous.  Hellacious is an adjective, hellaciousness is a noun, hellaciously is an adverb.

Google ngram (a quantitative and not qualitative measure).

For technical reasons this should not be taken too seriously but Google’s ngram appears to suggest use of “hellacious” has spiked every time the US has elected as president the Republican Party nominee, sharp increases in use associated with the terms of Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974), Ronald Reagan (1911-2004; US president 1981-1989), George W Bush (George XLIII, b 1946; US president 2001-2009) and Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021 and since 2025).  Political junkies can make of this what the will.  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.

“Hellacious” appears in many lists of obscure words, often with an explanatory note with a parenthesized “rare” although nobody seem yet to classify it “archaic” and it’s certainly not “extinct”.  Improbably (or perhaps not), the word made a rare appearance when an E-mail from Sarah, Duchess of York (Sarah Ferguson; b 1959) to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein (1953–2019) was published in England by the tabloid press and what was of interest was (1) her choice of words, (2) the date on which those words were written and (3) her previously expressed views on the man.  What prompted her in 2011 to write the E-mail was Epstein’s reaction to the duchess having a few weeks earlier, in an interview with the Evening Standard, publicly distanced herself from the disgraced financier, apologizing, inter-alia, for having accepted his gift of Stg£15,000, declaring she would “have nothing ever to do with him” again, that her involvement with him had been a “gigantic error of judgment”, adding “I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children”.  She promised never again to make contact.  Just to ensure she got the message across, she concluded: “I cannot state more strongly that I know a terrible, terrible error of judgement was made, my having anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein.  What he did was wrong and for which he was rightly jailed.”  He had been handed a three year sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

The Duchess of York, who did not say the “P word”.

Despite that unambiguous statement, some weeks later she sent him an E-mail assuring the convicted paedophile she had not in the interview attached the label “paedophilia” to him: “As you know, I did not, absolutely not, say the 'P word' about you but understand it was reported that I did”, adding “I know you feel hellaciously let down by me.  You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family.”  As it transpired, “generous was a good choice of word.  Immediately details of the E-mail were published, the duchess’s office went into SOP (standard operating procedure) “damage control mode”, a spokesperson asserting the E-mail was written in an attempt to counter a threat Epstein had made to sue her for defamation, explaining: “The duchess spoke of her regret about her association with Epstein many years ago, and as they have always been, her first thoughts are with his victims.  Like many people, she was taken in by his lies.  As soon as she was aware of the extent of the allegations against him, she not only cut off contact but condemned him publicly, to the extent that he then threatened to sue her for defamation for associating him with paedophilia.”

Some might think it strange one would fear being sued for defamation by a convicted paedophile on the basis of having said “what he did was wrong and for which he was rightly jailed” but a quirk of defamation law is one can succeed in every aspect of one’s defense yet still be left with a ruinously expensive bill so the spokesperson’s claim the “…E-mail was sent in the context of advice the Duchess was given to try to assuage Epstein and his threats” may be true.  Epstein died by suicide while in custody (despite the rumours he may have been one of the many victims of “Arkancide” and murdered on the orders of crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) there is no evidence to support this) and the duchess’s unfortunate communication was but one of the consequences of Epstein’s conduct, the ripples of which continue to disturb the lives of his many victims and, allegedly, the rich, famous and well-connected who may have been “supplied” with under-age sexual partners from Epstein’s “stock”.  Tellingly there appears to be much more interest in identities of the latter than concern for the former.

Peter Mandelson, 8 August 1988, cibachrome print by Steve Speller (b 1961), Photographs Collection, National Portrait Gallery, London.  In a coincidence, the duchess’s eldest daughter (Princess Beatrice, Mrs Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi) was born on 8 August 1988 and in the weird world of the astrologers, the date 8/8/88 is “linked with abundance and is one of the most powerful dates for manifestation in the calendar”.  The date 8/8/88 is also a rather tawdry footnote in Australian political history.  Early in October 1987, the National Party's embattled Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen (1911–2005; premier of Queensland 1968-1987) convened a press conference at which he announced he intended to retire on “the eighth of the eighth of eighty-eight”, the significance being that would mark 20 years to the day since he'd been sworn in as premier.  As things turned out, his support within the party collapsed as revelations continued to emerge from an on-going enquiry into corruption in the state and on 1 December 1987 he was compelled to resign, jumping while being pushed along the plank as it were.  Although he was in 1991 tried for perjury and corruption, the trial was abandoned after the jury was unable to agree on a verdict.  It soon emerged that while eleven jury members found the Crown's case as convincing as just about anyone else who heard the evidence, one did not and that was the jury foreman (Luke Shaw, b 1971) who was a member of the “Young Nats” (the National Party's youth wing).  In 1992, the special prosecutor announced the Crown would not seek a second trial on the grounds that, at 81, Sir Joh was “too old”.  Sometimes one gets lucky.

Claims the duchess's former husband (Prince Andrew, Duke of York, b 1960) sexually abused a woman he was introduced to by Epstein were settled out of court (with no admission of liability and the payment of an “undisclosed sum”) and recently, the UK government sacked its erstwhile Ambassador to the US (Lord Mandelson (one time New Labour luminary Peter Mandelson (b 1953)) after revelations emerged confirming his association with Epstein was rather different than what he’d previously disclosed (there has been no suggestion Epstein supplied Lord Mandelson with males younger than the statuary age of consent).  Quite what else will emerge from documents in the hands of a US congressional panel remains to be seen but there’s a groundswell of clamour for complete disclosure and the renitence of the authorities to do exactly that has led to much speculation about “who is being protected and by whom”.  Noting that, many of Epstein’s victims have been in contact with each other and are threatening to compile a list “naming names”; when that is leaked (or otherwise revealed), it will be among the more keenly anticipated documents of recent years.

Also intriguing is whether Lord Mandelson (who has a history of "comebacks from adversity" to rival that of the Duchess of York), might wash up in Gaza as some part of the "interim governing body" Sir Tony Blair (b 1953; UK prime-minister 1997-2007) has offered to lead.  Pencilled-in as Gaza's "supreme political and legal authority" for up to five years, reports suggest Sir Tony would preside over a seven person board and a secretariat of two-dozen odd so, given how highly he valued "Mandy's" presence while in Downing Street, he might find somewhere to "slot in" Lord Mandelson.  Of course his Lordship would not be an ideal "cultural fit" for Gaza but as he'd tell Sir Tony, fixing that is just a matter of "media management".  Middle East politics is one thing but what's of interest to the English tabloids and celebrity gossip magazines is whether the (latest) downfall of the Duchess of York is this time “final”.  It was Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, later First Earl of Beaconsfield; UK prime-minister Feb-Dec 1868 & 1874-1880) who famously observed “finality is not the language of politics” and on countless occasions he’s been proved right but so frequent have been the duchess’s indiscretions the press is (again) asking whether this time there can be no comeback.  The extent of Epstein’s “generosity” was illustrated by uncontested revelations the duchess accepted from him not only the Stg£15,000 to which she admitted but also a further Stg£2 million ($A4 million), needed at the time to stave off bankruptcy.  Despite it all, it still can’t be certain this really is the end of her remarkably durable career as a public figure which has survived many scandals including:

(1) In 1992 (while still married), she was photographed having her toes sucked by a man (not her husband) while enjoying some topless sunbathing.  Interestingly, sex therapists do recommend toe sucking (and other “toe & foot” play) because (1a) the nerves in the feet are sensitive and (1b) toe sucking is likely to be a novel sexual experience, something rare for most jaded adults.  They do however caution the feet should be immaculately clean, prior to beginning any sucking.

(2) In 2010 she was filmed (with a hidden camera) while offering to sell “access” to the Duke of York (for a reputed US$1 million in 2010) before departing the room with a briefcase filled with cash.

Sister Princess Eugenie (Mrs Jack Brooksbank; b 1990, left) and father Prince Andrew (right) looking at Princess Beatrice's soon to be (in)famous Philip Treacy fascinator, Westminster Abbey, London, 29 April 2011.  Until she appeared wearing this construction, most photographs of Princess Beatrice had focused on her lovely sanpaku eyes.  Opinion in the celebrity gossip magazines was divided on whether Eugenie's glance suggested envy or scepticism.

(3) In 2011, she did not prevent her eldest daughter attending the wedding of Prince William (b 1982) and Catherine Middleton (b 1982) while wearing a “distinctive” fascinator by Irish society milliner Philip Treacy (b 1967).  It was derided as a “ridiculous wedding hat” which seems unfair because it was a playful design which wasn’t that discordant upon the head on which it sat and was the only memorable headgear seen on the day, added to which it was symmetrical which is these days is genuinely a rarity in fascinators.  It was later sold at a charity auction for US$131,560 (said to be a record for such creations) so there was that.  Interestingly, some two years after the princess's fascinator made such an impression, the milliner gave an interview to the UK's Sunday Times in which he proclaimed: “The fascinator is dead and I’m delighted.”  Asked why his view had changed, he explained: “The word fascinator sounds like a dodgy sex toy and what’s so fascinating about a fascinator?  Mass production means that they became so cheap to produce that now they are no more than headbands with a feather stuck on with a glue gun. We’re seeing a return to proper hats.”  Clearly, association with a "cheap" product worn by chavs was no place for a "society milliner" although the journalist did suggest the Mr Treacy's change of heart may have followed Elizabeth II (1926-2022; Queen of the UK and other places, 1952-2022) in 2012 banning fascinators from the Royal Enclosure at the Royal Ascot, meaning the creations were not just passé but proscribed.  If thinking back to that day in Westminster Abbey, the journalist may have been tempted to suggest Mr Treacy write a book called: The Fascinator, My Part in its Downfall but any temptation was resisted.  Despite the obituary, the fascinator seems alive and well and the fashion magazines provide guidance to help race-goers and others pick "a good one" from "a chav one".

Since the 2011 E-mail’s publication, charities, some of which have, through thick & thin, for decades maintained their association, rushed to sever ties with the duchess.  Whether this time it really is the end of her “public life” remains to be seen but if the worst comes to the worst, can always resort to a nom de plume and write another book.  A prolific author, she has published more than two-dozen, mostly children’s titles or romances for Mills & Boon and, despite the snobby views of some, those two genres do require different literary techniques.

Gaza

Nobody seems to have used the word “hellacious” in relation to the state of armed conflict (most having abandoned that euphemism and just calling it a “war”) which has existed in Gaza since October 2023 but, used in the sense of “horrible, awful, hellish or agonizing”, few terms seem more appropriate.  Over the last quarter century odd, the word “Hell” has often appeared in discussions of the Middle East and the events in Gaza have made terms like “Hell on Earth”, “Hellscape” and “Hellish” oft-heard.  In a sense, the war in Gaza is just one more rung on the ladder down which the region has descended ever since many wise souls counseled George W Bush (George XLIII, b 1946; US president 2001-2009) that were the US to invade Iraq, that would be “opening the gates of Hell”.  One can argue about just when it was since then those gates were opened but in Gaza it does appear they’ve not just been flung open but torn from the hinges and cast to the depths.  What has happened since October 2023 has provided a number of interesting case studies in politics, military strategy and diplomacy, notably the stance taken by the Gulf states but given the extent of the human suffering it does seem distastefully macabre to discuss such things in clinical terms.

What soon became apparent was that Benjamin Netanyahu (b 1949; prime-minister of Israel 1996-1999, 2009-2021 and since 2022) had grasped what he regarded as a “once-in-a-lifetime” military and political environment created by the atrocities committed by the Hamas on 7 October 2023; were it not for the historical significance of the term, he’d likely have referred to his strategy as the “final solution to the Palestinian problem” (which at least some of his cabinet seem to equate with “the Palestinian presence”).  The basis of that strategy is the basis also for the dispute which has to varying extents existed since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948: There are two sides, each of which contains a faction which holds a “river to the sea” vision of national exclusivity which demands the exclusion of the other from the land.  Both factions are a minority but through one means or another they have long been the conflict’s political under-current and, on 7 October 2023, they became the central dynamic.  That dynamic’s respective world views are (1) the Palestinian people will not be free until the eradication of the state of Israel and (2) Jews and the state of Israel will not be safe until the removal of Palestinians from the land.  Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet expresses this as “the dismantling of the Hamas” but what they do is more significant than what they say.

Donald Trump (left) and Benjamin Netanyahu (right), the White House, Washington DC, March 25, 2019.

In Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet there is a spectrum of opinion but what appears now most prevalent is the most extreme: That the Palestinians wish to see the Jews eradicated (or exterminated or eliminated) from the land of Israel and as long as they are here the Jews cannot in their own land be safe so the Palestinians must go (somewhere else).  The gloss on the “somewhere else” long has been the mantra “there is already a Palestinian state; it is called Jordan and they should all go and live there” but in the region and beyond, that’s always been dismissed as chimerical.  The “somewhere else” paradigm though remains irresistible for the faction in Israel which, although once thought cast adrift from the moorings of political reality, finds itself not merely in cabinet but, in the Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) of war, able to pursue politics by other means in a way never before possible, the argument being the Hamas attack of 7 October meant the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) were fighting a “just war”, thus the Old Testament style tactics.

In political discourse, the usual advice, sensibly, is that any comparisons with the Third Reich (1933-1945) should be avoided because the Nazis were so bad (some prefer “evil”) that comparisons tend to be absurd.  Historians have however pointed out some chilling echoes from the past in the positions which exist (and publically have been stated by some) in the Israeli cabinet.  Much the same world view was captured in a typically tart Tagebücher (diary) entry by Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1975; Nazi propaganda minister 1933-1945) on 27 March 1942:

“A judicial sentence is being carried out against the Jews which is certainly barbaric but which they have fully deserved.  In these matters, one cannot let sentimentally prevail.  If we do not defend ourselves against them, the Jews would exterminate us.  It is a life and dress struggle against the Jewish bacillus.  No other government and no other regime could muster the strength for a general solution of this question.  Thank God the war affords us a series of opportunities which were denied us in peacetime.  We must make use of them.”

Mr Netanyahu and his cabinet understand what the Hamas did on 7 October created “a series of opportunities” they never thought they’d have and, as the civilian death toll in Gaza (reckoned by September 2025 to be in excess of 65,000) attests, the IDF has made muscular use of the night and fog of war.  Of course the “somewhere else” fantasy of some Israeli politicians remains very different to the mass-murder alluded to by Goebbels or explicitly described by Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945; Reichsführer SS 1929-1945) in his infamous speech at Posen in October 1943 but what Mr Netanyahu has called his “historic and spiritual mission” of “generations” is creating a poison which will last a century or more.  For what is happening in Gaza, there seems no better word than “hellacious”.