These are rocky times for the movie-rental giant Blockbuster Inc. Its stock, which once traded for $20 a share, now trades for less than 40 cents. Battered by competitors, Blockbuster posted a greater than expected quarterly loss last month and said it would gradually close as many as 545 stores that aren't performing well - thereby, coincidentally, busting up a number of blocks.
Since the Second World War, a blockbuster has referred to a hit film, book or other entity that wowed the public. "And for the moment Avatar is the biggest of all," A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times last Sunday, "a juggernaut that makes the word blockbuster sound quaint." The postwar term also referred to real-estate sharks who spread rumours to persuade people to sell their homes, which the sharks then bought for a song. In the 1950s and sixties, such schemes exploited the prejudices of white homeowners who didn't want people of a different colour or religion moving next door, a practice that figured in the recent movie An Education. According to the book Modern Real Estate Practice, "any message, however subtle, that property should be sold or rented because the neighbourhood is 'undergoing changes' is considered blockbusting." I've also heard the term used to describe shady speculators who rent houses to jerks with the aim of annoying neighbours to the point of driving them out, though I can't find anything in print to buttress that claim.
All these blockbusters got their name from the Block Buster, the British name for a two-tonne (also four-tonne) bomb used during the Second World War to demolish industrial sites, and joined in 1944 by the five-tonne Factory Buster. It was called a Block Buster because it could handily destroy a city block. Figuratively, a hit movie strikes the box office with impressive force - oddly, a blockbuster is a success but a bomb is a failure - while the real-estate ploy reshapes a block.
The block in blockbuster derived from the Middle Dutch blok, meaning tree trunk. The first meaning of the English verb was to place blocks of wood as obstacles in people's paths, but by the 1400s it had acquired the broader sense of impeding someone's passage. The bust in blockbuster is an 18th-century corruption of burst, and has since acquired all sorts of side meanings. People are busted (arrested) for crimes, busted (hit) on the jaw and busted (exposed) when caught in a compromising position. Rappers bust (perform) a move; cowboys bust (tame) broncos. If your enterprise is a bust (failure), you go bust (broke).
However, the bust of a famous figure and the female bust arrived by a different route, which Joseph B. Solodow traces in his new book Latin Alive. The Latin ambo meant both, a meaning that survives in such words as ambiguous, acting in two opposite ways, from ambo and agere, to act. (Similarly, the Greek word for both, amphi, turns up in such words as amphibious, living both on land and in water). If something was scorched, it was ambustum (burned on all sides, from ambo and ustum, burned). Instead of thinking of the word as amb plus ustum, the Romans misunderstood it as am plus bustum - "what linguists call 'misdivision,'" Solodow writes. They accordingly shortened it to bustum and defined it as a funeral pyre.
The word eventually came to refer to any burial place. It's not certain what happened next, but there may be a connection between bustum and the later Italian word busto, a head-and-torso statue. The link - and why spoil a good story? - is that this was the sort of statue you'd find outside a tomb. The Italian busto led (by way of French) to the English bust, referring to the sculpture. Since busts emphasized the chest, the word also came to refer to a woman's bosom. It's an anomaly of the language that people who are close are bosom friends, while people who stop being close bust up.