Digging for 'infrastructure' in the OED

The Monitor’s language columnist admits grudging admiration a wonky but useful term that covers a lot of important 'stuff.'

Infrastructure. Is there a less sexy word in English? One less likely to make anyone's heart beat faster? Would an orator like Winston Churchill have used such a word?

Those thoughts presented themselves the other day as I listened to a report about President Obama's recent trip to New Orleans. Evidently seeking a little relief from the health-care website drama, he left Washington to plump for investments in infrastructure.

Here's what his spokesman, Jay Carney, had to say about it: "The virtue of investment in infrastructure is that it's a double win because you get the immediate effect of building and the jobs created from that and the economic energy and activity created by that, and then the long-term benefit to the economy of improved infrastructure, whether it's ports or airports or roads or highways or bridges."

I'd have thought that presidential spokespeople would have a rule against using infrastructure twice in one sentence. But to his credit, Mr. Carney managed to do so in an utterance that at least parsed grammatically.

Infrastructure comes from Latin words meaning, literally, "the structure beneath," and the ancient Romans built a lot of it, some of which remains today.

But infrastructure is a modern word. It came into English as a direct borrowing from French. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that the word was found in the Dictionnaire Robert of 1875. That was a time of the building of railroad lines, public water systems, telegraph lines – the fiber-optic cables of their day.

The first usage example in English the OED cites is from 1927, a reference to a railroad in the south of France: "The tunnels, bridges, culverts, and 'infrastructure' work generally of the Ax to Bourg-Madame line have been completed."

The term seems to have caught on midcentury to describe a lot of the stuff that got built as part of what was known as "the war effort." As the European Review noted in 1951, in another usage example OED cites, "This new term 'infrastructure'... denotes fixed military facilities such as airfields, base installations and transport systems."

By the late 1970s and early '80s, infra­structure, usually glossed as "roads and bridges," was creeping into mass media news reports. Some high-profile bridge collapses prompted major efforts at safety review and reconstruction.

Infrastructure never lost its wonky tone, but it referred to something that clearly needed attention.

A literal-minded civil engineer would point out that irony is not what you want when you're building, or rebuilding, a bridge. But there is an irony in infrastructure. It often refers to things that are quite concrete; in fact, to things that are made of concrete. But the word can also be adapted to metaphorical use. The OED cites, for instance, a writer on music (1956): "What I call the infrastructure is the regularly produced two- or four-beat meter (2/2 or 4/4 measure) that characterizes any jazz performance."

A few years before, Winston Churchill had harrumphed in the House of Commons, "In this Debate we have had the usual jargon about 'the infrastructure of a supra-national authority.' " Note that he was using the term not only metaphorically, but pejoratively.

It's a wonky term, all right, but I have to admit a grudging admiration for its capacity to bring "all that stuff" under one umbrella. It knows its stuff, and it does its work.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Digging for 'infrastructure' in the OED
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Verbal-Energy/2013/1120/Digging-for-infrastructure-in-the-OED
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe