Tarmacadam

Tarmacadam (pronounced tahr-muh-kad-uhm)

(1) A paving material consisting of coarse crushed stone covered with a mixture of tar and bitumen.

(2) To cover or surface with tarmacadam.

1880–1885: The construct was tar + macadam (the spelling tar-macadam was also used).  Tar was from the Middle English ter, terr & tarr, from the Old English teoru, from the Proto-West Germanic teru, from the Proto-Germanic terwą (related to the Saterland Frisian Taar, the West Frisian tarre & tar, the Dutch teer & German Teer), from the primitive Indo-European derwo- (related to the Welsh derw (oaks), the Lithuanian dervà (pinewood, resin), the Russian де́рево (dérevo) (tree) and the Bulgarian дърво́ (dǎrvó) (tree)), from dóru (tree).  Tar described the black, oily, sticky, viscous substance, consisting mainly of hydrocarbons derived from organic materials such as wood, peat, or coal and it has been in use for millennia including as a water-proofing agent in the warships of Antiquity where it worked well but, being flammable, increased the vessels vulnerability to attack by “fire-ships”, an early “high-tech” weapon.  It’s used also as a descriptor of the solid residual by-product of tobacco smoke, seen often in anti-smoking campaigns, often demonstrating the effect on the lungs.  The old slang of a “tar” (also “jack tar”) being a sailor was unrelated to the hydrocarbon derivative and was a clipping of “tarpaulin”, allusion to the clothing seafarers wore.  In drug user slang, “black tar” was a form of heroin.  Tarmacadam is a noun & verb, and tarmacadaming & tarmacadamed are verbs; the noun plural is tarmcadams.

A Clan MacAdam family crest (there are many MacAdam crests and coats of arms).

The origin of the prefixes “Mc” & “Mac” in Scottish surnames lie in the Gaelic language historically was spoken in Scotland and both “son of”, thus indicating lineage, specifically to signify “son of” a particular person or ancestor (a la Robinson, Johnson et al).  Over centuries, the original “Mac” prefix was sometimes shortened to “Mc” but both forms are used interchangeable, carrying the same meaning.  The prefixes were an example of Celtic naming traditions (obviously most prevalent in Scotland & Ireland but also in other Gaelic-speaking regions) where surnames often were patronymic, based on the name of a father or ancestor.  Family lineage and heritage are important aspects in the naming traditions and conventions in many cultures and the “Mac” & Mc” use was the Gaelic practice.  The surname McAdam (also as MacAdam, Macadam & Mac Adaim (Irish)) belonged to a Scottish Gaelic clan which originated as a branch of Clan Gregor and although it has spread to many nations of the old British Empire (notably Ireland, the US, New Zealand, Australia and Canada), it is most prominent in the Galloway and Ayrshire regions of Scotland.

Clan MacAdam tartans: Reproduction (left), Modern (centre) and Ancient (right).  There are many Clan MacAdam tartans and the provenance of some may be dubious.  

The Gaelic “son of Adam” existed in those cases where the Biblical name had not been Gaelicized.  In this sense it was a companion of McGaw & MacGaw (from a Gaelicized form of the personal name) which in Ireland evolved as McCadden (in County Armagh) and McCaw (in County Cavan).  The Gaelic original seems to have been MacAdaim, introduced into both England and Scotland by twelfth century crusaders returning from the various (and usually unsuccessful) expeditions to “free” the Holy Land from Islamic control; Among the warrior crusaders, it was a fashion to give their children biblical names and because of the patronymic convention, they became elements in surnames from the thirteenth century onwards, MacAdam & McAdam proliferating.  So, given the etymology, it would be reasonable to assume tarmacadam might be pronounced tahr-mick-adam but even by the turn of the twentieth century it had become a stand-alone English word pronounced tahr-muh-kad-uhm.  

Tarmacadaming in progress (the worker on the right wielding a “tarmac rake”).  Like an iceberg, much of what a road is lies beneath. 

John McAdam (1756- 1836) was a Scottish civil engineer who specialized in road-building who in 1824 invented a process he called “macadamisation”.  His innovation was a system which enabled roads to be built with a smooth hard surface, using a defined mix of materials consisting particle of mixed sizes and predetermined structure; it offered the advantage of a surface which was more durable and less muddy than soil-based tracks.  Except when subjected to sustained periods of extreme weather, a characteristic of a “macadamed” surface was that vehicular transport tended to “compact and preserve” the integrity of the structure rather than wear and contribute to its deterioration.  However, as early as 1834 others began experimenting with tar (essentially as a sealant or sort of glue) as a way of strengthening a macadam road, increasing its durability, some of these enchantments involving both a top and underlying layer of tar and others adding to the surface alone.  Tar-augmented macadam was in use by the late nineteenth century but it never became widespread until the demands imposed by increasingly fast and heavy motorized vehicles.  John McAdam personally was never an advocate of the use of tar in road-building, his concern that there existed a tendency for such methods to “trap” water which would expand in sub-zero temperatures, causing the surface to break up; for this reason he preferred a structure which “breathed”, allowing the slight slope he engineered into his projects to permit natural drainage.

PavingExpert.com has a fine page explaining the terminology.

It was the Welsh civil engineer Edgar Hooley who in 1901 “invented” tarmacadam although “discovered” is a better description of what happened because the circumstances were serendipitous.  Mr Hooley was walking towards an ironworks when he observed an unusually smooth stretch of road and when he enquired what had caused the phenomenon, he was told a large barrel of tar had fallen onto the road and smashed, disgorging the contents which quickly spread, making a black, stick, mess.  Staff from the ironworks had been dispatched with a cart of slag (a waste-product from the blast furnaces with instructions to spread it across the road and Mr Hooley noted the impromptu resurfacing had solidified the road, giving it a marvelously smooth, consistent surface with no rutting and no dust.

Prototype William C Oastler steamroller, Cooke Locomotive factory, Paterson, New Jersey, 1899.

Within months, Mr Hooley had completed his design for a process he called “tarmac”.  This involved mechanically mixing tar and aggregate into a dispensing device which “laid-it-down” to be compacted with a steam-engine powered roller (the appropriately named “steamroller”).  What made the process possible was the basic tar being modified with the addition of pitch, cement & resin.  In 1902, Mr Hooley was granted a patent and the essence of his design remains in use today.  It produced good results but it was a more expensive method than the traditional approach but what radically reduced the cost was the emergence in the US of a large-scale petroleum industry which produced large quantities of bitumen as a by-product, something for which there was then little demand.  The sudden availability of vast quantities of bitumen meant coal tar could be replaced and Mr Hooley’s mechanized process then became a cheaper method of road building, the combination of the dispensing device and steamroller eliminating much of the labor-intensive activities inherent in the business of macadamisation; the most familiar modern version of the process in the “tar and chip” method which civil engineers refer to as BST (bituminous surface treatment).

Tarmacadam variations.

The classic tarmac surface is now rarely used although in a curious linguistic quirk, the word persists as a common term describing the apron outside airport passenger terminals (the “marshalling area” where aircraft are parked to allow passengers to embark & disembark (de-plane the current buzz phrase)) although these are now typically constructed with concrete.  In some markets “asphalt concrete” (the smooth, black surface sometimes called “road carpet”) but the word “tarmacadam” remains commonly used in road-building and other fields in civil engineering.  Technically, Tarmacadam should now correctly be referred to as “bituminous macadam” (“Bitmac” in professional slang) and it’s one of those processes which is appropriate for some jobs and not others, largely because while a relatively cheap method when used at large scale, for small areas it can be very expensive because the machinery is all designed to be deployed at scale.

On the tarmac: Lindsay Lohan in costume for Liz & Dick (2012), Van Nuys Airport, Los Angeles, June 2012.  Based on this image, the Van Nuys tarmac is of concrete construction.

Arkancide

Arkancide (pronounced ahr-kuhn-side)

A neologism coined to describe the remarkably high death-toll (by causes such as "suicide", "misadventure" and "accident") among those associated with Bill (b 1946; US President 1993-2001) and Hillary Clinton (b 1947).

2005-2006: A compound word, the portmanteau being Arkan(sas) + -cide.  The name of Arkansas, the US state, was applied first to the Arkansas River and derives from the Modern French Arcansas, the plural form of the transliteration of akansa, an Algonquian term for the Quapaw people (a Dhegiha Siouan-speaking people who settled in the area in the thirteenth century); Akansa is thought also the likely root of Kansas, another US state.  Aspects of the word Arkansas have long been debated.  Pronunciation had varied from the start and it wasn’t until 1881 the state legislature defined the official pronunciation being with the final "s" silent, following the French practice and in 2007, the politicians passed a resolution declaring the possessive form to be Arkansas's.  The suffix –cide is a word-forming element meaning "killer", from the French -cide, from the Latin -cida (cutter, killer, slayer), from -cidere, a combining form of caedere (to strike down, chop, beat, hew, fell, slay), from the Proto-Italic kaid-o-, from the root kae-id- (to strike).  The element also can represent "killing," from the French -cide, from the Latin -cidium (a cutting, a killing).  Arkancide is a noun & verb and Arkancided is a verb; the noun plural is Arkancide or Arkancides (depending on context) and the use of an initial capital seems universal.

Bill & crooked Hillary Clinton.

Bill Clinton built his political base in Arkansas, first as attorney-general, later as governor and in Arkansas, as subsequently in the White House, with each election of Bill, voters received a free copy of crooked Hillary.  Arkancide was coined to describe the phenomenon of the surprisingly high number of deaths (especially the many recorded officially as “accident” or ruled “suicide” even if the method “chosen” appeared, prima facie, to make self-inflicted injuries actually impossible) among those associated with Bill and crooked Hillary Clinton.  Depending on which conspiracy theorist does the body count, the numbers bounce around a bit and the more rigorous researchers do exclude from their lists those souls for whom the cause of death was, at least on the balance of probabilities, not suspicious, but every tally is in the dozens.  What all agree is the catalogue begins with Kevin Ives (1970-1987) & Don Henry (1971-1987) in 1987 and ends (thus far) with Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019) in 2019 and it’s difficult to guess at the veracity of the connection between the Clintons and all these deaths.  Like any data set, much work will have to be done to determine the relationship between cause and effect and, as is drummed into every student during their first lecture in Statistics 101, correlation does not of necessity equate with causation and a mere list of apparent coincidences (even if in the dozens) does not prove Jeffrey Epstein was murdered on the orders of crooked Hillary any more than it proves the assassin was a Freemason.  Officially, the establishment's consensus was (and remains) it's all mere coincidence, many of the dead just really unlucky and statisticians who have run the numbers say the conspiracy theory is debunked, one notable factor the predictable large number of people still alive who could in some way be linked with any US president.  Beginning in the 1990s, the slang terms for the phenomenon were "Clintonization" & "Clinton Body Count" but neither never caught on to the extent  of Arkancide, probably because the latter, being a little more removed, functions better as a euphemism.  Also, pre-dating even the arrival of the Clintons in Arkansas politics, was the sardonic phrase Arkansas Sudden Death Syndrome (ASDS), used to describe those whose death was said to be at the hands of the state's employees, this means of demise apparently unusually frequent in Arkansas.

Randall Made Knives of Orlando, Florida: The Arkansas toothpick

To gain a sense of the way the folk in the state of Arkansas have long been perceived, consider the Arkansas toothpick, an impressive dagger produced usually in lengths between 12-20 inches (300-500 mm) and claimed to be ideal for “thrusting & slashing”.  The weapon is said to be the creation of US knifemaker James Black (1800–1872) and is described by many historians as an “improved version” of the famous Bowie knife, the design of which was credited to James Bowie (1796–1836) who enjoyed the sort of varied career once often enjoyed south of the Mason-Dixon Line, his activities including land speculation (lawful and not), slave trading (mostly lawful) and military adventures (officially sanctioned and not).  In truth, Mr Black’s original dagger seems to have been a slight variant of the Bowie knife because there’s little in documents from the nineteenth century to suggest the two were regarded as sufficiently different to be used for different purposes.  The term “Arkansas Toothpick” seems first to have appeared in the late 1820s or early 1830s in tales by European travellers who told of the rugged characters they encountered in the backwoods of Arkansas, their habits including using the long-bladed daggers to “pick their teeth”.  Some have speculated the term might have pre-dated the debut of the Bowie knife in (circa 1830) and that the notion of two different knives evolved in the nineteenth century only because of this casual journalistic slang.  However it happened, the Arkansas Toothpick and Bowie knife are now established items in the knifemakers’ catalogues.

The idea of a biopic documenting the allegedly murderous trail of death in the wake of Bill & crooked Hillary was so obviously and attractively filmic it must be only the fear of litigation that has prevented a project being brought to fruition.  The satirical site Weekly World News did suggest Hill & Bill might be in the works, the casting for crooked crooked Hillary an obvious choice but left unexplored was who to play her husband.  To depict Bill Clinton would demand a wider range than most actors possess so it would be tempting to look outside the profession and cast former film producer Harvey Weinstein (b 1952) but his commitments make that now impossible, though presumably he could play Jeffrey Epstein, on-location as it were.  Still, so irresistible is the lure of a tale like this that screenplays presumably lie in drawers, awaiting the circumstances (God forbid) which will permit the pitch.

The Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport

Welcome sign: Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport.

What is now the Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport was Little Rock’s first aerodrome, opened in 1917 as a military facility called the Little Rock Intermediate Air Depot, operated by the US Army Signal Corps; in 1925, the federal government acquired some adjoining land additional property to support the activities of an observation squadron of the Arkansas National Guard.  By 1928, reflecting the way in earlier centuries commerce and support services had usually “sprung up” around ports, by 1928 the first of many aircraft manufacturing and maintenance businesses had been established in close proximity to the facility which, in 1930, passed to local civilian ownership, commercial air services launched the following year (by American Airlines, then known as American Airways).

During the inter-war years, the airport was renamed Little Rock Municipal Airport and expanded from a single grass field (known in the industry as a “sod runway”) to three paved runways; despite the effects of the Great Depression, civil aviation in the era continued to expand and the building of runways was an attractive form of job creation by government because they were classic “shovel ready” projects which then could absorb for months at a time many of the unskilled and semi-skilled unemployed to lay the asphalt-concrete mix; despite “tarmac” enduring as a popular colloquialism to describe the paved parts of an airport, the traditional tarmacadam (which uses tar as a binder) had by then ceased to be used because it lacked the strength and durability required to handle the weight, speed, and fuel spills associated what were by then heavy airframes.

USGS (US Geological Survey) aerial photograph of Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport; note crooked aspect of runways.

As upgraded, the airport became established as a hub for commercial and military aviation.  In 1942, with the entry of the US into World War II (1939-1945), the War Department (not renamed “Department of Defense” until 1946 and since 2025 it appears to be using both names) assumed control and daily commercial air services did not resume until the facility was returned to the City of Little Rock after the war, at which point, daily commercial air services re-commenced.  The “Adams Field” element in the name is a tribute to Captain George Adams (1899-1937) of the Arkansas National Guard, killed on the tarmac in a “freak accident” when struck by the blade of a propeller which had become separated from its housing.  Although in March 2012, the Little Rock Municipal Airport Commission voted to rename the facility the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in honor of "the Clintons' public service and their ties to Arkansas", the designation "Adams Field" remains in use for references to the runways and air movements.  In its October 2013 edition, Travel + Leisure magazine released the results of a survey which found travelers ranked the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport as the worst of the 67 surveyed, prompting the airport administration to retaliate by commissioning their own survey.  This contradicted the magazine's numbers and claimed some 90% of passengers were satisfied with their experience.  It's not known if the dissenting 10% committed "suicide".