L E G M O U N T A I N

The term “blimp” is reportedly onomatopoeic, the sound the airship makes when one taps the envelope (balloon) with a finger. Although there is some disagreement among historians, credit for coining the term is usually given to Lt. A.D. Conningham of the British Royal Navy in 1915.[citation needed]

A different derivation is given by Barnes & James in “Shorts Aircraft since 1900″[2]

“In February 1915 the need for anti-submarine patrol airships became urgent, and the Submarine Scout type was quickly improvised by hanging an obsolete B.E.2c fuselage from a spare Willows envelope; this was done by the R.N.A.S. at Kingsnorth, and on seeing the result for the first time, Horace Short, already noted for his very apt and original vocabulary, named it ‘Blimp’, adding, ‘What else would you call it?’”

An often repeated, but false, alternative explanation for the term says that at some time in the early 20th century, the United States military had two classes for airships: Type A-rigid and Type B-limp (hence “blimp”). In fact,

“there was no American ‘A-class’ of airships as such—all military aircraft, heavier or lighter-than-air were designated with ‘A’ until the appearance of B-class airships in May 1917. There was an American B airship—but there seems to be no record of any official designation of non-rigids as ‘limp’. Further, according to the Oxford Dictionary, the first appearance of the word in print was in 1916, in England, a year before the first B-class airship.” (”Etymology of ‘Blimp’” by Dr. A. D. Topping, AAHS Journal, Winter 1963.)

The perpetuation of this erroneous explanation is an example of false etymology.

It’s an option.

The Infinite Library is an ongoing project by Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda.  It is primarily an expanding archive of books, each created out of pages of one or more found books and bound anew. The online catalogue serves as an index.

‘The book objects (…) are each made from pages of existing books removed from their bindings and rebound as one. Some of these series loosely relate to each other via a third element: geometrical shapes abstracted from the images, computer-edited, and overprinted on the originals. The disparate image stocks become intertwined and open on one another. Having transcended any thematic organization, the loose pages now have the potential to amalgamate into an infinite number of new books. In so doing, they yield a library that defies conventional categorization.’

Dominikus Müller for bb5

www.theinfinitelibrary.com

Bernard Voita is Swiss. This piece is from his book White Garden. The image is a bit baffling and inner at first, rather than mimetic.