podictionary - the podcast for word lovers

A rerun from May 2006

I can think of three meanings for the word train right off the top of my head.

• There is the train that people might ride on either to go to work every day or when traveling around Europe.
• There’s the training that takes place in classrooms and
• there is the train that drags along the ground behind a woman’s wedding dress.

All of these trains, and more, do in fact relate to the same word root.  In Latin the root word came from the same root for the word “tractor” and meant to pull something.  From there in English over 700 years or so the word has been pulled in all sorts of directions from meaning the track of an animal to the gait of a horse.

It’s easy to see how the train of a woman’s dress could evolve from this pulling sense, and about 500 years ago how it began to apply to the direction of pupils, pulling them along in their course of study.  By the early 1800s it began to be applied to physical activity as well, as you might train for a race.

It was still well before Shakespeare’s time that “train” began to apply to a connected series of events or a line of some kind. And it was around the same time that people began to do athletic training that locomotive or railroad trains were first called trains.

I see a reference here to “train oil” that clearly predates railroads and the reason is that this was not oil to be used on trains, but oil that was drawn from whales, often boiled from their blubber.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary trainspotting is the hobby of hanging around beside railway lines and taking careful note of the details of the trains that go by.  There is a particularly successful movie called trainspotting that isn’t about trains at all but about junkies.  Taking a look at Urbandictionary I see that there are three definitions there for trainspotting.  One is the OED version, another is heroin injection, which would make sense in connection with the book and the movie.

Before I looked this up I had always assumed that the tracks in an addict’s arm were the source for the title. But the third Urbandictionary definition is people who hang around the DJ at a dance and take careful note of all the music he plays.  This is clearly more along the obsessive line of people who make notes on locomotives than a connection to junkies.

There is an implication in one of the entries at least that the course of the word trainspotting from hanging around railways to heroin addiction is because people obsessive about the music were also people who were shooting up.  However, I find that according to the British Council of the Arts on contemporary writers, the title of the book is supposed to be an inside joke on the fact that the junkies were hanging around an old train station in a part of town that was run down and hadn’t seen a train go through in years.

While we are taking cues from Urbandictionary I find that their entries for “train” are a little off-putting, think of a lineup of people and sex in the same context.  At first I just assumed this was one of the weaknesses of Urbandictionary, allowing almost any jerk to input whatever crude insider slang they wanted, no matter how small the circle might be of people who actually used the word in that sense.  But then I found in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang a very similar entry supposedly dating from the 1980s in Britain.

Being the happily married guy that I am, I never knew—and maybe I didn’t want to.