Horology

Horology (pronounced haw-rol-uh-jee)

(1) The science of time.

(2) The art and science of making timepieces or measuring time.

(3) In Orthodox Christianity, the office-book of the Greek Church for the canonical hours.

1852: The construct was the Ancient Greek hōro (combining form of hṓra (hour; part of the day; any period of time)) + -logy.  The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +‎ -logy.  The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century.  French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).  Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story).  In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie).  Within a few decades of the intrusion of modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology (1820); hatology (1837)).  In this evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al).  Descents of the Greek hōro came into use in many languages including the Hebrew הוֹרָה‏ (hóra), the Romanian horă and the Turkish while from the Modern Greek χορό (choró) (accusative of χορός (khorós) (dance)) came Hora, a circle dance popular in the Balkans and Israel. In Late Latin, the derived form was horologium.

Between the early sixteen and nineteenth centuries the meaning was restricted to describing clocks or their dials by at least 1820 reference books were noting “term horology is at present more particularly confined to the principles upon which the art of making clocks and watches is established”.  The earlier sense in English reflected the inheritance from the Latin horologium (instrument for telling the hour (and in Medieval Latin “a clock”), from the Ancient Greek hōrologion (instrument for telling the hour (ie the sundial; water-clock et al), from hōrologos (telling the hour).  Horological was used as early as 1590s, horologiography (the art or study of watches and timepieces) by the 1630s and the first horologists (the practitioners of horologiography) appeared to have emerged (or at least first advertised themselves) in 1795.  The noun horologe (a clock or sundial) is long obsolete.  Horology, horologiography & horologist are nouns, horological is an adjective and horologically is an adverb; the noun plural is horologists.

Greenwich Mean Time

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.  It’s daily reset point is now midnight but, in the past, it has been set from different times including at noon and for this reason, if GMT is of substantive importance in some historic document, it’s sometimes necessary to determine which method of calculation applied at the time.  Because of Earth's uneven angular velocity in its elliptical orbit and its axial tilt, noon (12:00:00) GMT is rarely the exact moment the Sun crosses the Greenwich meridian and reaches its highest point in the sky.  The event may occur up to 16 minutes before or after noon GMT, a discrepancy included in the calculation of time: noon GMT is thus the annual average (ie "mean") moment of this event, which accounts for the "mean" in GMT.  In the English-speaking world, GMT is often used as a synonym for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and while this is close enough for many practical purposes, in the narrow technical sense GMT is now a time zone rather than time’s absolute reference.  For navigation, it is considered equivalent to UT1 (the modern form of mean solar time at 0° longitude); but this meaning can differ from UTC by up to 0.9 seconds so GMT should no longer be used for purposes demanding a high degree of precision.

Shepherd Gate (slave) Clock, Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

The Shepherd gate clock is installed at the gates of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and was the first clock ever to display GMT to the public.  It is a “slave clock”, hardwired to the Shepherd “master clock” which was first commissioned at the observatory in 1852.  One obviously unusual aspect of the gate clock is that it has 24 hours on its face rather than the typical 12, thus at 12 noon the hour hand is points straight down rather than up.  In digital timepieces are common and the user often has the choice of a 12 or 24 hour format by in analogue devices they’re historically rare although Ford Australia did include one as a novelty in the first series of its locally produced LTD & Landau (1973-1976).  The clock remained a one-off.

Lindsay Lohan wearing Rolex Datejust Blue Diamond.  Ms Lohan has a number of Rolexes and some watch sites have noted her preferences for the larger, chunkier men's versions.  That larger face is certainly easier to read but some also prefer the more extravagant look.

Between 1852-1893, the Shepherd master clock was the baseline of the UK’s system of time, its time was sent over telegraph wires to London and many other cities including some in Ireland and from 1866, the signal was also relayed to a clock in Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, along the new transatlantic submarine cable.  One of history’s most significant clocks, it originally indicated astronomical time, in which the counting of the 24 hours of each day starts at noon though this was later changed to starts at midnight.  It continues to show GMT and is never adjusted for daylight saving time.

Bogan

Bogan (pronounced bow-ghin)

(1) A backwater, usually narrow and tranquil or sluggish.

(2) Any narrow stretch of water.

(3) In Australia and New Zealand, derogatory slang used to describe a person whose speech, clothing, attitude and behavior are considered unrefined or unsophisticated.

Circa 1991: The origin of bogan is uncertain, about the only thing on which most dictionaries agree (although none have produce anything more than anecdotal evidence) is the term may have emerged in Melbourne in the late 1970s, the earliest documented use dating from 1991.  Competing words from the same era (such as bevans, westies, chiggas (or chiggs) & booners), which tended to be regionally specific faded from use as bogan became universal, the speculation being the use on commercial television and youth-oriented FM radio accelerated the process.  There is both a Bogan River and a Bogan Shire in central New South Wales (NSW) and it’s speculated some earlier Australian slang may be the basis for the modern use.  The first recorded instance of bogan in a jocular adjectival form was in Banjo Paterson’s (1864–1941) The City of Dreadful Thirst:

We don't respect the clouds up there, they fill us with disgust,
They mostly bring a Bogan shower ⁠— three raindrops and some dust;
But each man, simultaneous-like, to each man said, 'I think
That cloud suggests it's up to us to have another drink!

The “bogan shower” was thus a poor imitation of the real thing and, presumably by extension, the later “bogan gate” described a rather rough & ready, makeshift farm gate.  From here, some etymologists suggest the idea of the bogan as something cheap, inferior and unsophisticated developed although how and why it began to gain critical mass in the 1980s remains unexplained.  It has however proved adaptable.  In one of Australia's recent spate of defenestrations, the knifed prime-minister was replaced with one a bit boganish and the prime-minister's official residence came to be referred to by some as "boganville" (a play on words referencing Bougainville Island which is (at least for now) part of Papua New Guinea (PNG)).  Mischievously, the opposition's spokesman on foreign affairs stood in parliament and asked the deposed leader (by then the foreign minister) "Will the Foreign Minister advise the House when he intends to return to Bougainville?"

The word is the Australia version of those that exist elsewhere such as Chav in England (probably derived from chavi, a Romani (Roma; Traveller; Gypsy) word for child) or Ossi (easterner) in the Fourth Reich (used in post-unification Germany as a disparaging term for those coming to the west from the former GDR (East Germany)).  Use is criticized as a form of snobbery which of course it is but a form of inverse-snobbery has emerged with bogans now self-identifying in a modern form of class-pride.  The unique aspect of boganism is that, unlike chav or other ethnic-based slurs, bogans are associated, however inaccurately in a world of cross-cutting cultures, exclusively as white and of Anglo-Saxon extraction.  This makes bogans the only societal sub-set set able to be derided, denigrated and vilified; bogans having no recourse to the formal and informal mechanisms of protection available to other (ethnic, race, gender, sexual orientation, sex etc) minorities.  Society seems to need to have one minority available for disparagement and a combination of legislation and social pressures mean all others now enjoy some sort of protection.  Others permissible targets such as fat, stupid people are not actually a separate group; such people presumed to be bogans until proven otherwise.

Winfield Blue was once really blue and advertised: 1976 (left), 1979 (centre) & 1986 (right). 

Bogan stereotypes abound and historically they had names like Todd and Chantelle, the archetypical Chantelle a sixteen year old mother of two and in some sort of relationship with a man who may be the father of at least one and while barely literate and probably unable to point to Canada on a map, is most adept with Instagram and TikTok.  Of late however, the list of possible bogan names has expanded (including a few original concoctions) and one news site identified (an apparently non-exhaustive list) the most bogan names thus far registered in 2022 which included Brexleigh, Iveigh, Juul, Kardi, Kior, Maevery, Miraccle, Resilia, Salmon & Samanda for girls while boys were blessed with Brave, Draven, Draxler, Kashdon, Knoxlee, Ledgen, Maxon, Roar, Zaiken & Zinc.  The novel names or variations in spelling of older forms is new but some cultural markers are intergenerational such as footwear (thongs if possible, Ug Boots if it’s too cold) and cigarettes, Winfield Blue (although the packaging is now plain except for the disturbing photographs of the consequences of smoking) apparently still the most popular and carried usually tucked into a t-shirt’s sleeve.  However, despite the most enduring stereotype, the mullet is no longer the default hair-style and the goatee not the inevitable beard, rat-tails and a number of closely cropped variations now common.

Bogan culture

Bogans at home.  This house will contain many big TVs.

Bogans may seem remote from the progress of civilization but there’s certainly an identifiable culture and, within their cultural specializations, there's doubtless a pecking order.  Although derided by the genteel as unsophisticated, that’s a misunderstanding because although sophistication is a hierarchal construct, there are many different sophistications, all of which enjoy their own hierarchies and while bogans may be thought to have appalling taste in most things, in aspects of life in which they’re interested (big televisions, jet-skis etc), bogans are genuine experts.

Cashed-up bogans (CUBs) at home.  This house will contain many big TVs which will be positioned by the interior decorator is a "tasteful way".

A recent phenomenon is the CUB (cashed-up bogan) which reflects the higher incomes incomes enjoyed in the last quarter-century odd by those (skilled and trained but not usually university-educated) who have benefited from the resources and construction booms.  It’s a term of both social and economic significance and refers to those who have recently and suddenly become richer yet lack the cultural and social skills to match what is typically expected of those with wealth.  In this it differs from a parvenu in that conventions of use suggest a parvenu tends to come from the middle-class and is often an employee while a CUB is quintessentially from the trades and will likely be self-employed.  Parvenu and the CUB are terms laden with the snobbery of classism.  The idea is of those newly arisen (ie the nouveau riche), especially if by some accident or luck or circumstances, being thought by those already there not worthy of their new assertion of status and despised for their attempts to persuade, the sort of people David Lloyd George (1863–1945; UK prime-minister 1916-1922), speaking of his Liberal Party colleagues, called “jumped-up grocers”.  The CUB by comparison is unaware of or indifferent to the conventions of polite society and, content with materialism, usually makes no attempt socially to climb.  That means snobs despise them for other reasons; multiple huge televisions in vulgar houses thought not tasteful, hence the view it’s just appalling for such people to have money because they have not the taste to know how it should be spent.

The highest form of bogan culture remains the burn-out, and the hotted-up Holden Commodore seems still the preferred machine.  A burn-out is achieved by applying maximum power to the rear wheels while applying the brakes on the front and object is to destroy the back tyres, preferably by reducing both to chunks of smoking rubber.  All this is achieved while travelling a very short distance, usually in somewhat irregular circles.  The burn-out’s origin is in drag-racing where it’s done (in a brief, straight-line run), to heat the tyres to the point at which they achieve maximum traction.  In such competition, the object is to attain the lowest elapsed-time to complete a quarter-mile (402.336 m) sprint from a standing start.  So in drag-racing, there’s thus a purpose whereas otherwise the burn-out is thought a display of bogan barbarism.  Polite society frowns on hobbies such as burn-outs but in fairness to bogans, some of the engineering required to produce machines with the robustness required to endure the stresses imposed is of very high quality.

While the hotted-up Commodore is the vehicle of choice, bogans not yet able to afford such a status-symbol (your actual basic bogan), will improvise.

Before the word became associated with opprobrium, Bogan was just another name to be applied to this and that and dotted around the place are many avenues so named.  Some living at these addresses are not best pleased and for some years residents of a pleasantly leafy part of Sydney’s North Shore have been lobbying their council to change their roadway’s name from Bogan Place to Rainforrest Close.  One resident noted there was also the practical benefit to de-boganizing the place given the street sign has been stolen six times in two years.  However, he added the main reason was "We're middle class people and it's got really nothing to do with who's in the street".  Presumably it’s all Audis and Lexuses there and not a hotted-up Commodore in sight.  However, others saw commercial possibilities and Forbes Shire Council changed the name of Bogan Gate Road to The Bogan Way, an initiative of the Tottenham Development Group which expects the new name to attract hordes of bogans in hotted up Commodores anxious to take selfies under the street signs, the attraction being they’ll spend time in community, spending up big on pre-mix cans of bourbon & cola and packets of Winfield Blue, thereby injecting much money into the local economy.

Bogan and Sons is a highly regarded hardware supplier (Unit 10 / 8 Chrome Street, Salisbury, Queensland 4107, Australia).

Janus

Janus (pronounced jey-nuhs)

(1) In Roman mythology, a god of doorways (and thus also of beginnings), and of the rising and setting of the sun, usually represented as having one head with two bearded faces back to back, looking in opposite directions, historically understood as the past and the future.

(2) When used attributively, to indicate things with two faces or aspects; or made of two different materials; or having a two-way action.

(3) In zoology, a diprosopus (two-headed) animal.

(4) In chemistry, used attributively to indicate an azo dye with a quaternary ammonium group, frequently with the diazo component being safranine.

(5) In astronomy, a moon of the planet Saturn, located just outside the rings.

(6) In figurative use, a “two-faced” person; a hypocrite.

(7) In numismatics, a coin minted with a head on each face.

(8) In architecture, as the jānus doorway, a style of doorway, archway or arcade, the name derived from the Roman deity Iānus being the god of doorways.

Mid-late 1500s: From the Latin Iānus (the ancient Italic deity Janus), to the Romans of Antiquity, the guardian god of portals, doors, and gates; patron of beginnings and endings.  The Latin Iānus (literally “gate, arched passageway”) may be from the primitive Indo-European root ei- (to go), the cognates including the Sanskrit yanah (path) and the Old Church Slavonic jado (to travel).  In depictions, Janus is shown as having two faces, one in front the other in back (an image thought to represent sunrise and sunset reflect his original role as a solar deity although it represents also coming and going in general, young and old or (in recent years) just about anything dichotomous).  The doors of the temple of Janus were traditionally open only during the time of war and closed to mark the end of the conflict, the origins of allusions to the “temple of Janus” being used metaphorically to mean conflict or wartime and the month of January is named after Janus, the link being to “the beginning of the year.  Janus is a noun or proper noun and Janian is an adjective.

Prosthetic in studio (left), Ralph Fiennes (b 1962) on-set in character (centre) and Peter Dutton (b 1970; leader of the opposition and leader of the Liberal Party of Australia since May 2022) imagined in the same vein (right).

The prosthetic used in the digitally-altered image (right) was a discarded proposal for the depiction of Lord Voldemort in the first film version of JK Rowling's (b 1965) series of Harry Potter children's fantasy novels; it used a Janus-like two-faced head.  It's an urban myth Peter Dutton auditioned for the part when the first film was being cast but was rejected as being "too scary".  If ever there's another film, the producers might reconsider and should his career in politics end (God forbid), he could bring to Voldemort the sense of menacing evil the character has never quite achieved, fine though Mr Fiennes' performance surely was.  Interestingly, despite many opportunities, Mr Dutton has never denied being a Freemason.

An eighteenth century carving of Janus in the style of a herm.

A part of the etymological legacy of the Roman Empire, the name Janus appears in several European languages.  In Danish (from the Latin Iānus), it’s a Latinization of the Danish given name Jens.  In Faroese, it’s a male given name which begat (1) Janussson or Janusarson (son of Janus) and (2) Janusdóttir or Janusardóttir (daughter of Janus).  In Estonian it’s a male given name.  In Polish, it’s both a masculine & feminine surname (the feminine surname being indeclinable (a word that is not grammatically inflected).  There is no anglicized form of the Latin name Janus.  Although it was never common and is now regarded by most genealogy authorities as "rare", when used in the English-speaking world the spelling remain "Janus".  Often, when Latin names were adopted in English, even when the spelling was unaltered, there were modifications to suit local phonetics but Janus is pronounced still just as it would have been by a Roman.

Tristar pictures used the janus motif in the promotional material for I Know Who Killed Me (2007).

Dating from the 1580s, was from the Latin ianitor (doorkeeper, porter), from ianua (door, entrance, gate), the construct being ianus (arched passageway, arcade" + tor (the agent suffix).  The meaning “usher in a school” and later “doorkeeper” emerged in the 1620s white the more specific (and in Scotland and North America enduring) sense of “a caretaker of a building, man employed to attend to cleaning and tidiness” seems first to have been documented in 1708 (the now unused feminine forms were janitress (1806) & janitrix (1818).  Why janitor survived in general use in Scotland and North America and not elsewhere in the English-speaking world is a mystery although the influence of US popular culture (film and television) did see something of a late twentieth century revival and in  sub-cultures like 4chan and other places which grew out of the more anarchic bulletin boards of the 1980s & 1990s, a janitor is the (often disparaging) term for a content moderator for a discussion forum.

Augustus Orders the Closing of the Doors of the Temple of Janus (circa 1681), oil on canvas by Louis de Boullogne (1654–1733), Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

Among the more annoying things encountered by those learning English are surely Janus words, those with opposite meanings within themselves.  Examples include:

Hew can mean cutting something down or adhering closely to it.  Sanction may mean “formal approval or permission” or “an official ban, penalty, or deterrent”.  Scan can mean “to look slowly and carefully” or “quickly to glance; a cursory examination”.  Inflammable, which many take to mean “easy to burn” but the treachery of the word lies in the in- prefix which is often used as a negative, with the result that inflammable can be deconstructed as “not flammable”.  Trip can (and usually does) suggest clumsiness but can also imply some nimbleness or lightness of foot, as in the saying “trip the light fantastic”.  Oversight is a particularly egregious example.  To exercise oversight over someone or something is provide careful, watchful supervision yet an oversight is an omission or mistake.  In the ever-shifting newspeak of popular culture, the creation of the janus-word is often deliberate.  Filth can mean “of the finest quality”, wicked can mean “very good” and in the way which might have pleased George Orwell "bad" has become classic newspeak.   “Bad weed” can mean the drug was either good or bad depending on the sentence structure: “that was bad weed” might well suggest it was of poor quality while “man, that was some bad weed” probably means it was good indeed.  Saying nice now seems rarely to mean what dictionaries say nice has come to mean but can variously describe something wonderful, appalling or disgusting.

Muse

Muse (pronounced myooz)

(1) To think or meditate in silence, as on some subject; to meditate upon.

(2) To gaze meditatively or in wonder (archaic though used still in poetry).

(3) A state of abstraction (archaic).

(4) Thoughtfully to comment or ruminate upon some topic.

(5) In Classical Mythology, originally the goddesses of song, meditation & memory, but latterly and more commonly as the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne who presided over various arts.

(6) The goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or any goddess presiding over a particular art (sometimes lowercase); just about any source of inspiration.

(7) The genius or powers characteristic of a poet (always lowercase).

(8) As the acronym MUSE (Mainstream US English), the strain of US English considered to be standard or unmarked by dialectal variation in pronunciation, syntactic structures, or vocabulary, used in the mainstream news media and taught in (almost all) schools.

(9) A bar or poet (obsolete).

(10) A gap or hole in a hedge or fence through which a wild animal is accustomed to pass; a muset (rare though the concept is now often part of road or railroad construction as under or overpasses for the use of wildlife).

1300–1350: From the Middle English muse & musen (to mutter, gaze meditatively on, be astonished), from the Middle French muser, from the Old French (which may have been influenced by the Medieval Latin mūsus & mūsum (snout)).  The fourteenth century verb muse (to reflect, ponder, meditate; to be absorbed in thought) has a murky history, one strain of etymological thought being it was based on the idea of “standing with one's nose in the air” or even “to sniff about” (in the manner of a dog which has lost the scent), thus the link to muse (muzzle) from the Old French & Classical Latin mūsa (snout) of unknown origin.  The fourteenth century noun muse (one of the nine Muses of classical mythology) was from the Old French Muse and directly from the Classical Latin mūsa, from Ancient Greek Μοῦσα (Moûsa) (a muse (also music, song)), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European root men- (to think).  The sense of (an inspiring goddess of a particular poet (with a lower-case m-)) dates from the late fourteenth century.  Synonyms of the verb include brood, cogitate, consider, contemplate, deliberate, dream, feel, meditate, moon, percolate, ponder, reflect, revolve, roll, ruminate, speculate, think, weigh, chew over & mull over

The noun musing (act of pondering, meditation, thought) emerged at much the same time as a verbal noun from the verb.  The noun museum was first used in the 1610s to describe the university building in Alexandria and was from the Latin museum (library, study), from the Ancient Greek mouseion (place of study, library or museum, school of art or poetry (originally “a temple or shrine of the Muses”).  The earliest use in reference to English institutions was in the mid-seventeenth century when it was applied to libraries (in the sense of collections of books, documents and other manuscripts) for scholarly study (1640s) while the modern idea of a physical "building or part of a building set aside as a repository and display place for objects relating to art, literature, or science" dates from the 1680s.  Muse is a noun & verb, muser & musing are nouns, musing is a verb museful an adjective and musingly & musefully are adverbs; the noun plural is muses.

Portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton (circa 1782) by George Romney.  Emma Hamilton (1765-1815) was the mistress of Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson (1758-1805) and muse of the portraitist, George Romney (1734-1802).

The acronym MUSE (Mainstream US English) seems first to have appeared in 1997 and describes what used to be called GA (General American), the unofficial standard accent of the United States.  It’s essentially the accent of much of the Midwest and the West and remains by far the most frequently heard on US broadcast news (regardless of political leanings or affiliation).  It’s thus something of an unofficial standard but does differ from the previous “prestige accent”, the so-called “trans-Atlantic” which was clipped and precise but without the exaggerated form of the UK’s RP (received pronunciation).  The critique of MUSE is that (MUSE) is often treated as morally superior, a view which of course implies negative perceptions of “non-standard languages”, a process of stigmatization which perpetuates dialect discrimination which can result in the disparagement or other mistreatment of users of non-standard varieties.  The acronym MUSE is merely descriptive among academics in the field but is politically divisive in that it’s thought by many as the superior accent in a hierarchy (an idea familiar in the UK) in which the regional forms (such as the Southern Accent) or those influenced by ethnic identity (such as African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)) are thought deviations from what is defined as “correct”.  A similar political movement is now promoting Ebonics (the construct a portmanteau of ebony + phonics which originally referenced the languages spoken by the descendants of slaves in the Caribbean, and North America but which was in the 1970s appropriated by African-American academic psychologist Professor Robert Williams 1930-2020), a defined sociolect of what technically is a sub-set of African-American English as an equally legitimate form of the language.  The dialect certainly differs from standard American English and its adoption as a political marker reflects the strain of multi-stranded separatism which now characterizes the positions taken by activists.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens because Ebonics is an example of how English has in the past evolved and, under the Raj, the British noted the adaptations their colonized peoples made to English and even adopted some of the words or expressions which proved useful.  Identity politics have of course evolved since the Raj and there’s now a view that to plunder something like Ebonics for the odd handy phrase would be an act of cultural appropriation and use must remain exclusive to people of color.

Lindsay Lohan, MUSE Magazine photo-shoot, January 2010.

Amuse (to divert the attention, beguile, delude) was a mid-fifteenth century verb from the Old French amuser (fool, tease, hoax, entrap; make fun of (literally "cause to muse" (in the sense of being distracted from some useful purpose)), the context being a- (from Latin ad- (through; towards), but here thought a causal prefix) + muser (ponder, stare fixedly).  This original sense in English is technically obsolete but echoes of the meaning live on in critiques the more serious-minded sometimes make of the more banal examples of popular culture.  For most of the eighteenth century, the word assumed the usual meaning “to deceive or cheat by first diverting attention”; the modern “bemuse” thus retaining something of the old meaning.  In the Ancient Greek amousos meant "without Muses (and hence "uneducated"), another connection some like to link to popular culture.  The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) noted “amuse” was never used by Shakespeare, indicating it wasn’t in widespread use before the seventeenth century.

In Classical Greek Mythology, the original three goddesses were Aoede (song), Melete (meditation), and Mneme (memory) but later writers fleshed-out the roll-call and scholars consider the standard canon to be the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne who presided over various arts: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (lyric poetry), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (religious music), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), and Urania (astronomy).  In Roman mythology the Camenae were goddesses thought originally water deities, inhabiting a sacred grove and spring located outside the Porta Capena (gate in Rome's Servian Wall).  They were believed imbued with magic powers which could cure ailments and prophesy the future so in Roman religious rituals, the Camenae were offered libations of water and milk and it was the poet Quintus Ennius (circa 239–circa 169 BC) who identified them with the Muses; there they’ve remained.

Marilyn Monroe 1962 (left) & Lindsay Lohan 2011 (right).

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) has since her death been a visual muse for many in popular culture including Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Cynthia Sherman (b 1954), Richard Avedon (1923–2004), James Rosenquist (1933–2017), Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) & Richard Pettibone (b 1938), all of who followed their pursuit with a seriousness quite unfairly never afforded to her acting while she was alive.  Lindsay Lohan twice made a muse of Marilyn Monroe, in 2008 & 2011 reprising two of her photo sessions.

Dump

Dump (pronounced duhmp)

(1) To drop something or let fall in a mass; fling down or drop heavily or suddenly.

(2) To empty the contents of something (by tilting, overturning etc).

(3) To dismiss, fire, or release from a contract.

(4) In informal (and very common) use, to end a relationship with someone (especially a romantic partner), used mostly when the action is one-sided although there are many mutual dumpings, even if some are technically retrospective.

(5) Suddenly to transfer or rid oneself of some responsibility, task or duty.

(6) In the slang of boxing (1) to knock down an opponent & (2) intentionally to lose a match.

(7) In commerce (1) to put (goods or securities) on the market in large quantities and at a low price without regard to the effect on market conditions or (2) deliberately to offer goods in large quantities or at prices below the cost of production & distribution in an attempt to drive out competition.

(8) In international trade, to sell (goods) into foreign markets below cost in order to promote exports or damage foreign competition.

(9) In computers, (1) to print, display or record on an output medium the contents of a computer's internal storage or the contents of a file, often at the time a program fails, later to be used to debug or determine the cause or point of failure or (2) as screen dump, to print or create an image file of the screen’s display.

(10) Of precipitation (rain, hail & (especially) snow), heavy downfalls.

(11) In historic use, a small coin made by punching a hole in a larger coin (called a holey dollar and issued in both Canada and Australia).

(12) A deep hole in a river bed; a pool (a northern England regionalism).

(13) In slang, to kill; to arrange or commit murder.

(14) To fall or drop down suddenly.

(15) To throw away, discard etc something.

(16) In informal use, to complain, criticize, gossip, or tell another person one's problems (often as “to dump on”); to treat with disrespect, especially to criticize harshly or attack with verbal abuse.

(17) In vulgar slang, an evacuation of the bowels; to defecate (often as “take a dump”; men especially fond of the phrase “huge dump”).

(18) An accumulation of discarded garbage, refuse etc; a tip or landfill site, also called a dumpsite or dumping-ground.

(19) In military use, a collection of ammunition, stores, etc, deposited at some point, as near a battlefront, for distribution (ammo dump, fuel dump etc).

(20) In mining, a runway or embankment equipped with tripping devices, from which low-grade ore, rock etc., are dumped; the pile of stuff, so dumped.

(21) In informal use, a place, house or town (even a state or entire country according to some) that is dilapidated, dirty, or disreputable.

(22) In merchandising, a bin or specially made carton in which items are displayed for sale.

(23) In surfing (of a wave) to hurl a swimmer or surfer down.

(24) To compact bales of wool by hydraulic pressure (Australian and New Zealand).

(25) A mournful song; a lament; a melancholy strain or tune in music; any tune (obsolete).

(26) A sad, gloomy state of the mind; sadness; melancholy; despondency (usually in the form “down in the dumps”).

(27) Absence of mind; reverie (now rare).

(28) Heavily to knock; to stump (Scottish, obsolete).

(29) A thick, ill-shapen piece (UK, archaic).

(30) A lead counter used in the game of chuck-farthing (UK, archaic).

(31) A type of dance (obsolete).

1300–1350: From the Middle English dompen & dumpen (to fall suddenly, plunge), from the Old Norse dumpa (to thump, strike, bump).  The modern senses of the transitive verb and noun are unknown prior to the nineteenth century and may either be from another source or are an independent expressive formation.  There may have been some Scandinavian influence such as the Norwegian dumpa (suddenly to fall) which may also be linked with other Germanic forms such as the Middle Low German dumpeln (to duck) and the Danish dumpe (suddenly to fall).  The use in the sense of “hole used for the disposal of unwanted items by burying” was a development of the Scots dump (hole in the ground), the Norwegian dump (a depression or hole in the ground), the German Low German dumpen (to submerge) and the Dutch dompen (to dip, sink, submerge), something obviously not unrelated to the early fourteenth century meaning “throw down or fall with force, drop (something or someone) suddenly” which didn’t exist in Old English.  The modern use is actually most modern, the sense “unload en masse, cause to fall out by tilting up a cart etc” not recorded until it emerged in American English by 1784 while that of “discard, abandon” dates from 1919.  The use in economics to describe “export or throw on the market in large quantities at low prices” was first noted in 1868 in the context of anti-competitive practices.  A dumping ground was first documented in 1842 although the term may earlier have been in oral use.  Dump & dumping are nouns & verbs, dumped is a verb, dumper & dumpage are nouns and dumpy is an adjective; the noun plural is dumps.

By 1865, the noun dump was understood as place “where refuse is dumped, piled or heaped; a repository of refuse matter” and applied originally to extractive mining as a development of the verb, the use extending to sites for discarding domestic rubbish by 1872, the earlier “dumping-ground” common by 1857.  The meaning “any shabby or dilapidated place” dates from 1899 while the use by the military to describe places for the “collection of ammunition, equipment etc, deposited at a convenient point for later distribution” was a product of World War I (1914-1918), noted first in 1915 and possibly a development from soldiers’ slang although the later war-time slang to mean “act of defecating” appears to be of civilian origin, noted first in the US in 1942.  The dump-truck was first so described in 1930s and although truck had for decades been used to dump stuff, the name was derived from the use of hydraulic rams to enable to load more quickly to be emptied by raising the load bed or freight compartment at an acute angle.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, 2011.

The “Dempster-Dumpster trash-hauling mechanism” remains familiar as the modern “dumpster”, a large, mobile container designed to be removed by a truck and taken away so the contented could be dumped in a dump, the container quickly reused.  It was patented by the Dempster brothers of Knoxville, Tennessee who ran an operation manufacturing waste collection vehicles (which would eventually include the Dempster Dumpmaster and Dempster Dinosaur).  The Dempster-Dumpster system achieved success by creating a system of mechanically emptying standardized metal containers which had been perfected between 1935-1937.  The concept of the dumpster (a standardized design able to be stored, re-used and transported efficiently) later influenced the development of container shipping.  The name dumpster became generic and was itself linguistically productive: “dumpster diving” (1979) described the practice of scavenging from dumpsters while “dumpster fire” was a figurative reference to a situation at once calamitous, foul and either insoluble or, if fixable, not worth the effort.  In use, a “dumpster fire” is similar to a “train wreck” or “shit show” but different from a “hot mess”, hot messes worth fixing because they remain in essence, desirable.  The use of “dumpster fire” spiked in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, used not only by both camps but also disillusioned neutrals.

The noun landfill dates from 1916 was a euphemism for dump although unlike some of the breed, it was at least literally true.  The adjective dumpy (short and stout) was from circa 1750 and the origin is undocumented but many etymologists assume it was linked to dumpling (mass of boiled paste (also “a wrapping in which something is boiled”)) which dates from circa 1600 and was from the Norfolk dialect, again of uncertain origin but the source may be Germanic or simply from “lump” (and there are those who argue dumplings were probably originally “lumplings”).  Lump was from the Middle English lumpe, from a Germanic base akin to the Proto-Germanic limpaną (to glide, go, loosely to hang).  “Humpty Dumpty” was a French nursery rhyme hero (it seems first to have been translated into English in 1810) and in the late eighteenth century it had been used to mean “a short, clumsy person of either sex”, presumably a reduplication of Humpty (a pet form of Humphrey (which was used of mandarin Sir Humphrey Appleby in the BBC Television comedy Yes Minister) although a humpty-dumpty in the 1690s was originally was a drink, a cocktail of “ale boiled with brandy” which probably tasted better than it sounds.  The construction was based presumably on hump and dump but the basis has eluded researchers.  In the late twentieth century, “hump & dump” was repurposed to describe the practice (habit, calling, tactic, whatever) of enticing a woman in order to enjoy sex and immediately afterwards leaving, never to ring or call.  It’s subsequently be claimed by bolshie women for much the same purpose; the variations included “fuck & chuck”, “pump & dump:, “jump and dump” and “smash and dash”.

Crooked Hillary dumping on deplorables, Georgia, 2016.

Big buses have long been used by politicians for their campaign tours.  They offer lots of advantages, being offices and communications centres with at least some of their running costs offset by a reduction in staff travel expenses.  Additionally, with five large, flat surfaces, they are a rolling billboard although that can be good or bad.  In 2016, one of crooked Hillary Clinton’s campaign buses was photographed in Lawrenceville, Georgia dumping a tank full of human waste onto the street and into a storm drain.  The local news service reported that when police attended the street was “…was covered in toilet paper and the odor was noxious”.  Hazmat crews were called to clean up the scene and the matter was referred to the environmental protection division of Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources.  The Democratic National Committee (DNC) later issued an apology, claiming the incident was “an honest mistake.”  Using the word “honest” in any statement related to crooked Hillary Clinton is always a bit of a gamble and there was no word on whether the dumping of human excrement had been delayed until the bus was somewhere it was thought many deplorables may be living.  If so, that may have been another “honest mistake” because Gwinett County (in which lies Lawrenceville) voted 51.02% Clinton/Kaine & 45.14% Trump/Pence although the symbolism may not have been lost on much of the rest of Georgia; state wide the Republican ticket prevailed 50.38% to 45.29%.

Dump has been quite productive.  A “dump-pipe” is part of the exhaust system in an internal combustion engine; a “brain dump” or “info dump” is the transfer of a large quantity of information or knowledge from one person (or institution) to another, although it’s also used in the slang of those working in the theoretical realm of the digitizing of human consciousness; a block dump was an image contains the sectors read from an original floppy diskette or optical disc; “dump months” are those periods during which film distributers & television programmers scheduled content either of poor-quality or of limited appeal; a “dump job” was either (1) the act of moving a corpse or some incriminating material from the scene of the crime to some un-related place, preferably remote & deserted or (2) the abandonment of an unfinished task for which the abandoner might be expected to take responsibility, especially in a fashion that makes it likely that one or more colleagues will take on its completion; the “mag dump” was military slang for the act of firing an entire magazine-full of ammunition from a fully-automatic weapon in a single burst; “dumpsville” could be either (1) the figurative location of a person who has been dumped by a lover or (2) a description of an undesirable town or other locality; to be “down in the dumps” is to be depressed, miserable and unhappy.

An electrically controlled exhaust system "cut-out", the modern version of the old, mechanical, "by-passes".  All dump-pipes work by offering exhaust gasses a "shortcut" to the atmosphere.

In internal combustion engines (ICE), there are both down-pipes and dump-pipes.  Their functions differ and the term down-pipe is a little misleading because some down-pipes (especially on static engines) actually are installed in a sideways or upwards direction but in automotive use, most do tend downwards.  A down-pipe connects the exhaust manifold to exhaust system components beyond, leading typically to first a catalytic converter and then a muffler (silencer), most factory installations designed deliberately to be restrictive in order to comply with modern regulations limiting emissions and noise.  After-market down-pipes tend to be larger in diameter and are made with fewer bends to improve exhaust gas flow, reduce back-pressure and (hopefully) increase horsepower and torque.   Such modifications are popular but not necessarily lawful.  Technically, a dump-pipe is a subset of the down-pipes and is most associated with engines using forced aspiration (turbo- & some forms of supercharging).  With forced-induction, exhaust gases exiting the manifold spin a turbine (turbocharger) or drive a compressor (supercharger) to force more of the fuel-air mixture into the combustion chambers, thereby increasing power.  What a dump-pipe does is provide a rapid, short-path exit for exhaust gases to be expelled directly into the atmosphere before reaching a down-pipe.  That makes for more power and noise, desirable attributes for the target market.  A dump pipe is thus an exit or gate from the exhaust system which can be opened manually, electronically, or with a “blow-off” valve which opens when pressure reaches a certain level.  In the happy (though more polluted) days when regulations were few, the same thing was achieved with an exhaust “by-pass” or “cut-out” which was a mechanical gate in the down-pipe and even then such things were almost always unlawful but it was a more tolerant time.  Such devices, lawful and otherwise, are still installed.

Grab from a Microsoft Windows system dump.  Although dumps contain much, of the thousands of lines one might contain, only a small string of text in one line might be relevant and users may need some assistance to interpret the result. 

In computing, a system dump is typically a commitment to a file of what exists in memory (random access memory (RAM) or on a paged volume) and they’re created usually at points of failure, creating essentially a snapshot of what was happening either at or immediately prior to the unfortunate event.  The contents of a system dump can be used to identify errors and debug programs.  A “stand-alone dump” program (a SAD or SADMP) produces a dump occupied by either (1) a system that failed or (2) a stand-alone dump program that failed.  Either the stand-alone dump program dumped itself (a self-dump) or the operator loaded another stand-alone dump program to dump the failed stand-alone dump program.  It’s less ominous than it sounds and together, the stand-alone dump program and the stand-alone dump together form what is known as the stand-alone dump service aid.  The significance of the element “stand-alone” is that the dump is performed separately from normal system operations and does not require a system to be in a condition for normal operation.  It means that except in cases of catastrophic failure (especially if involving the total loss of mains & UPS (uninterruptable power supply) power, it should be possible always to create a high-speed, unformatted dump of central storage and parts of paged-out virtual storage on a tape device or a direct access storage device (DASD).  The stand-alone dump supplies information which can be used to determine why the system or the stand-alone dump program failed.