Mini | Automotive | The Rat Look & Murdered Out Rides

“You never see the same mini twice”

Heraclitus

The Mini was born in 1959. The first British ‘little’ car, where other countries had the Fiat 500 and other such bubble cars, it was the mini that conquered Europe and came out top of its class. The Volkswagen Beetle enjoyed similar popularity in North America.

The ad men for the mini were clear to point out that little didn’t mean small and the early advertisements featured regular sized families with irregular amounts of luggage all of which could fit in the Mini – stacked neatly in the boot, in the bins of the passenger doors, under seats, with efficient packing the mini was a verified TARDIS. Originally aimed at the 1960’s housewife, the mini was the car to carry the kids and the shopping and still be able to squeeze into the smallest of parking spaces.

An early promotional photograph showing an Austin Seven with all the luggage it could supposedly carry!

And a Mini is big on the inside. In your average motor you have the space consuming console between the two front seats where the gear box is – not with the Mini – it was revolutionary in the sense that it had the gear box underneath the engine optimized for space. Further, it had a transversely mounted engine- being sideways enabled the front to be shorter and making the outside shell smaller overall.  The engine itself is worth dwelling on for a few words, arguably the most enduring engine in car history.  The A-Series is one of the most common in the world, launched in 1951 with the Austin A30 and remained in production all the way through to the last Mini in 2000.

The Mini used a variety of groundbreaking manufacturing techniques – not just the aforementioned engine and gear box, but also the seams of the body parts were on the outside to keep costs down – imagine sewing three edges of two squares of leather together to make a rudimentary purse. It was these peculiarities that first highlighted the Mini for customization. The king of Mini customization is undoubtedly John Cooper - as Shelby was to the mustang John Cooper was to the Mini. In 1961 Cooper developed the first Mini Cooper, tuned to racing standards. Famously in 1964 Paddy Hopkirk won the Monte Carlo Rally in a Mini Cooper. Between 1964-1967 the Mini Cooper won the Monte Carlo rally three times. With its worldwide rally acclaim the Mini’s identity as the housewives choice had radically changed and on the back of its success Mini customization kits entered the market and with them opened up the potential of the Mini’s customization to everyone with a spanner and the disposition to get their hands greasy. A culture was born.

 

The Rat Look Mini

For over 40 years the British icon that is the Mini continued to engrain itself in our hearts and drives and more and more of the almost infinite customization options came to be. Arguably, the last Mini was sent out of the factory in 2000, and the Mini became the ‘Classic Mini’ when BMW took over and released the MINI (BMW would argue differently). 

 

Murdered Out

So after many years of customization no two Mini’s are the same. Every mini has its story. Long lost owners, accident scars, their own idiosyncratic customization. In the many veins of car customization that is prevalent nowadays, there is a mini version. – whether that be the rat look, Euro style, murdered out or the host of other weird an wonderful things people do to their cars – whatever that may be, there is a Mini expressing it. 

by Woody Harringman 

Edward 'Woody' Harringman is a mini owner and enthusiast. Cabinet maker by trade, rarely writes articles and is the younger brother of James Harringman, Editor of Silkworms Ink.

Mini | Linguistics | Help!

"Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things and I'll show you a man who cannot be trusted to do big things."

- Lawrence Bell

As we are dealing with the idea of 'mini' this week, I thought it an appropriate time to share two small pieces of technical nomenclature for language's tiniest losses. By sheer happenstance, both happen to begin with the prefix 'hap'.

Haplography

One of those idiomatic linguistic rules which only applies to a tiny portion of written sentences. Haplography occurs when we remove the repetition of a morpheme or punctuation which, logically speaking, should appear twice in a word or sentence. The most common example of these is where a declarative sentence ends in a word that is abbreviated with a period (but note that this rule does not carry over to questions or exclamations).

Example:

A: Hello, I am here with the I.R.S.

B: Damn, you're seriously here with the I.R.S.?

Honestly, I don't know what would happen if one were dealing with a brand name that incorporated an exclamation point or a question mark into its identity. I suppose apostrophes would have to come into play...

A: What's your favourite Beatles album?

B: Probably 'Help!'.

Haplology

This is a similar area of linguistics, referring to the omission of a syllable from a word in such a way that phonetically streamlines the pronunciation. It is largely an aural phenomenon but, if institutionalised, it can leak into the written language.

Examples:

Ordinary become or-din-ry

Probably becomes prob-ly

Particularly becomes par-tic-u-ly

I don't think the common mistake of pronouncing 'specific' as 'pacific' is an example of this or if it is just a throwback to what is referred to as 'consonant cluster omission' when discussing the speech acquisition of babies. If this aspect of linguistics interests you, I suggest you have a look into 'the fis phenomenon' and see where your research takes you.

I hope that the existence of these wonderful words is a discov'ry to some of you, and that you'll all now go off and start using them in your poems.

Phil Brown
Poetry Editor

Mini | Introduction | The Small, the Tiny and the MINUSCULE

A small leak can sink a great ship.
Benjamin Franklin

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

Albert Einstein

This week we are taking arms with microscopes and taking a close look at the small, the tiny and the minuscule. Does size matter? Do great things come in small packages? Have we missed something? Perhaps we shall find out.