Portico

Portico (pronounced pawr-ti-koh or pohr-ti-koh)

(1) In architecture, a covered (but not enclosed) entrance to a building, the structure consisting of a roof supported by columns or piers, usually attached to the building as a porch.

(2) The Stoic philosophy, named after the public porch on the agora of Athens where Zeno taught (now obscure and used only in the history or teaching of academic philosophy).

1595–1605: An Italian borrowing from the Latin porticus (gate; entrance), the construct being porta + -icus.  Porta is from the primitive Indo-European root per- (to pass through or over), probably as a feminine nominalization of pr-tó- (passed through; crossed) and related to the Ancient Greek πόρος (póros) (means of passage).  The –icus suffix is from the i-stem + -cus, occurring in some original cases and later used freely.  It was cognate with the Ancient Greek -ικός (-ikós), the Proto-Germanic –igaz, the Old High German and Old English -ig, the Gothic -𐌴𐌹𐌲𐍃 (-eigs) and the Proto-Slavic –ьcь.  The Slavic form fossilized into a nominal agent suffix, but probably originally also served adjectival functions.  The Latin porticus was a doublet of porche and both plural forms, porticoes & porticos, are acceptable.

Portico at front entrance of the Port Office building, Edward Street, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The architect was Francis Drummond Greville Stanley (1839—1897) who completed the design between 1875-1877 while appointed Queensland Government Architect.

First widely used as a formalised style in Ancient Greece, a portico is a porch which provides cover over the entrance to a building.  Until recently, historians of architecture insisted on a portico being a structure supported by columns or pillars but without walls, variations of the theme usually called colonnades or ante rooms.  Now, the more general term "porch" seems often extended to what used to be a portico.

Drayton Hall, Charleston, South Carolina.

Drayton Hall, a fine example of Palladian architecture, is thought to have been completed in the early 1750s.  On the west façade, it features an unusual, recessed, double projecting portico, one striking aspect of which is the twinned staircases.  Symmetrically paired staircases leading up to porticos were a common feature in antebellum architecture but it’s rare to see them attached at right angles, the style of the plantation era tending to favour sweeping curves.

Villa Cornaro, Venice.

Drayton Hall’s double-layer portico is said to be the first of its kind in North America and influenced by similar constructions in Italy by Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) who lent his name to this style.  His Villa Cornaro, a country estate in Piombino Dese, near Venice, he designed in 1551-1552, leaving an interesting discussion of the building in the second volume of I quattro libri dell'architettura (The Four Books on Architecture (1570)).

Lindsay Lohan approaching the portico of the "London house" in Parent Trap (1998).   The house is 23 Egerton Terrace, Knightsbridge London, SW3 although in the film it's labelled Number 7.

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.

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.

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.

A discarded proposal for the depiction of Lord Voldemort (left) in the Harry Potter films had him two-faced and Peter Dutton as imagined in the same vein (right).

One of the proposed models for the character of Lord Voldemort in JK Rowling's series of Harry Potter children's fantasy novels used as Janus-like two-faced head.  It's an urban myth Ms Rowling's inspiration for Lord Voldemort was Peter Dutton (b 1970; leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition in the Australian parliament since 2022) although, should his career in politics end soon (God forbid), he could find a new career in film, bringing Voldemort the evil and sense of menace the character has never quite achieved.  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 appalling or disgusting.

Satellite

Satellite (pronounced sat-l-ahyt)

(1) In astronomy, celestial body orbiting around a planet or star; a moon.

(2) In geopolitics, as “satellite state”, a country under the domination or influence of another.

(3) Something (a county, sub-national state, office, building campus etc), under the jurisdiction, influence, or domination of another entity; Subordinate to another authority, outside power, or the like (also known as a “satellite operation”, “satellite campus”, “satellite workshop” etc).

(4) An attendant or follower of another person, often subservient or obsequious in manner; a follower, supporter, companion, associate; lackey, parasite, sycophant, toady, flunky; now used usually in the derogatory sense of “a henchman” although, applied neutrally, it can be used of someone’s retinue or entourage (and even the machinery of a motorcade).

(5) A man-made device orbiting a celestial body (the earth, a moon, or another planet etc) and transmitting scientific information or used for communication; among astronomers and others form whom the distinction matters, man-made devices are sometimes referred to as “artificial satellites” to distinguish them for natural satellites such as the Earth’s Moon.  The standard abbreviation is “sat” and the situation in which a satellite is hit by some object while in orbit (which at the velocities involved can be unfortunate) is called a “sat-hit”.

(6) As “derelict satellite”, a man-made device (including the spent upper-stages of rockets) in orbit around a celestial body which has ceased to function.

(7) In medicine, a short segment of a chromosome separated from the rest by a constriction, typically associated with the formation of a nucleolus.

(8) In biology, a colony of microorganisms whose growth in culture medium is enhanced by certain substances produced by another colony in its proximity.

(9) In formal grammar, a construct that takes various forms and may encode a path of movement, a change of state, or the grammatical aspect (highly technical descriptor no longer used in most texts).

(10) In television, as satellite TV, the transmission and reception of television broadcasts (and used also in narrowcasting) using satellites in low-earth orbit.

(11) In the military terminology of Antiquity, a guard or watchman.

(12) In entomology, as satellite moth, the Eupsilia transversa, a moth of the family Noctuidae.

1540-1550: From the fourteenth century Middle French satellite, from the Medieval Latin satellitem (accusative singular of satelles) (attendant upon a distinguished person or office-holder, companion, body-guard. courtier, accomplice, assistant), from the Latin satelles, from the Old Latin satro (enough, full) + leyt (to let go) and listed usually as akin to the English “follow” although the association is undocumented.  Although the Latin origin is generally accepted, etymologists have pondered a relationship with the Etruscan, either satnal (klein) (again linked to the English “follow”) or a compound of roots: satro- (full; enough) + leit- (to go) (the English “follow” constructed of similar roots).  Satellite is a noun, verb & adjective and satellitic & satellitious are adjectives; the noun plural is satellites.  Satellitious (pertaining to, or consisting of, satellites) is listed by most dictionaries as archaic but is probably the best form to use in a derogatory sense, best expressed in the comparative (more satellitious) or the superlative (most satellitious).

Lindsay Lohan promoting the Sick Note series, TV & Satellite Week magazine, 21-27 July 2018.

The adjectival use is applied as required and this has produced many related terms including satellite assembly (use of committees or deliberative bodies created by a superior authority), satellite broadcasting (in this context distinguished from transmissions using physical (point-to-point) cables or ground-based relays), satellite campus, satellite DNA (in genetics, an array in  tandem of repeating, non-coding DNA), satellite-framing (in linguistics, the use of a grammatical satellite to indicate a path of motion, a change of state or grammatical aspect (as opposed to a verb framing)), satellite navigation (the use of electronic positioning systems which use data from satellites (often now as “SatNav”)) and satellite station (either (1) as ground-base facility used for monitoring or administrating satellites or (2) a manned facility in orbit such as the ISS (International Space Station)), satellite telephone (telephony using satellites as a transmission vector)

Sputnik 1 blueprint, 1957.

The original sense in the 1540s was "a follower or attendant of a superior person" but this use was rare before the late eighteenth century and it seemed to have taken until the 1910s before it was applied in a derogatory manner to suggest "an accomplice or accessory in crime or other nefarious activity” although the Roman statesman Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 BC) often used the Latin form in this way.  In the seventeenth century, as telescopes became available, the idea was extended to what was then thought to be "a planet revolving about a larger one" on the notion of "an attendant", initially a reference to the moons of Jupiter.  In political theory, the “satellite state” was first described in 1800, coined by John Adams (1735-1826; US president 1797-1801) in a discussion about the United States and its relationships with the other nations of the Americas although in geopolitics the term is most identified with the “buffer states”, the members of the Warsaw Pact which were within Moscow’s sphere of influence.  The familiar modern meaning of a "man-made machine orbiting the Earth" actually dates (as scientific conjecture) from 1936, something realized (to the surprise of most) in 1957 when the USSR launched Sputnik 1.  Sputnik was from the Russian спу́тник (sputnik) (satellite (literally "travelling companion” and in this context a shortened form of sputnik zemlyi (travelling companion of the Earth), from the Old Church Slavonic supotiniku, the construct being the Russian so- (as “s-“ (with, together)) + пу́тник (pútnik) (traveller), from путь (put) (way, path, journey) (from the Old Church Slavonic poti, from the primitive Indo-European pent- (to tread, go)) + ник (-nik) (the agent suffix).

Sputnik, 1957

Russian Sputnik postcard, 1957.

The launch of Sputnik shocked the American public which, in a milieu of jet aircraft, televisions and macropterous Cadillacs, had assumed their country was in all ways technologically superior to their Cold War enemy.  Launched into an elliptical low-Earth orbit, Sputnik was about twice the size of a football (soccer ball) and it orbited for some three more months before falling towards earth, the on-board batteries lasting long enough for it to broadcast radio pulses for the first three weeks, transmissions detectable almost anywhere on earth.  It sounds now a modest achievement but it needs to be regarded as something as significant as the Wright Flyer in 1903 travelling 200 feet (61 m), at an altitude of some 10 feet (3 m) and in the West the social and political impact was electrifying.  There were also linguistic ripples because, just as a generation later the Watergate scandal would trigger the –gate formations (which continue to this day), it wasn’t long before the –nik prefix (which had actually been a part of Yiddish word creation for at least a decade) gained popularity.  Laika, the doomed stray dog launched aboard Sputnik 2 in November 1957 was dubbed muttnik (although the claims it was the first living thing in space have since been disproved because "living" entities were both on board the Nazi V2 rockets (1944-1945) which often briefly entered the stratosphere and have long been present in the upper atmosphere where they’re ejected into space by natural atmospheric processes) while the early US satellites (quickly launched to display the nation’s scientific prowess) failed which gave the press the chance to coin kaputnik, blowupnik, dudnik, flopnik, pffftnik & stayputnik.

Sputnik 1's launch vehicle (left), the satellite as it orbited the earth (centre) and in expanded form (right. 

Although not a great surprise to either the White House or the Pentagon, the American public was shocked and both the popular and quality press depicted Sputnik’s success as evidence of Soviet technological superiority, stressing the military implications.    This trigged the space race and soon created the idea of the “missile gap” which would be of such significance in the 1960 presidential election and, although by the early 1960s the Pentagon knew the gap was illusory, the arms race continued and the count of missiles and warheads actually peaked in the early 1970s.  It also began a new era of military, technological, and scientific developments, leading most obviously to the moon landing in 1969 but research groups developed weapons such as the big inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and missile defence systems as well as spy satellites.  Satellites were another step in the process of technology being deployed to improve communications.  When President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, the news didn’t reach Europe until the fastest ship crossed the Atlantic a fortnight later.  By the time of President McKinley’s assassination in 1901, the news travelled around the world by undersea cables within minutes.  In 1963, while news of President Kennedy’s death was close to a global real-time event, those thousands of miles from the event had to wait sometimes twenty-four hours to view footage which was sent in film canisters by air.  By 1981, when an attempt was made on President Reagan’s life, television feeds around the planet were within minutes picking up live footage from satellites.

1967 Plymouth Satellite convertible.

Chrysler's Plymouth division introduced the Satellite on the corporation's intermediate ("B") platform in 1965 as the most expensive trim-option for the Belvedere line.  Offered initially only with two-door hardtop and convertible coach-work, the range of body-styles was later expanded to encompass four-door sedans and station wagons.  In a manner, typical of the way the industry applied their nomenclature as marketing devices to entice buyers, the Belvedere name was in 1970 retired while Satellite remained the standard designation until it too was dropped after 1974.

1970 Plymouth Road Runner, 440 6 Barrel.

Were it not for it being made available in 1966 with the 426 cubic inch (7.0 litre) Street Hemi V8, the Belvedere and Satellite would have been just another intermediate but with that option, it was transformed into a (slightly) detuned race-car which one could register for the road, something possible in those happier times.  The Street Hemi was an expensive option and relatively few were built but the demand for high-performance machinery was clear so in 1968, Plymouth released the Road Runner, complete with logos (licensed from the Warner Brothers film studio for US$50,000) and a “beep beep” horn which reputedly cost US$10,000 to develop.  The object was to deliver a high-performance machine at the lowest possible cost so the Road Runner used the basic (two-door, pillared) body shell and eschewed niceties like carpet or bucket seats, the only addition of note a tuned version of the 383 cubic inch (6.3 litre) V8 engine; for those who wanted more, the Street Hemi was optional.  Plymouth set what they thought were ambitious sales targets but demand was such that production had to be doubled and the reaction encouraged the usual proliferation, a hardtop coupé and convertible soon rounding out the range.

1970 Plymouth Hemi Road Runner Superbird.

The option list later expanded to include the six-barrel version of the 440 cubic inch (7.2 litre) V8, a much cheaper choice than the Street Hemi and one which (usually) displayed better manners on the street while offering similar performance until travelling well over 100 mph (160 km/h) although it could match the Hemi’s sustained delivery of top-end power which, with the right gearing, would deliver a top speed in excess of 150 mph (240 km/h), something of little significance to most.  However, by the early 1970s sales were falling.  The still embryonic safety and emission legislation played a small part in this but overwhelmingly the cause was the extraordinary rise in insurance premiums being charged for the highset-performance vehicles, something which disproportionately affected the very buyers at which the machines were targeted: single males aged 19-29.  However, the platform endured long enough to provide the basis for the Road Runner Superbird, a “homologation special” produced in limited numbers to qualify the frankly extreme aerodynamic modifications for use in competition.  At the time, the additions were too radical for some buyers and dealers unable to find buyers were forced to convert the things back to standard specifications to shift them from their lots but they’re now prized collectables, the relatively few with the Street Hemi especially sought.

1971 Plymouth Hemi Road Runner.

The intermediate line was revised in 1971 using the then current corporate motif of “fuselage styling” and it was probably more aesthetically pleasing there than when applied to the full-sized cars which truly were gargantuan.  The 1971 Satellites used distinctly different bodies for the two and four-door models and while there were no more convertibles, the Street Hemi and six-barrel 440 enjoyed a swansong season although sales were low, the muscle car era almost at an end.