We’ve Been “Nuking” Food for More Than 40 Years

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hey, this is Andrew from Lexington, South Carolina.

Hey, Andrew. Welcome. Hi, Andrew. What’s up? So I guess I’ll just jump right into it. My question would be, or, you know, just growing up, my mom and my grandma used to both say to me, like, whenever I wanted to put something in the microwave or reheat something, they would always say, you know, just nuke it or, oh, just nuke it in the microwave. And I just kind of wanted to know, you know, where that word came from and, you know, how it relates to microwaving something.

Okay. So when would this be? What decade are we talking?

I was born in the late 90s, so I would say, you know, early 2000s is mostly when I would hear it.

The first place that we have print records and print versus spoken, because obviously we can’t track what people say, but if they write it down, we can match the words to dates. And that first match that we have is from the Daily Tar Heel, which is a student newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1982 of students. It’s a long jokey piece about students nuking food on a college campus, talking about melting things in the microwave.

Which is really interesting because obviously nuking things and nuclear weapons is terrible. And we’re talking about going from the idea of nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons to microwaving food. It’s a really big leap, right?

But there is a path there. There is a path. And part of it has to do with how we got from the word nuclear to the word nuke in UKE. And it happened almost immediately, you know, after the nuclear weapons were used during World War II by the United States on Japan. The idea of nuclear weapons was pervasive throughout the Western world.

And by the late 50s, nuke as a shorthand for weapons themselves was common in the popular press. And in the military in the 1960s, nuke could be used to mean a nuclear-powered sea craft, like a submarine, or a sailor that was assigned to such a ship. And in the public sphere, nuke was used as a shorthand for a nuclear power station.

So there’s this period in the 1960s where you could see a protest where people would be chanting no nukes. And you might not know whether or not they were talking about no nuclear power stations or no nuclear weapons, because they could be protesting against either or both, I guess. Pretty interesting.

But also at the same time that verb to nuke was growing, and the obvious use of to attack with nuclear weapons was there, but even almost immediately it starts to be used hyperbolically, which is the great American way with language, where we exaggerate or understate to just a ridiculous level. And we used it almost immediately to mean to punish or destroy, to ruin.

There’s one quote from the early 1960s talking about getting revenge on a fellow Air Force cadet. It’s called nuking them. And this is called semantic bleaching, which is a kind of amelioration where something goes from really negative to fairly positive.

Wow, that’s really cool.

Yeah. And it just kept going from there until we get to the idea where you can nuke your nachos to warm them up. Of course, the main problem is there’s nothing nuclear about a microwave. It’s radio waves in there.

Right. That’s what I thought as well. So I didn’t see the connection before, but it’s starting to make sense now.

Yeah. When the microwaves popped up in the mid-1970s, I think it was, even though the name of how the food is cooked is right there, the machine is called by the method. I think it was and maybe still is mysterious to people. I mean, you can see through the little window the food bubbling, and the food is hot when you take it out, but the device itself is cool. It’s kind of like magic.

So I think in people’s minds, you know, this mysteriousness of nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the mysteriousness of microwaves just kind of went hand in hand. They’re just a weird, mysterious technology to people. So amelioration. Yeah, that’s what happened with that one. Something terrible becomes something mundane.

Yeah, well, now I know.

That’s awesome.

Thank you guys so much.

Yeah, you’re welcome, Andrew. Call us again sometime, all right?

All righty.

Sounds good.

Y’all have a good day.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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