chain gangs and bucket brigades

[Arnold Zwicky]

more on "bucket brigade": none of my british sources (OED2, Chambers
1998, Collins Cobuild 1995) has it.  both my big american dictionaries
(WNI3, RHDEL) have it, and both of them list the (clearly original)
specific sense, involving chains of people, buckets of water, and
fires, plus an extended sense: WNI3 extends it to chains in emergency
situations, but suggests that people are not necessarily involved
(sense 2: "any chain (as of persons) acting to meet an emergency"),
while the more recent RHDEL keeps the emergency and human action
components but not the chain component (sense 2: "a group of persons
organized or acting in cooperation to cope with an emergency").

only RHDEL has a cite: "Seeing the two guests of honor bickering,
the rest of the group formed a bucket brigade to calm them."  this
strikes me as distinctly odd, but i'd understand what was intended.

all this leads me to suggest that the writer on the brighton newspaper
was reaching for an expression meaning 'a chain of persons acting to
meet an emergency', recalled that there was some appropriate
americanism, and then pulled up "chain gang" (which at least has the
relevant word "chain" in it) rather than "bucket brigade".  (terry
pratchett would then seem to have a firmer grasp of americanisms than
this journalist, which wouldn't surprise me at all.)  this would
make it an inadvertent error, a semantically based word- (well,
expression-) finding error.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), errorist