Titanic

The 19th century into the early 20th was a period when things titanic were in vogue.


Titan was the name, in Greek mythology, of the elder brother of Kronos and the ancestor of the Titans. In poetry it was also used to refer to his grandson, the Sun-god, Helios. The adjective titanic came to mean gigantic, colossal, thus in all ways resembling the nature or character of the Titans. This sense became progressively widened, coming into particularly wide usage in the 19th century, denoting a person, mountain, tree, etc. of gigantic stature or strength, physical or intellectual, a ‘giant." In 1796 titanium, one of the particularly strong rare metals, was given its name. Titanic, towards the end of the century, was applied descriptively to machines of great size and power, for example a dredger or a crane. 


Thus when the famous British liner of 1912 received its name, it was drawing on nearly a century of fascination with the large, the powerful, the mechanical, and drew from a legacy of Greek mythology that had for decades been applied to modern technological power. 

Tacks Day

It's tax time, and having reflected on taxes a bit, I found myself drawn to tacks, tack, and tackiness.


As my fourth grade teacher was fond of saying (and this was when Ross Perot was going around doing his shtick), flat tacks don't work. It's true, tacks need a point. A tack is something that fastens one thing to another thing using its sharp point. All sorts of small fasteners have been called tacks. Nowadays, we tend to think of the little ones we use on cork boards. 

Because my postings tend often to have something to do with ships, it is important to note that one particularly important kind of tack was used on a ship: one kind of "tack" was a rope, wire, or chain and hook used to secure to the ship's side the windward side of the lower square sails of the sailing ship in certain circumstances. "Tack" thus came to refer to the "lower windward corner of the sail" where such an attachment was fixed. 

From this we get the verb "to tack" which I remember learning at summer camp when we had sailing lessons. (I wasn't exactly a sailing master). It means to move in a zigzag way, keeping the boat in a 90 degree relationship to the wind, alternately on the port and starboard sides of the vessel. From this maneuver comes the more figurative sense of the verb: "To change one's attitude, opinion, or conduct; also, to proceed by indirect methods."

Tack is also something that sailors might eat on a ship. Hard tack, that is. This sense derives from a more metaphorical or abstract use of tack to mean "strength" or "sustenance," and thus came to be used to refer to foodstuff in general. Hard tack, or ships biscuit, was used from 1836 in opposition to "soft tack" which meant bread. 

Tacky in one sense means "sticky," that is, having the quality of sticking onto something. This usage is mainly attested in the 20th century. But the more common sense of this adjective now is different: "Dowdy, shabby; in poor taste, cheap, vulgar." The origin of this word, which is older, is obscure, and seems to relate to a 19th century usage of the word to refer to "A poor white of the Southern States from Virginia to Georgia," which in turn came from a use of the word to mean a "degenerate broken down horse." Its relationship to the sticky or fastener sense of tack is unclear, and there may not be a connection. 

How should we celebrate Tacks Day this year?

Flotsam and Jetsam

I've always liked the words FLOTSAM and JETSAM. But can I use them in a sentence?

Constance Hale thinks she can.

In a recent New York Times piece, Hale compared different kinds of sentences to different kinds of boats:

There are as many kinds of sentences as there are seaworthy vessels: canoes and sloops, barges and battleships, Mississippi riverboats and dinghies all-too-prone to leaks.

But some sentences aren't really sentences at all. They don't have a subject (which she calls the 'what') and a predicate (the 'so what') so they are the "impostors, flotsam and jetsam — a log heading downstream, say, or a coconut bobbing in the waves without a particular destination."

Logs, Blogs, and Chunks of Wood

A log is something you chop from a felled tree and maybe stick in a fireplace or use for construction. It is also anything shaped like said wooden object: a piece of goat cheese, for instance. A log is also a place where people record important information, for example on a ship and, nowadays, in the form of a weblog, aka. blog. What's the connection between these?

(An aside for the Talmud scholars among you: a log is also a Hebrew liquid measurement equal to about three quarters of a pint, but sometimes compared to the volume of various numbers of eggs. Rabbis in the Talmud debate just how many logs of wine one needs to drink to fulfill various ritual obligations, e.g. on Passover).

The origin of the tree log seems obscure. OED doesn't think it comes from Old Norse or Late Scandanavian though there are theories. It may have been more onomatopoeic, an attempt to express the notion of something heavy through sound, but this is inconclusive.

Here we move on to the ship connection. In the realm of seafaring, which I'm beginning to learn bits and pieces about as I blog (see my post on tenders), the LOG, between the 16th-18th centuries, was an apparatus made out of wood--basically a log--used for ascertaining the rate of a ship's motion. This contraption would consist of a thin quadrant of wood, loaded so as to float upright in the water, fastened to a line wound on a reel. 1574: "They hale in the logge or piece of wood again, and looke how many fadome the shippe hath gone in that time."

The pieces of information about distance and speed gleaned from repeated uses of the log would need to be recorded, usually on a LOG-SLATE or LOG-BOARD at first, and then later transcribed into the LOG-BOOK, which eventually got shortened into LOG.

Like so many other words, a term that had a very clear nautical context broadened in its meaning and came to mean any book in which key pieces of information were recorded. This broader sense seems not to have come into broad use until the 20th century, often as various kinds of manufacturers found themselves recording the details of their production. Thus, Printer's Ink Monthly, 1937: "Log, an account of every minute of broadcasting, all errors being considered. An accurate journal required by law." Or Fenelon, Economics of Road Transport, 1925: "A daily log prepared by the driver of each vehicle, showing the nature of the work performed, the tonnage carried, the time taken, etc."

Weblog seems to have premiered in the early 1990s to mean "A file storing a detailed record of requests handled (and sometimes also errors generated) by a web server." In 1997 the OED has the first instance of "weblog" meaning the more personal log of reflections that would eventually become the blog. J. Barger, in a Usenet newsgroup in 1997, posted the following: "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis," to which he assigned the URL www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html.

OED has the first use of blog as both noun and verb in 1999.

By this point, it really wasn't about trees anymore, but let's not forget that this all comes from tying logs to the back of boats.