Word of the week: Dismantle
Moving fast, pulverizing things.
Things fall apart, and not always from mere age and decrepitude. Sometimes human intervention plays a large, malevolent role.
Which is to say that I’ve been seeing “dismantle” a lot lately, and I’ve wondered what the word had to tell us.
Dismantling the news
A representative sample of recent headlines:
“Trump preparing to sign order to dismantle Education Department” (CNN, March 6)
“Homeland Security ends TSA collective bargaining agreement, in effort to dismantle union protections” (AP, March 6)
“As expected, Donald Trump is targeting San Francisco’s Presidio for dismantling” (The Nerd Reich, February 20)
“Trump is fast dismantling the free press. We have to stop him.” (Opinion columnist Dana Milbank, Washington Post1, March 7)
“Trump official dismantling USAID secretly met with Christian nationalists abroad, report says” (CBS News, March 7)
“Just over six weeks. That’s how long Donald Trump has been dismantling the foundations of democracy.” (Dan Rather, March 6)
And check out this March 4 post by Mike Masnick — “Why Techdirt Is Now a Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It or Not)” — which uses dismantle, dismantled, or dismantling a total of eight times. Here’s one example:
One of the craziest bits about covering the systematic dismantling of democracy is this: the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do. They’re almost proud of it. They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite. (Remember when Musk said he was buying Twitter to protect free speech? And then banned journalists and sued researchers for calling out his nonsense? Same playbook.)
I recommend you read Masnick’s entire article, and bookmark Techdirt for frequent reference.2
Why did editors in every corner of the media choose this particular word, dismantle, to describe the government teardown we’re experiencing? Maybe because it suggests deliberation rather than havoc and thus shields the editors from retribution. In fact, given the speed, scope, and recklessness of the operations, we might be better served by that skunked word decimate.3
The dismantle chronicles
Despite the violent appearance of that Bay Ltd. industrial dismantling site, dismantle has mild origins. The noun mantle has meant “a long, loose cloak” since Old English; the verb to mantle came along in the early 13th century and meant “to cover or envelop.” It took the French, however, to create desmanteller — “to take a man’s cloak off his back” — and then to ship it back across the Channel, where it devolved into dismantle around 1579. (Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 1623: “Muffle your face, Dis-mantle you, and … disliken / The truth of your owne seeming.”4)
But the subjects of Queen Elizabeth I couldn’t let a good French import serve just one purpose. Even as dismantle was being used in its unclothing sense, it also took on the more aggressive meaning of “to pull down, take to pieces, destroy, raze” — the meaning we retain today.
And there’s more! The Latin source of mantle, mantellum, meant both a cloak and a beam of wood or stone above a fireplace. (I’m guessing here, but maybe “cover” is what links them.) English picked up this second meaning around 1500, switching up the spelling on what seem like whims: mantell, mantalle, mantle, mantel. American English maintains a distinction between mantel (fireplace shelf) and mantle (a covering); British English tends to use mantle for both.
Professional dismantlers are careful to distinguish between dismantle and demolish. Midwest Steel, for example, deploys a dismantling operation when “the facility or its components have significant potential to be redeployed within the plant owner’s organization, or potential for resale on the used equipment market.” Demolition, by contrast, “generally refers to the act of tearing down or destroying the structures” and is “generally a more aggressive and involved procedure.”
Dismantling a surname
All the sources I’ve consulted tell me that Mantel/Mantell is most likely an occupational surname; that is, some ancestor was a cloak-maker.
However, that doesn’t explain the shift in stress from first syllable (the cloak) to second syllable (the surname). And it doesn’t explain why the surname is so frequently associated with Ashkenazi Jews. Could it be unrelated to cloaks and instead an alternative spelling of Mendl — a diminutive of the Hebrew name Menachem — or Mandel, German and Yiddish for “almond”? Hilary Mantel, pictured here, was raised in a Roman Catholic family; her family name may in fact have cloakish connections. Or maybe her ancestors made mantelpieces.
If you can clear matters up, please leave a comment.
(Thanks to my friend the rare-book dealer Suzanne Mantell for family genealogy!)
Dismantle, solo
One last interesting thing about dismantle: It belongs to that peculiar category of English vocabulary called unpaired words.
An unpaired word, writes Jess Zafarris in her Useless Etymology blog, is “a word that doesn’t exist in common use without a particular prefix or a suffix, or has no natural opposite.” Dismantle does have a natural opposite — build or assemble — but without its dis- prefix it’s an orphan.
English has quite a few unpaired words: innocent, disgusted, unscathed, etc. Back in 1994 Jack Winter wrote a brilliant piece of short fiction for The New Yorker that relied for its humor on a series of such words — but without the affixes by which we know them. It’s called “How I Met My Wife,” and it includes this paragraph:
I was plussed. It was concerting to see that she was communicado, and it nerved me that she was interested in a pareil like me, sight seen. Normally, I had a domitable spirit, but, being corrigible, I felt capacitated—as if there were something I was great shakes at—and forgot that I had succeeded in situations like this only a told number of times. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings.
The New Yorker makes it hard to dig up 30-year-old pieces from the magazine’s archive, but you can read the story in its entirety here, thanks to the University of Pennsylvania’s linguistics department.
I remembered the story, but not the author’s name or anything else he’d written. When I looked him up I discovered that he’d died in 2007, at 64, “from a series of health complications.” His New York Times obituary reveals that he’d edited the Harvard Lampoon and won a Writers Guild award for his first TV script, for The Dick Van Dyke Show:
But after he left a hot career in Los Angeles in his late 20s and moved back to his hometown, New York, the résumé more or less ended and the anecdotes began.
Mr. Winter lived a spartan existence in a huge, 10-room apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which for years was nearly bare except for a piano, a couple of chairs, a bed, a television, piles of rugs and hundreds of frogs, which he collected and kept in a shower stall.
He traveled extensively, often to remote parts of Africa, and came back with stories about meeting the Pygmies and singing to hippopotamuses. But otherwise, what did he do all day?
“I never asked, but I had no idea,” said the writer Cheryl Bentsen, a longtime acquaintance.
He led, you might say, an oddly mantled life.
Why? Because Techdirt has “spent decades documenting how technology and entrepreneurship can either strengthen or undermine democratic institutions. We understand the dangers of concentrated power in the digital age. And we’ve watched in real-time as tech leaders who once championed innovation and openness now actively work to consolidate control and dismantle the very systems that enabled their success.” Yep, another dismantle.
Legal scholar and lexicographer Bryan A. Garner coined “skunked term” to mean “a word whose usage becomes such a controversy that it can't be used without raising a stink.” Decimate is one of those words: Some people insist it must mean “to destroy one in ten,” because that’s its etymology, but since the middle of the 17th century, according to lexicographer Erin Brenner, it’s also meant “to destroy a large proportion.” Also on its way to becoming skunked: the verb to trump.
Disliken: an obsolete verb meaning “to disguise.”
All this talk of mantles reminded me of a tour I took of a Frank Lloyd Wright home. I believe it was the Barton House -- on the grounds of the Martin House -- in Buffalo -- but my memory of the exact property is a bit blurry.
Anyway, the house was symmetrical, and one could see into two particular rooms across a common foyer, and the homeowner requested matching fireplace mantels in these adjacent rooms.
Wright did NOT design mantels, nor did he want to mount mantels, but the homeowner insisted. Sooo...Wright acquiesced. However, he fashioned two identical mantels -- but with the top surface of each mantel at an incline -- so that one could not place anything on them, say, like a mantel clock.
LOL -- talk about dismantling the mantel!
What Elon and the Muskrats are doing, IMO, is more "demolish" than "dismantle." If you are dismantling something, it suggests that you are not dropping pieces of it all over the street. Maybe you're even going to use parts of it somewhere else. Demolition is what you'd expect from a guy so stupid and naive that he named himself "big balls."