Because Symbols Are Arbitrary, Word Meanings Can Change Over Time.
Words alter meaning all the time — and over fourth dimension. Language historian Anne Curzan takes a closer wait at this phenomenon, and shares some words that used to mean something totally different.
Words change meaning over fourth dimension in ways that might surprise you. We sometimes notice words irresolute significant under our noses (e.g., unique coming to mean "very unusual" rather than "1 of a kind") — and it tin can be disconcerting. How in the globe are we all going to communicate effectively if we let words to shift in meaning like that?
The adept news: History tells us that we'll exist fine. Words have been changing meaning — sometimes radically — as long as there have been words and speakers to speak them. Here is just a small sampling of words you may non take realized didn't always mean what they mean today.
- Prissy: This word used to hateful "silly, foolish, elementary." Far from the compliment it is today!
- Dizzy: Meanwhile,silly went in the opposite management: in its earliest uses, information technology referred to things worthy or blessed; from there it came to refer to the weak and vulnerable, and more recently to those who are foolish.
- Awful: Awful things used to be "worthy of awe" for a diversity of reasons, which is how nosotros go expressions like "the awful majesty of God."
- Fizzle: The verb fizzle one time referred to the act of producing tranquility flatulence (recall "SBD"); American college slang flipped the discussion'due south meaning to refer to failing at things.
- Wench: A shortened course of the Sometime English word wenchel (which referred to children of either sex), the give-and-take wench used to mean "female kid" before it came to be used to refer to female servants — and more than pejoratively to wanton women.
- Fathom: It can exist hard to fathom how this verb moved from significant "to encircle with one'south arms" to meaning "to understand after much thought." Here's the scoop: 1's outstretched artillery can be used as a measurement (a fathom), and once yous take fathoms, y'all tin can use a fathom line to measure the depth of h2o. Remember metaphorically and fathoming becomes most getting to the lesser of things.
- Clue: Centuries ago, a clue (or clew) was a ball of yarn. Think well-nigh threading your manner through a maze and you'll run across how we got from yarn to primal bits of evidence that assist us solve things.
- Myriad: If you had a myriad of things 600 years agone, information technology meant that you specifically had 10,000 of them — not just a lot.
- Naughty: Long agone, if y'all were naughty, you lot had cypher or cypher. Then information technology came to mean evil or immoral, and now you lot are merely badly behaved.
- Eerie: Before the word eerie described things that inspire fear, information technology used to describe people feeling fear — equally in one could feel faint and eerie.
- Spinster: As information technology sounds, spinsters used to exist women who spun. Information technology referred to a legal occupation before it came to mean "unmarried woman" — and often non in the most positive ways, as opposed to a bachelor …
- Bachelor: A bachelor was a young knight earlier the word came to refer to someone who had achieved the lowest rank at a academy — and it lives on in that significant in today's B.A. and B.S degrees. It's been used for unmarried men since Chaucer'southward day.
- Flirt: Some 500 years agone, flirting was flicking something abroad or flicking open a fan or otherwise making a brisk or jerky motility. Now information technology involves playing with people's emotions (sometimes it may feel like your heart is getting jerked around in the process).
- Guy: This word is an eponym. It comes from the proper name of Guy Fawkes, who was part of a failed try to blow up Parliament in 1605. Folks used to burn his effigy, a "Guy Fawkes" or a "guy," and from at that place information technology came to refer to a frightful figure. In the U.Southward., it has come to refer to men in general.
- Hussy: Believe it or not, hussy comes from the word housewife (with several sound changes, clearly) and used to refer to the mistress of a household, not the disreputable woman it refers to today.
- Egregious: It used to be possible for it to exist a practiced affair to be egregious: it meant you were distinguished or eminent. Only in the stop, the negative meaning of the word won out, and at present information technology ways that someone or something is conspicuously bad — not conspicuously good.
- Quell: Quelling something or someone used to mean killing it, not merely subduing it.
- Divest: 300 years ago, divesting could involve undressing as well as depriving others of their rights or possessions. It has only recently come to refer to selling off investments.
- Senile: Senile used to refer simply to anything related to old age, so you could have senile maturity. Now information technology refers specifically to those suffering from senile dementia.
- Meat: Have you ever wondered about the expression "meat and drink"? Information technology comes from an older meaning of the discussion meat that refers to food in general — solid food of a variety of kinds (not just animal flesh), as opposed to drinkable.
We're human being. Nosotros love to play with words in creative means. And in the process, we alter the language. In hindsight, we oft think the changes words undergo are fascinating. May we transfer some of that fascination and wonder — some of the awe that used to make the words awful and awesome synonymous — to the changes nosotros're witnessing today.
Sentry Anne Curzan'southward TED Talk to notice out what makes a word "real".
Source: https://ideas.ted.com/20-words-that-once-meant-something-very-different/
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