\"Cannibalize\" Has Three Meanings. Raymond Chandler Needed All of Them.
Some words pull double duty. Some pull triple. "Cannibalize" is one of the rare ones that evolved three distinct meanings over 300 years, and then a single novelist came along and made all three feel inevitable at once.
A Word With a Strange History
Here's a word fact worth knowing: the OED dates "cannibalize" to 1655. Back then it meant to overwhelm or destroy something completely. One thing consuming another.
Then 1920 arrives and the business world borrows it. Suddenly a new product can "cannibalize" sales from an older one. Same company, one thing eating another.
Then World War II happens and the word sprouts a third meaning: stripping one machine for parts to repair another. The first recorded use of this sense appeared in Stars and Stripes, London edition, November 26, 1942. Mechanics couldn't get new parts, so they took what they needed from the broken stuff and built something that worked.
Three meanings. One word. And then there's Raymond Chandler.
The Stories Nobody Knew Existed
Chandler published 23 short stories during his lifetime. Most readers know about 15 of them. Eight spent roughly 25 years buried in pulp magazines, uncollected, largely forgotten. Chandler died in 1959 without ever pulling them together.
It wasn't until 1964 that Philip Durham, a professor of American literature at UC, introduced what became Killer in the Rain and brought those eight stories into the light.
Why had Chandler excluded them from his lifetime collections? Because he'd already used them. He cannibalized eight early stories for his novels, stripping them for parts. If you know your Stars and Stripes sense of the word, this makes complete mechanical sense.
What "Stripped for Parts" Actually Looks Like
Take The Big Sleep. It has 21 characters. Seven came from a story called "The Curtain." Six came from "Killer in the Rain." Four were composites. Four were genuinely new.
That's not a rough draft getting revised. That's two short stories being disassembled and rebuilt into something larger.
One greenhouse scene in "The Curtain" runs about 1,100 words. Chandler expanded it for The Big Sleep. The new version is approximately 2,500 words. Same scene, same beats, more than doubled in length and texture. He didn't just transplant it. He grew it.
He did the same thing assembling Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake. Both built from earlier short story material. By the time Marlowe had a name, Chandler had already run four other detective characters through this parts-stripping process: a nameless first-person narrator, then Carmady, then John Dalmas, then John Evans. Marlowe was the machine that finally ran.
What This Tells You About Words
Here's the thing word lovers actually care about: the same act can need three words to describe itself, or one word can stretch to cover the whole thing.
Chandler's process was simultaneously: overwhelm (the original 1655 sense, in the sense that the novels consumed the stories completely), competitive displacement (the 1920 sense, his novels replacing the stories in his own bibliography), and parts-stripping (the 1942 WWII sense, the most literal fit).
"Cannibalize" does all three jobs. That's remarkable efficiency for a single word.
Philip Durham found the buried stories. Chandler completed seven novels and left an eighth to be finished after his death. The eight stolen-from stories are why that math is so interesting. Eight cannibalized. Eight novels. One word that knows exactly what happened.
Source: Stancarey