melt / meltdown / molten

The remains of Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant several months after the 1986 accident

25 March 2024

In the public imagination, the noun meltdown is closely associated with nuclear reactor accidents. Given Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukashima, this association is quite understandable, but the word has an older use in metal smelting. And of course, it is also used metaphorically for an emotional breakdown. The history of the word is illustrative of some of the common types of semantic change that words undergo.

At the core of meltdown is the verb to melt. The Present-Day verb comes from two distinct Germanic verbs, one strong and one weak. Strong verbs are those that inflect the tenses through vowel changes, e.g., come/came. Weak verbs inflect through standard suffixes, e.g., look/looks/looked. In Proto-Germanic these two verbs were distinct, but in Old English the two were starting to become confused. Old English had the strong verb meltan, which was originally intransitive—used for things that melted of their own accord but not for those that were melted by some agent—although there are transitive uses of this verb in later Old English. Our Present-Day adjective molten comes from the past participle of this strong verb (note the vowel shift). The second verb was the weak verb meltan/miltan/myltan, which was transitive, that is used for things that were melted by some agent.

The two were already starting to be confused in Old English, but in Middle English the conflation of the two verbs became complete, with the strong and weak inflections used indiscriminately. Gradually, the strong inflections fell away, disappearing by the Early Modern period, although one can occasionally encounter the strong past form molten in later poetry, as opposed to the weak melted.

Meltdown started out as a phrasal verb, melt down, used to refer to the process of smelting metals. We see this phrasal verb in Philip Sydney’s 1591 poem Astrophel and Stella, although Sidney is using the phrasal verb metaphorically:

When sorrow (vsing my owne Siers might)
Melts downe his lead into my boyling brest,
Through that darke Furnace of my heart opprest,
There shines a ioy from thee my onely light

In the twentieth century, the phrasal verb started to be used as a noun phrase, still within the realm of metallurgy. There is this from the Canadian Mining Journal of 2 April 1919:

The Carbon Iron Co., coated the sponge made with lime to retarol [sic, retard] its oxidation in the transfer and during the melt down in the open hearth furnace,—the coating would naturally be put on while the sponge was still on the hearth of the reverbatory.

And by mid-century, the open compound melt down had closed to meltdown. From the Indianapolis News of 26 August 1941:

An underground black market has developed in scarce defense materials. Bootleggers are making something like a national business out of surreptitiously selling metals, particularly aluminum, to small manufacturers on the verge of going out of business for want of raw materials. Fancy prices, usually double the fixed limit, are being extracted. The business has already developed the dark inventive scheming aspects of prohibition law violations—blind offices in large city buildings, actual meltdown of aluminum in small stills known as alley pots, and home smelting.

The nuclear sense is taken from the metallurgical one and dates to the early days of nuclear power. From the Washington Post of 24 March 1956:

To date, there have been only two reactor accidents reported anyway.

One in 1952 was at Canada’s Chalk River plate where a mechanical failure caused a meltdown of the uranium fuel and subsequent radioactive contamination of water and heavy water components.

So far, Philip Sidney aside, meltdown has remained in the technical realm of metals, including uranium in the cores of nuclear plants. But the 1979 reactor accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania would inject the word into the daily news cycle and on the lips of just about everyone in America. And it was this event that created the opportunity for extending the word into the emotional realm. People, as well as nuclear reactors, could have meltdowns. Here is a nice example from the Christian Science Monitor of 30 June 1980:

Messy rooms and teen-agers seem to be an unavoidable combination. […] The subject creates a lot of tension. And the other day David told me if I said one more word about it he would have a meltdown. And again I laughed. And, of course, the laughter is marvelous. It clears the air.

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Sources:

Bosworth, Joseph and T. Northcote Toller. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, with Supplement. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1898 and 1921, s.v. meltan, v., miltan, v. Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online.

Goldsand Freund, Roz. “Laughter Clears the Air Until He Cleans Up His Room.” Christian Science Monitor, 30 June 1980, 14/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Mallon, Paul. “News Behind the News.” Indianapolis News, 26 August 1941, 7/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Moffatt, James W. “A New Method for the Smelting of Iron Ores.” Canadian Mining Journal, 40.13, 2 April 1919, 208/1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2001, s.v. melt, v.1, meltdown, n.; September 2002, s.v. molten, adj.

Sidney, Philip. Syr P.S. His Astrophel and Stella. London, Thomas Newman, 1591, 45. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Unna, Warren. “A-Reactor Insurance.” Washington Post, 24 March 1956, 15/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 1986. Ukrainian Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (USFCRFC). IAEA ImageBank (Flickr). Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Easter / Easter bunny / pasch / paschal

Easter postcard, early 20th century

24 March 2024

Easter is the name for the Christian celebration of Jesus’s resurrection. The name is an old one, going back to Old English. The root is Germanic and, unsurprisingly, is related to the cardinal direction east. The Proto-Indo-European root is *aus-, meaning to shine, and is a source for many words referring to the dawn, like the Latin aurora and the Greek ηως (eos). But while Easter has a Germanic root, the name only survives in common usage in English and German (Ostern). Other Germanic languages tend to use words based on the post-classical Latin pascha.

Given its religious significance, it should be no surprise that the Old English eastre appears some 375 times in the surviving corpus of texts, which were largely copied by nuns and monks. One example is from the late ninth-century translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. (While he was English, Bede wrote in Latin.) In a passage about Abbot Ceolfrith’s mission to King Naitan of the Picts, the translation says:

Sende him crætige wyrhtan stænene cyricean to tibrianne; sende him eac stafas & gewrit be gehealde rihtra Eastrana & be Godes þeowa sceare, eac oðrum rihtum Godes cyricean.

(He sent him skilled workers to build a stone church; he also sent him letters and writings about the observance of the correct [date of] Easter & about the tonsure of God’s servants, and other rules of God’s church.)

Bede’s history is very much preoccupied, one might say obsessed, with telling how the Celtic church was converted to Roman Catholicism, with the date of Easter being the prime indicator of that conversion.

In another work, Bede gives an origin for the word Easter, one that is often cited to this day despite there being little evidence to support it. In his De temporum ratione (About the Reckoning of Time), written in the early eighth century, Bede says in a passage explaining the names of the months:

Eostur-monath, qui nunc paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a dea illorum quae Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant, nomen habuit, a cujus nomine nunc paschale tempus cognominant, consueto antiquae observationis vocabulo gaudia novae solemnitatis vocantes.

(Eostur-monath has a name which is now translated as paschal month, which was once named after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, and in whose name they held and celebrated feasts. Now they call the paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new ritual by the traditional name of the ancient observance.)

The Christian church repurposing pagan celebrations to correspond with Christian holidays was, however, a common occurrence, so Bede’s explanation is plausible on its face. But there is no other evidence for the existence of such a goddess; all we have is Bede’s word for it, and Bede is not exactly what one might call a reliable narrator. So, a more parsimonious explanation would be that the Old English name was originally a reference to the vernal equinox and its corresponding celebrations, eliminating the goddess from the equation. After all, the equinoxes are the dates when the sun rises closest to true east.

The other common term for Easter is pasch, which in English is more usually found in its adjectival form paschal. English use of this word also dates to Old English. It’s a borrowing from the Latin pascha, which in later centuries was reinforced by the influence of the Anglo-Norman pasche, and in Scotland and the north of England by the Old Danish paska. Ultimately, the word comes from the Hebrew pesah, meaning Passover, that holiday being celebrated at roughly the same time as Easter.

English use of pasch dates to at least the early eleventh century, when it appears in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, an astronomical and calendrical text. Byrhtferth uses the word to refer to the Jewish holiday:

Pasca ys Ebreisc nama, and he getacnað oferfæreld.

(Pasch is a Hebrew name, and it signifies passover.)

And to the Christian one:

He abæd æt þam mihtigan Drihtne mid eallum his munucheape þæt he him mildelice gecydde hwær hyt rihtlicost wære þæt man þa Easterlican tide mid Godes rihte, þæne Pascan, healdan sceolde.

(He prayed to the mighty Lord with all his assembly of monks that he might graciously make known to him where one should most properly according to God’s law, hold the Pasch, the Easter season.)

Eostre is not the only mythical being associated with the holiday; there is the Easter bunny. The bunny was originally a hare, and the tradition started in Germany as the Osterhase. The first reference to the tradition in English that I’m aware of is from Charles Dickens’s Household Words of 7 June 1851:

Children were celebrating Good Friday by buying sugar lambs, which held little crimson and gold banners between their little fore-legs, as they lay innocently reposing upon green sugar banks. Many also were the sugar hares, Easter hares—those fabulous creatures so dear to German children—which were also bought, though, properly Easter had not yet arrived. But the hares and their gay crimson eggs had arrived days and days before.

German immigrants brought the tradition to the United States, and in the process the hare became a rabbit or bunny. The first reference to the Easter bunny that I know of is in a short poem published in the Detroit Free Press of 5 April 1897. The poem is reprinted from the Indianapolis Journal, but I cannot locate it in that paper:

Already do the windows show
The joyous Easter bunny,
And Maud on bonnets new doth blow
Great wads of Easter money.

To sum up, the name Easter was originally a reference to the vernal equinox, and pasch to the Jewish Passover. The story of the goddess Eostre, while plausible, is supported by only the thinnest of evidence and more likely arises out of a misunderstanding of pagan religious practices by Bede and other early medieval, Christian scholars.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix. s.v. aus-.

Baker, Peter and Michael Lapidge. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. Early English Text Society (EETS), S.S. 15. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995, 3.1, 122–23; 3.2, 138–39.

Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Accessed 31 July 2020.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I. Toronto: U of Toronto, 2018, s.v. eastre.

Miller, Thomas. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, part 1.2. Early English Text Society (EETS), O.S. 96. London: Oxford UP, 1891, 5.19, 469–70.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2011, s.v. Easter, n.1; June 2005, s.v. pasch, n.

Wallis, Faith. Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2004, 54.

nickel

The reverse of a Canadian nickel coin

22 March 2024

Nickel is a chemical element with atomic number 28 and the symbol Ni. It’s a hard, silvery-white, lustrous metal. It’s a common metal, but rarely found in pure form in nature. Nickel is widely used in all sorts of products, notably stainless steel, magnets, batteries, and as plating for a wide variety of objects.

Nickel alloys have been known since antiquity. By the eighteenth century, German miners were calling nickeline ore (nickel arsenide) Kupfernickel, literally copper-nickel. The Nickel in this case being the name of demon. The name is a hypocoristic form of Nicholas, as in the name Old Nick for Satan. The ore resembled copper ore, but mining it often resulted in miners suffering illness from the arsenic content, hence the demonic name. (Cf. pumpernickel and cobalt)

In 1751, Swedish chemist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt attempted to extract copper from Kupfernickel and ended up with nickel. He published his discovery that year, but did not coin the name nickel until a subsequent publication three years later:

Kupfer-Nickel år den malm, som har storsta halten af den forr bestresne och utgifne halfmetallen, hvaraf jag tagit mig anledning, at behålla samma namn for des regulus, eller for mera vighets skul, kalla honom Nickel.

(Kupfer-Nickel is the ore that has the greatest content of the previously stressed and released semi-metal, which is why I have taken the opportunity to keep the same name for its regulus, or for the sake of more dignity, call it Nickel.)

US and Canadian five-cent coins are called nickels because they are minted from a copper-nickel alloy (that’s actual copper, not Kupfernickel). The US nickel was introduced in 1866, with Thomas Jefferson's visage being placed on the obverse in 1938. Canadian nickel was introduced in 1922.

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Sources:

Cronstedt, Axel F. “Fortsättning af rön och försök, Gjorde Med en Malm-art från Los Kobolt Grufvor” (16 February 1754). Kongl. Svenska Vetenskaps Academiens Handlingar, 15, 1754, 38–45 at 39. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2003, s.v. nickel, n. and adj.; second edition, 1989, s.v. copper-nickel, n., kupfernickel, n.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, c. 2010. Wikipedia. Public domain image.

bible

A Gutenberg Bible in Yale University’s Beinecke Library

20 March 2024

Bible has several meanings in Present-Day English usage. Most commonly it refers to the Christian and Jewish scriptures, and when used this way it is generally capitalized. But bible can also be used in an extended sense to mean any authoritative book or collection of writings, in which case it is usually written in lower case. In the past, bible could also refer to any large book or tome.

The English word is borrowed from both the Old French bible and the medieval Latin biblia—the French word, of course, also comes from the Latin. The Latin biblia is a late addition to that language. For instance, it does not appear in Anglo-Latin sources until the close of the eleventh century. Jerome referred to his translation of the Christian scriptures as a bibliotheca, that is a library or collection of books. The Latin, in turn, is borrowed from the Greek βιβλία (biblia, books). The Greek word is the plural of βιβλίον (biblion), a diminutive of βίβλος (biblos), literally meaning the inner bark of papyrus and by extension a paper or scroll or, in later use, a codex or book.

One of the earliest uses of Bible is in the poem Cursor Mundi, written in the thirteenth century in a Northumbrian dialect, but with manuscripts dating to the late fourteenth. The passage in question recounts the tale of Noah and the flood:

Quen noe sagh and was parseueid
Þat þis rauen him had deceueid,
Lete vte a doue þat tok her flight
And fand na sted quare-on to light;
Sco com a gain wit-outen blin,
And noe ras and tok hur in;
Siþen abade he seuen dais,
Efter þat, þe bibul sais,
Þan he sent þe dofe eftsith;
Sco went forth and cam ful suith,
Son sco cam and duelld noght,
An oliue branche in moth sco broght.

(When Noah saw and had perceived
That the raven had him deceived,
[He] let out a dove that took to flight
And found no place whereon to light.
She returned without tarryin’;
Noah rose and took her in;
Then he abided for seven days,
After that, the Bible says,
Then he sent the dove again;
She went forth and returned very swiftly;
Soon she returned, delaying nought;
An olive branch in her mouth she brought.)

(Another manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Fairfax MS 14 written in a West Midland dialect and copied at roughly the same time, spells the word bible.)

By the late fifteenth century, bible had acquired other senses. It could refer to a large tome or book. This sense can be found in the poem Piers Plowman. In this passage, the character Anima is speaking to corrupt clergy:

For as it semeth ye forsaketh no mannes almesse—
Of usurers, of hoores, of avarouse chapmen—
And louten to thise lords that mowen lene yow nobles
Ayein youre rule and religion. I take record at Jesus,
That seide to hise disciples, “Ne sitis acceptors personarum.”
Of this matere I myghte make a muche bible.

(For as it seems you forsake no man’s alms—
Of usurers, of whores, of avaricious merchants—
And bow to these lords that might lend you coins
Contrary to your rule and religion. I witness what Jesus
Said to his disciples, “Do not be greedy people.”
About this matter I could write a long book.)

The Present-Day sense of an authoritative book dates to the early eighteenth century, if not earlier. Here is a use from the issue of the newspaper The Craftsman, dated 16 November 1728:

As a farther Proof of your Sincerity in the Love of your Country, be careful and diligent in the Use of all those Means, which your glorious Ancestors have afforded you for the right Understanding and Preservation of our happy Constitution; “particularly by reading Magna Charta, (the Englishman’s political Bible) and making it familiar to you.

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Sources:

Cursor Mundi, Part 1 of 6. Richard Morris, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 57. London: Oxford UP, London, 1961, 116, lines British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A.iii. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

D'Anvers, Caleb. The Craftsman, No. 124, 16 November 1728. In The Craftsman, vol. 3. London: R. Francklin, 1731, 298. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. R.E. Latham and D.R. Howlett, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018, s.v. biblia, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Langland, William. The Vision of Piers Plowman (B text), second edition. A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. London: J.M. Dent (Everyman), 1995, Passus 15, lines 84–89.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. bible, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Bible, n.

Photo credit: Adam Jones, 2018, Flickr.com. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

main / Main Street / high / High Street / highway

View looking north down Main Street, Toms River, NJ

18 March 2024

Cf. main drag

The use of Main Street and High Street is an example of the divergence of North American and British English. While both terms can be found on either side of the Atlantic, the former is more common in North America and the latter in the UK. Both are terms for the principal road in a town, and both have become metonyms for aspects of urban life. In this case, the divergence appears to be the result of a Darwinian selection process—the need for new street names in North America opened up a lexical niche that coincided with a shift in the meaning of the adjectives main and high, which favored main as the choice for the new roads.

Both main and high trace back to Old English, but their relevant adjectival uses are somewhat more recent. Main comes from the Old English noun mægn, meaning strength or might. It appears in this sense in the poem Beowulf:

                          Heold hine fæste
se þe manna wæs    mægene strengest
on þæm dæge    þysses lifes.

(He held him fast, he who of humans was strongest of might in that day of this life.)

The adjectival use of main to mean principal or chief is in place by the mid sixteenth century, about the time Europeans began to establish colonies in the Americas. We see it in an inventory of a minor noble’s household goods:

A louse beddstedd of waynscott iij s. iiij d. Twoo great standing chestes withe one mayne cheste—vj s. viij d.

In contrast, the Old English adjective heah, “tall, lofty, exalted,” could also signify “principal.” Heah burh or heah ceaster, for example, means “principal or capital city.”

As street names, High Street is older than Main Street, dating to the Old English heahstræte, which appears multiple times in charters, usually in the context of denoting the boundaries of a parcel of land.

Highway also makes a single appearance in the extant Old English corpus, in a Kentish charter in the phrase cyniges heiweg. But the etymology of this word is disputed. The first element could be hay or hedge, making the phrase king’s hay-way or king’s hedge-way instead of king’s highway. But the word survived into and prospered in Middle and Modern English.

The phrase main street, as a descriptor, not a name, is in place by 1591 when it appears in William Garrard’s The Arte of Warre (the book was published posthumously; Garrard had died in 1587):

Directly from this towards the North, runneth one maine stréete 40 pace brode, that deuideth the horse campe from the foot campe.

The earliest recorded use of Main Street as a name for a road that I’m aware of is in an 1810 description of Chillicothe, Ohio.

Water street which runs about E. by N. parallel to the Scioto, is half a mile long, and contains ninety houses. […] Main street, parallel to Water street, is one hundred feet wide, as is Market street which crosses both at right angles.

There is no authoritative list of the most common street names in either the United States or Britain, probably because it’s not an easy question to answer. Besides the mammoth task of gathering the data, interpreting which are distinct streets can be tricky. For example, is North Main Street distinct from South Main Street?

If one googles the question for Britain, the answer that is invariably given is that High Street is the most common road name in the UK. Of course, most of these sites give no indication of what the source of their data is. But a 2020 analysis appearing in Towardsdatascience.com that is based on Ordnance Survey data confirms that High Street is the most common in England and Wales, followed by Station Road and Main Street coming in third. Scotland, of course, goes its own way, with Main Street topping the list.

And in 2015, the Washington Post took a stab at it for the United States. Park was the most common street name, followed by Second in second place. Main and First are further down the list, probably because they knocked each other out of contention for first place. Main is, however, the most popular street name in Maine.

Both terms have spawned metonymic uses, indicating that they have become ingrained in their respective national psyches. Main Street has been a metonym for small-town America since at least 1916, a use popularized by Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel of that name. The metonym originally had a pejorative cast, representing provincial and unenlightened opinion, but seems to have meliorated in recent years and now represents common-sense, middle-class values and is often used in opposition to the business interests of Wall Street. In Canada, the name has also generated mainstreeting and to mainstreet, terms for retail political campaigning, perhaps coined and certainly popularized by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in the late 1950s. Across the Atlantic, by the early 1970s, High Street, because streets with that name were commonly fronted by shops, had become a metonym for the retail sector of the economy.  

More likely the divergence between the British High Street and the North American Main Street is simply due to the opening of a lexical niche with the creation of cities and streets in the New World and the decline in the use of high to mean “principal.” The streets on the new continent had to be named something, and Main just happened to gain a beachhead, perhaps because at the time the meaning of high was being narrowed, and its use as a descriptor seemed more enigmatic. Main Street is the third most popular street name in the UK, but in the old country without the opening of the niche by new construction, this popularity simply did not have the ability to overcome the 500-year head start of the already established High Street.

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Sources:

Abdishakur. “What Can Analyzing More Than 2 Million Street Names Reveal?” Towardsdatascience.com, 23 January 2020.

Cuming, Fortescue. Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country. Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear, & Eichbaum, 1810, 194. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, second edition (DCHP-2), 2017, s.v. mainstreeting, n.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. heah, adj., heah-stræt, n., heah-weg, n.

Fulk, R.D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition. Toronto: U of Toronto, 2008, 29, lines 788b–790.

Garrard, William. The Arte of Warre. London: For Roger Warde, 1591, 262. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Guo, Jeff. “We Counted Literally Every Road in America. Here’s What We Learned.” Washington Post, 6 March 2015. Washingtonpost.com.

“The Inventorie of the Implements and Houshold Stuffe, Goodes & Cattelles, of Sr. Henrye Parkers Knt., 1551–1560.” In Hubert Hall, Society in the Elizabethan Age. London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1886, 151. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Jefferson, Ed. “What We Can Learn from a List of Every Single Road Name in the UK?” City Monitor, 3 June 2023.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. heigh, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2000, s.v. main, n.1, main, adj.2., main street, n., mainstreeting, n., mainstreet, v.; September 2014, s.v. high, adj. & n.2, highway, n., high street, n. and adj.

Photo credit: Mr. Matté, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.