chain gangs and bucket brigades

[Laurence Horn]

Arnold Zwicky writes:

>"bucket brigade" is semantically related, but in my experience (and,
>apparently, the experience of the compilers of AHD3) it refers only to
>conveying water to fight fires, hence to conveying material
>towards/into a location.  but several extensions would be natural:
>conveying something other than water; responding to some disaster
>other than fire; conveying material away from/out of a location.  with
>all three of these extensions (preserving only the joint conveying and
>the response to a disaster), "bucket brigade" could have been used to
>describe the rescue operation in arundel high street.  (in a further
>extension, the expression could refer to situations other than rescues
>- to any situation where hand-to-hand passing offers an advantage
>over individuals carrying material over some distance.)
>
>there are many real-life situations where person-to-person conveying
>is used: removing rubble from collapsed or exploded structures,
>passing sandbags to levees, removing sodden books from a flooded
>library (as happened here at stanford two years ago), for example.
>how are these cooperative rescue operations referred to in newspaper
>reports?
>
And not just rescue operations per se.  When I was visiting Al Aqsa Mosque
on the Temple Mount in Jersualem last summer (how about that for placename
dropping?), there was a long line of volunteers, stretching from outside
the Mosque to the central altar area, passing along building materials hand
to hand (bricks and the like) for rehabbing a bit of the structure.  (I
suppose that COULD count as rescuing in the broader sense, but it wasn't an
emergency of the sort you usually see in the TV News pictures of bucket
bridgades, sandbaggers and the like.)  It would be convenient to have a
cover term for the procedure, but I suspect we'll have to coin one.

larry