Portmanteau

Portmanteau (pronounced pawrt-man-toh)

(1) A case or bag to carry clothing in while traveling, made usually from stiff leather, hinged at the back so as to open out into two compartments

(2) A word created by blending two or more existing words.

1580s (for the travelling case (flexible traveling case or bag for clothes and other necessaries)): From the Middle French portemanteau (travelling bag, literally "(it) carries (the) cloak").  The original meaning from the 1540s was “court official who carried a prince's mantle" from porte, (imperative of porter (to carry) + manteau (cloak)).  The correct plural is portmanteaux but in modern English use, portmanteaus (following the conventions for constructing plurals in English) is now more common.  In the nineteenth century, the word was sometimes Englished as portmantle, a use long extinct.  The notion of the portmanteau word (word blending the sound of two different words) was coined by Lewis Carroll (pen-name of Charles L. Dodgson; 1832-1898) in 1871 for the constructions he invented for Alice Through the Looking-Glass such as Jabberwocky, his poem about the fabulous beast the Jabberwock.  Portmanteau in this sense has existed as a noun since 1872.

Vintage Louis Vuitton Portmanteau, typically circa US$50-80,000 depending on condition.

A portmanteau word, a linguistic blend, differs from contractions and compounds.  Contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do + not to make don't, whereas a portmanteau word is joins two or more words that relate to the one contractual theme.  A compound word is merely the joining for words in their original form (eg under + statement) without any truncation of the blended words.  Portmanteau words (eg breakfast & lunch to create brunch) always modifies at least one of the original stems.

Lindsay Lohan's handy moniker Lilo (the construct being Li(ndsay) + Lo(han) and it's used sometimes as LiLo) is a portmanteau word.

The word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in Alice Through the Looking-Glass (1871) where the concept is helpfully explained by Humpty Dumpty.  Less erudite but just as amusing was the creation of refudiate by Sarah Palin when she got confused and conflated refute and repudiate although it’s unclear whether she knew the meaning of either.  Even those created or used by more literate folk are not always accepted.  Irregardless (portmanteau of regardless and irrespective) seems to stir strong feelings of antipathy in pedants who generally won’t accept it even as a non-standard form and insist it’s simply wrong.  Other languages also create blended forms as needed.  The title of Emile Habibi’s 1974 novel was translated from Arabic utashaʔim (pessimist) + mutafaʔil (optimist) into English as The Pessoptimist.  Arabic linguistic traditions however prefer acronyms and compounds which sometimes overlap.  The group known variously as ISIL or ISIS (although they came to prefer "caliphate" or "Islamic State" (IS)) first adopted the name ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām (Islamic State if Iraq and the Levant) which is usually written as Daesh or Da'ish.  IS think this derogatory as it resembles the Arabic words daes (one who tramples underfoot) and dāhis (those who sows discord).  IS threatened to punish those who use Daesh or Da'ish with a public flogging; repeat offenders promised the cutting out of the tongue.

In the manufacture of big words, English is unlikely ever to match the Germans.  Until changes in EU regulations rendered it obsolete, the longest word in the Fourth Reich was rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz (law delegating beef label monitoring).  Currently, the longest word accepted by German dictionaries is kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung (automobile liability insurance), editors rejecting donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenswitwe (widow of a Danube steamboat company captain) because of rarity of use.

Bosnywash

Bosnywash (pronounced baws-nee-wosh, bos-nee-wash or boz-nee-wawsh (varies in the US by locality))

An informal noun describing the densely populated conurbation extending from Boston to Washington, encompassing New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

1971 (1967 for Boswash):  The construct was Bos(ton) + n(ew) y(ork) + wash(ington) and the form was always either Bosnywash or bosnywash, boswash following the same convention.  The constructs come from the age of the typewriter and not only would BosNYWash have been harder to type and read, the use of initial capitals in the elements of portmanteaus, blends or contractions was not a practice which came into wide use in English until the 1980s, under the influence of the IT industry which was searching for points of differentiation.

It’s debatable whether Bosnywash is a portmanteau or a contraction.  A portmanteau word is a blend of two or more words or parts of words, combined to create a new word.  A contraction is a word created by joining two or more words which tend in normal use to appear in sequence.  The stems of words which comprise a contraction are not truncated so on which side one sits in this doubtlessly pointless debate hangs on whether one regards the accepted short forms Bos, NY & Wash as “words” for the technical purpose of construction.  The rules of structural linguistics complicate things further because if a portmanteau is created by using already shortened compounds, they result can also be defined a clipped compound.  Quite what interpretation would apply to Boswash been derived from Bosnywash would thus presumably be less certain still but most regard both as portmanteaus.

BosWash and Bosnywash mean exactly the same thing: a densely populated conurbation extending from Boston in the north to Washington in the south, encompassing New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.  The concept of cities expanding to envelop an entire surrounding land mass to exist as one vast megalopolis was the vision of US systems theorist Herman Kahn (1922–1983) who in 1967 coined the word Boswash for one of his essays speculating about the future.  While the word Boswash was novel, the idea that part of the north-eastern US might develop into the one, contiguous populated area had been discussed by urban geographers for almost a decade and it was just one of several places urban area had The idea of vast and expanding cities had been noted as a demographic phenomenon for centuries but the sudden acceleration of the global population, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century (the cause: (1) the wide deployment of modern Western medical techniques which simultaneously lowered the infant mortality rate & lengthened the typical human lifespan, (2) the installation of sanitation systems which reduced disease, (3) vaccinations against disease and (4) increases in agricultural output (the so-called “green revolution)) focused the attention of economists and urban geographers who, extrapolating historic and contemporary trends, developed the concept of the modern mega-city.  Bosnywash (phonetically, probably a more attractive word) appeared half-a-decade after Boswash in The Bosnywash Megalopolis: A Region of Great Cities (1971) by Leonard Arthur Swatridge (b 1931) and was likely an exercise in legitimization, folk in NYC never likely to take much notice of anything which doesn’t include their city.  There, if it didn't happen in New York, it didn’t happen.

South-east Queensland (Australia) and the trend towards the Gold Coast-Brisbane-Sunshine Coast megalopolis.

The idea has been applied to many areas of high population growth and increasing urbanization (globally, the dominant trend of the last seventy-five years) where cities and towns grow towards each other.  The south-east corner of the Australian state of Queensland is noted as an instance of what was one as transport corridor tended to develop into a megalopolis, stretching from the southern border of the Gold Coast to the northern extremes of the Sunshine Coast.  The word megalopolis was from 1832, the construct being the Ancient Greek megalo- (great), from megas (genitive megalou) +‎ -polis (city).  It was used to describe a big, densely populated urban complex and during Antiquity was an epithet of the great cities (Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria); it was also was the name of a former city in Arcadia.  The rarely used descriptor of an inhabitant was megalopolitan.

Herman Kahn is remembered as a futurist but he built his early career as a systems theorist and, while at the RAND Corporation, was prominent in constructing the theoretical framework on which the US political-military establishment constructed the strategies which dictated the scope and form of the nuclear arsenal and the plans for its use.  Perhaps the highest stakes version ever undertaken of what came to be known as scenario planning under the application of game theory, Khan’s models were among those which, in a reductionist process, led to some awful yet elegant expressions such as “mutually assured destruction (MAD)” which triggered a generation of specialists in the Pentagon and the Kremlin counting missiles as the basis of high Cold War politics.  Kahn was reputedly one of the figures who served as an inspiration for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's (1928-1999) dark satire Dr Strangelove (1964) and, unsurprisingly, Sidney Lumet (1924-2011) noted the character of Professor Groeteschele in his more somber film of nuclear war, Fail Safe (1964).

Bosnywash personified: Lindsay Lohan (with former special friend Samantha Ronson), Estate Nightclub, Boston, January 2009 (left), shopping in New York City, September 2013 (centre) & at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Washington DC, April 2012 (right).

Mizzle & Drizzle

Mizzle (pronounced miz-uhl)

(1) To rain in fine drops; a form of precipitation between mist and drizzle.

(2) In (almost exclusively British) slang, to decamp; to disappear or suddenly leave (now rare).

(3) In (almost exclusively British) slang, to induce a muddled or confused state of mind.

1475–1485: From the late Middle English missellen & missill (to drizzle), cognate with the Dutch dialectal form mizzelen (to drizzle), the Low German miseln & mussel (to mizzle), the Dutch miezelen (to drizzle, rain gently) and akin to the Middle Dutch misel (mist, dew).  The slang use in both senses dates from the mid-eighteenth century.  It’s of obscure origin, possibly a frequentative related to the base of mist or related to the Middle Low German mes (urine), the Middle Dutch mes & mis (urine), both from the Old Saxon mehs (urine), from the Proto-Germanic mihstuz, mihstaz & mihsk- (urine), from mīganą (to urinate), from the primitive Indo-European meigh & omeigh (to urinate).  There’s also some relationship with the English micturate (to urinate), the Old Frisian mese (urine), the Low German miegen (to urinate), the Dutch mijgen (to urinate) and the Danish mige (to urinate).  Mizzle and mizzler are nouns, the verbs (used with or without object) are mizzled & mizzling; mizzly the adjective.

Now often though a portmanteau word (the construct being mi(st) + (dr)izzle) mizzle & drizzle have wholly separate etymologies and, historically, mizzle was a synonym of dizzle.  As verbs the difference between drizzle and mizzle is that drizzle is (ambitransitive) “to rain lightly; to shed slowly in minute drops or particles” while mizzle is “to rain in very fine drops”.  As nouns the difference is that drizzle is light rain while mizzle is misty rain or drizzle, thus the sense in the etymologically wrong portmanteau turns out to be English as it is used: mizzle is precipitation somewhere between mist and drizzle.  What mizzle and drizzle have in common is that unlike fog droplets, both fall to the ground.

The strange use in (mostly) British slang to mean “abscond, scram, flee” is an example of a dialectical form which spread although use has declined to the point where it’s now rare.  The other slang sense (to muddle or confuse) was probably an imperfect echoic, a misreading of past tense/participle of “misled”.  Charles Dickens (1812–1870) liked words which, given how profligate he was in their use, was good.  In Bleak House (1852-1852), a cautionary tale of the woes to be had were one's matters to end up in the list of the Court of Chancery, mentioned to the Lord High Chancellor are Messrs Chizzle, Mizzle, Drizzle and otherwise.

Drizzle (pronounced driz-uhl)

(1) To rain gently and steadily in fine drops; to sprinkle (In meteorology, defined as precipitation consisting of numerous minute droplets of water less than 0.02 inch (0.5 millimeter) in diameter).

(2) To let something fall in fine drops or particles; to sprinkle.

(3) To pour in a fine stream.

1535–1545: From the Old English drēosan (to fall), of obscure origin but may be a formation from dryseling or a dissimilated variant of the Middle English drysning (a falling of dew), from the Old English drysnan (to extinguish), akin to the Old English drēosan (to fall; to decline (cognate to the Modern English droze & drwose)) and cognate with the Old Saxon driosan, the Gothic driusan, the dialectal Swedish drösla and the Norwegian drjōsa.  Drizzle & drizzler are nouns, the verbs (used with or without object) is drizzled & drizzling, drizzly the adjective.  A honey dipper is a tool with a grooved head, used to collect viscous liquids such as honey or syrup so it may be drizzled over toast, cereal or other food.

Honey being drizzled on almond-butter toast.

Shakespeare in act 3, scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet (1597) used the word in the sense familiar in the sixteenth century

When the sun sets the air doth drizzle dew,

But for the sunset of my brother’s son

It rains downright.

How now? A conduit, girl? What, still in tears,

Rain stopped play during the last session on the first day of the pink-ball cricket match in Hobart on 14 January 2021.  The fifth and final test of the 2020-2021 series and the first Ashes test played in Hobart, the curious decision by the umpires deprived the crowd the chance to watch the last thirty-odd overs.  The stoppage was prompted by a brief, light drizzle which nobody except the umpires seem to think could be called rain and the sight of the solitary umbrella opened in the ground being that held by the umpire attracted a few derisive comments.  There was a sudden spike in traffic to the Bureau of Meteorology’s website as people looked at the rain radar seeking some indication of when play might resume but the radar showed almost no cloud and virtually no indication of rain in a 128 km (60 mile) radius.  The next day, the bureau reported the rain gauges at weather stations in the Hobart CBD and airport registered a total of 0.0 mm of rain on that evening.

The laws of cricket actually don’t prohibit the game being played when it’s raining, provided it is not dangerous or unreasonable, Law 3.8 including the clause:  If conditions during a rain stoppage improve and the rain is reduced to drizzle, the umpires must consider if they would have suspended play in the first place under similar conditions. If both on-field umpires agree that the current drizzle would not have caused a stoppage, then play shall resume immediately.

It was certainly unusual and many test matches have resumed in drizzle or mizzle heavier than what was seen that Friday night.  The consensus was the umpires might have been concerned about the effect of a wet outfield on the pink ball, a construction relatively new to cricket which attempts to emulate the behavior of the traditional red ball while remaining easily visible under the artificial lighting used for day-night matches.  It seems the pink ball is more affected by moisture than the traditional red or the white ball used in limited-overs competitions, tending to swell.

Mizzle & Drizzle protection: Lindsay Lohan in New York City, August 2013.

Listicle

Listicle (pronounced lis-ti-kuhl)

A published article (print or on-line) which differs from a simple list in that the entries are augmented with some additional content (text, links or images).

2000–2005: A portmanteau word, a blend of list + (art)icle.  List (in this context) was from the Middle English lī̆st & lī̆ste (band, stripe; hem, selvage; border, edge, rim; list, specification; barriers enclosing area for jousting, etc), from the Old English līste (hem, edge, strip) or the Old French liste & listre (border; band; strip of paper; list) or the Medieval Latin lista, all from the Proto-West Germanic līstā, from the Proto-Germanic līstǭ (band, strip; hem, selvage; border, edge) which may have been from the primitive Indo-European leys- (to trace, track). It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian Lieste (margin, strip, list), the Dutch lijst (picture frame, list), the German Low German Liest (edging, border), the German Leiste (strip, rail, ledge; (heraldry) bar), the Swedish lista (list), the Icelandic lista & listi (list), the Italian lista (list; strip), the Portuguese lista (list), the Spanish lista (list, roll; stripe), the Galician lista (band, strip; list) and the Finnish lista ((informal) list; batten).  Article was from the Middle English article, from the Old French article, from the Latin articulus (a joint, limb, member, part, division, the article in grammar, a point of time), from the Classical Latin artus, from the primitive Indo-European hértus (that which is fit together; juncture, ordering), from the root huer- (to join, fit (together)).  The adoption to describe “pieces of written text” was based on the “joining” function in grammar.  Listicle is a noun; the noun plural is listicles.

That a listicle can be all or substantially made up of text, links or images in any mix is a familiar concept but if the piece is either exclusively or substantially focused on charts (usually in the statistical rather than admiralty sense although an "informational graphic" counts as a “chart” for this purpose), then it can be referred to with the companion term "charticle" (plural charticles), another portmanteau word, a blend of chart + (art)icle.  Charticle is fun but seems an unnecessary word and a needless layer of differentiation; like many modern coinings, it ends up in lists (which can sometimes be listicles) of unusual or rare words with little evidence of actual use; were it not for the on-line world, charticle would likely have died a quick death.

Listicle is really less a description than a slur, an encapsulated critique of “pseudo-journalism”, the accusation being that the structure of a piece is provided by a “paint-by-numbers” approach and is fundamentally a PowerPoint slide (sometimes even the bullet points are included) with annotations (usually images or text) added as desired.  Sometimes, the criticism implies the whole thing is a “cut & paste” job.  It can be a valid objection if the format is inappropriate for the content but not every article needs to be anything like one of Susan Sontag’s (1933—2004) essays and a well-written listicle can present information in a concise and easily digestible format; indeed in many longer form pieces (including academic papers), summary-type appendices (abstracts or executive summaries) often are in the form of a listicle and thire brevity is much appreciated.

Illustrative examples of the three basic types include (1) Harper’s Bazaar's “Eleven of Lindsay Lohan’s Best Style Moments” (just a summary paragraph and captioned photographs), (2) People’s “Lindsay Lohan’s Most Iconic Early Looks” (a summary paragraph and annotated photographs) and (3) The Guardian’s “Ranking of US Presidents” (text only and a listicle disguised as an article, the content of which was so predictable it would have delighted their devoted readers).

So the form of the listicle can be useful.  The objection to them seems to focus on (1) the (allegedly increasingly accelerating) proliferation of the things, (2) that many are “fake journalism” in that they are merely a “padded list”, a PowerPoint slide disguised as prose and (3) many are little more than click-bait used but build the nominal engagement count and drive website traffic.  In some cases, the more strident criticism is of journalism which at first glance seems to be an “article” (in the accepted sense of the word) but if subject to structural analysis (a popular thing to do in media studies classes), it can be reduced to a listicle, even to the point of it being obvious where the bullet points should appear.  This is good sport as a form of attack on newspaper columnists who espouse the “wrong” politics but in cases where word limits are imposed, it’s likely the format is used for utilitarian reasons: it’s just an efficient way to order and impart information.

It’s no longer necessary to read Machiavelli’s (Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, 1469–1527) Il Principe (The Prince; (1532)) because everything is now explained in in listicles.  There are free quotes.

The occasionally discussed matter of whether listicles are “real” journalism is something subjective and really depends on how one defines journalism (another significantly pointless exercise in this context, however vital it may be in a court of law).  The listicle is just another format and a well-written, information-dense listicle will contain journalistic elements, such as research and analysis and can be a more valuable thing than a piece, however conventional which is poorly-written, repetitive, or says very little.  All content should be judged on its merit rather than dismissed because of the form in which it's presented and it’s hard to escape the feeling they arouse such antagonism because they’re so often associated with entertainment and other parts of pop-culture.  There’s also the way listicles disproportionately populate the blogosphere and this one is probably as illustrative as any of the cynical way the format can be used for content creation.

Burkini

Burkini (pronounced boo-r-kee-nee or burr-kee-nee)

A type of bathing suit for women covering the torso, limbs, and head, leaving exposed the face, hands and feet.

2004: The construct is a portmanteau of bur(k)a + (bi)kini (by extraction from bikini, in interpreting the "bi" as a prefix "bi-), thereby creating the new suffix "bur-").  Burka (other spellings including burkha & burqa) is from 1836, from the Hindi बुरक़ा (burqā) (برقع‎ (burqā) in Urdu), from the Persian برقع‎ (borqa), from the Arabic بُرْقُع‎ (burqu).  The -kini is an adoption of the –kini in the Bikini, first noted in 1946.  Although known as the Eschscholtz Atoll until 1946, the modern English name is derived from the German colonial name Bikini, adopted while part of German New Guinea and was a transliteration from the Marshallese Pikinni (pʲi͡ɯɡɯ͡inʲːi), a construct of Pik (surface) + ni (coconut or surface of coconuts).

Lindsay Lohan in burkini, Thailand, April 2017.  Note the exposed feet which would have attracted the disapprobation of Afghan Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

Although most associated with those who adopt the style for religious reasons, it works functionally for anyone seeking to maximise skin protection.  The suits are made of SPF50+ fabric, generally using a finely-knit polyester swimsuit fabric rather than the heavier neoprene used for wetsuits.  The design is intended to respect Islamic traditions of modest dress but its acceptability is debated; few Muftis have seemed impressed and no Ayatollah is known to have commented although it’s known influential Hanafi scholars at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, reject full-body swimsuits as allowable wear in mixed company.  Appeal is however cross-cultural; burkinis proving popular in Israel, among both Jewish-Haredi and Muslims and there is the functional appeal, especially for those with fair skin, of protection from harsh sun.  In France, where there had been controversy since 2009, in 2016 a number of French municipalities banned the burkini, citing concerns about the repression of women.

The name is proprietary and trademarked name (as Burkini and Burqini) owned by its inventor, Aheda Zanetti (b 1967), a Lebanese-born Australian fashion designer, so technically should be capitalised in that context but lowercase is correct if used in the generic sense to describe similar swimwear.  The Burkini was released in 2004, following Zanetti’s earlier creation, the Hijood (a portmanteau of hijab and hood) designed permit participation in sports by Muslim girls whose practice of observance didn’t allow the clothing traditionally used in the West.

Wonder

Wonder (pronounced wuhn-der)

(1) To think or speculate curiously.

(2) To be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe; marvel (often followed by at).

(3) Something strange and surprising; a cause of surprise, astonishment, or admiration.

(4) The emotion excited by what is strange and surprising; a feeling of surprised or puzzled interest, sometimes tinged with admiration.

(5) A miraculous deed or event; remarkable phenomenon.

(6) As a modifier, exciting wonder by virtue of spectacular results achieved, feats performed etc; wonder drug; wonder horse; seven wonders of the ancient world et al.

Pre 900: A Middle English nouns wonder & wunder from the Old English wundor (marvelous thing, miracle, object of astonishment), from the Proto-Germanic wundrą.  It was cognate with the Scots wunner (wonder), the West Frisian wonder & wûnder (wonder, miracle), the Dutch wonder (miracle, wonder), the Low German wunner & wunder (wonder), the German Wunder (miracle, wonder), the Danish, Norwegian & Swedish under (wonder, miracle), the Icelandic undur (wonder) and the Old Norse undr (wonder).  In Middle English, by the late thirteenth century, it came also to mean the emotion associated with such a sight.  The original wonder drug (1939) was Sulfanilamide, one of the first generation of sulfonamide antibiotics and best known as M&B (after the British manufacturer May & Baker); it was later largely superseded by penicillin and other sulfonamides.  The verb (derivative of the noun), was from the Middle English wondren & wonderen, from the Old English wundrian (be astonished; admire; make wonderful, magnify), from the Proto-Germanic wundrōną.  It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian wunnerje, the West Frisian wûnderje, the Dutch wonderen, the German Low German wunnern, the German wundern, the Old High German wuntaron and the Swedish & Icelandic undra.  The sense of "entertain some doubt or curiosity" dates from the late thirteenth century.

Exactly or vaguely synonymous are conjecture, meditate, ponder, question, marvel, surprise, amazement, bewilderment, awe, scepticism, reverence, fascination, confusion, shock, admiration, doubt, astonishment, curiosity, uncertainty, surprise, fear, phenomenon, oddity, miracle, spectacle & speculate.  The noun wonderment is a noun has been in use since the 1530s while wonderful was drawn from the late Old English wunderfoll and wondrous emerged circa 1500, derived (it would seem) from the Middle English adjective wonders which was first noted in the early fourteenth century, originally genitive of the noun wonder, the suffix altered by the influence of such as marvelous etc; it existed as an adverb from the 1550s, the evolution related to wondrously & wondrousness.  Wonder is a noun & verb, wonderer & wonderment are nouns, wonderless is an adjective, wondrous is an adjective & adverb, wonderful is an adjective & adverb (and a non-standard noun) and wondrously is an adverb; the noun plural is wonders. 

The Wonderbra

The “wonder” in the portmanteau word Wonderbra underwent a bit of a meaning shift, decades after the product was released.  Although best-known for the illusory enhancement the structural engineering made possible, “wonder” was originally an allusion to the comfort offered compared with the usually more uncompromising alternatives of the time.  Wonderbra, marketed with an emphasis on the practicality and comfort made possible by innovations in construction, was first trademarked in 1939 by the Canadian Lady Corset Company and was for some years available only in Canada.  Not trademarked in the US until 1955, it wasn’t until 1961 (with the model 1300) that the now familiar, gravity-defying, design was released.

Even then, although the 1300 became the brand’s most popular product, it was thirty years before worldwide success was realized; although it had been on sale in the UK since 1964, sales boomed only in 1992, a success repeated in Europe the next season.  The Wonderbra was launched in the US in 1994 and, assisted by a minimalist advertising campaign featuring Czech model Eva Herzigová (b 1973), became not only a best-seller but part of the cultural lexicon.  The engineering of the Wonderbra wasn’t difficult to emulate and other manufacturers released clones, each with a portmanteau at least as suggestive of “wonder” as it had come to be understood in this context, Gossard offering an Ultrabra and Victoria's Secret a Miracle Bra.  Wonderbra responded to the competition with a novel technical innovation, the Air Wonder, inflatable for "high altitude cleavage".  Included with the Air Wonder was a mini-pump, small enough to fit in a handbag and be thus available for adjustments as circumstances demanded.

Wonderment: Lindsay Lohan as an enhanced Hermione Granger (a fictional character in JK Rowling's (b 1965) Harry Potter series), Saturday Night Live (season 29 episode 18), 1 May 2004.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

The pyramid today: it's the only of the seven wonders which still stands.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in 2570 BC and still stands, debate continuing about how it was built, how long the construction took and how many workers were required.  Built as a tomb for the fourth dynasty Egyptian pharaoh Khufu, it was part of a complex which included temples and many smaller pyramids.  Originally, the outermost stones were a highly polished white limestone, many of which were loosened by an earthquake some 600 years ago and over time, all were removed and used in the structures of cities and mosques.  As well as being of interest to architects, Egyptologists and archaeologists in general, the Great Pyramid has attracted cosmologists and mathematicians because of references to the Moon, the Orion constellation, continental gravity and other features of the heavens.  Each side of the pyramid is almost perfectly aligned with the four cardinal points of the compass while the dimensions convert to a ratio that equates to 2π with nearly perfect accuracy.

In the absence of evidence, artists can make of the gardens what they will.

According to legend, the Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built in 600 BC and stood until destroyed by earthquake in 226 BC but among historians there has long been debate about (1) whether the gardens ever existed and (2) if they did could they possibly have been the form usually described.  None of that ever bothered medieval story-tellers or poets, some of whom embellished the legend as they went.  Most tales recount how they were by King Nebuchadrezzar II because his wife missed the lush, green gardens of her home and in the medieval imagination they were represented sometimes as a cascading series of rooftops and sometimes dangling from structures built into the walls of the royal palace.  A more recent theory, noting the difficulties which would have existed in creating an irrigation system speculate that the myth may be based on gardens planted not in Babylon but close to Sennacherib at the eastern bank of the river Tigris.

Zeus: Because of the well documented contemporary descriptions, the renditions since are at least conceptually accurate.

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia (Δίας μυθολογία) was built in 430 BC and was destroyed by fire in 426 AD. Carved from ivory, on a throne of cedarwood, the statue in its right hand held a life-size statue of Nike, the goddess of victory, and in its left a large sceptre topped with an eagle. Said to be some 12 metres (40 feet) tall, contemporary accounts say it occupied the whole width of one of the temple’s aisles, its head reaching to the ceiling.  Debate has long surrounded the fate of the statue, some saying the structure was lost in the fire while others had it moved to Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) where if remained for decades before being destroyed.  Evidence about its appearance is fragmentary and unreliable; although there’s no doubt many copies at various scales were created during the 800-odd years it stood, none are known to have survived.

Before the fire: The Temple of Artemis is a popular model for modern re-creations.

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Ἀρτεμίσιον) was built in 550 BC and was destroyed by fire in 356 BC though as was the practice then, the structure was rebuilt several times over the centuries.  Unusually by the architectural conventions of the time, it was built substantially of marble and glittered with gold. The scale was impressive: from the high platform over a hundred sculptured columns supported the roof and being at least twice the size of the Parthenon, it was so breathtaking it was said to “rise to the clouds” which literally was rarely true but an example of how exaggeration in social media is nothing new.  The temple functioned also as an art gallery but the centrepiece was of course the statue of Artemis and if the legends are believed it was covered with gold and colourful stones, the legs adorned with carving of bees and animals with the top of the body adorned with breasts, symbolizing fertility.  It was destroyed in an act of arson by a malcontent called Herostratus who wished to secure a place in history by any means and the word herostatic (one who seeks fame at any cost) has endured.  Although made of marble, like the steel & glass Crystal Palace in London, the structure was packed with flammable materials and oils so it burned well.  There exists also a conspiracy theory that the act was a kind of inside job by the temple’s priests who had their own reasons for wanting a new building but neither that nor a reference to the writings of Aristotle which offers a lightning strike as the catalyst for the conflagration have much support among historians.

How to be remembered: The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (Μαυσωλεῖον Ἁλικαρνασσεύς), built as a tomb for Mausolus, a governor in the Persian Empire, was constructed in 352 BC and destroyed by earthquake in 1404 AD.  Said to be extravagant even by the standards of personal aggrandizement known throughout antiquity, the work included sculptural reliefs for each of the four sides of the building, commissioned from the leading Greek architects and artists; these soon became something of a tourist attraction.  Almost perfectly square and some 14 stories tall, the base covered some 10,000 square feet (900+ m²) while on each side of the tomb stood nine massive columns supporting a stepped pyramid on which stood by a four-horse marble chariot in which sat carvings of Mausolus and his Artemisia (who supervised the construction).  So famous was the tomb that Mausolus's name became the root for the word for large tombs in many languages.

Pleasing lines: The Lighthouse of Alexandria.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria (ὁ Φάρος τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας) was built in 280 BC and was destroyed by earthquake in 1323 AD.  It sat on the island of Pharos in the harbor of Alexandria and was the world’s first “famous lighthouse” although it was architecturally different to modern structures, built in three stages, all sloping inward.  Built with marble blocks suing lead as mortar, the lowest was square, the middle octagonal and the top cylindrical.  Within the lighthouse was a ramp and “dumb-waiter” used to transport the wood for the fire which burned during the night.  On the lantern floor, a large, curved mirror reflected the sunlight during the day and the fire at night and in clear weather it’s said seafarers could see the light even at a distance of 50 kilometres (30 miles).  The earth’s curvature makes this seem improbable but under certain atmospheric conditions (such as the light reflecting from clouds), it may have been possible.  Also plausible is the legend the light generated by the mirror was so bright and hot it could be used as a weapon of coastal defense to set fire to an enemy’s ships.  Under controlled conditions, because such ships were sometimes coated with flammable, tar-like substances (for water-proofing & timber preservation), it might have been possible but it would have been challenging to achieve this against a moving target.  Such was the power of the legend of the Pharos that the word remains the root for “lighthouse” in a number of languages.

Vaguely plausible rendering of how The Colossus of Rhodes may have appeared.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a very big statue, erected somewhere near the port of the city of Rhodes, the biggest settlement on what is the one of the larger Greek islands of the same name which lies off what is now Turkey’s Aegean coast.  Taking a dozen years to complete, the statue, construction of which began in 292 BC, was erected to honor Elios, the God of the Sun, who brought the inhabitants victory over Demetrius Poliorcetes (Demetrius I of Macedon; “The Besieger" 337–283 BC) who laid siege to Rhodes in 305-304 BC.  It stood for only sixty-odd years, collapsing during a severe earthquake which struck in 226 BC, contemporary reports indicating the structure fractured at both knees before toppling.  Remarkably, the mostly bronze wreckage was left substantially undisturbed for some eight-hundred years, becoming something of a tourist attraction before, in 654, it was salvaged by Arab invaders under the Muslim caliph Mu'awiya I (معاوية بن أبي سفيان‎, Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān; circa 600–680) who sold it to someone described as “a Jewish merchant from Damascus” who is said to have carted it off on a camel train of almost “a thousand beasts”.

Demetrios the Besieger had a scandalous private life but had a flair for military matters, noted too for innovations in engineering such as the machines and devices built by his armies as siege engines.  However, even the forces he was able at deploy in 305-304 BC weren’t sufficient to defeat the fortifications of Rhodes and eventually, Demetrios was compelled to retreat, abandoning the siege machinery on the island.  To give thanks to the Sun God, the Rhodians granted the commission to build a triumphal statue to Helios to the sculptor Chares of Lindos (Χάρης ὁ Λίνδιος, circa 330 BC-circa 280 BC), a pupil of Lysippos (Λύσιππος; fourth century BC) and, in the dozen years between 304-292 BC, he supervised the construction.

Logo of Lindsay Lohan's Beach House at Rhodes.

Structurally, the build was executed along the well-understood engineering principles of the age, the base of white marble first installed to which were affixed the feet and ankles, an iron and stone framework gradually formed as scaffolding and structure proceeded in unison upwards.  To permit the workers to reach the highest levels, an earth ramp was built because the heights involved meant a free-standing system of scaffolding would lack the needed stability; when the work was complete, the earth ramp was demolished and the soil carted off.  While the superstructure was built, workers cast the outer skin in bronze using plates, the metal formed with copper melted in large ovens, to which iron, making 10-20% of the mix, was added.  Then the mouton metal mixture was moved in large ladles to be distributed in clay molds, flat structures used to form sheets varying in thickness according to need. Once cast, the rough edges were ground away and the plates polished before they were transported to the building site where they were hammered to the desired shape to be attached to the iron structure,  The thickest and heaviest plates were those rendered for the feet and ankles, complex in the shape of their curves and needing more mass to afford greater stability.  Thus for a dozen years, the thin bronze skin was added to the growing body of stone, each plate fixed to the iron frame and then to the neighboring plate.  Once finished, it was polished to reflect the rays of the Sun so it would shine as intensely as possible, better to honor Helios. 

How engineers would today build a 122 m (400 feet) high Colossus using modern techniques of structural engineering.  An interesting exercise although the Greek exchequer may have other fiscal priorities.

From the laying of the first stone to its toppling, building its destruction lies a time span of but sixty-seven years but the Colossus ranks as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world with Great Pyramid of Giza which still stands after almost five-thousand.  Such was the scale of the Colossus that the ruins still impressed, “…even lying on the ground, it is a marvel" wrote Pliny the Elder (24-79) who noted few men could wrap their arms around the fallen thumb and each finger alone would have stood taller than most other statues.  The earthquake which so damaged the city 226 BC broke the Colossus at its narrowest and thus weakest points, the knees, and given the mass which existed above, there was no chance it could survive.  Although it would be centuries before the list of the seven wonders would exist as the codified canon now familiar, the stature was already famous and the an offer to the pay the cost of restoration was extended by Ptolemy III Euergetes (Πτολεμαῖος Εὐεργέτης, Ptolemy the Benefactor; circa 280–222 BC) of Egypt.  However, an oracle was consulted and their judgement forbade any re-construction so the offer was declined.  Details of the oracle’s pronouncement are lost but it’s speculated the conclusion may have been the earthquake was the act of a wrathful Helios and the ruins should be left where they fell, lest anger again be aroused.  There is no otherwise compelling explanation to account for why so much valuable bronze wouldn’t for centuries be recycled.

A (fanciful) engraving of the Colossus of Rhodes (circa 1540) by Martin Heemskerck (1498-1574).

The exact location remains uncertain but the notion the Colossus straddled the entrance to Rhodes harbor with ships passing between its legs was a figment of medieval imagination, a thing famously vivid.  Given its method of construction, such a thing would have collapsed under its own weight even before it was complete and, had it stood over the water, not only would construction have been challenging but when it fell, it would have blocked the entrance to the Mandraki harbor.  Despite that, in the early 1980s when a large piece of rubble was discovered in the water, there were still romantics who hoped this might vindicate the medieval theory.  There’s little doubt the story of a 60m (200 feet) tall Colossus straddling the entrance to the harbor was the work of opportunist poets and artists, the engineers and architects of the time sufficiently acquainted with physics and metallurgy to have assured all of the impossibility of their vision yet it seems long to have captured the medieval imagination.  Despite all that, it still influenced many even at the dawn of modernity, being one of the inspirations for the Statue of Liberty but that was designed in a way to ensure greater strength and stability, the weight distribution and the dimensions of the base entirely different.  There’s no doubt the statue stood somewhere in the proximity of Rhodes harbor but archaeological excavations have thus far revealed nothing, not unsurprising given the footprint of a vertical structure is much less than a temple or other building, and the urbanization of Rhodes over two millennia mean the site may long ago have been built-over.  The Colossus though would have shared one noted characteristic with the Statue of Liberty: When copper rubs on iron, it creates electricity, especially in a costal environment with salty air.  Like Liberty, the Colossus of Rhodes made its own electricity.