"Degradated"???

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 10/14/2001 9:45:28 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
slang at BLUEYONDER.CO.UK writes:

> I don't know 'degradated' but it must relate the old nuclear war jargon
>  'degrade', i.e. to knock out, and its extention 'graceful degradation',
>  (otherise known as 'failsoft'),

Why "must relate [to] the old nuclear war jargon"?  "Graceful degradation",
as well as "failsoft" and its probable ancestor "failsafe" are legitimate
terms in engineering and computer science that have no necessary connection
to warfare.

[Aside:  if you take the first OED2 definition, which is cited as 1535,
"Depostion from some rank, office, or position of honour as an act of
punishment", then "graceful degradation is an oxymoron.]

"Graceful degradation" means that when something fails, it gives you some
warning or some way of limiting potential damage or injuries or otherwise
allows you to save items of value during a failure.  The concept incredibly
goes back perhaps to the Stone Age, or at least to when Man began the
practice of underground mining.  If you have ever seen a picture of a coal
mine, you will notice that INVARIABLY the supporting beams are wood, not
metal.  Why?  Because wood, when it is about to collapse, makes a good deal
of noise (cracking sounds) and may show visible cracks.  Miners know that
when they hear the wood supports cracking it is time to get the Hades out of
there.  Metal supports, on the other hand, collapse without audible or
visible warning.  Underground mining is still dangerous with wood supports,
but noticeably less dangerous than if metal supports were used.

In other words, wood degrades much more gracefully than metal, where in this
case "degrades" means "collapses when holding up the rock overhead."


Another example: Windows 95 and 98.  When you are running a program which
crashes, Windows (usually) stays up, allowing you sometimes to recover data
or figure out what went wrong.  In this case, Windows applications degrade
rather more gracefully than they do under some other operating systems.  On
the other hand, Windows must be shut down with some care before turning off
the power to your PC.  If you just killed the power, or if you had a power
failure with no "UPS" (Uninterruptible Power Source) backup, Windows is
likely to lose data off your hard disk.  In other words, Windows degrades
catastrophically in the event of a power failure.

I can't find "graceful degradation" or "failsoft" in the OED2, but "failsafe"
is there, with the first citation being from aeronautics (not necessarily
military, civilian planes share the same engineering) in 1948.  There is even
a citation for "fail-dangerous" as the opposite of "fail-safe".

"To fail safe" is a stronger condition than "degrade gracefully".  To fail
safe, the item under discussion is not claimed to be foolproof, but rather is
designed so that when it does fail, it fails in the safest manner possible.
(The OED2 exaggerates when it says "to a condition involving no danger.")
The classic example is the airbrake on a railroad train.  If something
happens to the compressed air line (in Britain, to the vacuum line), then
every brake on every car goes into its strongest braking position.  (referred
to by the colorful term "dynamiting the Westinghouse").  This is not always
safe---an emergency stop of a high-speed train can derail cars, hence the
term "dynamiting"---but it is almost always safer than a high-speed train
losing its ability to use its brakes.

(The classic story is from the Santa Fe Railroad back in the Wild West.
Somebody prevented a serious accident by pulling out is Colt and putting a
bullet through the air hose.)

"Failsafe" has the odd and unwelcome distinction of having been placed in the
public consciousness by two men (Burdick and Wheeler) who had not the
slightest idea what the word meant when they entitled their best-selling
Kennedy-era novel "Failsafe".

In a message dated 10/14/2001 11:47:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
barnhart at highlands.com writes:

> I suspect that _degradate_ is a back formation from _degradation_ (OED:
>  c1535) in the sense "a lowering or reducing in strength, amount, etc."
>  (OED: 1769).  I found nearly 200 examples many of them in science.

Have you considered that not only do "degrade" and "degradation" have
different vowels in the first syllable but also that the former is iambic and
the latter trochaic?

                   - Jim Landau