The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Torpedoes and Turtles

The conflict between the Royal Navy and the revolutionary Americans also gave us the word torpedo, which has nothing and everything to do with being torpid.

The Latin word for tired or numb was torpidus. From this we got the adjective torpid, which is still with us today. And that would be the end of the story were it not for electrical fish.

That there are electric eels is commonly known. But there are also kinds of ray that can produce electricity, in fact they can produce 220 volts of the stuff, which is quite enough to knock you out, and therefore render you torpid.

In English they were once called numb-fish or cramp-fish, but the educated Latin name is Torpediniformes, with the major family being the torpedoes. As Lawrens Andrewe put it in his snappily-titled book of 1520, The noble lyfe & nature of man, Of bestes, serpentys, fowles & fisshes y be moste knowen:

For a long time, therefore, a torpedo was simply something that rendered you incapable. For example, there was an eighteenth-century dandy called Beau Nash who was awfully witty but had trouble writing well. ‘He used to call a pen his torpedo for whenever he grasped it, it numbed all his faculties.’ This is a shame, as Nash was meant to be the wittiest, most charming man of his day and when he died his wife went to live in a hollow tree near Warminster.[7]

But to return to the story: in 1776 the Americans were revolting. The British Navy sailed to New York, but so revolting were the Americans that the Brits decided to stay in the channel and blockade the harbour. The Americans didn’t like this, and there was a fellow called Bushnell who invented a submarine with which to attack the blockading British boats in the most unsporting manner.

Bushnell couldn’t decide what to call his new submarine: he seems to have been in two minds between the American Turtle and the Torpedo. In shape it resembled both. Eventually, he decided on the latter.

The idea of the submarine was that it had a ‘magazine or powder’ attached to it that it would screw to the hull of the British flagship. A timer would then be set, giving the submarine a few minutes to get clear, and then there would be a big explosion and the British boat would be blown to smithereens and beyond. This didn’t happen, as the revolting Americans were foiled by the hulls of the British ships, which were copper-bottomed.

But the Americans were not to be deterred. Another inventor called Fulton took up where Bushnell left off (Bushnell for some reason ran away to the South and took on a new identity). Fulton worked to the same general plan, but he gave the name torpedo to the explosive device rather than the submarine itself. He also decided to change it a bit. Rather than the submarine getting right up to the enemy ship, it would instead fire a harpoon at it. The explosive device would be attached to the harpoon by a rope and contain within it a timer. So the submarine would pop up, harpoon the ship, and disappear before the charge went off.

Fulton’s torpedoes didn’t work either. Decades passed of utterly ineffective torpedo inventing and improvement. The torpedo was fitted with a motor and other such gizmos, but nothing was sunk with a vile torpedo until 1878, when a Russian ship torpedoed an Ottoman one.

And that’s how tired and numb came to be a name for something fast and explosive.

Now, before the next story, what’s the connection between Mount Vernon in Virginia, Portobello Road in London, and feeling groggy?