I melt with you

Semantic Compositions readers may recall that your host has previously mentioned his uber-expensive subscription to TheStreet.com's various newsletters, including one which gives access to hedge-fund manager Doug Kass' writing. While your host can't really hope to prove it with links to lots of material (and won't reproduce more than a sentence or two in order to avoid violating the terms of service), suffice it to say that Mr. Kass is a writer that SC self-consciously models himself after, especially in regard to pop-culture allusions. One of his occasional references is to Star Trek, particularly to the Vulcan practice known as the "mind meld", which he uses as a synonym for "meeting"; e.g.

I am going into a mind meld for an hour or so but before I do, I want to repeat a point that I have made previously.

However, sometimes he substitutes the non-canonical phrase "mind melt", as he did yesterday:

I have been in a mindmelt for an hour or so and it doesn't look like I have missed anything at all.

Now, it could just be a typo -- although they aren't next to each other on the keyboard, there are phonological reasons for confusing "d" and "t". However, Merriam-Webster says that the etymology of "meld" used as a verb in this sense (of mixing; they don't specifically address Vulcans) is "a blend of melt and weld". So it seemed like it might be worthwhile to check for the possibility that the confusion comes from elsewhere. The stats (admittedly, with a corpus size and number of cases that wouldn't pass the smell test in any journal):

"mind meld": 2 instances

"mindmeld": 1 instance

"mind melt": 0 instances

"mindmelt": 4 instances

So allowing for inconsistency with spaces and the sparsity of the data, it looks like Mr. Kass uses "melt" and "meld" interchangeably. However, there's a great source for usage more generally -- Google. Repeating the searches:

"mind meld": 58,800 instances

"mindmeld": 5,520 instances

"mind melt": 5,560 instances

"mindmelt": 1,620 instances

While the canonical Star Trek form clearly is most common, the evidence suggests that it's an easy enough confusion to make, and if it's a typo, it's no more of one than missing the fact that it's supposed to be two words. For reference, Google lists 2.45 million hits for "melt", and "just" 1.35 million hits for "meld". Given that "meld" is derived from "melt" and that they sound so similar, perhaps the real surprise is that the correct usage is so predominant.

(For readers who grew up on a diet of non-80s music, the post title refers to this song, which might actually make more sense if it was "meld" instead of "melt".)

Comments

[Paul A Mongan]

I know that "meld" is the fusion of two words: "melt" and "_____". What is the other word?