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Leaving port, loaded to the gills, the MV Dali struck Baltimore’s bridge. Girders crumpled. The freeway buckled, slumped like rubber. Six onsite workers lost their lives, falling into the Patapsco.
Footage of the ship’s fatal progress went viral: the slo-mo crunch, the Meccano frailty, the plummeting fairy lights. Then came the headlines: “Tragedy Strikes”; “Heartbreak Bridge”. Yet hidden in each story was a word as baffling as the calamity.
Justice Lee’s Lehrmann judgement – and, perhaps, his TV diet – issued a new word into the public’s consciousness.Credit: Getty Images AsiaPac
Put it this way, when did you last suffer an “allision”? The term joined the weekly Trend Watch on the Merriam-Webster homepage, where the US dictionary logs what words pull the greatest number of look-ups, be that “impeach” or “apogee”, depending on the media’s focus.
As for allision, this maritime borrowing denotes “the striking of a vessel against a fixed object”. Like a collision, you say. Yeah, but no. The difference lies within insurance policies, no doubt, plus the etymology, where collide stems from Latin, literally meaning to dash together, like two oncoming cars, versus allide, its rarer cousin, meaning to strike against, like your sedan scraping the garage wall.
That’s to say the Francis Scott Key Bridge played no active role in the crash; the pylon was innocent. Owing to an onboard blackout, the MV Dali lost her steering, maydaying the US Coast Guard minutes before the andante allision. Cue the headlines, plus a new verb reaching landlubbers.
“Allision”: the MV Dali cargo ship after it hit Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge last month.Credit: AP Photo/Steve Helber
Now and then, in Trend Watch tradition, this column will also focus on words exposed by news or memes. A second candidate arose from Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation suit, cited within Justice Michael Lee’s 350-page judgment: “Given its unexpected detours and the collateral damage it has occasioned, it might be more fitting to describe [this matter] as an omnishambles.”
Akin to allision perhaps, in this legal “omnishambles” a three-year-long scandal blighted by bias, bile and furore arose from an alleged rape within parliament’s walls and ran smack-bang into the sandstone bulwarks of the Federal Court. “Mr Lehrmann raped Ms Higgins,” Justice Lee said. “I hasten to stress this is a finding on the balance of probabilities.”
The judgment seized the bulletins, in tandem with the o-word. Did Justice Lee just invent an alias for mess? Hardly, that honour falling to Tony Roche – not the tennis champ but a writer on the acerbic BBC comedy The Thick of It, first aired in 2005. Peter Capaldi played Whitehall flack Malcolm Tucker in the series, melting wallpaper with his feral wit.