Chereads / Super English / Chapter 15 - 15. Words change by doing nothing

Chapter 15 - 15. Words change by doing nothing

That is, the word stays the same but the meaning changes.

Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or

something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once

implied cowardice—as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same

source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of

praise, while enthusiasm which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild

abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not.

Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl

in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture,

from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps,

on second thought, it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant

flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's

Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was

pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

This drift of meaning, technically called catachresis, is as widespread as it is

curious. Egregious once meant eminent or admirable. In the sixteenth century,

for no reason we know of, it began to take on the opposite sense of badness and

unworthiness (it is in this sense that Shakespeare employs it in Cymbeline) and

has retained that sense since. Now, however, it seems that people are

increasingly using it in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being

pointless and unconstructive.

According to Mario Pei, more than half of all words adopted into English from

Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones. A word that

shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first

recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later

Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over

the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful,

unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and

—by 1769—pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and

radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as

when Jane Austen wrote to a friend, "You scold me so much in a nice long letter

… which I have received from you."

Sometimes the changing connotations of a word can give a new and startling

sense to literary passages, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge where Thomas

Hardy has one of his characters gaze upon "the unattractive exterior of Farfrae's

erection" or in Bleak House where Dickens writes that "Sir Leicester leans back

in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates." [Taken from "Red Pants," by Robert M.

Sebastian, in the Winter 198 9 issue of Verbatim

This drift of meaning can happen with almost anything, even our clothes. There

is a curious but not often noted tendency for the names of articles of apparel to

drift around the body. This is particularly apparent to Americans in Britain (and

vice versa) who discover that the names for clothes have moved around at

different rates and now often signify quite separate things. An American goinginto a London department store with a shopping list consisting of vest, knickers,

suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something

dramatically different from what he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an

American undershirt. Our vest is their waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties.

To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore

dress. Our suspenders are their braces. They don't need suspenders to hold up

their pants because to them pants are underwear and clearly you don't need

suspenders for that, so instead they employ suspenders to hold up their

stockings. Is that clear?) Sometimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or

expression. Neck was once widely used to describe a parcel of land, but that

meaning has died out except in the expression "neck of the woods." Tell once

meant to count. This meaning died out but is preserved in the expression bank

teller and in the term for people who count votes. When this happens, the word

is called a fossil.

Occasionally, because the sense of the word has changed, fossil expressions are

misleading. Consider the oft-quoted statement "the exception proves the rule."

Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when

you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After

all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can't. The answer is that an earlier

meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with

that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible—the exception tests the

rule. A similar misapprehension is often attached to the statement "the proof of

the pudding is in the eating."

Sometimes words change by becoming more specific. Starve originally meant to

die before it took on the more particular sense of to die by hunger. A deer was

once any animal (it still is in the German tier) and meat was any food (the sense

is preserved in "meat and drink" and in the English food mincemeat, which

contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it). A forest was

any area of countryside set aside for hunting, whether or not it was covered with

trees. (In England to this day, the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire is largely

treeless, as are large stretches of the New Forest in Hampshire.) And worm was

a term for any crawling creature, including snakes.