tsunami / tidal wave

Village in Banda Aceh, Indonesia following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed the lives of more than a quarter million people

1 April 2024

A tsunami is a series of large waves caused by an earthquake or other underwater disturbance. The phenomenon is also known by the technically inaccurate term tidal wave. Both terms have been in English use for over a century, with tidal wave being the older and until relatively recently the far more common of the two.

Tidal wave is an open compound noun formed within English, tidal + wave. Originally, the term had a very different meaning, referring to the bulge of water in the middle of the ocean caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. This sense of tidal wave dates to the early eighteenth century, when it appears in a 1715 treatise on the tides written by Edward Barlow, an English priest and inventor:

Notwithstanding the Co-extension of the Moon’s Pressure, to all that Tract of the Atlantick already described; so as to adjust the Primary Tide to itself, thro’out the said Extent of the Sea, to the same Instant, from the very nature of its Libration; yet as to that Part of the same Tidal Wave, which keeps closest to the Sea’s Central Meridian, where it rowls in deepest Water, and flows in the directest Channel, from the Tropick, its supposed Axe, towards the Pole; it must needs run higher than the rest of the Ocean.

Tidal wave could also be applied to the incoming water in a harbor at high tide, especially in a place where the tides were extreme. Because they resembled such an extreme tidal influx, by the mid nineteenth century tidal wave also came to applied to the waves generated by an earthquake, even though these waves are not tidal in nature. The earliest use in this sense that I have found (there are undoubtedly earlier examples out there), is from the Boston Courier of 6 May 1843, describing such a surge of water in Nova Scotia. From the description, it’s easy to see how such an earthquake-created surge could be mistaken for an extreme tidal surge:

A Tidal Wave. A singular phenomenon, which occasioned no little alarm, occurred at Yarmouth, N.S., on the 18th ult. The Herald, published at that place, says that at low water, a little before dusk, the tide suddenly rushed in, in the space of a few minutes to the height of five to seven feet, and immediately receded with equal rapidity, dragging some small craft from their moorings, and leaving the flats again bare. The whole took place in about twenty minutes. At Bunker’s Island and the Cove the water rose ten feet.

Tidal wave can also be used figuratively. Here is an example from the Bristol Mercury of 11 May 1839. The allusion here seems to be that of a tidal surge, rather than an earthquake-created one:

One thing has been proved, we think, sufficiently—that a government based on the doctrine of finality cannot stand: it was the rock on which the administration of Lord Melbourne has split. We are now about to try the interregnum of a Tory rule, that is less likely to withstand the shock of opinion, and the perpetual buffeting of the tidal wave of the movement still going on.

Tidal wave was far more common in non-scientific use than tsunami until the 1970s. Tsunami is a borrowing from Japanese, a compound formed in that language from tsu (harbor) + nami (waves). It first gained traction in the English-speaking scientific community in the early twentieth century because tidal wave is an inaccurate term when applied to earthquake-created surges.

The earliest use of tsunami in English that I know of is in Washington, DC’s Evening Star of 20 July 1896 in reference to the Sanriku earthquake of June 1896, magnitude 7.2. The earthquake created two tsunamis caused at least 22,000 deaths in Japan:

At about 8 o’clock the people living along the coast were startled from their tranquillity by a frightful roaring from the sea, likened to the reports of heavy artillery. Roused to action by cries of “tsunami,” tsunami,” [sic] (“tidal wave,” “tidal wave”) from those who realized the impending disaster, the inhabitants rushed from their homes into a night of pitchy blackness to be overtaken and engulfed in their flight to higher ground.

Early uses of tsunami in English were invariably in a Japanese context. The first use outside of that context that I know of appears in the journal Nature of 21 December 1929 in reference to a tsunami that struck the Maritime provinces of Canada:

The earthquake was obviously of the highest order of intensity at its centre, for it overthrew chimneys, and was therefore of the order of over No. 7 on the RossiForel scale in the towns of Nova Scotia, more than 400 miles from its origin, and it occasioned a tsunami or earthquake wave, which drowned 26 people on the Burin Peninsula in Newfoundland, did extensive damage to property, and in places swept inland to the height of 100 feet.

Like tidal wave, the noun tsunami can also be used figuratively to mean an overwhelming force. The first such use that I’m aware of occupies a transitional stage between literal and figurative. It is in the context of ocean pollution by undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau. From the San Francisco Chronicle of 3 April 1970:

Nowhere is this sense of urgency stronger than in America’s new ecological consciousness, Cousteau said.

“Perhaps a tsunami of salvation will come from America,” Cousteau said, using the technical term for a tidal wave. “It must come—for that’s what the oceans are all about: not for man to get richer, but for man to survive.”

And a figurative use of tsunami completely divorced from the context of the ocean appears two years later. From the journal Science of 11 August 1972:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently swimming through a tsunami of comments generated by its announced intention to alter the regulations concerning the dispensation of methadone.

Today, tsunami has been completely anglicized and it has overwhelmed the older term tidal wave.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Barlow, Edward. “The Second Treatise of the Tide.” In Meteorological Essays. London: John Hooke and Thomas Caldecott, 1715, 102. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“The Change in the Ministry.” Bristol Mercury (England), 11 May 1839, 3/1. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

“Dark View of Ocean Pollution.” San Francisco Chronicle (California), 3 April 1970, 6/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Gregory, J.W. “The Earthquake South of Newfoundland and Submarine Canyons” (letter). Nature, 124, 21 December 1929, 945–46. DOI: 10.1038/124945a0.

Holden, Constance. “Methadone: New FDA Guidelines Would Tighten Distribution.” Science, 177.4048, 11 August 1972, 502/1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2023, s.v. tidal wave, n.; second edition, 1989, tsunami, n.

“The Terrible Tidal Wave.” Evening Star (Washington, DC), 20 July 1896, 1/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“A Tidal Wave.” Boston Courier (Massachusetts), 6 May 1843, 2/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Philip A. McDanial, 2 January 2005, US Navy photo. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

nihonium

Monument commemorating the discovery of nihonium at the west gate to the Riken institute in Wako, Japan

29 March 2024

Nihonium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 113 and the symbol Nh. The half-life of its longest-lived isotope is measured in seconds. It has no applications beyond pure research.

The element was first reported to have been produced in 2003 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia as part of a collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the United States. The JINR-LLNL team published their finding in February 2004. But in October 2004, scientists at the Riken institute in Japan published a more detailed report on work they had been conducting on element 113.

It took until 2016 for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) to resolve the dispute over which group had priority in the discovery. IUPAC decided that the Japanese group had priority and announced this preliminary finding, along with the assignment of the name nihonium, in a press release dated 8 June 2016:

For the element with atomic number 113 the discoverers at RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science (Japan) proposed the name nihonium and the symbol Nh. Nihon is one of the two ways to say “Japan” in Japanese, and literally mean “the Land of Rising Sun”. The name is proposed to make a direct connection to the nation where the element was discovered. Element 113 is the first element to have been discovered in an Asian country.

IUPAC finalized its decision in December 2016.

IUPAC guidelines formulated in 2016 require new elements be named after either a mythological character or concept (or an astronomical object named after such a mythological concept), a mineral, a place, or a scientist. Elements in columns 1–16 of the periodic table take the usual suffix -ium. Those in column 17 take the suffix -ine, and those in column 18 the suffix -on. Nihonium is in column 13, hence the -ium ending. Of course, older names for elements may not conform to these guidelines.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). “IUPAC Is Naming the Four New Elements Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson  (press release), 8 June 2016.

Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR). “Discovery of the New Chemical Elements with Numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118” (press release), 6 January 2016.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Morita, Kosuke, et al. “Experiment on the Synthesis of Element 113” (30 July 2004). Journal of the Physical Society of Japan, 73.10, October 2004, 2593–96. DOI: 10.1143/JPSJ.73.2593.

Oganessian, Yu. Ts., et al. “Experiments on the Synthesis of Element 115.” Physical Review C, 69, 2 February 2004, 021601-1–5. American Physical Society.

riding

Canadian federal ridings, 2021

27 March 2024

When I moved to Canada in 2010, I soon discovered that legislative districts there are known as ridings. At first, I assumed the name came from the distance one could ride to get to the polls, but me being me, I had to look it up, and I discovered that the word goes back to pre-Conquest England. And the English county of Yorkshire, until quite recently, was divided into three districts known as ridings.

The Present-Day riding is a variation on trithing, which is from the Old Norse þriðjungr, meaning third part. Under the Danelaw, the portion of England ruled by the Danes prior to the Norman Conquest, English counties were divided into three administrative districts. The Old English form would be *þriðing or*þriding, but the word does not appear in the extant corpus. We do, however, see it in Anglo-Latin texts from the pre-Conquest period. The Laws of Edward the Confessor (1003–66) use the Latin trehingas and trehingref, who would be the governor of the district, a word that corresponds to sheriff, or shire-reeve who administers a shire:

Erant et alie potestates super wapentagiis quas trehingas vocabant, scilicet, terciam partem provincie, et qui super ipsam dominabantur, trehingref.

(There were also other authorities governing the wapentakes, which they called trehingas, namely, the third part of the province, and those who ruled over it, the trehingref.)

And the Yorkshire districts of Estreding, NortTreding, and Westreding are named in the 1086 Domesday Book. The Yorkshire ridings were officially abolished in 1974, but the East Riding was reestablished as an administrative district in 1996.

The word was imported into Canada in the late eighteenth century. It’s used in a 1792 proclamation by Governor John Simcoe, governor of Upper Canada, in which he divides the county of Glengarry (now in Ontario) into three legislative districts:

And know ye, also, that our said lieutenant-governor hath also declared and appointed, and doth hereby declare and appoint, that for the purposes of representation, the said county of Glengary, bounded as aforesaid, shall be divided into two ridings.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, first edition (DHCP-1), 1967, s.v. riding, n.

“Leges Regis Edwardi Confessoris,” § 31. In Benjamin Thorpe. Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, vol. 1 of 2. 1840, 196. Google Books.

Mills, A.D. A Dictionary of English Place-Names. Oxford, Oxford UP, 1991, 272, s.v. Riding, East, North, and West.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, s.v. riding, n.2.; second edition, 1989, s.v. trithing, n.

Simcoe, John Graves. “Proclamation” (16 July 1792). Fourth Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario. Alexander Fraser, ed. Toronto: L. K. Cameron, 1907, 180. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Smith, A. H. The Place-Names of the North Riding of Yorkshire. English Place-Name Society 5. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1928, 1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Lyraaaaaa, 2023. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.