Milieu

Milieu (pronounced mil-yoo, meel-yoo or mee-lyœ (French))

Surroundings, medium, environment. especially of a social or cultural nature.

1795-1805: From the twelfth century French milieu (middle, medium, mean (literally "middle place)) from the Old French as meillieu, mileu and miliu, from the Latin medius, from the primitive Indo-European root medhyo (middle) + lieu (place).  The French was derived from the Latin words medius (middle) and locus (place).  The rarely used plural forms of the noun are milieus (English) and milieux (French).  The construct of the French: mi- (mid) +‎ lieu (place) mirrors the sense of the word.

English speakers have used milieu for the environment or setting of something since the early-1800s but other "lieu" descendants are older: lieu itself and lieutenant since the fourteenth century.  By the late-1800s, milieu had become a fashionable word among scholars and writers.

In the milieu of the industrial baroque, Lohan Nightclub, Iera Odos 30-32 | Kerameikos, Athens 104 35, Greece.

In the twentieth century, milieu was adopted by the emerging discipline of sociology as a technical term.  C Wright Mills contrasted the immediate milieu of an individual’s life with the over-arching social, political and economic structure, highlighting the distinction between "the personal troubles of milieu" and the "public crises of social structure".  Emile Durkheim didn’t entirely disagree but seemed so fond of the word he described the big structures as the milieu social, asserting it contained internalized expectations and representations of social forces and social facts which, he argued, existed only in the imaginations of individuals as collective representations.  Phenomenologists, structuralists at heart, built two models: society as a deterministic constraint (milieu) or a nurturing shell.

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)

 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

© Donald Roeser (1976)

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 song.

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.

Factoid

Factoid (pronounced fak-toid)

(1) Something fictitious or unsubstantiated that is presented as fact, devised especially to gain publicity and accepted because of constant repetition.

(2) An insignificant, surprising or trivial fact (frequently used, especially in the clickbait business; probably now the accepted meaning).

1973: A compound word, the construct being fact + -oid.  Fact dates from the 1530s and was from the Old French fact, from the Latin factum (something done, an act, deed, feat, exploit etc (which in Medieval Latin was used also to mean “state, condition, circumstance”)), a noun use neuter of factus (done or made), the past participle of facere (to do; to make) and perfect passive participle of faciō (do, make), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European dhe (to put, place, set).  When in the early sixteenth century fact entered the Middle English it was used with the sense of “an action, a thing performed, anything done, a deed (thus a neutral word of action in that the deeds could be for good or ill) but later and predominately during the 1600s, the understanding of fact was “an evil deed or crime” (the legacy of this preserved in legal jargon ex post facto (retrospective), post factum (after the crime (literally (after the act)) etc.  The Old & Middle French later evolved into faict & fait and the Latin was the source also of the Spanish hecho and Italian fatto.  The suffix -oid was from a Latinized form of the Ancient Greek -ειδής (-eidḗs) & -οειδής (-oeidḗs) (the “ο” being the last vowel of the stem to which the suffix is attached); from εἶδος (eîdos) (form, likeness).  It was used (1) to demote resembling; having the likeness of (usually including the concept of not being the same despite the likeness, but counter-examples exist), (2) to mean of, pertaining to, or related to and (3) when added to nouns to create derogatory terms, typically referring to a particular ideology or group of people (by means of analogy to psychological classifications such as schizoid).  Factoid is a noun (the noun factoidism is non-standard) and factoidal is an adjectival; the noun plural is factoids.

The modern understanding of what constitutes a fact (except for the Trump White House where the Orwellian “alternative facts” were sometimes helpfully provided) is something “empirically proven, known to be true; what actually happened”.  In the early seventeenth century, under the influence of the development of what later came to be known as the “scientific method”, this began to replace the earlier sense which was really a statement or belief although the word had picked up such an association with acts of crime that it for a while wasn’t clear if the choice by the scientists was wise.  However, by the early eighteenth century London’s Royal Society effectively formalized the modern vocabulary of knowledge (theory, fact, disproof, experiment, hypothesis etc) and the lawyers happily retained their phrases.  The modern use as standardized in science was thus innovative because in Middle English there was no noun, the closest expression from earlier centuries being a phrase like “a thing proved true”.  Dictionary entries as early as 1707 included an entry for “facts” as the “real state of things; in reality” but the reality of the nature of scientific progress was acknowledged in 1729 by the entry “something presented as a fact but which might be or is false”.

Beauty and the Beast

Marilyn Munroe (1926-1962).

Factoid was coined by Norman Mailer in the 1973 “biography” of Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn: A biography), a collection of photographs for which Mailer provided the captions and some supporting short-form text), a factoid something “…that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact” and yet comes to be accepted as one, usually because it’s at least plausible, and (certainly in the pre-Internet age), either difficult or time-consuming to verify.

Norman Mailer (1923–2007).

Writing in the particular milieu of the America of Nixon and Agnew, Mailer regarded factoids with some suspicion, thinking them things “…which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the silent majority.”  He made this observation without obvious irony, despite admitting some of what he wrote in the book of Marilyn Munroe’s photographs was “speculative”.

However, even before the ubiquity of the internet, the meaning had begun to morph, with the new eventually supplanting rather than existing in parallel with Mailer’s creation, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defining factoid as (1) an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact and (2) a brief or trivial item of news.  The newer meaning was first popularized by the Cable News Network (CNN) (although in this newer sense it seems first to have appeared in Canada) in the 1980s when they presented bizarre or obscure, but nevertheless true snippets as "factoids" during newscasts.

A modern factoid site.

Some purists attempted a rescue.  William Safire (1929–2009) advocated factlet for CNN’s color pieces and it was adopted by up-market publications like The Guardian and The Atlantic but the popular press like factoid and it’s become a staple of internet clickbait.  That’s how English works, meanings of words like factoid and decimate shift over time according to use, sometimes coming even to mean the opposite of their original form.  The –let suffix was from the Middle English –let & -elet, from the Old French -elet, a double diminutive from the Old French –el & -et.  It was used to create diminutive forms and in English is widely appended (booklet: a small book, applet: a small computer application, piglet: a young pig et al).  It’s applied almost exclusively to concrete nouns and except in jocular use (and unusually for a diminutive) never with names. When used with objects, it generally denotes something smaller; when used with animals, it is of their young form; when used of adult persons, it’s usually depreciative, connoting pettiness and conveying contempt.  A special use was in suits of armor where it denoted a piece of the larger whole, this sense carrying over to some aspects of military uniforms.  The other suggestion was factette though that may have fallen victim to historic association.  The –ette suffix was from the Middle English -ette, a borrowing from the Old French -ette, from the Latin -itta, the feminine form of -ittus.  It was used to form nouns meaning a smaller form of something and thus, because factette could be seen as an inferior form of fact, the inference might be draw that “inferior” and the feminine forms of words were also inferior.

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.

Superleggera

Superleggera (pronounced soo-per-lee-ghera)

(1) In automotive coach-building, a method of construction which combined a framework of thin steel tubes with aluminum outer panels, producing a lightweight structure.

(2) In recent years, a designation used as a model name to refer to a “lightweight” vehicle even if not a classic superleggera structure.

1935 (a patent for the technique issued in 1936):  From the Italian superleggera (super light) (feminine singular of superleggero), the construct being super- +‎ leggero.  Super was from the Latin super-, from the Proto-Italic super, from the primitive Indo-European upér (over, above) which was cognate with the Ancient Greek ὑπέρ (hupér) (above) and the Proto-Germanic uber (now familiar in English and translated as “over” although this doesn’t wholly convey the sense in Modern German).  Leggero (light in weight, slight, thin) was from the Old French legier, from the Vulgar Latin leviārius, from the Latin levis, from the Proto-Italic leɣis, from the primitive Indo-European hlengwih-, from hléngus, from hleng (lightweight). The cognates included the Sanskrit लघु (laghú), the Ancient Greek ἐλᾰφρός & ἐλᾰχῠ́ς (elaphrós & elakhús) and the Old English lēoht (the ultimate source of the English light).  Superleggera is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is superleggeras (or in the Italian the masculine plural is superleggeri, the feminine plural superleggere).

Carrozzeria Touring and superleggera

It was in 1926 that two Milanese lawyers discussed how bored they were with mundane, if lucrative, legal work and much preferred the exciting world of the automobile, the industry then something like that of IT in the early twenty-first century in that a critical mass of users had been established, growth was consistent and new ventures were coming and going amid a milieu of M&A (mergers & acquisitions).  The lawyers negotiated a controlling interest in Milan-based coachbuilder Carrozzeria Falco, changing the company’s name to Carrozzeria Touring.  Contracts to provide bodywork soon followed including from some of the industry’s major manufacturers including Citroën, Isotta Fraschini & Alfa Romeo and for some time they continued to adopt Falco’s methods which was an adaptation of the “Weymann” system which involved laying fabric over lightweight frames supported by a traditional separate chassis.  Touring produced elegant coachwork of a high quality and attracted the patronage of both Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & prime-minister of Italy 1922-1943) and Victor Emmanuel III (1869–1947; King of Italy 1900-1946) although perhaps more influential was the Queen who was often photographed alighting from one of Touring’s large cars, a more imposing sight than the exit of her diminutive husband.

1938 Alfa Romeo 8C-2900B LeMans with Touring Superleggera (left), a wrought-iron artwork installation based on the idea using the Volkswagen Beetle as a model (centre) and Lindsay Lohan with conventional (body-on-chassis) Beetle (Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005)).

Touring proved innovative in its use of strong, lightweight alloys to support the fabric skins and they enjoyed much success also in applying the technique to aircraft components such as wings and fuselages but during the 1930s with both the military and civilian airlines wanting to fly higher, faster, for longer and in all weather, the shift was beginning towards all-metal construction.  This was an organic evolution of the Weymann technique but the weight and other characteristics of sheet aluminum differed greatly from stretched-fabric and the system needed substantially to be re-engineered and it was the lessons learned from fabricating fuselages which led to Touring developing superleggera, the design patented in 1936.  The essence of superleggera was a skeleton of small diameter tubes which formed a body’s core shape, to which were attached thin aluminum-alloy panels which provided both aerodynamic form and strength.  Compared with earlier methods, as well as being inherently light, the method afforded great flexibility in fashioning shape and Touring took advantage of the properties of the metal to create both complex and flowing curves.  Some of their cars of the era did have lovely lines and in addition to the collaboration with Alfa Romeo which yielded sports cars, gran turismo machines and racing cars, the house attracted business from Lancia, Bianchi and others.

1938 Lancia Astura IV series coupé by Touring (left), 1949 Ferrari 166mm barchetta by Touring (centre), and 2014 Ducati 1199 Superleggera (right).

In the post war years, an era in which demand was high and regulations rare, the number of cars built according to the superleggera system increased as Touring licensed the use of its patent to others including Hundon in the US, Pegaso in Spain and Bristol, Aston Martin & Lagonda in England.  Bristol particularly took to the idea because of their long experience with airframes but perhaps the most influential stylistically was the 1948 Ferrari 166 MM Touring barchetta, a charismatic shape which provided a template which would remain recognizable in Ferraris for a quarter-century, the motif of the egg-crate grill still in use today.  While superleggera was unsuited to volume production, for the exclusive ranges at the upper end of the market it was ideal and both Lamborghini and Maseratis emerged built with the technique.  Although the two are sometimes confused because there are visual similarities under the skin, the space-frame method differs in that it can support the whole structural load whereas a superleggera is attached to an existing chassis.

1960 Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato (left), 1961 Aston Martin DB4 Convertible (centre; the Volante designation wasn't then in use) and 1965 Aston Martin DB5 Saloon.

In the public mind, the most enduring connection was with Aston Martin which was granted a license to use the design and the Superleggera construction method at its Newport Pagnell plant for a fee of £9 for each of the first 500 bodies and £5 for each subsequent unit and the DB4 & DB5 (the latter made famous in the early James Bond films) were both built thus.  However, they represented something of the end of the era because governments were starting to pass laws which demanded road cars attain a certain degree of crash-worthiness, something the superleggera technique couldn’t be adapted conform to without sacrificing the very lightness which was its raison d'etre.  Additionally, the manufacturers were moving swiftly to replace body-on-frame with unit-construction.  Touring attempted to adapt to the changing environment by offering its services as a coach-builder for small, exclusive production runs and made the necessary capital investment but it had become crowded field, the supply of coach-builders exceeding the demand for their skills.  Touring ceased operations in 1966 but four decades on, there was an unexpected revival of the name, the company re-established as Carrozzeria Touring Superleggera, offering automotive design, engineering, coach-building, homologation services, non-automotive industrial design, and the restoration of historic vehicles.  A number of very expensive one-off and limited-production ventures for Maserati, Alfa Romeo and Bentley followed but what attracted most comment was the Sciàdipersia, shown in coupé form at the Geneva Motor Show in 2018, the cabriolet introduced the flowing year.  Based on the underpinnings of the Maserati Grantourismo, although owing no visual debt, it was very much in the tradition of the three Maserati 5000 GTs Touring built in 1959-1960, the first of which had been ordered by the Shah of Iran.  Superleggera however is now just a name with an illustrious history, the method of construction no longer in use and when used as a model designation, it now simply denotes what a literal translation of the Italian suggests: lightweight.

The original Maserati 5000 GT "Shah of Iran" by Touring (left; chassis #103-002) and Touring's Maserati Sciàdipersia in coupé form (centre; 2018) and roadster (right; 2019).

Mystique

Mystique (pronounced mi-steek)

(1) A framework of doctrines, ideas, beliefs, or the like, constructed around a person or object, endowing the person or object with enhanced value or profound meaning:

(2) The aura of mystery (real, imagined or confected) or mystical power surrounding a particular occupation or pursuit:

1891: A borrowing by English in the sense of “atmosphere of mystery and veneration”, from the French noun & adjective mystique (a mystic; the act of a mystic; the mystical), from the Latin mysticus, from the Ancient Greek μυστικός (mustikós) (secret, mystic), from μύστης (mústēs) (one who has been initiated).  Mystique is a noun; the noun plural is plural mystiques.

A Dangerous Liaison (2008) by Carole Seymour-Jones (1943-2015).

When Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex (1949)) was published by French feminist and social theorist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), it was recognized almost at once as a landmark in feminist thought but it was in the twenty-first century re-evaluated when gender came to be re-defined as a spectrum rather than a binary.  Of particular interest was de Beauvoir’s mapping of existentialist thought on to the matter, asserting that being a woman was a construct, something obviously dependent on being born female but the product of processes integral to a society in which women had been defined as inferior to men, a tradition she traces back centuries.  The Second Sex and Germaine Greer’s (b 1939) The Female Eunuch (1970) remain the two most important texts of late twentieth century feminism.  De Beauvoir is one of those writers who led a life which many choose to entangle with what she wrote but The Second Sex is best read by allowing the words to prevail.  

However, the complexity of The Second Sex, infused as it was with strands of French structuralism, meant that it lacked accessibility unless a reader had some background in certain philosophical traditions and it was American feminist Betty Friedan’s (1921–2006) The Feminine Mystique (1963) which, by sheer weight of numbers, proved the greater influence politically, many claiming still it was the work responsible for the emergence of second wave feminism.  The Feminine Mystique is by comparison a slight work and although not of excessive length, is thematically repetitious and can be deconstructed as a long social media post about one woman’s discontent with her life, something to which she (not without justification) links the structure of the patriarchal society in which she exists.  That made it a compelling polemic for the receptive millions of women who read it as their own biographies and ensured its success but it also lent second-wave feminism (which greatly the book at least influenced) a distinctly white, Western, middle-class flavor which asked many of the right questions but ignored (rather than deliberately excluded) most of what lay beyond that fashionable but narrow cultural vista.

Jane Birkin and the mystique of the Birkin Bag

Jane Birkin (with her usual straw bag) and Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) at the premiere of their film Slogan, August 1969.

One well-known example of manufactured mystique is that attached to the Birkin Bag manufactured by the French fashion house Hermès, the origin of which was a chance meeting in 1984 on Paris-London shuttle flight between the English actress Jane Birkin (1946-2023) and Jean-Louis Dumas (1938-2010), then executive chairman Hermès.  Ms Birkin was placing her usual straw bag in the overhead locker when “everything fell out” her belongings scattering over her and Monsieur Dumas.  The inevitable conversation ensued and the pair thrown together by circumstances spent the brief flight designing Ms Birkin’s ideal leather bag for weekend travel, the airline’s sick bags improbably used for the first sketches.  Within months, the Birkin was a Hermès part-number.

Although in her later years Ms Birkin ceased to carry one (it became “just too heavy"), over the last four decades, the Birkin has become a coveted item, much sought by those attracted by its association with pop-culture celebrities and the price-tag which begins somewhere over US$10,000 and can, for a custom unit, extend into six figures.  Although the Birkin range is advertized both in the glossy catalogues and on-line, it’s not a “display item” carried on the shelves of the bricks & mortar stores and it’s long been part of the product’s image that as well as being PoA (price on application), they’re not “for everyone”, Hermès selling them only to someone “suitable”; it’s all part of the mystique.  There has long been speculation about how “real” this mystique may be, the suspicion being that if anyone offers cold hard cash (or its modern equivalent), a store manager would think of their end-of-year bonus and make the sale.  However, in March 2024, two disgruntled (rejected) Birkin customers filed suit in Federal court in California, alleging Hermès was in violation of US antitrust legislation by allowing only those with a “sufficient purchase history” with the company to bag a Birkin.  Essentially, the case hinges on the lure of the right to buy a Birkin being used as an inducement to spend money on shoes, jewellery, scarves and such, the carrot of the bag dangled while the stick is used to force folk to create a “purchase history”.  The suit also noted the company’s sales associates are driving the scheme, thereby gaining benefits for both themselves and Hermès, an important technical point in US antitrust law.

Hermès Birkin 3-en-1: "(1) a canvas clutch topped with the emblematic leather flap, (2) A leather tote with side straps & turnlock and (3) A clutch & tote together recreate the eternal Birkin."  The 3-en-1 is one of many current designs in the range.

Interestingly, it was further alleged the floor staff don’t earn commissions on Birkin bag sales and are instructed to use the handbags only as a device “…to coerce consumers to purchase ancillary products” while only “…those consumers who are deemed worthy of purchasing a Birkin handbag will be shown a Birkin handbag” in a private viewing room.”  Any civilian (ie a non-celebrity or not someone identified as rich) walking into the store and asking to see a Birkin is told they’re “out of stock”.  The lawsuit requested class-action status for thousands of US consumers who bought Hermès goods or were asked to buy them as a prerequisite for buying a Birkin and sought unspecified monetary damages and a court order banning Hermès’s allegedly anti-competitive practices.

A certain, brutish mystique: 1974 Holden Torana L34.

Restrictions on a right to purchase are not unusual.  Ferrari have specified that some of their low-volume models are available only to previous customers and that has sometimes demanded the prior purchase of more than one of the Italian machines.  Whether apocryphal or not, the story is that on more than one occasion, upon being informed of the clause, the buyer would at random pick a Ferrari from the showroom stock and buy it, just to qualify.  Somewhat down the food chain, in 1974 when quietly Holden in Australia introduced their L34 option (a homologation package to ensure certain parts could be used in racing) for the Torana SL/R 5000, although the thing could be registered for road use, it was specified it could be bought only by holders of a certain level of competition licence issued by CAMS (Confederation of Australian Motor Sport).  That policy was a pre-emptive strike to ensure there would be no repetition of the moral panic stirred up two years earlier by the tabloid press which claimed the three local manufacturers were selling “160 mph (257 km/h) supercars” to the public, summoning the fear of the usual suspects (males aged 17-25) unleashing these lethal weapons on public roads.  As was often the case in moral panics, the tabloids were being economical with the truth but their campaign spooked the politicians and the manufacturers, the new generation of high-performance machinery swiftly cancelled.  Ironically, when tested, it transpired the L34 package was about durability rather than power or speed and was actually a little slower than a standard SL/R 5000 but the exotic terms & conditions (T&Cs) certainly gained it some mystique.

The Mean Girls (2004) crew on DeviantArt by SBBeauregarde in cosplay mode: Marvel Comics' Mystique.

The Mystique de la Merde 

The word mystique even has a place in what must be one of the darker corners of literary theory.  The term Mystique de la Merde dates from September 1956 when an article by Robert Elliot Fitch (1902-1986) was published in the New Republic.  Fitch was a Congregationalist minister who graduated successively from Yale (1923), the Union Theological Seminary (1926) and Columbia (1929), later becoming a professor of Christian ethics and dean of Berkeley's Pacific School of Religion but he was interested also in literary theory, often as a device by which he could explore the decline in Western society associated with God’s withdrawal from the place.  Fitch’s Mystique de la Merde wasn’t literally “the mystique of shit” but a description of what he detected in literature (and therefore life in general) as “a preoccupation with the seamier, muddier, bloodier aspects of life, as well as, excessively, with sex and money.”  Befitting the decline of civilization, Mystique de la Merde was a deliberately more vulgar version of Nostalgie de la boue (nostalgia for mud), a phrase coined in 1855 by French dramatist Émile Augier (1820–1889) meaning “an attraction for low-life culture, experience, and degradation (in individuals, institutions & culture).”

In his New Republic piece, Fitch started as he intended to continue: "…perhaps we should take note of a brand of piety which may best be characterized as the mystique de la merde. This might be rendered in English as the deification of dirt, or the apotheosis of ordure, or just plain mud mysticism.  At any rate it provides a label for a sectarian cult which appears to have attracted some of the best talent in contemporary literature."  He nominated Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) as a founding father of the cult (he must have been tempted to call him the “high priest”) in whose writing he identified a surfeit of “…fertility, money, blood and iron."  One sex was stirred into that mix (as Hemmingway did), one has, as Fitch noted: all “…the basic ingredients of ultimate reality" as seen by the merde mystics.

Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, 1952.  F Scott Fitzgerald's (1896–1940) wife Zelda (1900–1948) described Hemmingway's novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) as "Bull fighting, bull slinging, and bullshit".  Had she lived, she may have found "Mystique de la Merde" a needless gloss.

Writing in the milieu of the beat generation writers, Fitch observed that in handling what clearly was a literary phenomenon, the critic was at some disadvantage because while writers could function on the “four letter [word] level”, “…the critic must stick to three-syllable words.”  He concluded, presumably not without regret, that: “When we have become honest, we discover that the reigning God is only a devil in disguise" and the real reason for this is that God “…has made us unhappy.”  He cites Mrs Evans in Eugene O'Neill’s (1888–1953) soliloquy heavy Strange Interlude (1928) who affirms that the only good thing is being happy: “I used to be a great one for worrying about what's God and what's devil, but I got richly over it… being punished for no sin but loving much.”  One suspects Fitch might have written a critique of the early twenty-first century with some relish.