Newmanesque

Newmanesque (pronounced new-min-esk)

The feelings of wonderment, awe, fear and enchantment induced in one when looking to the stars.

1860: From the writings of Cardinal Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890), the construct being Newman + esque.  The -esque suffix was from the French -esque (-ish, -ic, -esque), from the Italian -esco, from the Latin -iscus, of Germanic origin, from the Lombardic -isc (-ish), from the Proto-West Germanic -isk, from the Proto-Germanic -iskaz (-ish), from the primitive Indo-European -iskos.  It was cognate with the Old High German -isc (from which German gained -isch), the Old English –isċ, the Old Norse –iskr and the Gothic -isks.   It was appended to nouns (particularly proper nouns) to form adjectives in the sense of (1) resembling or tending towards and (2) in the style or manner of.  English picked up the suffix directly as –ish; the -esque suffix technically means a stronger association than -ish or -ite but is often anyway preferred for literary effect.   

Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890).

John Henry Newman was a poet and theologian, first an evangelical Anglican priest (albeit one gradually assuming a higher ecclesiastical tone) who later, despite having once described the Roman church as "…polytheistic, degrading and idolatrous" became a Roman Catholic cardinal.  This appears to have happened because Newman the younger became haunted by the fourth century words of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430), Securus judicat orbis terrarum!, usually translated by scholars as “the verdict of the world is conclusive” and by theologians as “wherefore the entire world judges out of security, they are not good who separate themselves from the entire world, in whatever part of the entire world”.

To structuralists, it means “it is good to keep the sinners in our midst if this is the way we may convert them”.  Newman dwelt on this for some time, an indication it’s not good for impressionable souls to read Augustine at too young an age.  Among the laity, Newman is most remembered for what’s called the newmanesque or the newmanist: the sense of awe wonderment even atheists might feel when gazing at the stars.  In July 2019, Pope Francis (b 1936; pope since 2013) announced at the Consistory of Cardinals that Newman would be created a saint and his canonisation was formally announced on 13 October, thus becoming the first English saint since the seventeenth century.  It’s a long process: Newman was proclaimed "Venerable" by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in 1991 and was beatified in 2010.  Canonisation was the final step.

The Newmanesque: Look back in awe

Hubble Space Telescope Image NGC 6302 (butterfly nebula), 27 July 2009.

Image NGC 6302, commonly called the butterfly nebula, was taken by the Hubble telescope on 27 July 2009.  Something of a celestial Rorschach test card, cosmic reality belies the delicate appearance of this butterfly, those fragile-looking wings actually boiling cauldrons of gas, swirling at some 36,000^o F (20,000^o C) and travelling through space at 600,000 mph (960,000 km/h), fast enough to travel between earth and the moon in little more than twenty minutes.  The butterfly is in our Milky Way galaxy, some 3800 light-years distant in the constellation of Scorpius, the glowing gas the star’s outer layers, expelled over two millennia, the wingspan more than two light-years across.

At the centre lies a dying star once five times the mass of the Sun but, with its envelope of gases ejected, it’s now unleashing the stream of ultraviolet radiation that gives the cast-off material its glow.  The central star can’t be seen because of the surrounding thick belt of dust which constricts its outflow, creating the classic “bipolar” or hourglass shape shared with many planetary nebulae.  The data from Hubble do however allow scientists to construct a picture with the surface temperature estimated to be over 400,000^o F (220,000^o C), making it one of the Milky Way’s hotter stars.  Before losing the extended outer layers, the star had evolved into a red giant, with a diameter a thousand times that of the Sun, some of the cast-off gas creating the doughnut-shaped ring while other gas was ejected perpendicular to the ring at higher speeds, producing the butterfly’s elongated wings.  Later, as the star heated, a faster stellar wind (a stream of charged particles), ploughed through the structure, again modifying the shape.

Flat

Flat (pronounced flat)

(1) Level, even, or without unevenness of surface, as land or tabletops.

(2) Having a shape or appearance not deep or thick.

(3) Deflated; collapsed.

(4) Absolute, downright, or positive; without qualification; without modification or variation.

(5) Without vitality or animation; lifeless; dull.

(6) Prosaic, banal, or insipid.

(7) In artistic criticism, lifeless, not having the illusion of volume or depth or lacking contrast or gradations of tone or colour.

(8) Of paint, without gloss; not shiny; matt.

(9) In musical criticism, not clear, sharp, or ringing, as sound or a voice lacking resonance and variation in pitch; monotonous.

(10) In musical notation, the character ♭ which, when attached to a note or a staff degree, lowers its significance one chromatic half step.

(11) In music, below an intended pitch, as a note; too low (as opposed to sharp).

(12) In English grammar, derived without change in form, as to brush from the noun brush and adverbs that do not add -ly to the adjectival form as fast, cheap, and slow.

(13) In nautical matters, a sail cut with little or no fullness.

(14) A woman’s shoe with a flat heel (pump) or no heel (ballet flat).

(15) In geography, a marsh, shoal, or shallow.

(16) In shipbuilding, a partial deck between two full decks (also called platform).

(17) In construction, broad, flat piece of iron or steel for overlapping and joining two plates at their edges.

(18) In architecture, a straight timber in a frame or other assembly of generally curved timbers.

(19) An iron or steel bar of rectangular cross section.

(20) In textile production, one of a series of laths covered with card clothing, used in conjunction with the cylinder in carding.

(21) In photography, one or more negatives or positives in position to be reproduced.

(22) In printing, a device for holding a negative or positive flat for reproduction by photoengraving.

(23) In horticulture, a shallow, lidless box or tray used for rooting seeds and cuttings and for growing young plants.

(24) In certain forms of football, the area of the field immediately inside of or outside an offensive end, close behind or at the line of scrimmage.

(25) In horse racing, events held on flat tracks (ie without jumps).

(26) An alternative name for a residential apartment or unit (mostly UK, Australia, NZ).

(27) In phonetics, the vowel sound of a as in the usual US or southern British pronunciation of hand, cat, usually represented by the symbol (æ).

(28) In internal combustion engines (ICE), a configuration in which the cylinders are horizontally opposed.

1275–1325: From the Middle English flat from the Old Norse flatr, related to Old High German flaz (flat) and the Old Saxon flat (flat; shallow) and akin to Old English flet.  It was cognate with the Norwegian and Swedish flat and the Danish flad, both from the Proto-Germanic flataz, from Proto-Indo-European pleth (flat); akin to the Saterland Frisian flot (smooth), the German flöz (a geological layer), the Latvian plats and Sanskrit प्रथस् (prathas) (extension).  Source is thought to be the Ancient Greek πλατύς (platús & platys) (flat, broad).  The sense of "prosaic or dull" emerged in the 1570s and was first applied to drink from circa 1600, a meaning extended to musical notes in the 1590s (ie the tone is "lowered").   Flat-out, an adjectival form, was first noted in 1932, apparently a reference to pushing a car’s throttle (accelerator) flat to the floor and thus came to be slang for a vehicle’s top speed.  The US colloquial use as a noun from 1870 meaning "total failure" endures in the sense of “falling flat”.  The notion of a small, residential space, a divided part of a larger structure, dates from 1795–1805; variant of the obsolete Old English flet (floor, house, hall), most suggesting the meaning followed the early practice of sub-dividing buildings within levels.  In this sense, the Old High German flezzi (floor) has been noted and it is perhaps derived from the primitive Indo-European plat (to spread) but the link to flat as part of a building is tenuous.

The Flat Earth

Members of the Flat Earth Society believe the Earth is flat but there's genuine debate within the organisation, some holding the shape is disk-like, others that it's conical but both agree we live on something like the face of a coin.  There are also those in a radical faction suggesting it's actually shaped like a doughnut but this theory is regarded by the flat-earth mainstream as speculative or even "heretical".  Evidence, such as photographs from orbit showing Earth to be a sphere, is dismissed as part of the "round Earth conspiracy" run by NASA and others.

The flat-earther theory is that the Arctic Circle is in the center and the Antarctic is a 150-foot (45m) tall wall of ice around the rim; NASA contractors guard the ice wall so nobody can fall over the edge.  Earth's daily cycle is a product of the sun and moon being 32 mile (51 km) wide spheres travelling in a plane 3,000 miles (4,800 km) above Earth.  The more distant stars are some 3100 miles (5000 km) away and there's also an invisible "anti-moon" which obscures the moon during lunar eclipses.

Lindsay Lohan in Lanvin Classic Garnet ballet flats (Lanvin part-number is FW-BAPBS1-NAPA-A18391), Los Angeles, 2012.  In some markets, these are known as ballet pumps.

Flat Engines

“Flat” engines are so named because the cylinders are horizontally opposed which means inherently there are always an equal number of cylinders.  It would not be impossible to build a flat engine with an uneven cylinder count but the disadvantages would probably outweigh anything gained and specific efficiencies could anyway be obtained in more conventional ways.  The flat engine configuration can be visualized as a “flattened V” and this concept does have some currency because engineers like to distinguish between the “boxer” and the “180^o V” (also called the “horizontal V”, both forms proving engineers accord the rules of math more respect than English).  The boxer is fitted with one crankpin per cylinder while the 180^o V uses one crankpin per pair of horizontally opposed cylinders.

The 180^o V vs the Boxer.

Both engines use a 180^o layout but the boxer gains its name from the manner in which each pair of opposing pistons operate: Those with pairs of pistons which move inwards and outwards at the same time are dubbed “boxers” on the metaphor of the pugilist punching their gloves together before the start of the match whereas those where the strokes vary are merely “flat”.  Apart from engineers, this matters to pedants who enjoy pointing out that while all boxers are flat, not all flats are boxers, a distinction Ferrari to this day are not much concerned about, on the factory website referring to the flat-12 introduced in the 365/4 BB variously as a “boxer”, a “flat-12” and a 180^o V12”.  Actually, the story of the BB (1974-1983) is even more amusing because years later the factory would admit the name designation didn’t actually stand for “Berlinetta Boxer” but Bridget Bardot, the engineers developing the thing quite besotted.  There’s also another version of the flat engine and that’s one in which there are two crankshafts (at the far left & right) and no cylinder head; the combustion chamber created in the gap between the two pistons.  The layout offers some advantages and enjoyed some success in commercial vehicles but never really caught on.

The boxer layout has been in use since 1897 when Carl (also as Karl) Benz (1844–1929) released a twin cylinder version and it was widely emulated although Mercedes-Benz has never returned to the idea while others (notably BMW (motorcycles), Porsche and Subaru) have made variations of the flat configuration a signature feature.  The advantages of the flat form include (1) a lower centre of gravity, (2) reduced long-term wear on the cylinder walls because some oil tends to remain on the surface when not running, meaning instant lubrication upon start-up and (3) a lower physical mass which permits bodywork more easily to be optimized for aerodynamic efficiency although this is of little practical advantage except on race cars.  The disadvantages include (1) greater width, (2) accessibility (a cross-flow combustion chamber will necessitate with the intake or exhaust (usually the latter) plumbing being on the underside, (3) some challenges in providing cooling and (4) the additional weight and complexity (two cylinder heads) compare to an in-line engine (although the same can be said of conventional vees).

Flat out but anti-climatic: The Coventry-Climax flat-16

Flat engines have ranged from the modest (the Flat-4 in the long-running Volkswagen Beetle (1939-2003)) to the spectacular (Coventry-Climax and Porsche both building Flat-16s although both proved abortive).  The most glorious failure however was the remarkable BRM H16, used to contest the 1966-1967 Formula One (F1) season when the displacement limit was doubled to three litres.  What BRM did was take the 1.5 litre V8 with which they’d won the 1962 F1 driver and constructor championships, flatten it to and 180^o V and join two as a pair, one atop the other.  It was a variation on what Coventry-Climax had done with their 1.5 litre V8 which they flattened and joined to create a conventional flat-16 and the two approaches illustrate the trade-offs which engineers have to assess for merit.  BRM gained a short engine but it was tall which adversely affected the centre of gravity while Coventry-Climax retained a low profile but had to accommodate great length and challenges in cooling.  The Coventry-Climax flat-16 never appeared on the track and the BRM H16 was abandoned although it did win one Grand Prix (installed in a Lotus chassis).  Unfortunately for those who adore intricacy for its own sake, the plan to build four valve heads never came to fruition so the chance to consider an engine with sixteen cylinders, two crankshafts, eight camshafts, two distributers and 64 valves was never possible.  Truly, that would have been compounding existing errors on a grand scale.  Tellingly perhaps, the F1 titles in 1966-1967 were won using an engine based on one used in General Motors road cars in the early 1960s before it was abandoned and sold to Rover to become their long-running aluminium V8.  As raced, it boasted 8 cylinders, one crankshaft, two camshafts, one distributer and 16 valves.  The principle of Occam's Razor is essentially: “the simplest solution is usually the best".

The ultimate flats: Napier-Sabre H-24 (left) and BRM H-16 (right).

The H configuration though was sound if one had an appropriate purpose of its application.  What showed every sign of evolving into the most outstanding piston aero-engine of World War II (1939-1945) was the Napier-Sabre H-24 which, with reduced displacement, offered superior power, higher engine speeds and reduced fuel consumption compared with the conventional V12s in use and V16s in development.  The early teething troubles had been overcome and extraordinary power outputs were being obtained in testing but the arrival of the jet age meant the big piston-engined warplanes were relics and development of the H24 was abandoned along with the H-32 planned for used in long-range heavy bombers.

Flatware

Flatware (pronounced flat-wair)

In catering, an omnibus term covering (1) cutlery such as the knives, forks, and spoons used at the table for serving and eating food & (2) crockery such as those plates, saucers, dishes or containers which tend to flatness in shape (as opposed to the more capacious hollowware).

1851: The construct was flat + ware.  Flat dates from 1275–1325 and was from the Middle English flat from the Old Norse flatr, related to Old High German flaz (flat) and the Old Saxon flat (flat; shallow) and akin to Old English flet.  It was cognate with the Norwegian and Swedish flat and the Danish flad, both from the Proto-Germanic flataz, from the primitive Indo-European pleth (flat); akin to the Saterland Frisian flot (smooth), the German flöz (a geological layer), the Latvian plats and Sanskrit प्रथस् (prathas) (extension).  Source is thought to be the Ancient Greek πλατύς (platús & platys) (flat, broad).  The sense of "prosaic or dull" emerged in the 1570s and was first applied to drink from circa 1600, a meaning extended to musical notes in the 1590s (ie the tone is "lowered").   Flat-out, an adjectival form, was first noted in 1932, apparently a reference to pushing a car’s throttle (accelerator) flat to the floor and thus came to be slang for a vehicle’s top speed.  The noun was from the Middle English flat (level piece of ground, flat edge of a weapon) and developed from the adjective; the US colloquial use as a noun from 1870 meaning "total failure" endures in the sense of “falling flat”.  The notion of a small, residential space, a divided part of a larger structure, dates from 1795–1805; variant of the obsolete Old English flet (floor, house, hall), most suggesting the meaning followed the early practice of sub-dividing buildings within levels.  In this sense, the Old High German flezzi (floor) has been noted and it is perhaps derived from the primitive Indo-European plat (to spread) but the link to flat as part of a building is tenuous.

Ware was from the Middle English ware & war, from the Old English waru & wær (article of merchandise (originally “protection, guard”, the sense probably derived from “an object of care, that which is kept in custody”), from the Proto-Germanic warō & Proto-West Germanic war, from the Proto-Germanic waraz, the Germanic root also the source of the Swedish vara, the Danish vare, the Old Frisian were, the Middle Dutch were, the Dutch waar, the Middle High German & German Ware (goods). All ultimately were from the primitive Indo-European root wer- (perceive, watch out for)  In Middle English, the meaning shifted from "guard, protection" to "an object that is in possession, hence meriting attention, guarded, cared for, and protected".  Thus as a suffix, -ware is used to form nouns denoting, collectively, items made from a particular substance or of a particular kind or for a particular use.  In the special case of items worn as clothing, the suffix -wear is appended, thus there is footwear rather than footware.  In the suffixed form, ware is almost always in the singular but as a stand-alone word (meaning goods or products etc), it’s used as wares.  Ladyware was a seventeenth century euphemism for "a woman's private parts" (the companion manware etc much less common) and in Middle English there was also the mid-thirteenth century ape-ware (deceptive or false ware; trickery).

Hardware and software were adopted by the computer industry, the former used from the very dawn of the business in the late 1940s, borrowing from the mid-fifteenth century use which initially described “small metal goods” before evolving to be applied to just about everything in building & construction from tools to fastenings.  Apparently, software didn’t come into use until the 1960s and then as something based on “hardware” rather than anything to do with the mid-nineteenth century use when it described both "woolen or cotton fabrics" and "relatively perishable consumer goods"; until then there was hardware & programs (the term “code” came later).  The ecosystem spawned by the industry picked up the idea in the 1980s, coining shareware (originally software distributed for free for which some payment was hoped) and that started a trend, begetting:

Abandonware: Software no longer updated or maintained, or on which copyright is no longer defended or which is no longer sold or supported; such software can, with approval pass to others for development (takeoverware) or simply be purloined (hijackware).  Abandonware is notoriously associated with video game development where there’s a high failure rate and many unsuccessful projects later emerge as shareware or freeware.

Adware: Nominally free software which includes advertising while running.  Adware sometimes permits the advertising to disappear upon payment and is popularly associated with spyware although the extent of this has never reliably been quantified.

Baitware: Software with the most desirable or tempting features disabled but able to be activated upon payment; a type of crippleware or demoware.

Freeware: Free software, a variation of which is “open source” which makes available also the source code which anyone may modify and re-distribute on a non-commercial basis.  Google’s Chrome browser is a famous example, developed from the open source Chromium project.

Censorware: An umbrella term for content-filtering software.

Demoware: A variation of crippleware or baitware in that it’s a fully-functional version of the software but limited in some critical way (eg ceases to work after 30 days); also called trialware.  The full feature set is unlocked by making a payment which ensures the user is provided with a code (or "key") to activate full-functionality.  The fashionable term for this approach is "freemium" (a portmanteau of free & premium, the idea being the premium features cost something.

Donationware: Pure shareware in that it’s fully-functional and may be used without payment but donations are requested to support further development.  A type of shareware.

Postcardware: Developer requests a postcard from the user’s home town.  This really is a thing and the phenomenon is probably best explained by those from the behavioral science community; also called cardware.

Ransomware: Software which “locks” or in some way renders inaccessible a user’s data or system, requiring a payment (usually in crypto-currency) before access can be regained; malware’s growth industry.

Spyware: Software which furtively monitors a user’s actions, usually to steal and transmit data; antispyware is its intended nemesis.

Malware: Software with some malicious purpose including spyware and ransomware.

Bloatware: Either (1) the programs bundled by manufacturers or retailers with devices when sold, (often trialware and in some notorious cases spyware) or (2) software laden with pointless “features” nobody will ever use; also called fatware, fattware and phatware.

Vaporware: Non-existent software which is either well behind schedule or has only ever been speculative; also called noware.

Ford flathead V8 with heads removed (right), a pair of (flat) heads (centre) and V8 with (aftermarket Offenhauser) heads installed.

Flat as a noun, prefix or adjective has also been productive:  Flat white can be either a coffee or a non-gloss paint.  Flatway and flatwise (with a flat side down or otherwise in contact with a flat surface) are synonymous terms describing the relationship of one or more flat objects in relation to others and flat-water is a nautical term meaning much the same as "still-water".  The flat universe is a cluster of variations of one theory among a number of speculative descriptions of the topological or geometric attributes of the universe.  Probably baffling to all but a few cosmologists, the models appear suggest a structure which include curves while as a totality being of zero curvature and, depending on the detail, imply a universe which either finite or infinite.  In internal combustion engines, a flathead engine (also called the sidevalve or L-Head) is one where the poppet valves are built into the engine block rather than being in a separate cylinder head which has since the 1950s been the almost universal practice (overhead valve (OHV) and overhead camshaft (OHC)).  Until the 1950s, flatheads were widely available in both cheap and expensive vehicles because they used relatively few moving parts, were simple (and thus economic) to manufacture and existed in an era of low-octane fuels which tended to preclude high engine speeds.  During the Second World War (1939-1945), decades of advances in design and metallurgy were effectively accomplished in five years and flathead designs were phased out of production except for non-automotive niches where simple, cheap, low-revving units were ideal.  The classic flathead was the Ford V8 (1932-1953 in the US market although, remarkably, production overseas didn’t end until 1993) which encompasses all the advantages and disadvantages of the design and was so identified with the concept that it’s still known as “the Flathead”, the name gained because the “head”, containing no valve-gear or other machinery, is little more than a piece of flat steel, providing a sealing for the combustion process.

Flat Earth Society factional options.

Members of the Flat Earth Society believe the Earth is flat but there's genuine debate within the organization, some holding the shape is disk-like, others that it's conical but both agree we live on something like the face of a coin.  There are also those in a radical faction suggesting it's actually shaped like a doughnut but this theory is regarded by the flat-earth mainstream as speculative or even heretical.  Evidence, such as photographs from orbit showing Earth to be a sphere, is dismissed as part of the "round Earth conspiracy" run by NASA and others.  The flat-earther theory is that the Arctic Circle is in the center and the Antarctic is a 150-foot (45m) tall wall of ice around the rim; NASA contractors guard the ice wall so nobody can fall over the edge.  Earth's daily cycle is a product of the sun and moon being 32 mile (51 km) wide spheres travelling in a plane 3,000 miles (4,800 km) above Earth.  The more distant stars are some 3100 miles (5000 km) away and there's also an invisible "anti-moon" which obscures the moon during lunar eclipses.

Lindsay Lohan in Lanvin Classic Garnet ballet flats (ballet pumps in the US) (Lanvin p/n: FW-BAPBS1-NAPA-A18391), Los Angeles, 2012.

Ballet flats are shoes which either literally are or closely resemble a ballerina’s dancing slippers.  In the US, ballet flats are almost always called ballet pumps and this use has spread, many in the industry also now calling them pumps, presumably just for administrative simplicity although the standardization does create problems because the term “pump” is used to describe a wide range of styles and there’s much inconsistency between markets.  A flat-file database is a database management system (DBMS) where records are stored in a uniform format with no structure for indexing or recognizing relationships between entries.  A flat-file database is best visualized as the page of a spreadsheet which no capacity for three-dimensionality but, in principle, there’s no reason why a flat-file database can’t be huge although they tend for many reasons not to be suitable to use at scale.

The Flatiron building (circa 1904) oil on canvas by Ernest Lawson (1873-1939).

The Flatiron Building is a 22 storey, 285 foot (86.9 m), tall building with a triangular footprint, located at 175 Fifth Avenue in what is now called the Flatiron District of Manhattan, New York City.  Opened in 1902 and originally called the “Fuller Building”, the Flatiron was one of the city’s first skyscrapers and gained the nickname which stuck because people compare the shape to the cast-iron clothes irons then on sale although, viewed from ground level, the shape is deceptive; whereas an iron is symmetrical, the Flatiron is an irregular triangle: a wedge.  A striking example of modernist design, it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989.

Flatware

Flatware in its historic sense is now rarely used outside of the categorization systems of catering suppliers except in the US where it vies with “silverware” & “flatwaresilverware” to describe what is in most of the English-speaking world called cutlery.  In modern use, a term which covers some utensils and some dishware seems to make no sense and that’s correct.  The origin of flatware belongs to a time when those to whom an invitation to dinner was extended would bring their own “flatware” (knife, fork, spoon, plate, goblet) because in most houses, those items existed in numbers sufficient only for the inhabitants.

Jacob Rees-Mogg taking a dish of tea.  Mr Rees-Mogg (b 1969), a noted member of Boris Johnson's government since 2019, is sometime referred to as "the right honourable member for the eighteenth century".

As applied to crockery, flatware items were in the fourteenth century those plates, dishes, saucers which were "shallow & smooth-surfaced", distinguishing them from hollowware which were the larger items (steel, china, earthenware) of crockery used to cook or serve food (onto or into flatware to be eaten with flatware).  The seemingly aberrant case of the cup (something inherently hollow) being flatware is that what we would now call a mug or goblet, like a knife, fork or plate, was an item most people would carry with them when going to eat in another place.  The issue of cup and saucer existing in different categories thus didn’t exist and in any case saucers were, as the name suggests, originally associated with the serving of sauce, being a drip-tray.  The cup and saucer in its modern form didn’t appear until the mid eighteenth century when a handle was added to the little bowls which had been in use in the West for more than a hundred years (centuries earlier in the East) and reflecting handle-less age, the phrase “a dish of tea” is still an occasionally heard affectation.

Elizabeth II farewelling Bill & crooked Hillary Clinton, Buckingham Palace, 2000.

Almost universally, flatware is referred to as "the silver".  Eating and drinking has long been fetishized and adopted increasingly elaborate forms of service so (except for the specific sense in the US) the term flatware is now of little use outside the databases of catering suppliers, crockery and cutlery now more useful general categories which can accommodate what is now a huge number of classes of wares.  Flatware is a noun and the noun plural is flatwares.