dickens

Woodcut from the Compendium Maleficarum, a manual for witch-hunters, 1608

10 June 2024

No, not the famous nineteenth-century writer. This is the slang term, as in the exclamation what the dickens? Dickens is a euphemism for devil. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the 1599 play King Edward IV, Part 1, commonly attributed to Thomas Heywood. The passage is from a comic scene in which the duchess is talking about hunting a deer, and the character Hobs is talking about snogging one who is dear to him:

Du[chesse]. Well met good fellow; sawst thou not the hart?

Ho[bs]. My heart? God blesse me from seeing my heart.

Du. Thy heart? the deere, man, we demaund the deere?

Hobs. Do you demaund whats deere? marie corne & cowhides, Masse a good smug Lass, well like my daughter Nell; I had rather then a bend of leather shee and I might smutch togither.

Dutchesse. Cam'st thou not downe the wood?

Hobs. Yes mistris that I did.

Dutch. And sawst thou not the Deer imbost.

Hobs. By my hood ye make mee laugh, what the dickens is it loue that makes ye prate to mee so fondly? by my fathers soule I would I had iobd faces with you.

(masse = uncertain, perhaps mercy; smug = trim, neat, smart; smutch = smooch; imbost = to drive prey on a hunt; iobd faces/jobbed faces = kissed)

While that play is the first published use of the word, Shakespeare may have beaten Heywood to the punch. He uses the word in his The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Margaret Page is trying to recall Falstaff’s name:

M.Pa. I cannot tell what (the dickens) his name is my husband had him of, what do you cal your Knights name sirrah?

Rob. Sir Iohn Falstaffe.

Ford. Sir Iohn Falstaffe.

M. Pa. He, he, I can neuer hit on’s name; there is such a league betweene my goodman, and he.

We don’t know exactly when Shakespeare wrote this play. It may have been performed as early as April 1597, but it wasn’t entered into the Stationer’s Register until 1602. But this line does not appear in either the 1602 or 1619 quarto editions. It isn’t until the 1623 First Folio that we see the dickens in the play. As usual, the quarto editions of this play are unreliable—in this case the first quarto appears to have been reconstructed from memory by an actor or someone who had seen the play—so maybe the line was used in its early performances, or maybe not. There is no way to tell for sure.

But the expression is probably not original to either Heywood or Shakespeare. It seems to have been a slang term circulating at the time.

As a diabolical euphemism, dickens shares the initial d with devil, as does the similar euphemism deuce. The name Dickin or Dickon, a diminutive of Dick, are well attested and older, so the euphemism probably assigns that name to Satan, and so it is akin to Old Nick, which dates to before 1643. Some have suggested that it is an alteration of devilkin, but there is no evidence for this.

The dickens, along with deuce, which appears by 1651, are also of note because they mark a shift in what was considered profanity, probably a result of the Protestant Reformation and nascent Puritanism. In the Elizabethan era and earlier, references to the devil are common. Shakespeare, for example, was not shy about calling the devil by his name. But by the end of the sixteenth century such euphemisms were beginning to appear, and by the mid seventeenth century such euphemisms were the norm. Shakespeare’s use of what the dickens is another example of his being attuned to the latest slang and linguistic trends, but Heywood’s use shows that Shakespeare was not unique in this regard. Other playwrights of the era were just as likely to use trendy slang and neologisms.

This shift in what is considered impolite speech also demonstrates that what we consider to be profanity is really a question of fashion. What is considered highly offensive in one era may not be so in another. Think of today’s speech where sexual terms are becoming increasingly acceptable, while the taboos are racial and misogynistic epithets; a century ago the opposite would have been the case. What the dickens is up with that?

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. dickens, the, phr., what the dickens...? phr.  

Heywood, Thomas. The First Part of King Edward the Fourth. In The First and Second Partes of King Edward the Fourth. London: I.W. for John Oxenbridge, 1599, sig. E3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Hughes, Geoffrey, “Devil, The,” The Encyclopedia of Swearing, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006, 118–20.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. dickens, n.; June 2017, devil, n., devilkin, n.; March 2004, s.v. Old Nick, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v., deuce, n.2.

Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.2. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio). London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 49. Folger Shakespeare Library.

meitnerium

Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, c.1910

7 June 2024

Meitnerium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 109 and the symbol Mt. It is extremely radioactive, with a half-life measured in seconds. It was first created in 1982 at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. It is named for physicist Lise Meitner, the physicist who in 1938, along with her nephew and fellow physicist Otto Robert Frisch, and chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, discovered nuclear fission. Hahn, alone, received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery. Placing Meitner in the long line of women who have been denied a Nobel Prize because of their sex.

While it was first synthesized in 1982, it took a decade for the element to be named and another five years for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) to officially bless the name meitnerium. The naming was delayed not for anything having to do with meitnerium itself, but because of a dispute over who had first synthesized other transuranic elements. The name was first revealed in an article in the 18 September 1992 issue of Science that detailed the naming controversy:

Call it a late christening ceremony. Researchers from the German Heavy Ion Research Society's laboratory in Darmstadt last week announced names for three chemical elements (107, 108, and 109 in the periodic table)—the heaviest elements yet discovered—that were found at Darmstadt way back in the early 1980s

[…]

Why did the German researchers wait so long to name their elements? The answer lies in an unseemly row that has been raging since the 1960s. Both the Dubna researchers and their main competitors—a team from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory led by Glenn Seaborg—claim to have discovered elements 104 and 105. The Americans wanted to name them rutherfordium and hahnium; the Russians, kurchatovium and nielsbohrium. Until this squabble was sorted out, the naming of the heavier elements was also held up.

[…]

Elements 104 and 105 are therefore still embroiled in controversy. But 107 to 109 are finally cleared for christening by the Darmstadt researchers. Assuming the names are approved, as expected, by IUPAC's Commission on the Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry, element 107 will be called nielsbohrium (as a gesture to the Dubna group); 108 will be named hassium, after the Latin name for Hesse, where the Darmstadt lab is based; and 109 is to be meitnerium, after the German nuclear physicist Lise Meitner.

IUPAC approved the name in September 1997.

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Sources:

Holden, Constance. “Random Samples.” Science, 257.5077, 18 September 1992, 1626–27 at 1626. JSTOR.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2001, s.v. meitnerium, n.

Stone, Richard. “Transuranic Element Names Finally Final.” Science, 277.5332, 12 September 1997, 1601. JSTOR.

separation of church and state

Rembrandt Peale portrait of Thomas Jefferson, 1800, oil on canvas

5 June 2024

It is often said that the US Constitution erected a wall of separation between church and state. But these words do not appear in the text of the Constitution. Instead, the phrase comes from an 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. The association had written the newly elected president expressing concern that their state constitution did not prohibit the government from establishing a state religion, and Baptists being a religious minority in the state at that time, feared for their religious liberty. Jefferson replied:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Jefferson’s draft of the letter still exists, and, among other changes, he originally had written “a wall of eternal separation” but opted to leave out the word eternal in the final version.

The phrase entered into constitutional jurisprudence some seventy-six years later when it was used by Chief Justice Morrison Waite in the 1878 case of Reynolds v. United States, the first US Supreme Court case to address the scope of the First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty. George Reynolds, a Mormon, had been convicted of the crime of bigamy. The conviction was upheld by the Utah Territorial Supreme Court, and Reynolds appealed to the US Supreme Court on multiple grounds, including that the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment protected plural marriage. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, declaring that marriage “while from its very nature a sacred obligation, is nevertheless, in most civilized nations, a civil contract, and usually regulated by law,” and therefore could be regulated by the state. Under the First Amendment, “Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.”

While the phrase is Jefferson’s coinage, the idea of a separation between ecclesiastical and temporal power is not original to him. The political philosopher John Locke, upon whose ideas much of the US Constitution is based, wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration, published in 1689:

It is not my Business to inquire here into the Original of the Power or Dignity of the Clergy. This only I say, That Whence-soever their Authority be sprung, since it is Ecclesiastical, it ought to be confined within the Bounds of the Church, nor can it in any manner be extended to Civil Affairs; because the Church it self is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the Commonwealth. The Boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles Heaven and Earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two Societies; which are in their Original, End, Business, and in every thing, perfectly distinct, and infinitely different from each other. No man therefore, with whatsoever Ecclesiastical Office he be dignified, can deprive another man that is not of his Church and Faith, either of Liberty, or of any part of his Worldly Goods, upon the account of that difference between them in Religion. For whatsoever is not lawful to the whole Church, cannot, by any Ecclesiastical Right, become lawful to any of its Members.

And Jefferson’s contemporary, philosopher Denis Diderot, wrote in his Observations sur le Nakaz, commentary on a statement of legal principles issued by Catherine the Great of Russia, who was Diderot’s patron:

One question for discussion is whether the political institutions should be put under the sanction of religion. In the acts of sovereignty I do not like to include people who preach of the existence of a being superior to the sovereign, and who attribute to that being whatever pleases them. I do not like to make a matter of reason into one of fanaticism. I do not like to make a matter of conviction into one of faith. I do not like to give weight and consideration to those who speak in the name of the Almighty. Religion is a buttress which always ends up bringing the house down.

The distance between the throne and the altar can never be too great. In all times and places experience has shown the danger of the altar being next to the throne.

Diderot wisely opted not to send his observations to Catherine, in which he accused her of being a despot and tyrant, for when she finally read them after his death in 1784, she was furious and declared the observations to be nonsensical and incoherent.

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Sources:

Diderot, Denis. “Observations sur le Nakaz.” In Diderot: Political Writings. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler, eds. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1992, 77–164 at 82–83.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, 1 January 1802. Library of Congress. Text (as sent). Text (draft).

Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration (c.1780). London: Awnsham Churchill, 1689, 18–19. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878). Thomson Reuters Westlaw.

Image credit: Rembrandt Peale, 1800. White House Collection. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

bootylicious / babelicious

Cover of Dr. Dre’s single Fuck Wit Dre Day

3 June 2024

Bootylicious is an adjective meaning sexually attractive. It is formed from booty + -alicious, which is derived from delicious. The word is an Americanism that got its start in Black slang. Use of the combining form -alicious to form new words dates to the late nineteenth century and marks the quality of the first element of the compound as being appetizing or attractive.

The earliest known use of bootylicious is by the Los Angeles rap group W.C. and the Maad Circle on their September 1991 song Back to the Underground. It’s being used in the sense of weak or contemptible lyrics:

I'm bucking up these MCs, Rappers are coming in stacks and packs
But on the real; most of y'all ain't saying jack (YEP!)
But the same old, same old, so what you got a little fame!
(Dig a dam) What's up with this Rap Game?
Seems like you gotta be whack or even super Bootylicious to get paid
I gotta wear Fade
I guess I'll be a broke motherfucker with the dollar to my name
Cause I ain't crossing over the fame (Hell No!)

In April 1992, rapper Dr. Dre recorded the word bootylicous in the lyrics to the song Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’). The song was written by Snoop Doggy Dog, as he then styled himself, who also performed in the recording along with Dre. The song was released that December on Dre’s album The Chronic. The single was released in May 1993.

The song is diss on fellow rapper Easy-E, who had led the rap group N.W.A., to which both Dre and Snoop had belonged. Dre and Snoop accused Easy-E, along with N.W.A.’s manager Jerry Heller, of cheating the other members of the group. Dre and Snoop use bootylicious to refer to Easy-E’s weak or poor lyrics:

Your bark was loud but your bite wasn't vicious
And them rhymes you were kickin' were quite bootylicious

This sense of bootylicious seems to come from a sexist metaphor of women being poor songwriters. Dre and Snoop are accusing Easy-E of writing like a woman. This sense is evidence that bootylicious was already established in oral use in the sexually attractive sense.

They were not the only ones to use bootylicious in this sense. We see this in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a Black newspaper, on 19 May 1994:

The “Bootylicious” Award” goes to Kool-Aid who also gets the “Worse [sic] Use of a Sample Award.” I don’t know if you’ve peeped this one out, but it has some rooty-poot kid sampling Naughty By Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray.” First off [sic] all, ole boy sounds stupid as I don’t know what. Then if you check the audience that he’s supposed to be performing in front of, you’ll see that there’s not a black face in the crowd. You know why, ’cause only white folks would sample Naughty’s top hit for a Kool-Aid commercial.

But this sense of bootylicious referring to bad rap lyrics did not have legs, eventually fading from use.

We see the sexually attractive sense by December 1993, with the release of Domino’s (Shawn Antoine Ivy’s) Do You Qualify? on his eponymous album:

She's only sixteen, but looks twenty-two,
And age isn't a factor cuz she's fine to the dude,
And plus she's built like a truck there must be somethin' in her food,
Or her water,
Because she's somebody's daughter
Who's attractive to a son, as well their father's,
And they know this, that ass sticks with us,
And like my homie told me once she's quite bootylicious,
Watch your mouth drop with them dubs that she threw on,
Dandy like candy, so you can get your chew on,
What'cha wanna do?  What'cha gonna do?
When you find out that she's far from twenty-two?

And this sense appears in print two months later in an article about youth slang in Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune on 17 January 1994. Given that it’s Idaho, the article is most likely describing the speech of white youth, which shows how much influence Black rap artists had on teen slang, both white and Black, of the era, and is further evidence that bootylicious was quite active in oral use before seeing print:

Winning the prize for originality: “flippen flappin’,” an expression of anger; “booty-licious,”' as good-looking; “wheaties,” describing any farmers; “womyn,” a slang for a female; and “yum,” an expression for when a girl sees a good-looking guy. 

We see a parallel development in white slang at about the same time with the word babelicious. That word is also recorded in 1992, in the film Wayne’s World, starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, in which the following exchange takes place:

WAYNE: But before we go, we’d like to take a moment here for a Wayne's World salute to the Guess jeans girl, Claudia Schiffer. Schwing!

GARTH: Schwing!

WAYNE: Tent pole! She's a babe.

GARTH: She's magically babelicious.

WAYNE: She tested very high on the strokability scale.

(Reader Adam Ford notes, quite correctly, that magically babelicious is a riff on the tagline for Lucky Charms cereal, “They’re magically delicious.”)

The two words showcase how white and Black slang interacted in the era. The two are recorded at about the same time, but there is evidence that bootylicious had earlier currency in oral use, so it seems likely that Myers’s use of babelicious was influenced by bootylicious. But it is possible that babelicious had an earlier currency as well. If so, the two would seem to have developed in parallel. But with rap’s growing popularity among white youth in the mid-1990s, bootylicious crossed over and became far more popular than its white counterpart.

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Sources:

Domino (Shawn Antoine Ivy). “Do You Qualify?” Ohhla.com (The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive), n.d.

Dr. Dre (Andre Romell Young) and Snoop Dogg (Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr.). “Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’).”.  The Chronic (album), 1992. Azlyrics.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. booty, n.2, bootylicious, adj., babe, n.

Mitchell, Marsha. “Peace from the Editor!” Los Angeles Sentinel, 19 May 1994, C-6/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Myers, Mike, Bonnie Turner, and Terry Turner, writers. Wayne’s World (film), Penelope Sheeris, director. Paramount Pictures, 1992. TikTok.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. booty, n.3; September 2004, s.v., bootylicious, adj., babelicious, adj.

The Right Rhymes, n.d., s.v. bootylicious, adj. (Shout out to Jesse Sheidlower for pointing this site out to me.)

Vogt, Andrea. “Youth and Language the Dynamics of ‘Dissin’ ‘Wassup? Yo, Homies Are Down with the Code[‘] (Translation: Like Their Predecessors in American Pop Culture, Teen-Agers of the ’90s Have Created Their Own Novel Language.” Lewiston Tribune (Idaho), 17 January 1994. NewsBank: Access World News—Historical and Current.

W.C. and the Maad Circle. “Back to the Underground.” Ohhla.com (The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive), n.d.

Image credit: Death Row Records, 1993. Wikipedia. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of the image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

platinum

31 May 2024

Platinum is a chemical element with atomic number 78 and the symbol Pt. It is a silvery-white, unreactive, dense, malleable, and ductile semimetal. It is a precious metal, at times being more expensive than gold, and is often used in jewelry. Its most common application, however, is in catalytic converters for automobiles, and it has various other applications.

Platinum was unknown to Europeans prior to the conquest of the Americas, where the Indigenous people of South America had been mining it for centuries. The Spanish called the metal platina (little silver), and the name platinum is a Latinization of the Spanish name, platin[a] + -um (after the classical Latin aurum (gold) and argentum (silver)).

The Spanish, however, initially considered it an impurity that tainted gold, and consequently paid it little interest. The first appearance of the name platina in print is in Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan y Santacilia’s 1748 Relacion Historica del Viage a la America Meridional, which described the authors’ travels through South America in the 1730s. The passage in question relates to the Chocò region in what is now Colombia and describes the difficulty in extracting gold from ore that also contains platinum:

En el Partido del Chocò, haviendo muchas Minas de Lavadero, como las que se acaban de explicar, se encuentran tambien algunas, donde por estàr disfrazado, y envuelto el Oro con orros Cuerpos Metalicos, Jugos, y Piedras, necessita para su beneficio del auxilio del Azogue; y tal vez se hallan Minerales, donde la Platina (Piedra de tanta resistencia, que no es facil romperla, ni desmenuzarla con la fuerza del golpe sobre el Yunque de Acero) es causa de que se abandonen; porque ni la calcinacion la vence, ni hay arbitrio para extraer el Metal, que encierra, sino à expensas de mucho trabajo, y costo.

(In the District of Chocò, there are many Laundry Mines, such as those just explained, there are also some, where because the Gold is disguised and wrapped with other Metallic Bodies, Fluids, and Stones, it needs the help of Mercury to extract it; and perhaps there are Minerals where the Platina (Stone of such resistance that it is not easy to break it, nor crumble it with the force of the blow on the Steel Anvil) is the cause of their abandonment; because neither calcination defeats it, nor is there any way to extract the Metal it contains, except at the expense of a lot of work and cost.)

In early use, English borrowed the Spanish name platina. We see this in the first mention of the metal in the 1750 volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:

This Semi-metal was first presented to me about nine Years ago, by Mr. Charles Wood, as skilful and inquisitive Metallurgist, who met with it in Jamaica, whither it had been brought from Carthagena in New Spain. And the same Gentleman hath since gratified my Curiosity, by making further inquiries concerning this Body. It is found in considerable Quantities in the Spanish West Indies (in what Part I could not learn) and is there known by the name of Platina di Pinto[,] The Spaniards probably call it Platina, from the Resemblance in Colour that it bears to Silver. It is bright and shining, and of a uniform Texture; it takes a fine Polish, and is not subject to tarnish or rust; it is extremely hard and compact; but, like Bath-metal, or cast Iron, brittle, and cannot be extended under the Hammer.

And the Latin platinum appears by 1783, when it is found in Torbern Bergman’s Sciagraphia regni mineralis (Sketch of the Mineral Kingdom):

Aurum nempe omnibus aliis precipitatur metallis, excepto forte Platino, quod ita explicandum existimo. Calx auri vi majoris attractionis phlogisticon singulis eripit et hoc ipso solubilitatem amittit, reducta decidens. Itaque auro in serie metallorum saltim secundus competit locus. Platinum dejicitur omnibus, auro tamen minus distincte.

(Namely, gold is precipitated by all other metals, except perhaps platinum, which I think should be explained in this way. The calx of gold, having the greatest attraction for phlogiston, frees it from other metals, and thus loses its solubility, falling off as a reduction. Therefore gold deserves at least the second place in the series of metals. Platinum is precipitated by all, but less distinctly than gold.)

The English translation of this work, published the same year, however, continues to use platina. The only mention of the Latin platinum is in the index, which cross-references it to instances of platina.

But within a few years, English had also borrowed the Latin name, and platinum came to be the more common name in that language. We see platinum being used in a 1786 translation of an essay by Carl Wilhelm Scheele:

This matter [i.e., coloring agent or dye] has a more sensible action upon the calces and metallic precipitates: All the calces, however, are not attacked; for it produces no effect upon the calces of platinum, tin, lead, bismuth, iron, manganese, and antimony.

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Sources:

Bergman, Torbern. Outlines of Mineralogy. William Withering, trans. Birmingham: Piercy and Jones for T. Cadell and G. Robinson, 1783, 131. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Bergman, Torbern. Sciagraphia regni mineralis. London: John Murray, 1783, 136–37. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2006, s.v. platinum, n. and adj., platinic, adj., platina, n. and adj.

Scheele, Carl Wilhelm. “Dissertation on Prussian Blue, Part 2” (1783). The Chemical Essays of Charles-William Scheele. London: J. Murray, 1786, 391–406 at 394. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

de Ulloa, Antonio and Jorge Juan y Santacilia. Relacion Historica del Viage a la America Meridional, vol. 2, part 1. Madrid: Antonio Marin, 1748, 6.10, 606. Google Books.

Watson, William and William Brownrigg. “Several Papers Concerning a New Semi-Metal, Called Platina” (5 December 1750). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 46, December 1750, 584–96 at 586. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1749.0110.

Photo credit: Focal Foto, 2023. Flickr.com. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 license.