The More Things Change, the More Their Names Stay the Same

The last two posts on Mobile Bay remind me of an old problem, the conservatism of naming. Over-and-over again in history we see a word change its meaning, sometimes drastically, in a short period of time and create intense confusion.

Take the torpedo. To the Victorians the name could mean: (1) a stationary naval mine, (2) a spar torpedo, (3) a towed torpedo, (4) a primitive land mine, and (5) an automobile or fish torpedo - what we would think of as a torpedo today. A spar torpedo was essentially a long pole or boom with an explosive charge attached. It was extended from the bow or at an angle from a vessel and was intended to detonate when it struck another boat or ship. It was with one of these that the Confederate submarine Hunley sank the USS Housatonic. Towed torpedoes were explosive charges fitted with vanes or fins. When towed by a ship, the vanes caused them to swing out to the side of the ship. As the attacking ship passed, it was intended that the towed torpedo would strike the enemy vessel and explode. The fish torpedo (so called because it swam under the water) was also often called a Whitehead torpedo, after its inventor.

From the context, we can usually tell which weapon the author intended. This is, as I said, an old problem, and the solution is not always so obvious. The early history of guns and gunpowder is a case in point. For many years, there were scholars who believed that guns and gunpowder were an Arabic invention, or at least that they appeared in the Middle East before they did in Europe. One of the chief reasons for this was because the terms barud (pronounced with both vowels long, something like "bay-rood" I believe) and naft originally seem to have meant saltpeter and an inflammable mixture used as an incendiary weapon, respectively, but both came to mean gunpowder. Historians running into this were not always certain which meaning was intended, nor were they at all certain when the usage changed. In fact the use of naft to mean either gunpowder or an incendiary continued side-by-side for a time. (J.R. Partington has a good discussion of this in Chapter V of his, A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder, 1960, reprinted 1999, esp. pp. 189-197.)

Similar confusion arose in China and in Europe over the terminology of the new weapons. Decades of scholarship were needed to sort it all out.  Today we continue to apply old words in specific ways to new technologies. We might recall that, a hundred years ago, a computer was a person who made computations, or that a tank was still strictly something for holding liquids. The more things change, the more their names remain the same.