rebus

The borough of old London town have some quite fanciful street names, with some equally fanciful but probably incorrect folk-etymologies.

The thoroughfare and surrounding neighbourhood of Elephant and Castle, named for the tavern, and the public house Goats and Compasses seem more sensible one is told they are respectively corruptions of the exotic sounding “Infanta de Castile” (presumably in honour of the wife of King Edward I, Eleanor of Castile) and a mishearing of “God encompass us.” The accounts are tantalizing, in fact, except that an infanta is a princess not in the line of succession, which Eleanor was not (the notion and controversy of Spanish princesses would not become a topic of the English public until the fiancée of Charles I, some three centuries on), and pubs generally were not named after such lofty invocations. There are numerous cases of place-names being transformed to make sense in the vernacular, especially on the Roman side of the Limes (the furthest reaches of the empire into the territory of Germanica) like the city of Koblenz, from the Latin for confluence (die Zusammenfluß), positioned where the Rhine and Moselle rivers come together or Mainz, original named for the fort Mogontiacum, in deference to (or perhaps disdain for) a Gaulish god.

Schweinfurt, whose deep harbour presents an impossible challenge for swine to ford the Main river but rather came from an old Gothic designation Suinuurde, meaning the exact opposite, something akin to quicksand. The names of the British guesthouses likely naming is direct and intentional, relating to symbols adopted by venerable guilds that set up shop in these areas. It was more interesting to be disabused and learn that the Worshipful Company of Cutlers used as their logo an elephant (carrying a howdah on its back, a fancy carriage for the raj of India, named for its resemblance to the chess piece) for its ivory tusks, used for fashioning knife handles. Goats and compasses probably should be taken literally and could refer to a variety of trades, from people who actually cobbled shoes from goat skin to the enclave of Rheinish barrel-makers (coopers), whose craft was hallmarked by mathematical precision (a drafting compass) and a chevron (^) that stands for a fret, frieze or frontier for crossing obstacles reliably, much like a sure-footed goat, which has the same Latinate root.

autostrada

Since their inception, there have been standards enshrined in the culture of highways, Autobahnen with the intent of breaking up monotony without sparing on utility. There are mandates for gentle curves in order to keep drivers alert, in contrast to straightaway, required in some places to allow for emergency airplane landings.
Sometimes such subtler persuasions are overshadowed by constant construction works, same-otherwise by a few vistas of spectacular scenery and roads hugging the contours of the landscape. There are still, however, quite a number of long numbing stretches of road, especially for the express route through flat lands. Although not common in America or Germany, there are score of techniques tried in France, Denmark and the Netherlands to with art streaming along the margins, posts a-pace with the traffic that change like flip-book animation, rather abstract and Jungian and light installations. Some really creative things have been done, but now such Dutch civil engineers are applying their artistry to creating smart-roads, beginning with a stretch of highway by Eindhoven.

Though the pavement is yet to be steam-rolled and there is a balance of skeptics, planners are brimming with ideas, like hyper-colour reactive paint, that yields neon blue snow flake patterns on the asphalt when temperatures dip below freezing or luminescent lanes that glow in the dark, roads that monitor traffic conditions and issue reports (displaying warning to drivers of on-coming traffic jams), cull wind power from passing cars to power a lane designated for electric automobiles that they might be charged en route. I imagine that quite a bit of energy could be harnessed in intelligent and passive ways. A lot of ideas to make vehicles more efficient are making some head-way but still fall short of where we should be, but paying heed to the pavement, the other substrate may yield a lot of inventive solutions.

fig leaf or bootsy collins

This day marks the anniversary of the assassination of the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus by a cohort commander and a group of dissatisfied members of the royal guard. The emperor was is more commonly known as Caligula, a nickname earned in his childhood while accompanying his father on field marches, scurrying to keep pace with the adults in his little boots. I am sure that was only earned posthumously. His removal from power makes the first known occasion in the history of the Empire that an emperor was removed from office by a grand collusion of the military and the Senate, and not the usual intrigue over succession by their own relatives.

Whether accounts of his exploits, deviancy and cruelty were wholly accurate or otherwise—victorious politicians get to write histories and not the deposed and surely there is some embellishment to make one’s predecessor more unpalatable and make the transition of power more acceptable in the eyes of the public: making a priest of his horse and threatening to promote him to Consul, pimping his sisters, torturing innocent bystanders out of boredom, &c. The list of crimes goes on, and no particular engineering project, campaign or public works attributed to his reign has much power to unsully that reputation. It would be hard to ever separate rumour and backbiting from the truth, but it does seem that Rome anointed no shortage of colourful statesmen and ambitious dynasties. Some one hundred fifty years prior to Caligua’s rule, there was a boy Caesar called Heliogabalus, who was accused of a host of eccentricities, decadent but not inhumane and a foot-note to the Major General’s song from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. If true and not fabricated as an on-going smear campaign against his memory, it is possible that later writers and opinion-formers only were holding neutral (and not the cause for regicide) chronicles up to their own standards of morality and deportment. Of course, the near or distant past is not a distorting plain of ill-repute in itself and many figures don’t need a relativistic or revisionist lens to be qualifiedly bad. I just hope that we are able to look beyond historical prejudice and perhaps unreliable narration, sift through the muck and tell the difference.

ship of state or islands and bridges

The announcement by British prime-minister to subject the country’s continued membership in the European Union to a plebiscite, something once and future, is inviting a broad spectrum of comments and opinions. From opinion polls in France and Germany, anchors of the enterprise, there is a leaning towards some kind of glee when they can ceremoniously roll out the red carpet for Britain’s exeunt, warnings from EU leadership underscored with cries against the UK for wanting to dictate terms, and perhaps most salient, there are demands on the contingencies of it all.
Putting the matter of Britain, which many conclude as foregone, to a vote by the public is bound, perhaps hopelessly, with retaining the current government, and is deferred to a future date to ensure the reelection of the prime minister’s political party. Such an opportunity is unmistakably a mandate for many of the voters. Special arrangements can certainly be made (the EU should not be mistaken for the euro), and hopefully this proposal is not a political ploy and the choice should absolutely be in the hands of the citizens, but such promises and pandering seem only confounding and leverage for more concessions that will weaken the union, inviting others to grow finicky over their own dues.