Harvest

Harvest (pronounced hahr-vist)

(1) The season when ripened crops are gathered.

(2) The crop or yield of one growing season.

(3) A supply of anything gathered at maturity and stored.

(4) The result or consequence of any act, process, or event.

(5) To gather (a crop or the like); to reap.

(6) To gain, win, or use (a prize, product, or result of any past act, process etc)

(7) To catch, take, or remove (animals), especially for food.

(8) To collect (any resource) for future use.

(9) In epidemiological statistical analysis, as harvesting effect, a method used to calculate the excess deaths suffered during certain events (and the subsequent decrease in the expected normal mortality rate as the specific conditions subside.

(10) To extract an organ or tissue from a living or dead body, for the purposes of fertilization, transplantation or research.

(11) In modern paganism, a ceremony held on or around the autumn equinox, traditionally the harvesting season.

Pre 950: From the Middle English harvest & hervest (autumn, one of the four seasons; period between August and November), from the Old English hærfest (autumn, harvest-time; August), from the Proto-West Germanic harbist, from the Proto-Germanic harbistaz (harvest-time, autumn, fall) (source also of the Old Saxon hervist, the Old Frisian & Dutch herfst & the Old Norse haust (harvest)), from the primitive Indo-European kerp- (to gather, pluck, harvest).  It was cognate with the German Herbst (autumn) and related to the Old Norse harfr (harrow), the Old High German herbist (autumn), the Latin carpere (to pluck), the Ancient Greek karpos (fruit) and the Sanskrit krpāna (shears).  Curiously, the use in cell biology to refer to the extraction of cell began in 1946, the same year it appears first to have been applied to the hunting and gathering of wild animals.  The earlier (and mostly dialectical) forms harvist, hervest, harst & hairst are all obsolete.

Lindsay Lohan with a pair of ratchet loppers, pruning cuttings for the potting shed, May 2015.

In the Old & Middle English, it was primarily a season name, the sense of the implied reference to the gathering of crops just something of tradition and the specific, separate meaning (the time of gathering crops) dates only from the mid-thirteenth century, the sense extended to the action itself and the product of the action only after circa 1300.  Early in the sixteenth century, harvest assumed the now familiar meaning exclusively and the borrowed autumn and repurposed fall supplied the season name.  Being more evocative, fall is better than autumn.  The figurative uses began to emerge in the 1530s, use as an adjective documented early in the sixteenth century.  “Harvest home” which included the “festival feast”, was a festive event celebrating the bring home of the last of that season’s harvest and is first recorded in 1577.  The harvest moon, dating from 1704, was that which was full within a fortnight of the autumnal equinox.  Harvestable & harvestless are adjectives; harvestability and harvesting are nouns. 

The New Holland CR 10.90 Raupe-HSCR Harvester: harvesting.

The harvester, agent noun from harvest and noted since the 1590s, was “a reaper", a device used to assist in and speed-up the gathering of certain crops and the variations were many.  The first (vaguely) recognizable ancestor of the modern combine harvester was the generation of harvesters (the earliest of which were horse-drawn and seem to have been in use since the 1820s although no patent was issued until 1835) first sold in 1847 and advertised as machines for the “reaping and binding field crops".  The combine harvester (often referred to as “combines” or “headers”, the latter a reference to the bolt-on attachments optimized for particular crops) is so named because it combines in one machine the four separate harvesting operations, (1) reaping, (2) threshing, (3) gathering and (4), winnowing, the (5) multi-function headers a more recent innovation.  The tractor and the combine harvester are two of the most revolutionary machines, partially responsible for huge increases in agricultural production, equally dramatic reductions in the farm labour force and the consequent acceleration of urbanization as a demographic trend.

The Harvesting Effect

The harvesting effect (properly called mortality displacement) is a term from a process in epidemiological statistical analysis which maps and quantifies (1) a period where the human death rate significantly exceeds the predicted level and (2) a subsequent period when aggregate mortality is lower.  A harvesting effect is almost always associated with external factors such as war, extreme climatic conditions, famines or epidemics & pandemics.  Implicit in the model is the notion of a relationship of vulnerability between those who suffer an early death and the sudden change in external circumstances.  For example, when wars occur, there’s inherently the possibility of an accelerated death toll among those most likely to be serving in the most dangerous aspects of military service (fit, healthy young men) whereas when societies are subjected to extremes of heat or cold, it’s the frail and elderly who are most vulnerable.  The harvesting effect is a useful analytical tool because it can quantify the extent to which causation can be attributed: a subsequent drop in the mortality of a target population would suggest a high causal correlation because the heatwave, polar vortex or whatever, has in advance already harvested the expected victims.  That is rationalized as accelerated mortality, those who died as a result of the event were old and frail and thus likely soon anyway to die.  War-time and post-war data is interesting too for those studying not only the long-tail effects of physical injuries sustained in conflict but also those of mental illness caused by the trauma of the experience.  Historians can also use the data, where it exists with a high degree of reliability, to track the extent to which the causalities of war were civilians, something which in the West rose and fell between antiquity and the modern era before spiking dramatically in the wars of the twentieth century.

The harvesting effect is of great interest during and in the aftermath of pandemics and epidemics.  In the sombre world of public health policy, the harvesting effect is noted as one of the factors which can lead to pandemics and epidemics receding or even disappearing, the idea being the disease having already harvested the susceptible; those who remain are the strong who won’t succumb and the resistant who remain unaffected.  As a statistical source, the raw data of excess deaths is helpful too in determining the true death toll from a disease like COVID-19.  Difficult anyway in developing countries where in non-pandemic conditions there’s often a high proportion of deaths where a cause, even if known, isn’t recorded but in countries with highly developed health systems, many factors can mean the data is inaccurate.  That includes social stigma which in some countries apparently appears to some extent to have attached to COVID-19; it was certainly a factor in the early, misleading count of deaths from AIDS, the sudden spike in fatal pneumonia a sociological rather than a medical phenomenon.

Estimation of excess deaths against official COVID-19 deaths, published by The Economist, mid 2021.

A number of institutions accumulated the data-sets necessary to assess the true COVID-19 death toll and several, including the Financial Times and The Economist, collaborated to create the World Mortality Dataset (WMD) which contains both their statistical analysis and some discussion of the results.  At a time when the official global death toll was around 4.8 million, the findings published on the WMD (a perhaps unfortunate acronym) suggests a true number somewhere between 8 and 18.5 million.  Using the same statistical modelling, the death tolls for the previous four influenza pandemics (if happening now), they put at 75 million (1918), 3.1 million (1957), 2.2 million (1968) and 0.4 million (2009).  It certainly appears the official toll is significantly understated but the WMD does caution the usual caveats inhabit the margins: this is a composite of many data sets, capturing not only COVID-19 deaths (strictly speaking) but also those with some indirect association such as those suffering other conditions yet not able to secure timely treatment because the pandemic displaced healthcare resources.  It would be difficult to create a statistically robust formula to calculate relative contributions to death by various factors.  The method the WMD use they represent as:

Excess mortality = (A) Deaths directly caused by COVID infection

+ (B) Deaths caused by medical system collapse due to COVID pandemic

+ (C) Excess deaths from other natural causes

+ (D) Excess deaths from unnatural causes

+ (E) Excess deaths from extreme events: wars, natural disasters etc.

Running the COVID-19 numbers also produced some interesting finding of general interest in the field of public health.  There were some countries, those with natural geographic advantages and which applied stringent control measures, in which actual mortality was lower than that expected, the spreading virus (indirectly) turning the curve negative because the policies enforced had the side-effect of effectively eliminating seasonal influenza and its associated deaths.

The official COVID-19 death toll: 5,476,854 on Wednesday 5 January 2022, 13:42 GMT.            

Crop

Crop (pronounced krop)

(1) In agriculture, the cultivated produce of the ground, both while growing and when harvested.

(2) In aggregate, the yield of such produce for a particular season.

(3) The yield of some other product in a season.

(4) A supply produced in a given (not necessarily annual or seasonal) period.

(5) A collection or group of persons or things appearing or occurring together (often as “current crop”, “this year’s crop etc”).

(6) The stock or handle of a whip.

(7) In equine use, variously (1) a short riding whip consisting of a stock without a lash (also called riding crop) or (2) less commonly, the lashing end of a whip, both styles used in the BDSM community.

(8) In zoology, a pouch in the esophagus of many birds, in which food is held for later digestion or for regurgitation to nestlings (also called the craw);  a chamber or pouch in the foregut of arthropods and annelids for holding and partly crushing food.

(9) In agriculture, the act of cropping (including having animals crop by allowing them to eat what’s growing).

(10) A mark produced by clipping the ears (used with cattle and other livestock).

(11) In hairdressing, a close-cropped hairstyle or a head of hair so cut.

(12) An entire tanned hide of an animal.

(13) In mining, (1) an outcrop of a vein or seam or (2) tin ore prepared for smelting.

(14) To cut off or remove the head or top of plants, grass etc; to cut off the ends or part of something; to cut short.

(15) As crop-top (or crop top & croptop), a shirt or top cut high to expose the midriff.

(16) In photography and image manipulation, to cut off unwanted parts of a print, negative or digital image (historically those parts at the edges but the term has long been used for general editing).

(17) The entire tanned hide of an animal.

(18) In medicine and pathology, a group of vesicles at the same stage of development in a disease.

(19) In geology, the shortened form of outcrop.

(20) In architecture, the foliate part of a finial.

Pre 900: From the Middle English crop & croppe, from the Old English crop & cropp & croppa (sprout, or top of a plant, bunch or cluster of flowers, ear of wheat (or other grain), paunch, crown of a tree, craw of a bird, a kidney), from the Proto-West Germanic kropp, from the Proto-Germanic kruppaz (body, trunk, crop), from the primitive Indo-European grewb- (to warp, bend, crawl).  It was cognate with Dutch krop (crop), the German Low German Kropp (a swelling on the neck, the craw, maw), the German Kropf (the craw, ear of grain, head of lettuce or cabbage), the Swedish kropp (body, trunk), the Norwegian kröypa (to bend), the Old Norse kroppr (rump, body) and the Icelandic kroppur (a hunch on the body).  Crop was related to crap and was a doublet of group and croup.  The verb was from the Middle English croppen (to cut, pluck and eat), from the Old English croppian.  It was cognate with the Scots crap (to crop), the Dutch kroppen (to cram, digest), the Low German kröppen (to cut, crop, stuff the craw), the German kröpfen (to crop), the Icelandic kroppa (to cut, crop, pick); the sense of all was literally, to remove the crop (top, head, ear) of a plant.  Crop is a noun & verb, cropping & cropped (cropt was the archaic spelling); the noun plural is crops.

Lindsay Lohan in crop tops.  All these photographs have been cropped to render them in the same aspect ratio.

Crop started modestly enough for a word which evolved to enjoy such a definitional range and use idiomatic form: In the Old English it meant only (1) craw of a bird & (2) rounded head or top of a herb and while the latter is found also in High German dialects, the subsequent developments in the sense of “head or top” generally and of “produce to be harvested from the fields” appear exclusive to English.  The meaning "grain and other cultivated plants grown and harvested" (especially "the grain yield of one year"), having been in Anglo-Latin in the early 1200s, was adopted in Middle English a century later, the sense development thought something which happened under the influence of the early thirteenth century verbal meaning "cut off the top of a plant".  From the notion in agriculture of “top” cam the use to describe the "upper part of a whip" which evolved by the 1560s be the "handle of a whip" (1560s) and thus by 1857 "a kind of whip used by horsemen in the hunting field" (1857).  Unlike traditional whips (which were really one long lash), it proved useful in having a rigid handle and thus could be hand for things like opening gates or other tasks when a wand or stick helped.

Riding crops are a staple device in the BDSM (Bondage, Discipline (although some say Dominance & submission is more indicative of actual practice) & SadoMasochism) community.  The photograph at the right was a "mid-session" promotional shot and has been cropped. 

The general sense of "anything gathered when ready or in season" dates from the 1570s and the idea of the “thick, short head of hair" was from 1795, both developed from the late fourteenth century sense of "top or highest part of anything".  In Middle English, crop and rote (the whole plant, crop and root) was figurative of totality or perfection.  The concept of the crop-circle dates from a surprisingly recent 1974 although they had been noted before.  The verb in the sense of “cut off the top of a plant” evolved from the verb around the turn of the thirteenth century, extended by circa 1350 to animals (originally of sheep) feeding on plants.  The general meaning “to cut off” dates from the mid fifteenth century, used from circa 1600 to refer to the practice of “cutting off a part of the ear of an animal as a mark of identification and ownership”.  In tailoring, as a term to describe the clipping of cloth, it’s been in use since 1711 and surprisingly perhaps, in fashion the staple crop top seems first to have been described as such only after 1984.  Crop and harvest can for many purposes be used interchangeably to refer to a season’s produce.  Yield refers to the return in food obtained from land at the end of a season of growth and can also be used in highly technical ways to measure metrics of specific efficiency and output.  Crop also denotes the amount produced at one cutting or for one particular season while harvest denotes either the time of reaping and gathering, or the gathering, or that which is gathered: the season of harvest; to work in a harvest; a ripe harvest.  Produce once described little more than household vegetables and still has that sense but the use has expanded.

Top before & after: The undesirable part of the photo has been cropped-out.  Lower before & after: The undesirable part of the photo has been edited-out.

In photography and image manipulation, cropping is the cutting off of un-wanted parts of a print, negative or digital image.  Technically, a crop is performed only at the edges and the removal of any other part is an edit by "crop" has long been industry slang for just about any modification.

Crop-up (to sprout, appear apparently without design from below the surface), although now most associated with agriculture was actually a mid-nineteenth century borrowing from mining where it referred to the geological phenomenon of the veins of ore or strata of rock “coming to the surface and becoming visible on the ground", that use noted since the 1660s.  The cropper dates from 1858 (usually as “come-a-cropper”) was a fall, originally from horseback and, as it usually involved the rider being thrown over the horse's head, there was always the connotation of failure but it now refers to a fall of any kind and elicits usually sympathy or myth depending on the severity of injury.  Also based on the idea of “head, sprout or top”, outcrop was first use in geology in 1801 to mean “exposure of rocks at the surface”.  The noun sharecropper (and share-cropper) was coined 1887 to describe the particular form of leasehold used in the southern US whereby a land-holder would lease land to a tenant to plant and harvest, also receiving a defined share of the crop. The noun share-crop came into use in 1867 and was used as a verb by 1871 although the noun sharecropping seems not to have been in use before 1936.  The cash-crop was one produced for sale rather than consumption; a bumper crop was a very good harvest (based on an old meaning of bumper as “big, full to the brim”); and crop rotation was a method of agricultural management designed to preserve the fertility of soil and limit the proliferation of pests; crop dusting was the spraying of crops with fertilizer or insecticide from low-flying aircraft dubbed crop-dusters; the cream of the crop is the best of any particular group.

Autumn

Autumn (pronounced aw-tuhm)

(1) The season between summer and winter; also known as the fall and once known as the harvest.  In the Northern Hemisphere it’s between the September equinox and the December solstice; in the Southern Hemisphere it’s between the March equinox and the June solstice.

(2) A time of full maturity, especially the late stages of full maturity or, sometimes, the early stages of decline.

1325–1375: From the Latin autumnus, replacing the Middle English autumpne (the modern form of which dates from the sixteenth century) from the Middle French autompne, from the thirteenth century Old French automne.  The Latin autumnus (also auctumnus, perhaps influenced by auctus "increase") is of unknown origin, some suspecting Etruscan root but a more supported view is a meaning "drying-up season" with a root in auq-, comparing the archaic English sere-month "August."  Interestingly, while “summer”, “winter” and “spring” are inherited Indo-European words in Latin, a foreign origin of autumnus is conceivable as there is no evidence for any similar etymology for “autumn"; indeed, autumn's names across the Indo-European languages leave no evidence there ever was a common word for it.  Many "autumn" words mean "end”, “end of summer" or "harvest" and variations include the Greek phthinoporon (waning of summer), the Lithuanian ruduo (autumn) rudas (reddish) in reference to leaves and the Old Irish fogamar (literally "under-winter”).  Harvest was the English name for the season until autumn began to displace it during the sixteenth century and “backend”, a once common name for the season in Northern England, has been mostly replaced by autumn.  In the Romance languages, the Italian autunno, the Spanish otoño and the Portuguese outono are all from the Latin word.  The only surviving derived form is the adjective autumnal; the meaning "maturing or blooming in autumn” dates from the 1570s, by the 1630s it had come to be used in the sense of "belonging or pertaining to autumn" and by the 1650s, figuratively as "past the prime".  Autumn is a noun and adjective and autumnal is an adjective; the noun plural is autumns.

Lindsay Lohan at Petro Zilla show, Mercedes-Benz Fall 2004 Fashion Week, Bryant Park, Manhattan, March 2004.

Autumn dates from medieval times, examples existing as early as the twelfth century but it wasn’t until the sixteenth it was in common use, having supplanted the earlier “harvest”.  Because it’s so much more evocative, the alternative word “fall” really is better than autumn.  The exact derivation of fall is unclear, with the Old English fiæll or feallan and the Old Norse fall all possible candidates.  The term came to denote the season in sixteenth century England, a contraction of Middle English expressions like "fall of the leaf" and "fall of the year" and it was seventeenth century English emigration to the American colonies which took “fall” across the Atlantic.  While the term fall gradually became nearly obsolete in Britain (though there are signs of a twenty-first century revival), it became close to universal in North America.  Season names are not capitalized in modern English unless at the beginning of a sentence or when the season is personified (as in Old Man Winter, Winter War, Summer Glau et al).  This is in contrast to the days of the week & months of the year, which are always capitalized.

The fallen leaves: why "the fall" is so much more evocative that "autumn".  However, the adjective autumnal remains indispensable because clumsy constructs like "fallesque" or "fallish" are ghastly.

Patterns of use of fall & autumn in US & British English.  The twenty-first century trends are attributed to the influence of the internet.

Ode to Autumn (1819) by John Keats (1795-1821).

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
 
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
 
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The English romantic poet John Keats wrote his best-remembered ode To Autumn after a stroll near Winchester one autumnal evening.  Within a year of publication, Keats died in Rome.

Vintage

Vintage (pronounced vin-tij)

(1) The wine from a particular harvest or crop (usually a season).

(2) Of wine, the product of a season of outstanding quality (labeled by calendar year)

(3) The annual produce of the grape harvest, especially with reference to the wine obtained (technically also recorded as the “yield of grapes during one season”).

(4) The time of gathering grapes, or of winemaking.

(5) The act or process of producing wine; winemaking.

(6) The class of a dated object with reference to era of production or use.

(7) A wine of a specified vintage:

(8) Attributively, a subset of something, representing often the most memorable or highest quality items produced (although it can apply to all associated with the designated era) such as vintage cars, vintage dresses et al.  Sometimes, what constitutes a “vintage” item (as opposed to a “veteran”, “antique” et al) is defined by various institutions (vintage watches for example said to be those dated between 1870 and 1980).

(9) Attributively, something old-fashioned or obsolete.

(10) Attributively, something the being the best of its kind.

1400-1450: From the Middle English vendage & vyndage, from the Anglo-Norman vendenge, from vinter, from the Old French vendage & vendenge (vine-harvest, yield from a vineyard (and cognate with the French vendange)), from the Latin vindēmia (a harvest of grapes, vintage), the construct being vīn(um) (grape; wine) + dēmō (take off or away, remove), the construct being de (of; from, away from) + (e)mō (acquire, obtain).  A number of European languages including Spanish, Polish and (surprisingly) France adopted “vintage from English”.  Vintage is a noun, verb & adjective, vintager is a noun, vintagey is (a non-standard) adjective and vintaged & vintaging are verbs; the noun plural is vintages.

Warrnambool Heritage "The Aged Vintage" cheese.  Very good.

The meaning shifted to “age or year of a particular wine” after 1745 with the general adjectival sense of “being of an earlier time” emerging in the early 1880s.  In the business of winemaking, the notion of “vintages” came in the twentieth century to become elastic, the term not of necessity misleading, just one which needed to be understood.  Originally, a vintage was one wine, produced with grapes grown and harvested in the one season and that system is still used but the word has long been used also as a label to denote “something of a superior quality”.  The taste of wine being a subjective thing however and something the industry (often in the small print or with a “NV” added) markets as “non-vintage” may by many buyers be preferred to a “vintage” because the “un-vintaged” drop might be a blend of wine from several years; something routinely done to ensure a particular product tastes much the same from year to year.  Even then, while the regulatory environments in many jurisdictions do specify that to qualify as a “vintage”, the fluid in the bottle must contain a minimum volume from the year on the label but the “foreign” content can be as high as a quarter and according to EU regulators, in some places special exemptions have been granted permitting a 50/50 split.  The use also proved attractive to others and there are many “vintage” cheeses and other foodstuffs, the word in this context meaning little more than being sold at a higher price.

Brass era: 1915 Stutz Bearcat Model F.  Although untrue, it was for years part of Stutz folklore than anyone who died in one merited an obituary in the New York Times.

“Vintage” has been used of cars since 1928 but in the post-war years when the idea of cars as collectables coalesced, in various places categories were created and while somewhat arbitrary, the cut-off points between one era and another tended to reflect the existence of something significant which (at least for the majority of the vehicles involved) made them in some way identifiably different from what came before.  The terms vary: The most evocative is the “brass era” used in the US and it covers essentially anything produced between the beginning of organized production in the mid 1890s and 1915, the name chosen because of the extensive use of brass for fittings such as headlamp surrounds radiators and levers, the polished metal lending the distinctiveness.  The choice of 1915 as the end of the brass era reflected the decline in the use of the material as mass production made the use of other materials more attractive but the main factor was that was the year Ford ceased use for the Model T, the car which had for years dominated the market.  In the UK (and therefore throughout most of the old British Empire), cars produced prior to 1919 were called “veteran” although there was for a time a fashion to speak of them as “Edwardian, a reference to the reign of Edward VII (1841–1910; King of the UK & Emperor of India 1901-1910), the imprecision in the dates accounted for by “Edwardian” being used as a descriptor of the fashion, architecture etc of the era rather than the reign proper.  “Vintage” cars are those made between 1919-1930 (or 1916-1930 in US use) and as an epoch that follows what was at the time called “post-war” (between the end of the World War (1914-1918) and the onset of the Great Depression.  Conveniently, it conforms (more or less also to the advances in engineering and style which made the machines of the 1920s distinct from those of the next decade.

Post-war classic: 1948 Cisitalia 202 CMM by Vignale.

So, what in political science are the “inter-war years” are divided by the collector car community into “vintage” and “pre-war”, the later epoch being 1930-1942 (US passenger car production ending early in 1942).  Most of what was produced between 1945-1948 was a continuation of what was abandoned with the onset of hostilities but nothing produced after 1945 is grouped with the “pre-war” cohort and the era is generally called “post-war classics” and depending on who is writing the classification, that period ends somewhere around 1960-1962, motoring’s beginning of “the modern” although that’s obviously inexact, some strikingly modern stuff coming from as early as the 1940s and some true relics still on sale as late as 1968.  These definitions don’t apply to stuff made outside the West and in places like the Warsaw Pact nations, the relics would endure until the 1990s; nor do they include retro devices like the Morgan or products of pure-functionalism like Jeeps and Land Rovers.  In the modern age, the labeling has changed and the tendency now is to use self-explanatory terms like “1970”s, “muscle car era” etc.

Lindsay Lohan in a vintage Herve Leger bandage dress, New York, May 2007 (left) and in a vintage-style dress, New York, February 2017.    

In fashion, “vintage” can mean a piece from decades ago or just a few seasons earlier.  Vintage items can sometimes be genuine museum pieces or simply be “old” enough to have gained some sort of respectability.  To be “vintage”, something needs to be the product of an acknowledged designer or manufacturer; items which have gained their notoriety for some other reason (who it’s associated with or the circumstances in which it was worn) can be newsworthy but they’re not “vintage”.  The word is used also of style, a “vintage look” an indicating that an outfit is something which either recalls something associated with an older style or uses known motifs to achieve the effect.  Depending on the implementation, the latter can also be treated as a “retro” whereas a “vintage look” is something where the relationship is more vague.

There is vintage and there is retro: Lindsay Lohan in an art deco mini-dress, said to be a vintage original, paired with a pair of retro Prada stilettos in burgundy.

Boycott

Boycott (pronounced boi-kot)

(1) To combine in abstaining from, or preventing dealings with, as a means of intimidation or coercion; the refusal to purchase the products of an individual, corporation, or nation as a way to apply social and political pressure for change.

(2) To abstain from buying or using.

1880: (in the sense described): Named after Charles Boycott, an estate manager in Ireland, against whom nonviolent coercive tactics were used in 1880.  The surname, recorded as Boycott and Boykett, is both English and Irish, although the origins are the same.  It appears originally to have been locational from Boycott, either in Berkshire or Shropshire, derived from “Boia's cot” (Boia a pre-seventh century Old English term of personal endearment for a boy or young man).  Boycott is a proper noun, boycott is a noun & verb, boycotting is a noun & verb, boycotter, boycottism & boycottage are nouns, boycotted is a verb; the noun plural is boycotts.

Origin

Captain Charles Boycott (1832–97) was an English land agent for an absentee landlord in County Mayo, Ireland.  In 1880, after a year of bad harvests, the landlord offered his tenants what he considered a generous 10% reduction in their rents.  The tenants however thought this parsimonious and demanded a 25% reduction which was rejected and Captain Boycott was dispatched to evict the revolting tenants.  About the same time, the period which came to be known as the Irish “land war”, Irish nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), a member of the Irish Land League, had proposed dealing with landlords and land agents through a peaceful form of social ostracism rather than resorting to violence, suggesting the local community should simply ignore the land agents and conduct no business with them.

Former England cricket captain Geoffrey Boycott (b 1940), Headingley, Leeds, 1977, playing a rare defensive shot.

As news of Boycott’s evictions spread, he found himself isolated within the local community and, despite the immediate economic consequences, his workers stopped working in his fields, stables and house, local businessmen no longer traded with him and the postman refused to deliver his mail.  Because of these actions, Boycott faced financial peril because nobody would harvest the crops, forcing him to bring in fifty workers and an escort of almost a thousand armed police and soldiers to guard them, the cost of these measures exceeding the value of the harvest.  Following the harvest, the boycott on Boycott was sustained and the new use of the word spread quickly, the New York Tribune applying the term in 1880, The Spectator the following year.  It has entered other languages, being used sometimes in French, German, Spanish, Italian and even Japanese (ボイコット (Boikotto)).

The boycott can be an effective tactic which can be applied in diplomacy, commerce or politics, the boycotting of elections a widely used tactic.   

Historically and by convention, a boycott is an action by an individual or a community whereas such programmes pursued by states tend to be known as embargos or sanctions.  An interesting hybrid, designed to encourage individuals, institutions and states, is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Palestinian-led pressure group, formed in 2005, with a stated objective to force Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, removal of the separation barrier in the West Bank, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.

Reaper

Reaper (pronounced ree-per)

(1) A machine for cutting standing grain; reaping machine; a machine used to harvest crops.

(2) One who reaps; a person employed to harvest crops from the fields by reaping; a machine operator who controls a mechanical reaper.

(3) A short form of grim reaper (often capitalized), the personification of death as a man or cloaked skeleton holding a scythe.

(4) The recluse spider (Loxosceles and Sicarius spp).

Pre 1000: From the Middle English reper, repare & repere (a harvester, one who cuts grain with a sickle or other instrument) from the Old English compound rīpere (the agent-noun from the verb reap), the construct being reap (from the Middle English repen, from the Old English rēopan & rēpan, variants of the Old English rīpan (to reap), from the Proto-Germanic rīpaną and related to the West Frisian repe, the German reifsen (to snatch) and the Norwegian ripa (to score, scratch); source was the primitive Indo-European hireyb- (to snatch)) + -er (from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, probably borrowed from Latin –ārius and later reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant was -our), from the Latin -(ā)tor, from the primitive Indo-European –tōr; the suffix was added to verbs to form an agent noun).  The agent noun meaning "a reaper" is from the 1590s whereas the sense of "a machine for cutting grain" dates from 1841 and that of a “machine for reaping and binding field crops" appeared in 1847.  Variations of the spelling including Riper, Ryper & Riper appear in pre-1000 parish records as surnames and the presumption is most would have had some sort of vocational relationship to “reap”; Repere was first noted as a surname in the early fourteenth century.  Reaper is a noun; the noun plural is reapers.

The Grim Reaper as often depicted.

The use as the name of a personification of death dates from 1818 and “grim reaper” was first attested in 1847 although the association of grim and death is document from at least the seventeenth century with actual common use probably much earlier; a Middle English expression for "have recourse to harsh measures" was “to wend the grim tooth” and has been found as early as the 1200s.  The adjective grim was from the Old English grimm (fierce, cruel, savage; severe, dire, painful), from the Proto-Germanic grimma- (source also of the Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old High German & German grimm (grim, angry, fierce), the Old Norse grimmr (stern, horrible, dire), the Swedish grym (fierce, furious), from the primitive Indo-European ghremno- (angry), thought to be imitative of the sound of rumbling thunder (and may thus be compared with the Greek khremizein (to neigh), the Old Church Slavonic vuzgrimeti (to thunder) and the Russian gremet' (thunder).  Grim by the late twelfth century had lost the worst of the earlier connotations of violence and foreboding, by then understood to impart a sense of "dreary, gloomy".  The verb form in the Old English was grimman (past tense gramm; past participle grummen), while the noun grima (goblin, specter) may also have been a proper name or attribute-name of a god, the source of its appearance as an element in so many place names.

The Grim Reaper: Public health initiative, Australia, 1987.

The Grim Reaper was a 60 second-long television advertisement, run in 1987 as part of a public health campaign to increase awareness of the danger of HIV/AIDS.  It depicted the Grim Reaper of popular imagination in a ten-pin bowling alley, using a seven foot high (2.1 m) bowling ball to knock over men, women and child "pins", each of which represented a victim of the disease.  It was part of what would later be called a multi-media campaign which included radio broadcasts and printed material and certainly provoked a reaction, more sophisticated consumers of messaging thinking it at least banal and perhaps puerile while others found it disturbing and reported it scared their children.  The public response was hardly “hysterical” as has sometimes been claimed although the even then assertive gay community didn’t like that they were explicitly mentioned, fearing scapegoating although, given the publicity which by then had been documenting the track of AIDS for some four years, that horse had already bolted.  It was by the standards of the time confronting and criticism meant the government cancelled broadcasting, three weeks into a run which was intended to be twice the duration yet the public health community was pleased with the results and the programme was praised internationally, the direct Australian approach influencing others.  Some Australian state governments subsequently used even more graphic imagery in public health initiatives around matters such as smoking and road safety but it’s notable that attempts to use similar techniques to promulgate messages during the COVID-19 pandemic were thought a failure.  With various platforms having desensitized most to all but the most horrific sights, the public’s capacity to be shocked may have moved beyond what television advertising agencies can manage.

Blue Öyster Cult (Don't Fear) The Reaper (1976) © Donald Roeser (b 1947)

All our times have come

Here but now they're gone

Seasons don't fear the reaper

Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain, we can be like they are

 

Come on baby, don't fear the reaper

Baby take my hand, don't fear the reaper

We'll be able to fly, don't fear the reaper

Baby I'm your man

 

La, la, la, la, la

La, la, la, la, la

 

Valentine is done

Here but now they're gone

Romeo and Juliet

Are together in eternity, Romeo and Juliet

40,000 men and women everyday, Like Romeo and Juliet

40,000 men and women everyday, Redefine happiness

Another 40,000 coming everyday, We can be like they are

 

Come on baby, don't fear the reaper

Baby take my hand, don't fear the reaper

We'll be able to fly, don't fear the reaper

Baby I'm your man

 

La, la, la, la, la

La, la, la, la, la

 

Love of two is one

Here but now they're gone

Came the last night of sadness

And it was clear she couldn't go on

Then the door was open and the wind appeared

The candles blew then disappeared

The curtains flew then he appeared, saying don't be afraid

 

Come on baby, and she had no fear

And she ran to him, then they started to fly

They looked backward and said goodbye, she had become like they are

She had taken his hand, she had become like they are

Come on baby, don't fear the reaper

Although they’d led a discursive existence since 1967, by the early 1970s, Blue Öyster Cult was in the crowded field of post-psychedelic acts blending quasi-classical motifs, mysticism, neck-snapping riffs and pop panache.  Coming from this milieu, the commercial success in 1976 of the single (Don't Fear) The Reaper was unexpected although more predictable was the controversy triggered by the lyrics being interpreted as advocating suicide.  It’s tempting to read the words that way, the eye drawn to the mention of Shakespeare's star-cross'd lovers, but the musician who wrote the lyrics claimed the song was about mortality and the inevitability of death, not its hastening and that in Romeo and Juliet he saw a couple with a faith in eternal love, not icons of a death cult.  The forty-thousand souls mentioned being taken by the reaper is way too high to refer to the daily suicide toll and actually references the total daily death take, the “forty thousand” being a bit of artistic license because the real number (125-135,000 at the time the lyrics were penned) would have too many syllables for the rhythm of the music.

Coming & going, dressed for the occasion.  Lindsay Lohan in Grim Reaper mode fulfilling a court-mandated community service order at LA County Morgue, October, 2011.