jets careening over the tarmac

As an old man, and one who was taught by the nuns at St. Aidan’s School in Brookline, Massachusetts, I am always enchanted to see how the ignorant manage to change the English language. Thus ‘careen’ universally does duty for ‘career’, and ‘flounder’ for ‘founder’. (‘The car careened into the water, and there it floundered.’) But those are obvious errors in hearing, the way ‘chaise longue’ has become ‘chaise lounge’ in American usage. More mysterious is the way that words meaning one specific thing become generalized.

So I read, in a book about the American base at Khe Sanh, Vietnam, that when the battle was won, Marine helicopters picked up the ‘tarmac’ and carried it off. Now, ‘tarmac’ is short for “tar macadam’, meaning a road surface consisting of petroleum and sand. In aviation, the ‘tarmac’ became the hardened surface where planes were parked and serviced, and eventually it was extended to the runway itself. Now, Khe Sanh’s runways was actually made of perforated steel planks, which the US military called PSP and the British called Marsden Matting. It was a quick and dirty way to put down a hard surface. So, when the journalist saw the helicopters carrying off the PSP, he called it ‘tarmac’.

More recently, the same transformation has come to ‘jet”, meaning a turbine wherein kerosene is burned to create a plume of hot gas which at once drives the airplane forward and turns the turbine that pulls more air into the engine. The signal feature of a jet airplane is that it doesn’t have a propeller—the oldfashioned way of moving a heavier-than-air vehicle through the sky. Yet increasingly ‘jet’ is being applied to prop-driven aircraft. I first noticed this in an awful but much-acclaimed booked about the Pacific War called Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, whose author mentioned, among other malapropisms, that WW2 aircraft carriers were a dangerous place to work because their decks were slippery with spilled jet fuel.

Now in Friday’s Wall Street Journal I see the same astonishing confusion: a review of With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain explains that Britain won its epynomous Battle because in 1940 it had “a network of radar stations, an all-volunteer observer corps, a well-fortified operations room at RAF headquarters, and a ready fleet of fighter jets and pilots…’

Well, shucks. No wonder the Germans lost!