Rabbit

Rabbit (pronounced rab-it)

(1) Any of several soft-furred, large-eared, rodentlike burrowing mammals of the family Leporidae, allied with the hares and pikas in the order Lagomorpha, having a divided upper lip and long hind legs, usually smaller than the hares and mainly distinguished from them by bearing blind and furless young in nests rather than fully developed young in the open.

(2) Any of various small hares.

(3) The fur of a rabbit or hare, often processed to imitate another fur.

(4) A runner in a distance race whose goal is chiefly to set a fast pace, either to exhaust a particular rival so that a teammate can win or to help another entrant break a record; pacesetter.

(5) In sport, a person poor at a sport; in cricket specifically, an unskilled batter (also as “batting bunny”, usually clipped to bunny).

(5) As Welsh rabbit, an alternative form of Welsh rarebit & Welsh ribbit (A snack made of cheese melted with a little ale and served on toast).  Welsh rabbit was the original form but was erroneously marked as a corruption in a dictionary published in 1785 although it’s not clear if the editor made the assumption or drew the conclusion from oral evidence.

(6) In nuclear engineering, a pneumatically-controlled tool used to insert small samples of material inside the core of a nuclear reactor.

(7) In computing theory, a large element at the beginning of a list of items to be bubble sorted, and thus tending to be quickly swapped into the correct position.

(8) In northern English regional slang, as “rabbit catcher”, a midwife or one who by force of circumstance assists in the delivery of a baby.

(9) As “rabbit ears”, the indoor dipole television antenna which typically sat atop the early analogue sets which received a terrestrial signal.

(10) Incessantly or nonsensically to talk.

(11) To hunt rabbits.

(12) In US slang, to flee.

1375-1425: From the late Middle English rabet & rabette, from the Anglo-Latin rabettus, from the Middle French rabouillet (baby rabbit), from the dialectal Old North French rabotte, probably a diminutive of Middle Dutch or West Flemish robbe (rabbit, seal), of uncertain origin but which may be an imitative verb (perhaps robben or rubben (to rub)) and used to allude to a characteristic of the animal.  The related forms include the French rabot (plane), the Middle Dutch robbe (rabbit; seal (from which Modern Dutch gained rob (seal (also “rabbit”), the Middle Low German robbe & rubbe (rabbit), the later Low German Rubbe (seal), the West Frisian robbe (seal), the Saterland Frisian Rubbe (seal) and the North Frisian rob (“seal”) eventually borrowed as the German Robbe (seal).  Early dictionary editors thus described the word as “a Germanic noun with a French suffix”.  Rabbit is a noun & verb, rabbitiness is a noun, rabbited is a verb, rabbitlike & rabbity are adjectives and rabbiting is a noun & verb; the noun plural is rabbits and (especially in the collective) rab·bit.

Lindsay Lohan with rabbit.

Until the late nineteenth century, the meaning was exclusively what would now be understood as “a young rabbit” but it came to be used of the whole species, replacing the original coney, owing to the latter's resemblance to and use as a euphemism for cunny (“vulva” and linked obviously with “cunt” although despite that the preferred slang with some zoological allusion came to include “beaver”, “camel toe” and (especially) “pussy”, rather than “bunny”).  The noun coney dates from the early thirteenth century and was abstracted from the Anglo-French conis and the Old French coniz, (plurals of conil (long-eared rabbit; (Lepus cunicula)) from the Latin cuniculus, the source also of the Spanish conejo, the Portuguese coelho and the Italian coniglio), the small, Spanish variant of the Italian hare (Latin lepus).  The word may ultimately be from the Iberian Celtic although classical writers said it was Hispanic.  In Middle English the two forms were cony & conny (the derivations including coning, cunin & conyng) while the Old French had conil alongside conin.  The evolution seems to be that the plural form conis (from conil, with the -l- elided) was taken into English and regularly single-ized as cony.  The Old French form was borrowed in the Dutch konijn and the German Kaninchen (a diminutive), and is preserved in the surname Cunningham (from a place-name in Ayrshire).  Rabbits not being native to northern Europe, there was no Germanic word for them.  In the fourteenth century “rabbit” came to describe the young of the species and over the centuries came to supplant coney, a process complete by the early nineteenth.  It was another of those exercises in sanitization because in English & Welsh slang, coney had been adopted as a punning synonym for cunny (cunt).  That was complicated by it appearing in the Book of Proverbs in the King James Version of the Bible (KJV, 1611) so the work-around was to change the pronunciation of the original short vowel (rhyming with honey, money) to rhyme with bony, stony.  In the Old Testament, the word translates the Hebrew shaphan (rock-badger).

When Volkswagen in 1974 introduced the Golf in the North American market, it was named the Rabbit, apparently because it would thought the name would suggest qualities such as “agility, speed & playfulness” which were positive attributes in what was then (by US standards) a very small car, much smaller than the more recent versions.  Because of the international success of the Golf, when the revised model was released in 1983, the North American cars switched to that name and it’s been marketed that way since except between 2003-2008 when the Rabbit badge was revived.  The revival was in retrospect a curious choice given the obvious advantages offered by using the one name globally but at the time VW America had a rationalization: “We think we have some opportunities to do something creative with the Rabbit nameplate and recognizes the Golf nameplate has never really caught on with North American consumers as it was overshadowed by the Jetta sedan and wagon.  Volkswagen customers want a relationship with their cars and names like The Thing, Beetle, Fox and Rabbit support this."  Whatever the opportunities may have been, the linguistic experiment wasn’t continued and since 2009, it’s been Golfs all the way.

US market VW Golfs: 1974 Rabbit L (Generation 1)  (left) and 2007 Rabbit TSI (Generation 5).

There was some linguistic irony in VW’s choice because as the US satirist & critic HL Mencken (1880–1956) pointed out in The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (1919): “Zoologically speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit.”

The White Rabbit was a character in Lewis Carroll’s (1832–1898) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and one which appears often, always in a waistcoat with pocket watch and in a hurry, fearful always of the impending fury the duchess will visit upon him should he be a moment late.  It’s the white rabbit which Alice follows down the rabbit hole, leading to the bizarre adventures recounted.  One of popular culture’s best-known rabbits gave rise to the phrase “bunny boiler”, a reference to the scene in the film Fatal Attraction (1987) in which a scorned woman revenged herself upon her adulterous ex-lover by tossing his daughter’s pet rabbit into a pot of boiling water; he arrives home to discover a boiled bunny.  The Warner Brother cartoon character Bugs Bunny first appeared on the screen in 1938 and is often described by his shotgun wielding antagonist, the lisping Elmer Fudd, as "that wascally wabbit".

In idiomatic use there’s “pull a rabbit out of the hat” (to find or obtain a sudden solution to a problem), “rabbit-hearted” (someone timid or inclined to be flighty), “rabbit food” (a disapproving view of vegetables held by some meat-eaters), “the rabbit test” (an early pregnancy test involving the injection of the tested woman's urine into a female rabbit, then examining the rabbit's ovaries a few days later for changes in response to a hormone (“the rabbit died” the phrase indicating a positive test or an admission of one’s pregnancy)), “breed like rabbits” (slang for an individual, family, or sub-group of a population with a high birth-rate), “down the rabbit hole” (a time-consuming tangent or detour, often one from which it’s psychologically difficult to extricate oneself), “lucky rabbit’s foot”, (the carrying of a luckless bunny’s preserved rabbit’s foot as a lucky charm), “like a rabbit warren” (a confusingly labyrinthine environment (used literally & figuratively)), “rabbit in the headlights” (an allusion to the way rabbits (like some other wildlife) sometimes “freeze” when caught in the light of an oncoming vehicle’s headlamps) and the inevitable “rabbit fucker” (a general term of disparagement (although it could be applied literally in the right circumstances)).

The “earless” rabbit with “eared” companions.

In May 2011, some weeks after the meltdown at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant which suffered severe damage in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, a video of an “earless rabbit” began to circulate, purportedly captured in an area just beyond the crippled plant’s exclusion area.  The immediate speculation was of course the creature’s unusual state was a result of a radiation-induced genetic mutation.  Geneticists however had a less troubling explanation.  Although there’s no doubt the radiation emitting from Fukushima Dai-ichi (some 225 kilometres (140 miles) north-east of Tokyo) represents a major risk to health and the long-term environmental effects remain unclear, the scientists say not only is it unlikely to be linked with the earless rabbit, such creatures are far from unusual.  According to a  statement issued from Colorado State University's Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences: “…radiation can cause mutations that can be occasionally expressed as obvious birth defects, such as shown in the video.  However, to say this is the result of contamination from the Fukushima accident is a stretch, because natural radiation, as well as many other chemical substances in the environment and other factors, can also be mutagenic.  In most cases, the cause of congenital birth defects in humans and other animals cannot be determined and as far as science has shown, there have never been mutations produced by ionizing radiations that do not occur spontaneously as well.”

Rabbits used in nuclear reactors: Polyethylene 1-inch (25 mm) rabbit (left), Polyethylene 2-inch (50 mm) rabbit (centre) and Titanium 2-inch (50 mm) rabbit.

The rabbit does though have a place in nuclear engineering.  In the industry, the term “rabbit” is used to describe a range of pneumatically controlled tools which are used remotely to insert or retrieve items from a nuclear reactor or other radioactive environments.  The name is thought to come from the devices being tubular (on the model of the rabbit borrow) which allows samples rapidly to be injected into the periphery of a reactor core, the injectables moving “with the speed of startled rabbits” although there may also be the implication of rabbits as expendable creatures, the tool essential for maintenance, inspection, and repair tasks in nuclear facilities, where direct human intervention is either dangerous or impossible because of high radiation levels.

Winston Churchill inspecting the progress of project White Rabbit No, 6, Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, England, November 1941.

The World War II (1939-1945) era White Rabbit No. 6 was an engineering project by the British Admiralty although as a security measure the official code-name was changed to Cultivator No. 6 to make it sound less mysterious and more like a piece of agricultural equipment.  It was a military trench-digging machine and an example of the adage that “generals are always preparing to fight the last war” and although designed exclusively for army use on (and at least partially under) land, it came under the auspices of the Royal Navy because it was a brainchild (one of many) of Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) who, between the outbreak of war in 1939 and his assumption of the premiership some months later, served as First Lord of the Admiralty (the service’s civilian head).  Trenches and artillery had been the two dominant features of World War I (1914-1918) and Churchill had spent some months (1915-1916) in one of the former while under fire from the latter while commanding a battalion; before the implications of mechanization and the German’s Blitzkrieg (lightning war) tactics were apparent, he assumed the new war in France would unfold something like the old, thus the interest in something which would “revolutionize trench warfare”.  Trench warfare however wasn’t repeated so White Rabbit No.6 was soon realized to be already obsolete and the project was abandoned and although the most fully developed of the prototypes did perform according to the design parameters, whether it would have been effective remains doubtful; remarkably, work on these things wasn’t wholly abandoned until 1942.  The “White Rabbit” project codes came from Churchill’s sense of humor, his ideas coming, as he said: “like rabbits I pull from my hat” and he supported many, some of which were of great military value while others, like the “floating runways” (artificial icebergs made with a mixture of shards of timber & frozen water), were quixotic.

White Rabbit © Copperpenny Music, Mole Music Co

Surrealistic Pillow album cover, 1967.

White Rabbit was a song by Grace Slick (b 1939) and released on the album Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane.  The lyrics were inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871).  It was the psychedelic era and drug references were common in popular music and in the case of White Rabbit it may have been appropriate if the speculation the books been written while the author was under the influence of Laudanum (a then widely-available opiate-infused drug) is true (there's no evidence beyond the circumstantial).  Given the imagery in the text, it’s not difficult to believe he may have been on something and among authors and poets it was a popular way to stimulate the imagination, inspiring at least some of one of the most beloved fragments of English verse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834) Kubla Khan (1797) which ends abruptly at 54 lines.  According to Coleridge, he was unable to recall the rest of the 300-odd which had come to him in an opium-laced dream (the original publication was sub-titled “A Vision in a Dream”) because he was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock” (a nearby Somerset village).  Grace Slick would have sympathized with an artist being intruded on by commerce.

White Rabbit lyrics:

One pill makes you larger

And one pill makes you small

And the ones that mother gives you

Don't do anything at all

Go ask Alice

When she's ten feet tall

 

And if you go chasing rabbits

And you know you're going to fall

Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar

Has given you the call

Call Alice

When she was just small

 

When the men on the chessboard

Get up and tell you where to go

And you've just had some kind of mushroom

And your mind is moving low

Go ask Alice

I think she'll know

 

When logic and proportion

Have fallen sloppy dead

And the White Knight is talking backwards

And the Red Queen's off with her head

Remember what the dormouse said

Feed your head

Hypnopompic

Hypnopompic (pronounced hip-nuh-pom-pik)

Of or relating to the state of consciousness between sleep and becoming fully awake.

1897: The construct was hypno-, from the Ancient Greek ὕπνος (húpnos) (sleep) + the Ancient Greek πομπή (pomp(ḗ)), (a sending away) +‎ -ic.  The -ic suffix was from the Middle English -ik, from the Old French -ique, from the Latin -icus, from the primitive Indo-European -kos & -ḱos, formed with the i-stem suffix -i- and the adjectival suffix -kos & -ḱos.  The form existed also in the Ancient Greek as -ικός (-ikós), in Sanskrit as -इक (-ika) and the Old Church Slavonic as -ъкъ (-ŭkŭ); a doublet of -y.  In European languages, adding -kos to noun stems carried the meaning "characteristic of, like, typical, pertaining to" while on adjectival stems it acted emphatically; in English it's always been used to form adjectives from nouns with the meaning “of or pertaining to”.  A precise technical use exists in physical chemistry where it's used to denote certain chemical compounds in which a specified chemical element has a higher oxidation number than in the equivalent compound whose name ends in the suffix -ous; (eg sulphuric acid (H₂SO₄) has more oxygen atoms per molecule than sulphurous acid (H₂SO₃).  The word was coined in the sense of “pertaining to the state of consciousness when awaking from sleep” by Frederic WH Myers (1843-1901), the construct being from hypno- (sleep) + the second element from the Greek pompe (sending away) from pempein (to send).  The word was introduced in Glossary of Terms used in Psychical Research, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. xii (1896-1897 supplement), an organization founded by Myers.  Hypnopompic & hypnopompia were thought to be necessary as companion (in the sense of “bookend”) terms to hypnagogic & hypnagogia (Illusions hypnagogiques) which are the “vivid illusions of sight or sound (sometimes referred to as “faces in the dark”) which sometimes accompany the prelude to the onset of sleep.  Hypnopompic is an adjective and hypnopompia is a noun; the noun plural is hypnopompias.

Frederic Myers was a philologist with a great interest in psychical matters, both the orthodox science and aspects like the work of mediums who would “contact the spirits of the dead”, the latter, while not enjoying much support in the scientific establishment, was both taken seriously and practiced by a remarkable vista of “respectable society”.  Mediums enjoyed a burst in popularity in the years immediately after World War I (1914-1918) when there was much desire by grieving wives & mothers to contact dead husbands and sons and some surprising figures clung to beliefs in such things well into the twentieth century.  In the early 1960s, a reunion of surviving pilots from the Battle of Britain (1940) was startled when their wartime leader and former head of Royal Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding (1882–1970), told them: “regularly he communicated with the spirits of their fallen comrades”.  Myers also had what might now be called a “varied” love life although it’s said in his later life his interest was restricted to women, including a number of mediums, all reputed to be “most fetching”.

In the profession, while acknowledging the potential usefulness in things like note-taking in a clinical environment, few psychologists & psychiatrists appear to regard hypnopompia & hypnagogia as separate phenomena, both understood as the imagery, sounds and strange bodily feelings sometimes felt when in that state between sleep and being fully awake.  In recent years, as the very definition of “sleep” has increasingly been segmented, the state in some literature has also been referred to both as “stage 1 sleep” & “quiet wakefulness” although the former would seem to be most applicable to falling asleep (hypnagogia) rather than waking up (hypnopompia).  Still, the distinction between what’s usually a late night versus an early morning thing does seem of some significance, especially that most in the discipline of the science of sleep (now quite an industry) seem to concede wake-sleep & sleep-wake transitions are not fully understood; nor are the associated visual experiences and debate continues about the extent to which they should (or can) be differentiated from other dream-states associated with deeper sleep.

Waking in a hypnopompic state: Lindsay Lohan in Falling for Christmas (Netflix, 2022).

One striking finding is that so few remember hypnopompic & hypnagogic imagery and that applies even among those who otherwise have some ability to recall their dreams.  What’s often reported by subjects or patients is the memory is fleeting and difficult to estimate in duration and that while the memory is often sustained for a short period after “waking”, quickly it vanishes.  An inability to recall one’s dreams in not unusual but this behavior is noted also for those with a sound recollection of the dreams enjoyed during deeper sleep states.  What seems to endure is a conceptual sense of what has been “seen”: faces known & unknown, fragmentary snatches of light and multi-dimensional geometric shapes.  While subjects report they “know” they have “seen” (and also “heard”) more fully-developed scenes, their form, nature or even the predominate colors prove usually elusive.  Despite all this, it’s not uncommon for people to remark the hypnopompic experience is “pleasant”, especially the frequently cited instances of floating, flying or even a separation from the physical body, something which seems more often called “trippy” than “scary”.

For some however, the hypnopompic & hypnagogic experience can be recalled, haunting the memory and the speculation is that if “nightmarish” rather than “dream-like”, recollection is more likely, especially if associated with “paralyzed hypnogogia or hypnopompia” in which a subject perceives themselves “frozen”, unable to move or speak while the experience persists (for centuries a reported theme in “nightmares).  Observational studies are difficult to perform to determine the length of these events but some work in neurological monitoring seems to suggest what a patient perceives as lasting some minutes may be active for only seconds, the implication being a long “real-time” experience can be manufactured in the brain in a much shorter time and the distress can clinically be significant.  For this reason, the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) regards hypnagogia & hypnopompia as something similar to synaesthesia (where a particular sensory stimulus triggers a second kind of sensation; things like letters being associated with colors) or certain sexual fetishes (which were once classified as mental disorders) in that they’re something which requires a diagnosis and treatment only if the condition is troubling for the patient.  In the fifth edition of the DSM (DSM-5 (2013)), hypnagogia anxiety was characterized by intense anxiety symptoms during this state, disturbing sleep and causing distress; it’s categorized with sleep-related anxiety disorders.

The Nightmare (1781), oil on canvas by the Swiss-English painter John Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), Detroit Institute of Arts.  It's a popular image to use to illustrate something "nightmare related".

When the political activist Max Eastman (1883–1969) visited Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)in Vienna in 1926, he observed a print of Fuseli's The Nightmare, hung next to Rembrandt's  (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn; 1606-1669) The Anatomy Lesson.  Although well known for his work on dream analysis (although it’s the self-help industry more than the neo-Freudians who have filled the book-shelves), Freud never mentions Fuseli's famous painting in his writings but it has been used by others in books and papers on the subject.  The speculation is Freud liked the work (clearly, sometimes, a painting is just a painting) but nightmares weren’t part of the intellectual framework he developed for psychoanalysis which suggested dreams (apparently of all types) were expressions of wish fulfilments while nightmares represented the superego’s desire to be punished; later he would refine this with the theory a traumatic nightmare was a manifestation of “repetition compulsion”.

Crossbody

Crossbody (pronounced kraws-bod-ee or kros‐bod-ee)

(1) Of or noting a type of bag, distinguished by a long shoulder strap intended to be worn diagonally across the body.  A crossbody purse or crossbody wallet is a variation on the theme.

(2) In professional (ie choreographed) wrestling, a term covering several aerial moves in which one competitor launches themselves from a height (sometimes using the ring’s ropes or corner-posts to gain altitude) landing horizontally or diagonally across their (often already) prostrate opponent's torso, forcing them to the mat if they were standing.

Early 1950s: The construct was cross + body.  As a prefix, cross was from the Middle English cros- & crosse- (relating to a cross, forming a cross, in the shape of a cross or “X”), developed from the noun and influenced by “across”.  Body (the spelling bodie is long obsolete) was from the Middle English bodi & bodiȝ, from the Old English bodiġ (body, trunk, chest, torso, height, stature), from the Proto-West Germanic bodag (body, trunk), from the primitive Indo-European bhewd (to be awake, observe).  It was cognate with the Old High German botah from which the Swabian gained Bottich (body, torso).  Although as late as the sixteenth century, “body” was used in the now archaic sense of the “section of a dress or gown extending from the neck to the waist but excluding the arms” the idea of the crossbody was a reference always to “the body” in the sense of the physical structure of a human form, in this case the torso, the line extending from a shoulder to around the opposite hip.  The alternative spelling is cross–body.  Crossbody is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is crossbodies.

The cross-prefix has widely been used for similar or analogous purposes such as the crossbow, (an early, mechanized version of the bow and arrow), the cross-bolt (a means of adding additional structural rigidity to the main bearings in an internal combustion engine by adding locating bolts at a 90^o angle to those mounted vertically) and cross-purposes (a conversation in which two or more are talking while misunderstanding each other's plans, intentions or meanings) and the cross-stitch (in needlework or embroidery, a double-stitch which forms a cross.  Many other uses such as cross-country, cross-dresser, cross-cultural et al, are different in that they don’t involve the “X” shape or (of necessity) anything in a diagonal.

Bill Clinton & Monica Lewinsky, the White House, February 1997, one of the photographs of the 1990s.

Monica Lewinsky (1973) was the young intern of whom in 1998 Bill Clinton (b 1946; US president 1993-2001) infamously remarked “I did not have sexual relations with that woman… Miss Lewinsky.”  Had that been something said in a county court in a remote flyover state of a consensual encounter between two obscure private citizens, defense counsel may have succeeded in arguing that for there to be “sexual relations” one must have “sex” and what transpired had not crossed the accepted definitional threshold.  In 1998, there probably were still places where such distinctions were maintained but because what happened happened in the White House between the chief magistrate of the United States and an intern a quarter century younger, Monicagate played out.  As presidential scandals go there have certainly been worse and as Harold Macmillan (1894–1986; UK prime-minister 1957-1963) replied when woken in the middle of the night to be told a member of his cabinet was in the midst of an affair with a young lady “with both a present and a past” who was also enjoying the affections of a Soviet spy: “Well at least it was with a woman.”  That the liaisons with the Russian were arranged at the behest of MI5 (the UK's internal security organization) is one of the many details which made the Profumo Affair (John Profumo (1915–2006)) one of the century's juiciest scandals although, some of the files containing "sensitive" information about members of the English establishment remain embargoed until 2046. Even then, few expect to see unredacted papers. 

Bill Clinton and crooked Hillary Clinton, the Hamptons, 2021.

A youthful indiscretion is one thing but an indiscretion with a youth is something else and whether crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) ever forgave her husband only she knows but she didn’t leave him so there was that.  She had her own reasons to stay which may or may not have involved forgiveness but the conventional political wisdom remains that had the US constitution allowed it, Bill Clinton would probably have enjoyed a comfortable victory in the 2000 presidential election so enough of the US population either forgave him or were indifferent in the matter.  Monica Lewinsky fared not as well, being as unprepared for what ensued as just about anyone in her position would have been and it’s remarkable she coped as well as she did.  However, now 50, Ms Lewinsky has survived and in February 2024 emerged as the face of women’s fashion label Reformation’s latest campaign, one focused on corporate workwear and, in concert with vote.org, encouraging women to “use their voice” in the upcoming election and given the extent to which recent court decisions have encouraged an influential faction in the Republican Party to mount further assaults on the rights of women, their vote has the potential to be decisive in contests for both houses of Congress.

Monica Lewinsky's photoshoot for Reformation’s You’ve Got the Power campaign. 

The “You’ve Got the Power” campaign slogan thus has a dual meaning, referencing both the exercise of the franchise and the “power dressing” of the wardrobe (good taste prevailed and no electric blue dresses were featured) although big shoulder pads didn’t make a return which would have disappointed some but the corporate staples red (here described as “scarlet”) and black were prominent.  The range was conservative as befits the target market but seems to have been well-received and serious students of such things especially appreciated the inclusion of an irregular polka-dot in black & white.  Ms Lewinsky certainly looked good and while photographers have tricks to play with lighting and angles, there’s little to suggest much post-production editing was done; she looked a youthful, elegant 50.  One piece which attracted attention was the “Monica” bag which came with both a fitted top-handle and a longer strap, allowing it to be carried on the shoulder or as a crossbody.

Reformation’s "Monica" crossbody bag in black (left) and topo (right).

The Monica crossbody bag is available in topo or black.  Topo is a Spanish word meaning “mole” (both (1) in zoology as the small mammal and (2) in the jargon of espionage a “sleeper agent” who infiltrates an organization, usually to spy) and as a dark brownish-grey colour (ie an approximation of the colour of a mole's skin (hence the familiar "moleskin"), it’s the equivalent of the English taupe, from the French taupe, from the Latin talpa (mole).  In the circumstances, “talpa” presumably was more appealing to the marketing department than “moleskin” although “black” was refreshingly simple.  Reformation’s Monica (as in the crossbody bag) web page recommended the topo hue worked well paired with their “Lysander” dress, available in “selene” (the rather fetching polka-dot) or “midnight” (a dark blue close to navy and far enough removed from the shade of dress Ms Lewinsky made famous not to attract comment).  How fashion houses come up with product names is often mysterious.  Lysander was from the Ancient Greek Λῠ́σᾰνδρος (Lúsandros) and is a (now rare) male given name although in the US there has in the twenty-first century been a modest resurgence.  In the Greek, the name was used to denote “liberator” and it became entrenched in English probably because William Shakespeare (1564–1616) used it in the comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1596), a romp in which Lysander found himself under Puck's spell after running away with his beloved Hermia, enduring a half-dozen cases of mistaken identity before being reunited, marrying in a triple ceremony (all of which sounds curiously modern in a Netflix sort of way).  What Reformation may have had in mind was Lysander (circa 454-395 BC), the Spartan admiral who liberated his people from the hegemony of Athens, his most famous victory being the sinking of the Athenian fleet at the Battle of Aegospotami (405 BC), the engagement which ended the Peloponnesian War.  Presumably, the thinking at Reformation was the name of an admiral from Antiquity was enough of a connection with navy blue although that tradition of use in navies began many centuries later.  There was also the Westland Lysander, a World War II (1939-1945) era communications & support aircraft used by the British Army and best remembered for (1) its role in smuggling spies and saboteurs into occupied Europe and (2) the unusual use of the wheel spats as mounting points for machine guns and ordnance such as 250lb (115 KG) bombs.  In production in the UK & Canada between 1936-1943, it was an uncelebrated but versatile platform which provided invaluable service in the clandestine operations run by the UK’s remarkably large number of agencies concerned with dirty tricks and other murky business.  It’s not likely Reformation thought much about the aircraft.

The Monicagate (1998) effect: The decline of the use of the name Monica in the US

Monica is a female given name and the variants in other European languages include Monique (French & Dutch), Mónica (Spanish Portuguese & Italian), Mônica (Brazilian Portuguese), Monika (Polish, Slovak, Slovine, Lithuanian, Croatian, Finnish, German & Indian, Czech, Bulgarian, Latvian, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian & Danish), Moonika (Estonia), Mónika (Hungarian) and Mònica (Catalan).  The origin is obscure but may be from a Phoenician, Punic or Berber dialect, the oldest known instance being as the name of the mother of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) although it has also been associated with the Ancient Greek μόνος (monos) (alone, only, sole, single).  It was Monica who converted Augustine to Christianity and in gratitude the Church also canonized her.  The Latin name Monica was from monere (to advise), an inflection of moneō, from the Proto-Italic moneō, from the primitive Indo-European monéyeti, causative from men- (to think); it was etymologically unrelated to later forms.  As an English name, it has been in use since the mid-eighteenth century while in the US, popularity peaked in the mid-1970s before beginning a gradual decline which became a precipitous plummet after 1999, something it seems reasonable to attribute to “the Monicagate effect”.

Lindsay Lohan with crossbody bags: At the LLohan Nightclub pop-up event, Playboy Club, New York, October 2019 (David Koma crystal-embellished cady midi dress with asymmetric hem, Valentino Rockstud 110mm pumps and Chanel mini tweed bag with crossbody strap from the Spring/Summer 2015 runway collection) (left) and with Louis Vuitton Louis Vuitton Le Coussin BB Bag (with a detachable crossbody strap), arriving at JFK Airport, August 2022 (right).

Creature of habit: Audrey Hepburn carrying her crossbody purse, Rome, 1971.

The crossbody bag in one form or another would have existed about as long as there have been bag-like creations for holding stuff because the design offers the advantage of transferring the weight to the shoulders (alternating if required) and leaving the user inherently "hands free".  Although for centuries a feature of military webbing, as a packaged piece of fashion, the industry usually credits the "design" of the product to Robert Sakowitz and later refinements to his daughter Bunny (she added the game-changing zipper!), the latter acknowledging a debt to the eighteenth century cross-body "strap bags".   The mix of thoughtful detailing, practicality and high prices meant that in the 1950s it soon became a a fashion staple and Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993) using one in her portrayal of the modern young spinster Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) cemented it's place.  It's never left and a crossbody bag is merely one worn across the body with the strap extending diagonally from one shoulder to the opposite hip but the utility come from (1) hands-free convenience, (2) security & stability while affording ease of access to multiple compartments and (3) the ability to optimize weight distribution.  The crossbody method can be applied to bags of various sizes and there are even crossbody wallets and small purses and while such things might sound merely decorative, men tend often forget it's not uncommon for a woman's entire outfit to include not one pocket and in an era when it's become possible to carry only one's phone, a lipstick and a small can of mace; practicality need no longer be big.

The Monica 560

France's finest ever: 1963 Facel Vega Facel II.

In the fashion business there have been a number of products named “Monica” and it’s likely this often was for no reason other than it was thought appropriately feminine and pleasing to use.  There is also an automotive footnote, the Monica 560 a French-built luxury car which was the last of the first generation of trans-Atlantic hybrids which, combining elegant European coachwork with robust, powerful, very cheap (and very thirsty) US-sourced drive-trains, flourished between the mid-1950s and the first oil shock two decades later.  It’s often said the Monica was an attempt to resurrect the much lamented Facel Vegas (1954-1964) but the founder was more nostalgic still, the industrialist Jean Tastevin (1919-2016) recalling the pre-war Delahayes, Bugattis Delages & Buccialis, French cars which ranked with the world’s finest.  However, when in the late 1960s Monsieur Tastevin surveyed the scene, even the more expensive French cars, whatever their other virtues (some of which were admittedly well concealed), were under-powered and although in many ways sophisticated, lacked the power and refinement of the British, US & European competition.  His core business was the large conglomerate Compagnie française de produits métallurgiques (CFPM) which specialized in building freight rail wagons, his imaginative business model including leasing them, a form of vertical integration which provided a stable revenue stream during periods of diminished demand.  

One of the valve cover castings for a Martin V8 installed in a prototype Monica.

With this industrial capacity and financial infrastructure, he reasoned building a car to compete with the other speciality builders (and he included in that the upper-range Mercedes-Benz, Jaguars and such) was within CFPM’s capacity and in that he may have been correct but a combination of bad decisions, bad luck and bad timing doomed the project.  The first mistake was to try to match Maserati & Ferrari in the use of a bespoke engine rather than the US V8s pragmatically adopted by Jensen, Bristol, Iso, Monterverdi and others; Tastevin wanted a thoroughbred, not a bastard.  What was available was a V8 designed by the gifted English engineer Ted Martin (1922-2010) and it was in many ways outstanding being robust, compact, powerful and light.  Convinced, Tastevin bought the rights along with the collateral contract under which Rolls-Royce agreed to handle the production, the prestige of a “Rolls-Royce-built engine” another thing which appealed.  Unfortunately, Monsieur Tastevin subsequently demanded of Rolls-Royce they guarantee the power output of each unit, an underwriting the company declined on the basis that as a manufacturing and assembly contractor of something they’d not designed and tested, they were not prepared to guarantee someone else’s work.  His contract well-written, Ted Martin kept the money and Tastevin had to find another engine.

The first (left) and second (centre) Monica prototypes and the Amiot 143M (1931-1944), a French five-seat reconnaissance bomber (right).

By early 1968, that was still to happen and prototypes were built with the Martin V8.  There was progress in that the chassis and most of the underpinnings were in close to their final form but the all-important styling was still a work in progress although that is being charitable, the appearance of the early prototypes in the tradition of some of the inter-war bombers built for the French Air Force which to this day remain among the ugliest aircraft ever to fly.  The English were involved in the appearance of the early cars so blame can be shared and it wasn’t until the Italian carrozzeria Vignale became involved, something like the final, sleek form emerged although the work would be brought to fruition by others because Vignale subsequently was shuttered.  One thing which was deemed right as soon as the decision was made was the car’s name: Madam Tastevin’s name was Monique.

The Monica stand, Paris Motor Show, 1972.

The Monica made its debut at the Paris Motor Show, late in 1972 and impressed many with the look of its jewel-like V8 and sumptuous interior although the price raised a few eyebrows, costing as much as two Citroën SMs, then the most expensive car produced in France.  In the way of such things, the sales projections were optimistic, suggesting as many as 500 Monicas annually even though the market for big, expensive four-door saloons had become crowded; not only were specialists like Iso, Monterverdi and De Tomaso offering fully-developed and well-established models with reliable US V8s, Jaguar’s V12-powered XJ12 had set a dynamic benchmark at an extraordinarily low price and Mercedes-Benz were rumoured to be preparing a 7.4 litre (452 cubic inch) version of their epoch making S-Class (W116) (post-oil shock, eventually it would in 1975 surface as the 450 SEL 6.9).  Still, in 1972, generally, there was faith in the future.

1973 Monica 560 interior.  The engine was from the US, the leather & burl walnut was English, it was styled in Italy and the gearbox was German (or from the US if automatic).  It had a "French flavor". 

There optimism was still in the air in 1973 (the oil wouldn’t stop flowing until October) but by then the hunt was on for a new engine.  The contractual squabble with Rolls-Royce was one thing but by then, it had anyway finally occurred to Tastevin’s inexperienced team that the Martin V8, an enlarged racing engine, was never going to possess the characteristics needed in a luxury car.  It was noisy, at its best with a manual gearbox and at anything but high revs (where it needed to operate to produce the required power), somewhat rough.  In the early 1960s the Maserati Quattroporte had been much the same and it sold well but then there were few alternatives and the world had moved on; what buyers now wanted was the turbine-like smoothness of the XJ12 or the effortless torque of the big-displacement V8 hybrids.  The 3.4 litre (209 cubic inch) Martin V8 was a vibrant thing which would have been entertaining in a sports car but it wasn't what the target market now expected in a luxury saloon.  Tastevin’s original plan had been to build a high-performance sports car and the switch to four-door coachwork came early in the development process.  Of all the hybrids built in the era, the Monica was the only one never offered as a coupé. 

One of the few: 1974 Monica 560 Berlina.

Surrendering to the inevitable, Tastevin phoned Detroit and arranged to purchase a batch of Chrysler’s 340 cubic inch (5.6 litre) (LA) V8s, one of the best of the small-block engines of the era and equally adaptable either to the company’s TorqueFlite automatic transmission or the ZF five-speed manual which still had real appeal for some.  Although by then somewhat detuned from its peak during the muscle car years, the 340 could be run in Europe without most of the power-sapping anti-pollution gear insisted on by US regulators (things were different then) and the performance was sparkling; in deference to Europeans for whom cubic inches were mysterious, the car was named the Monica 560.  In 1974, the finished product was ready for sale although inflation meant the already high price had risen by over 50% since 1972 and the four-fold increase in the price of oil in the wake of the embargo had punished demand for fast, thirsty, cars, especially those from a previously unknown manufacturer.  By late 1974, many of the makers of the trans-Atlantic hybrids were either closed or in the throes of what would for most be a not long-protracted demise.  After 17 Monicas were sold in a few months, it was obvious the math was wrong and in February 1975, the company’s closure was announced, one of many such press-releases that year and while a handful of uncompleted chassis were brought to a finished state by a contracted third party, it’s never been clear how many.  Had the Monica 560 been brought to market in 1968 or 1969, it might have enjoyed some years of modest suggest although there’s no reason to believe it would have weathered the winds of change brought by the 1970s any better that the others which fell victim.