Meld
Vulcan mind tricks
December 11, 2009 8 comments
Oliver Kamm’s “The Pedant” column continues to demonstrate just that level of scrupulous attention to detail and fact that we have come to expect from him. This week, he claims that the word meld cannot mean “combine”:
Both writers are using “meld” as if it means “put together” […] Avoid it. “Meld” comes from the German verb “melden”, meaning “to announce”. The word is used in card games. It means to declare a combination of cards with scoring value.
The use of “meld” by the two writers in The Times bears no relation to what the word means.
From the OED:
meld (meld), v.3 orig. and chiefly U.S. [perh. a blend of MELT v.1 and WELD v.; but cf. E.D.D. melder entanglement, mental confusion; meldered, mixed, entangled.] trans. and intr. To merge, blend; to combine, incorporate.
1939 New Yorker 23 Sept. 31 (Advt.), Schenley’s exclusive process — melding — which ‘marries’ the whiskey blend so perfectly that it retains its rich flavor. […]
So Kamm, comically, is insisting that a sense of meld which has been in use for at least seventy years “bears no relation to what the word means”. Let us all join together in hoping that his state of “mental confusion”, or melder, clears up soon!
When I need the proper meaning of a word adjudicated, I ask myself, how would Mr. Spock use this word?
SNAP! I was on the train, having read this before leaving, and was sitting there, despondently wondering what precisely was infuriating me so much about Kamm’s piece, why I couldn’t put it out of my mind. And then it struck me! As soon as I could, I raced to a computer and found this comment already written – so, thank you, WIIIAI, for putting it so nicely.
I don’t know why the piece is classified under “LIFE AND STYLE -> WOMEN”, though it does at least mean that Kamm’s readers are given easy access to “Celebrity Watch: Lady Gaga’s the greatest” and “Tumbles and a tongue-tied Kate Moss at the British Fashion Awards“.
Still, strange way to m…, er – combine your articles.
That’s astonishing. I was going to ask what then does Kamm think the word ‘meld’ actually means (apart from that obscure card game usage), but upon reading the piece it’s apparent he thinks the word doesn’t mean anything at all, but is probably a nonsense portmanteau-word combining* ‘melt’ and ‘weld’. Which means that every time he’s come across ‘meld’ being used in precisely the sense he decries, it never occurred to him that this might be what the word actually means, given it doesn’t mean anything else.
*feel free to replace with the obvious gag.
Is it co-incidence that Kamm name checked Quentin Letts of the Mail, and later that day, Letts named checked him? Neither mention is explicitly hostile, but this could be the beginning of a feud. Letts mentions that Kamm signed the Ban Blair baiting petition along with 194 others. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that not even all Labour MPs signed, which suggests that Blair defending is a minority taste.
Kamm is delusional about his competence, whether in matters Balkan or linguistic. On English “meld” he ignores that “meld” is never used in conformity with the German usage ‘to mention, announce, report, inform, denounce” and so on. As for syntax, English “meld” is used “absolutely”, i.e. without complement, i.e. without a “direct object”. But in German “melden” takes any complement, such as “news, event, incident” and more. Ferdinand de Saussure, in his book “Semantics”, over a hundred years ago regaled his readers with the Stoic grammarians’ term “pregnancy”. Saussure was referring to the process whereby one word absorbs into itself the meaning of an adjacent word.—ADJACENT is Latin for ‘lying next to’. For example, “a laptop” or a “desk top” in most occurrences today does not simply refer to your lap top or a desk top; it’s a computer so placed. Just so, in English “meld” is used in the card game canasta, where “meld” is etymologically from the German phrase “ich melde / I declare sc. that I hold a combination of cards with scoring value”. Groucho Marx was a fine grammarian, e.g. in his use of pregnancy jokes: “Will you join me in a cup of tea? –Do you think there’s enough room?” . “Cup of tea” is pregnant here with the meaning of an unstated element, “drinking”.
Surely the ultimate source of the laptop/desktop distinction resides in the unit’s physical composition: the former features a monitor inseparable from the CPU; the latter does not.
Of course Oliver Kamm probably talks about resting his dinner on his “lap top” whilst watching Come Dine With Me. And refers to his Sony VAIO as “that tiny magic box thing.”
“Surely the ultimate source of the laptop/desktop distinction resides in the unit’s physical composition: the former features a monitor inseparable from the CPU; the latter does not.”
Er, that would define an iMac as a laptop. I assure you: mine is not one. (And you can plug laptops into desktop screens; just as you can take your laptop apart and disconnect the screen.) Laptop is better defined as a ‘portable unit’ with its own power source (not true of iMacs).
Support for democracy_grenade: http://icanhascheezburger.com/.....op-laptop/