Dreadnought

Dreadnought (pronounced dred-nawt)

(1) A type of battleship armed with heavy-caliber guns in turrets: so called from the British battleship HMS Dreadnought (1906); A name used by the Royal Navy for many ships and submarines.

(2) A garment made of thick woolen cloth that can defend against storm and cold.

(3) A thick cloth with a long pile.

(4) Slang a heavyweight boxer, sometime extended to the largest or heaviest in a given field.

(5) A person who fears nothing; something that assures against fear.

1800-1810: The construct is dread + nought.  Dread is from the Middle English dreden, from Old English drǣdan (to fear, dread), aphetic form of ondrǣdan (to fear, dread), from and- +‎ rǣdan (from which English picked up read); corresponding to an aphesis of the earlier adread.  The Old Saxon was antdrādan & andrādan (to fear, dread), the Old High German was intrātan (to fear) and the Middle High German entrāten (to fear, dread, frighten).  Nought is from the Middle English nought & noght, (noȝt), from the Old English nōwiht & nāwiht (the construct being nay +‎ a +‎ wight), which in turn came from ne-ā-wiht, a phrase used as an emphatic "no", in the sense of "not a thing".  In the transition to Modern English, the word reduced gradually to nought, nawt and finally not; a doublet of naught.  The alternative spelling (though never used by the Admiralty) is Dreadnaught.

The dreadnoughts

HMS Dreadnought, 1906.

Launched in 1906, HMS Dreadnought is often said to have revolutionized naval power, the design so significant it proved the final evolution of what had, by the late nineteenth century, evolved into the battleship.  Subsequent vessels would be larger, faster, increasingly electronic and more heavily armed but the concept remained the same.  HMS Dreadnought rendered instantly obsolete every other battleship in the world (including the rest of the Royal Navy) and all other battleships then afloat were immediately re-classified as pre-dreadnoughts. 

HMS Dreadnought.

Her main design features were speed, armor, steam turbine propulsion and, especially, firepower almost exclusively of weapons of the largest caliber.  In the decades after her launch, British, German, American, Japanese and other navies would build larger and heavier dreadnoughts until, during world war two, their utility was finally seen to been eclipsed by both aircraft carriers and submarines.  The last dreadnought, HMS Vanguard, launched in 1946, was scrapped in 1958 but the US Navy maintained, on either the active or reserve lists, at least one of the four battleships it retained from WW2 until 2004 when the last was decommissioned.

HMS Dreadnought, 1908.

That it was the Royal Navy which first launched a dreadnought doesn’t mean the British Admiralty was alone in pursuing the concept.  Naval strategists in several nations had noted the course of battle between the Russian and Japanese fleets in 1905 and concluded the immediate future of naval warfare lay in the maximum possible deployment of big guns, able to launch attacks from the longest possible range, subsidiary smaller caliber weapons seen even as a disadvantage in battle.  That the Royal Navy was the first with such a ship afloat was a testament to the efficiency of British designers and shipbuilders, not the uniqueness of its plans.

Much read in palaces, chancelleries and admiralties around the word was a book released in 1890 called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 by US naval officer and theorist Captain Alfred Mahan (1840-1914).  Published in what, in retrospect, was a historical sweet-spot (technologically and politically) for the views it espoused, it brought Mahan great fame and exerted an extraordinary influence on diplomacy, military planning and the politics of the era.  The book was not alone the cause of the naval arms-race in the decade before the First World War but was at least a sharp nudge, push or shove depending on one’s view.  Curiously though, although a work primarily about naval strategy, while many of the maritime powers seemed convinced by Mahan’s arguments about the importance of naval sea power in geopolitics, not all admiralties adopted the strategic template.  What all agreed however was they needed more ships.

The nineteenth century of Pax Britannica ("British Peace", echoing the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire), describes the century of relative great-power stability between the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) and the outbreak of war in 1914 encompasses the idea of British Empire as the global hegemon, a role possible only because the Royal Navy enjoyed an unchallenged ability to patrol and protect the key maritime trade routes.  The effective control of these transport corridors not only guaranteed the security of the British Empire but it meant also the British effectively controlled maritime access to much of Asia, the Americas, Oceania the south Pacific, although, one factor in the success was it was that London ran things essentially in accordance with US foreign policy, assisting Washington in enforcing the Monroe Doctrine which upheld the US preponderance of interest in the Americas.  It can be argued the roots of the so-called "special relationship" took hold here.

The British Empire, in terms of the impression created by a map of the world on which its colonies and dependencies were colored usually in some shade of red, was deceptive, the remit of the local administrators sometimes extending little beyond the costal enclaves, even the transport links between towns not always entirely secure.  Never did the Empire posses the military resources to defend such vast, remote and disparate territories but it was the control of the sea, uniquely in history, which allowed the British for centuries to maintain what was, with no disparagement intended, a confidence trick.  The reason the empire could be maintained was not because of control of big colonies, it was all the little islands dotted around the oceans which enabled the navy to operate outposts which housed the ports and coaling stations from which ships could make repairs or provision with fuel, food and water.  All those little dots on the map were the "keys to the world".  Mahan’s book had drawn its influential conclusions from his study of the role of sea power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; what the British did was take advantage of the circumstances of the nineteenth century and deploy their sea power globally, in competition when necessary, in cooperation when possible and in conflict when required.  The practical expression of all this was British naval policy: that the Royal Navy must be of sufficient strength simultaneously to prevail in war against the combined strength of the next two biggest navies, either in separate theatres or as a massed fleet.

By the early twentieth century, economic and geopolitical forces combined to render the policy impossible to maintain, Britain no longer able to operate in “splendid isolation” (another somewhat misleading phrase of the era), needing alliances to spread the load of imperial defense.  It wasn’t just the rapid growth of the German fleet which had changed the balance of power but that alone was enough for the British and the French to reach an accommodation which is remembered as the Entente Cordiale (Cordial Agreement) of 1904 which may or may not have been an alliance but was enough of one for the admiralties in Paris and London cooperatively to organize the allocations of their fleets.  It certainly illustrated Lord Palmerston's (1784–1865) doctrine that the country had neither eternal allies nor perpetual enemies but only permanent interests for despite the centuries of enmity between Britain and France, the self-interest of both dictated the need to align against the German threat.

Royal Navy battlecruiser HMS New Zealand, 1911.

It was in this atmosphere the great naval arms race took place, plans for which were laid before the Wright brothers had flown a hundred–odd feet, barely off the ground, torpedoes were in their infancy and submarines were little threat more than a few miles from the coast.  The measure of a fleet was its battleships and their big guns and whichever side could put to sea the most firepower was winning the race.  It intrigued the navalists, strategists and theorists who knew from history that such a race, if left to run, could end only in war, the great, decisive set-piece battle of which would be the clash of massed fleets of battleships on the high seas, trading shell-fire at a range of twenty miles (32 km), before closing for the kill as the battle climaxed.  Dreadnought was one strand of the theorists’ imagination but there were others.  There was a school of thought which favored an emphasis on radio communications and a greater attention to the possibilities offered by the torpedo and, most influentially, what seems now the curious notion of a complimentary range of faster capital ships, essentially battleships with the big guns but little armor, the loss of protection off-set by the few knots in speed gained; these ships were called battlecruisers.  The argument was they could fight at such range nothing but a battleship would be a threat and those the battlecruiser could outrun because of their greater speed.  It seemed, to many, a good idea at the time.

Super Dreadnought: HMS Iron_Duke, Port Said, 1921.

But it was the Dreadnoughts which captured the imagination and defined the era.  Impressive though she was, HMS Dreadnought was not long unique as navies around the world launched the own and, as happens in arms races, the original was quickly out-classed and the next generation of ships, bigger and more heavily gunned still, came to be known as super dreadnoughts.  War did come but the grand battle on the high seas which the navalists had, for a quarter century been planning, never happened.  There were smaller clashes of squadrons but the imperative of the Royal Navy was more practical and traditionally British: avoid defeat.  As Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty (minister for the navy), emphasized to the First Sea Lord (the navy’s senior admiral), against a continental empire like Germany, while the Royal Navy couldn’t in a year win the war, because Britain’s empire was maritime, they could lose it in one afternoon.  Accordingly, the Royal Navy made no sustained attempts to induce a massed battle, focusing instead on a blockade, keeping the German fleet confined to its ports.  It was the German admirals who attempted to force the British to a set-piece battle, venturing into the North Sea in May 1916 with a fleet of nearly a hundred, including sixteen dreadnoughts and five battlecruisers.  Against this, the British assembled a hundred and fifty odd with twenty-eight dreadnoughts and nine battlecruisers.  The action came to be known as the Battle of Jutland.

German battlecruiser SMS Goeben, 1914.

On paper, although the result described as inconclusive, it was a tactical success for the Germans but strategically, the British achieved their goal.  The dreadnoughts barely engaged, most of the action confined to the battlecruisers and, unlike the smaller Battle of Tsushima (May 1905) in the Far East, fought by pre-dreadnoughts a decade earlier between the Japanese and Russian fleets, there was no winner in the traditional sense of naval warfare.  The German's tactical success in retrospect was something of a Dunkirk moment but the strategic implications were profound.  British losses were heavier but their numeric advantage was such they could absorb the loss and had the financial and industrial capacity to restore the fleet’s strength.  Damage to the German fleet was less but they lacked the time or capacity to build their navy to the point it could be used as a strategic weapon and it remained confined to its ports.  Both sides learned well the inherent limitations of the battlecruiser.

WWI era German U-Boot (Unterseeboot (under-sea-boat)), anglicized as U-Boat.

After Jutland, the German admirals concluded that to venture again against the British Home Fleet would either be an inconclusive waste or lead to the inevitable, decisive defeat.  They accordingly prevailed on the politicians and eventually gained approval to use the only genuinely effective weapon in their hands, the submarine.  It was the consequences of unrestricted submarine warfare which would bring the United States into the war in 1917 as a belligerent and without that intervention, the war would certainly have followed a different course and reached perhaps a different conclusion.

Although HMS Dreadnought lent her name to an era and remains one of the most significant warships built, she's remembered for the geopolitical reverberations around her launching rather than any achievement at sea, missing even the anti-climatic Battle of Jutland because of a scheduled re-fit.  Indeed, her only achievement of note in combat was the ramming and sinking of German U-Boat SM U-29 on 18 March 1915 although that remains a unique footnote in naval history, being the only time a battleship deliberately sank an enemy submarine.  Dreadnought was decommissioned in 1920 and scrapped the next year.  Later, under the terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty which sought to prevent another naval arms race, most of the surviving dreadnoughts were scrapped or scuttled but many of the super-dreadnoughts remained in the fleets, some not scrapped until after World War II.  The name has a strong resonance in the halls of the Admiralty (now the Navy Command in the Ministry of Defense) and has been chosen for the class of vessels to replace the existing Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines.  Now under construction, the first of the Dreadnought class boats is expected to enter service early in the 2030s.

Bunga

Bunga (pronounce bung-gah)

(1) A name given by locals to a location near Moreton Bay in what is now the state of Queensland, Australia.

(2) Phrase associated with a visit by a fake Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage to a British warship in 1910.

(3) A term used by for former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to describe some of the social events he hosted, derived apparently from certain behaviour at the events.

Early 1800s: A word known in English in the early nineteenth century, drawn from various parts of the British Empire.  In Malay-speaking countries bunga means flower and bunga bunga is the plural.  It’s an Aboriginal place name in Queensland and the name of a deity worshiped in Malaysia, Thailand, the southern Philippines and northern Sumatra

The Dreadnought Hoax

The Dreadnought hoaxers.

In 1910, Horace de Vere Cole (1881-1936), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), her brother Adrian Stephen (1883-1948) and a small group of friends, made up in the now socially unacceptable black-face, pretended to be the Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage, obtaining permission to visit the Royal Navy battleship HMS Dreadnought at anchor in Weymouth, Dorset.  The party was welcomed aboard the ship and an honor guard presented arms, accompanied by a rendition of a national anthem (which actually wasn't that of Abyssinia).  It was reported that each time they were shown some marvel of the ship, such as electric light, they murmured the phrase bunga, bunga!  When the pranksters revealed the hoax, there was some embarrassment but remarkably, it transpired no laws had been broken so prosecutions weren't possible (it would be very different today).  The Dreadnought's junior officers decided justice had to be done and met in the wardroom, staging a symbolic thrashing of the buttocks of the male miscreants.  Ms Woolf wasn't punished in absentia, the Royal Navy's long tradition with the lash not extending to the spanking of women.   

Silvio Berlusconi and the bunga bunga parties

Karima El Mahroug (b 1992) better known by her stage name Ruby Rubacuori (Ruby the Heartstealer).

Officially, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (1936-2023; Prime Minister of Italy 1994-1995, 2001-2006 & 2008-2011, MEP since 2019) hosted private parties.  It later emerged they were a sort of semi-structured orgy run by signor Berlusconi to permit his (male) friends to enjoy the conversational skills of young women, anxious to please both host and guests.  Some of the women were younger than others and one turned out to be Ruby the Heartstealer, a pleasingly pneumatic nymph younger even than she at the time admitted.

Silvio and friends, off to bunga bunga.

Evidence Ruby the Heartstealer supplied in 2010 suggested she had received US$10,000 from signor Berlusconi while attending parties at his mansions.  Hoping to clarify the nature of these events, Ruby the Heartstealer described orgy-like behaviour where signor Berlusconi and more than a dozen young women performed an “African-style” ritual, referred to by those in attendance as "bunga bunga", the young ladies performing in varying degrees of undress.  Ruby the Heartstealer though maintained she never enjoyed intimacy with signor Berlusconi and that he "behaved like a father", adding he had given her the cash only because she had told him she was in some trouble.  In June 2013 he was found guilty of paying for sex with an underage prostitute and of abusing his office, was sentenced to seven years in prison and banned from holding public office for life.  A year later, judges in Milan overturned the conviction on appeal and the only conviction which was sustained was for tax evasion although, because of his age, he was spared prison and required to perform "community service".  Ruby did lie to him about her age and and few would deny it was at least plausible she was older.  Really, he was a victim. 

Silvio Berlusconi with Vladimir Putin (b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999).

A great character in European politics, he remains Italy's longest-serving prime-minister since Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & prime-minister of Italy 1922-1943), a reasonable achievement given the churn-rate in those years.  Although there were scandals aplenty signor Berlusconi proved to be a great survivor and as soon as the pleasing technicalities of Italian law allowed his ban on seeking public office to expire earlier than that imposed in the headline sentence, he sought a seat in the European Parliament and was elected in 2019 and three years later returned to the Italian Senate after winning a seat in the 2022 Italian general election which brought Giorgia Meloni (b 1977; prime minister of Italy since 2022) to power.  There will be critics and it's absurd to suggest (as a few have) that he was to blame for the political emergence of Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) and polarizing as he was, many of his achievements were real and Italy has had prime-ministers who promised more and did less.  The government announced a national day of mourning for Wednesday 14 June, the day his state funeral will be conducted at Milan Cathedral.  Despite it all, he'll always be remembered as someone who got a bit of fun out of life and there are worse ways to be remembered.

Silvio's linguistic gift:  After bunga bunga re-entered the language, not even The Observer could resist using it when commenting (with their usual superior air) on Vanity Fair's photo-spread of Lindsay Lohan for the Italian edition.

Hoodoo

Hoodoo (pronounced who-do)

(1) A set of spiritual practices and traditions created and concealed from slave-owners by enslaved Africans in North America, based on traditional African beliefs.  Practiced predominantly in the south-east US, its identifiable features include folk magic, rituals of protection, herbal medicine, charming of objects, and ancestor veneration.

(2) In casual use, bad luck, or a person or thing that brings bad luck, not necessarily associated with the supernatural; to jinx, to bring bad luck or misfortune.

(3) In geology, a pillar of rock, created by various forces of erosion (also known as spires of rock, fairy chimneys, earth pyramids (and in particular formations) tent rocks).

1870: A creation of US English meaning "one who practices voodoo", apparently a variant of Voodoo.  The meaning "something that causes or brings bad luck" seems to have emerged in the 1880s and it was being used as a verb by 1886.  Interestingly, in 2002, it was documented also as a distinctly non-religious American folk magic.  Until the late twentieth century, hoodoo was spelled with & without an initial capital letter in a most inconsistent matter, both forms sometimes appearing in the one document.  The modern practice (which seems compelling) is to capitalize in when the word is used in the context of the spiritual practice or the cultural identification but to use all-lowercase when referring to the geological formations or used as casual slang (perhaps surprisingly, there’s been little apparent interest in proscribing hoodoo in this sense on the grounds of cultural appropriation).  Hoodoo is a noun & verb, hoodooed & hoodooing are verbs and hoodooism is a noun; the noun plural is hoodoos.

The first known instance of Hoodoo in English was in 1870 but the origins are wholly speculative, etymologists concluding it was probably an alteration of voodoo, a word drawn from the Ewe and Fon languages of Ghana and Benin which reference a divinity although the Akan odu (medicine) may be related and there’s also the possibility of a link to the Hausa hu'du'ba (resentment and retribution).  Less likely, but not impossible is that it’s from the variant Hudu (spirit work) in the Ewe language spoken in Ghana and Togo.  The link with Voodoo however is most convincing because Hoodoo was as early as the late nineteenth century identified as an African dialect with practices similar to the mysteries of Obi (Obeah) in the Caribbean.

Pre-production de Havilland Comet (DH 106) with the original, square windows, England, 1949.

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.  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.

Pre-dreadnought battleship, USS Texas ("Old Hoodoo"), 1898.  Note the sailors' washing hanging from the railings, a long naval tradition.   

Sailors are said to be notoriously superstitious and probably didn’t need much persuasion to call the USS Texas “Old Hoodoo”.  The US Navy’s first (pre-dreadnought) battleship, she was commissioned in response to the naval arms race which developed in the Americas in the late nineteenth century although despite the tensions, the construction was undertaken as what would soon seem a leisurely pace; ordered in 1886, it wasn't until 1889 the keel was laid down and when finally commissioned in 1895, although not yet obsolescent, she was hardly in the forefront of naval architecture.  The ships accident-prone reputation was well deserved and had stated early with incidents of grounding, flooding (drowning three of the crew) and a collision with the dock.  However, she rose to the occasion and provide sterling service during the Spanish–American War (1898) but ironically, the reputation gained was such that the Navy decided to use the now storied name for a new dreadnought and the USS Texas (BB-35), commissioned in 1914, was later declared a national historic landmark and is the last surviving World War I era dreadnought.  As sailors know, it’s bad luck to change the name of a ship and, now named the USS San Marcos, so it proved, towed as a hulk to shallow waters in Chesapeake Bay where, resting on the bottom, she became an increasingly battered target ship and the navy used her for gunnery practice until the late 1940s.  Increasing water traffic however mean the remains had become a navigational hazard and most of the remains were removed as scrap in 1959.

Hoodoos short (left), tall (centre) and clustered (right), Arizona, south-west US.

In geology, a hoodoo (also known as spires of rock, fairy chimneys, earth pyramids (and in particular formations) tent rocks) is a tall, typically thin, spire of rock formed by the processes of erosion (wind, rain, floods) and are forms usually of a relatively soft rock (such as sandstone) topped by harder stone which better resists the forces of nature.  Mostly, they exist within sedimentary rock and volcanic rock formations.  Hoodoos can be only a few feet high or exceed the level of multi-storey buildings and the shape they assume is wholly dictated by the composition of the rocks from which they’re formed, the erosional patterns differing according to the hardness of the material.  The introduction of the word hoodoo to geology seems to have happened in the late nineteenth century at the time when it had entered the vernacular to describe both the rituals of certain folk magic and the sense of doom or bad luck.  As the more remote regions of the western US were explored, the rocky structures were noted to be of not dissimilar spiritual significance to First Nations peoples and in some cases literally to be the petrified remains of those punished by the gods for their transgressions.

In the natural environment, temperature can also create structures with a hoodoo-like appearances.  Trees in Finland (left), a frozen fountain in Shevchenko Garden, Kharkiv, Ukraine (centre) and frozen Geyser in Letchworth State Park, New York with volcano-like flow maintained at the top (right).

Ersatz

Ersatz (pronounced er-zahts or er-sahts)

(1) Serving as a substitute; synthetic; artificial (adjective).

(2) An artificial substance or article used to replace something natural or genuine; a substitute (noun).

1875: From the German ersatz (units of the army reserve (literally "compensation, replacement, substitute"), a back-formation from ersetzen (to replace; substitute good) from the Old High German irsezzen, the construct being ir- (an unaccented variant of ur; in German, the prefix signifying a notion of getting something (either by conscious effort or (rarely) producing the effect of coming to have it unintentionally) by specific means) + setzen, from the Middle High German setzen, from the Old High German sezzen, from the Proto-Germanic satjaną, from the primitive Indo-European sodéyeti; from the primitive Indo-European root sed- (to sit); it was cognate with the Hunsrik setze, the English set and the Dutch zetten.  Historically an adjective, use of ersatz as a noun was first noted in 1892.

Technically, although ersatz has many synonyms (synthetic, phony, imitation, fake, sham, substitute, counterfeit, bogus, manufactured, pretended, simulated, spurious, copied, false et al), because of its association with inferior quality goods (such as chocolate and, most famously, the notoriously unpleasant ersatz coffee, made typically from acorns), produced in Germany during the world wars to compensate for the shortage of genuine products, Ersatz tends to be used in that context while the preferred terms in modern English use are fake & faux, the latter with the particular sense of something imitative yet deliberately not deceptively so.  Indeed, faux can have positive connotations (faux fur, leather etc) and, among vegans, such things may be obligatory. 

Originally, the German military jargon was Ersatz Corps which described reserve, substitute or replacement troops, the word later adopted by the Kaiserliche Marine (the Imperial Navy) as part of the secrecy protocol which didn’t reveal the names of vessels until launch (and, in war-time, even during sea-trials), ships thus appearing in the naval lists with names like "Ersatz Yorck class".  During the two world wars, it was most famously applied to over ten-thousand substitute products, both industrial and consumer goods, created because of shortages.  The word entered Russian and English and came to describe any product thought not as good as the original.

Lindsay Lohan v Take-Two Interactive Software Inc et al, New York Court of Appeals (No 24, pp1-11, 29 March 2018)

In a case which took an unremarkable four years from filing to reach New York’s highest appellate court, Lindsay Lohan’s suit against the makers of video game Grand Theft Auto V was dismissed.  In a unanimous ruling in March 2018, six judges of the New York Court of Appeals rejected her invasion of privacy claim which alleged one of the game’s characters was based on her.  The judges found the "actress/singer" in the game merely resembled a “generic young woman” rather than anyone specific.  Unfortunately the judges seemed unacquainted with the concept of the “basic white girl” which might have made the judgment more of a fun read.

Beware of imitations: The real Lindsay Lohan and the GTA 5 ersatz, a mere "generic young woman".

Agreeing with the 2016 ruling of the New York County Supreme Court which, on appeal, also found for the game’s makers, the judges, as a point of law, accepted the claim a computer game’s character "could be construed a portrait", which "could constitute an invasion of an individual’s privacy" but, on the facts of the case, the likeness was "not sufficiently strong".  The “… artistic renderings are an indistinct, satirical representation of the style, look and persona of a modern, beach-going young woman... that is not recognizable as the plaintiff" Judge Eugene Fahey wrote in his ruling.  Lindsay Lohan’s lawyers did not seek leave to appeal.

Schematic of Ersatz Yorck's armor deployment.

Ersatz Yorck was one of the project names for a planned build of three battlecruisers ordered in 1916 by the German navy.  After the first keel had been laid down, influenced by the tendency, noted since the launching a decade earlier of the Royal Navy's HMS Dreadnought, towards bigger guns, the design was revised to become was significantly heavier than the Mackensen class which had been the original template.  The name Ersatz Yorck was derived from the ship being the replacement (ie ersatz in the original German sense of the word) for the Roon class armored cruiser SMS Yorck, sunk in home waters in 1914 after striking a (German) mine.  The other two ships in the programme were Ersatz Gneisenau & Ersatz Scarnhorst, both slated as replacements for namesakes lost during the Battle of the Falkland Islands (1914).

The three ships were never completed because it had become apparent augmenting the surface fleet was reinforcing failure and that U-boat (submarine) construction was a better use of available resources.  Thus the partially built Ersatz Yorck, years from completion, was broken up on the slipway and cannibalized to support U-boat production.  However, the navy retained the blueprints and it was these plans which in the 1930s provided the basis for what became the Scarnhorst class battleships although, in the Second World War, the illusion a surface fleet would be a more effective instrument of war at sea than the U-Boats proved again a chimera and one which meant that even in the early days of the conflict, the British never quite lost control of the Atlantic.  Had Germany entered the war with the 300 operational submarines advocated by the navy's U-Boat branch rather than the two-dozen odd available in 1939, the battle in the Atlantic would have have assumed a different character.   

Truculent

Truculent (pronounced truhk-yuh-luhnt or troo-kyuh-luhnt)

(1) Defiantly aggressive, sullen, or obstreperous; aggressively hostile; belligerent; fiercely argumentative; eager or quick to argue, fight or start a conflict.

(2) Brutally harsh; vitriolic; scathing,

(4) Savage, fierce (archaic).

1530–1540: From the Middle French, from the Latin truculentus, the construct being truc- (stem of trux (genitive trucis) (fierce; wild; savage; pitiless) + -ulentus (the adjectival suffix (and familiar as the related –ulent).  Although the ultimate source is uncertain, it may be from a suffixed form of the primitive Indo-European root tere- (cross over, pass through; overcome).  Truculent is an adjective, truculence & truculency are nouns and truculently is an adverb

Narcissus Truculent, commonly known as the truculent daffodil.

The original meaning was “cruel or savage” in the specific sense of “barbarous, ferocious, fierce”.  By the early seventeenth century the emphasis on “deadly & destructive” gave way to “defiant, uncompromising, belligerent, inflexible, stubborn, unyielding and eager to argue or start a conflict” and it’s likely the shift happened as the use transferred from descriptions of soldiers to more general discourse; it was thus an elaborated type of figurative use.  The noun truculence dates from 1727 and was from the Latin truculentia (savageness, cruelty), from truculentus.  The earlier noun truculency was in use as early as the 1560s.  The comparative is “more truculent” and the superlative “most truculent”, both forms able to be used either of one or between two or more: “Mr Trump seemed more truculent than usual” & “Mr Trump was at his most truculent” instances of one form and Mr Trump proved more truculent than Mr Romney” the other.  However, despite the labelling habits of some, truculence does not imply motive, merely conduct.  The use of truculent by some implies there’s resentment but there’s no etymological or other historical basis for that; truculence is a way of behaving, not the reason for the behavior.  An imaginative meteorologist might speak of “a truculent hurricane” but there’s no implication the weather system feels mistreated and is thus lashing out; it’s just an especially violent storm.  Nor does “truculent” of necessity imply something violent or raucous and there are many who gain their effectiveness in debate from their “quiet truculence”, a description often used of the English writer PC Wren (1875–1941), the author of Beau Geste (1924).  Wren’s “quiet truculence” was less to do with what was in his books than his unwavering insistence the tales of his life of adventure in the French Foreign Legion were all true, despite the complete absence of any documentary evidence.

Words often used (sometimes too loosely especially given the shifting sense since the seventeenth century) as synonyms include abusive, aggressive, antagonistic, bad-tempered, barbarous, bellicose, browbeating, brutal, bullying, caustic, combative, contentious, contumelious, cowing, cross, defiant, ferocious, fierce, frightening, harsh, hostile, inhuman, inhumane, intimidating, invective, mean, militant, mordacious, mordant, obstreperous, opprobrious, ornery, pugnacious, quarrelsome, rude, savage, scathing, scrappy, scurrilous, sharp, sullen, terrifying, terrorizing, trenchant, violent, vituperative & vituperous.  It may be a comment on the human character there are rather fewer antonyms but they include cooperative, gentle, mild, tame, polite, correct & nice (which has itself quite a history of meanings).

A truculent Lindsay Lohan discussing industrial relations with her assistant.

All things considered, truculent would seem an admirable name for a warship but only twice has the Royal Navy agreed.  HMS Truculent (1916) was a Yarrow Later M-class destroyer which had an unremarkable war record, the highlight of which was a footnote as one of the three destroyers escorting the monitors used in the famous Zeebrugge Raid of 23 April 1918 which was an early-morning attempt to block the Belgian port of Bruges-Zeebrugge by scuttling obsolete ships in the canal entrance and using others packed with explosives to destroy port infrastructure.  Only partially successful, the bloody and audacious raid is remembered for the phrase "Eleven VCs before breakfast", an allusion to the decorations awarded (11 x VCs (Victoria Cross), 21 x DSOs (Distinguished Service Order) and 29 x DSCs (Distinguished Service Crosses)).  The second HMS Truculent (P315) was a T-class submarine, launched in 1942, which sunk nine ships during World War II (1939-1945).  It’s remembered now for lending its name to the “Truculent Light”.  On 12 January 1950, while travelling at night on the surface in the Thames Estuary, she collided with the 643 ton Swedish carrier SS Divina, on passage from Purfleet to Ipswich with a cargo of paraffin and, her hull been severely breached amidships, the submarine sank almost instantly with the loss of 64 men (there were 20 survivors).  As a consequence, regulations were introduced requiring all Royal Navy submarines be fitted with an additional steaming, panoramic white light on the bow.  The “Truculent Lights” ensure that while on the surface, despite being low in the water at in darkness close to invisible, submarines remain visible to other ships.

The wreck of HMS Truculent being salvaged.  All Royal Navy submarines have since “the Truculent Incident” been fitted with a 360^o white navigation light on the bow, known as the “Truculent Light”.

There have been no Truculents launched since but other "aggressive names" have over the centuries been used or proposed including 5 x HMS Vindictive (the last launched in (1918), 6 x HMS Arrogant (1896; a planned aircraft carrier was cancelled in 1945), 1 x HMS HMS Aggressor (1801; a planned aircraft carrier was cancelled in 1945), 1 x HMS Antagonist (a planned submarine cancelled in 1945), 8 x HMS Bruiser class (1947), eight x HMS Savage class  (1942), 1 x HMS Violent (1917) and 7 x HMS Warspite (1991; Warspite scheduled to be the third of the planned Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines) and 9 x HMS Terror class (1916).  Anticipating a later truculent spirit however there was, uniquely, an HMS Trump (P333), one of the 53 of the third group of the T class.  She was launched in 1944 and for most of her life was attached to the Australia-based 4th Submarine Squadron (although remaining always on the Royal Navy's list).  HMS Trump was one of her class which remained in service after the war and based in Australia, was re-fitted to provide the enhanced underwater performance needed for the anti-submarine force to counter the growing threat from the Soviet navy.  The last Royal Navy submarine posted to be stationed Australian Waters, she was struck from the active list in 1969 and scrapped in 1971.  HMS Trump notwithstanding, the naming trend in recent decades has been less truculent and it can’t be long before HMS Diversity is launched.

Banner

 Banner (pronounced ban-er)

(1) The flag of a country, army, troop etc.

(2) An ensign or the like bearing some device, motto, or slogan, as carried in religious processions, political demonstrations etc.

(3) A flag used as the standard of a nation, sovereign, lord, knight, military formation or other institution (and by extension (1) the military unit under such a flag or standard & (2) a military or administrative subdivision).

(4) A sign painted on fabric or some other material and hung over a street, entrance etc.

(5) Anything regarded or displayed as a symbol of principles.

(6) In heraldry, a square flag bearing heraldic devices.

(7) In journalism, a headline extending across the width of a newspaper or web page (in print usually across the top of the front page); also known as banner line, banner headline, screamer or streamer.

(8) As a verb, in journalism, (of a headline), prominently to display (used in other contexts by analogy).

(9) In advertising, an advertisement appearing across the top or bottom or along one side of a newspaper or web page; also known as a banner ad .

(10) An open streamer with lettering, towed behind an airplane in flight, for advertising purposes.

(11) A placard or sign carried in a procession or demonstration.

(12) As an adjective, leading or foremost.

(13) Historically, a type of administrative division in Inner Mongolia and Tuva, made during the Qing dynasty; at that time, Outer Mongolia and part of Xinjiang were also divided into banners.

1200–1220: From the Middle English banere (piece of cloth attached to the upper end of a pole or staff), from the Old French baniere (flag, banner, standard) (from which modern French in the twelfth century gained bannière), from the Late Latin bann & bannum (variants of bandum (standard)), from a Frankish or West Germanic source, from the Proto-Germanic bandwa (identifying sign, banner, standard (and also “military formation under a banner”), source also of the Gothic bandwa (a sign), from suffixed form of the primitive Indo-European root bha- (to shine).

A non-official Royal Standard of Croatia, one of several designs used by those affiliated with the movement seeking to restore the Royal House of Croatia.

A banner was the standard (a type of flag) of a king, lord, or knight, behind which his followers marched to war and to which they rallied in battle.  From the early fourteenth century, there was also the related noun banneret, an order of knighthood, originally in reference to one who could lead his men into battle under his own banner, for centuries a common European practice when armies were organized ad-hoc for invasions and formations were deployed under their banners rather than being mixed.  It later came to mean “one who received rank for valiant deeds done in the king's presence in battle”.  As is still the practice, such honors had grades and there was also the bannerette (a small banner), awarded to those who provided service meritorious rather than valorous.  The reason a banner was attached to a tall pole and carried by “a standard bearer” was that in the swirl of battle, such was the clatter that communication by voice could soon become impossible over even short distances and the only way a commander could effectively re-assemble his troops into formation was to have them return to the banner.  This was the origin of the phrase “rally around the flag”, in the twentieth century re-purposed metaphorically although the figurative sense of "anything displayed as a profession of principles" was used as early as the fourteenth century.  The first use of banner to describe newspaper headlines which in large, bold type stream across the top of the page dates from 1913.  The term “banner blindness” was created in 1998 to describe the tendency of users to ignore banner advertising on websites.  Synonyms (depending on context) can include emblem, headline, bunting, pennant, streamer, advertisement, leading, colors, ensign, heading, pennon, standard, exceptional, foremost, outstanding, banderole, burgee & gonfalon.  Banner is a noun, verb and adjective, bannered is an verb & adjective and bannering is an adjective; the noun plural is banners.

Flag of the Commander of the Croatian Navy.

Technically, the term banner can be used to describe any flag, ensign, pennant or standard although it’s now less used for the more precise terms have come to be well-understood and are thus more popular.  Pennant was from the Middle English penon, penoun & pynoun, from the Old French penon, from the Latin penna (feather).  Although it wasn’t always the case, a pennant is distinguished by its elongated shape which tapers to a point.  It’s now especially associated with naval use, the advantage of the shape being that it tends to remain legible even in conditions where material of square or rectangular shape can become distorted.  Pennants are also used by sports teams and university societies.  In sporting competition, a championship is sometimes referred to as “the pennant” or “the flag” even though such thing are not always awarded as physical trophies.

Flag of the Socialist Republic of Croatia (1947–1990) under comrade Marshall Tito.

Ensign was from the Middle English ensigne, from the Old French enseigne, from the Latin īnsignia, the nominative plural of īnsigne.  By convention of use, ensign is now used almost exclusively by the military, especially by naval forces (the use to describe the lowest grade of commissioned officer in the US Navy (equivalent to a sub-lieutenant, and once used also in the infantry (the coronet fulfilling the role in the cavalry) dates from the role evolving from the assigned role of being responsible for the care, raising and lowering of flags and pennants, including the unit’s ensign).  In navies, the principal flag or banner flown by a ship (usually at the stern) to indicate nationality is called the ensign (often modified as red ensign, royal ensign etc).

Standard was from the Middle English standard, from the Old French estandart (gathering place, battle flag), from the Frankish standahard (literally “stand firm, stand hard”), the construct being stand +‎ -ard.  There is an alternative etymology which suggest the second element was from the Frankish oʀd (point, spot, place (and linked with the Old French ordé (pointed), the Old English ord (point, source, vanguard), the German Standort (location, place, site, position, base, literally “standing-point”))).  The notion is this merged with the Middle English standar, stander or standere (flag, banner (literally “stander)).  Standard is now the usual form when describing symbol of an individual, family, clan or military formation when presented in the shape used by national flags.

1957 Standard Ensign.  It typified the dreary products offered by much of the British industry in the post-war years.  The flag is the Red Ensign (Red Duster in nautical slang), the civil ensign of the UK, flown by British merchant or passenger craft since 1707.

The Standard Motor Company operated in the UK between 1903-1970 although in 1963 it ceased to use the Standard name on products sold in most markets, switching them to Triumph which would be used until 1984, the company having been integrated into the doomed British Leyland (BL) conglomerate in 1968.  In India, where the operations had become independent of BL, the Standard name lingered until 1988.  In 1957, Standard, having obtained from the Royal Navy the right to use the name Vanguard (the name of many ships and submarines including the last dreadnought (big battleship) ever launched) for their family car (the Standard Vanguard, 1948-1963), decided to continue the nautical theme by naming their new model the Ensign (1957-1963).  In the manner of the Citroën ID (1957-1969) and Mercedes-Benz 219 (W105, 1956-1959), the Ensign offered a large-bodied vehicle at a lower price, achieved by fitting a less powerful engine and substantially reduced equipment levels.  Until 1962 the Ensign was available only with a 1670 cm³ (102 cubic inch) for-cylinder engine which even in the pre-motorway era was thought marginal in a relative heavy car but, although slow, it offered a lot of metal for the money and sold well to fleets and the government, the military especially fond of them.  If the 1.6 litre gas (petrol) version was slow, also available was a version with a 1622 cm³ (99 cubic inch) Perkins P4C diesel engine, the low survival rate of which is sometimes attributed to so many being sold to the Coal Board or Wales and, having descended into Welsh valleys, they lacked to power to climb out.  The last of the Ensigns (1962-1963) were fitted with a 2163 cm³ (132 cubic inch) four-cylinder gas engine which proved more satisfactory but by then the Vanguard-Ensign line was outdated and the names were retired when the replacement range was marketed under the Triumph rather than the Standard marque.

Once the "Standard of the World": 1938 Cadillac Series 90 V16 Convertible Coupé (left), 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham (centre) & 1967 Cadillac Coupe DeVille convertible.

Elsewhere in the automotive world “standard” was used in different ways.  Cadillac long used the slogan “The Standard of the World” and that was certainly true in the 1930s when the Cadillac V16s were at least the equal in engineering and craftsmanship to anything made in Europe an even in the late 1960s, although the “hand-made” years were over, the company still offered the finest engine-transmission combinations in the world and managed to master sub-systems like air-conditioning in a way it took the Europeans a few decades to match.  After about 1970, it was usually downhill for the old “standard of the world” although there have been some hopeful signs in the twenty-first century.  General Motors’ now defunct southern outpost, Holden, in first two decades (1948-1966), used standard to mean “basic”, the better-equipped versions being the “Business” and the “Special”.  In England, Jaguar’s pre-war use of SS as a brand was apparently derived from the company’s origin as the Swallow Sidecar Company but, after the association with the Standard Motor Company as an engine supplier, the factory began to prefer Standard Swallow, the cars sold under the badge Jaguar SS.  After the war, the SS label was dropped, the association with the Nazi Party’s SS (Schutzstaffel (security section or squad)) too unsavory in those times although the moment would soon pass, Jaguar in 1957 reviving the name for the XK-SS, the road-going version of the D-Type race car.

Pennant of the commander of a flotilla of naval vessels in the Croatian Navy.

Flag is from the Middle English flag & flagge (flag), of uncertain origin.  It may have been related to the early Middle English flage (name for a baby's garment) and the Old English flagg & flacg (cataplasm, poultice, plaster) or could have been merely imitative or otherwise drawn from the Proto-Germanic flaką (something flat), from the primitive Indo-European pleh- (flat, broad, plain), referencing the shape.  The modern flag is a piece of cloth, decorated with a combination of colors, shapes or emblems which can be used as a visual signal or symbol.  In Admiralty use, a “flag” can refer to (1) a specific flag flown by a ship to show the presence on board of the admiral; the admiral himself, or their flagship or (2) a signal flag or the act of signaling with a flag.  The now familiar use as national symbol is surprisingly modern.  Although flags and standards were of course common even before the current conception of the nation-state coalesced, it wasn’t until the eighteen century that the association of a flag with a country became close to universal.  One interesting quirk of national flags is that since Libya’s was redesigned, the flag of Jamaica is the only one on Earth not to include either red, white or blue.

A banner used in Croatia between 925-1102 (left), the current Croatian flag adopted after independence in 1990 (centre) and the Croatian naval ensign (1990).

One of the most ancient symbols to endure in modern nation flags is the red & white checkered pattern used to this day on the flag of Croatia.  The oldest known example dates from 925 and the pattern was used (with the odd interruption) for centuries, even when the country was a non-sovereign component of supranational states such as the Habsburg Empire.  A red star was used instead when Croatia was a part of comrade Marshall Tito’s (1892-1980) Jugoslavija (Yugoslavia) between 1945-1990 but the red & white checks were restored when independence was regained in 1990.

Ivana Knoll at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

Noted Instagram influencer Ivana Knoll (b 1992) was a finalist in the Miss Croatia beauty contest in 2016 and for her appearances at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, chose a number of outfits using the national symbol of the red and white checkerboard, matching the home strip worn by the team.  By the standards of Instragram, the design of the hoodie she donned for Croatia's game against Morocco at the Al-Bayat stadium wasn't particularly revealing but it certainly caught the eye.  As if Gianni Infantino (b 1970) doesn't have enough to ponder, the former Miss Croatia tagged FIFA in her posts, fearing perhaps the FIFA president may not be among her 600,000 Instagram followers and her strategy seems to have had the desired effect although whether the design which, does cover her hair, shoulders and legs, will prove sufficiently demur to satisfy the local rules, isn't clear.   The guidance provided by FIFA indicated non-Qatari women don’t need to wear the abaya (the long, black robe), tops must cover their midriff and shoulders, and skirts, dresses or trousers must cover the knees and clothing should not be tight or reveal any cleavage.  In accordance with the rules or not, Ms Knoll proved a popular accessory for Qatari men seeking selfies.

Croatian FIFA World Cup 2022 strips, home (left) & away (right). 

On the basis of her Instagram posts, the German-born beauty wouldn't seem to be in compliance with the rules but thus far there's been no report of reaction from the authorities but if she has any problems, Sepp Blatter's (b 1936; FIFA president 1998-2015) lawyers may be available.  They seem pretty good.  Paradoxically, although the impressively pneumatic Ms Knoll generated much interest in her hoodie, had she worn an all-enveloping burka in the red & white checkerboard, it might have gained even more clicks.

Lindsay Lohan with ensigns, flags and pennants.