How ‘de-escalate’ escalated

‘What we want to see,’ David Cameron said last week, ‘is a de-escalation.’ Or, as the Tanaiste of Ireland put it: ‘If the Russian authorities do not de-escalate this crisis, the EU will take consequential action.’ In other words: make it less serious, or we’ll take it very seriously.

De-escalate sounds a nasty new word. It is indeed fairly new, first recorded in 1964. But in The Spectator for 14 September 1967, Douglas Skelton wrote from Washington: ‘A good case can be made for the thesis that the administration is seriously preparing to de-escalate the war.’ That was Vietnam. ‘Imagine the scene in the middle of next year, or even earlier,’ our correspondent continued: ‘no more bombing of North Vietnam, which pleases a number of people; the troops are starting, very slowly to be sure, to come home, which pleases everyone.’ Then in January came the Tet offensive.

Escalators, like shares, go down as well as up. The physical escalator, from which the figurative kind derives, was originally a trade name. ‘A movable stairway,’ the New York Journal reported in 1900, had been ‘built by the Otis Elevator Company for the use of passengers of the Manhattan Elevated Railway’. The first escalator on the London Underground was installed in 1911 at Earl’s Court.

Escalators adapted the name of the military activity of escalading — going over walls with ladders. A ladder in Greek is klimax. In 1889, the Oxford English Dictionary complained of the ‘popular ignorance and misuse of the learned word’ climax to mean ‘culmination, height, acme or apex’. Then in 1918 Marie Stopes used it to mean ‘orgasm’. Some people won’t be told.

Anyway, the verbal model for escalator was elevator. Elevators were used for wheat from the 1780s, but in 1853 Harper’s magazine wrote of the imminent introduction to New York of ‘a steam elevator, by which an indolent, or fatigued, or aristocratic person may deposit himself in a species of dumb waiter at the hall door, and by whistle, or the jingling of a bell, be borne up, like so much roast-goose with gravy, to the third, fourth, or fifth floor’.