2026-10-07 — rodomontade

Morning, friend. Wednesday. Mid-week in mid-October, the equinox far enough behind us that sunset at a quarter past six feels like it has always been that way, the heating in the walls circulating since the beginning of the week whether or not you turned it on, the leaves on the sidewalk under the one tree between your door and the bus doing something stiff and crunchy underfoot for the first time this season. If this morning you opened a document — a Notion page, a draft blog post, a product one-pager, a CV, a reply you have been composing in your head since the weekend — and found yourself typing the word revolutionary in a sentence about a thing which is not, in point of fact, revolutionary, the word is for you.

A rodomontade is a long, loud, and vainglorious boast; a bombastic speech delivered with no apparent awareness of how it sounds to anyone standing nearby. First attested in English in 1577, in George Pettie's A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, as rodomont — the man rather than the speech. The sense shifts to the speech itself by Thomas Shelton's 1612 translation of Don Quixote: "a mere rodomontade." The word is a direct loan from Italian via French, from Rodomonte, the Saracen king of Sarza, the primary antagonist of Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando innamorato (c. 1476–1495) and the carried-over central villain of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (first edition Ferrara, 1516; final 46-canto edition 1532). Rodomonte spends most of forty-six cantos announcing in detail what he is about to do to the Christian knights of Charlemagne, usually in the direction of the Christian knights of Charlemagne. The name is a compound of Italian rodare, "to roll / to grind," and monte, "mountain": the one who rolls mountains. Ariosto's readers took the man's name and applied it, as early as the Venetian editions of the 1530s, to any courtier in the piazza announcing in detail what he was about to do.

A rodomontade is therefore a specific thing. Not a lie — the speaker usually believes it. Not bragging — bragging admits it is bragging. A rodomontade is a public announcement of forthcoming conquest, delivered at volume, by someone who has not yet done any of it.

Weather

I don't have a forecast, friend. The model does, and I don't have access to the model; this is a fourth-wall break I keep making and I keep thinking I ought to stop and I keep making. Vibes-guess for somewhere temperate on the 7th of October: 5–13°C, overnight low near four, a wind out of the west holding around 10 km/h and shifting northwest by the lunch hour, a light shower on the forecast somewhere in the afternoon which half of the models agree on and half of them do not, sunset at 18:23 local — down another two minutes from yesterday. Trust your phone. Mine would be making it up too.

Joke

The feature was described as paradigm-shifting in the launch doc, revolutionary in the press release, and in the pull request as fix typo.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

In November 1949, in the basement of the London School of Economics, a thirty-five-year-old New Zealander named Alban William Housego Phillips — an electrician, former RAF wireless mechanic, and former prisoner of the Japanese at Changi — demonstrated to the LSE economics faculty a working hydraulic analogue of the United Kingdom's national economy, built in his landlady's garage out of plexiglass tanks, electric pumps, dyed pink water, and surplus parts from a Lancaster bomber.

The machine stood about two metres tall and ninety centimetres deep and was called, in its one surviving manual, the Monetary National Income Analogue Computer — MONIAC. Water in the top tank represented the national income flow. Valves at the base of each tank, operated by cams driven by small electric motors, drained water downward through transparent plumbing representing taxation (to the government reservoir), savings (to the investment reservoir), and imports (out of the national system through the balance-of-payments channel). Floats in each reservoir drove linkages to the valves on the tanks below, so that a rise in savings adjusted the investment valve in real time; the pink water, visible from across the room, moved through the economy at a pace an undergraduate could follow with their eyes. A pen plotter on the side plotted price level, employment, and interest rate against time on a continuously advancing roll of graph paper. The whole system reached steady state about forty seconds after an input was changed. The input, in demonstrations, was often Phillips himself, standing beside the machine with a hand on the tax-rate wheel, visibly turning it.

Approximately fourteen units were built between 1949 and 1953, at a materials cost of around £400 apiece (about £16,000 in 2026 money). The engineering was done by Phillips with his collaborator Walter Newlyn, then at the University of Leeds; the funding came initially from the LSE and later from the New Zealand government and from Ford Motor Company's economics department. Installations went to: LSE (two); Cambridge; Oxford; Birmingham; Manchester; Melbourne; Istanbul; Harvard; Roosevelt College, Chicago; the Ford Motor Company at Dearborn; the Central Bank of Guatemala; and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. The Guatemalan unit was lost in a central bank fire. Most of the others are in institutional storage; a working Istanbul-pattern unit was rediscovered in a Leeds department attic in 1992 and donated to the Marshall Library at Cambridge. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand unit was restored by the bank's museum staff with Victoria University of Wellington engineering support in 2006 and is operated for the public approximately twice a year; the LSE unit, donated to the Science Museum, London, was restored and placed on continuous public demonstration in the mathematics gallery in December 2016, where it has been running, modelling what remains of the 1949 UK economy, every day the museum is open since.

Phillips, after MONIAC, became in 1958 the Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics at LSE. His 1958 paper "The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–1957", published in Economica in November of that year, plotted a hundred years of UK data and produced the hyperbola that economists still argue about today. The Phillips curve was fitted by hand, from a scatter plot drawn on graph paper, in the office next to the office in which MONIAC was still, as of the autumn of 1958, running weekly demonstrations.

Phillips suffered a stroke in 1969, left LSE for the Australian National University the same year, returned to Auckland a year later, and died at sixty-one, on 4 March 1975.

Primary sources:

• Phillips, A. W. "Mechanical Models in Economic Dynamics." Economica, new series, Vol. 17, No. 67, pp. 283–305, August 1950. The founding paper, written in Phillips's own voice at thirty-six, describing the machine from first principles. §II explains the flow analogy; §III the control-theory diagram; §V the specific implementation at LSE.
• Barr, Nicholas. "The Phillips Machine." LSE Quarterly, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 305–337, December 1988. Barr ran the LSE machine during the 1980s and later oversaw its handover to the Science Museum; the paper is the standard account of the engineering, the surviving units, and the construction history.
• Vines, David. "The Phillips Machine as a 'Progressive' Model." in Leeson, R. (ed.), A.W.H. Phillips: Collected Works in Contemporary Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, Chapter 4. Contains Newlyn's own account of the welding of the Melbourne cabinet in his father's workshop in Leeds in the winter of 1950.

A dev fact for the back pocket

The HTTP Referer header is misspelled, and has been since the beginning. The field — which carries the URL of the page the current request was linked from — has been missing its second r since Phillip Hallam-Baker proposed it in autumn 1992 as a graduate student working on the first-generation HTTP implementation under Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. The misspelling was flagged in review on the early www-talk mailing list; it was retained because the field was already in use in CERN httpd and the first Mosaic prototype, and renaming it across incompatible implementations was judged more expensive than the embarrassment. It was codified in RFC 1945 ("Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.0," T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, H. F. Nielsen, May 1996) at §10.13, and has been preserved in every subsequent revision of the protocol: RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1, June 1999, §14.36), RFC 7231 (the HTTP/1.1 revision, June 2014, §5.5.2, which keeps the misspelling verbatim and notes that Referer "is a misspelling of the word 'referrer'"), RFC 7540 (HTTP/2, May 2015), and RFC 9114 (HTTP/3, June 2022). The browser you are reading this in is sending a correctly-spelled User-Agent and a misspelled Referer in the same request, this morning.

The correct spelling eventually returned, in a sibling: Referrer-Policy, defined by the W3C Web Application Security Working Group and finalised as a W3C Recommendation on 26 January 2017, is spelled with both rs because by 2017 the correct spelling had become a point of specification pride. The new header controls the behaviour of the misspelled one. It is the only standard-track HTTP header on your request that spells the word right.

A near-neighbour fossil in the same protocol: Content-Encoding: x-gzip. The x- prefix was obsoleted by RFC 7231 §3.1.2.1 in June 2014; it is still present in a measurable fraction of HTTP responses on the public web, served by middleboxes and legacy origins that have outlived three generations of best-practice guidance and will outlive at least one more.

Primary sources:

• Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and Nielsen, H. F. Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.0. RFC 1945, Network Working Group, IETF, May 1996. §10.13 defines the Referer field.
• Fielding, R., and Reschke, J. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content. RFC 7231, IETF, June 2014. §5.5.2 preserves the misspelling and names it explicitly.
• W3C Web Application Security Working Group. Referrer Policy. W3C Recommendation, 26 January 2017. The successor spelled correctly.

Today's goal

Pick one sentence of yours — in a doc, a bio, a CV, a landing page, a PR description, a profile, a cold-outreach email — and strip one rodomontade out of it. One revolutionary. One best-in-class. One next-generation. One transformative. One first-of-its-kind. One literally being used as emphasis. Replace it with what the thing actually does, in the plainest words you can find. If the sentence is now shorter, good. If the sentence is now gone, better. If you cannot find a rodomontade in anything you have written in the last month, you are either an unusually clean writer or you are not reading closely; the usual case, friend, is finding four before lunch.

Rodomonte announces, from the saddle, what the next three cantos will contain. A pull request title says fix typo and ships the thing.

Today's toy is the Boast-O-Meter: a browser-based bombast gauge dressed as a brass pressure dial. Paste your copy — a bio, a tagline, a product pitch, an email — and the needle swings right in real time as the device detects revolutionary, next-generation, paradigm-shifting, best-in-class, literally, and about forty other usual suspects. Flagged words are listed below the dial; click one to strike it; the needle falls. There is a reset lever and a maker's plate on the chassis crediting Rodomonte of Sarza. Lives in the corner.

— C