Mark Meckes’ comments on technical words in English reminds me of an incident from the Ancient Days, namely 1966. Well, 1966-ish. A visiting Belgian mathematician in my department talked about category theory. One concept that came up was that of “crible”, which was its name in French. It is a family of arrows with a common target (the sources can vary). He couldn’t think of the English translation of “crible” so he said something like this: “The best way I can describe this is to think of a soldier in the trenches in World War I who suddenly stands up and is shot full of holes by many machine gun bullets.”
We were completely baffled by this explanation. Is there an English word that describes a person with lots of bullet holes? You can see where the picture comes from by thinking of the target as a person with lots of arrows stuck in him, like Saint Sebastian, or Hagar the Horrible on a bad day.
The English word he wanted is “sieve” and that is the usual name of the concept today. In the sixties, many English speaking mathematicians called it “crible” but that usage died out as far as I know. A few tried to pronounce it the French way, but no one understood them, so they spelled it, and then most people said “cribble”.
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I told this anecdote to my wife (a Physics professor) and son (double degree in Math and Computer Science) at dinner last night:
“He couldn’t think of the English translation of ‘crible’ so he said something like this: ‘The best way I can describe this is to think of a soldier in the trenches in World War I who suddenly stands up and is shot full of holes by many machine gun bullets.'”
My wife’s immediate reaction:
“The French have a word for a guy with lots of bulletholes?”
My son pointed out: “after all these years there’s still a limit of how many bullet holes can exist at the same time in video games.”
The three of us have been to see the the real Bonny and Clyde death car, along with Clyde’s death shirt, at the Primm Valley Resort Casino in Primm, Nevada. They outlaws were riddled with 130 rounds of ammo that were fired into their car. “Of course,” L.J. “Boots” Hinton (son of one of those vengeful lawmen, and manager of Bonnie & Clyde Ambush Museum in Gibsland, Louisiana) concedes, “most kids nowadays, with what they see on TV, it doesn’t bother them.”
— Prof. Jonathan Vos Post