SURGE
Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 11:34 pm
• surge •
Pronunciation: sêrj • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb, intransitive (no direct object)
Meaning: 1. To billow powerfully, to rise and fall in heavy waves. 2. To move forward in a powerful wave. 3. To increase or improve suddenly and to a great extent.
Notes: I kept hoping that the misuse of today's Good Word would go away before sullying its reputation. It seems, however, to have spread to all the news organizations in the US. Even though I have meticulously built a reputation for stretching the sense of words to the maximum, calling a military buildup or reinforcements a "surge of troops" enters territory where even I fear to tread. It is a metaphor that just doesn't work and smacks a bit of warspeak.
In Play: Troop surges are possible: "At the captain's command, the troops surged out of the trenches." Troops can surge through enemy lines when those lines break. The important point is that a surge must be a strong wave-like motion, a push forward, powered by a force within whatever is surging. The buildup currently underway is a discrete division being added from the outside to those already in Iraq—by no means a surge.
Word History: Today's widely misused word came to us from an ancestor of French surgir "spring up, burst forth" from Latin surgere "to rise". The Latin verb comprises sub "(from) below" + regere "to lead, be straight" based on the root reg. This Proto-Indo-European root apparently had the same ambiguity as English rule "a straight edge" and "to dominate, control". It shows up in Latin regula "straight stick", which French reduced to rule, and also rex (regis) "king", which became French roi "king" and royal, which English borrowed unchanged. In Sanskrit it emerged as raja "king, ruler", a constituent in the compound maharaja "great leader". The first element of this word is the adjective maha "great", a distant cousin of English much and Greek mega "large", used now in such words as megaton and megabyte.
Pronunciation: sêrj • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb, intransitive (no direct object)
Meaning: 1. To billow powerfully, to rise and fall in heavy waves. 2. To move forward in a powerful wave. 3. To increase or improve suddenly and to a great extent.
Notes: I kept hoping that the misuse of today's Good Word would go away before sullying its reputation. It seems, however, to have spread to all the news organizations in the US. Even though I have meticulously built a reputation for stretching the sense of words to the maximum, calling a military buildup or reinforcements a "surge of troops" enters territory where even I fear to tread. It is a metaphor that just doesn't work and smacks a bit of warspeak.
In Play: Troop surges are possible: "At the captain's command, the troops surged out of the trenches." Troops can surge through enemy lines when those lines break. The important point is that a surge must be a strong wave-like motion, a push forward, powered by a force within whatever is surging. The buildup currently underway is a discrete division being added from the outside to those already in Iraq—by no means a surge.
Word History: Today's widely misused word came to us from an ancestor of French surgir "spring up, burst forth" from Latin surgere "to rise". The Latin verb comprises sub "(from) below" + regere "to lead, be straight" based on the root reg. This Proto-Indo-European root apparently had the same ambiguity as English rule "a straight edge" and "to dominate, control". It shows up in Latin regula "straight stick", which French reduced to rule, and also rex (regis) "king", which became French roi "king" and royal, which English borrowed unchanged. In Sanskrit it emerged as raja "king, ruler", a constituent in the compound maharaja "great leader". The first element of this word is the adjective maha "great", a distant cousin of English much and Greek mega "large", used now in such words as megaton and megabyte.