Occasionally my kids remind me I should no longer use certain terms that in my younger days were quite acceptable. I generally agree, although I still think the term Orient is prettier than Asia. I would not be as interested in riding on the Asia Express as I would on the Orient Express. However, to use Oriental as a designation of cultural origin for people is dumb. Orient means east and there is always a human east from oneself so it does not describe anything.
My kids have also reminded me not to use the term “classy”, because once you use the term classy it is no longer classy. Now I use the term classy only in ironic fashion.
Recently I have been involved in the historic study and appreciation of Intermodalism. Friend and client Frank DeGiulio sent me a lovely 1989 paper on the history and law of Multimodalism. (Tulane Law Review, December, 1989, Admiralty Law Institute Symposium: Terminal Operations and Multimodalism, Richard W. Palmer and Frank P. DeGiulio)
In the paper he notes that Containerization, Intermodal and Multimodal are interchangeable terms.
Frank mostly uses Multimodal and that made me wonder if that is the more current or correct term. I generally use Intermodal. It has “inter” in it, which, to me, sounds like “international” or other sexy words with “inter” in it. To me the Intermodal Express train just sounds more “inter”esting than Multimodal Express train.
Anyway, I was curious and checked “inter”net definitions.
Today there actually appears to be a distinction between Intermodal and Multimodal. Intermodal is a technical term for transport of a cargo using different transport devices. Multimodal more generally refers to a contractual concept in intermodal transportation. So, it actually turns out that both Frank and I are right. I have been dealing with the subject on a technical level, while Frank’s paper heavily discusses contract and legal issues.
Containerization simply is an older term that was used for both concepts before the more recent terms came into vogue. I remember first seeing the emergence of the term Intermodalism in the late 1980’s in an article in the Journal of Commerce with a title sort of like: “Can Intermodalism be stopped?” The article discussed planned ship-to-rail terminals, dedicated container railroads, and Post Panamax container ships and noted that Intermodalism was still only in its early stages. And they were right.
I also should point out that Microsoft Word tells me that Intermodalism and Multimodalism are not contained in the spellcheck dictionary. Which, in its own way, is a reflection on the low regard for one of history’s most significant innovations.
There is an interesting way to check for the commonality of words by using Ngram viewer. This is a Google program that records the prevalence of words in publications. When I entered the blog title words in Ngram viewer, I got the following graph.
The scale is difficult to read, but it shows the trend. This is the prevalence of the words between 1920 and 2022. Blue is Containerization, red is Intermodalism, and green in Multimodalism.
After 1950, the term Containerization exploded and then shrunk.
Meanwhile, there was a bump in Intermodalism between 1990 and 2000. and then the term faded to the same level as Multimodalism. (There is a tiny bump in Intermodalism in the 1930’s. This may relate to a weird and misguided court decision about Containerization and Intermodalism in railroad transportation and is discussed in Frank’s paper.)
The post 2010 bump in Containerization is interesting, because it did become more prevalent in the news with lost containers, container homes, wedged container ships in the Suez Canal, and COVID supply issues, and the other terms would be too obscure to use in public media.
Still, it does not make total sense, so I tried Containerization, Intermodal, and Multimodal for the same period and got this:
The word prevalence scale changes, but in this graph the Containerization (blue) prevalence and curve is the same. We have a similar bump for Intermodal as we saw in Intermodalism, and it outperforms Containerization, but here Multimodal really takes off. The Intermodal(ism) trend kinda makes sense. Once Intermodalism was firmly established, there was less reason to talk about it. It came, it worked, and now we talk about different things.
But what about the variation between Multimodalism and Multimodal? It turns out that Multimodal does not just refer to cargo. It also is a term that is defined as using different media such as text, audio and video within one project. It is basically the same as Multimedia, and is an internet term. Hence its sudden rise in the 1990’s. Somewhere, in that massive pile of the term Multimodal, it still occasionally refers to cargo instead of media but that meaning cannot be readily extracted from this Ngram.
But if I search Intermodal Transportation and Multimodal Transportation between 1960 and 2022, I get this graph with blue as Intermodal and red as Multimodal.
Intermodal and Multimodal track beautifully. They rise together in the first bump until 1972 when they drop a little (end of Vietnam War, depression, oil crisis) and then take off again in the late 80’s. They follow closely until about 2017 when Multimodal becomes a little more prevalent.
This graph makes a lot of sense, since Multimodal is a legal and contract term. Terms like that tend to stick around. Intermodal is a technical term, and only shows up when there is technical upheaval on the subject. Once Intermodal is firmly in place and working as expected, nobody talks about it anymore.
Wait! It is a Yogi-ism!
Nobody talks about Intermodal anymore, because everybody is using it!
And this brings me back to why I am dabbling in the history of Intermodalism. Intermodalism is everywhere, but the vast majority of the country’s population knows nothing about it and has no clue how to find a job in this stable, vibrant, viable and profitable industry.
We need to fix that.
