January 2005 Archives
Tsunamis and related words: shallow-water wave;
tsunami; ring of fire; bathemetric
From an old joke: mutable; beddable (bedabble);
Eponyms (non-character) from writings: Baedeker;
Boswell; roorback; pasquinade; yapp binding; machiavellian; Knickerbocker
Etymologies in the Sky: moon;
meteoroid; meteor; meteorite; cosmos (cosmology)
Tsunamis and related words
For obvious reasons, this week is devoted to
words related to tsunamis. I have had to put some of this science together
myself, trusting readers to provide any needed correction.
Before we can properly define 'tsunami', we must define a scientific concept.
shallow-water wave – a wave whose depth is a very small, in comparison
to its wavelength
The concept is relevant because with a shallow-water wave, one can simplify the
formula for determining how fast the wave moves. Basically, only one factor is
relevant: wave speed is proportional to the square root of wave depth. The
deeper the wave, the faster it moves.
Obviously, a shallow-water wave can be one of small depth, or one of great
wavelength. This point will lead us to the definition of 'tsunami', tomorrow.
The dictionaries will tell you that a
tsunami is a kind of 'tidal wave' or storm wave (Webster's, Hutchinson;
Wordnet), or a 'large', 'great' or 'high' wave. (Webster's, OED; AHD). That is
shameful. In fact a tsunami it has nothing to do with the tides or storms. And
its strike is insidious precisely because, in the open ocean it is not 'large'
at all; it can barely be noticed.
We said that a "shallow-water wave" is one whose depth is a very
small, in comparison to its wavelength. That of course is achieved if a wave
has very long wavelength. Such a wave is called a tsunami.
tsunami – a series of waves of extremely long wave length and long
period (generated in a body of water by an impulsive disturbance that
vertically displaces the water)¹
For two reasons, a tsunami will strike with little warning. First, it crosses
deep ocean very quickly, roughly as fast as a jet plane, and with little energy
loss. (Reason: with such great wavelength, even in deep ocean it still acts as
a shallow-water wave.²) Second, a bit of reflection shows that a tsunami –
however big it may be when it hits the land – is almost undetectably small
while it is speeds across the ocean. As you've read, it takes special sensors
to detect it there. Ships at sea will not even notice it, and hence provide no
radio warnings, and we do not read of tsunami damage to ships at sea.
Indeed, invisibility-at-sea is the source of the name tsunami. Fisherman
who had had a calm and peaceful voyage, with no extraordinary waves, would be
baffled to return and find the port devastated. The disastrous wave, it would
seem, was one that had struck only in the harbor. Hence it was a "harbor
wave", which in Japanese is tsu-nami.
A tsunami becomes noticeable only when it slows, in shallow coastal waters.
There its size depends on harbor configuration, and may not be particularly
impressive. But the tsunami continues inexorably, and simply does not stop.
¹Source: US National
Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, which appears they have taken the
accepted scientific definition. A tsunami can have a wavelength in excess of
100 km – some sources say much more – and period of several minutes to an hour.
Contrast typical wind-driven swells along a beach: wave length of 150 m and
period of about 10 seconds.
²For such a wave, speed = √(g*depth), where g = acceleration of gravity,
9.8 m/sec/sec. Work it out and you'll find a tsunami travels through
5,000-meter ocean (which is not atypical) at almost 800 km/hr, or 500 mph.
We've seen that a tsunami is generated in a
body of water by an impulse that vertically displaces the water. What could
that impulse be? Destructive tsunamis are most commonly caused by undersea
earthquakes (less commonly by submarine landslides, infrequently by submarine
volcanic eruptions and very rarely by a large meteorite striking the ocean from
above).
It follows that destructive tsunamis will most often occur in the most
earthquake-prone area of the ocean. That area is the Pacific Ocean, in which
about 90% of the world's earthquakes occur.¹ That Pacific area has been given a
special name.
ring of fire – an extensive zone of volcanic and seismic activity that
coincides roughly with the borders of the Pacific Ocean
¹The next most
seismic region, 5-6% of earthquakes, is the Alpide belt, extending from
Mediterranean region eastward through Turkey, Iran, and northern India. I
assume that since it is not oceanic, earthquakes there would not generate
tsunamis.
bathemetric – regarding measurement of the depths of an ocean or other body
of water
[T]he Indian Ocean
has none of the deep-sea tsunami detection equipment. Still, Titov said, a
rapid forecast and alert system based just on the seismic and bathymetric
(sea floor topography) data could have saved lives. There are six tsunameters
deployed in the Pacific Ocean today, Bernard said, offering the "bare
minimum" of an early warning system. "We probably need more like
20," he said.
– Tom Paulson, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Dec. 28, 2004, quoting
cutting-edge experts at the NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in
Seattle
From an old joke
Old joke: Three
bachelors were kidding their married friend.
"You've
been married five years now, George," said one, "and still no
childeren? Is your wife" (and here he tried a very bad pun) "unbearable?"
Or,"
interjected another, "perhaps she's inconceivable?"
"Maybe
she's, uh, impregnable," joked the third.
George
shook his head sadly. "No, boys, you're all wrong. She's insurmountable
and inscrutable."
A thorough logophile would have more puns here. Let us look at some words that
would fit punningly, and look at their true meanings.
George shook his head sadly. "The woman
never even stops talking. She's simply not mutable."
A pun, because in fact mutable is not a form of to mute, make
silent.
mutable – prone to change; inconstant; also, capable of change or
of being changed
[The antonym, immutable, is more frequently used.]
Jack and Emily
were the monikers most frequently given to boys and girls in England and Wales
last year. Jack has been tops for a decade, and favourite boys’ names only
shuffle their order over time. But Emily has been No 1 for just two years, and
girls’ names tend to be more mutable, changing with
fashion.
– The Times, Jan. 5, 2005
George added, "She doesn't like bedabbling." George is punning on these two words:
bedabble - (trans. v, from 'dabble') to dabble upon; to sprinkle
or wet
beddable - (informal, from 'bed') sexually attractive or
available
His face was
round, white, pockmarked and bedabbled with sweat like a Cheshire
cheese. - Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel
I stared upon his blood-bedabbled breast
And sang my malediction with the rest.
– William Butler Yeats, A Woman Young and Old
He still runs away
from danger when he can, still seduces, or is seduced by, every beddable
woman, still lies, flatters, and cajoles without scruple.
– - Anthony Lejeune, book review in National Review, July 10, 1995
Adrienne Shelley, star of Sudden Manhattan, says: "I got a call in
my car on my way to an audition from my agent. He said, 'The important thing is
that they think you are beddable."
Eponyms (non-character) from writings
Many eponyms are the names of characters in
literature, including mythology and the bible. We can speak of a Hercules
or a hermaphrodite, a Judas or a Jonah, a milquetoast
or a munchkin.
From the world of writings we also have occasional eponyms that are not merely
character names. Obviously, an author's name can used to mean "written by
or in the style of": a Shakespearean sonnet. A few of these
non-character eponyms have a larger sense. This week we'll look at some of
them, familiar and unfamiliar.
Baedeker – a guidebook to countries or a country; more generally, a
guidebook to places
[after Karl Baedeker, 1801-1859, who published a series of travel
guidebooks]
Without some
yet-to-be-written Baedeker, the casual visitor to Santa Fe
in the '90s would scarcely detect the activities and events which signal a
major change in the city's legendary but willfully old-line art world.
– Jan Ernst Adlmann, Art in America, Jan. 1995
Why traipse all over town searching for the perfect cut, wax, or brow tweese
when Benton Jordan, the brains behind the new beauty Baedeker
head to toe, has done the work for you? ... she has collected the low-down on
350 local salons and spas in a comely aqua Zagat-sized paperback.
– Audrey Davidow, Los Angeles Magazine, August 2001
Boswell – an
assiduous and devoted recorder of another's life, words and deeds.
[after James Boswell (1740-1795), renowned as biographer of Samuel
Johnson]
The black-capped
chickadee is a half-ounce bundle of feathers, unbridled energy and--as
scientists are discovering--amazing avian brainpower. And Susan Smith, no
weirder than most bird students, is its Boswell. Her 1991
book is a notably readable summary of everything then known about the species.
– Les Line, Total recall - chickadee behavior, National Wildlife, Feb.
1, 1998
Chief Seattle's ecosermon in 1854, extolling the virtues of living in harmony
with nature, has become part of environmental lore. The speech is quoted
everywhere.
Except for one niggling detail: It's all bogus. Henry Smith, the
frontier doctor who became Chief Seattle's self-appointed Boswell,
however, didn't actually publish a translation of the Chief's speech until
1887--more than 30 years later
– Linda Marsa, Talk is Chief, Omni, Dec. 1992
In 2002 the Supreme
Court of India (at §12) quoted in full this bogus
Chief Seattle speech, with high praise, stating, "The reply is
profound. It is beautiful. It is timeless. It contains the wisdom of the ages.
It is the first ever and the most understanding statement on environment. The
whole of it is worth quoting as any extract from it is to destroy its
beauty."
During James Polk's 1844 campaign for US
president, the Ithaca Chronicle, in upstate New York, published blockbuster
excerpts from Roorback's Tour through the Western and Southern States in 1836.
Baron Von Roorback had told of meeting a group of slave traders, noting,
"Forty of these unfortunate beings had been purchased, I was informed, of
the Hon. J. K. Polk, the present speaker of the house of representatives; the
mark of the branding iron, with the initials of his name on their shoulders
distinguishing them from the rest."
The Chronicle had made a total fabrication. No such Baron existed; no such book
existed; the extract was lifted from a recent travel-book by George W.
Featherstonhaugh, and altered by inserting Polk's name and shifting the locale
to near Polk's home. So today's eponym, the name of an author, is uniquely that
of an author who never existed.
roorback (or roorbach) – a defamatory lie, put out to smear a politician
Nor is the typical
American journalist's credulity confined to such canards and roorbacks
from far places. He is often victimized just as easily at home.
– H.L. Mencken, Journalism in America
A longer Mencken extract (ellipses omitted),
leading up to his above sentence, will certainly be amusing, and it may be
timely. For Dan Rather of CBS News, following controversy over a false news
story he aired, has recently announced that he will be taking early retirement
For
example, the problem of false news. How does so much of it get into the
American newspapers, even the good ones? [The checkers], facing the elemental
professional problem of distinguishing between true news and false, turned out
to be incompetent. Obviously, the way to diminish such failures in future is
not to adopt sonorous platitudes borrowed from the realtors, the morticians,
the sanitary plumbers and the Kiwanis, but to undertake an overhauling of the
faulty technic, and of the incompetent personnel responsible for it. I don't
think it will make demands that are impossible. The bootlegging, legal or
delicatessen professions, confronted by like demands, would quickly furnish the
talent necessary to meet them; I see no reason why the profession of journalism
should not measure up as well.
When the means are readily at hand, [the news editor] often attempts to
check it, and sometimes even rejects it. But when such checking presents
difficulties – in other words, when deceit is especially easy, and hence should
be guarded against most vigilantly – he succumbs nine times out of ten, and
without a struggle. It was precisely by this process that the editors of the Times
made that paper ridiculous. In the face of great improbabilities, they
interpreted their inability to dispose of them as a license to accept them as
truth. Journalism will be a sounder and more dignified profession when a
directly contrary interpretation of the journalist's duty prevails. There will
then be less news in the papers, but it will at least have the merit of being
true.
pasquinade – a satire
or lampoon, esp. one ridiculing a specific person. verb: to ridicule
with a pasquinade (pasquin; pasquil – rarer terms; same meanings;
can also mean 'one who lampoons')
In 1501, an ancient statute was unearthed and set up in a public square in
Rome. Folks took to posting lampoons and satirical verses on the statue, which
they nicknamed "Pasquino" after some sharp-tongued curmudgeon.
(Sources differ as to whether he was an ancient or a contemporary, a
schoolmaster, a tailor or a cobbler.) Soon the term pasquinata came to
mean such a lampoon, and an English form became current when Thomas Nash, in
1589, began using the pseudonym of 'Pasquil of England'.
To give you the full flavor, I must quote a pasquinade at length.
When Michaelis's
testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson's suspicions of his wife I
thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade
...
– F. Scott
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
[During the hullabaloo when P.T. Barnum brought Jumbo the Elephant to America,]
the New York Times claimed Queen Victoria "would often romp with
him by the hour, making him fetch and carry like a dog and rolling with him in
innocent delight upon the turf. Later in life, when the danger that her Majesty
might by accident roll upon Jumbo and seriously injure him became too obvious
to be disregarded, the Queen ceased to romp with him, though she still kept up
the custom of having him sit by her side at the tea-table and 'beg' for a lump
of sugar like a trained poodle." All this was kept secret from the
Liberals, of course, until the unfortunate day when Jumbo got tangled in a
palace clothesline and became [dangerously] excited, thereby necessitating the intervention
of the police. Barnum immediately composed a reply to this pasquinade,
in which he generously offered to "assuage the royal grief and stop the
flow of royal tears" by returning to England with Jumbo the following
October.
– A. H. Saxon, P.T.
Barnum
yapp binding – a style of leather bookbinding, with soft limp edges that
overlap and thus protect the exposed edges of the pages.
Illustrated here. Use is almost completely confined to religious books.
[After William Yapp, bookseller in the latter part of the 19th century,
who designed the style for pocket-bibles.]
machiavellian – cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous
[Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), It. statesman who, in The Prince
(written ~1513, publ. 1532) advises that unethical methods may be needed to get
and use political power]
There are of
course machiavellian manipulators everywhere who seek only to
place themselves first.
– Lloyd Best, Trinidad and Tobago Express, Jan. 15, 2005
Knickerbocker – a New Yorker descended from the early Dutch settlers; or,
more broadly, a New Yorker
In 1809 an ad in the New York Post sought
the whereabouts of one Deitrich Knickerbocker, an elderly gentleman "not
in his right mind." A later announcement told that, the man not being
found, his creditors would publish an odd manuscript of his to satisfy his
debts. Soon, there appeared Knickerbocker's History of New York.
It was a literary hoax. There was no such gentleman. The actual author was a
young and then-unknown fellow, Washington Irving. The work, hilariously
satirical, was a great success, and its exact title will give you a taste:
A History of New
York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty.
[subtitle:] Among many Surprising and Curious Matters, the Unutterable
Ponderings of Walter the Doubter, the Disastrous Projects of William the Testy,
and the Chivalric Achievements of Peter the Headstrong, the three Dutch
Governors of New Amsterdam; being the only Authentic History of the Times that
ever hath been, or ever will be Published.
So extravagant an origin calls for an
extravagant illustration.
Suzanne couldn't
help herself. After all, he was only a laborer, and an Irish one at that. His
long dark lashes lowered, and when he looked up from under them, his gaze was
potently seductive. "Are you going to meet me, Miss Vanderkemp?"
Suzanne did not have to think about it. Soon she would marry some pale, boring Knickerbocker,
or maybe some moneyed newcomer. It wouldn't be horrid, but it would hardly be
exciting. She wanted Jake O'Neil.
– Brenda Joyce, After Innocence (excerpted)
Etymologies in the Sky
This week we'll present the interesting etymologies
of some familiar words from astronomy. My grateful acknowledgement to AR
Tullock, whose article in The Scotsman provided the idea of this theme
and much of the information, to which I have added.
moon – from an Indo-European root meaning 'to measure"; a month is
measured by the phases of the moon
If I understand correctly, in many of the Indo-European languages the words for
"moon" and "month" are identical or are cognates: German,
Sanskrit, Irish, Lithuanian, Avestan, Persian, Old Irish, Welsh. In other
languages (Greek, Armenian) they were originally cognates, until another term
was substituted for "moon".
It would seem obvious that the words meteor
and meteorology must be related, and yet they have entirely different
meanings: meteorology is the study of weather and other aspects of the
atmosphere, not the study of meteors. What then is the connection
between the two words?
We understand that lightning, streaking across the night sky, is a phenomenon
of the atmosphere. The ancients, seeing the differently-shaped steak of light
which we today call a meteor or shooting star, had no reason to
think it too was anything other than atmospheric. The English word meteor
meant 'an atmospheric phenomena of any type'.¹ Only in the 1800s did it become
generally understood that the streak of a shooting star was something
fundamentally different. With that, the word meteor became confined to a
shooting star, and new forms of the word emerged:
�.
meteoroid² – a stone in interplanetary space,
too small to be an asteroid
�.
meteor – the streak of light as that stone passes through the earth's
atmosphere; also, the stone itself during that passage
�.
meteorite – the same stone, resting on or in the earth
How did meteor come to mean 'an
atmospheric phenomenon' in the first place? It began with Greek aeirein
'to raise' and aoros 'lifted' (kin to the terms that gave us aorta
'that which is hung', air, and malaria 'bad air'). The Greeks
added the prefix meta- 'over; beyond' to form meteoros, referring
to a ship raised on the crest of a wave, but later taking this word to mean
'suspended up in the air'.¹ Hence meteorology, the study of atmospheric
phenomena.
The verb form of the same word (meteôrizô 'to raise in the air') came to
be used figuratively for 'to raise hope' (Thucydides) or 'to inflate with
pride' (Aristophanes, The Birds). In the Bible the word is used
precisely once and with an unclear meaning, something like 'to be kept in
suspense'. (Luke xii. 29)
¹One spoke of four
types of meteors: aqueous meteors (rain, snow, hail); aerial meteors
(wind); luminous meteors (aurora, rainbow); and igneous or fiery
meteors (lightning; shooting star)
²Coined 1865 by Hubert Anson Newton of Yale: "The term meteoroid will be
used to designate such a body before it enters the earth’s atmosphere." Amer.
J. of Science (apparently at 39:198, but possibly at 37:377-389 or
38:53-61). AHD
calls him 'Huburt', but is mistaken.
Disclaimer: I rely
on secondary sources; certain details conflict or appear in only one source. I
have not been able to trace original texts, nor do I speak Greek.
cosmos – the
universe, the world, seen as a well-ordered whole
cosmology – a account (whether scientific, philosophic or mythic) of the
creation of the universe
The root is Greek kosmos "orderly arrangement". in Homer, kosmeo
is the act of marshaling troops.
The same sense of kosmos gives us microcosm, macrocosm, cosmopolitan,
and obviously cosmonaut. Less obviously, it is the base of cosmetic:
Greek kosmetikos "skilled in adornment," > kosmein
"to arrange, adorn," > kosmos "order."