Milieu

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

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

(2) A group of people with a common point of view; a social class or group.

(3) In psychotherapy, as "milieu therapy" a controversial form of community-based psychotherapy in which patients are encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and others within the unit, based upon a hierarchy of collective punishments.

(4) In linguistics & human communications, as "milieu control", tactics that control environment and human communication through the use of peer pressure and group language.

1795-1805: From the twelfth century French milieu (physical or social environment; group of people with a common point of view (literally “middle place”)), from the Middle French milieu, meilleu, & mileu, from the Old French milliu, meillieu & mileu (middle, medium, mean),  from the Latin medius, formed under the influence of the primitive Indo-European root medhyo (middle) + lieu (place), thus understood as the Latin medius (half; middle) + locus (place, spot; specific location) and the French construct mi- (mid) +‎ lieu (place) mirrors that.  English speakers have used milieu for the environment or setting of something since the early-1800s but other "lieu" descendants are later including lieu itself and lieutenant, in use since the fourteenth century.  By the mid-nineteenth century milieu was in use in English in the sense of “surroundings, medium, environment: and had become a fashionable word among scholars and writers.  A micromilieu is a subset of a milieu.  Milieu is a noun; the noun plural is milieux or milieus.

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.  The US sociologist Charles Wright Mills (1916–1962; professor of sociology at Columbia University 1946-1962) 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".

Mills' best known work was the much criticized but also influential The Power Elite (1956), a work much focused on the construct of the milieu which is the repository of power in the modern capitalist West.  Mills took a structuralist approach and explored the clusters of elites and how their relationships and interactions works to enable them to exert (whether overtly or organically) an essentially dictatorial control over US society and its economy.  Mills, while acknowledging some overlap between the groups, identified six clusters of elites: (1) those who ran the large corporations, (2) those who owned the corporations, (3) popular culture celebrities including the news media, (4) the upper-strata of wealth-owning families, (5) the military establishment (centred on the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff) and (6), the upper echelons of government (the executives, the legislatures the judges, the senior bureaucracy and the duopoly of the two established political parties.  The overlaps he noted did not in any way diminish the value of his description, instead illustrating its operation.  Had he lived, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) probably wouldn't much have differed from Mills but in his era he was more concerned with an individual's personal formation and the relationship of that to the enveloping milieu in which they existed.  He described the "big" structure as the milieu social, asserting it contained internalized expectations and representations of social forces & 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.

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.

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).

Vickers Wellingtons (B-series, Mark 1) during production, the geodesic structure visible, Brooklands, England, 1939.

There are obvious visual similarities between the classic superleggera method and the geodesic structure used in airframes and some buildings, most famously the “geodesic dome”.  The imperatives of both were strength both aim to create strong and lightweight structures, but they differ in their specific design and application.  As used in airframes, the geodesic structure consisted of a network of intersecting diagonal braces, creating a lattice framework which distributed loads as evenly as possible while providing a high strength-to-weight ratio.  This was of great significance in military airplanes used in combat because it enhanced their ability better to withstand damage better, the stresses distributed across the structure rather than being restricted to a limited area which could create a point-of-failure.  The geodesic framework was based on geometric principles which had been developed over centuries and typically employed hexagons & triangles to render a structure which was both rigid & light.  Superleggera construction differed in that it involves the creation of a lightweight tubular frame, covered with aluminum body panels of a thinness which wouldn’t have been possible with conventional engineering.  The attraction of the superleggera technique was the (relatively) minimalistic framework supported the skin, optimizing weight reduction without compromising strength.  So, structurally, the difference was the geodesic design used a network of intersecting braces to form a lattice, while the superleggera construction used a tubular frame covered with panels.

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia (pronounced mes-uh-puh-tey-mee-uh)

An ancient region of West Asia between the lower and middle reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; the site of several ancient civilizations including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites and Assyrians.

Pre AD: From the Classical Latin Mesopotamia, from the Koine Greek Μεσοποταμία (Mesopotamía), a feminine substantive form of the adjective μεσοποτάμιος (mesopotámios) (between rivers), from the Ancient Greek μέσος (mésos) (between) + ποτᾰμός (potamós) (river) + -ιος (-ios), so called because Mesopotamia is located between the Tigris & Euphrates Rivers.  It was also used as a translation of the Biblical Hebrew נַהֲרַיִם‎ (naharáyim), the dual form of נָהָר‎ (nahár) (river).  The Arabic forms were بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن‎‎ (Bilād ar-Rāfidayn) or بَيْن ٱلنَّهْرَيْن‎ (Bayn an-Nahrayn), the Persian was میان‌رودان‎ (miyân rudân), and the Syriac ܒܝܬ ܢܗܪܝܢ‎ (Beth Nahrain) (land of rivers) also come from the ancient Greek root words mesos and potamos, translating to “land between rivers”.  It was used throughout the Greek Septuagint (circa 250 BC) to translate the Hebrew and Aramaic equivalent Naharaim but an even earlier Greek usage is evident from The Anabasis of Alexander, written in the late second century AD, but specifically referring to sources from the time of Alexander the Great.  In the Xenophon’s (circa 430 BC-354 BC) Anabasis (circa 370 BC), Mesopotamia was used to designate the land east of the Euphrates in north Syria.

The Aramaic term biritum (or birit narim) corresponded to a similar geographical concept but Mesopotamia later came generally to be applied to all the lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris, thereby incorporating not only parts of Syria but also almost all of Iraq and southeastern Turkey, the neighboring steppes to the west of the Euphrates and the western part of the Zagros Mountains also often included.  A further distinction is usually made between Northern or Upper Mesopotamia and Southern or Lower Mesopotamia.  Upper Mesopotamia, also known as the Jazira, is the area between the Euphrates and the Tigris from their sources down to Baghdad. Lower Mesopotamia is the area from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf and includes Kuwait and parts of western Iran.  In modern academic use, Mesopotamia often also has a chronological connotation, used to designate the area until the Muslim conquests, with names like Syria, Jazira, and Iraq being used to describe the region after that date although some revisionist critics argue these later euphemisms are Eurocentric terms attributed to the region in the milieu of the nineteenth century colonial and other Western encroachments.

The Mandate for Mesopotamia

The Mandate for Mesopotamia (الانتداب البريطاني على العراق‎ in the Arabic) was a proposed League of Nations mandate to cover Ottoman Iraq (Mesopotamia); it would have been entrusted to the British but was superseded by the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, an agreement with some similarities to the proposed mandate.  The proposed mandate was not formalised and although in accordance with the Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916; negotiated between English politician Colonel Sir Mark Sykes (1879–1919) & French Diplomat François Georges-Picot (1870–1951), was never documented or defined beyond a draft paper prepared by the UK's Colonial Office (and an exhaustive publication of those would run to several volumes).

The proposed Mandate for Mesopotamia (a 1920 map from the archives of the UK's Colonial Office).

London’s plans included the annexation of Mesopotamia to India "as a colony of the Indians” and of course included the typically cynical British colonial fix: support for the minorities: the Jewish community in Baghdad, the notables in Baghdad and Basar, the rich landowning Arabs and Jews, and the Shaikhs of sedentary tribes.  The British Empire might have been theft on history's grandest scale achieved by the splutter of musketry, but along the way, by means of mutual back-scratching, some others did OK and as an afterthought, Mosul was bolted on to the British sphere of influence, the spoils of a deal between French prime minister Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929; French prime minister 1906-1909 & 1917-1920) and his British counterpart, David Lloyd George (1863–1945; UK prime-minister 1916-1922).  The mandate was never established as unrest overtook Iraqi so the Kingdom of Iraq under British Administration, or Mandatory Iraq (الانتداب البريطاني على العراق‎) (al-Intidāb al-Brīṭānī ‘Alá al-‘Irāq) was instead created, pursuant to the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty (1922), full independence granted in 1932.  The sweep of territories from Rangoon to the Rock of Gibraltar continue to reverberate from the lines the colonial powers drew on maps.

Zettai ryouiki

Zettai ryouiki (pronounced Zah-thai-rye-ouk-i)

(1) In an anime game (dating from 1995), an asset obtainable which playing which afforded the player something like the “invulnerability” or “unlimited damage” concepts familiar in gaming.

(2) As pop culture slang in women’s fashion (dating from 2014), the area of visible bare skin above the socks (classically the above-the-knee variety) but below the hemline of a mini-skirt, shorts or top.

1995: From the Japanese 絶対領域 (zettai ryōiki) (literally “absolute territory” and used variously in anime gaming (and the surrounding cultural milieu) and pop-culture fashion).  The form of Romanization most common in the West is zettai ryouiki, the alternative spelling zettai ryōiki (ぜったいりょういき).  Zettai ryouiki is a noun.

Sock heights in Japan can all be used with the zettai ryouiki look although the classists insist the genre is restricted to those in over-knee & thigh-high socks.

A often heard phrase in English ie “the (French / Germans / Jews / Koreans etc) have a word for everything”.  It’s not literally true and given the huge size of the English vocabulary it’s probably more true of English than any other.  Nobody is quite sure just how many words there are in English and given the frequency with which words are created and fall from use, there can only ever be estimates.  The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says there are between 170-200,000 words currently in use but that estimate doesn’t include the most specialized technical and scientific terms or words from regional dialects and other specialized fields.  English of course steals (the polite term among lexicographers is “borrowed”) much from other tongues and were all these and the technical terms and their variants to be included in the count, some have suggested the total might approach a million.  What “the x have a word for everything” implies is a sense of surprise that anyone has a word for a thing or concept which seems variously funny, bizarre or unnecessary.

Zettai ryouiki in the anime tradition.

The term zettai ryouiki began in anime gaming in 1995 with the sense “holy space into which no other can intrude”, much along the same lines as “invulnerability” or “unlimited damage” in other games.  It was obvious transferrable beyond gaming sub-culture and among Japanese youth, entered slang in the context of “one’s own personal space” which others shouldn’t transgress.  Around 2013, the phrase was appropriated to describe the area of visible bare skin above the socks (classically above-the-knee socks) but below the hemline of a miniskirt, shorts or top.  It isn’t certain but the use seems to have been adopted after an advertising agency organized a campaign involving young women, for various commercial purposes, applying temporary tattoos high on their thighs, suggesting they pair the look with dark socks or stockings, the top of the socks and the hem of their mini skirts framing the message.  As a visual device, the intent was to focus on the flesh (and thus the logo) and this the fashionistas replicated although they wanted eyeballs only on their skin.  Within months, the shop Zettai Ryōiki opened in Akihabara, Tokyo, dedicated to long socks and tights.

Zettai ryōiki: Lindsay Lohan exploring the possibilities.  

The original use of zettai ryōiki described only the pairing of a miniskirt with over-knee or thigh-high socks which meant the visible skin area, though not dimensionally specific, existed within narrow parameters.  Conceptually however, the idea eventually encompassed all styles which featured an expanse of skin between the top of the sock and the hem of whatever was worn above although the purists continue to decry the use of shorter socks.  Helpfully, the most uncompromising of the sub-culture provided a mathematical formula in the form of a coefficient which was calculated using (1) the length of the miniskirt, (2) the visible skin and (3) the length of the sock which sits above the knee.  Thus not height-dependent, known as the “golden ratio”, a tolerance of +/- 25% was allowed which permitted slight variations.

The achingly lovely Brigitte Bardot (1934-2025) liked the zettai ryouiki look although she achieved it usually with high leather boots rather than socks.  She appears here with 1969 Chevrolet Corvette (left), 1967 Lancia Flavia Convertible (centre) and circa 1968 Citroën 2CV.

Unlike many film stars who were drawn to fast or luxurious cars, Bardot seemed usually to prefer smaller machines (although she did for some years own a Rolls-Royce).  Her 1954 Simca 9 Cabriolet was a gift from the manufacturer which sounds generous but it was not a regular model (it was either a prototype for a never-produced cabriolet or a one-off created especially for her (both accounts appearing) and thus couldn’t be sold; in exchange, for several years she undertook promotional activities on their behalf.  Based on the number of photographs which exist, she drove it happily for half a decade before replacing it with a 1959 Renault Floride cabriolet (sold in some markets as the Caravelle).  Her Simca’s 1221 cm³ (75 cubic inch) engine had produced a modest 50 horsepower (HP) but the Renault’s 845 cm³ (52 cubic inch) unit was rated at a mere 37 so clearly she put a premium on style over speed.

Corvette Deluxe Wheelcovers (P01 (1968, left) and P02 (1969, right).

The Corvette was fitted with the “Deluxe Wheelcovers” (Starburst Turbines) available between 1968-1973.  The 1968 units (P01) were unique in having feature lines pointing directly to the cap's centre whereas the ones (P02) subsequently used until the 1974 season had a distinct starburst in the centre cap and that's indicative of the difficulties which can present when attempting a restoration of a 1968 Corvette, a model with an unusually large number of “one year only” components.  Even in 1968 some publications thought the Deluxe Wheelcovers a curious addition to the Corvette's option list and the scepticism wasn’t merely aesthetic, the wheelcovers weighing a hefty 8 lb-odd (3½ KG) and needing to be balanced at the factory prior to fitting (the lead weights attached internally).  For a machine Chevrolet was still marketing as “America’s only sports car), adding weight which conspicuously was purely decorative was thought “mixed messaging”.  Of course many who purchased Corvettes bought them as something purely decorative and there were enough of them to keep option P01/P02 on the lists for six seasons and the fitment rate was a reasonable 17.6%, 28,850 of the 163,913 Corvettes built in those years so equipped although it’s certain many subsequently were replaced with the more popular Rally Wheels which better suit the machine’s character.  However, in the twenty-first century, original Deluxe Wheel Covers emerged as a tradable commodity because those wishing to satisfy the NCRS’s (National Corvette Restorers Society) clipboard-carrying originality police needed sets.  1968 sets in perfect condition have been advertised for as much as US$1100.00, a reasonable increase from the US$57.95 Chevrolet that year charged for four.   With the withdrawal of the P02 option for 1974, never again would wheelcovers be offered for the Corvette.

Brigitte Bardot posing with her 1954 Simca Type 9 Weekend Cabriolet at the family home, Louveciennes, France, 1955.

Simca described the Bardot cabriolet as the “Aronde Weekend”.  The Aronde was the car on which Simca’s post-war success was based and although the avian name (in French, literally “Swallow”) might hint at the songbird’s elegance in flight, the machine gained its reputation from robustness and practicality although the utilitarian styling was certainly modern and nicely balanced.  Founded in 1934, Simca (Societe Industrielle de Mecanique et Carrosserie Automobile) for more than a decade produced, under licence, slightly modified Fiats but in 1951 the Aronde debuted with demand immediately exceeding supply; continually revised, it remained in production until 1964.  In the way things were then done, the Aronde, as well as the basic four-door sedan, appeared in an array of body styles including two-door station wagons (the Australians producing a four-door variant), vans, pick-ups (utes), coupés (some of them the then fashionable hardtops) and a cabriolet. The cabriolet however didn’t appear until 1957 after the Aronde had been revised to make the structure sufficiently rigid to support the convertible coachwork without needing the extensive modifications which would have rendered series production unviable.  Brigitte Bardot’s cabriolet, based on the original “9 Aronde” was thus a genuine one-off, the aluminum and steel body hand made by the coachbuilder Facel (soon to become famous for the memorable Facel Vegas) and, appropriately, carries serial number 001.  It still exists and is on permanent display at the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.  Lane specializes in European cars (with a commendable emphasis on the rare, strange and truly bizarre) and, like most of its exhibits, the Simca remains in sound working order; it is, in the jargon of the collector trade, “a survivor”, being wholly original and never having been restored.  After some six years in her hands, the car was passed (either sold or gifted, both tales appear) to her friend and neighbour, the French sculptor César Baldaccini (1921–1998).

Dauphine (César Baldaccini’s first Compression plate (Flat compression) piece in his Compression d'Automobile (Compressed cars) series) was literally a Renault Dauphine (1956-1967) “turned into art” using a hydraulic press; it was first shown in Milan in 1970.

The installation’s other pieces are Compressions cubiques (Cubed compressions), made from the salvaged wrecks of cars of various makes (Simca, Renault, Fiat etc) in what are presumably “designer colors”, the artist’s thing being depictions of shapes (including the human form, in whole or in part) in materials like scrap metal and plastics.  The symbolism was apparently something about the movement’s usual suspects (consumerism, alienation and the wastefulness of capitalist mass-production).  Baldaccini was leading light in the Nouveau Réalisme (“new wave of realism) movement (post-war Europe was a place of political and artistic “movements”) and he’s now best remembered for his many “compression” pieces, most of which were cars which had emerged from the crusher.  It had been the sight of a hydraulic crushing machine at a scrap yard which had inspired the artist and the pieces became his signature, rather as “wrapping” large structures was for Christo (Christo Javacheff (1935–2020)).  The pair encapsulated modern art: Christo wrapped a building and called it “art”, while Baldaccini took a crushed car, put it in a gallery and called it “art”.  Prior to some point in the twentieth century, such antics would have been implausible but after things moved from the critical relationship being between artist and audiences to that between artist and critics, just about anything became possible, thus all those post-war “movements”.

BB & BB:  Ferrari 365 GT4 BB (left) on display at the 1971 Turin Motor Show and Brigitte Bardot, supine, with classic (socks) zettai ryouiki, 1968 (right).

Appearing also in Formula One and sports car racing, between 1973-1996 Ferrari used a flat-12 in a number of road cars.  Pedants insist the engines, rather than being "boxers", were really 180^o V12s ("flattened V12" in the engineer's slang) because of a definitional distinction related to the attachment and movement of internal components; the external shape is essentially identical but the factory was in general a bit loose with the nomenclature on which purists like to insist.  In the UK, Coventry Climax were even more ambitious in developing a flat-16 for the new 3.0 litre (183 cubic inch) limit in Formula One for 1966: it used two 1.5 litre (92 cubic inch) "flattened V8s" joined together but the problems proved insurmountable and the remarkable powerplant never left the test bench.  The first of the road-going flat-12 Ferraris was the 365 GT4 BB (1973-1984), the “BB” long thought to stand for Berlinetta Boxer but Road & Track in 2018 noted RoadRat's publication of an interview with the BB’s designer, Leonardo Fioravanti (b 1938) who admitted it was named after Brigitte Bardot simply because the staff in Ferrari's design office were as besotted with the hauntingly beautiful Mademoiselle as engineers (not all of them men) everywhere.  She was at the time the world's most famous sex symbol and in the pre-TokTok era, that was quite something; "Berlinetta Boxer" was just the factory's cover story (later confirmed on the Ferrari website) and undeniably there's some similarity in the pleasing lines of the two.  Until then "Berlinetta Boxer" was the orthodoxy although there must have been enough suspicion about for someone to speculate the origin might be bialbero, (literally "twin shaft"), a clipping of bialbero a camme in testa (double overhead camshaft (DOHC)) which was from the slang of Italian mechanics.

Kawai Maid Café & Bar Akiba Zettai Ryoiki, 3-1-1 Sotokanda 1F Obayashi Bldg., Chiyoda 101-0021 Tokyo Prefecture (IRL (in real life) left) and a (stretched) depiction of them as they might appear when created as robots (digitally altered image, right).

Japanese futurists predict that when robotics are sufficiently advanced, among the first humanoid bots in Tokyo's bars and cafés will be those in the style of the zettai ryoiki girls, adding they'll be dimensionally modeled on the basis of anime, not even the more slender female human frames.  The artistic motif will thus be mannerism rather than realism so, the flesh & blood waitresses (left) will be "the inspiration" but their AI (artificial intelligence) controlled robotic replacements will be closer in appearance to those in the image to the right.  The mechanical engineering will be challenging to implement but building robotic café waitresses may be one of the simpler forms of human emulation because (1) the surface on which they walk is flat and predictable, (2) they will function in a climatically controlled environment (consistent temperature & humidity, still atmosphere etc) and (3) the expected range of movement is limited.  As recently as five years ago, another advantage was thought to be the nature of the job meant the need for the robots to use a quite limited vocabulary with a defined syntactical range but with the extraordinary advances in AI making them able to emulate conversational language with (almost) all its nuances, that aspect is deemed solved.

Fluffies, Tokyo, Japan, April 2024.

Zettai Ryouiki definitely has attained cultural respectability but opinion remains divided on solid fluffy leg warmers (fluffies).  Presumably the (hopefully) final version of the leg-warmers of the 1980s (the decade which brought us mass-market shoulder pads), few predicted the evolutionary step of "added flufiness" but once colors, stripes and spots had been exhausted, there really was nowhere else to go.  Fluffies really did show up on the catwalks but just about everything does and there seemed little to suggest the designers toyed with them for anything other than "shock value" (something these days hard to achieve) but they did reach the high street.  Paradoxically, because most were made with synthetic fibres, they didn't provide the warmth of the usually woolen originals but fashion and function often don't overlap.  Japanese schoolgirls have long been the trend-setters of the nation's fashions and they went through a phase of pairing the zettai ryouiki aesthetic with fluffies.  So influential are the young ladies that this roaming pack, although they've picked up the look, are not real schoolgirls.  So, beware of imitations.

Occidental & Oriental

Occidental (pronounced ok-si-den-tl)

(1) Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Occident or its natives and inhabitants (usually initial capital letter).

(2) A literary or formal word for Western.

(3) A native or inhabitant of the Occident (usually initial capital letter).

(4) An artificial language, created by Baltic German mathematician Edgar de Wahl (1867-1948), later renamed Interlingue shortly before the publication of Interlingua (1949) (always initial capital).

1350–1400: A Middle English borrowing from the Old French occidental from the Latin occidentālis (western), the construct being occident- + -ālis.  The Latin occidentalis was from occidēns (west), the present active participle of occidō (I fall down; pass away).  Occidental is a noun & adjective, occidentalism, occident & occidentalist are nouns and occidentally is an adverb; the noun plural is occidentals.

Oriental (pronounced awr-ee-en-tl or ohr‐ee-en-tl)

(1) Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Orient, or East; Eastern (usually initial capital letter).

(2) Of the orient, or the eastern region of the world.

(3) In geography, belonging to a geographical division comprising southern Asia and the Malay Archipelago as far as and including the Philippines, Borneo, and Java (initial capital letter).  (In pre-modern geography, pertaining to the regions east of the Mediterranean, beyond the Roman Empire or the early Christian world).  Oriental is a noun & adjective, orientalism, orient & orientalist are nouns and orientally is an adverb; the noun plural is orientals (often correctly used with initial capital).

(4) In jewelry, designating various gems that are varieties of corundum: Oriental aquamarine; Oriental ruby (usually initial capital letter).

(5) Designating certain natural saltwater pearls found especially in Asia.

(6) Of a pearl or other precious stone: having a superior lustre.

(7) A breed of slender muscular cat with large ears, long legs, and a long tail.

(8) A native or inhabitant of the Orient (usually initial capital letter).

(9) In astronomy and astrology), pertaining to the eastern part of the sky; happening before sunrise.

(10) Designating various types of aromatic tobacco grown in Turkey and the Balkans (post-nineteenth century use).

(11) A lily cultivar of a widely varied group, with strong scent.

(12) In any context, eastern or of the eastern part (obsolete except as a literary or poetic device).

1350–1400: Middle English from the Middle French $ Anglo-Latin oriental from the Latin orientālis (eastern), from oriēns (rising (of the sun)), present active participle of orior (I rise), the construct being orient- (east, the east) –ālis.  The suffix –ālis was added to a noun or numeral to form an adjective of relationship; it was from the primitive Indo-European -li-, which later dissimilated into an early version of –aris, perhaps connected to hzel- (to grow).  The neuter form was –āle.

Edward Said

Controversial even in the post-colonial milieu of the time, Edward Said’s (1935-2003) Orientalism (1979) was a critique of a particular construct of the historic Western treatment of things eastern.  It dealt with not only academic orientalists but also seminal figures of western social science such as Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Max Weber (1864-1920) whose writings emphasized fundamental differences between East and West.  It’s regarded still, by some, as a dangerous book, blamed for the schism in the field of modern Middle Eastern studies which coalesced into the polarized factions of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and its newer rival, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA).  The stylistic patchwork Said adopted perhaps made criticism inevitable.  Within a scholarly framework, the author laid bare his outage at the reductionist objectification of the Western tradition in its treatment of the other, his words construed as political and polemic.

Even the book's covers attracted comment and varied according to the market in which it was sold although, unlike some controversial titles, it was apparently never necessary anywhere to offer it in a plain, brown wrapper. 

Detractors and admirers alike all were aware of the significance of Orientalism and it’s regarded still as “one of the most influential scholarly books published in English in the last half-century”, even by some who documented its flaws.  The book was one of those rare texts in historiography which stirred up a stormy debate in and beyond academia, the idea of authors in the West having a skewed and condescending view towards the East finding a sympathetic audience.  So incendiary was the reaction that not only was the book controversial but so was the nature of the reaction although, despite the claims of some, the pattern of the responses appeared not to align with the ethnicity or religious orientation of the scholars and intellectuals but with their attitude to history and the modern and post-modern philosophical ideas (deconstruction, truth as illusion, intellectual hegemony etc).

In a sense, it was Said himself who created the structure for the criticism which would follow because he defined Orientalism in three ways: (1) the academic profession, (2) the world view and (3) a mode of hegemony.  The first was the most readily understood, an academic Orientalist was anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient, whether they be an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, philologist or literary critic.  That did not imply the world view of Orientalists was monolithic but Said did contend that their views were almost invariably dictated by a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the “the Orient” and “the Occident” (ie between Eastern & Western culture) and this applied also to poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists and economists, their position a direct inheritance from the ideas spread by European imperial administrators, travellers and explorers; whether in simple or elaborate form, the theorists, novelists and poets all worked within the same framework of “difference”.  Finally, Said defined Orientalism by the actual political and colonial relations constructed in “the West” epistemologically, based on the earlier definitions; it was this construct with which the West conducted itself with the Orient.  Perhaps predictably, the academics appeared more upset at what they perceived as Said’s attack on the accuracy of their research and their intellectual impartiality than what was done with what he claim they created, even if unknowingly. 

One concept he introduced was the notion of “the distinction between the latent and manifest orientalism”, the latent being a general unconscious certainty the Orient was the way it has been described by the practitioners while the manifest was the supremacy of American imperialism as practiced since in the post-war years they assumed the hegemony in things east of Suez from the British and French: “The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism”.  The idea of the latent and manifest wasn’t wholly new but was one which later would be picked up and developed in critical race theory (CRT).

An occidental in the orient: Long-time resident Lindsay Lohan creating a photo opportunity with the Dubai Police, thanking them and the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for their ongoing support during the Covid-19 pandemic, Dubai, April 2020.

That the critics found faults in both Said’s historiography and theoretical inconsistencies in his framework clearly pleased them but appeared to do little to affect the impact of Orientalism, something probably at least partly attributable to his deconstruction of the Western filter through which things eastern were viewed being built with the tools provided by some of the cult favourites in late twentieth century Western philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) (representation and the thing-in-itself), Michel Foucault (1926–1984) (discourse, power, knowledge, episteme and truth regimes), Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) (cultural hegemony) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) (deconstruction).  Said was a subtle thinker but to try to synthesize something from applying the thoughts of that lot would of necessity need some intellectual brutishness just to make it fit and it’s not surprising there were those who faulted him for occupying “…theoretical positions which are mutually contradictory”.  Still, if anything the effect of that was stimulative and Orientalism was one of those books which people read and found it confirmed their own views about the West or the West’s critics.  It’s doubtful Orientalism changed many minds and there were flaws which the critics were right to identify but regardless of how ultimately it will be remembered as an academic text, it remains a literary classic.