Go Hermantile

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning.

This is Mark calling from San Diego.

Hi, Mark. Welcome.

Hi, Mark. What’s up?

Well, I’ve got a question about a word that may be a nautical term. In any case, the only people I’ve heard use it are Navy folks. But I’d like to know something about it, like where it comes from and what it really means. I think I know what it means. And the word is hermitile.

And my whole career in the Navy, I’ve heard folks say, use this word sort of as a synonym for going crazy or getting really angry. When the chief came down and found that guy sleeping on watch, he went completely hermitile.

Hermitile. How do you spell that?

Well, I’m not entirely sure. I tried to look it up in the dictionary and I couldn’t find it. But then the other day, I’m reading a book, also a Navy story, The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna. And I saw the word in print, H-E-R-M-E-N-T-I-L-E, hermentile. I’ve always heard it without the N, but in print when I saw it, there was an N. And, of course, I looked that up in the dictionary as well and can’t find that one either.

Okay. I can help you with this. This is a military term for sure. You can find this back as far as the 1920s, probably World War I, among the Navy and the Marines. And it has a wide variety of spellings, but they’re all almost all what you say they are. H-E-R-M-A-T-I-L or H-E-R-M-A-N-T-I-L. Sometimes the vowels will change to an I or an E, but it’s more or less the same stuff.

There are two entries in Urban Dictionary that are more or less the same as you give them, something about getting really angry or being crazy. But what’s not clear to me exactly what we mean by this. Do they just go out of their head and run down the beach naked screaming, or do they get violent and have a shoot-em-up? Or do they just, I don’t know. What kind of form does this take when somebody goes home a tile?

Well, it’s kind of used to describe somebody who did a lot of yelling and screaming.

Okay.

Right? They were angry.

Okay, very good. And so you said you’ve known this your whole time in the military. How long has that been, if you don’t mind me asking?

25 years.

25 years.

Okay, that’s good. So it’s still got some history. That’s great. Sometimes these terms die out and they don’t pass to the new generation. What’s really interesting is how consistently it stays within the military circles. It’s either in military fiction or it’s in military reports or it’s in first-person memoirs or autobiographies of people who’ve served time in wars or in the trenches or what have you.

Anyway, so that’s the best that I can do for you. I’ll keep digging on this because what’s really interesting is, for me, one of my colleagues has done a lot of work on the slaying of the First World War, and he didn’t have this term. So you, Mark, have turned me on to something that I think is incredibly cool, and I’m glad to have it.

So a bit of a mystery still for you, but I think you’re on the track.

Thank you very much.

All right, take care.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Mark. Bye-bye.

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