What do the following terms in the piece below mean: “the hat qua hat” and “double divots framing”. I look forward to your feedback.
“But the fuss was in large part about the hat qua hat. Its text, “Make America Great Again”—a shameless rip-off of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.” (Note how Trump tweaks it to be both less inclusive and more bossy.) The hat’s foamy front—apparently made from a repurposed beer koozie. The double divots framing the central peak. And of course the braided rope that elegantly stretched across its brim.”
You’re having problems understanding this because you cut it off from its context and you’re trying to understand three random words out of a whole sentence. The phrase “double divots framing” doesn’t mean anything any more than “the car that” means something. It’s nonsense. It’s just three words that happened to be strung together in a specific sequence in a sentence.
This isn’t a problem with understanding English. This is a problem with understanding literally any language. There’s absolutely no language on Earth which makes sense if you take bits and pieces of it out of context.
This is the context. It’s describing how the hat looks. If you don’t understand some specific word, look up that word. Don’t expect us to be able to explain three arbitrary words plucked out of a sentence.
Well, I think one of the hardest parts of understanding a language is distinguishing between those words that are part of an idiom (and cannot be simply looked up) and those words that are not part of an idiom and can be taken literally.
I think it’s fair to simply point out that these specific three words aren’t an idiom and the literal definition applies, without expecting someone to always know that ahead of time.
OK, I suppose this is fair. It still seems odd that someone would take “double divots framing” to be an idiom given how it’s used in the sentence, but I guess it’s possible.
The writer is complaining that folks are focusing on the construction of the hat. “Hat qua hat” means “the functional hat qualities of the hat” as opposed to the slogan/meaning of the hat, to which the author delineates his opposition.
IMHO the construction matters too. It fails so ludicrously in it’s attempt to relate. The hat is meant to be a bridge to working-class people, who tend to wear baseball caps. But the front where the writing is, is not the normal embroidered material - it’s some kind of high-tech foam, which results in the strange peak and weird divotswhere it attaches to the cap. And they’ve included this braided material, reminiscent of a captain’s hat, which are worn more by pretentious boat (“yacht”) owners than by actual sea captains.
It just screams “new money” “pretension” and “failure to relate.”
And perhaps an additional tie to Mr Trump in particular, whose association with golf is widely known. (In golf, the divot is the clump of turf scooped out by the golf club as it strikes the ball. The depression left behind is not actually the divot itself, but the terms are frequently interchanged…)
Slightly better view of the “divots” (actually, divot marks) on each side of the hat peak here.
“qua” is a Latin word that is used in English to denote the things about an object, process, thought, etc. that are inherent to the type of object denoted by its name, as opposed to any of the details of the object that are only part of that particular instance. That is, people were complaining about the things that were fundamental to its structure as a covering for one’s head, something that every hat has to have in some form to be considered a hat, as opposed to the message conveyed by the hat as hats are not typically considered to be carriers of messages.
“Divots” are indentations in the ground caused by a golf club striking a ball. They are very shallow and have roughly the same shape as the top of the hat on either side of its front peak. “Framing” means that they are the same on either side of it, like a picture frame in reference to a picture.
The OP gave the full context of the phrase right in the OP and also provided a link to an ever fuller context, so it’s odd that you focused in on the phrasing of the snippet provided in the post title while completely ignoring the larger context that was provided.
But even with that you are mistaken. “double divots framing” does have a clear meaning just like “two lines surrounding” or “a circle around” have meaning even when taken as fragments of a sentence.
No. In “Pretty Woman”, Gere and Roberts are at the horse Polo, and they collect the divots (clumps of grass) . and put them back into hoof-prints … holes.
In “An etymological dictionary of the Scottish language: illustrating …, Volume 1”
By John Jamieson, he says that the only close word in gaelic is “fovate” which english has as “fuel”. This is the material which they used to set peat or timber alight. Peat… so if you were down to burning peat, what would you have as tinder ? dried grass… You’d have gone out to the fields and pulled up grass to use later as tinder. It can be seen that in the construction of a gaelic mud house, the walls, and the top of the roof were rather water proofed, basically similar to cement rended, with fovate, or now “divot”, as the soil with grass roots in it sets like concrete, witness a cricket pitch or lawn bowls green… The grass leaves cut down to the soil surface and killed, the surface can set rock hard.
