fissile

I care not one whit about Mel Gibson's latest trouble. But I did find this commentary by Rabbi Daniel Lapin very interesting: "Mel Gibson and Me"

(Lapin also wrote the LRC article "Why Mel Owes One to the Jews" about various Jewish organizations targetting The Passion of the Christ.)

But this isn't a post about Mel Gibson, nor is it about Rabbi Lapin.

It's about the word 'fissile' which I encountered for the first time tonight in an article from The Guardian: "Why are we crucifying Mel Gibson?":

Gibson is under the influence of an even more fissile brew. He has shown what happens when you mix celebrity and fundamentalism, two of the most potent hallucinogens of the modern world. For that revelation, at least, he should be praised.

Fissile? A fissile brew?

I use Mac OS X's built-in dictionary for definitions on this blog because I think it looks purty, but I tend to turn first to the 1913 Webster's because I have faster tools for searching it and it's easier to save the definitions into a vocabulary folder:

Fissile \Fis"sile\, a. [L. fissilis, fr. fissus, p. p. of
findere to split. See {Fissure}.]
1. Capable of being split, cleft, or divided in the direction
of the grain, like wood, or along natural planes of
cleavage, like crystals.
[1913 Webster]

A brew capable of being split along natural planes? Still didn't make any sense.

Ah, but this is one of those words that shows the weakness of a hundred-year-old dictionary, because 'fissile' took on a very different meaning after the discovery/invention of nuclear fission: