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intertwingle

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

WOTD – 9 February 2025

Etymology

PIE word
*h₁én

Probably a blend of intertwine +‎ intermingle.[1] The word has apparently been coined independently several times:

  • It was used by the Indian author and translator Manmatha Nath Dutt (1855–1912) in an 1896 work: see the quotation.
  • It appears to have been used comically by Montgomery Gordon Rice of Bradley Polytechnic Institute in an April 1901 performance of Esmeralda: see the quotation.[2]
  • It was used as a noun by the American-British author Henry James (1843–1916) as a nickname for a group of his Emmet female cousins who were painters;[3] and also by the American artist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) as a nickname for his 1900s genre paintings of his nieces, the Ormond sisters.[4] Sargent was referring to the use of shawls as a motif,[5] or the interchangeability of the models or their convoluted poses.[6] (The American artist Jane Emmet de Glehn (1873–1961), one of Henry James’ “intertwingles”, was also a friend and model of Sargent’s.)
  • The word was used in the urban planning context by Tracy Augur in the 1950s (see the 1954 quotation), and adopted by others including Dennis O’Harrow.

Sense 2 (“of documents, information, etc.: to interconnect or interrelate in a complex way”) was developed from its use in Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) by the American philosopher and sociologist Theodor Holm Nelson (born 1937):[7] see the quotation.

Pronunciation

Verb

intertwingle (third-person singular simple present intertwingles, present participle intertwingling, simple past and past participle intertwingled) (intransitive, informal, rare)

  1. To confuse or entangle together; to enmesh, to muddle.
    • 1896, chapter IX, in Manmatha Nath Dutt, transl., A Prose English Translation of Srimadbhagavatam, book IX, Calcutta, West Bengal: […] H. C. Dass, […] [for] Manmatha Nath Dutt, →OCLC, page 37:
      Now, having descarded,[sic – meaning discarded] by virtue of the spirit of the lord of universe, the possessions resembling the city of the Gandharvas created by the illusive energy of God which naturally get intertwingled with (one's) soul; go I to seek the protection of Him.
    • 1901 June, “April”, in Polyscope, volume I, number 1, Peoria, Ill.: Bradley Polytechnic Institute, →OCLC:
      Athletic benefit. Esmeralda a great success. [Montgomery Gordon] Rice gets the ring ceremony "intertwingled."
    • [1917 June 27, “By the Way”, in The Outlook, volume 116, New York, N.Y.: Outlook Co., →OCLC, page 344, column 3:
      A writer in the Kansas City "Star" has discovered that there is a "Kansas language." […] To the Kansas list we beg to add a New Jersey word, "intertwingle"—as roots do in the soil.]
    • 1950 December, “Children’s Books, Christmas, 1950. A Personal Choice of a Dozen. [book reviews]”, in The New Era in Home and School, volume 31, number 10, [London]: [New Education Fellowship], →OCLC, page 246:
      The Little Fire Engine. Even if Graham Greene had not come out from the anonymity of The Little Red Engine and signed it, this is surely the Book of the Year. Pathos and humour ‘inextricably intertwingled’. Charlie Chaplin would not have disowned it, and a much younger [Walt] Disney at his best would have envied it.
    • 1954 October, Carl Feiss, “Out of School: City Planning Education as Related to Architectural Education”, in Progressive Architecture‎[2], volume XXXV, number 10, New York, N.Y.: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2024-04-17, page 174:
      This is largely an accident of history, but it is also a natural concomitant of the need for coupling urban technological analysis and problem explorations with designed and concrete solutions to social, political, economic, and physical problems of urban areas expressed in physical terms as plans. The fact that all of these elements are, as Tracy Augur says, "inextricably intertwingled" makes for the complex job of the "generalist in planning," in contradistinction to the specialist, let us say, in school architecture, or hospital architecture, or residential architecture.
    • 1958, News of the American Alumni Council, Washington, D.C.: American Alumni Council, →OCLC, page 9, column 2:
      Fortunately, these objectives are not only compatible, but are, to use a popular Washington phrase, "inextricably intertwingled."
    • 1963, Willis H[oward] Ware, “The Store”, in Digital Computer Technology and Design, volumes II (Circuits and Machine Design), New York, N.Y.; London: John Wiley and Sons, →OCLC, pages 12.52–12.53:
      Such a magnetic matrix, plane, or array can function as a serial store. In a 1024-core square array, the X dimension could represent the 32 bit positions of a word and the Y dimension, 32 different words. […] This plane of 1024 cores, so far as organization is concerned, can be thought of as four 32 × 8 arrays intertwingled.
    • 1965, Aerospace Medicine, volume 36, St. Paul, Minn.: Aerospace Medical Association, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 606, column 1:
      The "inextricable intertwingling" of engineering and science and research and development is no better illustrated than in this example of the particle accelerators.
    • 1984, Stanley Unwin, Deep Joy: Master of the Sproken Word, Whitby, North Yorkshire: Caedmon of Whitby, →ISBN, page 139:
      I was particularly attracted to her, not only because of her spontaneous eloquence but also because she recognised me as: ‘the gentleman who gets his words all intertwingled’.
  3. (computing, information science) Of documents, information, etc.: to interconnect or interrelate in a complex way.
    • 1974 March, Theodor H[olm] Nelson, “Dream Machines: New Freedoms through Computer Screens—a Minority Report [‘On Writing,’ a Paradigm of the Creative Process]”, in Computer Lib/Dream Machines, South Bend, Ind.: Theodor H. Nelson, published March 1977, →OCLC, page 98, column 2:
      But why should things be saved? Everything is deeply intertwingled. We save for knowledge and nostalgia, but what we thought was knowledge often turns to nostalgia, and nostalgia often brings us deeper insights that cut across our lives and very selves.
    • 1991 February, Mark Bernstein, “Deeply Intertwingled Hypertext: The Navigation Problem Reconsidered”, in Technical Communication: Journal of the Society for Technical Communication, volume 38, number 1, Arlington, Va.: Society for Technical Communication, →ISSN, →JSTOR, →OCLC, executive summary, page 41:
      Deeply intertwingled hypertext documents offer readers abundant choices, permitting reader and author to work together to dynamically reorganize the document to meet specific needs.
      An adjective use.
    • 2005 September, Peter Morville, “Intertwingled”, in Simon St. Laurent, editor, Ambient Findability, Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 84:
      [A] book on Amazon is far more than the words between its covers. We can learn its cost and publisher; what other books the author has written; what readers think about the book; what other books those readers have bought; and we can keyword search the full text. Data and metadata intertwingle with patterns of purchase and use: […]
    • 2015, Theodor Holm Nelson, “What Box?”, in Douglas R. Dechow, Daniele C. Struppa, editors, Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing), Cham, Zug, Switzerland; Heidelberg, Baden-Württemburg: Springer Open, Springer International Publishing, →DOI, →ISBN, →ISSN, part IV (The Last Word), page 134:
      This book, like the conference, is called Intertwingled. It’s a word that expresses a philosophical position about cross-connection. I said in Computer Lib, "Everything is deeply intertwingled." I meant that all subjects and issues are intertwined and intermingled. But intertwingled subjects are not what computers usually represent. From the beginning, people have set computers up to be hierarchical. […] Now, it's also a metaphysic to say, "everything is deeply intertwingled," since the sentence cannot be proven true or false. But it is computer science to say that we need to represent cross-connection, and I’m expressing a computer science opinion when I say that intertwingularity is a better form of representation—for everything—than hierarchy.
      See the 1974 quotation for Nelson’s original use of the word.
    • 2020, Andrew Prescott, “Community Archives and the Health of the Internet”, in Simon Popple, Andrew Prescott, Daniel H. Mutibwa, editors, Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices (Connected Communities), Bristol; Chicago, Ill.: Policy Press, University of Bristol, →ISBN, part III (Disruptive and Counter Voices: The Community Turn), page 260:
      [John] Sheridan (2018) argues that the ‘intertwingling’ of records will become commonplace, and records will contextualise each other.

Translations

References

  1. ^ Trevor [J.] Fairbrother (1990) “Sargent’s Genre Paintings and the Issues of Suppression and Privacy”, in Doreen Bolger, Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., editors, American Art around 1900: Lectures in Memory of Daniel Fraad (Studies in the History of Art; 37; Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Symposium Papers; XXI), Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, →ISBN, →ISSN, page 41, column 1: “[T]he word—an amusing (almost vaudeville) hybrid of intertwine and intermingle— […]”; see also the 2015 quotation by the American philosopher and sociologist Theodor Holm Nelson (born 1937).
  2. ^ “Athletic Benefit: Esmeralda: Presented by Students for the Benefit of Athletic Association, Saturday April 6, 1901”, in Polyscope, volume I, number 1, Peoria, Ill.: Bradley Polytechnic Institute, 1901 June, →OCLC; Victor J. West, editor (1901 May 24), “Bradley Briefs”, in The Tech, volume IV, number 7, Peoria, Ill.: Students of the Bradley Polytechnic Institute, →OCLC, page 6, column 1: “New word, just coined—intertwingled. Copyright applied for. All rights reserved.”
  3. ^ Edward J. Foote (1977 July–October) “An Interview with Frederick W[illiam] MacMonnies, American Sculptor of the Beaux-arts Era”, in New-York Historical Society Quarterly‎[1], volume 61, number 3, New York, N.Y.: New-York Historical Society, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2024-06-17, footnote 25, page 117: “[…] [Ellen Emmet] Rand was a cousin of Henry James, who used to call on her and her sister and cousins, who were also painters; James called these girls ‘the intertwingles’.”
  4. ^ See, for example, Evan Charteris (1927) chapter XXII, in John Sargent […], New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, page 178:
    It was with the utmost reluctance that he [John Singer Sargent] could be induced, for the purpose of sale, to pull out any one of the water-colours which used to lie in their frames, jammed one against the other, in a large rack on the floor of his studio. If in response to insistence he acquiesced, he would produce one or two, always with a good deal of gutteral protest, pointing out what he considered their drawbacks, and qualifying them with some derogatory title. “Vegetables,” “Dried Seaweed,” “Troglodytes of the Cordilleras,” “Blokes,” “Idiots of the Mountains” and “Intertwingles” come back to me as a few of the titles bestowed on various renderings of woodland scenery, muleteers, figures on a hillside, and of a portrait group on a river bank.
  5. ^ Richard Ormond, Elaine Kilmurray quoting Dorothy Vickers (Sargent’s goddaughter) in a letter dated 14 October 1950 (2003) “Portraits 1900–8”, in John Singer Sargent: The Later Portraits (Complete Portraits; III), 2nd edition, New Haven, Conn.; London: [F]or the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 189: “The lovely shawl was his – intertwingles was a perfect name but entertwingles would be better as when he arranged draperies etc he used pins – which often pricked […]”
  6. ^ Carol Troyen (1993) “75. Simplon Pass: The Lesson, 1911; 76. Simplon Pass: The Tease, 1911”, in Sue Welsh Reed, Carol Troyen [authors], Cynthia M. Purvis, editor, Awash in Color: Homer, Sargent, and the Great American Watercolor, Boston, Mass.: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in association with Bulfinch Press, Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 161, columns 1–2:
    Sargent referred to Rose-Marie and Polly (as well as their sisters Reine Ormond and Dorothy [Dolly] Barnard) as the “inter-twingles,” an allusion to their willing interchangeability as models but also, perhaps, to the easy familiarity and affection among the young women. […] [Footnote 6] [Trevor J.] Fairbrother (“Sargent’s Genre Paintings,” p. 41) […] suggests that it [the word intertwingle] refers as well to the convoluted poses Sargent asked his models to assume.
  7. ^ Dick Helser (2015) “An Advanced Book for Beginners: How Computer Lib/Dream Machines Shaped Our Perspective on Cybercrud, Interactivity, Complex Texts and Computer Creativity”, in Douglas R. Dechow, Daniele C. Struppa, editors, Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing), Cham, Zug, Switzerland; Heidelberg, Baden-Württemburg: Springer Open, Springer International Publishing, →DOI, →ISBN, →ISSN, part II (Peer Histories), page 53: “Ted was key to the development of hypertext, […]”

Further reading

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