Autumn

Autumn (pronounced aw-tuhm)

(1) The season between summer and winter; also known as the fall and once known as the harvest.  In the Northern Hemisphere it’s between the September equinox and the December solstice; in the Southern Hemisphere it’s between the March equinox and the June solstice.

(2) A time of full maturity, especially the late stages of full maturity or, sometimes, the early stages of decline.

1325–1375: From the Latin autumnus, replacing the Middle English autumpne (the modern form of which dates from the sixteenth century) from the Middle French autompne, from the thirteenth century Old French automne.  The Latin autumnus (also auctumnus, perhaps influenced by auctus "increase") is of unknown origin, some suspecting Etruscan root but a more supported view is a meaning "drying-up season" with a root in auq-, comparing the archaic English sere-month "August."  Interestingly, while “summer”, “winter” and “spring” are inherited Indo-European words in Latin, a foreign origin of autumnus is conceivable as there is no evidence for any similar etymology for “autumn"; indeed, autumn's names across the Indo-European languages leave no evidence there ever was a common word for it.  Many "autumn" words mean "end”, “end of summer" or "harvest" and variations include the Greek phthinoporon (waning of summer), the Lithuanian ruduo (autumn) rudas (reddish) in reference to leaves and the Old Irish fogamar (literally "under-winter”).  Harvest was the English name for the season until autumn began to displace it during the sixteenth century and “backend”, a once common name for the season in Northern England, has been mostly replaced by autumn.  In the Romance languages, the Italian autunno, the Spanish otoño and the Portuguese outono are all from the Latin word.  The only surviving derived form is the adjective autumnal; the meaning "maturing or blooming in autumn” dates from the 1570s, by the 1630s it had come to be used in the sense of "belonging or pertaining to autumn" and by the 1650s, figuratively as "past the prime".  Autumn is a noun and adjective and autumnal is an adjective; the noun plural is autumns.

Lindsay Lohan at Petro Zilla show, Mercedes-Benz Fall 2004 Fashion Week, Bryant Park, Manhattan, March 2004.

Autumn dates from medieval times, examples existing as early as the twelfth century but it wasn’t until the sixteenth it was in common use, having supplanted the earlier “harvest”.  Because it’s so much more evocative, the alternative word “fall” really is better than autumn.  The exact derivation of fall is unclear, with the Old English fiæll or feallan and the Old Norse fall all possible candidates.  The term came to denote the season in sixteenth century England, a contraction of Middle English expressions like "fall of the leaf" and "fall of the year" and it was seventeenth century English emigration to the American colonies which took “fall” across the Atlantic.  While the term fall gradually became nearly obsolete in Britain (though there are signs of a twenty-first century revival), it became close to universal in North America.  Season names are not capitalized in modern English unless at the beginning of a sentence or when the season is personified (as in Old Man Winter, Winter War, Summer Glau etc).  This is in contrast to the days of the week & months of the year, which are always capitalized.

The fallen leaves: why "the fall" is so much more evocative that "autumn".  However, the adjective autumnal remains indispensable because clumsy constructs like "fallesque" or "fallish" are ghastly.

Patterns of use of fall & autumn in US & British English.  The twenty-first century trends are attributed to the influence of the internet.

Ode to Autumn (1819) by John Keats (1795-1821).

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
 
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
 
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The English romantic poet John Keats wrote his best-remembered ode To Autumn after a stroll near Winchester one autumnal evening.  Within a year of publication, Keats died in Rome.

Harvest

Harvest (pronounced hahr-vist)

(1) The season when ripened crops are gathered.

(2) The crop or yield of one growing season.

(3) A supply of anything gathered at maturity and stored.

(4) The result or consequence of any act, process, or event.

(5) To gather (a crop or the like); to reap.

(6) To gain, win, or use (a prize, product, or result of any past act, process etc)

(7) To catch, take, or remove (animals), especially for food.

(8) To collect (any resource) for future use.

(9) In epidemiological statistical analysis, as harvesting effect, a method used to calculate the excess deaths suffered during certain events (and the subsequent decrease in the expected normal mortality rate as the specific conditions subside.

(10) To extract an organ or tissue from a living or dead body, for the purposes of fertilization, transplantation or research.

(11) In modern paganism, a ceremony held on or around the autumn equinox, traditionally the harvesting season.

Pre 950: From the Middle English harvest & hervest (autumn, one of the four seasons; period between August and November), from the Old English hærfest (autumn, harvest-time; August), from the Proto-West Germanic harbist, from the Proto-Germanic harbistaz (harvest-time, autumn, fall) (source also of the Old Saxon hervist, the Old Frisian & Dutch herfst & the Old Norse haust (harvest)), from the primitive Indo-European kerp- (to gather, pluck, harvest).  It was cognate with the German Herbst (autumn) and related to the Old Norse harfr (harrow), the Old High German herbist (autumn), the Latin carpere (to pluck), the Ancient Greek karpos (fruit) and the Sanskrit krpāna (shears).  Curiously, the use in cell biology to refer to the extraction of cell began in 1946, the same year it appears first to have been applied to the hunting and gathering of wild animals.  The earlier (and mostly dialectical) forms harvist, hervest, harst & hairst are all obsolete.

Lindsay Lohan with a pair of ratchet loppers, pruning cuttings for the potting shed, May 2015.

In the Old & Middle English, it was primarily a season name, the sense of the implied reference to the gathering of crops just something of tradition and the specific, separate meaning (the time of gathering crops) dates only from the mid-thirteenth century, the sense extended to the action itself and the product of the action only after circa 1300.  Early in the sixteenth century, harvest assumed the now familiar meaning exclusively and the borrowed autumn and repurposed fall supplied the season name.  Being more evocative, fall is better than autumn.  The figurative uses began to emerge in the 1530s, use as an adjective documented early in the sixteenth century.  “Harvest home” which included the “festival feast”, was a festive event celebrating the bring home of the last of that season’s harvest and is first recorded in 1577.  The harvest moon, dating from 1704, was that which was full within a fortnight of the autumnal equinox.  Harvestable & harvestless are adjectives; harvestability and harvesting are nouns. 

The New Holland CR 10.90 Raupe-HSCR Harvester: harvesting.

The harvester, agent noun from harvest and noted since the 1590s, was “a reaper", a device used to assist in and speed-up the gathering of certain crops and the variations were many.  The first (vaguely) recognizable ancestor of the modern combine harvester was the generation of harvesters (the earliest of which were horse-drawn and seem to have been in use since the 1820s although no patent was issued until 1835) first sold in 1847 and advertised as machines for the “reaping and binding field crops".  The combine harvester (often referred to as “combines” or “headers”, the latter a reference to the bolt-on attachments optimized for particular crops) is so named because it combines in one machine the four separate harvesting operations, (1) reaping, (2) threshing, (3) gathering and (4), winnowing, the (5) multi-function headers a more recent innovation.  The tractor and the combine harvester are two of the most revolutionary machines, partially responsible for huge increases in agricultural production, equally dramatic reductions in the farm labour force and the consequent acceleration of urbanization as a demographic trend.

2025 John Deere 9900 Self-Propelled Forage Harvester: 956 horsepower.

Modern harvesters are machines of extraordinary efficiency, one able in an hour to reap more than what would once have taken a large team of workers more than a day.  Mechanized harvesters were an early example of the way technology displaces labor at scale and because historically women were always a significant part of the harvesting workforce, they were at least as affected as men.  The development meant one machine operator and his (and they were almost exclusively men) machine could replace even dozens of workers, something which profoundly changed rural economies, the participation of the workforce engaged in agriculture and triggered the re-distribution of the population to urban settlements.  Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest innovation in technology applied to agriculture as just a one operator + machine combo replaced dozens of workers, multiple machines now go about harvesting which an AI bot handling the control and a dozen or more of these machines can be under the supervision of a single individual sitting somewhere on the planet, not so much controlling the things and monitoring for errors and problems.  Removing the on-site human involvement means it becomes possible to harvest (or otherwise work the fields) 24/7/365 without concerns about intrusions like light, the weather or toilet breaks.  Of course people remain involved to do tasks such as refueling and such but AI taking over many of these roles may be only a matter of time.

1981 Chevrolet Corvette: 190 horsepower. 

John Deere's yellow & green has around the planet for decades been a familiar sight in fields but it's not a mix often seen on the road; strange color-combos are not unknown but in recent decades factories have restricted not only the range of hues offered but also the ways they can be combined.  The 1981 Chevrolet Corvette (above) definitely didn’t leave the assembly line in yellow & green; that season, yellow (code 52) was available but there was no green on the color chart and while two-tone paint was a US$399.00 option, the only choices were Silver/Dark Blue (code 33/38); Silver/Charcoal (code 33/39); Beige/Dark Bronze (code 50/74) & Autumn Red/Dark Claret (code 80/98).  After taking in the effect of the yellow/green combo, the camel leather trim (code 64C/642) seems anti-climatic.

Maybe the Corvette's repaint was ordered by a fan of John Deere’s highly regarded farm equipment because JD’s agricultural products are always finished in a two-tone yellow/green (their construction equipment being yellow & black).  For the 1981 Corvette, a single engine was offered in all 50 states, a 350 cubic inch (5.7 litre) V8 designated L81 which was rated at the same 190 HP (142 kW) as the previous season’s base L48; no high-output version was now available but the L81 could be had with either a manual or automatic transmission (it would prove to be the last C3 Corvette offered with a manual).  Glumly though that drive-train might have been viewed by some who remembered the tyre-smoking machines of a decade-odd earlier, it would have pleased buyers in California because in 1980 their Corvettes received only the 305 cubic inch (5.0 litre) V8 found often in taxi-cabs, pickup trucks and station wagons; to them the L81 was an improvement.  The L81’s 180 horsepower certainly wouldn’t impress those in the market for John Deere’s 9900 Self-Propelled Forage Harvester, powered by a 1465 cubic inch (24 litre) Liebherr V12, rated at 956 HP (713 kW) (956 hp), the machine available only in the corporate two-tone yellow & green.  Like Corvettes which have tended to be quite good at their intended purpose and pretty bad at just about everything else, harvesters are specific purpose machines; one which is a model of efficiency at gathering one crop will be hopelessly inept with another and in that they differ from the human workforce which is more adaptable.  However, where there is some similarity in the plants, it can be possible for the one basic machine to be multi-purpose, the role changed by swapping the attachable device which does the actual picking or gathering.   

The Harvesting Effect

The harvesting effect (properly called mortality displacement) is a term from a process in epidemiological statistical analysis which maps and quantifies (1) a period where the human death rate significantly exceeds the predicted level and (2) a subsequent period when aggregate mortality is lower.  A harvesting effect is almost always associated with external factors such as war, extreme climatic conditions, famines or epidemics & pandemics.  Implicit in the model is the notion of a relationship of vulnerability between those who suffer an early death and the sudden change in external circumstances.  For example, when wars occur, there’s inherently the possibility of an accelerated death toll among those most likely to be serving in the most dangerous aspects of military service (fit, healthy young men) whereas when societies are subjected to extremes of heat or cold, it’s the frail and elderly who are most vulnerable.  The harvesting effect is a useful analytical tool because it can quantify the extent to which causation can be attributed: a subsequent drop in the mortality of a target population would suggest a high causal correlation because the heatwave, polar vortex or whatever, has in advance already harvested the expected victims.  That is rationalized as accelerated mortality, those who died as a result of the event were old and frail and thus likely soon anyway to die.  War-time and post-war data is interesting too for those studying not only the long-tail effects of physical injuries sustained in conflict but also those of mental illness caused by the trauma of the experience.  Historians can also use the data, where it exists with a high degree of reliability, to track the extent to which the causalities of war were civilians, something which in the West rose and fell between antiquity and the modern era before spiking dramatically in the wars of the twentieth century.

The harvesting effect is of great interest during and in the aftermath of pandemics and epidemics.  In the sombre world of public health policy, the harvesting effect is noted as one of the factors which can lead to pandemics and epidemics receding or even disappearing, the idea being the disease having already harvested the susceptible; those who remain are the strong who won’t succumb and the resistant who remain unaffected.  As a statistical source, the raw data of excess deaths is helpful too in determining the true death toll from a disease like COVID-19.  Difficult anyway in developing countries where in non-pandemic conditions there’s often a high proportion of deaths where a cause, even if known, isn’t recorded but in countries with highly developed health systems, many factors can mean the data is inaccurate.  That includes social stigma which in some countries apparently appears to some extent to have attached to COVID-19; it was certainly a factor in the early, misleading count of deaths from AIDS, the sudden spike in fatal pneumonia a sociological rather than a medical phenomenon.

Estimation of excess deaths against official COVID-19 deaths, published by The Economist, mid 2021.

A number of institutions accumulated the data-sets necessary to assess the true COVID-19 death toll and several, including the Financial Times and The Economist, collaborated to create the World Mortality Dataset (WMD) which contains both their statistical analysis and some discussion of the results.  At a time when the official global death toll was around 4.8 million, the findings published on the WMD (a perhaps unfortunate acronym) suggests a true number somewhere between 8 and 18.5 million.  Using the same statistical modelling, the death tolls for the previous four influenza pandemics (if happening now), they put at 75 million (1918), 3.1 million (1957), 2.2 million (1968) and 0.4 million (2009).  It certainly appears the official toll is significantly understated but the WMD does caution the usual caveats inhabit the margins: this is a composite of many data sets, capturing not only COVID-19 deaths (strictly speaking) but also those with some indirect association such as those suffering other conditions yet not able to secure timely treatment because the pandemic displaced healthcare resources.  It would be difficult to create a statistically robust formula to calculate relative contributions to death by various factors.  The method the WMD use they represent as:

Excess mortality = (A) Deaths directly caused by COVID infection

+ (B) Deaths caused by medical system collapse due to COVID pandemic

+ (C) Excess deaths from other natural causes

+ (D) Excess deaths from unnatural causes

+ (E) Excess deaths from extreme events: wars, natural disasters etc.

Running the COVID-19 numbers also produced some interesting finding of general interest in the field of public health.  There were some countries, those with natural geographic advantages and which applied stringent control measures, in which actual mortality was lower than that expected, the spreading virus (indirectly) turning the curve negative because the policies enforced had the side-effect of effectively eliminating seasonal influenza and its associated deaths.

The official COVID-19 death toll: 5,476,854 on Wednesday 5 January 2022, 13:42 GMT.            

Skirt

Skirt (pronounced skurt)

(1) The part of a gown, dress, slip, or coat that extends downward from the waist.

(2) A one-piece garment extending downward from the waist and not joined between the legs, worn especially by women and girls.

(3) Some part resembling or suggesting the skirt of a garment, as the flared lip of a bell or a protective and ornamental cloth strip covering the legs of furniture.

(4) In saddlery, in a small leather flap on each side of a saddle, covering the metal bar from which the stirrup hangs.

(5) In the building trades, a baseboard or apron.

(6) In furniture design, a flat horizontal brace set immediately beneath the seat of a chair, chest of drawers, or the like, to strengthen the legs; also called a bed or frieze (a flat brace or support immediately beneath a tabletop).

(7) The bordering, marginal, or outlying part of a place, group etc; the outskirts; to lie along the border of somewhere.

(8) In slang, an older (and usually disparaging or offensive) term used to refer to a woman or girl.

(9) In rocketry, an outer part of a rocket or missile that provides structural support or houses such systems as avionics or gyroscopes.

(10) To avoid, go around the edge of, or keep distant from (something that is controversial, risky etc).

(11) In the wool industry, to remove low-grade wool and foreign matter from the outer edge of fleece.

(12) In the design of internal combustion engines, the lower part of the block which extends to (or below) the centre of the crankshaft line.

(13) In the design of suction or elevating devices, a flexible edging providing a partial seal at the base where the air flow occurs.

(14) In butchery, a cut of beef from the flank.

1250–1300: From the Middle English skyrte & skirte (lower part of a woman’s dress) from the Old Norse skyrta (shirt; a kind of kirtle) from the Proto-Germanic skurtijǭ (skirt).  The sense development from "shirt" to "skirt" is thought most likely related to the long shirts of peasant garb (the Low German cognate Schört, in some dialects translates as "woman's gown").  The meaning "border, edge" (in outskirts, etc) was first recorded in the late fifteenth century and the metonymic use for "women collectively" emerged as early as the 1550s although there’s no evidence the slang sense of "young woman" existed prior to 1906 with “skirt-chaser” (a womaniser) first attested 1942.  The mini-skirt dates from 1965, reputedly the invention of French designer André Courrèges (1923-2016).

Annotated schematic of Ford Y-block V8 (left) and a 430 cubic inch (7.0 litre) MEL V8 during the restoration of a 1958 Lincoln Premiere Coupe in Autumn Rose & White (right).  The MEL V8 was also in the "Y-block" shape but is never referred to as such because the identifier MEL (Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln) is used.  Thus the 239-256-272-292 & 312 Ford V8 and 279-302-317-332-341 & 368 Lincoln V8 families are the Y-blocks while the MEL (383-410-430 & 462) MEL V8 is a Y-block type design.

The Ford & Lincoln “Y-block” V8 engines gained their nickname from the deep skirting of the block which extended below the crankshaft line, making for an unusually robust bottom end, something which would prove of some significance long after the unit had in the US been supplanted by more modern designs.  In many ways the Y-blocks were a curious cul-de-sac in the evolutionary path of the US V8 engine, having an unusual port design which rendered development by conventional means impossible (hence the brief resort to supercharging) and the dimensions limited the potential for increased displacement.  It was noted also for the unique arrangement of the solid valve lifters which had to be installed from below and a firing order which produced a distinctive and pleasing burble from the exhaust.  Compared with Ford’s earlier and later V8s, both the Y-Blocks were short-lived, the Lincoln (some of which were actually used in Ford trucks) used between 1952-1963 while the Ford lasted from 1954 until 1964, their replacements both adopting a more conventional design approach.  However, the Ford lived on in Romania until 1975 where it was produced under licence as a truck engine (the durability of the tough, deep-skirted block an asset in a market where conditions were tough and the quality of oil and fuel sometimes suspect) and in Argentina until 1988, the South Americans improving things greatly with their re-designed heads which used conventional porting.

The Pencil Skirt

Lindsay Lohan in racerback floral crop top and matching high-waisted pencil skirt with cobalt blue suede heels; Suno Spring Collection, 2013.

A pencil skirt is a slim-fitting garment with a severe, narrow cut.  The classic design was approximately knee-length but modern, more flexible fabrics have made possible calf-length styles.  It borrows its name from the writing instrument because, tailored for a close fit, it is pencil-like: long and slender.  Flexible in use, it’s the quintessential mix-and-match item, able to be worn either as a separate piece or as part of an ensemble.  A vent is usually placed in the back (or increasingly at the sides, especially in longer styles) because the slim shape would otherwise impede movement although a more modest kick pleat can instead be used.  Modern stretchy fabrics have made practical functional pencil skirts without either vents or pleats but they seem still popular for aesthetic reasons.  Historically, the industry paired pencil skirts with stilettos or court shoes but they’re now worn in just about any combination, boots proving increasingly popular.  French designer Christian Dior (1905–1957) included a classic pencil skirt in his 1954 Autumn-Winter collection although the style had long been worn.  Economical in the use of fabric compared with more voluminous cuts, its popularity had been boosted by war-time rationing and post-war austerity.

The pencil skirt’s precursor was the hobble skirt, an Edwardian-era fad inspired by the Ballets Russes, a Paris-based ballet company which, between 1908-1929, performed in the Americas and Europe (though paradoxically never in Russia because of the political convulsions).  Highly influential, Ballets Russes brought modernism to ballet with works commissioned from Stravinsky, Debussy, Prokofiev, Satie and Ravel, and their artistic collaborators included Kandinsky, Benois, Picasso and Matisse.  Coco Chanel (1883–1971) was one of their costume designers but it’s not known if she penned the hobble skirt.

Sombrero

Sombrero (pronounced som-brair-oh or sawm-bre-raw (Spanish))

(1) A sometimes highly embroidered, broad-brimmed hat of straw or plush felt, usually with a high conical or cylindrical crown and a saucer-shaped brim, worn especially in Spain, Mexico, and the south-western United States.

(2) A style of automobile wheel-cover which became popular in the US during the 1950s, the enveloping design vaguely similar to the motifs associated with the hat.

(3) A mixed drink, made with coffee liqueur and cream.

(4) In ten-pin bowling, a series of four consecutive strikes.

1590–1600: From the Spanish from sombrero de sol (broad-brimmed hat offering shade from the sun) and originally "umbrella, parasol" (a sense found in English by the 1590s), from sombra (shadow; shade) from the Late Latin subumbrare (to shadow), the construct being sub (under) + umbrāre (from umbra (shadow)) + ero (the dative & ablative singular of erus, from the Proto-Italic ezos (master), from the primitive Indo-European heshós (master) and cognate with the Hittite išhāš (master)) and thus literally "shade-maker".  Sombrero is a noun and sombreroed is an adjective, (the non-standard sombrerolike & sombreroesque both used informally); the noun plural is sombreros.

Politicians are often compelled to wear sombreros in the search for votes.  Others wear them by choice.

(1) Gerald Ford (1913–2006; US president 1974-1977).

(2) Comrade Marshal (Josip Broz) Tito (1892–1980;  Yugoslav president 1953-1980).

(3) Adlai Stevenson II (1900–1965; Democratic presidential nominee 1952 & 1956).

(4) Hugo Chávez (1954–2013; Venezuelan president 1999-2002 & 2002-2013).

(5) Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974).

(6) Britney Spears (b 1981; entertainer).

(7) Benedict XVI (1927–2022; pope 2005-2013, pope emeritus 2013-2022).

(8) Barry Goldwater (1909–1998; Republican presidential nominee 1964).

1961 Lincoln Continental SS-X-100 with sombrero wheel covers, Dallas, 22 November 1963 (left) and with the (ex Continental Mark II) turbine-style wheel covers and some of X-100’s protective accessories (right).

Traces of a sombrero-like shape can be discerned in the designs used for the early post-war Cadillacs but it was in the 1950s the style became popular with many manufacturers emulating the lines.  Although less popular by the early 1960s, the coachbuilders Hess & Eisenhardt chose to use sombrero-style wheel covers from the 1957 Lincoln Premiere when the White House’s 1961 presidential parade limousine was updated in 1963 with a current model grill.  This was the famous SS X-100 (the Secret Service inventory number) in which the president was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963.  It was extensively re-modeled in the aftermath of the assassination (and again in 1967), Hess & Eisenhardt reverted to the turbine-style wheel covers from the Continental Mark II (1956-1957) with which the car had originally been fitted.  Although other presidential parade cars were built in 1968 and 1972, X-100 continued to be used by Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter until 1977 and it’s now on permanent display in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

1952 Cadillac sombrero wheel covers (16 inch reproductions) (left), 1954 Packard sombrero wheel covers (centre) and 1957 Cadillac sombrero wheel cover, Cadillac by 1957 unable to resist adding embellishments.

The terms “wheel cover” & “hubcap” (or hub-cap) have long been used interchangeably but the two, historically, are different.  The distinction between the two is that a wheel cover covers the entire diameter of the wheel whereas a hubcap covers only the center portion of the wheel, concealing at most only the lug nuts which secure the wheel.  The origin of the hub cap pre-dates powered-transportation and was simply a device which fitted over the hub of a wheel to prevent dirt and debris from entering the assembly and contaminating the grease which provided lubrication and some of the early versions were actually called dirt-caps or grease-caps.

1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III saloon with wire wheels with centre hub cap (left) and an unusual 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III pillarless fixed head coupé (FHC) with wheel covers over wire wheels.

As wheel designs evolved from those used on hand-carts or horse-drawn vehicles, the hubcaps were enlarged to extend protection to the lug nuts, reducing abrasion and limiting the moisture penetration which encouraged rust.  The hubcap was thus a purely utilitarian device and this functionality was extended in the 1920s when all-enveloping wheel covers (some of which had actually been seen in the nineteenth century) began to appear in volume.  These were usually covers for wire wheels (a type preferred because they were much lighter that those made from pressed steel) and served to protect both the spokes and the brakes behind from dirt and the impact of stones and rocks, an important consideration when so many roads were un-sealed.  Owners and drivers appreciated the protection, wire wheels notoriously time-consuming to clean.  One drawback however was that the air-flow to the brake drums was inhibited so the brakes were more prone to overheating, thus reducing their retardative effect but as some soon discovered, speed and economy were actually improved because the smooth wheel covers were aerodynamically more efficient, as aspect of design which continues to be exploited to this day.  In the UK, both hubcaps and wheel covers were originally called nave plates.  Nave (hub of a wheel) was from the Middle English nave, from the Old English nafu, from the Proto-West Germanic nabu, from the Proto-Germanic nabō (which influenced the Dutch naaf, the German Nabe and the Swedish nav), from the primitive Indo-European hneb- (navel) and related to the Latin umbō (shield boss), the Latvian naba and the Sanskrit नभ्य (nabhya).  The idea of it being “something central” was a development from the Latin nāvem, the singular accusative of nāvis, terms from architecture which referred to the middle section of a church (later extended to other structures & shipbuilding).

1959 Imperial Silvercrest Landau (left), 1959 Edsel Citation convertible (centre) and 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz (right).

Also exploited, for better and worse, were aesthetic sensibilities.  It was in the stylistically exuberant US of the 1950s that wheel covers became truly extravagant and heavy, the latter something that brought its own problems.  The design teams took to wheel covers with enthusiasm because changes were cheap to implement and they soon became part of product differentiation, the higher in the hierarchy a model sat, the more elaborate the wheel covers were likely to be.  The sombreros were just one style, others referencing influences as diverse as the original wire wheels, the turbines in jet engines, water fountains, the full moon (though without pock-marks) and beehives.

Dog dishes: 1966 Ford Fairlane 427 (left), 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T 440 Six Pack and 1969 Yenko Chevrolet Nova 427.

Wheel covers became part of what was typically an annual cycle of styling changes and it wasn’t unusual for those used on last year’s top-of-the-line model to re-appear on a cheaper line and just because wheel covers had arrived, hubcaps didn’t go away, fitted almost always as standard equipment on the cheapest entry-level models and those defined as heavy-duty such as the ones built for police fleets.  Simple steel stampings, they were cheap to produce and, being lightweight, were less prone to becoming detached during brisk driving, the “flying hubcap” (actually usually a wheel cover) a noted feature of many of Hollywood’s car chases and something the many film buffs delight in noting sometime escape the "continuity process", a lost wheel cover inexplicably having re-attached itself later in the sequence.  The simple pressings were sometimes dubbed “poverty hubcaps” but a more common nickname was “dog dish”, a reference to their appearance if upturned.

Mercedes-Benz 600 SWB with early, two-piece hub cap & trim ring combination (left) and the later, less pleasing, one-piece wheel cover.

The wheel cover as part of a re-style was not restricted to the US but manufacturers in the UK & Europe were more conservative (an exception to this tended to be the locally produced models from companies ultimately owned by US corporations; as in Australia, these sometimes used hand-me-downs from Detroit), hubcaps persisting longer while “trim-rings” began to be added to emulate wheel covers but designs were often carried over from one model to the next.  In this, the Mercedes-Benz 600 (M100, 1963-1981) is a footnote in hubcap history in that in its eighteen-odd years in production, the only styling change (other than the disfigurements demanded by US regulators) was to replace the two-piece hubcap/trim ring combination with a one-piece wheel cover.  This was unfortunate because the earlier style better suited the car and designers have distinguished between them, calling one the "frowning" and the other the smiling, the 600 definitely a "frowning" sort of car.

Lindsay Lohan in Sombrero.

Wheel covers remained of interest to those designing cars for competition, the trade-off between brake cooling and aerodynamic advantage weighed up according to the nature of the event.  On the circuits a premium usually was attached to cooling but those setting speed records were particularly attracted to the smoothest possible shape which meant flat wheel covers of some description were often fitted and where possible many choose to enclose the wheel to whatever extent was possible; In testing, Jaguar discovered an additional 3-4 mph (5-6 km/h) could be attained if the XK120’s (1948-1954) rear wheels were wholly enclosed by fender skirts (also called spats).  In the modern era, even with aluminum or composite wheels optimized for lightness and brake cooling, there are manufacturers which use additional wheel covers, either to produce downforce for use in competition or to reduce drag, lowering energy consumption to increase a vehicle’s range.  Like many manufacturers of EVs (electric vehicles) Tesla uses the combination of aluminium wheels (for weight-saving) and a plastic wheel cover (for aerodynamic efficiency), the latter the main reason why there have been so few EV convertibles, the inherent inefficiency of the shape imposing a significant penalty "in the drag".  When the naked wheel of a Tesla Cybertruck is revealed, many are struck by the attractiveness of the design.

The selfie sombrero, a 2014 co-development between Christian Cowan-Sanluis and Acer Inc of Taiwan.

In 2014, in one of the IT industry’s less remembered collaborations with the fashion business, designer Christian Cowan-Sanluis (b 1994) joined with Taiwanese (Taiwan a renegade province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)) manufacturer Acer to produce a “limited-edition” (a perhaps unnecessary announcement) sombrero with an integrated tablet, able to spin through 360^o.  Said to be the ultimate solution to selfie takers who struggle to find their best angle, the wide-brimmed apparatus included an Iconia A1-840 tablet.  Listed upon release at a not unreasonable Stg£599, the selfie-sombrero was based on a hat in Cowan-Sanluis' autumn-winter 2014 collection, noted for having been modeled by Lady Gaga (b 1986).

Lady Gaga in original sparkly pink sombrero from Christian Cowan-Sanluis’ autumn-winter 2014 collection.

Technically, the design was helpful for selfie-takers because of the mounting which allowed the tablet to spin through 360^o, helping the user to determine the best angle while snapping and reviewing the results.  With an internet connection, the perfect selfie could then instantly be uploaded to the social platform of choice.  Early adopters were encouraged to place an order, the designer noting the creation of ten pink sparkly glitter cases with accompanying hats in the same style as that worn by Lady Gaga.

Comet

Comet (pronounced kom-it)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1963 Mercury Comet S-22 Convertible.

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

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

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

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

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

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