Stotan

He had a great admiration for the Spartans, you know the Grecian army people who I remember even as a kid myself, reading some story, I can’t remember whether it was in mythology or some ancient history book anyway, but where a Spartan had stolen a fox and he’d been detected, and rather than get detected and lose face, he hid the fox under his clothing and the fox ate his stomach out and he didn’t let out a sound. I mean being able to stand enormous pain without showing it, and of course the other part of the Spartan was the Stoic, and again, the person who basically doesn’t show emotion particularly. And he’d put those two together to come up with ‘Stote’, and so you were supposed to, as the great ‘If’ poem says from Rudyard Kipling: ‘To treat triumph and disaster as the same’, and realise there was something bigger behind it all anyway, so it’s not worth getting excited about or depressed about. So that was basically what the Stotan stuff was. 

-Herb Elliot