Tank

August 23rd, 2012 by admin

Sometime in the 1970s, as these “tank” phrases began to be adopted by the general public, they lost their “did it on purpose” meanings and “to tank” came to mean simply “to fail utterly,” with no implication of corruption. But there must have been a few old boxing fans left in the early 1990s, because “to be in the tank for” then reappeared in political jargon, with its original meaning of “in the pay of” or “secretly in favor of or committed to” (“NBC is clearly in the tank for Clinton”).

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Posted in August 2012, columns | 3 comments

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  1. Terry Diggs:

    September 13th, 2012 at 12:40 pm

    Here in Arkansas where I live, a “pond” is a small body of water, whether naturally occurring or manmade. A usage I’ve only noticed in Texas is to call a naturally-occurring small body of water a “pond,” but a man-made body of water is called a “tank.”

  2. Barney Holland:

    May 23rd, 2018 at 11:54 am

    The Spanish words “Llano Estacado” translated as “The Staked Plains” denotes that area of NW Texas that Coronado crossed circa 1540. Allegedly called that because the Spaniards had to stake their horses because their were no trees or took tall stakes to mark their progress and help them find their way back across the trackless grasslands, or to describe the Cap Rock that, from a distance can appear to be a palisade of stakes around a fort. I cannot credit the fellows who suggested a few years ago in an article in Texas Monthly, I think, that if one inserts an “N” in the second word and make it “Estancado” it translates as “the plain of many ponds” or “the pond-covered plain” from the Spanish word “tanque”. Well, there are some 17,000 shallow ‘ponds’ in the area covered by NW Texas, SW Oklahoma, Eastern New Mexico and SW Kansas and Coronado crossed this area in a wet year . . . The authors suggested that a very early cartographer in Spain or Mexico dropped the “N’ by mistake and “Estacado” survived, was translated and reasons given for its origin.
    There is a Tanque, Arizona and, as you say, that is the origin of the English word for a small body of water.

  3. Helmi:

    January 3rd, 2021 at 5:47 am

    This article mentions women wearing tank suits, but I’m pretty sure men wore something very similar since there was still some modesty surrounding the male chest as well in that era (pre-1950’s).