Rare causative spotted
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"Switching strength on and off", Nature 6/9/2011:
A material has been designed to switch back and forth between a strong, brittle state and a weak, ductile one.
Hai-Jun Jin at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang and Jörg Weissmüller at the Technical University of Hamburg in Germany made their composite by imbibing nanoporous gold (pictured) with an electrolyte. When the applied electrical potential shifted, the material showed distinct and reversible changes in strength, flow stress and ductility.
I'm used to seeing imbibe used with the subject actively taking in a (usually alcoholic) fluid, and the object being the fluid taken in, e.g.
While a few locals inside the bar imbibed an afternoon cocktail, people hurried by chatting on their cell phones, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings.
And of course there's a figurative usage, in which some more abstract substance stands in for the fluid:
The idea meant a lot, because her father, who had brought her to the United States from Ukraine when she was 11, had imbibed the American dream of a country hideaway, and it was only a modest inheritance after his death in 2006 that allowed her to achieve it.
So I figured that the use in Nature was a causative version of imbibe, by analogy with things like "the water boiled" vs. "Kim boiled the water", or "water poured out of the jar" vs. "Kim poured water out of the jar".
Except that this doesn't usually happen with verbs like imbibe. If Sam caused the sponge to absorb water, I can't idiomatically say that Sam absorbed the sponge with water. So I looked at the originators of the story — "Hai-Jun Jin at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang and Jörg Weissmüller at the Technical University of Hamburg in Germany" — and guessed that maybe this sentence started out in a press release written by someone who's not a native speaker of English.
But the OED's sense I.a. for imbibe is glossed as "trans. To cause to absorb moisture or liquid; to soak, imbue, or saturate with moisture; to steep. Obs.". The citations go back to Chaucer and Caxton:
c1386 Chaucer Canon's Yeoman's Prol. & Tale 261 And oure matires enbibyng [Corpus enbykynge, Petworth enbykinge] And eek of oure matires encorporyng And of oure siluer citrinacion.
1489 Caxton tr. C. de Pisan Bk. Fayttes of Armes ii. iv. 96 Towe of flaxe that wel embybed were with oyle.
Sense 2. is " trans. To ‘drink in’, absorb, or assimilate (knowledge, ideas, etc.); to take into one's mind or moral system", with citations back to 1555:
1555 R. Eden in tr. Peter Martyr of Angleria Decades of Newe Worlde Pref. sig. ciijv, They may also herewith imbibe trewe religion.
And for the modern, "literal" sense of physically drinking an actual liquid, we have to go to sense 3., "Of a person or animal: To drink in, drink (liquid); to inhale (the air, tobacco smoke)", with citations only to the 17th century:
1621 T. Venner Treat. Tobacco in Baths of Bathe (1650) 402 They that‥for every light occasion imbibe or take down this fume.
a1791 T. Blacklock Hymn to supreme Being in Poems (1793) 10 The wild horse‥Imbibes the silver surge, with heat opprest, To cool the fever of his glowing breast.
1828 Scott Fair Maid of Perth iv, in Chron. Canongate 2nd Ser. II. 131 Oliver‥raised it to his head with a trembling hand, imbibed the contents with lips which quivered with emotion.
So it seems that the historical progression was exactly the reverse of what I expected: first the causative subject-causes-object-to-take-in-liquid, then the metaphorical sense of drinking in ideas, and last the simple subject-takes-in-liquid. Go figure.
Have materials scientists preserved the "obsolete" causative sense since Chaucerian times? Or did they re-invent it recently, perhaps under the influence of the more liberal Chinese attitude towards diathesis alternations?
Jeremy Wheeler said,
July 9, 2011 @ 2:40 am
Fascinating! My first thought upon reading "[They] made their composite by imbibing nanoporous gold (pictured) with an electrolyte" was "some party!"
David J. Littleboy said,
July 9, 2011 @ 2:49 am
I'd guess that a non-native speaker mistranslated something, and the bloke writing the overview article just took the word as is from the mistranslation. (I'm not a materials scientest, but I spent 4 years not getting an MS therein at a famous technical institute, and the imbibe bit sounds much more like the sort of dizziness I see in non-native translations from Japanese. Really, this is exactly the sort of thing that goes wrong when a non-native speaker looks up something in the dictionary and gets confused about transitive/intransitive usage.)
disfraz said,
July 9, 2011 @ 2:53 am
Seems like there's some interference here with [i]imbue[/i] as well, for what it's worth.
Martina A. said,
July 9, 2011 @ 3:03 am
The opposite seems to have happened with the Italian verb "imbevere", which I had used up to now with the causative meaning of "causing something to absorb some other substance", but apparently was originally born in the sense of "taking in something" (Latin "imbibere").
(references: http://dizionari.corriere.it/dizionario_italiano/I/imbevere.shtml for the first meaning and http://www.lessicografia.it/IMBEVERE%20e%20IMBERE for the second one)
Bruce L said,
July 9, 2011 @ 4:36 am
I've seen 'imbibed' used in a number of technical chemistry / technology magazines now, by what appear to be native English speakers. It doesn't feel like a "Chinese English" issue to me, but rather scientists starting to agree on a new piece of jargon for a specific phenomenon.
Carsten said,
July 9, 2011 @ 5:31 am
Just since you wondered if the use of "imbibe" in the paper is maybe due to one of the authors' native language: The word you'd probably use in German is "tränken", which is a causative derivation of "trinken" (to drink), and means "to give sth to drink to", but also "to soak sth in a fluid".
Ø said,
July 9, 2011 @ 8:23 am
Bruce L: A quick search shows that transitive "imbibe" has been used for many years in technical writing (about materials absorbing water). One of the first hits was an 1827 book. But do you mean that you have been seeing the causative "imbibe"?
Jerry Friedman said,
July 9, 2011 @ 9:53 am
I looked a bit at Google Books. The causative sense seems to have been current till at least 1830 or so, but might fall off after that. There are scattered examples in the 20th century, but I've found only snippets and can't tell whether they're by native speakers.
Here is a use, apparently by a native speaker, from 1993. "Artist's paper was imbibed with a solution of common salt and dried." However, as this describes a photographic process from the 1830s, the author might have been quoting a description from the time without updating the language.
So at this point I can't tell whether it's a non-native error or an unusual jargon sense.
sarang said,
July 9, 2011 @ 10:16 am
A quick search in Physical Review archives gives a bunch of results, of which the first is from 1989: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v62/i7/p804_1
"Mixtures of lutidine and water imbibed in porous Vycor have been studied using Raman, elastic, and quasielastic light scattering."
Authors are from Bell Labs — possibly sometime colleagues of yours — and are definitely not Chinese. All these papers seem to have to do with stuff "imbibed into" Vycor and other porous glasses. (Preposition varies from paper to paper.)
But as previous comments have said, causative "imbibe" seems to have been around for a while.
Brett said,
July 9, 2011 @ 10:16 am
I know I've seen odd-seeming uses of "imbibe" in materials science papers, but I can't recall if they were causative or whether they just seemed awkward. (My research only brushes up against materials science occasionally, so I'm not really conversant in all the jargon of the field; and jargon often seems awkward to unfamiliar readers.)
Mark Mandel said,
July 9, 2011 @ 10:25 am
My first or second thought was that seen the causative sense in the OED or some other historical dictionary and assumed it was current. But Bruce L. & sarang have shown that it really is current shoptalk.
marc said,
July 9, 2011 @ 11:34 am
This return to the ur-meaning of an otherwise familiar word is pretty common in technical writing. One example I recently encountered was "to implicate a fiber" in the meaning of "interweave a fiber into a material."
marc said,
July 9, 2011 @ 11:36 am
And David (こんちわ!), by "non-native," you mean not native in the target language, right?
Rebecca said,
July 9, 2011 @ 7:14 pm
I've seen/heard "imbibe" used in the basic transitive "soak up" sense in discussions related to dying various sorts of fiber, eg. comparing how various materials imbibe various dyes in differing degrees. But I don't recall hearing a true causative construction as above. It strikes me odd enough that I think I'd notice it, instead of a more typical complement clause, like "we can get the reed to imbibe more dye by adding salt to the soak water" or something like that.
However, I did notice a (to me) odd use on a dye blog (http://buydyes.info/tag/ecofriendly/) that seems related, but not indentical to the causative use cited above:
"You can’t expect your child to study all through the day. Give them toys that are earth-friendly so that you imbibe the habit of using recyclable products in them forever."
It's not quite the same, the object is, so to speak, the liquid, whereas in the cited example, the object is the sponge (if I understand the passage correctly). But as the subject is still something causing something else to get soaked, is it still causative?
In any case, it's a jarring construction, for me. But I do wonder if the relatively common use of "imbibe" in the dye world influenced this particular use.
Hermann Burchard said,
July 9, 2011 @ 8:44 pm
@David J. Littleboy (translation question):
See the Technische Uni presser:
http://intranet.tu-harburg.de/aktuell/pressemittelung_einzeln.php3?id=7702
Checking, the word for imbibe[d] is eingebracht, a common word meaning brought in, perhaps a bit technical in flavor, referring to introducing the conductive liquid into the porous channels of the metal.
There is also a photo of a faintly smiling Prof Jörg Weissmüller (not Johnny).
Garth said,
July 10, 2011 @ 12:55 am
I've seen it used in many places in contexts relating to calalysts especially. As an example a search for Imbibed into the catalyst will bring up many results.
Barbara Partee said,
July 10, 2011 @ 1:50 am
Now that that use is pointed out, it seems kind of natural — aren't there a number of in-, im-, en-, em- words that are similar? Not only imbue, but inculcate, embed, engender, …? I haven't done any research, I'm just blithely folk etymologizing, but these seem not so much causatives of simple transitives as primarily 'putting something into something', which can be causative or not, as in the two senses of imbibe. What Martina said about Italian imbevere and Latin imbibere is interesting — it's at least consistent with the idea that the two senses have roughly equal status. (you put something 'liquidly, drinkingly' into something, which may or may not be yourself?) Maybe this speculation-without-research is slightly irresponsible, in which case I apologize in advance.
Dan M. said,
July 10, 2011 @ 3:38 am
I think marc is onto something with his comment about materials science often using older meanings. As a related example, when discussing thermodynamics, it's very common to refer to a process (or the materials reacting in that process) as "evolving" a particular quantity of steam.
To my vague intuition, this feels like a kind of subtle teleology, in that engineers who are describing materials undergoing reactions speak from sort-of anthropomorphic perspective of the material being affected.
Olof Hellman said,
July 11, 2011 @ 1:23 am
As a materials scientist, I'll note that for the technical audience, the meaning is clear: nanoporous gold is a solid and the electrolyte is a liquid, and no matter how the sentence is formulated, solid drinks liquid: Saying "the researchers imbibed the gold with the electrolyte" and "the researchers imbibed the electrolyte into the gold" are effectively equivalent.
A similar case exists for 'implant' (as Barbara points out, another im-word): "The researchers implanted the silicon with dopants" v. "The researchers implanted dopants into the silicon". Both are perfectly natural.
Elijah said,
July 11, 2011 @ 2:57 pm
I've only ever really heard or used imbibe intransitively (that I can remember, of course), and usually humorously, e.g., "Shall we imbibe?" or "We're going to the bar and imbibe". But reading the cited example from the paper, I understood what they meant immediately. In fact, it took me a while to get at exactly what this post was saying, and even e.g. Jeremy Wheeler's comment flew over my head at first.
ohwilleke said,
July 11, 2011 @ 4:07 pm
I would think that the idiomatic American English word would be "infuse" rather than "imbibe."
Olof Hellman said,
July 12, 2011 @ 1:19 am
@ohwilleke – "infuse" is completely different, wherein traces of a solid are extracted and distributed in a liquid, as in brewing tea, or flavoring vodka. However, the grammatical flexibility holds: "I infused the vodka with the anise", "I infused the anise into the vodka".
Dils said,
July 18, 2011 @ 5:05 am
@ Olof The relationship I believe is that the gold, in common American English usage could imbibe the electrolyte, and not the other way around. The constructions you mention are not the ones being questioned. It seems that to imbibe has lost the older meaning that is similar to imbue or implant, and only retained the "to drink" definition.
Alon Lischinsky said,
July 29, 2011 @ 3:04 am
Picking up on what Martina A. said, Spanish embeber means roughly 'soak', and has both transitive ('se dize spongia para pintar et para limpiar. es toda con escondedrijos et llena de cauezuelas. et embebe en si el agua') and causative ('tomó un pañuelo de tocuyo, lo embebió de aguardiente, lo espolvoreó con sal y se lo puso como gorro de noche') uses.
There is no decent historical dictionary of Spanish to identify when each developed, but a quick look at CORDE makes it rather clear that the causative sense is relatively new; I haven't been able to spot any quotes earlier than the 19th century, while the transitive example above is from 1490.