Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On
Speaking about the recent
second earthquake in Nepal, CNN’s Wolfe Blitzer referred to tremblers or
tremblors. It’s impossible to tell from pronunciation alone how he would have
spelled it.
He should have used the
more correct temblor, a word for earthquake taken from the Spanish, and at
first popularized in the southwestern United States. To tremble is to shake or
quiver involuntarily because of fear or cold, so a trembler could be a
terrified person, but not properly an earthquake.
He could also have used
the word tremor, a shaking movement of the ground before or after an
earthquake. Contributing to the confusion is the fact that all three words
(trembler, temblor, tremor) track back to the same Latin verb, tremere, to shake.
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