digest

摘要

For some the epitome of motive power is the steam engine. It is noisy, an ecologist's nightmare, inefficient, expensive to run and, most importantly, it is alive. The heart of the steam engine is the boiler, an agent noun from the verb to boil. As boiling will have been used for cooking for millennia, it is not surprising to find derivations of this word are common to many languages across Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. In its modern sense the name is fairly recent, coming to English from Old French bolir used to mean 'boil, bubble' and also 'ferment, gush'. Further back it is found in Latin bullire with the same meaning. Interestingly the homonym 'boil', referring to the skin infection, is used much earlier and shares a common origin in Proto-Indo-European beu meaning 'to swell' that is appropriate in both cases. This is also the basis for words such as 'boast', 'bole' and 'bull'.