Word of the week: Escalate
What's up with this word?
I have two excuses to write about escalate this week. Here’s one of them:
The Westfield San Francisco Centre on Market Street closed for good, or ill, on January 31, a late casualty of the San Francisco doom loop.1 I don’t love shopping in malls, but I’d always liked this one, which was easily accessible by public transit and home to Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom stores as well as a multiplex cinema and many distinctive shops and restaurants. The center — all 1.5+ million square feet of it — had occupied hallowed retail ground: It sat on the site of the flagship Emporium department store, which had opened in 1896 under a spectacular 100-foot dome. When the San Francisco Shopping Centre replaced the old Emporium in 1988 — it became a Westfield property in 2002 — it kept the dome and built the first spiral escalators in the United States. At one time I was slightly acquainted with one of the engineers who had worked on the project; she remains the only escalator engineer I’ve ever known. I remember her glowing pride in this unprecedented structural achievement. Here’s hoping that the building’s next reincarnation retains those escalators (and the dome).
Here’s another reason I’ve been thinking about escalate:
Escalate has been in headlines a lot lately, often in conjunction with tensions. Tensions have been escalating between the U.S. and Iran. Between the U.S. and Colombia. Between the U.S. and Venezuela. In the Middle East. And, harrowingly, in Minnesota.
Occasionally we see the opposite: de-escalate.
Is there a connection between escalators and “escalating”? There certainly is.
“English didn’t have the verb ESCALATE until after escalators had been invented—and when it first appeared in the language in the 1920s, it originally meant ‘to ride on an escalator’.” — Haggard Hawks, the internet handle of etymologist Paul Anthony Jones.
The story of how escalator gave rise to (ha!) escalate is both a cautionary tale of trademark genericide — “the gradual process of a trademarked term becoming generic through use by the common individual” — and an example of the suppleness of the English language. Here’s how New York trademark lawyer Michael Jones explains it:
The word “Escalator” was originally a trademarked name owned by the Otis Elevator Company. It was coined in the early 1900s to describe their moving staircase invention. This innovation revolutionized the way people moved within public and commercial buildings, offering a novel and efficient means of transportation between floors. This device was a significant technological advancement at the time, and it quickly gained popularity worldwide.
However, as moving staircases became more common in department stores, airports, and subway stations, the term “Escalator” began to be used by the public and competitors to describe any moving staircase, not just those that Otis manufactured. This widespread generic use of the term led to its dilution as a proprietary trademark.
By the 1920s, the lower-case back-formation escalate began appearing in print, often between quotation marks to indicate its novelty. (“Moving stairway” and “moving staircase” had been the standard locutions beginning around 1897.) The OED gives this citation, from the January 1927 issue of The Atlantic, as the earliest attested example of the verb escalate:
As for comfort, we twentieth-century people are soothingly immersed in it. Ours is a steam-heated, well-lighted, cunningly upholstered, warm-bathed era. With almost incredible ingenuity we ward off the bumps, plane the sharp corners, ‘escalate’ the heights. From twilight-sleep birth to narcotized death we insist upon ease. It is that without which all else is intolerable.
(Emphasis added.)
Usage of escalate surged during the Cold War, when “the nuclear and airpower revolutions greatly increased that escalation might quickly lead to catastrophic results, even as leaders sought to control it” (Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century). The Cold War also gave us de-escalate: The OED credits a 1964 Christian Science Monitor article with that word’s first appearance in print.
Escalators go down as well as up. But escalate can mean only “to go up”: to scale. A much older word, escalade — a borrowing from French — had been an English noun since the late 1500s and a verb since the early 1800s. It also denoted ascension: “scaling the walls” of, say, a fortress.
You may be wondering whether elevate followed a similar linguistic path as a back-formation from elevator. It did not. Elevate — “to raise above the usual position” — has been an English word since about 1497. Elevator — something that hoists or lifts — arrived in the mid-1600s, when it had an anatomical sense (“a muscle which raises or lifts a limb or an organ”). Elevator took on its mechanical meaning beginning in 1787 (“grain elevator”), and in the mid-1800s it acquired its “chiefly North American” sense of a lift, hoist, or ascending chamber for people and cargo other than grain. Unlike escalator, elevator was never a registered trademark.
I love this June 1853 citation in the OED from Harper’s Magazine:
The introduction of a steam elevator, by which an indolent, or fatigued, or aristocratic person may..be borne up..to the third, fourth, or fifth floor.
And beyond the fifth floor? Inconceivable!
Onward and upward: Read my March 2023 post on elevated, the ever-popular lifestyle adjective.
A term often seen in proximity to the verb to spiral, as in “Downtown San Francisco Spirals Toward Retail Doom Loop.”
I miss that town. I guess everybody else does, too. It's like the saying, "You can't step into the same river twice." It seems fitting that a city born of a gold rush has been seriously damaged by another one down in Silicon Valley. As far as I know, I never set foot in the San Francisco Centre (I was gone for the entire 1990s), but I remember the slow death of The Emporium.
Well, (usage of) that (word) escalated quickly!