Parthian

Parthian (pronounced pahr-thee-un)

(1) A native or inhabitant of Parthia.

(2) An Iranian language of ancient and medieval Parthia.

(3) Of or relating to, or characteristic of Parthia, its inhabitants, or their language.

522: (Although use doubtless predates the first recorded use)  It refers to a native or inhabitant of Parthia (ancient kingdom northeast of Persia in western Asia) and was from the Old Persian Parthava (a dialectal variant of the stem Parsa and the source of "Persia" (the plural was Partienes).  In English, Parthian had been used by historians and geographers since the 1520s and the familiar adjectival form "Parthian shot" seems to date from the early nineteenth century but images of the act had existed for two millennia and had since the 1630s been referred to as the "Parthian fight".  William Shakespeare (1564–1616) liked the word: Or, like the Parthian, I shall flying fight (Cymbeline (circa 1610), Act I, Scene VII).  Parthian is a noun & adjective and if used in the sense of “of or relating to the historic Parthia or Parthians” it is with an initial capital; the noun plural is Parthians.

The Parthian shot and the parting shot

Journalists at Murdoch tabloid the New York Post can be relied upon to re-purpose a metaphor.

The Parthian shot was a military tactic, used by mounted cavalry and made famous by the Parthians, an ancient people of the Persian lands (the modern-day Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979).  While in real or feigned retreat on horseback, the Parthian archers would, in full gallop, turn their bodies backward to shoot at the pursuing enemy.  This demanded both fine equestrian skills (a soldier’ hands occupied by his bows & arrows) and great confidence in one's mount, something gained only by time spent between man & beast.  To make the achievement more admirable still, the Parthians used neither stirrups nor spurs, relying solely on pressure from their legs to guide and control their galloping mounts and, with varying degrees of success, the tactic was adopted by many mounted military formations of the era including the Scythians, Huns, Turks, Magyars, and Mongols.  The Parthian Empire existed between 247 BC–224 AD.

As a metaphor, “Parthian shot” describes a barbed insult or some sort of attack delivered while in the act of retreat.  There are aspiring pedants who like to point this out to those using the term “parting shot” in a similar vein and while they’re correct the latter is sometimes being used incorrectly, in many instances they’re right for the wrong reasons.  “Parthian shot” seems first to have appeared in a letter written by an army officer serving under the Raj, Captain Godfrey Mundy (1804-1860), ADC (aide-de-camp) to Field Marshal Stapleton Cotton (later Lord Combermere, 1773–1865; Commander-in-Chief, India 1825-1830) using it while speaking of a successful shot during one of the many hunting expeditions which so contributed to the slaughter of the sub-continent’s wildlife during the colonial era.  That was in 1832 and while there’s evidence of use in succeeding decades, it was after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) published A Study in Scarlet (1886) which included the sentence: “With which Parthian shot he walked away, leaving the two rivals open-mouthed behind him” that the phrase began with some frequency to appear in English.

The battlefield tactic had for some time been known to historians and soldiers before it emerged as a metaphor and it’s thought Captain Mundy was being a little loose in his interpretation, everything suggesting the “Parthian shot” he mentioned was the firing his “Joe Manton” (a shotgun manufactured by the English gunsmith Joseph Manton (1766–1835)) backwards, over his shoulder, a trick with looks impressive in movies but which demands practice to avoid a self-inflicted injury.  Although it’s sometimes suggested “parting shot” was a folk etymology from “Parthian shot”, the former was in use by at least the late 1700s and etymologists can find no documentary evidence, however convincing the linkage may appear and it’s not impossible “parting shot” evolved (possibly even in more than one place) separately and among those who had never heard of the “Parthian shot”.  So, while the two terms are often used interchangeably and in general use “Parthian shot” is now rare, those who wish can achieve nuances of difference: (1) A “Parthian shot” is an attacking comment made while in retreat and (2) A “parting shot” is a “last word” delivered while breaking off from an oral engagement; it does not of necessity imply a retreat.

The Bolton-Paul Defiant (1939-1943)

The Royal Air Force (RAF) tried a variation of the Parthian shot with Bolton-Paul Defiant, a single-engined fighter and Battle of Britain contemporary of the better remembered Spitfire and Hurricane.  Uniquely, the Defiant had no forward-firing armaments, all its firepower being concentrated in four .303 machine guns in a turret behind the pilot.  The theory behind the design dates from the 1930s when the latest multi-engined monoplane bombers were much faster than contemporary single-engined biplane fighters then in service. The RAF considered its new generation of heavily-armed bombers would be able to penetrate enemy airspace and defend themselves without a fighter escort and this of course implied enemy bombers would similarly be able to penetrate British airspace with some degree of impunity.

By 1935, the concept of a turret-armed fighter emerged.  The RAF anticipated having to defend the British Isles against massed formations of unescorted enemy bombers and, in theory, turret-armed fighters would be able approach formations from below or from the side and coordinate their fire.  In design terms, it was a return to what often was done early in the First World War, though that had been technologically deterministic, it being then quite an engineering challenge to produce reliable and safe (in the sense of not damaging the craft's own propeller) forward-firing guns.  Deployed not as intended, but as a fighter used against escorted bombers, the Defiant enjoyed considerable early success, essentially because at attack-range, it appeared to be a Hurricane and the German fighter pilots were of course tempted attack from above and behind, the classic hunter's tactic.  They were course met by the the Defiant's formidable battery.  However, the Luftwaffe learned quickly, unlike the RAF which for too long persisted with their pre-war formations which were neat and precise but also excellent targets.  Soon the vulnerability of the Defiant resulted in losses so heavy its deployment was unsustainable and it was withdrawn from front-line combat.  It did though subsequently proved a useful stop-gap as a night-fighter and provided the RAF with an effective means of combating night bombing until aircraft designed for the purpose entered service.

Trends of Use

Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Whet

Whet (pronounced hwet or wet)

(1) To sharpen (a knife, tool, etc) by grinding or friction.

(2) To make keen or eager; stimulate:

(3) To stimulate one’s curiosity (usually in the phrase “to whet the appetite”)

(4) The act of whetting or a person or device which whets.

(5) Something that makes more keen or intense; an appetizer or aperitif.

(6) A spell of work; a short period of time (US slang, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, such as the phrase “to talk a whet”).

(7) To preen (obsolete).

Pre 900: From the Middle English verb whetten & noun whete, from the Old English verb hwettan (to whet, sharpen (and figuratively "to incite or encourage”) and noun hwǣte, a derivative of hwæt (bold) and related to hvæt (sharp), from the Proto-West Germanic hwattjan, from the Proto-Germanic hwatjan & hwatjaną (to incite, sharpen), from the primitive Indo-European kehid (sharp).  It was cognate with Dutch wetten (“to whet, sharpen”), the German wetzen (“to whet, sharpen”), the Icelandic hvetja (“to whet, encourage, catalyze”) and the dialectal Danish hvæde (“to whet”).  The Proto Germanic hwatjan & hwatjaną which was from the primitive Indo-European root kwed- (to sharpen), source also of the Sanskrit codati (incites (literally "sharpens")), the Old English hwæt (brave, bold) and the Old Saxon hwat (sharp) was the source also of the Old Norse hvetja (to sharpen, encourage), the Middle Low German & Middle Dutch wetten, the Old High German wezzan, the German wetzen (to sharpen) and the Gothic ga-hvatjan (to sharpen, incite).  Whet is a noun and verb, whetted & whetting (used with object) are verbs, whetter a noun and whetted an adjective.  The noun plural is whets and the homophone wet (in accents with the wine-whine merger).

The Modern English words wet and whet are etymologically unrelated but for a number of reasons are sometimes, understandably, confused.  Nor is the whet/wet thing an isolated example and the reason for much confusion lies in the terminology familiar to historians, translators and etymologists: the source of most modern English being conveniently traced back to Ancient Greek and the surprisingly large number of forks of Latin, through the filter of Old and Middle English.  The Greek & Latin is obviously foreign and for most, words can be recognized only by their similarity to what is now familiar but Middle English is (at least substantially) readable to a modern English-speaking audience prepared to guess a little and pick up wherever possible from the context or sentence structure.  Old English (which once was the “Olde English” which better captures the idea) however really is a misnomer and is almost wholly unrecognizable and is better thought of as pre-English and probably only the most structurally oriented etymologists would regard it as a proto-form.  Indeed, many prefer the alternative “Anglo-Saxon” as a description because it was introduced to the British Isles by the Germanic peoples who settled in the mid-fifth century, a timing which meant it was in that language that were written what came to be regarded as the first works of Literature “in English”.

One suspects that were an anthropologist now to discover the old texts as a novel form, it’s unlikely they’d be labeled as any form of “English”, something which may have happened because of a desire (which long persisted in the study of “English” history) to make Englishness as ancient as possible, historians long seduced by their constructions of all that stretched back to the island’s links with the classical age.  Except when treated as aberrations, uncivilized barbarians and pockets of violent backwardness, much of the non-English contribution to the history of life on the British Isles tended until recently to be neglected or devalued by historians and the attitude to language reflects this but that Modern English contains both wet and whet, pronounced the same yet meaning different things hints at the tangle, an additional twist being that some “whets” and distinguished from others by being used “wet”.

In English use, this meshing of sound and overlap of meaning does produce the odd tendency to error.  For example, a Parthian shot (Parthian an Iranian language of the people of ancient and medieval Parthia) is a metaphor used to describe a barbed insult, delivered as the speaker departs, the construction based on a military tactic used by Parthian mounted cavalry.  While in real or feigned retreat on horseback, the archers would turn their bodies back in full gallop to shoot at the pursuing enemy, quite a trick which demanded fine equestrian skills given that the riders’ hands were occupied by his bows and arrows.  It was more admirable still because the Parthian military used neither stirrups nor spurs, riders relying solely on the pressure from their legs to guide and control their galloping beasts.  However, the literal “Parthian shot” was literally also something of a “parting shot” given the way it was delivered and among English speakers is often rendered as “parting shot”, a use so frequently encountered that many dictionaries now accept it as a legitimate alternative form as long as the correct meaning is conveyed: Whichever word is used, the metaphor refers not merely to an effectively made comment, the essence being that it is delivered at the point of departure.

Part in this sense was from the Old French departir, from the Late Latin departiō (to divide), the construct being dē- (away from) +‎ partiō (part, divide).  Interestingly, “part” (in the sense of “piece of something) existed in Old English and is an example that the relationship with the more recent Middle & Modern English is occasionally recognizable.  Part was from the Middle English part, from the Old English part (part) and the Old French part (part), both from the Latin partem, accusative of pars (piece, portion, share, side, party, faction, role, character, lot, fate, task, lesson, part, member), from the primitive Indo-European par- & per- (to sell, exchange).  It displaced the Middle English del & dele (part), from the Old English dǣl (part, distribution).

Lindsay Lohan wetting her whistle during a fishing trip with Hofit Golan (b 1985, Israeli media personality), July 2016.

Whet and wet are subject to the same linguistic clatter.  To “whet one’s appetite” and “wet one’s whistle” can both mean “to imbibe an aperitif” although there are differences of nuance, the former meaning “to sharpen the desire for more” while the latter references the usefulness of alcohol as a social lubricant.  The occasional mistake is thus understandable and those learning English must think such things surely unnecessary but, as a noun, things don’t improve.  The English whet is a word about sharpening things and a whetstone is a literally a piece of stone, most frequently in the shape of a rectangular cuboid (although there are specialized shapes optimized to sharpen different devices with more complex curves) against which the edges of a blade are worked at an acute angle until sharp.  That’s fine but whetstones are often used with a cutting fluid (water or an oil), both to enhance the sharpening and carry away swarf (the tiny fragments of metal lost from a blade).  A whetstone may thus be used wet or dry but fortunately, the term “wet whetstone” has always been avoided and the variations are instead styled water stones (also waterstones) or oil stones (also oilstones).

Japanese Natural Whetstone.

Whetstones may be cut wholly from natural stone or modern composites.  The natural product (an there are cults among the advocates of the various types), is formed usually of some form of quartz, and documented since antiquity are the locations of the quarries which produce the whetstones able to provide a blade with the sharpest edge although recent research seems to indicate there’s little difference in the results it’s possible to achieve but a huge gulf in the efficiency with which one does the job compared with another and it’s thought the ease of operation was as much a factor in historic preferences as the fineness of the edge.  The classical whetstones, being a natural product were subject also to much variation in appearance and the more pleasing or rare have always been prized, some now collector items, bought to be displayed rather than used for their historic purpose.

The synthetic composites are made usually with a type of ceramic such as silicon carbide (carborundum) or aluminum oxide (corundum), held together with a bonded abrasive.  Popular in industry and commerce because they offer a faster cutting action than natural stone, they have the advantage of being able to be fabricated as a double-block, coarse grit on one side, fine on the other, thus enabling the one reversible piece to be used instead of two.  Unlike a natural stone, the consistency of particle size, distribution and density can be almost perfectly replicated throughout and although artisans may still hanker for the look and feel of real stone, it’s admitted the modern synthetics are usually now superior; the ability to integrate nano-sized particles meaning the construction of composites is now almost infinitely variable.

Dalstrong’s summary of sharpening techniques when using their synthetic composite whetstones.

Karen

Karen (pronounced kar-uhn (kahr-ren or kuh-ren for the given name))

(1) A group of people of eastern and southern Burma (Myanmar).

(2) One of these people.

(3) The language of the Karen, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan family.

(4) Of or relating to the Karen people or their language.

(5) A female given name, originally a form of Katherine.

(6) A general purpose pejorative term used to disparage white, middle-class, middle-aged women.

1759: The original spelling was Carian, from the Burmese ka-reng (wild, dirty, low-caste man), a not entirely affectionate local descriptor of the Mongoloid people of Burma.  For the ethnic group, the noun plural is Karens, (especially collectively) or Karen; for all other uses it’s Karens. 

1800s: The feminine proper name entered English from the Danish Karen, a vernacular form of Catherine & Katherine that arose in medieval Denmark.  Rare in the English-speaking world before 1928, it first became popular during the 1940s and was consistently in the top-ten for girls born in the United States between 1951-1968, and was the third most popular girl's name in 1965.  That proved to be peak-Karen and its use rapidly declined to be negligible.  Used in the Danish, Arabic, Dutch, Hebrew, Norwegian, German and English languages, variants (mostly German, Austrian & the Nordic countries) include Caja, Kaja (Danish), Caren, Caryn, Karena, Kaat, Karin, Karyn (and dozens of others), it has since 1945 also been used in Japan, China, Malaya (later Malaysia) and the Philippines.

Karen can also be a family name (surname).  In Armenian, Karen (Կարեն) (kɑˈɾɛn) is a common masculine given name, derived from the Parthian name of the House of Karen (or Caren) which ruled the Tabaristan region, corresponding (approximately) to the provinces of Gilan and Mazandaran.  The House of Karen (Kārēn in the Middle Persian; Kārēn in the Parthian & Persian (کارن‎), Kārin or Kāren, known also as Karen-Pahlav (Kārēn-Pahlaw)) was one of the seven great houses during the rule of the Parthian and Sassanian Empires.  The masculine given name Garen is a western Armenian form of the eastern Armenian Karen.

One spelling used in both Germany and the Nordic countries is Carin.  The Swedish-born Countess Carin von Kantzow (1888-1931) was the first wife of Hermann Göring (1893–1946; leading Nazi 1922-1945, Hitler's designated successor & Reichsmarschall 1940-1945) and the palatial country house (construction of which was paid for by the state) he had built during the 1930s was “Carinhall” in her memory.  Carinhall sat in the grounds of his large hunting estate (another gift from the state) in the Schorfheide Forest, north-east of Berlin and was the site of many events in which he showed off his varied tastes in clothing (including Roman togas and painted toenails) and sybaritic lifestyle.  What went on at Carinhall was the subject of much gossipy humor in political & diplomatic circles and the more austere Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) once suggested to a visitor: “You should visit Göring at Carinhall, a sight worth seeing.”.  He later had a much smaller lodge built after marrying his second wife (Emma “Emmy” Sonnemann (1893–1973)); that he named “Emmyhall”.  In 1945, as the Red Army approached, Göring had Carinhall destroyed with explosives and only a few ruins now remain.

Hitler and Göring at Carinhall. The reaction of more conventional types to Göring’s appearance and behaviour was captured by an entry in the memorable diary of Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903–1944; Italian foreign minister 1936-1944 (and the son-in-law of Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & prime-minister of Italy 1922-1943)).  The occasion was the Reichsmarschall’s visit to Rome early in 1942, seeking Italian reinforcements for the faltering campaign in Russia:

“As usual he is bloated and overbearing.  We had dinner at the Excelsior Hotel, and during the dinner Goering talked of little else but the jewels he owned. In fact, he had some beautiful rings on his fingers.  On the way to the station he wore a great sable coat, something between what automobile drivers wore in 1906 and what a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera.”

Beware of the edgy bob

Karen is a pejorative term used in the English-speaking world to disparage white, middle-class, middle-aged women on the basis of their sense of entitlement and demanding behavior.  It’s thus a particular critique of white privilege and is especially associated with a certain bob cut hairstyle, now known in the industry as the speak to the manager.  The origins are murky and the Karen in its now understood term is really a coalesced form from a number of threads to define characteristics like "entitlement, selfishness, a desire to complain" with stereotypical behavior being demanding to “speak to the manager”, usually about some trivial matter.  A creation of social media, the evolution from its point of critical-mass has (presumably coincidently) run in parallel with COVID-19; in November 2019, Google reported fewer than 20,000 instances of use which, by July 2020 had increased to over eight million.  It has origins in the mid-2010s as a way for people of color, particularly African-Americans, to satirise the class-based and racially charged hostilities and micro-aggressions they often face and in that it was different from the BLM (black lives matter) movement in that it focused not on violence but on instances of casual-racism, always by women perceived to be of a certain age and class.  Earlier instances were tied to specific events captured on the suddenly ubiquitous smartphones, yielding the predictably alliterative Permit Patty, BBQ Becky and Golfcart Gail but, in 2018, the trend distilled into Karen, an apparently quintessentially white name.

Except in Scandinavia, Karens are dying out.

Quite how "Karen" should be classified attracted feminist deconstruction. Although used exclusively in a pejorative manner toward a person of a specific race and gender, the subject, although female, is not one historically associated with discrimination in this context and thus the critical descriptive tools really didn’t exist.  The conclusion seemed to be this was just another way to silence women, denying them a right to speak.  The more radical feminist left, attracted more to intersectionality, suggested it was "sexist, ageist, and classist”, although, despite being deployed only against white women, it couldn’t, as a matter of law in most Western jurisdictions, be thought racist as such although, because the targets of many Karens were depicted as minorities, it did fit into the general rubric of the critique of white privilege.  Use seems to have peaked in 2020 but "a Karen" is still often heard.

Tenterhook

Tenterhook (pronounced ten-ter-hook)

(1) One of the hooks or bent nails that hold cloth stretched on a tenter.

(2) As “on tenterhooks”, in a state of uneasy suspense or painful anxiety.

1470–1480: A compound word tenter + hook.  Tenter (wooden framework for stretching cloth) is from the circa 1300 Middle English tenter and is of uncertain origin but thought probably borrowed from Latin via Old French (although the evolution of the ending is wholly obscure).  The source was the Latin tentorium (tent made of stretched skins) from tentus (stretched), a variant past participle of tendere (to stretch), from the primitive Indo-European root ten- (to stretch).  Hook is pre-900, from the Middle English hoke, from the Old English hōc, from the Proto-Germanic hōkaz (which influenced also the West Frisian & Dutch hoek (hook, angle, corner), the Low German Hook, variant of hakô (hook), the West Frisian heak and the Dutch haak (hook)).  It’s probably ultimately from the primitive Indo-European kog-, keg- & keng- (peg, hook, claw).

Tenterhooks.

The plural form tenterhooks (one of the hooks that holds cloth on a tenter) was noted first in the late fifteenth century but the figurative phrase “on tenterhooks” is from 1748 and its more evocative imagery meant it soon supplanted “to be on tenters” which had been in use since the 1530s.  The phrase “on tenterhooks” came to mean “being in a state of tension, uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense” figuratively stretched like the cloth on the tenter.  Improvements in the design of machines means tenterhooks are no longer widely used in cloth manufacturing, the word tenterhook is now used almost exclusively used in the metaphorical sense.

Those on tenterhooks waiting for new Lindsay Lohan content were glad to learn of the two-film deal with Netflix, Falling for Christmas released in November 2022 while Irish Wish is scheduled for debut in 2023.

The phrase “on tenterhooks” is one of the most misspoken in English, often pronounced as “tenderhooks”.  Only “Parthian shot” suffers more, rendered frequently as “parting shot”, a more understandable mistake given the context.