Treadmill

Treadmill (pronounced tred-mil)

(1) A device for producing rotary motion by the weight of people or animals, treading on a succession of moving steps or a belt that forms a kind of continuous path, as around the periphery of a pair of horizontal cylinders (also called a treadwheel (archaic)).

(2) An exercise machine that allows the user to walk or run in place, usually on a continuous moving belt.

(3) Figuratively, a process or situation in which continued effort leads to or is required for remaining at a particular state or level without moving ahead; any monotonous, wearisome routine in which there is little or no satisfactory progress.

(4) By extension, anything repetitive and unending.

(5) In molecular biology, as treadmilling, the apparent locomotion of certain cellular filaments by adding protein subunits at one end, and removing them at the other, a phenomenon observed in many cellular cytoskeletal filaments.

1822: The construct was tread + mill.  Tread was from the Middle English tred, from treden (to tread), from the Old English tredan, from the Proto-West Germanic tredan, from the Proto-Germanic trudaną.  Mill was from the Middle English mylne & mille, from the Old English mylen, from the Proto-West Germanic mulīnu (mill), from the Late Latin molīna, molīnum & molīnus (mill), from the Latin verb molō (grind, mill), related to the Proto-Germanic muljaną (to crush, grind (related to the later English millstone).  Although speculative, some etymologists have suggested a relationship with the surname Milne, based on an associative link with the profession of some sort of milling.  The synonyms for the physical devices have variously included mill, stepper & everlasting staircase, and in the figurative sense, chore, drudgery, groove, labor, pace, rote, routine, rut, sweat, task, toil, travail & moil.  Treadmill is a noun, treadmilling is a noun & verb, treadmilled is a verb (the forms treadmillish & treadmillesque are both non-standard); the noun plural is plural treadmills.

Depiction of penal treadmill (the wheel).

Treadmills originated as a means of translating human energy into mechanical action to be applied to tasks such as moving water or air, grinding grain or making more efficient processes like the kneading of dough.  All such devices had since the mid sixteenth century tended to be known as treadwheels and the name treadmill wasn’t widely adopted until 1822 when a machine, invented by the son of a miller and used in English jails since 1818, was introduced into the US prison system, the intention in both places being to occupy the prisoners (on the basis of the theory that “the Devil makes work for idle hands”) and harness the energy produced for some useful purpose (although it’s unclear to what extent the devices were ever used a power source).  Designed ultimately to accommodate a dozen-odd men at a time, penal treadmills were rotating cylinders with steps built into the external surface, the prisoners essentially “walking uphill” for up to 4000 metres (14,000 feet) per day.  In prison slang the treadmills became known as “the wheel” and they were widely used in England until a decline in the late nineteenth century before use was discontinued in 1902; In the US, they were rare and extinct by mid-century, prison administrations preferring to apply the labor of inmates directly to some productive purpose.  The penal treadmill (the wheel) is best remembered as being one of the punishments to which Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was subjected during some of the two-year sentence he received after being convicted of gross indecency.

Lindsay Lohan on treadmill, Planet Fitness Super Bowl commercial, 2022.

The figurative senses allude to the way running on a treadmill requires continued effort and motion in order to remain in the same place and it’s used to refer either to one’s continued application to a specific task without making discernible progress towards the goal or the general idea of being “stuck in a rut”, leading a repetitive existence.  The idea for the familiar modern device dates from the early twentieth century and in medicine, sports and the military, variations emerged as required but by the 1970s, they became a standard piece of gym equipment and have become increasingly elaborate, linked to diagnostic and monitoring sensors and even the generation of electricity, some commercial operations granting users credits against the charges for use.

The term "euphemism treadmill" was coined by Harvard professor and psycholinguist Steven Pinker (b 1954) to describe the process by which euphemisms become as emotionally or politically loaded as the words supplanted.  It was the same idea as “euphemism cycle” which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor had mentioned as long ago as 1974 but more exact in that the process is lineal rather the cyclical; once cancelled, euphemisms seem forever doomed.  Linguists call this the move from euphemism to dysphemism and while it’s impossible to know how long this has existed as a social phenomenon, the implications differ greatly between (1) purely oral cultures, (2) one where written or other records exist and (3) the digital era.  It’s now not uncommon for words individuals used decades earlier (at a time when use was either common or at least tolerated) to be produced so an understanding of historical context matters.  The word retard for example was once thought neutral and inoffensive compared with the earlier terms (idiot, imbecile & moron) which had migrated from clinical use to become slurs used as general-purpose insults against anyone.  Retard suffered the same fate and it may be the currently acceptable terminology (intellectual disability, individual with an intellectual disability & intellectually and developmentally disabled) will undergo the same process although none roll of the tongue as easily as retard and IDD is not effortless so they may endure as neutral.  The solution, Pinker pointed out, was that people should be educated to "think differently" about the subject, substituting euphemisms when progress inevitably from sanitized to slurs just kicks the can down the road. 

Structurally though, the process can be seen as inevitable because it’s associative, a product of the interplay between a descriptor and that it denotes.  Gay (a word with a centuries-long history in sexual politics) emerged in the late twentieth century as the preferred term to replace all the slurs referring to homosexuals, recommended by many even as preferable to homosexual which, despite being a neutral descriptive formation, had come to be regarded by many as a slur or term of derision.  Of course, being associative, gay soon came also to be used as a slur (and as a synonym for strange, weird, un-cool or queer (in its more traditional sense)) though the negative application is now socially proscribed so gay in its modern sense may survive.  So, the change of a descriptor doesn’t necessarily change attitudes.  Just because gay became preferred to homosexual didn’t mean homophobia vanished although, interestingly, although there’s a record of the word gayphobia from as early as the 1990s, it never caught on.

Of interest too is the succession of terms which replaced the infamous N-word.  Negro (which probably already is N-word 2.0 except in historic references) was in the 1960s used in the sense of something purely descriptive by mainstream figures such as John Kennedy (1917-1963; US president 1961-1963) and civil rights activist Martin Luther King (1929-1968) but it too came to be regarded as slur and was replaced by black.  Negro did though have an interesting history.  When first used in print in English in the mid-sixteenth century it was nearly always capitalized, the uncapitalized use beginning to appear in the late eighteenth century and becoming the standard form in twentieth although there were activists who insisted an initial capital was justified as a mark of respect, despite this being etymologically dubious.  It’s now rare because it carries connotations of earlier discrimination although remains acceptable in context, such as when used by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The mater of capitalization had also affected the use of black, some activists claiming its should be capitalized whereas white should not and that too is a purely political argument given the word initially gained currency because it was thought white’s linguistic equivalent.  In many ways that was true but it was controversial because, as used, it wasn’t exactly synonymous with Negro which is why the more precise African American became popular in the 1980s, again for reasons of seeking social equivalence (Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans et al).  Black, in practice, is often used to refer to dark-skinned people whether or not of African descent and for this reason it became unfashionable.  Other sub-sets have also moved in their own direction, the Fox News audience now preferring “the 13%”.

The distinction between colored people and people of color puzzles some but is entirely due to the historical association of colored and colored people with racism both subtle and overt.  People of color is a construction without the baggage and to date has generally be used to assert identity or in a celebratory sense and technically it’s a synonym for non-white because all those not white can so self-classify.  However, language evolves and there’s no guarantee people of color won’t emerge as a slur.  So, it can be a linguistic minefield and while the general principle is that people should be described as they wish to be described (or described not at all), at least for now, people of color seems safe.

Lindsay Lohan on treadmill, Planet Fitness Super Bowl Commercial, 2022.

Invert

Invert (pronounced in-vurt)

(1) To turn upside down.

(2) To reverse in position, order, direction, or relationship.

(3) To turn or change to the opposite or contrary, as in nature, bearing, or effect; to turn something inward or back upon itself; to turn inside out.

(4) In chemistry, to a subject a substance to a reaction in which a starting material of one optical configuration forms a product of the opposite configuration; subjected to a reaction in which a starting material of one optical configuration forms a product of the opposite configuration.

(5) In music, to subject to musical inversion, the transposition between the upper voice part and the lower (to move the root note of a chord up or down an octave, resulting in a change in pitch).

(6) In phonetics, to articulate as a retroflex vowel; to turn the tip of the tongue up and back.

(7) In formal logic, to form the inverse of a categorical proposition.

(8) In psychology & psychiatry, a person who adopts the role of the opposite sex (historically used in clinical practice and law enforcement as an alternative word for homosexual.

(9) In civil engineering (particularly hydrology), the lower inner surface of a drain or sewer; the lowest point inside a pipe at a certain point.

(10) In Architecture, an arch that is concave upwards, especially one used in foundation work; the base of a tunnel on which the road or railway may be laid and used when construction is through unstable ground (and may be flat or form a continuous curve with the tunnel arch).

(11) A sometimes used synonym for divert in certain contexts; to convert to an incorrect use.

(12) In anatomy, to turn the foot inwards.

(13) In biochemistry, as invertasome, a nucleoprotein complex that causes inversion of a DNA sequence.

(14) In skateboarding, a technique in which the skater grabs the board and plants a hand on the coping so as to balance upside-down on the lip of a ramp.

(15) In zoology, an informal term for an invertebrate.

1525–1535: From the Middle French invertir, from the Latin invertere (to turn upside down or inside out), the construct being in- (in) + vertere (to turn), an inflection of vertō (I turn; I change; I reverse), from the Proto-Italic wertō, from the primitive Indo-European wértti from the root wer- (to turn; to bend).  It was cognate with the Sanskrit वर्तते (vártate (to turn)), the Sanskrit वर्तयति (vartáyati (to turn)), the Avestan varət, the Proto-Slavic vьrtěti, the Old Church Slavonic врьтѣти (vrĭtěti (to turn around)), the Polish wiercić (to drill; to fidget), the Russian вертеть (vertetʹ (to rotate)), the Proto-Baltic wert-, the Lithuanian ver̃sti, the Persian گرد‎ (gard (grow; turn)), the Proto-Germanic werþaną (to become), the Old English weorþan (to happen), the English worth and the Old Irish dofortad (to pour out).  The prefix -in is quirky because it can act either to negate or intensify.  The general rule is that when pre-pended to a noun or adjective, it reinforces the quality signified and when pre-pended to an adjective, it negates the meaning, the latter mostly in words borrowed from French.  The Latin prefix in- was from the Proto-Italic en-, from the primitive Indo-European n̥- (not), the zero-grade form of the negative particle ne (not) and was akin to ne-, nē & nī.  In Modern English it is from the Middle English in-, from Old English in- (in, into), from the Proto-Germanic in, from the primitive Indo-European en.  In the Classical Latin, invertere had the literal sense of "turn upside down, turn about; upset, reverse, transpose" and was used figuratively to suggest "pervert, corrupt, misrepresent" while when used of words it implied "being used ironically". Invert, invertibility & inverting are nouns, verbs & adjectives, inversion, inversion & inverter are nouns, inverted is a verb & adjective, invertible & inversive are adjectives and invertedly is an adverb; the noun plural is inverts.

Pittsburgh Police arrest card #25747, from 1932 which circulated on the internet after being published in Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots (2006) by Mark Michaelson, Steven Kasher & Bob Nickas.  Some thought the “Crime” noted was “Invert” (and thus suggesting the offence was homosexuality) or the word was “Invest” what was police slang for “investigate”.  There appears to have been a typo and the correct letter could be either “v” or “s” but it seems most likely he was being investigated as a suspected communist.

Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing (1840-1902) was a German psychiatrist remembered for his seminal work Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study) (1886).  Fortunately for all, for most purposes he shortened his name to Richard von Krafft-Ebing and was recognized as perhaps the first acknowledged expert on matters of sexual deviance, his publications either creating or formalizing the diagnostic categories which would remain influential for decades and some of his work remains recognizable in the literature even today.  One of his terms was "sexual inversion" which he used to describe homosexuality and it appeared in the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952.  Dr von Krafft-Ebing had used sexual inversion as a purely descriptive term for homosexuality, reflecting the academic tone he adopted in the hope those other than in the professions of medicine or law would be discouraged from turning the pages.  Very much seriously minded, he didn’t write to satisfy prurient interest.  He did however definitely regard sexual inversion as deviant and in this sense it carried over to the DSM where it was listed as a mental disorder although the operation of the linguistic treadmill meant that when the DSM-II was issued in 1968, the term was replaced with “homosexuality”.  From then on, the profession moved in the last quarter of the twentieth century as legislative change would unfold in the Western world, sometimes moving ahead of the law, sometimes following.  When the fourth edition of the DSM-II was published in 1974, the APA tested the waters by introducing a sort of diagnostic ambivalence about the matter and with the coming of the DSM-III (1980), homosexuality ceased to be considered a mental disorder and was treated as just another variation in the human condition.

Lindsay Lohan contemplating the subliminal messaging of The McDonalds big “M”, McDonald's drive-thru, Santa Monica, California, December 2011.  The car is a Porsche Panamera.

A contemporary of Dr von Krafft-Ebing was of course the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), someone who thought much about the centrality of sex to the human condition and, famously, the role of mothers in its formation.  One admirer (though by no means an uncritical one) of Dr Freud was the Russian-born, US-based clinical psychologist Louis Cheskin (1907-1981) who systematized a process of analysis which tracked the relationship between the aesthetic elements (ie the packaging) of products with customers’ perceptions of the content; this he called “sensation transference”.  Some of his best known work was in colors, working out how people generally understood the messages conveyed by different hues and he applied his findings with great success to product wrappings, corporate logos and even the interior color schemes for department stores and restaurants.  According to him, a restaurant which wants its customers to linger might use blue while a fast-food outlet which wants a high turnover of it chairs and tables should favor orange or yellow.

A practical application of Freud via Cheskin: Charlotte McKinney’s (b 1993) famous advertisement for Carl's Jr. Restaurants LLC, Super Bowl XLIX, 2015.

Already famous from his work with the Ford Motor Company, notably for his collaborations with the company’s general manager Lee Iacocca (1924–2019) during which he conducted the research which contributed to the marketing campaigns for the wildly successful Mustang (1964) and Lincoln’s Continental Mark III (1968), Cheskin was retained as a consultant by McDonald’s, then in the throes of one of their periodic changes to the corporate logo.  At the time, McDonald’s management wanted to refocus the business and one aspect of this was to change the stylized “M” (the golden arches), then thought dated.  In this case Louis Cheskin followed Freud and wrote one of his persuasive papers which convinced the executives the big “M” was a asset because, as well as the obvious association with the McDonald’s name, there was also a culinary cum anatomical link: If the “M” was inverted, it summoned in the mind the nurturing image of a mother’s breasts, “subconsciously making hungry customers feel comforted and at home”.  Whether the chain’s slogan at the time (Give mum a night off) was influential in the decision to retain the (uninverted) “M” isn’t clear.”

Evolution of the big “M” since 1942 (left) and inverted (right).  One can see what Louis Cheskin was getting at.

Whisk

Whisk (pronounced wisk or hwisk)

(1) To move with a rapid, sweeping stroke.

(2) To sweep (dust, crumbs etc, or a surface) with a whisk broom, brush, or the like.

(3) To draw, snatch or carry etc; a generalized term meaning to move or do something nimbly or rapidly (often as “whisked away”, “whisked off” etc).

(4) To whip (eggs, cream etc.) to a froth using a whisk or other beating device.

(5) The an act of whisking; a rapid, sweeping stroke; light, rapid movement.

(6) As whisk broom, a device topped with a small cluster of grass, straw, hair or the like, used especially for brushing.

(7) A kitchen utensil, in the form of a bunch of (usually metal wire, plastic strands or (in the Far East) bamboo) loops held together in a handle and used for beating, blending or whipping eggs, cream; making souffles etc.  Modern whisks can also be electro-mechanical and “non-stick” whisks use a Teflon coating.

(8) The by-product of something which has been “whisked away”.

(9) A special plane used by coopers for evening a barrel’s chimes (the curved, outermost edge or rim at the top and bottom ends of the barrel, typically wider and thicker than the rest of the staves (the vertical wooden planks that form the sides)).

(10) In fashion, a kind of cape forming part of a woman's dress (sometimes detachable).

(11) In some card games, the act of sweeping the cards off the table after a trick has been won.

1325–1375: From the Middle English & Scots wysk (rapid sweeping movement), from the earlier Scots verbs wisk & quhisk, from the Old English wiscian (to plait) & weoxian (to clean with brush), from a Scandinavian source comparable to the Old Norse & Norwegian visk (wisp), the Swedish viska besom & wisp (to whisk (off)) and the Danish visk & viske (to wipe, rub, sponge) and related to the Middle Dutch wisch, the Dutch wis, the Old High German wisken (to wipe) & wisc (wisp of hay), the German Wisch, the Latin virga (rod, switch) & viscus (entrails), the Czech vechet (a wisp of straw), the Lithuanian vizgéti (to tremble), the Czech vechet (wisp of straw) and the Sanskrit वेष्क (veṣka) (noose) all thought from the Proto-Germanic wiskaz & wiskō (bundle of hay, wisp), from the primitive Indo-European weys- or weis (to turn; to twist).  The un-etymological wh-, noted since the 1570s, probably developed because it was expressive of the sound typically generated by the act of “whisking” something; the same evolution was noted in whip and the onomatopoeic whack and whoosh.  The device used in preparing food (implement for beating eggs etc) was first documented as “a whisk” in the 1660s although cooks had presumably been using such things for many years.  The verb developed in the late fifteenth century, the transitive sense from the 1510s while the familiar meaning “to brush or sweep (something) lightly over a surface” dates from the 1620s.  Whisk & whisking are nouns & verbs and whisked is a verb; the noun plural is whisks.

Variations on a theme of whisk.

Whisk is (almost) wholly unrelated to whisky & whiskey.  Dating from 1715, whisky was a variant of usque,an abbreviation of usquebaugh, from the Irish uisce beatha (water of life) or the Scots Gaelic uisge-beatha (water of life), ultimately a translation of the Medieval Latin aqua vītae (water of life (originally an alchemical term for unrefined alcohol)).  The form whiskybae has been obsolete since the mid eighteenth century.  The Scots and Irish forms were from the Proto-Celtic udenskyos (water) + biwotos (life), from biwos(alive).  The Old Irish uisce (water) was from the primitive Indo-European ud-skio-, a suffixed form of the root wed- (water; wet); bethu (life), from the primitive Indo-European gwi-wo-tut-, a suffixed form of gwi-wo-, from the root gwei- (to live). The noun plurals are whiskies & whiskeys.  Although iskie bae had been known in the 1580s, it appears unrelated to usquebea (1706), the common form of which was uisge beatha which in 1715 became usquebaugh, then whiskeybaugh & whiskybae, the most familiar phonetic form of which evolved as “usky”, influencing the final spellings which remain whisky & whiskey.  Wisely, the Russians avoided the linguistic treadmill, the unchanging vodka freely translated as “little water”.  The exception was the “whisky”, a small carriage (technically a “light gig” to coach-builders) which was from the verb whisk, the idea being something in which one was “whisked quickly around” the lightweight carriages being faster than most.  Chefs also caution home cooks not to confuse “whisky butter” (A concoction made of whisky, butter & sugar) with “whisked butter” which is butter which has been whisked.

Lindsay Lohan Oreos

Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap (1998).

Whether it was already something widely practiced isn’t known but Lindsay Lohan is credited with introducing to the world the culinary novelty Oreos & peanut butter in The Parent Trap.  According to the director, it was added to the script “…for no reason other than it sounded weird and some cute kid would do it."  Like some other weirdnesses, the combination has a cult following and for those who enjoy peanut butter but suffer arachibutyrophobia (the morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of one’s mouth), Tastemade’s have provided a recipe for Lindsay Lohan-style Oreos with a preparation time (including whisking) of 2 hours.  They take 20 minutes to cook and in this mix there are 8 servings (scale ingredients up to increase the number of servings).

Ingredients

2 cups flour
1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (plus more for dusting)
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
1 ¼ cups unsalted butter (at room temperature)
¾ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Powdered sugar, for dusting

Filling Ingredients

½ cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
¼ cup unsweetened smooth peanut butter
1 ½ cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
A pinch of kosher salt (omit if using salted peanut butter)

Filling Instructions

(1) With a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, the butter & peanut butter until creamy.

(2) Gradually add powdered sugar and beat to combine, then beat in vanilla and salt.

Whisking the mix.

Instructions

(1) Preheat the oven to 325°F (160°C). Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

(2) In small bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa powder & salt.

(3) In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Mix in the vanilla extract. With the mixer running on low speed, add the flour mixture and beat until just combined (it should remain somewhat crumbly).

(4) Pour mixture onto a work surface and knead until it’s “all together”; wrap half in plastic wrap and place in refrigerator.

(5) Lightly dust surface and the top of the dough with a 1:1 mixture of cocoa powder and powdered sugar.

(6) Working swiftly and carefully, roll out dough to a ¼-½ inch (6-12 mm) thickness and cut out 2 inch (50 mm) rounds.  Transfer them to the baking sheets, 1 inch (25 mm) apart (using a small offset spatula helps with this step). Re-roll scraps and cut out more rounds, the repeat with remaining half of the dough.

(7) Bake cookies until the tops are no longer shiny ( about 20 minutes), then cool on pan for 5 minutes before transferring to wire rack completely to cool.

(8) To assemble, place half the cookies on a plate or work surface.

(9) Pipe a blob of filling (about 2 teaspoons) onto the tops of each of these cookies and then place another cookie on top, pressing slightly but not to the extent filled oozes from the sides.

(10) Refrigerate for a few minutes to allow the filling to firm up.  Store in an air-tight container in refrigerator.

The manufacturer embraced the idea of peanut butter Oreos and has released versions, both with the classic cookie and a peanut butter & jelly (jam) variation paired with its “golden wafers”.  As well as Lindsay Lohan’s contribution, Oreos have attracted the interest of mathematicians.  Nabisco in 1974 introduced the Double Stuf Oreo, the clear implication being a promise the variety contained twice crème filling supplied in the original.  However, a mathematician undertook the research and determined Double Stuf Oreos contained only 1.86 times the volume of filling of a standard Oreo.  Despite that, the company survived the scandal and the Double Stuf Oreo’s recipe wasn’t adjusted.

Scandalous in its own way was that an April 2022 research paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids wasn’t awarded that year’s Ig Nobel Prize for physics, the honor taken by Frank Fish, Zhi-Ming Yuan, Minglu Chen, Laibing Jia, Chunyan Ji & Atilla Incecik, for their admittedly ground-breaking (or perhaps water-breaking) work in explaining how ducklings manage to swim in formation.  More deserving surely were Crystal Owens, Max Fan, John Hart & Gareth McKinley who introduced to physics the discipline of Oreology (the construct being Oreo + (o)logy).  The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +‎ -logy.  The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century.  French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).  Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story).  In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie).  Within a few decades of the intrusion of modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology (1820); hatology (1837)).  In this evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al).  Oreology is the study of the flow and fracture of sandwich cookies and the research proved it is impossible to split the cream filling of an Oreo cookie down the middle.

An Oreo on a rheometer.

The core finding in Oreology was that the filling always adheres to one side of the wafer, no matter how quickly one or both cookies are twisted.  Using a rheometer (a laboratory instrument used to measure the way in which a viscous fluid (a liquid, suspension or slurry) flows in response to applied forces), it was determined creme distribution upon cookie separation by torsional rotation is not a function of rate of rotation, creme filling height level, or flavor, but was mostly determined by the pre-existing level of adhesion between the creme and each wafer.  The research also noted that were there changes to the composition of the filling (such as the inclusion of peanut butter) would influence the change from adhesive to cohesive failure and presumably the specifics of the peanut butter chosen (smooth, crunchy, extra-crunchy, un-salted (although the organic varieties should behave in a similar way to their mass-market equivalents)) would have some effect because the fluid dynamics would change.  The expected extent of the change would be appear to be slight but until further research is performed, this can’t be confirmed.  The 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will (as a webcast) happen on Thursday 14 September 2023, at 18:00 pm (US eastern time).

Spook

Spook (pronounced spook)

(1) In informal use, a ghost; a specter; an apparition; hobgoblin.

(2) A person whose appearance or conduct is thought “ghost-like”.

(3) In philosophy, a metaphysical manifestation; an artificial distinction or construct.

(4) In slang, a ghostwriter (one who writes text (typically columns, autobiography, memoir) published under the name of another,

(5) In slang, an eccentric person (now rare).

(6) In disparaging and offensive slang, term of contempt used of people of color (historically African-Americans).

(7) In slang, a spy; one engaged in espionage.

(8) In slang, a psychiatrist (originally US but now more widespread under the influence of pop culture.

(9) In the slang of blackjack, a player who engages in “hole carding” by attempting to glimpse the dealer's hole card when the dealer checks under an ace or a 10 to see if a blackjack is present.

(10) In southern African slang any pale or colorless alcoholic spirit (often as “spook & diesel”).

(11) To haunt; inhabit or appear in or to as a ghost or spectre.

(12) To frighten; to scare (often as “spooked”).

(13) To become frightened or scared (often as “spooked”); applied sometimes to animals, especially thoroughbred horses.

1801: A coining of US English, from the Dutch spook (ghost), from the Middle Dutch spooc & spoocke (spook, ghost), from an uncertain Germanic source (the earliest known link being the Middle Low German spōk (ghost), others including the Middle Low German spôk & spûk (apparition, ghost), the Middle High German gespük (a haunting), the German Spuk (ghost, apparition, hobgoblin), the Danish spøg (joke) & spøge (to haunt), the Norwegian spjok (ghost, specter) and the Swedish spok (scarecrow) & spöke (ghost).  The noun spook in the sense of “spectre, apparition, ghost” seems first to have appeared in a comical dialect poem, credited to “an old Dutch man in Albany” and printed in Vermont and Boston newspapers which credited it to Springer's Weekly Oracle in New London, Connecticut.  The regional diversity in language was then greater and evolutions sometimes simultaneous and the word also appeared in US English around 1830 as spuke & shpook, at first in the German-settled regions of Pennsylvania, via Pennsylvania Dutch Gschpuck & Schpuck, from the German Spuk.  Spook & spooking are nouns & verbs, spooker & spookery are nouns, spooktacular is a noun & adjective, spooktacularly is an adverb, spooked is a verb & adjective, spookery is a noun, spooky, spookiest & spookish are adjectives; the noun plural is spooks.

Spooked: Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed Me (2007).

A “spook show” (frightening display) was a term in use by 1880 and in the sense of a “popular exhibition of legerdemain, mentalism or staged necromancy” it was documented by 1910.  The spook house (abandoned house) was in use in the 1850s, the expression meaning “haunted house” emerging in the 1860s.  The meaning “superstition” had emerged by 1918, presumably an extension from the earlier sense of “a superstitious person”, documented around the turn of the century although it probably existed longer in oral use.  In the 1890s, “spookist” (described variously as “jocular” and “a less refined word” was used to refer to spiritualists and medium (and in those years there were a lot of them, their numbers spiking after World War I (1914-1918) when many wished to contact the dead.  Spooktacular (a pun on “spectacular” developed some time during World War II (1939- 1945).  The meaning “undercover agent” or “spy” dates from 1942 (inducing “spookhouse” (haunted house) to pick up the additional meaning “headquarters of an intelligence operation”, a place presided over by a “spookmaster” (“spymaster” the preferred modern term).  In the same era, in student slang a spook could be an unattractive girl or a quiet, diligent, introverted student (something like the modern “nerd” but without any sense of a focus of technology).

Senator Rebecca Ann Felton (1835–1930, left) and Senator Mitch McConnell (b 1942; US senator (Republican-Kentucky) since 1985; Senate Minority Leader since 2021).  The spooky resemblance between Senator Fulton (who in 1922 served for one day as a senator (Democratic-Georgia), appointed as a political manoeuvre) and Senator Mitch McConnell has led some to suggest he might be her reincarnated.  Some not so acquainted with history assumed the photograph of Senator Felton was Mitch McConnell in drag.

The sense of spook as “a black person” is listed by dictionaries of US slang as being documented by 1938 (the date of origin uncertain) and it seems to have begun in African-American (hep-cat) slang and it was not typically used with any sense of disparagement, nor was it thought in any way offensive word.   However, by 1945 it had picked up the derogatory racial sense of “black person”, defined specifically as “frightened negro” and it became a common slur in the post-war world, probably because that even by then the “N-word” was becoming less acceptable in polite society.  That was the “linguistic treadmill” in practice but spook had also deviated earlier: In 1939 it is attested as meaning “a white jazz musician” and is listed by some sources as a disparaging term for a white person by 1947.  Spook also developed a curious fork in military aviation although one probably unrelated to the informal pilot’s jargon of the 1930s, a “spook” a “novice pilot” of the type who “haunt the hangers”, hiring air-time and learning to fly for no obvious practical purpose other than the joy of flying.  During the early 1940s, the US Army Air Force (USAAF) began the recruitment of black athletes for training as pilots, conducted at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama; the group (1940-1948) was known as the Tuskegee Airmen and during World War II (1939-1945) they gained a fine reputation when deployed as combat units.  However, they also suffered prejudice and when first posted to Europe were often called the “Spookwaffe” (a play on Luftwaffe, the name of the German air force) although as happened decades later with the by then infamous N-word, some black pilots “re-claimed” the name and used it as a self-referential term of pride.

Left to right: Spook, the Bacterian ambassador, Benzino Napaloni, Diggaditchie of Bacteria (a parody of Benito Mussolini), Adenoid Hynkel (Adolf Hitler) and Field Marshall Herring (Hermann Göring).  The satirical film The Great Dictator (1940) was very much a personal project, Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) writing, producing & directing as well as staring as Adenoid Hynkel, Phooey of Tomainia.  The rather cadaverous looking Spook was the Bacterian ambassador.

Seventy years of spooks.

On 9 September 2019, the Royal Australian Mint released a 50 cent coin to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic spy agency (similiar in function to the UK's MI5 (Security Service)).  The issue was limited to 20,000 coins and each featured an encrypted code, similar in structure to those used by spooks during the Cold War.  At the time of the release, the Mint ran a competition inviting attempts to "solve the code", the prize the only proof commemorative coin in existence.  The competition was won by a fourteen year old who is apparently still at liberty, despite having proved him or herself a threat to national security.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) gave the word a few memorable phrases but one of the most evocative is a calque of the German spukhafte Fernwirkung (rendered by Einstein as spukhafte Fernwirkungen (spooky actions at a distance) in a letter of 3 March 1947 to the physicist Max Born (1882–1970)).  Einstein used “spooky actions at a distance” to refer to one of the most challenging ideas from quantum mechanics: that two particles instantaneously may interact over a distance and that distance could be that between different sides of the universe (or if one can’t relate to the universe having “sides”, separated by trillions of miles.  Known as “quantum entanglement”, it differs radically from some of the other (more abstract) senses in which everything in the universe is happening “at the same time”.

This aspect of quantum mechanics has for a century-odd been one of the most contested but the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists who designed experiments which tested the theories, their results contradicting Einstein and discovering the seriously weird phenomenon of quantum teleportation.  Quantum entanglement is a process in which two or more quantum particles are in some way connected so any change in one causes a simultaneous change in the other, even if they are separated by vast distances.  Indeed those distances could stretch even to infinity.  Einstein was one of many physicists not convinced and he didn’t like the implications, calling the idea “spooky action at a distance” and preferred to think the particles contained certain hidden variables which had already predetermined their states.  This was neat and avoided the need for any teleportation.  However, what the 2022 Nobel Laureates found that the fabric of the universe should be visualized as a sea of wave-like particles that affect each other instantaneously, distance as conventionally measured being irrelevant.  What that seems to mean is that nothing has to travel between the two particles (the speed of light therefore not a limitation) because the two are in the same place and that place is the universe.  The English physicist Sir Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) was surely correct when he remarked “…not only is the universe queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine.”

Hispanic & Latino

Hispanic (pronounced hi-span-ik)

(1) Relating to, characteristic of, or derived from Spain or Spanish-speaking countries (applied especially to Spanish-speaking Latin America.

(2) A person whose primary or native language is Spanish.

(3) As Hispanic-American (and the rarer Hispano-American), a citizen or resident of the United States who is of Spanish or Spanish-speaking Latin-American descent; often used to refer to non-Spanish speakers, except for technical use, it’s now often replaced by the more general Latino.

(4) The Iberian Peninsula, when under the control of Ancient Rome (now in historic reference only).

1575-1585: From the Latin hispānicus (Spanish), the adjectival derivation of the Classical Latin (and Ancient Greek) Hispania (Spain) and Hispanus/Hispanos (Spaniard), ultimately probably of Celtiberian origin.   In English the word is attested from the sixteenth century, spreading to American English) by the nineteenth.  The construct is hispania +‎ -icus.  Hispania was long thought derived from a Phoenician/Punic name ‘i shapan, (land of hyraxes), cognate to the Hebrew שָׁפָן‎ (shafan) (hyrax), supposedly applied because the Phoenicians thought the land's many rabbits resembled hyraxes.  This theory (or legend) was repeated by many Roman authors and may explain why Hispania is depicted with rabbits on some Roman coins.  Later scholars however have cast doubt on the story and suggested possible Phoenician etyma, the most supported is ‘i ṣapun ((is)land to the north).  The –icus suffix was added to a noun or verb to form an adjective.  It was from the i-stem + -cus, occurring in some original cases but later used freely.  It was cognate with the Ancient Greek -ικός (-ikós), the Proto-Germanic –igaz, the Old High German and Old English -ig, the Gothic -eigs, the Proto-Slavic –ьcь, the last having long fossilized into a nominal agent suffix  but originally probably also served adjectival functions.  The words Spain, Spanish, and Spaniard are of the same etymology as Hispanus.

Latino (pronounced luh-tee-noh (U) or la-tee-noh (non-U))

(1) Of or relating to people of Latin American origin or descent, especially those living in the United States.

(2) A person of Latin American origin or descent, especially one living in the United States.

1939: A creation of American English borrowed from Spanish adjective latino, in this context short for latinoamericano (Latin American) and thus an ellipsis of that form, from the Latin latīnus (pertaining to Latium, the region of Italy around Rome), possibly from the primitive Indo-European base stela- (to spread, to extend, hence flat country as opposed to mountainous).  Latino was first attested as a prefix from 1939 as a combining form of Latin, from ablative of the Latin latīnus.  It began to enter common use in the US in 1945-1950 as Latino referring to the places or people with Latinate or Romance language in common, the construct essentially a truncated merging of Latin + americano, the adjectival sense of Latino-American (al la African-American) first noted in 1974.  In noun form it should be gender-neutral but has always tended to male association; Latina is the feminine form and there’s long been the gender-neutral Latinx but a more interesting recent invention is latin@, the @ said to resemble both the feminine ending/element “a” and the masculine “o”, though the vagaries of pronunciation probably escape all but native Spanish speakers.

Changes in conventions of use

Latino and Hispanic, though laden with associative connotations from decades of use in the US, refer only to a person's origin and ancestry; a Latin(o/a/x/@) or Hispanic person can be any race or color, the former coming from anywhere in the defined geographical space, the latter the Spanish-speaking sub-set.  Among etymologists and political geographers, there has long been debate about whether the Caribbean can in whole or in part be considered as Latino although some are certainly Hispanic. Some suggest those from French Guiana should be accepted as Latino because French shares linguistic roots with Spanish and Portuguese which does seem a tenuous point, little different about whether people from English-speaking Belize and Guyana and Dutch-speaking Suriname truly fit under the category since their cultures and histories are so distinct.

Latin America, extends from the US-Mexico border to the southern Chilean islands, encompassing many countries, most of them predominately Spanish-speaking, a legacy of colonization.  In the US, the terms Hispanic and Latino (Latina for women, sometimes written as the gender-neutral Latinx or Latin@) were adopted in an attempt, initially for administrative purposes, loosely to group immigrants and their descendants.  The early post-war use of the terms, mostly by statisticians, epidemiologists and other academics does indicate there was adherence to the technical meanings but this dissipated as the words, especially Hispanic, entered mainstream media and public discourse.  By the mid-1950s, Hispanic tended to be used to reference everything and everyone south of the US-Mexico border, regardless of language spoken but since revisions to statistical categories during the Nixon administration (1969-1974) (the change first reflected in the 1980 Census form), the blanket term has tended towards the more correct Latino, the trend accelerating in recent years.  Despite this, some do still use the terms interchangeably.

Lindsay Lohan alighting from helicopter, São Paulo Airport, Brazil, April 2013.

Hispanic is generally accepted as a narrower term that includes people only from Spanish-speaking Latin America, including those countries and territories of the Caribbean or from Spain itself.  Thus, a Brazilian could be Latino and non-Hispanic, a Spaniard could be Hispanic and non-Latino, and a Colombian could adopt both terms.  Perhaps seeking to clarify things, the 2010 US Census helpfully listed both terms specifically mentioning the Spanish-speaking areas of the Caribbean but somewhat vaguely excluded non-Spanish speaking countries.  Whether pragmatically or for other reasons, when filling-out the form, many Latin American immigrants and descendants simply stated their countries of origin.  It may be the case Hispanic is on the linguistic treadmill and should thus be avoided.