SURGE

[Dr. Goodword]

• 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.

[Perry]

Perhaps those who incorrectly use surge, as in warspeak are thinking of this as a contranym to insurgency?

[gailr]

I can add nothing to Dr. Goodword's commentary on the current misappropriation of "surge".

In the Battle of Crecy (1346) the French vastly outnumbered the invading, on-the-run English, yet they suffered devastating losses, due entirely to pigheadedness. Determined to follow tradition and ignoring the mounting barriers of their own dead and wounded, the French sent wave after wave of knights surging into the mud around a little hill south of Wadicourt. From it, the English longbowmen and defense rained down death "as thick as snow", according to survivors.

Those who don't learn from history condemn everyone to repeat it.

-gailr

[Bailey]

I think New Orleans knows about surges.

mark hurry-cane Bailey