Brink

Brink (pronounced bringk)

(1) The edge or margin of a steep place or of land bordering water.

(2) Any extreme edge; verge.

(3) A crucial or critical point, especially of a situation or state beyond which success or catastrophe occurs:

1250–1300: From the Middle English brink, from the Middle Dutch brinc from the Old Norse brink (steepness, shore, bank, grassy edge).  It was cognate with the Middle Low German brink (edge, hillside) and the Old Norse brekka (slope, hill).  Danish gained brink directly from the Old Norse but for most other languages the greater influence was the Proto-Germanic brenkon, probably from the primitive Indo-European bhreng-, a variant of bhren- (to project; edge), source also of the Lithuanian brinkti (to swell).  Brink is a noun and brinkless an adjective; the noun plural is brinks.

Brinkmanship

A coining from the early cold war, brinkmanship is forever associated with John Foster Dulles (1888-1959; US Secretary of State 1953-1959), the origin in the words he used in a 1956 interview with Time-Life’s Washington bureau chief James Shepley (1917-1988):

“The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.”

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969; US president 1953-1961), November 1955.

Even then, it was hardly a new notion of geopolitics and, as a strategy, doubtlessly as old as conflict itself and with some history in US political discourse, John Quincy Adams (1767-1848: US President 1825-1829) having adopted the imagery of “…the brink of war” as early as 1829.  Brinkmanship however was applied to, rather than invented by Dulles.  It was the creation of President Eisenhower’s Democratic Party opponent in the 1952 & 1956 elections, Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965), who gave an interview some weeks after Dulles in which he disparaged the secretary of state for "boasting of his brinkmanship, the art of bringing us to the edge of the nuclear abyss."  Stephenson was borrowing from the then quite novel "-manship" words which had entered the vernacular and the word quickly caught on, the Cuban Missile Crisis (October, 1962) often used as an exemplar of the policy in action although the revelations which later emerged about what actually transpired during those dramatic October days showed there were many more complexities at play.

Beyond the brink:  Foster Dulles' headstone, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

Born shortly after Stephenson’s interview was brinkmanship's illegitimate sister, the wholly unetymological brinksmanship, the added -s- a construction based on the earlier salesmanship, sportsmanship etc.  Invention of the facetious –manship formations is often attributed to the humorist Stephen Potter (1900-1969) who in 1947 published The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (or the Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating) and in subsequent years added golfmanship and one-upmanship to his informal lexicon.  Gamesmanship had however been used and discussed by Ian Coster (1903-1955) in his autobiographic Friends in Aspic (1939) and he attributed it to the poet Sir Francis Meynell (1891-1975).  Coster used an amateur village cricket team to illustrate gamesmanship.  Because such teams typically contained only two or three competent fieldsmen, advantage could be gained by ensuring all were wearing identical clothing and, especially, headgear, thereby making it harder for the batsman to tell whether his shot was heading towards a good fieldsman or a dud.

Lindsay Lohan on the brink of a wardrobe malfunction, Miami, Florida, May 2011.

In the public imagination, brinkmanship remains still the enduring encapsulation of the High Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular, the events in the Caribbean summed up in the words of Dean Rusk (1909–1994; US secretary of state 1961-1969): “We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”  That narrative at the time suited the White House (and the phalanx of Kennedy family hagiographers who shaped the truths & myths of Camelot) and the various parts of the nuclear weapons establishment (a diverse crew including the Air Force, the navy, the Pentagon and the Defense Department, all with their own policy agendas to push) forged the influential idea of “calibrated brinkmanship”, an extension of the original position attributed to Dulles modified by the notion that it’s the superiority of one’s nuclear arsenal and a perception of willingness to use it which will allow one to prevail in a crisis.  It would be years before it would be revealed the crisis of 1962 unfolded rather differently but by then, the perception had done its damage.

Détente & Entente

Détente (pronounced dey-tahnt or dey-tahnt (French))

(1) A period of lessening tension between two national powers, or a policy, usually by means of negotiation or agreement, designed to lessen that tension.  A détente is not the resolution of disagreement between the powers but a device to reduce the tensions these disagreements induce.

(2) A term used by historians to describe US foreign policy between the first Nixon administration (1969) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979).  Détente’s companion word in Russian was разрядка (razryadka) (reduction of tension) 

1912: From the French détente (literally “a loosening or relaxation”), from the Old French destente, a derivative of destendre (to relax; to release), the construct being des- (from the Middle French, from the Old French des-, from the Latin dis-, from the Proto-Italic dwis-, from the primitive Indo-European dwís and cognate with the Ancient Greek δίς (dís) and the Sanskrit द्विस् (dvis), the prefix used variously to convey (1) asunder, apart, in two, part, separate, (2) reversal, removal or (3) utterly, exceedingly.) + tendre (to stretch). A doublet of intent.

The French use was influenced by the Vulgar Latin detendita, the feminine past participle of detendere (loosen, release) and as a political term in the sense of "an easing of hostility or tensions between countries", it became more popular in diplomatic discourse after Russia joined the Anglo-French entente cordiale.  In French, the word dates from the 1680s; the earlier detent was a mechanism that temporarily keeps one part in a certain position relative to that of another, which can be released by applying force to one of the parts.  It was used most in engineering to describe a locking mechanism, often spring-loaded to check the movement of a wheel in one direction, the most obvious example of which is a pulley.  In English it was treated as a French word until it was used to describe a theme in US foreign policy 1969-1979.  In English, the spelling detente is often used; the noun plural is détentes.

Entente (pronounced ahn-tahnt or ahn-tahnt (French))

(1) An arrangement or understanding between two or more nations agreeing to pursue shared interests with regard to affairs of international concern but without concluding a formal binding alliance.

(2) The parties to an entente cordiale collectively.

1844: From the French entente (understanding) from the Old French verb entente (intention) a noun use of the feminine of entent, past participle of entendre (to intend).  Although not all agree, there may have been some influence from the Latin intenta, perhaps perhaps through the substantivized Vulgar Latin past participle intendita, as a variant of intenta.  In English, “the entente” has long been used as verbal shorthand for the Anglo-French entente cordiale (1904), the best known of the many ententes, the first apparently document in 1844.  The noun plural is ententes.

Détente

Until the late 1960s, the word détente was rare except in diplomatic circles or the work of historians.  In the language of diplomacy, it came into use around 1912 when there were (obviously not successful) attempts by Germany and France to reduce tensions which may have given it a bad name although it appears often in the archival records of the League of Nations (1920-1946), something which may further have added tarnish.  The revival came when Dr Henry Kissinger (b 1923; US national security advisor 1969-1973 & secretary of state 1973-1977) was appointed national security advisor by Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974), bringing with him a long study of diplomacy and a feeling for the desirability of a “balance of power” between the USSR and US, under which a stable “peaceful co-existence” could be maintained.  The core element of détente was arms-limitation, Kissinger’s idea being there was no surer path to a reduction in tensions than reducing the possibility of conflict escalating to nuclear confrontation.  Kissinger belong to the "power realist" school of thought in political scientist, opposed to the "idealists" who believed in defeating rather than co-existing with opposing ideologies.  As "neo-cons" (neo-conservatives), the idealists would re-emerge in Washington DC in the twenty-first century and the world is still dealing with the implications of their various flings. 

Détente: Dr Henry Kissinger & Dolly Parton, 1985.

There were regular summit meetings too and even Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 worked as a part of détente with the USSR but détente did not fundamentally change the post-war American strategy of containment.  Instead it was a mechanism of pursuing containment in a less confrontational method, offering inducements such as technology transfers or trade agreements in exchange for Soviet restraint in promoting revolutionary movements.  It was never envisaged as a means by which the USSR might be destroyed and Kissinger assumed the Soviet state would endure indefinitely in a stable bi-polar system where each side maintained its own spheres of influence and tended not to trespass too far into the other’s space.  The lure of détente faded after Nixon’s resignation and definitely was over after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 but Ronald Reagan (1912-2004; US president 1981-1989), even before assuming office, had made clear he regarded détente as defeatist, thinking the very existence of the Soviet system (which famously he called an "evil empire") a problem to be solved, not merely managed.  Reagan’s approach was radical; he was the Leon Trotsky (1879–1940; Ukrainian-Russian Marxist revolutionary & theorist murdered by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) of the West, as opposed to détente as the Fourth Internationalist had been to the essentially similar doctrines of “peaceful co-existence” & “socialism in one state” which power-realist comrade Stalin adopted.

Entente

The Triple Alliance and Triple Entente were diplomatic arrangements formed in Europe in the decades prior to the First World War (1914-1918).  The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary & Italy was signed in 1882 as a defensive system directed entirely against France.  It was an integral part of the series of treaties and agreements variously negotiated or imposed by Otto von Bismarck (1815-1989; chancellor of the German Empire (the "Second Reich") 1871-1890) and needs to be understood in the way it interacted with other cogs in the Bismarck machine.  That machine, a collection of inter-locking treaties and agreements (some of them secret) worked to further the interests of (1) the German Empire and (2) a general peace in Europe and was a good device in Bismarck’s capable hands but it proved lethal when less competent practitioners (who didn’t fully understand the implications) inherited the tool.  The Triple Entente was between France, Russia and the UK and was formed in 1907; in the narrow technical sense it was not a formal military alliance but an “understanding” between the three to counter the growing power of Germany and the Triple Alliance.  The Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria would become attached to the Triple Alliance with the onset of war although Italy initially remained neutral before (in what would continue to be an Italian tradition) switching sided in 1915 to join the Alliance.  Both the Alliance and the Entente played their parts in the escalating tensions which culminated in the outbreak of hostilities which would trigger the chain reaction of declarations of war.  Had Bismarck still been in Berlin, it’s unlikely things would have been allowed to assume their own momentum.

The 1904 Anglo-French entente cordiale is well-remembered as a set of landmark agreements which resolved a number of long-standing territorial, economic, and strategic points of contention between Britain and France, London and Paris both motivated by their concerns of an increasingly assertive Germany.  From the entente of 1904, lay the winding path to 1914 and all that would follow but the first entente cordiale was concluded in 1844 in the wake of Queen Victoria’s (1819–1901; Queen of the United Kingdom 1837-1901) visit to King Louis-Philippe (1773–1850; King of the French 1830-1848) the year before.  The first British monarch to set foot in France since Henry VIII (1491–1547; King of England 1509-1547), the gesture was quite remarkable given that only three years earlier, the two countries had been on the brink of war.  Things had changed, with the removal of the long-serving foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (1784–1865; UK foreign secretary or prime-minister variously 1830-1865), relations rapidly improved, assisted by the warm friendship between the two sovereigns and it was Palmerston’s replacement, Lord Aberdeen (1784–1860;UK foreign secretary or prime-minister variously 1828-1855) who conjured-up the phrase “a cordial good understanding” to which the King of France responded with “une sincère amitié” and a spirit of “cordiale entente”, the latter catching on both sides of the channel.

It was however tentative, the entente cordiale was not an alliance confirmed by a treaty, but a concept, a state of mind which the French foreign minister François Guizot (1787–1874; French foreign minister or prime-minister variously 1840-1848) explained by saying “On certain questions, the two countries have understood that they can agree and act together, without a formal undertaking and without renouncing any aspect of their freedom.”  It was in its early days also administered in a very different way, not between ambassadors or bureaucrats but a kind of informal (an actually quite affectionate) back-channel of private correspondence, unknown to other ministers or monarchs, between the French and British foreign ministers.  It was a successful approach and enabled the resolution of difficulties which might otherwise have become crises, including the right of search on their respective ships to prevent slave trading; protectorates in the Pacific, French intervention in Morocco and many squabbles between ambassadors.  It smoothed out much but wasn’t always popular with others in both countries, most of whom brought up in the more gut-wrenching and combative traditions of preceding centuries.

Portrait of Queen Isabel II and her sister the infanta Luisa Fernanda (circa 1843) by Antonio.

One sensitive question was the famous affair of the Spanish marriages, those of the young Spanish Queen Isabella II (1830-1904) and her sister (Luisa Fernanda 1832–1897), something on which the Paris & London had very different views and a satisfactory compromise seemed at hand when, in 1846, the British government fell and old Lord Palmerston returned, bent on confrontation with Paris.  Guizot loathed Palmerston and with brutal rapidity concluded the Iberian marriages to the advantage of France (both marriages proved miserable but among European royalty happy unions were anyway vanishingly elusive) and with that, the entente cordiale was over.  However, although the warmth of the relationship since has fluxuated, the Royal Navy even sinking some of the French fleet in 1940 to prevent ships falling into German hands, France and Britain have not again been at war.

Canthus

Canthus (pronounced kan-thuhs)

The angle or corner on each side of the eye, formed by the natural junction of the upper and lower lids; there are two canthi on each eye: the medial canthus (closer to the nose) and the lateral canthus (closer to the ear).

1640–1650: From Ancient Greek κανθός (kanthós) (corner of the eye) (and also an alternative spelling of cantus (in music, sung, recited, sounded, blew, chanted etc)), which became conflated the New Latin canthus, from the Classical Latin cantus (the (iron) rim of a wheel)).  The term describing the “iron rim of a wheel” was ultimately of Gaulish origin, from the Proto-Celtic kantos (corner, rim) and related to the Breton kant (circle), the Old Irish cétad (round seat) and the Welsh cant (rim, edge).  The Greek form was borrowed by Latin as canthus and with that spelling it entered English.  In the medieval way of such things, canthus and cantus became conflated, possibly under the influence or regional variations in pronunciation but some etymologists have noted there was tendency among some scribes and scholars to favor longer Latin forms, for whatever reason more letters being thought better than fewer.  The most familiar descendent in music is the canto (a description of a form of division in composition with a surprisingly wide range of application).  Canthus is a noun and canthal is an adjective; the noun plural is canthi (pronounced kan-thahy).

One word in English which has long puzzled etymologists is the late fourteenth century cant (slope, slant) which appeared first in Scottish texts, apparently with the sense “edge, brink”.  All dictionaries list it as being of uncertain origin and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes words identical in form and corresponding in sense are found in many languages including those from Teutonic, Slavonic, Romanic & Celtic traditions.  Rare in English prior to the early seventeenth century, the meaning “slope, slanting or tilting position” had been adopted by at least 1847 and may long have been in oral use.  The speculation about the origin has included (1) the Old North French cant (corner) which may be related to the Middle Low German kante or the Middle Dutch kant, (2) the New Latin canthus, from the Classical Latin cantus (the (iron) rim of a wheel), (3) the Russian kutu (corner) and (4) the Ancient Greek κανθός (kanthós) (corner of the eye).  To all of these there are objections are the source remains thus uncertain.

The metrics of the attractiveness of women

PinkMirror is a web app which helps users optimize their facial aesthetics, using an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to deconstruct the individual components an observer’s brain interprets as a whole.  Because a face is for these purposes a collection of dimensions & curves with certain critical angles determined by describing an arc between two points, it means things can be reduced to metrics, and the interaction of these numbers can used to create a measure of attractiveness.  Helpfully, PinkMirror's site is interactive and users can upload a selfie for an analysis which will reveal if one is ugly or beautiful.  That's good because people have a right to know. 

Positive, (left), neutral (centre) & negative (right) eye canthal tilt.

Perhaps the most interesting example of the components is the eye canthal tilt, a positive tilt regarded as more attractive than a negative.  The eye canthal tilt is the angle between the internal corner of the eyes (medial canthus) and the external corner of the eyes (lateral canthus) and is a critical measure of periorbital (of, pertaining to all which exists in the space surrounding the orbit of the eyes (including skin, eyelashes & eyebrows) aesthetics.  The eye canthal tilt can be negative, neutral, or positive and is defined thus:

Positive: Medial canthus tilt between +5 and +8^o below the lateral canthus.

Neutral: Medial canthus and lateral canthus are in a horizontal line.

Negative: Medial canthus tilt between -5 to -8^o below the lateral canthus.

Pinkmirror cites academic research which confirms a positive canthal tilt is a “power cue” for female facial attractiveness and while it’s speculative, a possible explanation for this offered by the researchers was linked to (1) palpebral (of, pertaining to, or located on or near the eyelids.) fissure inclination being steeper in children than adults (classifying it thus a neonatal feature) and (2) it developing into something steeper still in females than males after puberty (thus becoming a sexually dimorphic feature).  Pinkmirror notes also that natural selection seems to be operating to support the idea, data from Johns Hopkins Hospital finding that in women, the intercanthal axis averages +4.1 mm (.16 of an inch) or +4^o, the supposition being that women with the advantage of a positive medial canthus tilt are found more attractive so attract more mates, leading to a higher degree of procreation, this fecundity meaning the genetic trait producing the characteristic feature is more frequently seen in the population.  Cosmetic surgeons add another layer to the understanding, explaining the canthal tilt is one of the marker’s of aging, a positive tilt exuding youth, health, and exuberance where as a line tending beyond the negative is associated with aging, this actually literally product of natural processes, the soft tissue gradually descending under the effect of gravity, as aspect of Vogue magazine’s definition of the aging process: “Everything gets bigger, hairier & lower”.

With people, medial canthus tilt is thus an interaction of (1) the roll of the genetic dice and (2) the cosmetic surgeon’s scalpel.  With manufactured items however, designers have some scope to anthropomorphize objects and few visages are as obviously related to a human’s eyes than the headlamps on a car.

The positive, neutral & negative: 1965 Gordon-Keeble GK-1 (left), 1958 Edsel Corsair Hardtop (centre) and 1970 Maserati Ghibli Spyder (right).

When headlamps were almost universally separate circular devices, the creation of a medial canthus tilt really became possible in the mid-1950s after dual units were first made lawful in the US and then rapidly became fashionable.  Overwhelmingly, the designers seemed to prefer the neutral and where a positive tilt was use, it was exaggerated well beyond that found in humans.  Instances of the negative were rare, which would seem to support the findings of attractiveness in humans but they were sometimes seen when hidden headlamps were used and there they were necessitate by the form of the leading edge under which they sat.  The suspicion is that designers found a negative slant acceptable if usually they were hidden from view.

Retractable headlights: 1972 Ferrari 356 GTC/4 (top left), 1968 Lamborghini Isoero (top right), 1967 Maserati Ghibli Spyder (bottom left) and 1970 Plymouth Superbird (bottom right).

With a retractable mechanism, usually they were hidden from view.  Although sometimes the diagonal placement of headlights was a deliberate choice by the stylist, it could be something dictated by the body's shape and this was the case when quad units were used in conjunction with retractable housings.  On most cars the diagonal motif appeared with the outboard lights mounted noticeably higher than those inboard but, because of the slope, when retractable lights were used the inner lights could sit higher, the visual effect sometimes exaggerated because the angle the housing (following the horizontal nose-line) assume when erected made the inboard lights seem higher still.  It was a product of shape and not something inherent to the “pop-up” retractable technique: The 1969 Dodge Daytona and 1970 Plymouth Superbird (both homologation exercises for use on the NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) ovals & tracks) both had their four headlights aligned in the horizontal.

2005 Porsche 911 Turbo S (996) (left), 2016 Ford (Australia) Falcon XR8 (FG) (centre) & 2000 Ferrari 550 Maranello.

As the interest in aerodynamics grew and there were advances in shaping glass and plastic economically to render compound shapes, headlights ceased to be almost always circular (except in the US where until the 1970s protectionist legislation demanded exactly that although before their imposition, during the 1930s the US industry had flirted with other than the round).  The German-built Ford Ford Taunus P3 (1960-1964) and the French Citroën Ami (1961–1978) both used lights which were variants of the filleted rectangle (a rectangle with curved corners) although the effect was more exaggerated on the Ford and tended to be the Ford Taunus and it tended to be called "lozenge-shaped" while the Citroën was merely "rectangular".  Separately, the technology had been developed respectively by lighting manufacturers Hella and Cibie.  The demands of aesthetics however didn’t change and designers tended still to neutral or positive tilts.  Care needed still to be taken however, the derided “poached egg” shape on the 996 generation of the Porsche 911 (1997-2006) not popular with the obsessives who buy the things, their view being each update should remain as devoted to the original (1963) lines as themselves.  One of the closest to a recent negative tilt showed up on the Ferrari 550 Maranello (1996-2001) and the factory hasn’t repeated the experiment.

Deconstructing Lindsay Lohan

The Pinkmirror app exists to quantify one’s degree of attractiveness.  It’s wholly based on specific dimension and thus as piece of math, is not influenced by skin tone although presumably, its parameters are defined by the (white) western model of what constitutes attractiveness.  Users should therefore work within those limitations but the model would be adaptable, presumably not to the point of being truly cross-cultural but specifics forks could certainly be created to suit any dimensional differences between ethnicities.  Using an industry standard known as the Photographic Canthal Index (PCI), one’s place on Pinkmirror’s index of attractiveness is determined by the interplay of (1) Nose width, (2) Bi-temporal to bi-zygomatic ratio, (3) chin length, (4) chin angle, (5) lower-lip height & (6) eye height.

Lindsay Lohan scored an 8.5 (out of 10), was rated as “beautiful” and found to be “very feminine, with great features of sexual dimorphism”, scoring highly in all facets except lower lip height and eye height.  Her face shape is the heart, distinguished by a broad forehead and cheekbones, narrowing in the lines of down to the jaw-line, culminating in a cute pointy chin.  Pinkmirror say the most attractive face shape for women has been found to be the triangle, scoring about the same as the oval while the heart, round, diamond, rectangle and square are also attractive to a lesser degree.  Within the app, pears and oblongs are described as “not typically seen as attractive” and while the word “ugly” isn’t used, for the unfortunate pears and oblongs, that would seem the implication.

Caduceus

Caduceus (pronounced kuh-doo-see-uhs, kuh-doo-syoos, kuh-doo-shuhs or kuh-dyoo-shus)

(1) In Classical Mythology, the staff entwined with two serpents and bearing a pair of wings at the top, carried by Hermes (Mercury) as messenger of the gods.

(2) The official wand carried by a herald in ancient Greece and Rome.

(3) A symbol (☤) representing a staff with two snakes wrapped around it, used to indicate merchants and messengers.  It is often substituted for the staff of Asclepius as a symbol of medicine and the medical profession, the basis for this apparently the adoption of the caduceus by the US Army Medical Corps (USAMC).

1585–1595: From the Latin, a variant of cādūceus & cādūceum, from the Doric Ancient Greek καρύκειον (kārȳ́keion) (herald's wand or staff), this and the Attic Greek κηρύκειον (kērúkeion) derived from κῆρυξ (kêrux) (herald, public messenger), the construct being kārȳk- (stem of kârȳx) (herald) + -eion, neuter of -eios (the adjectival suffix).  The word was related to κηρύσσω (kērússō) (I announce).  Caduceus is a noun and caducean is an adjective; the noun plural is caducei.

Staff of Caduceus.

A long tradition of use seems to have created the impression the caduceus is the true symbol of medicine rather than the classically correct staff of Asclepius.  Winged with two serpents coiling around it, it represented Hermes (and the Roman Mercury), the messenger of the gods, guide of the dead and protector of merchants, shepherds, gamblers, liars, and thieves.  By extension, the caduceus became also a recognized symbol of commerce and negotiation, two realms in which balanced exchange and reciprocity are recognized as ideals (if not always common practice).  However, nothing in the Classical tradition associated the caduceus with medicine or physicians.

Staff of Asclepius.

The true symbol of matters medical was the Staff of Asclepius.  In Greek mythology, Asclepius, the son of Apollo the physician, was the deity associated with healing and medicinal arts.  Such was his skill he surpassed his reputation of his father and was believed to be able to evade death and to bring others back to life from the brink of death and beyond.  There has long been debate about the significance of the serpents and although in Greek mythology snakes were considered sacred, there have been many theories offered to account for the association with healing.  One idea was the snake may symbolize rejuvenation (on the basis of the way in which the reptiles shed their skin) while an alternative explanation was it represented the healing of snakebites. 

Asclepiusian: Lindsay Lohan as a compelling (if unconvincing) nurse, Maroon 5 Halloween Bash, October 2011.

The significance of the staff was even more practical and may have been an allusion to the traditional treatment of a parasitic nematode called Dracunculus medinensis (Guinea worm) in which, doctors would cut a slit in the skin right in its path and, when it poked its head from the wound, take a small stick and slowly wrap the worm around it until it was fully removed. The infection is relatively rare today, but the same method of extraction is still used.  The erroneous use of the caduceus as the symbol of medicine appears dates from its adoption in 1902 as the insignia of the US Army Medical Corps (USAMC), many commercial, academic and governmental institutions following the military’s lead.  The choice in 1902 however was no mistake and the caduceus was the deliberate choice of Brigadier General George Miller Sternberg (1838-1915; US Army Surgeon General 1893-1902) who was attracted to the idea of it as a symbol of neutrality and non-aggression, as it was also used as a flag of truce and safe passage (a token of a peaceful embassy, it was originally an olive branch).  A bacteriologist dedicated to the scientific method, he believed that the caduceus would be a more fitting symbol for the medical corps than the Rod of Asclepius, which he felt was too closely associated with mythology and religion.

Official portrait of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (b 1947; governor of Massachusetts 2003-2007, junior US senator (R-Utah) since 2019) unveiled in a ceremony on the Grand Staircase at the Statehouse, Boston, July 2009.

Governor Romney’s official gubernatorial portrait was notable for the inclusion of a nested image of his wife (Ann, b 1949, the one with the “two Cadillacs”), something not included in the paintings of his 69 predecessors in the governor’s mansion.  That would have made the 52 x 37” (1320 x 920 mm) painting interesting enough for amateur psychiatrists but it included also a leather-bound folder carefully placed on the desk and embossed with a gold-colored caduceus.  This the governor wanted as a representation of the Massachusetts health-care bill he signed into law in 2006.

The artist, Richard Whitney (b 1949), was interviewed and revealed working the symbol into the work presented a greater challenge to the painting’s composition than the inclusion of Mrs Romney.  He sketched concepts with the symbol in a frame on the desk and another with it mounted on the wall but neither proved satisfactory and it was only a chance viewing of the leather folder used to hold legislation awaiting the governor’s signature which provided the inspiration.  That proved artistically uncontroversial, unlike the nested image of Mrs Romney, the state art committee which oversees official portraits objecting on the basis it had never been done before.  This was however the United States and in the spirit of the Medici, Governor Romney reminded the committee members he was paying for the portrait and he could have on it whatever he wanted.  His wishes prevailed but the artist did insist only one of them could be smiling; both would have been too much.

Oikophobia

Oikophobia (pronounced oick-oh-foh-bee-uh)

(1) In political science, an aversion to or rejection of one’s own culture, and traditions; a dislike of one's own compatriots.

(2) In psychiatry, one of a number of phobias related to (1) one’s home (either as a building or as place of abode), (2) returning to one’s home or (3) some or all of the contents of one’s home.

From the Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos) (house; household; a basic societal unit in Ancient Greece; a household or family line) +‎ -phobia from phóbos (fear).  The suffix -phobia (fear of a specific thing; hate, dislike, or repression of a specific thing) was from the New Latin, from the Classical Latin, from the Ancient Greek -φοβία (-phobía) and was used to form nouns meaning fear of a specific thing (the idea of a hatred came later).  Oikophobia & oikophobe are nouns, oikophobic is a noun and adjective and oikophobically is an adverb; the noun plural is oikophobes.

Roger Scruton in his study.  Although a staunch conservative tied to earlier traditions, even The Guardian granted a deservedly generous obituary.

The political sense where oikophobia (literally the antonym of xenophobia (hatred, fear or strong antipathy towards strangers or foreigners)) dates only from 2004 when it was used by English philosopher Roger Scruton (1944-2020) as part of the culture wars which swirl still around the critiques and defenses of Western civilization, the Enlightenment and the implications of post-modernism.  Scruton’s slim volume England and the Need for Nations (2004, Civitas, 64 pp ISBN-10-1903386497) argued that empirically, based on the last two-hundred years odd, it was the nation state which best created the conditions necessary for peace, prosperity, and the defense of human rights.  There are obviously not a few examples of nation states which have proven not to be exemplars of the values Scruton values but his agreement was essentially structural: Where there have been attempts to replace the nation-state with some kind of transnational political order, such things have tended to descend to totalitarian dictatorships like the old Soviet Union or evolve into bloated unaccountable bureaucracies like the post Maastricht European Union (EU).  It surprised nobody that enthusiastically he supported the UK’s exit (Brexit) from the EU:

 “I believe we are on the brink of decisions that could prove disastrous for Europe and for the world and that we have only a few years in which to take stock of our inheritance and to reassume it.  Now more than ever do those lines from Goethe’s Faust ring true for us: "Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen" (What you have inherited from your forefathers, earn it, that you might own it).  We in the nation states of Europe need to earn again the sovereignty that previous generations so laboriously shaped from the inheritance of Christianity, imperial government and Roman law. Earning it, we will own it, and owning it, we will be at peace within our borders.”

Portrait of Theodor Herzl (circa 1890), oil on canvas by Leopold Pilichowski (1869-1933), Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London.

Scruton of course rejected the notion he was in any way xenophobic but did reference that as oikophobia’s antonym when he described the latter as a “…need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ours” and ominously implicit in his critique was the observation it was a cultural malaise which tended to befalls civilizations in the days of decline before their fall.  Plenty have documented the mechanisms by which the faith in Western civilization was undermined, their phrases famous landmarks in the development of post-modernism including “cultural relativism”, “march through the institutions” & “deconstructionism” etc.  However, in a political context the idea of oikophobia wasn’t then entirely new, the idea of the “self-hating Jew” documented in 1896 by Austro-Hungarian Jewish lawyer Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) in his book 1896 book The Jewish State.  Regarded as “the father of modern political Zionism”, Herzl denounced those who opposed his model of a Jewish state in Palestine, calling them “disguised anti-Semites of Jewish origin”.  Essentially, Herzl saw being Jewish as not only compulsory for Jews but defined the only “true” Judaism as his Zionist vision but despite that, among European Jews, especially the educated and assimilated, Zionism was by no means universally supported and both sides weaponized their vocabularies.  In 1930, German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing (1872–1933) published Juedischer Selbsthass (Jewish Self-Hatred) and from then onwards the “self-hating Jew” came to be slung at those (often intellectuals) opposed to Zionism.  In 1933, Lessing (who had fled to Czechoslovakia) was murdered at the instigation of the Nazis.  In the post war years “self-hating Jew” has come to be used by Israeli politicians against any Jew who opposes their policies, often with as little basis as “fascist” came to be deployed in post-Franco Spain.

Before it was picked up in political science and purloined for the culture wars, oikophobia had been a technical term in psychiatry to refer to a patient’s aversion to a home environment, or an abnormal fear (phobia) of being in their own home, the companion terms being (1) ecophobia (fear of a home environment) the construct being eco- (from the French eco-, from the Latin oeco, from the Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos) (house, household) + -phobia & (2) nostophobia (a fear of, or aversion to, returning to one's home), the construct being the Ancient Greek νόστος (nóstos) (a return home) +‎ -phobia.  It was the idea of the “unwillingness to return home” that was later absorbed by the deconstructionists and other post-modernists in the sense of “an aversion to the past, the antithesis of nostalgia” because in their assault on Western society, it was the political and social relics they attacked, condemning them as symbols (indeed tools) of oppression and mechanisms by which the power elite maintained their hegemony.  Thus, Western legal & theological traditions and the artistic & literary canon were just one of many constructs and, because of their oppressive history, needed to be overthrown.

In psychiatry, oikophobia, ecophobia & nostophobia cold also be used of patients exhibiting the symptoms of phobia relating to all or some of the contents of a house: electrical appliances, the plumbing, the cupboards, the furniture, the light fittings etc.  So specific were some of these cases (an there were some not unjustified such as a fear of certain allergy-inducing substances such as chemicals) that the profession added domatophobia (a specific fear of a house as opposed to its contents), the construct being domato- (from the Middle French domestique, from the Latin domesticus, from domus (house, home) + -phobia.  In the years after World War II (1939—1945), the word domatophobia came to be used by journalists to described what was emerging as a mass phenomenon: women attracted to careers outside the home, this explained by (usually male) journalists as “a fear of or aversion to housework”, presumably their proper role.