Friday words #233

By | August 21, 2020

Today’s new-to-me word isn’t just about a new word, but an entirely new thing (to me). I will say up front that both the thing and the word are a bit obscure and civil-engineering-y.

The background is that we’re spending a few days in Crescent City, California. Among the local points of interest is a long jetty (a breakwater) that was built to enclose what is otherwise an unsheltered anchorage. The jetty stretches 3400 feet into the water, or almost 2/3 of a mile. As you’re walking along the jetty, you see some strange-looking, almost conical structures at the end. Here’s a photo:

(Credit: Richard Doody, 2011)

Getting closer didn’t really help us understand what the structures are. Here’s a closeup; it looks sort of like a concrete version of something you’d play a game of jacks with:

And one with my wife for scale:

Finally, here’s a collection of them as you see them piled off the wall at the end of the jetty:

So what are these things? It turns out that they’re dolosse (sometimes doloes), singular dolos. They’re used as a kind of shock absorber against waves that batter the jetty. The weird-looking shape is designed so that they can be positioned in a tangle that presents many different surfaces and angles to the force of a wave, thus helping to dissipate it. In fact, the analogy to a game of jacks is apt: the inventor, Eric Mowbray Merrifield, was specifically after a block shape that could be sprinkled (and interlocked) like jacks. (A blog post by “Alex D.” has a good overview of the Crescent City jetty and the use of dolosse in its construction.)

The reason that the name dolos (and especially its plural, dolosse) looks a little odd is that it comes from Afrikaans; Merrifield was a South African engineer, and dolosse were first deployed in the town of East London in South Africa. The word dolos refers to a knuckle bone used in divination or in games.

I suspect I might never need to know this word again. But we’ve all experienced that thing where once you become aware of something novel, you seem to notice it all the time. Who knows, maybe that will occur for dolosse as well.

On to origins. As I said, we’re on vacation, and I’ve been flipping through the hotel-room TV to find baseball games. Some of the sports channels are in Spanish; seeing the Spanish word deportes made me curious about where the word sports comes from.

Well, the Spanish word is truer to the origins than ours is; we had it originally as disport. We got it in Norman times from French desporter, which originates from the Latin roots dis- (“away”) and -port (“to carry”). The sense was something that “carries you away” from boredom or sadness. It was a noun in English by the early 1300s and a verb not long after that. Douglas Harper points out other words of a similar structure that have a similar metaphoric meaning: distract, divert, transport. By 1500, the word sport(s) was being used to describe organized team sports, not just diversions and games.

The word sport was derived from disport by clipping, in which a part of a word is cut off, specifically apheresis, or cutting off the beginning of a word. (Compare modern manifestations of apheresis: telephone > phone, because > ’cause). There are probably other examples in English where we reduced dis– or des- at the beginning of a word, but I haven’t found any. (I haven’t looked hard.)

A weird twist is that the Spanish word deportes might have been—according to the OED, anyway—a borrowing from the English word sport to refer to team sports, and not an evolution along the same lines as French desporter. If that’s true, the Spanish word would still technically be truer to the original, Latin-derived version, but not for the reason I’d thought. I think I might want a second opinion on the origin of the Spanish version, tho.

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