This, That and the Other

Tanks are vessels, often large, usually intended to contain liquid or gas. A tank might also be the quantity of material thus contained. A tanker will transport it. Damp and secure, jail cells are called tanks. Things that fail are said to tank, perhaps after the septic container. To tank up is to fill with fuel or alcohol, by which latter means inebriates get tanked, sometimes while wearing tank tops. The word “tank” might have come to English from Latin via Portuguese, in which case it is related to “staunch”, itself implying both firmness and the stoppage of fluid. Large, strong athletes are often nicknamed Tank after the weapon of war.

While designing tanks for military purposes during The Great War, the British called them landships. To keep their development secret from the Germans, landships were publicly described as tanks for holding benzene or water (take your pick). Military jargon in English now dubs the tank an Armoured Fighting Vehicle, partly to ape the German Panzerkampfwagon, and partly to empty the vessel of its civilian and undisciplined content. Even soldiers, however, generally contract this to its acronym AFV, or retain that gem of common parlance, the vulgar “tank”.

Many a philosopher has dreamed the dream of a perfectly unequivocal language in which each utterance says one and only one thing. Innovation in such a language would be difficult. Not only would it require the invention from scratch of new words and whole idioms every time something new was to be said, but such neologisms would lack the buzzing fertility of pre-existing, equivocal, expressions: their history, their grammatical plasticity, their whole or leadingly partial synonymity, their connotative auras and figurations, their innate humour and suitability for play, their manifold and ramifying relations to a local neighbourhood or family of sense. Equivocation is as important to invention in words as indeterminacy is to growth in character.