Echelon
Echelon comes from the French 茅肠丑别濒辞苍, a word whose literal meaning is “rung of a ladder.” Today the term applies generally to a level or rank of accomplishment or authority, but initially it was confined to military use in reference to a step-like formation of troops.
While echelon entered English in a military context, it was the first and second World Wars that extended the meaning to other nonmilitary sectors. During World War I, the term took on a more generalized sense of a “level” or “subdivision”; World War II broadened echelon鈥檚 usage to describe grades and ranks in professions outside the military.
At the same time, English speakers started using echelon to classify institutions or persons they held in high esteem by referring to them as part of the “upper” or “top” echelon. With this in mind, the phrase “social climber” conjures up the image of people who wish to ascend through the various ladder rungs of society until they reach the top.
Popular References
鈥擱ow echelon form: In linear algebra, a simplified form of a matrix in which each non-zero row has more leading zeros than the previous row.
鈥擡CHELON: Code name of a global surveillance system developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). It operates by intercepting and processing international communications transmitted via communications satellites.
鈥擳hird Echelon: A fictional sub-group of the NSA created by Tom Clancy in his Splinter Cell book series.
Related Quotations
“Beyond [the city] were the suburban homes of laborers and low-echelon executives who had carved brass-knuckled niches for themselves in the medium-income bracket.”
鈥擨rving E. Cox, Jr., (1955)
“If a CEO wavers and shows signs of not being confident of which way he wants to go, it sends shudders from the top echelon all the way down the mountain.”
鈥擠. A. Benton,聽 (2000)
鈥淸I]t is a monstrous leap from what [a master] can do to what the elite grandmasters (the Fischers and the Karpovs and the Kasparovs) can do, which is why even the top echelon of players often maintain a base of humility beneath their bluster.鈥�
鈥擬ichael Weinreb, (2007)
鈥淏y echelon we mean a formation in which the subdivisions are placed one behind another, extending beyond and unmasking one another either wholly or in part.鈥�
鈥擩ames Alfred Moss, (1914)
鈥淸T]hey echeloned to the right around the hill, and the 1st Platoon fired into their flank for ten to fifteen minutes; however, they never slacked or broke formation.鈥�
鈥擶illiam T. Bowers, (2008)
Read our previous post in this series about the word聽hypochondriac.A motley combination of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Germanic dialects, the English language (more or less as we know it) coalesced between the 9th and 13th centuries. Since then, it has continued to import and borrow words and expressions from around the world, and the meanings have mutated. (Awesome and awful once meant nearly the same thing.)Some specimens in the English vocabulary have followed unusually circuitous routes to their place in the contemporary lexicon, and this series, Lexical Investigations, unpacks those words hiding in our midst.
