the.com/fireman
the only person who runs toward what everyone else flees, calmly carrying axes
means A person whose job is to extinguish fires and rescue people from burning buildings and other emergencies.
from A transparent compound of "fire" and "man." "Fire" comes from Old English fȳr, with cousins across the Germanic family (German Feuer, Dutch vuur) and a deeper Indo-European root also behind Greek pŷr (as in "pyre"). The earliest "firemen" weren't always the heroes we picture: the word once also meant someone who tended a furnace or stoked the boiler of a steam engine or locomotive — literally a man who fed the fire — before it settled firmly on the one who fights it. The fire-fighting sense grew with organized brigades; in our gender-aware age, "firefighter" has largely taken over.
- origin
- name once meant the worker who stoked locomotive boilers
- sliding pole
- invented so horses below couldn't climb the stairs
- dalmatians
- bred to calm horses and guard the engine
- hidden danger
- more die from cardiac arrest than from flames
- gear weight
- full kit can exceed seventy pounds
fdny — new york city fire department with 216 firehouses and ~11,000 firefighters
london fire brigade — uk's largest fire service, established 1865, operates across greater london
tokyo fire department — japan's oldest fire department, founded 1872, serves tokyo's 14 million people