Meltdown

We went grocery shopping this morning and, as sometimes seems to happen in such places, there was a small child wailing. (And haven’t we all occasionally felt like wailing when shopping?) This little one was obviously having a “meltdown”, which is today’s Time Travel Tuesday focus. So, when did this word enter our language, and where did it come from?

The word “meltdown”, meaning to literally “melt down”, was first recorded in 1919 in the Canadian Mining Journal, referring to the melting of metal. The term then appeared in 1937 in an article discussing the making of ice cream in the Ice Cream Trade Journal. Since 1956 though, it has mainly been associated with nuclear reactors and cores.

But what about the figurative use of the word, as in the experience of the little child in the supermarket today? The first figurative “meltdown” appeared in the New York Times in 1979, in an article concerning a political downfall. “A sudden and decisive collapse” is the meaning given by the OED in this type of instance.

The colloquial use of the word for “a breakdown of emotions”, such as happens to a small child who’s had enough shopping, thank you very much, quickly followed in 1980. So parents everywhere have been dealing with offspring with meltdowns in supermarkets for over 40 years now. That takes some doing!