As Sile left to go to school this morning she said she would be late, “Unless I galvanize myself “.
Now the sad thing about being married to a word pedant/dictionary eater is that the pedantry, like the molecules in the third policeman’s saddle, begin to rub off on you after a while.
She had no sooner said it than she began to conjecture herself whether that made her like a galvanized bucket.

Sile in a Hurry.

It was like a red flag to a bull to a true word pedant and she wasn’t gone out the door before I had started Googling and indeed OEDing (Oxford English Dictionary to the unitiated) the whole Galvaized spectrum.

Now where as I knew that Galvanization was some sort of treatment for the preservation of iron I had always imagined that the use of the same word to indicate hurry was some sort of local Cork effort, possibly connected with the Galvin family.
I was wrong.

The man behind all of the Galvanizations is one Luigi Galvani (1738 to 1798)

Luigi Galvani

Apparently he was a pioneer of producing electricity by chemical means.
He then went on to apply, by experimenting with (one hopes) dead frogs

Luigi at play

Thus the sense of hurrying oneself’
or as the OED would have it;
“To stimulate a muscle or nerve by Galvanic current”

But to get back to the bucket.

Apparently this chemically produced electricity had a second application viz:

“To coat with metal by means of electrolysis, especially coat iron with zinc as a means of protection against rust”

So there you have it.
There is a relationship between the bucket and the hurry after all.
Bravo Luigi!