Stationary & Stationery

Stationery (pronounced stey-shuh-ner-ee)

(1) Writing paper.

(2) Writing materials, as pens, pencils, paper, and envelopes.

(3) Any office related hardware (staplers, pencil sharpeners et al) or consumables (staples etc), a use technically incorrect by historic standards but widely used and understood in commerce. 

1727: From the Medieval Latin statiōnārius (station), used to describe a bookseller who had a fixed station (especially at universities) as distinct from the then more prevalent form of commerce which was peripatetic.  The construct of stationery was not station + ery but stationer (one who sell paper, pens, books etc from a fixed location) + -y.  Stationery is a noun & adjective & stationer is a noun; the noun plural is stationeries but stationers is more commonly used.

Reader's Digest Kids Letter Writer Book & Stationary Set, one of Lindsay Lohan’s early (in 1994, then aged seven) modelling jobs.    The original form (circa 1675) was "stationery wares", describing the books, pens, ink and such sold by a "stationer" who was someone with "a station" (as opposed to the them common itinerant vendor)) and, over time, popular usage saw stationery gain and retain its modern association.  So there's a reason why two words with slightly different spellings share the same pronunciation yet have meanings which at first glance appear to be unrelated.  Such linguistic quirks are not unique to English but the language does seem to have many which, even when explained, must seen strange to those learning the tongue.

The suffixes –ary, -ery and –y

The suffix –ary was a back-formation from unary and similar, from the Latin adjective suffixes -aris and –arius.  It created the adjectival sense “of or pertaining to” when applied to various words, often nouns, and was used most frequently with words of Latin origin but it’s long been more broadly applied.  In mathematics, it’s used to refer to results having the specified -arity (the maximum number of child nodes that any node in a given tree (data structure) may have).-ate

The suffix -ery was from the Middle English -erie, from the Anglo-Norman and Old French -erie, which is inherited from the Latin -arius and Latin –ator (a suffix forming abstract nouns).  The suffix first appeared  in loan words from the Old French into Middle English, but became productive within English by the sixteenth century, in some instances properly a combination of -er with -y as in stationery, bakery & brewery, but also as a single suffix in words like slavery & machinery.  Added to nouns, it could form other nouns meaning "art, craft, or practice of"; added to verbs it could form nouns meaning "place of an art, craft, or practice”; added to nouns it could form other nouns meaning "a class, group, or collection of"; added to nouns it could form other nouns meaning "behaviour characteristic of."

The suffix -y was from the Middle English –y & -i, from the Old English -iġ (the –y & -ic suffixes), from the Proto-Germanic -īgaz (-y, -ic), from the primitive Indo-European -kos, -ikos, & -iḱos (-y, -ic).  It was cognate with the Scots -ie (-y), the West Frisian -ich (-y), the Dutch -ig (-y), the Low German -ig (-y), the German -ig (-y), the Swedish -ig (-y), the Latin -icus (-y, -ic) and the Ancient Greek -ικός (-ikós); doublet of -ic.  It was added to nouns and adjectives to form adjectives meaning “having the quality of” and to verbs to form adjectives meaning "inclined to”; “tending towards".  The suffix remains productive in English and can be added to just about any word.  If the result is something perceived not to be a real word, a hyphen should be used to indicate it’s a deliberate attempt to convey a meaning rather than a spelling mistake.  A few long-established words ending with this suffix have distinctive spellings, such as wintry and fiery, which are often misspelled as wintery and firey although these mistakes are now so frequent that they’re likely to gain acceptance and there are special cases: "firey" is now widely used in slang as a noun to describe fire fighters.

Stationary (pronounced stey-shuh-ner-ee)

(1) Standing still; not moving.

(2) Having a fixed position; not movable.

(3) Established in one place; not itinerant or migratory.

(4) Remaining in the same condition or state; not changing.

1400–1450: From the late Middle English from the Latin word statiōnārius (surface analysis station) from statiō (a standing, post, job, position) ultimately from stō (to stand). Stō was a word-forming element used in making names of devices for stabilizing or regulating (eg thermostat), from the Ancient Greek statos (standing, stationary) from the primitive Indo-European ste-to-, a suffixed form of root sta- (to stand, make or be firm)  It was first used in heliostat (an instrument for causing the sun to appear stationary (1742)).  The late fourteenth century sense of "having no apparent motion" was in reference to planets and was derived from the Middle French stationnaire (motionless) also from the Latin statiōnārius; the meaning "unmovable" is from 1620s.  Not unusually, the meanings in later English and European languages evolved beyond the original; in Classical Latin, statiōnārius is recorded only in the sense "of a military station, the word for "stationary, steady" being statarius.  Stationary is a noun & adjective, stationariness is a noun and stationarily is an adverb; the noun plural is stationaries.  The most common appearance of stationary as a noun is probably as a misspelling stationary but it can be use (1) as a clipping of the description of a static version of something (stationary engine et al) or (2) of any person or object which is not moving (usually in the context of a contrast with surrounding people or objects which are moving) and (3) in historic astronomy, a planet or other heavenly body which apparently has neither progressive nor retrograde motion (now obsolete).  In the aerospace community, it may be that "geostationary" (of satellites) are sometimes casually referred to as "stationaries") but it seems not documented.

Stationary Engines

Engineers insist a “stationary engine” is one bolted or cemented in place, to remain there until (1) it blows up, (2) it’s scrapped or (3) it’s uprooted and moved to a new location where it can again function.  Stationary engines provided much of the horsepower (a calculation devised to define engine power) for the first industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, used to drive anything from generators & pumps to cranks moving parts of machines.  The classic example were the big reciprocating devices (steam or internal combustion) whereas the large scale electric plants or turbines tended (once reaching a certain size) to be classified as “plant”.  The development of the infrastructure to distribute electricity from regional hubs meant the used of stationary engines declined but they remain widely used and are a common sight in rural areas where they both pump water from a variety of sources and distribute it to irrigation systems.  There are also engines which technically are portable (some small enough to be carried by hand while others are mounted on trailers, trucks or even boats) but which often function as stationary devices and engineers regards such things always as “portable”, even if stationary for years.

A Chrysler Air Raid Siren being delivered (1953, left) and permanently installed (1960, right), atop the Rob Storms Rochester Fire Department maintenance building, Rochester, Monroe County, New York.  This was a stationary engine even while on the truck which it remained after being taken up to the roof and bolted down.  Had it remained on the truck (even if bolted to the chassis) and been driven from place to be run, it would have been classified a “portable engine”.

According to Guinness World Records, the loudest sirens ever were the 350-odd built by Chrysler for the US government in the early 1950s and installed around the country to warn of an impending nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.  The maximum volume the devices generated was recorded (at a distance of 100 feet (30.5 m)) as 138 decibels (dB), a level which meant a human would be deafened if within 200 feet (61 m) during their operation.  Guinness noted the compressor discharge throughput at peak volume was 74 m³ (2,610 cubic feet at 7 lb per square inch) of air per second and the physics of fluid dynamics (air a fluid in this context) was such that this would have caused a sheet of paper in the path spontaneously to ignite.  By comparison the now retired supersonic airline Concorde at take-off produced noise levels between 112-114 dB at a distance of 100 feet and even the after-burner equipped military jets (F-16, F-35 et al) haven’t been recorded as generating levels as high as 138 dB.  Although there were ebbs in the tensions, the “High Cold War” is regarded as the time between the early 1950s and mid 1960s, the public perception of which was dominated by the fear of nuclear war. The US government made many preparations for such an event, notably building vast underground facilities where essential personnel (members of the administration, the Congress and their families and servants) could live until it was safe to emerge into the post- apocalypse world).  The tax-payers who paid for these facilities were of course rather less protected but the government in 1952 did install warning sirens in cities; people might still be vaporized by comrade Stalin’s (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) H-Bombs but they would know it was coming so there was that.

The early version was co-developed by Chrysler and Bell Labs and named the Chrysler Bell Victory Siren which sounds optimistic but although the acoustic properties met the specification, the drawback was the devices were manually controlled and required someone physically to be there to start the thing and, being directional, rotate it so the sound would be broadcast 360^o.  The obvious flaw was that were there to be a nuclear attack in the area, the job-description was self-sacrificial, something comrade Stalin would doubtless have thought just the part of the cost of war with the unfortunate soul posthumously to be awarded the coveted Герой Советского Союза (Hero of the Soviet Union) decoration.  However, neither the White House or the Pentagon liked the optics of that and revised specifications were issued.  Chrysler responded with a more elaborate device which was automated and remotely administrated, the Chrysler Air Raid Siren introduced in 1952.  It was powered by the corporation’s new 331 cubic inch (5.4 litre) Hemi-head V8, rated at what was then a stellar 180 HP (134 kW), a three-stage compressor added to increase output.  Instead of demanding a potentially doomed operator, there was a control panel connected (with nothing more than the two-pair copper cables which became familiar as Cat3) to dedicated phone lines so it could be activated either by local civil defense authorities or the military.  The big V8 provided sufficient power to both increase the dB and the geographical coverage, the siren able to be heard over an area of some 15.8 square miles (41 km³), an impressive number given the electric sirens used today for tornado and tsunami warnings have an effective footprint of only some 3.9 square miles (10 km³).

Chrysler FirePower 392 cubic inch V8 in 1957 Chrysler 300C Convertible.

In 1952, there was no engine better suited to the task than Chrysler’s new “FirePower” V8.  Applying their wartime experience building a number of high-output, multi-cylinder engines (the most remarkable a V16 aero-engine rendered obsolete by jet technology before it could be used), the FirePower featured hemispherical combustion chambers and was the corporation’s first use of overhead-valves.  Both designs had been around for decades but in time, Chrysler would make a (trade-marked) fetish of “Hemi”, continuing cheerfully to use the name for a range of V8s introduced in 2003 even though they were no longer a true hemi-head, the design unable to be adapted to meet modern exhaust emission laws.  The so-called “third generation” Hemi remains available still although how long it will last will be a matter of the interplay of politics and demand.  Doubtless, it was Greta Thunberg’s (b 2003) hit-list and that she and the engine debuted in the same year would have impressed her not at all.