What a mess

The fluid meaning of 'meltdown'

It's a collapse, a crunch, a slide, a plunge, a rout, a quake. In the most general and judicious term, it's a crisis - that Greek-derived word for "decision point" that carefully withholds judgment about whether the patient will recover or die.

But the most picturesque and widely used word for the economic shocks of the past week is one so new that we didn't have it the last time we really needed it, during the Great Depression: meltdown.

You might have guessed, plausibly, that meltdown would be an old word - that people would have taken the verb phrase, to melt down, and made it a noun back when they came up with, say, breakdown (1832) or holdup (1837), similar words compounded from Old English parts.

But no: Though the word was used in the 1920s and '30s, it wasn't applied to economic troubles; it was a technical term among ice cream makers. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to a 1937 mention in the Ice Cream Trade Journal, discussing additives that improve the treat's texture: "The Sod[ium] Alg[inate] ice cream melts down cleanly in the mouth... Due to the clean melt-down...a cooler sensation results in the mouth than with gelatin ice cream."

And Google Books, though its dating can be iffy, finds the same ice cream application 11 years earlier, in volume I of Jerome Alexander's "Colloidal Chemistry": "In the matter of melt-down and aging, the alginate has some advantage over gelatin," providing a "smoother and cleaner melt-down."

As a verb, not surprisingly, melt down was known - literally and figuratively - long before chemists started adding algae extracts to our ice cream. In 1599, the playwright Henry Porter had a character observe, "Her wit's a sun, that melts him down like butter." Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens" tells another character that given the opportunity, "Thou would'st have . . . melted down thy youth/ In different beds of Lust." And in the literal realm, we hear of tumors that melt down, as well as deer fat, church bronzes, and family silver.

But it wasn't till the 1950s that the notion of melting down, both as verb and noun, got its modern, nuclear-fueled punch. "A small experimental operation of a fast-breeder type reactor 'melted down' in Arco, Idaho, last November," reported Science in 1956, and Nucleonics commented on an "EBR-1 fuel meltdown."

These days, that would be more than enough propellant to boost a word into the media spotlight. But not in the buttoned-up '50s; the combination of Cold War sobriety and awe at the new nuclear danger seems to have kept meltdown on the shelf, and out of the everyday figurative lexicon, for a couple of decades.

In 1979, though, events conspired to launch meltdown upon its wide-ranging metaphorical career. The nuclear-catastrophe movie "The China Syndrome," was followed, in a matter of weeks, by a real nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. One burger joint in the threatened area renamed its cheeseburger "the Meltdown" - a signal that the word was escaping into jokey-ironic territory.

And in May of that year, The Washington Post applied the word to the Red Sox collapse in the first game of the season against the Yankees: "This Invasion of the Pennant Snatchers fulfilled every Boston nightmare. It was the hated Yankee Syndrome in full meltdown."

There was no stopping the spread of meltdown. In a 1981 book review in The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described a fictional character's "emotional meltdown." Soon toddlers' tantrums and lovers' breakdowns were being called meltdowns, with no need for the modifying "emotional."

In 1986, The Washington Post reported a now-familiar scenario: Hundreds of banks and insurance companies had banded together to bail out companies holding bad mortgage debt, fearing a "meltdown" that would spread to the nation's mortgage markets.

And in 1989, just a decade after Three Mile Island, we were introduced to Homer Simpson, safety inspector at the thoroughly poisonous, comically hazardous Springfield nuclear power plant.

Meltdown has been in widespread figurative use ever since, to mean - in the OED's definition - "Any uncontrolled and usually disastrous event with far-reaching consequences; a sudden and decisive collapse"; and in the financial world, "a rapid drop in the value of a currency, assets, shares, etc.; a crash."

But that explosion of popularity has left meltdown in something of a puddle, sensewise. When we've spent two decades using the word for tantrums and tennis losses and Britney Spears's troubles, what do we think when we read headlines referring to last week's "Meltdown Monday"? Does that meltdown sound like a world-changing catastrophe, or a mere ice cream liquidity issue? Meltdown may be more picturesque than crisis, but in a mere two decades, we've made it just as ambiguous.

E-mail Jan Freeman at mailtheword@gmail.com. For past columns, go to boston.com/ideas; visit the Word blog at boston.com/ideas/theword.

Correction: Because of a production error, the final sentence in the "Word" column in Sunday's Ideas section was cut off. The full sentence reads: "Meltdown may be more picturesque than crisis, but in a mere two decades, we've made it just as ambiguous."