Mach

Mach (pronounced mak, mahk or moch)

A number indicating the ratio of the speed of an object to the speed of sound in the medium through which the object is moving.  Also known as the Mach number; standard abbreviation is M.

1937: Named after Austrian physicist and philosopher Dr Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach (1838–1916) who devised the system of speed measurement based on the Mach number. He’s remembered also as the founder of logical positivism, asserting the validity of a scientific law is proved only after empirical testing.  The Mach number is important in the understanding of fluid dynamics and represents the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound (Mach 1.0).  It’s most applied to aircraft which are classified:

Subsonic      Mach <1.0
Transonic     Mach =1.0
Supersonic   Mach >1.0
Hypersonic   Mach >5.0

The speed of sound varies, reducing at higher altitudes and if aircraft exceed about 250 mph (400 km/h), air near the aircraft is disturbed, locally changing the density.  This compression, increasing with speed, alters the force on the aircraft and is of great importance to aerodynamicists and structural engineers.  The Mach number is within the science of fluid dynamics because air is fluid and, at hypersonic speeds, the energy of the airframe affects the chemical bonds which hold together the nitrogen and oxygen molecules of air, the heated atmosphere becoming an ionized plasma of gas.  That’s why spacecraft re-entering earth’s atmosphere need to be insulated from high temperatures.  Mach 1 was first exceeded by an aircraft in level flight in 1947 but man-made objects travelling at that speed had long-existed, even before modern ballistics.  The crack of a whip is actually the sonic boom caused by the tip exceeding Mach 1.

The 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1

Unlike Ford’s later Boss 302 and Boss 429 Mustangs, both powered by genuine racing engines, 1969’s outwardly similar Mustang Mach 1 was a less ambitious machine for street and strip and available with a variety of engines, one of which, thanks to a little Dearborn mendacity, was very competitive in the then highly popular sport of pro-stock drag-racing.  A moniker like Mach 1 is known in contract law as mere puffery, the notion being that in advertising it's possible to assert things which (1) can be neither proven nor disproven or (2), are so absurd no reasonable person would take them seriously.  In 1969 nobody took literally the idea a Mustang could break the speed of sound which was just as well because, at ground level, Mach 1 is 767 mph (1235 km/h) while the top speed of the most powerful Mustang Mach 1 was about 130 mph (210 km/h) or Mach 0.171.  Actually, most were built for drag-racing and geared for acceleration rather than top-end speed so few were capable of more than 115 mph (185 km/h) or Mach 0.151.

1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 with 428 (FE Series) CobraJet V8.

Hankering for a seven litre (427 cubic inch) version, Ford had added their 427 V8 (FE Series) to the Mustang’s option list for 1968 but none were built (although Shelby did one (or two depending on how such things are counted) and an uncertain number were fitted by dealers pursuant to customer request.  Probably now most remembered from service in the Ford GT40 and the AC Shelby Cobra, the 427 was a famously powerful and robust unit, a trophy winner on circuits from Daytona to Le Mans but was also cantankerous, noisy, an oil-burner and, perhaps most importantly for Ford, expensive to build because of its complex lubrication and cylinder width at the extreme limit of the block’s capacity.  It had also reached the end of its development so, until their new Boss 429 V8 (385 series) became available, Ford hotted-up the previously unremarkable 428 V8 (FE), used until then smoothly to propel big luxury cars like the Thunderbird and LTD.  Pleasingly for Ford, the 428 developed for the Mach 1 gained its increased output from bolt-on bits and pieces and was cheap to produce.

1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 with 351 (Windsor Series) V8.

Belying its dramatic appearance, the nose-heavy 428 Mach 1 was actually pretty bad at just about everything except the straight-line, quarter-mile sprints at which it excelled though Ford cheated to achieve even these 400 metre-long successes.  Upon its debut in 1968, the National Hot Rod Association (drag-racing’s sanctioning body) allocated vehicles to competition classes on the basis of manufacturers’ declared power-outputs.  Ford claimed the new 428 CobraJet generated 335 horsepower which was quite an understatement, something which allowed it to dominate that year’s national championships.  After that, the authorities cracked down and used their own assessments but by then the 428 CobraJet had done its job and such was the glow of the reflected glory that Ford sold over 70,000 Mach 1 Mustangs in 1969.  Not all were equipped with the big block 428 (a 390 cubic inch (6.5 litre) FE was also available which was about as heavy as the 428 but less powerful) and as road cars, those fitted with the small block (Windsor) 351 cubic inch (5.8 litre) V8 were probably more suited to what most people did most of the time.  Ford produced the Mustang Mach 1 between 1969 and 1978 although the 1974-1978 models are not well regarded, the name revived in 2003-2004 for a small production run and in 2021 the Mach 1 returned to the Mustang range.

Thrust SST, Nevada, 1997.

Almost fifty years to the day after US Air Force (USAF) pilot Chuck Yeager (1923-2020), flying a rocket-powered Bell X-1 aircraft, broke the sound barrier in Earth's atmosphere, RAF Pilot Andy Green (b 1962) set the absolute land speed record (LSR) driving the Thrust SST to a speed of 763.035 mph (1,227.985 km/h) over the stipulated flying mile (1.6 km).  It was the first time a land vehicle officially broke the sound barrier.  Powered by two afterburning Rolls-Royce Spey turbofan engines (the same type used by the British version of the F-4 Phantom II jet fighter) developing a net thrust of some 50,000 lb/f (223 kN) which equates to something in excess of 100,000 bhp (76 MW), the Thrust SST's record still stands.  Weighing a impressive 10 tons, at full throttle the fuel burn-rate was some 4.0 gallons (4.8 US gallons; 18 litres) per second or a tiny fraction of a mile per gallon.  Under the LSR rules mandated by the World Motor Sport Council, for a record officially to be sanctioned, there must be two runs in opposite directions within a certain elapsed time and the council confirmed the speed of sound was exceeded on both runs on 15 October 1997 at Black Rock Desert, Nevada (USA).

The only known photograph of the Anglo-French Concorde flying at Mach 2 (at 25,000 feet (7600 m) Mach 2 is 1,356 mph; 2,186 km/h; 1,185 knots), taken from a Royal Air Force (RAF) Panavia Tornado fighter while over the Irish Sea, April 1985.

Machboos

Lindsay Lohan in an interview published in the November 2022 edition of Cosmopolitan magazine revealed her favorite Middle-Eastern dish to cook was machboos, part of Arab cuisine throughout the region and prepared almost always with chicken with rice and vegetables.  A kind of blend of biryani and risotto, the rice is cooked in the spiced broth of the meat or chicken, melding the spices and ingredients.  Rice is a core component of Arabic cooking and interestingly, in Arabic it’s known as ruz but in the Khaleeji dialect it is aish (life) while in Egyptian Arabic, aish refers to bread, an indication of its centrality to the diet.  Like hummus, between nations (and even families) in the Middle East, there’s often disagreement about how machboos should be prepared, most of the arguments revolving around the bzar (the spice mix) but it’s certainly adaptable, able to be served with achaar (mango or lime pickle), daqoos (a spicy tomato sauce), or yoghurt with chopped cucumber and mint.

Ingredients (for serving 4-6) (from Table Tales: Exploring Culinary Diversity in Abu Dhabi (Rizzoli)).

6 tablespoons plain yogurt, divided
2 tablespoons Emirati bzar spice mix, divided
1½ kg chicken, cut into pieces
500 g basmati rice
80 mls vegetable oil
5 cardamom pods, crushed
1 cinnamon stick
10 black peppercorns
2 whole lumi, cracked
450 grams onions, chopped
1 tablespoon ginger, crushed
1 tablespoon garlic, crushed
4 small green chilies, halved
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon coriander powder
285 grams canned tomatoes, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
Cooking oil as required
450 grams potatoes, peeled and cubed
Handful of fresh coriander, chopped

Garnish

3 tablespoons cooking oil
2 onions, thinly sliced
85 grams raw cashews
55 grams raisins
Fresh coriander, chopped

Instructions

(1) Combine 4 tablespoons of yoghurt with 1 tablespoon of the bzar in a large bowl.  Coat the chicken and then marinade for 1 hour or longer.  Rinse the rice and soak in enough water to cover for 1 hour; drain.

(2) Heat the oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the cardamom pods, cinnamon stick, peppercorns and lumi and stir for 2 minutes.  Add the onions and sauté until golden.  Add ginger, garlic, and green chilies and stir for 2 minutes.

(3) Add the chicken and marinade and then cook for a few minutes on each side.  Sprinkle in the turmeric, the remaining bzar, cumin, and the coriander powder.

(4) Add the tomatoes, salt, and 2 cups of water; bring to a boil.  Cover, lower the heat, and simmer for 30 to 45 minutes, until the chicken is done.  Transfer the chicken to a roasting pan.

(5) Remove the cinnamon stick and lumi from the stock and discard.  Add the potatoes and fresh coriander and boil until the potatoes are just tender.  Adjust the stock to get a one-to-one ratio with the rice.  Stir in the remaining yoghurt until dissolved and then add the rice.  Seal the Dutch oven with aluminum foil, cover, and cook over low heat for 30 minutes until the rice is done.

(6) Turn on the oven broiler.  Brush the chicken with some oil and broil until golden.  Serve the rice on a platter with the chicken pieces on top.  Garnish with sautéed onions, cashews, raisins, and fresh coriander.

Garnish Instructions

(7) Place a large skillet over medium-high heat and add the oil and onions; sauté until they are dark brown, but not burnt.  Remove the onions with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels.  Sauté the cashews in the same oil until golden brown.  Finally, add the raisins during the last few minutes to complete.

Concord & Concorde

Concord or Concorde (pronounced kon-kawrd)

(1) Agreement between persons, groups, nations, etc.; concurrence in attitudes, feelings, etc; unanimity; accord; agreement between things; mutual fitness; harmony.

(2) In formal grammar, a technical rule about the agreement of words with one another (case, gender, number or person).

(3) A treaty; compact; covenant.

(4) In music, a stable, harmonious combination of tones; a chord requiring no resolution.

(5) As concordat, under Roman-Catholic canon law, a convention between the Holy See and a sovereign state that defines the relationship between the Church and the state in matters that concern both.

(6) In law, an agreement between the parties regarding land title in reference to the manner in which it should pass, being an acknowledgment that the land in question belonged to the complainant (obsolete).

(7) A popular name for locality, commercial operations and products such as ships, cars etc.

(8) In horticulture, a variety of sweet American grape, named circa 1853 after Concord, Massachusetts, where the variety was developed.

1250-1300: From the Middle English and twelfth century Old French concorde (harmony, agreement, treaty) & concorder, from the Latin concordare & concordia, (harmonious), from concors (of the same mine; being in agreement with) (genitive concordis (of the same mind, literally “hearts together”)).  The construct was an assimilated form of com (con-) (with; together) + cor (genitive cordis (heart) from the primitive Indo-European root kerd (heart)).  The "a compact or agreement" in the sense of something formal (usually in writing) dates from the late fifteenth century, an extension of use from the late fourteenth century transitive verb which carried the sense "reconcile, bring into harmony".  From circa 1400 it had been understood to mean "agree, cooperate, thus a transfer of sense from the Old French & Latin forms.  Concorde was the French spelling which eventually was adopted also by the British for the supersonic airliner after some years of linguistic squabble.  Concord is a noun & verb, concordance & concordat are nouns, concorded & concording are verbs and concordial & concordant are adjectives; the noun plural is concords.

The Concorde and other SSTs

Promotional rendering of Concorde in British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) livery.  BOAC was the UK's national carrier between 1940-1974 when merged with British European Airways (BEA) to form British Airways (BA).

Concorde was an Anglo-French supersonic airliner that first flew in 1969 and operated commercially between 1976-2003.  It had a maximum speed over twice the speed of sound (Mach 2.04; 1,354 mph (2,180 km/h)) and seated 92-128 passengers.  Man breaking the sound barrier actually wasn’t modern; the cracking of a whip, known for thousands of years, is the tip passing through the sound barrier and engineers were well aware of the problems caused by propellers travelling that fast but it wasn’t until 1947 that a manned aircraft exceeded Mach 1 in controlled flight (although it had been achieved in deep dives though not without structural damage).  The military were of course immediately interested but so were those who built commercial airliners, intrigued at the notion of transporting passengers at supersonic speed, effectively shrinking the planet.  By the late 1950s, still recovering from the damage and costs of two world wars, France and the UK were never going to be in a position to be major players in the space-race which would play-out between the US and USSR but civil aviation did offer possibilities for both nations to return to the forefront of the industry.  France, in the early days of flight had been the preeminent power (a legacy of that being words like fuselage and aileron) and UK almost gained an early lead in passenger jets but the debacle of the de Havilland Comet (1949) had seen the Boeing 707 (1957) assume dominance.  The supersonic race was thought to be the next horizon and the UK’s Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC) was in 1956 commissioned with the development of a Supersonic Transport (SST) for commercial use.

The committee’s early research soon established it was going to be an expensive undertaking so the UK sought partners; the US declined but in 1962 the UK and France signed the Anglo-French Concorde agreement, a framework for cooperation in the building of the one SST.  The choice of name actually came some months after the engineering concord was signed, the manufacturers submitting to the UK cabinet the names Concord and Concorde, it being thought desirable to have something which sounded and meant the same in both languages (the French had already agreed it shouldn’t be called the Super-Caravelle the project name for a smaller SST on which some work had been done in 1960).  The other suggestions put to cabinet were Alliance or Europa.  In the cabinet discussions in London, Alliance was thought to be "too military" and Europa offended those Tories who still hankered for the "splendid isolation" which had been the British view on European matters in the previous century.  Even in the nineteenth century age of Pax Britannica splendid isolation had been somewhat illusory but in the Tory Party the words still exerted a powerful pull.  

Concorde 001 roll-out, Toulouse Blagnac airport, 11 December 1967.

There is some dispute about whether the cabinet ever formally agreed to use the French spelling but, like much in English-French relations over the centuries, the entente proved not always cordial and the name was officially changed to Concord by UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (later First Earl Stockton, 1894–1986; UK prime-minister 1957-1963) in response to him feeling slighted by Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970; President of France 1958-1969) when Le President vetoed the UK’s application to join the European Economic Community (the EEC which evolved into the present Day EU of which the UK was a member between 1973-2020).  However, the Labour party won office in the 1964 general election and by the time of the roll-out in Toulouse in 1967, the UK’s Minister for Technology, Tony Benn (Anthony Wedgwood Benn, 1925–2014, formerly the second Viscount Stansgate) announced he was changing the spelling back to Concorde.  There were not many eurosceptics in the (old) Labour Party back then.

Concorde taking off, 1973 Paris Air Show, the doomed Tupolev Tu-144 is in the foreground.

The engineering challenges were overcome and in 1969, some months before the moon landing, Concorde made its maiden flight and, in 1973, a successful demonstration flight was performed at the same Paris air show at which its Soviet competitor Tupolev Tu-144 crashed.  Impressed, more than a dozen airlines placed orders but within months of the Paris show, the first oil shock hit and the world entered a severe recession; the long post-war boom was over.  A quadrupling in the oil price was quite a blow for a machine which burned 20% more fuel per mile than a Boeing 747 yet typically carried only a hundred passengers whereas the Jumbo could be configured for between four and five hundred.  That might still have been viable had have oil prices remained low and a mass-market existed of people willing to pay a premium but with jet fuel suddenly expensive and the world in recession, doubts existed and most orders were immediately cancelled.

Eventually, only twenty were built, operated only by BOAC (BEA/BA) and Air France, early hopes of mass-production never materialized; while orders were taken for over a hundred with dozens more optioned, the contracts were soon cancelled.  By 1976 only four nations remained as prospective buyers: Britain, France, China, and Iran; the latter two never took up their orders and by the time Concorde entered service, the US had cancelled their supersonic project and the Soviet programme was soon to follow.  Even without the oil shocks of the 1970s and the more compelling economics of wide-bodied airliners like the Boeing 747, there were problems, the noise of the sonic boom as the speed of sound was exceeded meaning it was impossible to secure agreement for it to operate over land at supersonic speed.  Accordingly, most of its time was spent overflying the Atlantic and Pacific and BA and Air France sometimes made profit from Concorde only because the British and French governments wrote off the development costs.  Concorde was an extraordinary technical achievement but existed only because the post-war years in the UK and France were characterised by national projects undertaken by nationalised industries.  Under orthodox modern (post Reagan cum Thatcher) economics, such a thing could never happen. 

On 25 July 2000, Air France Flight 4590, bound for New York, crashed on take-off out of Paris, killing all one-hundred and nine souls on board and four on the ground. It was the only fatal accident involving Concorde, the cause determined to be debris on the runway which entered an engine, causing catastrophic damage.  In April 2003, both Air France and British Airways announced that they would retire Concorde later that year citing low passenger numbers following the crash, the slump in air travel following the 9/11 attacks and rising maintenance costs.

Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap (1998)

Fictional works are usually constructed cognizant of physical reality and technological innovations have always influenced what's possible in plot-lines.  The cell phone for example offered many possibilities but also rendered some situations either impossible or improbable (although Hollywood has sometimes found either of those no obstacle in a screenplay).  The retirement of Concorde also had to be noted.  Not only had it long been used as a symbol of wealth but there was also the speed so plot-lines which included the relativities of the duration of commercial supersonic versus subsonic trans-Atlantic travel were suddenly no loner possible.  Lindsay Lohan's line in The Parent Trap (1998) since 2003 (and for the foreseeable future) is a relic of the Concorde era.     

Tupolev Tu-144 (NATO reporting name: Charger).

The Tu-144 was the USSR’s SST and it was the first to fly, its maiden flight in 1968 some months before Concorde and sixteen were built.  It was also usually ahead of the Anglo-French development, attaining supersonic speed twelve weeks earlier and entering commercial service in 1975 but safety and reliability concerns doomed the project and its reputation never recovered from the 1973 crash.  The Soviet carrier Aeroflot introduced a regular Moscow-Almaty service but only a few dozen flights were ever completed, the Tu-144 withdrawn after a second crash in 1978 after which it was used only for cargo until 1983 when the remaining fleet was grounded.  It was later used to train Soviet cosmonauts and had a curious post-cold war career when chartered by NASA for high-altitude research.  The final flight was in 1999.

Boeing 2707.

While perfecting supersonic military aircraft during the early 1950s, Americans had explored the idea of SSTs as passenger aircraft and had concluded that while it was technically possible, in economic terms such a thing could never be made to work and that four-engined jets like the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC8 were the future of commercial aviation.  However, the announcement of the development of Concorde and the Soviet SST stirred the Kennedy White House into funding what was essentially a vanity project proving the technical superiority of US science and engineering.  Boeing won the competition to design an SST and, despite also working on the 747 and the space programme, it gained a high priority and the 2707 was projected to be the biggest, fastest and most advanced of all the SSTs, seating up to three-hundred, cruising at Mach 3 and configured with a swing-wing.  Cost, complexity and weight doomed that last feature and the design was revised to use a conventional delta shape.  But, however advanced US engineering and science might have been, US accountancy was better still and what was clearly an financially unviable programme was in 1971 cancelled even before the two prototypes had been completed.

Lockheed L-2000.

Lockheed also entered the government-funded competition to design a US SST.  Similar to the Boeing concept in size, speed and duration, it eschewed the swing-wing because, despite the aerodynamic advantages, the engineers concluded what Boeing would eventually admit: that the weight, cost and complexity acceptable in military airframes, couldn’t be justified in a civilian aircraft.  As the military-industrial complex well knew, the Pentagon was always more sanguine about spending other people's money (OPM) than those people were about parting with their own.  Lockheed instead used a slightly different compromise: the compound delta.  After the competition, Boeing and Lockheed were both selected to continue to the prototype stage but in 1966 Boeing’s swing-wing design was preferred because its performance was in most aspects superior and it was quieter; that it was going to be more expensive to produce wasn’t enough to sway the government, things being different in the 1960s.  Reality finally bit in 1971.

Depiction of a Boom Overture.

In mid-2021 US airline United announced plans to acquire a fleet of fifteen new supersonic airliners which they expected to be in service by 2029.  It wasn’t clear from the press release what was the most ambitious aspect of the programme: (1) that the Colorado company called Boom, which has yet to achieve supersonic flight, would be able to produce even one machine by 2029, (2) that the aircraft can be delivered close to the budgeted US$200 million unit cost, (3) that what United describe as “improvements in aircraft design since Concorde” will reduce and mitigate the sonic boom, (4) that it won’t be “any louder than other modern passenger jets while taking off, flying over land and landing”, (5) that sufficient passengers will be prepared to pay a premium to fly at Mach 1.7 in a new and unproven airframe built by a company with no record in the industry or that (6) Greta Thunberg (b 2003) will believe Boom which says Overture will operate as a "net-zero carbon aircraft".

Unlikely to approve: Greta Thunberg.

The suggestion is the Overture will run on "posh biodiesel" made from anything from waste cooking fat to specially grown high-energy crops although whether this industry can by 2029 be scaled-up to produce what’s required to service enough of the aviation industry to make either project viable isn’t clear.  Still, if not, Boom claims "power-to-liquid" processes by which renewable energy such as solar or wind power is used to produce liquid fuel will make up any shortfall.  Boom does seem a heroic operation: they expect the Overture to be profitable for airlines even if tickets are sold for the same price as a standard business-class ticket.  One way or another, the path the Boom Overture follows over the next few years is going to become a standard case-study in university departments although whether that's in marketing, engineering or accountancy might depend matters beyond Boom's control.

Jumbo

Jumbo (pronounced juhm-boh)

(1) An informal descriptor for a very large person, animal, or thing, applied especially to an unusually large version of something usually smaller.

(2) In commerce, a term (sometimes interpolated into a brand) used to suggest a large version of something.

(3) A general term for wide-bodied passenger airplanes although historically most associated with the Boeing 747 (1969).

(4) In (mostly in the US) nautical use, a forestaysail having a boom (jumbo boom) along its foot, used especially on schooners; a sail used in place of a course on a square-rigged ship, having the form of an isosceles triangle set apex downward.

(5) In engineering & mining, as drilling jumbo, a platform-mounted machine used to drill rock.

(6) As mumbo-jumbo, a historic term used of paganism, originally referring to deities or other supernatural beings worshipped some West African peoples (usually in the form of an idol representing such a being). It was later adopted to describe any speech which was either technical jargon understood only by specialists or anything genuinely meaningless or incomprehensible.

1800–1810: Of uncertain origin but there is evidence the first use of the word by English-speakers was as an imperfect echoic of what was heard by European explorers or colonists in Africa.  It entered popular use after Jumbo, an East African elephant (1860-1885) was in 1882 exhibited by PT Barnum (1810-1891) of the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus.  The name may be derived from either the Swahili jambo (matter, thing) or jumbe (chief, headman) although some sources cite the Sanskrit जम्बु (jambū or jambul) (rose apple).  Most convincing comes from the anthropological record of west-Africa where jumbo was used to describe a "clumsy, unwieldy fellow" (1823), itself possibly from a word for elephant in a West African language, perhaps the Kongo nzamba.  As a modifier (formally & informally) to impart the sense of largeness, jumbo is appended as required: jumbo jet (and jumbojet), jumbo mortgage, jumbomania, jumbo slice, superjumbo, jumbo sandwich, jumbo cigar, jumbo burger, jumbo cola et al.  Walt Disney’s musical cartoon Dumbo (1941) influenced the adoption of dumbo to mean “someone not intelligent”, the use documented by 1951 but the oral use probably pre-dates that.  Jumbo is a noun & adjective, jumboization (and jumboisation) are nouns, jumboize (and jumboise) are verbs; the noun plural is jumbos.

PT Barnum's publicity materials were created prior to "truth in advertising" laws.

The original Jumbo (the elephant) was an exhibit in London Zoo, the institution having purchased the beast from French explorers who were said to have captured it as a calf in Abyssinia in 1861.  Barnum purchased Jumbo in 1862 (much to the displeasure of the English) and immediately began in the US one of his typically extravagant advertising campaigns which emphasised both what a coup he’d achieved by wresting it from the British Empire and what an extraordinary size the creature was.  His circus toured the country with Jumbo a star attraction until in September 1885 it was killed near Saint Thomas, Ontario when struck by a freight train.

Perhaps curiously, the noun mumbo-jumbo seems not to have fallen from the linguistic treadmill, despite its origin and early colonial associations.  It entered English in 1738, based on an account of an incident in 1732 which occurred near Sami (in modern-day Gambia).  In the publications of the time, the Mumbo Jumbo was described as a costume “idol” used by men to frighten others and as coercive tool to regulate behaviour; it was used especially against women to induce their submission.  In hours of daylight, the costume was mounted on a stick placed at the outskirts of the village while by night a man would dress in it, visiting the homes of women or others deemed a problem, disputes “settled” and punishments bestowed.  Other spellings noted in the eighteenth century include Munbo Jumbo, Numbo Jumbo and Mumbo Chumbo and the original account ascribed the practice to Mandingo but linguistic anthropologists have never been able to trace an obvious Mandingo term which might be the source, the suggestions including mama dyambo (pompom-wearing ancestor) and mamagyombo (magician who exorcises troubled ancestor spirits).  It may have been borrowed from another Niger-Congo language and the European colonial transcriptions were the French moumbo-dioumbo & moumbo-ioumbo and the Portuguese mumban-jumban.  On the basis of the colonial-era accounts, the tradition (of uncertain age) must have been widespread with all settlements in the region was said to have a Mumbo Jumbo and by the mid-nineteenth century it had in English become a byword for a “superstitious object of senseless worship”, evolving by the 1890s to describe any speech which was either technical jargon understood only by specialists or anything genuinely meaningless or incomprehensible, use presumably reinforced and encouraged by some perception of association with “mumble”.  In that sense, it somewhat differed from the pseudo-Latin “hocus-pocus” which described words or incantations wholly fake and intended to deceive.  Despite the history, mumbo jumbo seems still acceptable in English and why it hasn’t yet been condemned as racist or cultural appropriation isn’t clear.

Jambo!  Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls.

Much has changed in the twenty-first century and it’s doubtful all of “You got your freshmen, ROTC Guys, preps, JV jocks, Asian nerds, cool Asians, varsity jocks, unfriendly Black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don't eat anything, desperate wannabes, burnouts, sexually active band geeks, the greatest people you will ever meet, and the worst.  Beware of The Plastics.” would appear were the Mean Girls (2004) script to be written today, mere mention of ethnicity now often deconstructed as some level of racism.  Cady (the white protagonist raised (somewhere) in Africa) uses the Swahili greeting "jambo" (from -amba (to say) which linguistic anthropologists say was probably derived from the Proto-Bantu (there’s a similar term in Zulu)) to introduce herself to a table of “Unfriendly Black Hotties”.  The script never makes explicit just where in Africa Cady may have spent her youth but this, along with another couple of cultural and linguistic clues do hint it may have been among sub-Saharan ethnic groups although whether that was intentional isn’t documented.  However, “jambo” is one of several similar words used on the continent linked both to the later evolution in English of jumbo and mumbo jumbo and it may be jumbo was either a direct phonetic spelling recorded by Europeans or just a mis-heard rendition.

The prototype of first jumbojet (Boeing 747) on show on the forecourt at the Boeing’s factory in Seattle, Washington, 1968 (left), at the Paris Air Show in 1969 with a Concorde in the background (centre) and the last 747 (a freighter), also on the Boeing forecourt, November 2022.

Jumbo was a big elephant and the word was soon used to describe large examples of other things.  In commercial use, the first use seems to have been Jumbo Cigars, sold in 1886.  The best known use in the modern age is probably jumbo-jet (also appears jumbojet), probably first used by Boeing engineers circa 1960 although the first documented reference is from 1964.  It replaced the earlier Boeing engineering-slang jumbo-707, probably because a three syllable phrase is always likely to prevail over one with seven.  In the narrow technical sense, jumbo-jet came to refer to all wide-bodied (ie multi-aisled) passenger airplanes built since the late 1960s, but, being first, it tends most to be associated with Boeing’s 747.  Thus, when in the early 2000s, the even larger Airbus 380 took to the skies, the term superjumbo (and super-jumbo) was used by some, the airframe’s point of visual differentiation from the 747 being the Boeing’s famous hump being extended along the fuselage to the tail section, creating a double-decker.  The term (which had earlier been used of the stretched 747s) however never quite caught on in the same way because the 380 was unique and a class of superjumbos thus never emerged to demand a descriptive generic term.  As it was, economics conspired against the A380 and the circumstances in which it flew were very different to those envisaged in the late 1980s when first the project was conceived for not only had advances in engineering and materials allowed a new generation of twin-jet jumbos to operate at a much lower passenger cost per mile but airports, their systems and physical infrastructure optimized around the 747’s capacity, proved unwilling to make the changes needed to accommodate higher peak demand.  After little more than a dozen years of assembly, Airbus in 2021 ceased production of A380 after some 250 had been built.

One of NASA’s Boeing 747s, adapted as a heavy-lift platform to “piggy-back” the US Space Shuttles (left).  The Soviet Union (and briefly the Russians) used the one-off Antonov An-225 Мрія (Mriya (dream or inspiration)) to piggy-back its  Буран (Buran (Snowstorm or Blizzard)), the USSR's space shuttle (right).  The An-225, with the largest wingspan and heaviest take-off weight of any aircraft ever to enter operational service, was destroyed in the early days of the Russian invasion (the 2022 "Special Military Operation”) of Ukraine.

The 747 proved more enduring a successful and was a machine which was truly revolutionary in its social consequences.  Just as Boeing’s earlier 707 (1958) had been instrumental in making trans-Continental air travel a viable and reliable means of transport for a small number of people, the economics of scale made possible by the 747 meant such trips became accessible for many more.  Between 1968 and 2022, almost 1600 were built in a variety of lengths and configurations and it was for decades the faithful workhorse of many airlines, but it ultimately fell victim to the same financial squeeze that doomed the A380, twin-engined aircraft able to carry almost as many passengers at a significantly lower cost.  By 2016 it was clear demand had dwindled and most of the production thereafter was for freight operators still attracted by the 747’s unique combination of capacity, reliability and range.  As passenger 747s progressively are retired, many will be converted to freighters, an relatively simple operation envisaged even during the design process in the 1960s.  Many flyers however noted the 747’s demise with some regret.  None denied the advantages of airframes built from composite materials nor the enhanced economy of the twin-engine configuration but for those who flew for hours above 30,000 feet (9000+ m), knowing one was in a metal cylinder with the redundancy of four engines imparted great confidence.

Lindsay’s Olives in sizes to suit.  Black olive martinis are a cult.

In commercial use, obvious comparative terms like “small”. “medium” & “large” are commonly used and “extra” is often appended to “small” & “large”.  In the sizing of clothing, “extra” is used in multiples, labelled usually as XL XXL XXXL etc to indicate ascending graduations of large (L).  With the “Extra Large”, this is on the model of the DD, DDD, FF etc bra cup descriptors used by some manufacturers although the use varies, a DD sometimes the same as an E and sometimes something between a D & E.  However, at the other end of the size range, the multiple letters work the other way, an AAA cup smaller than an AA which is smaller than an A.  Linguistically, that does make sense because with bras the multiple letters are synonymous with “extra”, the AA being extra small and the DD extra large.  The alpha-numeric nomenclature used (30A, 32D etc) is maintained presumably because something like a "Jumbo" bra might lack sales appeal.  Where manufactures want to use descriptors which indicate a larger size beyond something like extra large, they’ll trawl the alphabet, thus product packaging described as “jumbo”, “super” “mega”, colossal” “super”, “maxi” etc.  Unlike S-M-L, there’s no defined ascendant order so it might be that where one manufacturer’s jumbo is larger than their mega while with some it may be the other way round.

Jumbo spark plugs.  This was actually advertising the strength of the spark rather than the plug, some of the Jumbo line of plugs physically smaller than than some offered by the competition.  The need for higher-performance spark plugs arose as higher octane gas (petrol) permitted compression ratios to rise.

Concordat

Concordat (pronounced kon-kawr-dat)

(1) An agreement or compact, especially an official one Agreement between things; mutual fitness; harmony.

(2) A formal agreement between two parties, especially between a church and a state.

(3) In Roman Catholic canon law, a pact, treaty or agreement between the Holy See and a secular government regarding the regulation of church matters.  In early use it was sometimes a personal agreement between pope and sovereign.

1610–1620: From the the sixteenth century French conciordat, replacing concordate from the Medieval Latin concordātum (something agreed), a noun use of the Latin concordatum, neuter of concordātus, past participle of concordāre (to be in agreement; to be of one mind), from concors (genitive concordis) (of one mind)  from concors (genitive concordis) (of one mind).  The original definition in Roman Catholic canon law was "an agreement between Church and state on a mutual matter".  Concordat is a noun, the noun plural is concordats and concordatory is an adjective.  Concord dates from 1250-1300, from the Middle English and Old French concorde from the Latin concordia, (harmonious), genitive concordis (of the same mind, literally “hearts together”).  Concordat is a noun and concordant an adjective; the noun plural is concordats.

The Duce, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945; Prime Minister of Italy 1922-1943) and Cardinal Pietro Gasparri (1852–1934; Cardinal Secretary of State 1914-1930) signing the Lateran Concordat in 1929.

The concordat, a formal agreement between the Holy See and a sovereign state, dates from a time when the relationship between the Church and sovereign entities was different than what now exists.  Indeed, the dynamics of the relationships have changed much over the centuries but, at any given moment, concordats have always been practical application of Church-state relations and, like all politics, were an expression of the art of the possible, a concordat not necessarily what a pope wanted, but certainly the best he could at the time manage, the best known tending to be the controversial, notably (1) the treaty of 1801 with Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821; leader of the French Republic 1799-1804 & Emperor of the French from 1804-1814 & 1815), (2) the Lateran Accord agreed in 1929 with Mussolini which created the modern city-state of the Vatican and which was the final step in Italian unification and (3) The Reich Concordat of 1933, the accommodation with Hitler’s Germany which was supposed to resolve the issue of relations which had been unsettled since Otto von Bismarck's (1815-1989; Chancellor of the German Empire 1871-1890) time but which Berlin repeatedly violated.

La Signature du Concordat aux Tuileries 15 juillet 1801 (The Signing of the Concordat at the Tuileries, 15 July 1801) (1803-1804) by François Pascal Simon Gérard (1770–1837) (titled as Baron Gérard in 1809); the original hangs in the Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.  

At least those violations weren’t wholly unexpected.  Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (1876–1958; Pope Pius XII 1939-1958) had been Apostolic Nuncio (ambassador; 1926-1929) to Berlin and was Cardinal Secretary of State (foreign minister; 1930–1939) when the Reich Concordat was signed and he was under no illusion.  When it was said to him that the Nazis were unlikely to honor the terms, he replied with a smile that was true but that they would probably not violate all its articles “at the same time”.  The sardonic realism would serve the cardinal well in the years ahead when often he would required to choose the lesser of many competing evils.  Some though, for a while, retained hope if not faith.  As late as 1937, Archbishop Conrad Gröber (1872–1948; Archbishop of Freiburg 1932-1948) thought the Reich Concordat proof that “…two powers, totalitarian in their character, can find agreement, if their domains are separate”.  Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945), another cynic though then still a realist, viewed the concordat much as Hermann Göring (1893-1946) would in his trial at Nuremberg describe all the treaties executed by the Nazis: “so much toilet paper”.  Actually an admirer of the Roman Catholic Church which had survived two-thousand years of European rough and tumble, he was resigned to a co-existence but one on his terms, noting the day would come when there would be a reckoning with “those black crows”.

Two of the twentieth century's great survivors, German vice chancellor Franz von Papen (1879-1969) (second from left) and the Holy See's secretary of state Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) (head of the table) meet in the Vatican on 20 July 1933 to sign the Reischskonkordat which some six weeks later was ratified by the Nazi-dominated Reichstag (the German parliament).  The cardinal calculated the Church would gain from the arrangement but had few illusions about the Nazis.  Upon being told the Nazis would probably violate the agreement, he agreed but observed they probably wouldn't violate all of the clauses "at the same time".  Later when being driven through Rome where he saw two men fighting in the street, he remarked to his companion "I imagine they've probably just signed a concordat".

That’s not to say there haven’t always been theorists who wandered a bit beyond the possible.  After the Reformation, there were those in the Church who held that the Church sits above the state in all things (the “regalist” position), while others (maintaining the “curialist” position) held that although the Church is superior to the state, the Church may grant certain privileges to the state through agreements such as concordats.  In the modern age, the accepted understanding of concordats is that the Church and the various sovereign states are both legal entities able to enter into bilateral agreements.  Concordats are thus no different than other treaties & agreements in that being executed under international law, they are enforceable according to legal principles.  Church and state may in some ways not be co-equal but canon law does recognise the two exist in distinct spheres and is explicit in respecting the bilateral agreements that the Holy See has entered into with other nation-states.  The Code of Canon Law states unambiguously that concordats override any contrary norms in canon law: “The canons of the Code neither abrogate nor derogate from the agreements entered into by the Apostolic See with nations or other political societies. These agreements therefore continue in force exactly as at present, notwithstanding contrary prescripts of this Code.”  This is an unexceptional statement familiar in many constitutional arrangements where two legal systems interact, the need being to define, where conflict may exist, which has precedence and is no more than an application of a legal maxim known to both canon and secular law: pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be honored).  Concordats can both protect and clarify the rights of the Church by precisely defining relationship between the Church and a state, expressed by the Second Vatican Council’s (Vatican II 1962-1965) pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et spes (Joay and Hope) in the statement:

“The Church herself makes use of temporal things insofar as her own mission requires it.  She, for her part, does not place her trust in the privileges offered by civil authority.  She will even give up the exercise of certain rights which have been legitimately acquired, if it becomes clear that their use will cast doubt on the sincerity of her witness or that new ways of life demand new methods.”

In other words, “if you can’t beat them, join them”, or, at least, enter into peaceful co-existence with them, a position in the modern age possible, if not uncontroversial with sovereign and sub-national entities notionally with Catholic majority populations (eg Bavaria 1966, Austria 1969, Italy 1985) but also with countries where Christians exist only as tiny minorities (eg Tunisia 1964, Morocco 1985, Israel 1993).  Nor does a concordat need to be a complete codification, the agreement between the Holy See and Tel Aviv noting that in certain matters, agreement had not been reached and discussions need to continue.  Such “framework” or “stepping-stone” agreements have been in the diplomatic toolkit for centuries but they’re a statement of professed intent and in the decades since there’s been little apparent progress in many of the unresolved matters important to the Holy See regarding physical property in the Holy Land and the “working document” was never ratified by the Israeli parliament (the Knesset).  At least partially filling this diplomatic lacuna was something which has thus far proved a coda to the Holy See’s official recognition in 2012 of the State of Palestine.  In 2015, The Vatican concluded a concordat with “the State of Palestine” (sic), supporting a two-state solution to the conflict between Palestine and Israel “on the basis of the 1967 borders”.  According to Rome, the provisions in the agreement concern technical (ie financial & legal) aspects of the legal status of Catholic facilities and personnel on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  That may be as boringly procedural as it sounds but what’s aroused interest is that the Vatican has refused to publish the text or comment on the details, thus arousing suspicion that the treaty between with the Palestinians might, at least in part, contradict the earlier concordat with Israel.  From Washington to Tel Aviv, many are interested in the small print.

Rome 1929: The Duce reads the Lateran Concordat's small print.

Interestingly, Vatican II struck the term concordat from canon law, apparently in a nod to the Council's declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis humanae (Of the Dignity of the Human Person) which mused on the evolution of a “…different model of relations between the Vatican and various states [which] is still evolving.”  Whatever might have been intended to be the implications of that, it reappeared with the Polish Concordat of 1993 and seems to be here to stay.