#459 Dammac

I discussed the word tarmac recently and speculated that it came from a possible conjunction and contraction of the words tar macadam. I was right. Except I pronounced it wrong. I’ve always pronounced it mac-a-damn. It should be muh-kad-um. Macadam is the original English word for what we normally call pavement or asphalt. English as in England English. Turns out, tarmac is a name that was trademarked in 1903 and was in common use in England by 1919 as a replacement for runway. Tarmac as a trademark name was derived from the word tarmacadam,(inflect it like Armageddon) which was a pavement created by spraying tar over crushed stone. The Mac in tarmac and macadam had nothing to do with McDonald’s. It had to do with McAdam. Yep. The pavement pioneer John McAdam. He was this Scottish engineer who proposed the creation of roadbeds using various levels of crushed rock way back in 1822. He was, in fact, against the use of binding materials on that rock. The binding material, tar, which then got added to both the road and the name is something that would have upset him. In fact, he didn’t even approve of the use of rollers in road building. Maybe it was a carryover from how he hated waiting for his wife to get her hair ready. Or possibly he thought by making the crushed rocks of uniform enough size, they would hang together of their own accord passively and flatly. Kind of an ideal engineering sort of fetish. Who knows? The only people who understand engineers are other engineers. Fortunately for modern roadbuilders—and drivers—John died in 1836, but not before his crushed rock layering method was also awarded verb status, with the word macadamize. As in I macadamized, she will macadamize, and if that guy at the end of the bar macadamize at my girlfriend one more time I’m gonna hit him with a crushed rock. The idea of mixing tar with the crushed gravel started a lot later, in the 1880s, and so poor John had no say over part of his name being bound for eternity with the dread tar.
Had I known all this when I was walking across the tarmac to the plane in Mexico, I’m sure I would have been much more appreciative. Unfortunately, I was more concerned with the excruciating pain in my ears from the screaming pitch of the jet engines all revving up around me. I thought it was nice that all the runway workers appeared to have on ear protection. And I’m sure that the deafening silence in the plane for the first hour of the trip was normal. After all, we were all recovering from some serious vacationing. But I did think it a little odd that the flight attendants had to mime everything. I mean they were pretty good with the emergency exit demonstration but you haven’t lived till you’ve seen someone try to mime the question: “Would you like some peanuts?” No but I would like some McAdam’s scotch…
America, ya gotta love it