Friday words #277

By | August 6, 2021

I’m accustomed to having people say “That’s a strange usage” about terms that are common in our domain (software), like failover, on-prem, quiesce, and allowlist. For new-to-me terms, the shoe is often on the other foot: I learn some term that seems novel to me, only to discover that it’s well known in a domain that I’m not familiar with.

This week it’s the word safing. I visited the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque this week, and there were many exhibits about nuclear weapons. In an exhibit about weapons accidents (referred to as broken arrows), I saw this on one of the exhibit plaques:

(The text says “Although the existing safing systems had proved adequate, the accidents at Palomares, Spain in 1966 and Thule, Greenland in 1968 spurred Sandia National Laboratories to improve the nuclear detonation safing concept.)

I’d never heard (I think?) the word safing before, although it was clear enough in context. I looked it up in M-W, which said that safing is the present participle of safe, but which has no entry for safe as verb. A couple of other general dictionaries I looked at had no entry for safing and likewise no verb sense of safe.

This suggests that it’s a specialized term. I found a definition in the DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (PDF) that sets the technical context for the term: “As applied to weapons and ammunition, the changing from a state of readiness for initiation to a safe condition. Also called de-arming.”

I was curious how old the term was, so a trip to the OED. As a verb, to safe appears in English in the 1600s (there’s a cite or two in Shakespeare). The most common uses seem to be technical: plumbing, engineering, and of course weaponry. There’s a 1993 Tom Clancy citation in the OED (“When it was over the men safed their weapons”) which almost answers a question I have about whether putting the safety on (e.g. on a rifle) constitutes safing. I’ll have to ask someone knowledgeable about weapons.

For origins, something I saw recently and was reminded about again by my daughter: where do we get the word vanilla?

To start, a little botany and history. As most people probably know, vanilla comes from the seed pod of a particular type of orchid. After drying and curing, the pods can be ground up or they can be soaked in alcohol to produce an extract.

Since vanilla is an orchid, naturally it’s a fussy plant. 🙂 In the wild, only a couple of species of animals can pollinate it. But in the 1800s, a 12-year-old enslaved boy developed a way to hand-pollinate the flowers, which launched the successful cultivation of the plant. The seed pods also have to be picked by hand, and have to undergo a careful drying process, so the whole business is labor-intensive. Because of all this work, apparently vanilla is the second most expensive spice after saffron, or so I read.

Now the name. The plant is native to central Mexico, where it was known as tlilxochitl. The Spanish did adopt some Nahuatl names into Spanish for New World foods, like cocoa and chocolate (from cacahuatl and chocolatl), tomato (from tomatl), and avocado (Spanish aguacate, from ahuacatl). But they didn’t adopt tlilxochitl, which was perhaps a phoneme too far to be easily adapted into Spanish.

Instead, they gave the plant a descriptive name: vainilla (note the extra i that we dropped early on in English). This is a diminutive form of vaina, meaning “pod,” so vainilla is “little pod.” The word vaina goes back to the Latin term vagina, which meant “sheath,” used for things like a sword sheath and the hull or husk of a grain. As an etymological aside, the Romans didn’t use the word vagina in the medical or biological sense that we have today; that sense was coined specifically as a medical term in the late middle ages.

I tell you, between learning about the etymology, the botany, and the husbandry of vanilla, I have a lot more respect for something that is, ironically, a synonym for bland.

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