Robot

Robot (pronounced roh-bot)

(1) A machine resembling a human, designed to perform certain functions.  Originally, the most popular were the “intelligent” mechanical beings which appeared in science fiction (SF) but of late advances in technology have encouraged manufacturers to build robots in humanoid form, the advantage being they can be applied to replace human labor using without the need to change existing infrastructure.

(2) A person who acts and responds in a mechanical, routine manner, usually subject to another's will; an automaton (often a figurative use).

(3) A device operating automatically, in a pre-programmed fashion.

(4) As a non-physical device (in software), a program which to some extent (including beyond) can duplicate or emulate human actions; now often called “bots”.

(5) As a modifier, a device not (directly) controlled by a human; something automated within certain parameters (such devices sometimes called “robot” in colloquial use).

(6) In surveying, a specialized form of theodolite which follows the movements of a prism and can thus be used by a single operator.

(7) In various forms of modern & modernist dance, a style in which dancers imitate the stiff and jerky movements of a stereotypical fictional robot.

(8) In various on-line communities, a habitual user who posts content of dubious or no value (in this case a human, not a bot in the modern sense)  In the earlier era of the bulletin boards an equivalent term was “slug” (which was probably worse than being labeled a “file pig”).

(9) In internet use (1) a computer-controlled character in a video game, especially a multiplayer one, (2) a dreadfully inempt player of video games and (3) a person thought to have no independent capacity for thought.

(10) Figuratively, a person who seems not to have emotions.

1920: Robot first appears (in the modern sense) in the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots (1920)) by Czech writer Karel Čapek (1890–1938), the word suggested by his brother, the artist, writer & poet Josef Čapek (1887–1945).  R.U.R. was Čapek's first international success and was a dystopian vision of an industrial society and while sometimes compared to Charlie Chaplin’s (1889–1977) Modern Times (1936), thematically, they’re quite different.  Typically, the word was brought unchanged into English but such was the simplicity of form that many languages have also retained the spelling, the odd variation including the Japanese robotto (ロボット) and the Swahili roboti.  Surprisingly, despite what must be a temptation, ROBOT is a rare construction as an acronym.  Robot, robotics, robotism, robotry, roboticization & roboticist are nouns, robotic, robotistic, robotical & robotlike (and the non-standard robotesque) are adjectives, robotize (also as roboticise) is a verb and robotically is an adverb; the noun plural is robots.

The Czech-derived robot (mechanical person, also “person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical”) was from robota (drudgery, servitude, compulsory labor) and robotník (the landless peasant so employed (although that was also sometimes applied to “richer peasants” (al la the Russian кула́к (kulák) (wealthy peasant) who employed their own roboniks), from robotiti (to work, drudge), from an Old Czech source akin to the Old Church Slavonic rabota (servitude), from rabu (slave), from the Old Slavic orbu-, from the primitive Indo-European orbh- (pass from one status to another (and related to the later English “orphan”)).  The German noun Robot, was used to refer to a system of serfdom in Central Europe, under which a tenant's rent was paid in forced labor and the Slavic thread is related to the German Arbeit (work), from the Old High German arabeit. 

Several derived forms entered the language after appearing in Liar! (1941, a short story by Russian-born US SF author Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) including the adjective robotic (of or characteristic of robots) and the nouns robopsychologist (one who studies or practices the discipline of robopsychology) & robotics (the science of robots, their construction and use) and earlier, in Robbie (1940 and first published as Strange Playfellow), he’d introduced roboticist (one who conceptualizes, designs, builds, programs, and experiments with robots).  Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics (1968) is often quoted as the basic framework of protocols which should be adopted as a regulatory environment for the industry.

Daleks: The original BBC series was broadcast in black & white which made life easier for the props department but the cyborg Daleks later came in designer colors.

“Bot” has become familiar in the internet era to describe software implementations which appear (sometimes deliberately) to be actual humans but it has a long history.  According to the authoritative Online Etymology Dictionary, “bot” as a head-clipping of “robot” was unknown until around the turn of the twenty-first century and remarkably: “The method of minting new slang by clipping the heads off words does not seem to be old or widespread in English.  The examples (za from pizza, zels from pretzels, rents from parents, burbs from suburbs) are American English student or teen slang and seem to date back no further than the late 1960s.”  Bot has flourished as have (cy)borg & (an)droid and there is sometimes genuine linguistic innovation in the field:  The name of the cyborg (a combination of robotics and a biological intelligence) Daleks in the BBC Dr Who television series was an invention with no etymological basis.

Long before computers and robots, “bot” had a history.  In the early sixteenth century, in what was thought an alteration of the Scottish Gaelic boiteag (maggot), in both England a Scotland, bot (and bott) meant “the larva of a botfly, which infests the skin of various mammals, producing warbles, or the nasal passage of sheep, or the stomach of horses”.  Unrelated to that (hopefully), was the eighteenth century English slang (often as the verbs botting & botted) meaning “to buggar” (ie the old criminal offence of “the abominable crime of buggery”).  Presumably an independent evolution was the now obsolete Australian slang meaning “to ask for and be given something with the direct intention of exploiting the thing’s usefulness” and dictionaries of slang suggest it was used almost exclusively of cigarettes (ie “can I bot a smoke?” a alternative form of “can I bum a smoke?”, the latter form now rare but still heard.  The World War I (1914-1918) era slang in Australia & New Zealand indicating a “"worthless, troublesome person” is extinct.  Strangely, given the document fondness for clippings & abbreviations in the camp lexicon, “bot” seems never to have emerged as a form of “bottom” which, in gay (male) slang, is the companion term for “top”.

Lindsay Lohan in the stop motion-animated sketch comedy Robot Chicken (2005-).  The character was voiced by Breckin Meyer (b 1974).

Of late, additions to the language have included robothood (the state or condition of being a robot; an environment largely or exclusively inhabited by robots), robotless (a place, institution or device in which robots are not used) and fembot (a female version of a robot).  Note that fembot is used in different ways.  In SF, fembots could genuinely be “female robots” for in the genre not only could there be actual genders (as opposed to the mere representation of characteristics) but there was not of necessity any need for the number of different sexes to be restricted to two.  In real-world use, voice fembots were among the earliest widely to be deployed and that was because the research made clear the female voice tended to be preferred (by men and women), thus the “talking clocks”, automated switchboard attendants etc usually being feminine.  In (derogatory) figurative use, fembot was used also to suggest a docile, unthinking and conformist woman (something like a mature version of the “basic bitch”), the idea explored in Ira Levin’s (1929—2007) The Stepford Wives (1972); the “feminist horror” genre remains still sadly neglected.  Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and sensors have in recent years made fembots notably more “realistic” and fembots have already been deployed in two of the oldest of the “feminized” professions: sex work & health care.

In medicine, the possibilities had been discussed for decades but the first products emerged in the 1980s as technology caught up with the most simple of the ambitions, robotic arms for use in simple procedures the first commercially available.  Progress was incremental until the last ten years although robotics did make a significant contribution to research, not only taking the place of human labor but making possible projects which would never otherwise have been possible because some of the big data analysis would have required so much labor that funding would never have been available.  The evolutionary pattern in the industry will likely follow the same path as in the legal professional in that the first human jobs to go are those in back-office and other administrative functions before ancillary roles are also absorbed by machines.  The clinicians will be last to be thinned from the hollowed-out middle while at the upper end, executive roles will continue and perhaps even expand while at the lowest level, cleaners, porters, security guards and such may endure, not because machines can’t be built to do the jobs but the nature of the duties is such the attrition rate will for the foreseeable future make human labor cheaper.

Grace the bot, coming to a hospital near you.

The use of fembots as ancillaries in clinical health care will of course be the thin end of the wedge because a fembot can instantly recall the complete medical history of all patients in a hospital while simultaneously possessing an unparalleled degree of medical knowledge, dynamically updated minute by minute.  Already, machines are proving better than humans in fields such as the analysis of diagnostic imagery and in the near to mid-term, the only obvious disciplines in the field where they’re likely to remain at a disadvantage is in certain surgeries and other activities where physical dexterity or the ability to execute intricate movements is at a premium.  Years from now (and there’s genuine debate about how many), those wishing to pursue a career in medicine might find psychiatry remains the last human preserve, at least for those tending to the rich; the poor will be relegated to pacifying drugs and bots. 

A Harmony 2.0 in completed form.

As sex dolls, progress has been followed with great interest and the most interesting aspect has been the extent of the focus on communication, the manufacturers clearly responding to demand from men for a “relationship” and not merely a more elaborate and life-like sex toy.  The phenomenon of “lonely Japanese men” has for some time been well-documented and it’s unlikely the problem is culturally specific so such demand is likely to exist also in other markets.  Manufacturers in the Far East have been active but so are players in Europe and the US and with the mechanical challenges “substantially” solved, attention has turned to emotions and their physical manifestations.  In April 2023, US-based Abyss Creations displayed what was described as a “new generation sexbot”, “Harmony 2.0” said to have the ability to learn from “her human companion” a greater range of emotions which subsequently can be generated, including tears.  Technology site CNET reported Harmony can be customized and is interactive, conversations able to be conducted, the quality of which will improve over time because the sexbot will learn from the experience; thus the emotional range of one Harmony 2.0 will differ from another which has been interacting with a different companion.  Memory is persistent and Abyss have indicated that at some time in the future, a greater range of “pre-loaded personalities” will be available, users able to choose “their type”, some presumably preferring a quiet and deferential sexbot, others something more highly strung.  Like anything, it’s all a question of what one wants from life (a male version is said to be “in development”) and being a software download, the implication is that if the personality of one’s Harmony 2.0 proves unsatisfactory, the memory can be over-written with something which hopefully proves better.  By default, Harmony has 18 distinct personality traits such as such as “shyness” or “strong sexual desire”; there seems no proneness to headaches although, at the software level, there’s no reason why one couldn’t be trained to display anything from aversion to sex to actual frigidity.  Again, it’s all a matter of what one wants from life and one can map one’s kinks onto one’s Harmony 2.0.

Mix & match: Being modular, there is a Harmony app (a subscription service) with which users can “build their bot”, customizing it according to one’s preferences (appearance and personality).

A Harmony 2.0 requires some 80 hours of labor to complete and every detail is said to be “perfect” (ie conforming to the desired specification) and the devices are modular.  This is familiar from the model used to build industrial robots where the one core design could be adapted to welding, component placing, painting or a range of other activities, simply by swapping attachments like arms and changing software instruction sets.  With sexbots, the modularity focuses more on aesthetic elements such as hair, eyes, mouths, breasts and such.  At the time of release, Abyss listed Harmony 2.0 at US$6,500 while the “tearful” version was US$12,000, reflecting both the development costs and the additional hardware (presumably plumbing including a “tear reservoir”) required.  Sexbots may only ever be a market niche but in a sense, it’s the oldest niche in the world.

Orphan

Orphan (pronounced awr-fuhn)

(1) A person who has lost one or both parents through death (now usually used only if both parents have died); term is used only with children or older minors and in informal use is sometimes extended to an abandoned child.

(2) A young animal left motherless by death or desertion.

(3) Figuratively, a person or thing without protective affiliation, sponsorship, etc.

(4) In typography (applied especially in word processing) the first line of a paragraph when it appears alone at the bottom of a page.

(5) Figuratively, something not (or no longer) authorized, supported, or funded; not part of a system; isolated; abandoned.

(6) In computing, any unreferenced object or a process, the parent of which has terminated.

(7) In medicine, as orphan disease (a rare disease) or orphan drug (something developed under the US Orphan Drug Act (1983) for orphan diseases).

(8) In biochemistry, as orphan receptor, apparent receptor that has a similar structure to other identified receptors but whose endogenous ligand has not yet been identified.

(9) In nuclear physics, as orphan source, a self-contained radioactive source that is no longer under proper regulatory control.

(10) In the automotive industry, cars still in use built by a manufacturer that has entirely ceased operations (applied informally also to vehicles produced to defunct divisions of parent corporations (eg Imperial, Pontiac)).

(11) In the matter of technology, literature and other copyrighted material, something abandoned by its owner or where the copyright holder is untraceable; in reference to software the slang term is “abandonware”.

1425–1475: The noun was from the late Middle English, from the Late Latin orphanus (destitute, without parents), from orbus (bereaved), from the Ancient Greek ὀρφανός (orphanós) (without parents, fatherless; bereaved (literally “deprived”)), from orphos (bereft), from the primitive Indo-European orbho (bereft of father (also "deprived of free status”), from the root orbh- (to change allegiance, to pass from one status to another), source also of the Hittite harb- (change allegiance), the Sanskrit arbhah (weak, child), the Armenian orb (orphan), the Old Irish orbe (heir), the Old Church Slavonic rabu (slave), the rabota (servitude ( and related to the modern robot), the Gothic arbja, the German erbe, the Old English ierfa (heir), the Old High German arabeit, the German Arbeit (work), the Old Frisian arbed and the Old English earfoð (hardship, suffering, trouble").  It was cognate with the Sanskrit अर्भ (árbha), the Latin orbus, (bereaved), the Old High German erbi, & arbi (hence the German Erbe (heir)) and the Old English ierfa (heir).  The Late Latin orphanós was the source also of the Old French orfeno & orphenin and the Italian orfano.  The extinct alternative spelling was orphane.  Some dictionaries list the noun orphanarium (a usually jocular term for an orphanage) as non-standard and the noun orphaner (synonym of orphan) as extinct; orphanotrophism & orphanotrophy are at least archaic.  Orphan is a noun, verb & adjective, orphancy, orphanship, orphaner, orphanity, orphanism, orphandom, orphanhood, orphanarium, orphanage, orphanry, orphanotrophism & orphanotrophy are nouns, orphanish & orphanlike are adjectives, orphaned is a verb & adjective and orphanize & orphaning are verbs; the noun plural is orphans.

The verb use (to reduce to the state of being an orphan) dates from circa 1814.  It was used as an adjective from the late fifteenth century, the figurative use emerging at the same time.  The syndicated newspaper cartoon strip Little Orphan Annie (1924-2010) created by Harold Gray (1894-1968) was originally titled Little Orphant Annie after the title of James Whitcomb Riley's (1849-1916) 1885 poem Little Orphant Allie (though it was originally titled The Elf Child, the name was changed by Riley for the third printing; it was a typesetting error which substituted “orphan” for “orphant”. Orphant was an old, corrupt form of orphan, attested from the seventeenth century.  The noun orphanage dates from the 1570s and originally meant “the condition of being an orphan", the more familiar modern meaning "a home for orphans" not used until 1850.  Other words for "the condition of being an orphan" have included orphanhood (1670s), orphancy (1580s), orphanism (1590s) & orphanship (1670s) and in Middle English there was the mid-fifteenth century orphanite (desolation, wretchedness).  The early forms to describe the building in which orphans were housed were orphan house (1711), orphan-asylum (1796) & orphanry (1872).  Orphanage prevailed over the others for no good etymological reason (some critics noting homes for girls weren’t called “girlages”) but despite there being a risk of confusion with the sixteenth century sense of “the condition of being an orphan", it was preferred and orphanhood came to be the standard form of description for the state despite the objection of pedants who insisted the English “-hood” should never be affixed to a Greek or Roman root; a long-lost battle even then.  The purists had more success in fighting off "Orphanotrophy" although the less objectionable "Orphanry" (as in “aviary”), although achieving the tick of approval from the lexicographers, seems never to have caught on, people presumably not attracted by the alignment of places for children being linguistically aligned with zoos.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

In antiquity, an orphan was one who had lost both parents but in English use, by the seventeenth century, the status of orphanhood was afforded to a child who had lost either.  That lead to constructions which defined the differential state (half-orphan, double orphan, maternal orphan & paternal orphan) and all the classifications were applied in a variety of ways, on both sides of the Atlantic, matters applying to children administered usually by local authorities so regional differences were common, some insisting the status of an orphan was created only upon the death of one or both parents while in other places desertion was sometimes sufficient.  The age at which one could, whatever the nature of the loss, cease to be regarded as an orphan was also inconsistent until the modern state evolved but the idea always was it ceased with adulthood but this tended sometimes to be a functional judgment based on prevailing social and economic conditions; it could be as young as 14 at a time when workforce participation (male and female) was common.  The modern practice has long been an orphan is a minor who has lost both parents but UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund (originally the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund but the name was changed in 1953, UNICEF retained as the name though no longer technically an acronym), UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS) and some NGOs (non-governmental organizations) label as an orphan any child who has lost one parent.  This is a practical approach acknowledging the often severe consequences which follow from the loss of one parent.  The verse in the New Testament imposing on all a duty to care for orphans is often quoted:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress…" (James 1:27 (KJV 1611)).

Less often cited are the passages from the Old Testament in which it’s threatened the wrath of God will make orphans of the children of he who mistreats an orphan:

22 Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child.

23 If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their cry;

24 And my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless. (Exodus 22:22-24 (KJV 1611)).

The holy Qu'ran has a number of passages which make clear the duty of all to care for orphans and not take from them:

Give orphans their property, and do not substitute bad things for good. Do not assimilate their property into your own. Doing that is a serious crime.  (The Women: 2).

Keep a close check on orphans until they reach a marriageable age, then if you perceive that they have sound judgement hand over their property to them... (The Women: 6).

1932 Studebaker Dictator.  Studebaker used Dictator as a model name between 1927-1937 and there was not political connotation, the word in 1927 not having the associations it would later gain.  By 1937 things had changed and the name was dropped.

Studebaker had a long and storied history, its origin in a German blacksmithing business (1736-1750), the family moving to the US and beginning the production of carriages and carts in 1852, its first automobiles actually electric cars offered in 1902 before the sale of gas (petrol) powered models in 1904.  The powered-range grew quickly and by 1919, Studebaker ceased production of horse-drawn carriages, a decision vindicated by its success in the 1920s.  Like many other concerns however, the Great Depression of the early 1930s mauled business and Studebaker was forced to enter bankruptcy although a reorganization and a financial re-structuring arranged by the venerable Lehman Brothers (1850-2008) permitted it soon to resume operations, the improving economic conditions of the mid-1930s ensuring ongoing profitability.

Studebaker US6 truck in Red Army use, configured as mobile Katyusha rocket launcher, circa 1943.  Under Lend-Lease arrangements, some 152,000 US6's were supplied during Great Patriotic War (1941-1945).

Comrade Stalin's (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) favorite cars by the 1930s were the big Packards but he acknowledged the importance of Studebaker trucks supplied by the US under Lend-Lease and the company also greatly benefited; like many US corporations, some of its golden years came during World War II (1939-1945) when industrial capacity was given over to government contracts fulfilling military demand.  A variety of materiel was produced but Studebaker’s most notable contribution to the war effort was the versatile US6 (G630 in the government purchasing system) 2½ (short) ton 6x6 trucks, over 150,000 of which were supplied to the Soviet Union.  Built in many configurations, the most memorable adaptation by the Red Army was as a mobile platform for the BM-31-12 (nickname: Andryusha) Katyusha rocket launcher, known to the enemy as “Stalin’s organs” because of the distinctive sound; before drones emerged as the preferred front-line weapon, the Russian army widely deployed such rockets in the “special military operation” (invasion) against Ukraine.  The US6 proved popular with Red Army troops who judged it superior to the locally-made ZIS-5 & GAZ-AA and better even than the captured German trucks with Maybach engines which (belying the German reputation for “good beer, good engines, good sausages”), were prone to overheating under extreme loads, unlike the Studebakers that never boiled.

Tough, durable and easy to repair, it was the WS6 that made possible the movement of the Red Army at the scale and speed achieved by 1943-1944 and it proved equally adept at handing the both the muddy and freezing conditions that became notorious on the Eastern Front; affectionately the troops nicknamed the things “Studer”.  The tale circulated that comrade Stalin even wrote a letter of appreciation to Studebaker, mentioning how important the US6 had been to the Red Army; that turned out to be apocryphal but in the Studebaker archives there are documents from Soviet officials expressing their satisfaction with the machines.  The flow of information between across the Iron Curtain was once highly restricted and one Soviet diplomat, arriving in the US in the late 1960s, expressed surprise Studebaker was no longer in business.  Brought up on the legends of the part the WS6 had played in Great Patriotic War, he'd assumed the company would still be a fixture in US manufacturing.  Of course, if corporate comings & goings in Detroit (actually South Bend, Indiana, where Studebakers were built, a place that wouldn’t again make the international headlines until 2020 when Pete Buttigieg (b 1982; US secretary of transportation 2021-2025), who served as mayor from 2012 to 2020 sought the Democratic presidential nomination), were a mystery to Russians, the Kremlin was just as opaque, even to experienced diplomats.  Probably no figure in the twentieth century was as dominating a dictator as comrade Stalin but even at the Yalta Conference (February 1945) there were senior figures in the US State Department and the UK’s Foreign Office who believed the one Russians knew as their vozhd (from the Russian вождь (vožd) (chieftain, leader) was a figure whose freedom of action was constrained by “hard liners in Moscow”.  

1964 Studebaker Avanti R2.

Studebaker had ups and downs after World War II but the long-term trend was down.  By the early 1960s the writing was on the wall but there was one last roll of the dice, a gamble that would be either the savior of the corporation or the final nail in the coffin.  Released in 1962, the Avanti straddled a spectrum of the market, seen mostly as what would come to be called a personal coupe, it was also the company’s halo car and, most unexpectedly, something of a pony car and muscle car before either segment really existed.  Offered in three versions: (1) the R1 with a 289 cubic inch (4.7 litre) V8 rated at 240 HP (horsepower), (2) the with R2 with a Paxton supercharger (generating an additional 50 HP) and, (3) the exotic 304 cubic inch (5.0 litre) R3 with 335 HP (only nine of which were built).  Performance was good, the Avanti at least competitive with the competition and to prove the slipperiness of the fibreglass body (styled by French-born, US-based designer Raymond Loewy (1893-1986)), the company took an R3 to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where it set 29 production-car records, posting a top speed of almost 170 mph (273 km/h).

The orphan Avanti production numbers, 1965-2006.

The Avanti’s appearance at the time was quite startling and the reception after being shown in New York in 1962 was generally positive but almost immediately the project encountered problems.  Because the car was expected to sell in relatively low volumes of around 20,000 annually and the body was rendered with complex curves, production in steel or aluminum was never considered, the panels instead molded in fibreglass, then still a more respectable material than it would later become.  Each Avanti however needed over 100 fiberglass components and the contractor experienced some difficulty in mass-producing them with the necessary tolerances, the ensuing delay meaning that in its first full year on sale, barely 1,200 reached customers, a disappointing debut for a car expected to rescue the corporation from impending bankruptcy.  Studebaker’s parlous finances were by now public knowledge and although things improved in 1963, buyers were scarce and fewer than 4,000 Avantis were sold, well below the volume at which production economically was viable.  The next year, the factory booked orders for fewer than a 1000 and, bowing to the inevitable, Studebaker announced the end of the Avanti; that turned out to be a harbinger, all US production ceasing in 1964, the corporation dissolved in 1966 after the Canadian facility was shuttered.

At that point the Avanti should, like literally thousands of others, simply have died but unusually, it become an orphan, a model cast adrift by the death of the parent corporation.  The Avanti, although Studebaker’s swansong, turned out to be a phoenix, the model attracting no fewer than five subsequent owners who, between 1965 and 2006, produced 3840 Avantis using a variety of drive-train combinations from the Detroit parts bin, some with convertible coachwork and even a handful of four-door sedans.  Even more a niche model than it had been under Studebaker’s parentage, in its best year as an orphan a mere 289 left the factory but for four decades (profitably and sometimes not) it was sustained by a small but devoted clientele and even today the survivors have a following, the most desirable of the early cars at auction typically attracting over US$40,000 at auction and sales of exceptional examples have been recorded achieving twice that.

Chopine

Chopine (pronounced choh-peen or chop-in)

(1) A shoe having a thick sole, usually of cork, suggesting a short stilt, worn especially by women in Europe in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries and said to have been introduced from the Ottoman Empire.

(2) A bottle of wine (usually Bordeaux) containing 250 ml, 1/3 of the volume of a standard bottle.

1570–1580: From the Middle French chapin, from the Old Spanish chapín (type of high shoe or clog, raised by means of a cork sole), from chapa (plate of metal), the construct being chap(a) (from the Middle French chape) + -in (the adjectival suffix).  The original, the Old Spanish chapín, was probably imitative of the sound made by the shoe when walking.  Dictionaries note a number of cognates of chopine including choppins & chapiney but, as might be imagined, it must have been a word in limited use (by cobblers, fashionistas etc) because there are no entries for the word (or similar forms such as cioppino or choppino) in English / Italian dictionaries of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries; perhaps it was at the time: "The shoe that dare not speak its name".  It's possible the equivalent in Renaissance Italian was zoccolo (familiar as the English plural "clogs") which may come from the Italian zocco (stump or block of wood) but adding to the murkiness, in one English / Italian dictionary, the word chopinos appears in the definition of the plural zoccoli.  Chopine is a noun; the noun plural is chopines.

Portrait de Chopin en Dante (drawing of Chopin as Dante, 1849), graphite pencil on paper by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Eugène Delacroix National Museum, the Louvre, Paris.  Inscribed Cher Chopin (Dear Chopin), the drawing is believed to have been sketched on 31 October, 1849, upon the artist learning of the composer's death some two weeks earlier.  It remained in Delacroix's bedroom until his death.

Unfortunately, chopiner is not an English noun meaning “one who makes or wears chopines” but a French verb meaning “to drink to excess” while the English adjective Chopinian carries the sense “of or pertaining to the Polish composer & virtuoso pianist Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)”.  A macabre footnote in Chopin's story is that Hans Frank (1900–1946; Nazi lawyer and governor of the General Government (1939-1945) in German-occupied Poland during World War II), whose rule in Nazi-occupied Poland was an appalling and bloody tale of corruption and depravity, when on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in all seriousness (as an experienced trial lawyer) offered in mitigation for his conduct the fact he'd established in Kraków a Chopin Museum, something he noted: “the Poles had never managed to do”.  The belated attempt at redemption came apparently at the instigation of Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945; Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda 1933-1945) who, although as evil as any of the Nazis, was at least clear-headed enough to understand carrots were in occupied territories at least as useful as sticks.

Defendants in the dock at the First Nuremberg Trial (Frank circled).

Acting under instruction from Berlin, Frank’s regime actively had attempted to eradicate Polish culture and while his methods were never subtle, the worst excesses included mass-murder of “the intelligentsia” (writers, artists, journalists, academics, priests etc) but the governor-general, bizarrely, had a personal obsession with Chopin, based on a genuine fondness for the music and many had been drawn to what been described as its “quasi-improvised” quality; the French composer Georges Bizet (1838–1875) spoke of Chopin’s work as “…charming, strange, unique, inimitable”.  Frank too clearly was charmed but understood the long dead composer would need to be “Germanized” to be acceptable in the Third Reich (1933-1945), taking measures such as spelling his name in a Germanic-sounding “Schopping” and banning performances of his compositions for Polish audiences.  The centrepiece of this improbable Nazi attempt at cult-creation was what Frank called the “temporary” Chopin Museum in his official headquarters at Wawel Castle in Kraków, a permanent structure to be erected once Germany had won the war.  In typical Nazi style, Frank dispatched his (by then well-experienced) agents to loot occupied Europe for Chopin artifacts, manuscripts, letters, death masks and memorabilia, managing to acquire (ie steal) even an original Pleyel grand piano that had belonged to the composer.  Despite that interest, in May 1940 he had made only a token attempt to prevent the destruction of the famous bronze Chopin Monument in Warsaw's Łazienki Park, the 16-ton statue cut into pieces and melted down for the benefit of the German war machine.

The Nuremberg Trial, 1946 (1946), oil on canvas by Dame Laura Knight RA (1877-1970), IWM (Imperial War Museum), London.

Dame Laura Knight’s large canvas The Nuremberg Trial, 1946, now hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London and is one of the most re-produced images from the trial.  An unusual blend of two aspects of realism achieved by a juxtaposition of defendants in the dock and a devastated Nuremberg cityscape (including corpses), the artist did change a few details to suit her didactic purposes, Hans Frank seated not in his usual place but at the painting’s bottom-right, presumably better to show the wrists damaged by a failed suicide attempt.  In court, Frank wore gloves to conceal the effect but these Dame Laura choose to remove.  Curiously for such an accomplished artist, some of the likenesses achieved of those in the dock are not impressive but it remains one of the trial’s most memorable images, despite at the time being received by the critical establishment without enthusiasm.

Sketch of Frank in the dock by New Zealand-born political cartoonist David Low (1891-1963).

For the museum’s opening ceremony, Frank personally selected Ludmilla Berkwic (1910–2005), a fine Polish concert pianist and piano teacher who, on Chopin’s Pleyel, preformed several pieces for an audience of high-ranking Nazis, the recital very well-received.  Unfortunately, Frank’s staff hadn’t dug too deep and what they failed to detect was that Ms Berkwic had since the start of the war being living under false papers because her father's family was Jewish.  That might have gone undetected were it not for Dr Goebbels having arranged for the performance to be filmed and, in an attempt to show how benign was Nazi rule in Poland, distributed throughout Europe on propaganda newsreels.  By 1943 he probably realized that might be a futile project but his energy for the Sisyphean task never waned.  However, an unexpected consequence of the publicity was it prompted one of Ms Berkwic’s jealous rivals to denounce her for having Jewish heritage.  That forced her and her mother to obtain from the Polish Underground new sets of forged papers and, strange as it sounds, they fled to Germany where they could be absorbed into the millions of captive Polish workers.  Hiding, as it were, “in plain sight”, she survived the war working in a munitions factory and in 1947 emigrated to the US, setting in New York.  Frank’s gesture did not make much impression on the judges of the IMT (International Military Tribunal) sitting for the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946): They convicted him on counts three (war crimes) and four (crimes against humanity) and handed down a sentence of death by hanging.  As a trained lawyer, Frank was at least a realist, the prison psychologist recording that when asked his reaction to the verdict, Frank had smiled when answering: “I deserved it and I expected it.”  Unlike the most recalcitrant of the defendants, he seemed aware too of the magnitude of the crimes being tried, admitting: “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.”  Some of what Frank stole for “his” Chopin Museum was recovered and today, the most comprehensive collection of the composer's memorabilia is housed in the official Fryderyk Chopin Museum in Warsaw, established in 1954 and operated by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute.

The ultimate platform shoe

How they worked.  Chopines were a kind of wonder bra for the feet.

Chopines began as a purely functional device; a means of raising women’s shoes and the hems of their dresses above the dirt and filth in which they were often compelled to walk; in the age of horse-drawn transport, streets sometimes were "rivers of blood, mud and horseshit".  It's said the chopines were brought to Europe by traders from the Ottoman Empire where they'd been worn in bath houses by concubines, courtesans and others, the speculation being they were originally a modestly proportioned device designed as a health measure, a means of protecting the feet from infection, bath houses being warm, dark and moist, the perfect incubation environment for bacteria.  As sometimes happens, they became a status symbol with prestige determined by their elevation, the tallest extant examples reaching 20 inches (508 mm) although some historians claim they were built as much as ten inches (254 mm) higher.  Students of the art suspect that if true, such things may have been constructed for shop-window displays rather than being worn because at that height they're really "stilts".  Beyond a certain height, practicality (ie stability) would certainly have become marginal but there's evidence highly stylized examples were worn outside the bath house on ceremonial occasions, the wearer presumably "mostly static".  Chopines were most popular in Spain and Italy in the late sixteenth century and when they spread to England, they were sometimes referred to as "the Venice" because of the perception that was their city of origin, a notion that seems to have arisen because of their mention in widely-read travel journals of the age; Venice was a popular destination for such travellers.  Their impracticality must have made them a niche item because they never became part of any defined English costume or style of dress but whether alpha-males objected to women suddenly appearing taller is lost to history.

Variations on a theme of chopine.

As shoes, they had a short life because their sheer size dictated they be made from lightweight materials like cork and wood although some surviving examples do have a metal framework.  The style, in a less extreme form, was briefly revived with the cork-soled platform soles of the 1970s which had the effect of creating a short-lived investment bubble in the Portuguese cork industry although, as economic theory would predict, as the craze faded a Portuguese "cork glut" saw prices collapse.  The absurdity of the style attracted the attention of writers:

"It is ridiculous to see how these ladies crawl in and out of their gondolas, by reason of their choppines [clogs]; and what dwarfs they appear when taken down from their wooden scaffolds; of these I saw nearly thirty together, stalking half as high again as the rest of the world."  (John Evelyn, diary entry, June 1645)

"By'r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine." (Hamlet, act 2 scene 2, William Shakespeare, 1602)

"He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a chopine... "(Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922).

Continuing the chopine tradition but with rather less elevation: Lindsay Lohan in Saint Laurent Billy leopard-print platform boots, New York, March 2019.

Shoes have not since ascended to the heights of the chopines but the attractions of elevation have endured.  The lovely elegance of a five-inch stiletto heel of course remains incomparable but while as a piece of design they’re there to be admired, at a certain point a stiletto becomes unstable.  As a piece of math, heel stability can be reduced to about as complex a problem in mechanics as one cares to make it, the significant variables being the heel height, heel-tip area, shoe geometry, the wearer’s centre of mass, foot position, ground reaction force, and the stiffness of the shoe & ankle as an encapsulated system.  So, the “tipping / stability problem” can be conceptualized (even if individual human variations make it difficult to produce a simple model) and the basic idea is that when standing, ground exerts a “vertical ground-reaction force” through the foot; if the shoe is stable, resultant force falls within the “support polygon” (essentially the area defined by the heel and forefoot contact points).  As a general principle, a shoe’s sole being broad and long (thereby distributing forces over a large contact area), what is critical is the heel, a structure with a much smaller contact area.  Essentially, the remains stable as long as pressure doesn't move beyond the available support area.

Saint Laurent Billy leopard-print platform boots from the Pre-Fall 2018 collection.  The large contact area of the kitten heel and height of the sole means stability is achieved but the style does demand some practice because one's "walking technique would need slightly to be adjusted.  

However, the slenderness of the stiletto operates as a multiplier effect, the heel height changes the geometry of the entire foot, not merely the size of the heel.  As the heel’s height increases, the foot shifts into plantar flexion causing a movement of the upper body, meaning the centre of mass relative to the heel changes.  For any given individual, with enough data points quantified, it would be possible to produce an equation that would find a “point of optimal stability” before increasing a heel's height induces “tipping”.  Beyond the “tipping point”, a shoe ceases to be neutrally stable and achieving a static equilibrium isn't possible without muscular compensation or movement.  That can be modelled in software but the practical complication is a human is not a rigid object standing atop an always flat, unmoving surface, ankle, foot and leg continually make corrections, often so minute and instinctive they’re imperceptible to the owner of those body parts.  Thus, a stiletto can statically be geometrically stable yet dynamically unstable.  That’s why heel-tip diameter is so critical in achieving stability and to illustrate that, imagine an example demonstrating not all four-inch (100 mm) stilettos have the same intrinsic stability.  Consider two otherwise identical 100 mm stilettos, one with an 8-mm heel tip, one with 20-mm, the latter allowing a greater movement of the centre of pressure before the ground-reaction force reaches the edge of the heel.  Math nerds can no doubt run the numbers and what they’d find is the intriguing result that doubling the heel height roughly halves the angular tolerance, while doubling heel-tip radius roughly doubles it.  Women used to stilettos of course don’t need an equation to tell them a shoe with an extremely narrow, high heel has a very small stability envelope; the "heelprint" is a vital part of the "footprint".

Lindsay Lohan in Christian Louboutin Madame Butterfly black bow platform booties with six-inch (150 mm) stiletto heel.  What the elevated sole does is change the foot's angle, meaning a similar stability is attained as would be achieved with a 100 heel used in conjunction with a conventional sole.

Hence the frequent use of thicker soles and while opinion can be divided on the look, the elevated platform mechanically is interesting because it allows the heel to be higher while keeping the foot at a less extreme angle; it’s a fudge and not always admired by those for whom the acute angle of the wearer’s foot is one of the most alluring aspects of the stiletto’s aesthetic but if done well, it can be pleasing; it’s not the classic look but needs to be judged on its own terms.  An example of the math is one of differentiation: A 120-mm heel with a 30-mm platform doesn't behave like a 120-mm heel on a flat platform; because of the additional height in the sole, the effective pitch (and thus stability) will be something like a shoe with a 90-mm heel and conventional sole.  Engineers call this the TBA (true biomechanical angle) and in the practical mechanics of the human foot it's of significance because the foot safely can tolerate only a certain maximum angle of incline angle before the ankle undergoes structural plantarflexion failure (where the foot is extended so straight the ankle loses all lateral muscle control).  All this was once a rarely explored exercise in equation-making because shoe designers could tell by looking at design whether it would be practical to wear; they didn’t need the math.  Engineers building humanoid robots did however need to do the sums even though they could, if need be, emulate millions of years of evolution and make feet and ankles more accommodating.  As the recent Humanoid Robot Olympics (August 2026) in Beijing demonstrated, the billions of dollars invested under the watchful eye of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) must have resulted in many correct calculations because what was achieved was impressive (including breaking the world record for the men's 100 metre sprint).  While the CCP surely is interested more in robots for factories and the military than “making a better stiletto”, it’s not impossible a Chinese scientist might gain a Ig Nobel Prize by publishing a by-product of humanoid robot research: the equation for the “perfectly stable stiletto”, designers able to “plug-in” their angles and dimensions meaning the “stability threshold” ceases to be theoretical and becomes just another metric.

Flamingo's Exotic Dancer's boots in baby pink are an example of what can be done if one can cast adrift what's possible from the moorings of what's practical.  Available in calf (left), ankle (centre) and thigh (right) length in a variety of heel and sole heights, there's both a commonality of design elements and interchangeability of components, meaning a high degree of production-line rationalization, making the range economic to produce.  It should be noted "exotic dancer" is a vocational euphemism so the target market is limited but there may be some demand from non-professionals who can see the potential for "home use".

Style by necessity, Paris circa 1942: The chopine's methods of construction and use of materials staged a partial comeback in occupied France (1940-1944).  The sculptured heel both lent style and reduced weight.

Wartime shortages of leather forced French cobblers to turn to more readily available materials such as wood or cork when repairing or replacing heels and soles and the improvisation quickly became characteristic of French footwear during the Nazi Occupation.  Of course, being French, mere functionalism wasn’t enough and identifiable styles emerged, creating a unique “fashion language”; in other words, a fine example of wartime necessity becoming fashion.  Supplies of leather for civilian consumer goods greatly were restricted in many countries during wartime but in places subject to Nazi occupation the deprivations were most severe with the German war machine absorbing the bulk of what was available.  Consequently, French shoemakers increasingly substituted wood, cork, textile, straw and whatever artificial materials could be adapted or re-cycled with wooden clogs becoming a common sight.

French open-toed pumps, circa 1944, Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Constructed on a wooden sole & heel with a raffia upper, the shoe is embellished with a polka-dot ribbon, the only leather component two small cuts for the contact areas of the sole and heel, covered with re-cycled material.  Although a product of necessity, the raffia/word combo does sometimes appear still in modern catalogues and, of course, polka-dots never really go out of style.  So, material supply was a problem but if anything that may have encouraged designers to explore the possibilities offered by materials not previously exploited.  Rather than simply forming blocks of wood or cork into a simple wedge that would have “done the job”, the photographic record makes clear women were wearing raised soles (some quite substantial platforms) and sculptural heels, some as extravagant as was possible within the limitations imposed and augmenting this, ribbons provided considerable scope for decorative variation; in a quirk of the wartime economy, ribbons were for some time among the few materials not subject to rationing.  Cobblers proved imaginative and French commerce rose to the occasion, shoe shops developing a fashion vocabulary: semelles compensées (platform/wedge soles) and semelles articulées (articulated soles) among the coinings.

Semelles articulées, Paris, circa 1942.  The look was soon in vogue.

The articulated creations were ingenious attempts to make wooden soles flexible enough for walking and while it was not possible wholly to emulate the behavior of leather, there were partial solutions, one using thin wooden strips and in 1941 there was the more intricate Smelflex in which the articulation interacted with laminated or hinged sections of wood; with dark irony, the occupying authorities noted the system was derived from a German patent.  In an example of the way in which populations adapt to circumstances, the look became a recognised fashion phenomenon of Occupation-era France and designers made no attempt to disguise their creations as leather, the wooden soles and heels presented explicitly as a blend of “ingenuity and Parisian elegance.”  In an amusing footnote, the shortage of leather and metal did answer the many pre-war complaints about the trend for extremely high, thin talons-échasses (stilt heels) that much pleased the men as they gazed at their drawing boards in Parisian fashion houses but were far from comfortable to wear for much beyond a photo-shoot for a glossy magazine.

Mr Putin (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999, left) with Xi Jinping (b 1953; General Secretary of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and paramount leader of the PRC (People's Republic of China) since 2012, right) (far left), Carla Bruni-Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (b 1967, left) and her husband Nicolas Sarközy (b 1955; President of France 2007-2012, right) (centre left), Marco Rubio (b 1971; US secretary of state since 2025) (centre right) and how it's done (far right).

In politics, the chopine lives on in the form of "elevator shoes" that can "add" as much a four inches (100 mm) to an individual's height through the mechanism of the "built-up" internal heel.  Politicians are known to wear them including Mr Putin, Mr Sarközy and Mr Rubio, indeed the latter's use of the shoes was exploited by Donald Trump (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) who coined "little Marco" as his opponent's moniker during the 2016 Republican presidential debates although that use is in abeyance while they maintain their at least temporary friendship.  As the elevation increases it's obviously necessary also to add to the upper so (1) the trick is concealed and (2) the ankle retains some lateral support; that's why many elevator shoes are really "elevator boots".  Either way, they work best if trousers are cut accordingly; done well, worn by a well practiced wearer, they should be unobtrusive unless closely inspected.