We've been on holiday, and on the afternoon when it poured with rain the sculpture exhibition was closed, and the Museum of Purbeck Stone was closed, and Monkey World was only letting people in if you'd booked yesterday, and so the only place left was the Tank Museum.
It proved fascinating - and sobering, too - but we were glad we'd visited.
There were huge tanks, and really quite small tanks, and armoured vehicles (they have wheels instead of caterpillars tracks (not that caterpillars have tracks, but hey...)), and there was even a tank that was basically a motor bike. We marvelled at the way the First Aid kits, if any, tended to be made of something no thicker than cardboard and were stuck onto the outside of the tank.
The very first tank was made in Britain during the First World War. At the time there were men dug into trenches that stretched from the northern European coast to Switzerland, and in between the lines, in no man's land, were coils of barbed wire which meant that no side could reach the other (though many, many lives were lost in repeated attempts to do so (which was literal madness)).
The museum was impressive and horrible, and I came away not at all bothered that women featured almost not at all.
The reason for this post, though, is the derivation of the work tank. Because a tank isn't actually a tank, is it?
Well, that's deliberate.
Word To Use Today: tank. This word comes from the Gujarati word tānkh, which means artificial lake, influenced on the way by the Portuguese word tanque, from estanque, pond, from estancar to block up, from the Latin stanticāre.
The military tank is so called because when it was being developed it was top secret, and a name was needed to disguise its function. It was going to be called a water carrier, but the people behind the design refused to be on the WC Committee, and so it became a tank.
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