273 words
✈️ ✈️ ✈️
 |
| War-time gremlin warning poster |
The notion we have of gremlins today, those mischievous little critters, a bit akin to fairies or goblins(α) and similarly celebrated in folklore—popularised by British author Ronald Dahl and featuring in numerous movies such as Stephen Spielberg’s Gremlins and Gremlins 2 movies—are not things people tend to associate with aircraft and the Royal Air Force. Yet that is precisely where the idea of a gremlin had its genesis. The mythological gremlin originated early in the 20th century with malfunctioning airplanes, when something went wrong with the equipment on the plane in flight or at some critical juncture, it became customary for pilots and air crews to evoke the name of “gremlins” as the invisible agents putting “spanners in the works” to cause inexplicable havoc and mayhem with the aircraft. The term has been around since the 1920s at least, but gained widespread currency during WWII with RAF airmen blaming gremlins for mishaps and accidents during flights, sometimes even (jocularly) attributing the gremlins’ “sabotage work” to their Axis sympathies!(Ⴆ)
The physical appearance of the gremlin is in the eye—or I should say the imagination—of the beholder. As Villain Wiki tells us, the variety is infinite…some people see them as humanoid elves, others see something darker, more sinister and menacing, and then again they are seen as beings resembling jackrabbits or bulldogs, and so on (‘Gremlins (folklore)’, Villain Fandom, villains.fandom.com/).
(α) or maybe, giving it an Irish hue, to leprechauns
(Ⴆ) post -war and into the modern age the gremlins’ field of sabotage and wreckage has extended to anything at all mechanical, electronic or computer-related
