The Words of the Week - Dec. 6

‘Tsunami’

A strong earthquake in California and accompanying tsunami warnings (later cancelled) led to increased lookups for the word tsunami on Thursday.

A powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Northern California on Thursday morning, sending tremors across the Bay Area and prompting immediate tsunami warnings along the coast. Emergency notifications sent to smartphones urged users in the affected areas to move to higher ground immediately: “A series of powerful waves and strong currents may impact coasts near you. You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters.”
— The San Francisco Chronicle, 5 Dec. 2024

Tsunami warning cancelled after magnitude 7 earthquake strikes California coast
— (headline), BBC, 5 Dec. 2024

We define tsunami as “a great sea wave produced especially by submarine earth movement or volcanic eruption.” The word comes from the Japanese tsunami, a combination of tsu, meaning “harbor” and nami, meaning “wave.”

‘Martial law’

Martial law saw a spike in lookups on Tuesday morning following news out of South Korea.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared emergency martial law on Tuesday, accusing the opposition of controlling parliament, sympathizing with North Korea, and engaging in anti-state activities that have paralyzed the government. … The immediate implications for governance and democracy remain uncertain.
— Michael D. Carroll, Newsweek, 3 Dec. 2024

South Korean parliament votes to defy president by lifting his declaration of martial law
— (headline), The Associated Press, 3 Dec. 2024

Martial law may be defined as “the law applied in occupied territory by the military authority of the occupying power” or “the law administered by military forces that is invoked by a government in an emergency when the civilian law enforcement agencies are unable to maintain public order and safety.” Because martial is a homophone of marshal, and because marshal also has military meanings, there is often confusion about which word to use. It may help to remember that in modern English martial only functions as an adjective; this is the word you want to use to modify law. Marshal can function as a verb or a noun, with meanings such as “to place in proper rank or position,” or “a general officer of the highest military rank.”

‘Depose’

Lookups for depose rose on Thursday morning in the aftermath of a shooting in Manhattan.

The CEO of a major health insurer was gunned down in a “brazen, targeted” attack in New York City, shot multiple times by a gunman at point blank range outside a famed Manhattan hotel, police said. … The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were discovered by detectives on the shell casings found at the scene ...”
— Aaron Katersky, et al., ABC News, 4 Dec. 2024

We provide a range of meanings for depose, including “to remove from a throne or other high position,” “to put down or deposit,” and “to affirm or assert.” In legal use, depose can mean “to testify to under oath or by affidavit” or “to take testimony from especially by deposition,” as in “depose a witness.”

‘Mammoth’

More people than usual looked up mammoth this week following coverage of a new scientific study concerning the ancient mammals.

For millions of years, North America was home to a zoo of giants: mammoths and mastodons, camels and dire wolves, sloths the size of elephants and beavers as big as bears. And then, at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch about 12,000 years ago, most of them vanished. Scientists have argued for decades about the cause of their extinction. Now, a study analyzing the ancient bones of a young child who lived in Montana suggests that early Americans hunted mammoths and other giant mammals to oblivion.
— Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, 4 Dec. 2024

We know the mammoth to be the now-extinct ancestor of the elephant, active during the Pleistocene epoch. Unlike modern elephants, mammoths typically had highly ridged molars, long tusks that curved upward, and well-developed body hair. The word mammoth came to English as a borrowing from the Dutch mammut or mammuth, in turn borrowed from the 17th century Russian word mamant. Mamant was probably borrowed from a presumed compound in Mansi, a Finno-Ugric language of western Siberia, meaning “earth horn.”

Word Worth Knowing: ‘Pudding’

Pudding may be far from the most unusual word we’ve highlighted in this section of Words of the Week, but we feel it’s worth knowing due to the sheer variety of foodstuffs for which it is used. The oldest sense of pudding dates to at least the 13th century, when it referred to what we might also call blood sausage or blood pudding, that is, a very dark sausage containing a large proportion of blood. Over the centuries it has acquired a goodly number of additional meanings, including but not limited to “a dish often containing suet or having a suet crust and originally boiled in a bag” (as in “steak and kidney pudding”); “a boiled or baked soft food usually with a cereal base” (as in “corn pudding” or “bread pudding”); and—broadly and primarily in British English—“dessert.”

The pudding perhaps most familiar to North American palates is a dessert of a soft, spongy, or thick creamy consistency, especially one made from sweetened milk or cream cooked with a thickener (such as eggs, flour, tapioca, or cornstarch) and usually flavored, as with chocolate or vanilla. And if that’s not enough pudding for you, go ahead and dip your spoon into entries for black pudding, hasty pudding, Yorkshire pudding, snow pudding, and Christmas pudding, among many sweet and savory others.