Meltdown: From Metallurgy to Metaphor

[beamjockey]

Someone mentioned an "emotional meltdown" to me this week. I realized that the word "meltdown" has not always been with us-- it was a term used by specialists until a particular historical moment, after which it was on everyone's lips. I used Google Ngram Viewer to investigate this

Comments

[controuble]

Today we know "meltdown" best as a word for an accident in an overheated nuclear reactor.
Only those of you who don't have kids on the spectrum - the rest of us know what it really means.

[beamjockey]

"The spectrum" is another term that has a new meaning that it didn't have a few years ago.

[derekl1963]

And one I am seemingly unaware of...

[beamjockey]

Some information may be found here.

[billroper]

OT: So was that you who got an acknowledgment in the Heinlein bio that I just finished reading this morning?

[beamjockey]

Bless you, my boy, for being the sort of person who reads Acknowlegements!

I actually made a a really subtle link in this blog entry to the page where I am thanked, but nobody noticed.

I gave Bill Patterson some information about Robert Cornog and he was gracious enough to thank me in the book. He has been very helpful in commenting on my own research. (Which, come to think of it, I should send you!)

[tigertoy]

I sometimes read acknowledgments, though (I must confess) usually only if I have some reason to think I might know someone who'll be mentioned there.

[acmespaceship]

Re: Ice cream meltdowns. I recall an unusually warm spring day at the Lincoln Park Zoo in the 1980's. The Good Humor trucks were down to their least popular items. The resulting meltdown, littering sidewalks all over the zoo, lives on in my memory as the Great Frog Massacre. It was quite grotesque until we established that it was, in fact, ice cream, and neither unfortunate amphibians nor odd polymers boiling out of the ground.

[ext_218039]

Or perhaps this?

[gypsy1969]

I use meltdown to refer to emotional out-of-control states, but when I hear it on the news, I figure it's a nuclear accident they are talking about.

[pecunium]

Bill.... ice cream is yummy, and keeps blood sugar from crashing, it may have played a critical role in reactor design.