So let’s talk about meat. You might think you’ve got a pretty good handle on what
“meat” means. Right? It’s the fleshy bits of animals, that you eat. Good old
reliable meat. Except, maybe not so reliable, because it hasn’t always meant that! There used
to be a time where “meat” simply was our word for food. And that’s just one of the
many words existing today that's shifted around in meaning through history. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
Language is a thing that’s just changing all the time. Like we saw in our video on
the History of English, change can affect any part of language! We can change the sounds
we have, like pronouncing the word knight the way we do now instead of the way we did
500 years ago, like [kniçt]. We can change the way that our sentences get put together, like
how many dialects of English have lost the double negation that Old English had.
Back a thousand years in English, something like “Shelley didn’t never back down from
a challenge” was okay everywhere. Now that construction only exists in a limited number
of dialects. But one of the most noticeable ways that change can hit a language is right in the vocabulary.
New words are invented or borrowed from other languages, and old words fall out of use.
Languages can do more than that, though! Even when you have a word already, it’s not
a static object. A lot of the time, words get shifted around to mean new things. You
only need to look around you to come up with a lot of examples. Your mouse isn’t a rodent.
Your shirt is probably not a tunic. And your chair is not a throne. Unless it is. Not judging.
This is all neat, but it seems kind of random, right? As it happens, there are actually
some big trends to how meanings can change over time. You do get a bit of random wiggle in the meaning,
but a lot of the kinds of changes that we see are systematic. As a category, we call these
different processes semantic shift. For example, one really common kind of change is Narrowing.
That's when a word’s meaning goes from something general to something more specific. Like meat!
Meat’s a lot more specific now than it used to be. Some other really neat examples exist
in this category, too. Like, girl used to refer to any young child, regardless
of their gender. It was only in the 1500s that it became specifically used just for, well, girls.
Or, “deer” was just a general term for animals, up until Shakespeare’s time.
Of course, semantic shift happens in all languages, not just in English. For example, if we look at Spanish,
we can find the word for “pray”, “rezar”. That used to just mean to say something aloud, like
the English “recite”. This got narrowed in meaning to just apply to praying. The opposite
of Narrowing is Broadening, which also happens a lot. This is when a word's meaning becomes more general.
So, like, a holiday used to literally mean a holy day, like a religious event of some
sort. Now it’s used for any kind of day off, or even for a trip or vacation. If you
say that you’re going on holiday to Wales to visit your friend Tim, no one's going to think you’re
going on a religious pilgrimage. Or, if you’ve studied Japanese, you might know that the
word “sake” is used both for the rice wine we call sake in English, and also for alcohol
in general.
This is because a really long time ago, Japan only had one kind of alcoholic drink, which
they fermented from rice and called sake. But later, when beer and wine and whiskey
and all the rest made their way to Japan? They needed a label for all of that, and used “sake”
as an extension. So that’s another example of Broadening.
Additionally, a word can pick up more meanings by being used as a metaphor. That’s where
you get something like “grasp”, a verb that originally just meant to physically hold on
to something. But look at something like “Desmond finally grasped the essentials of reading
and writing”. No one is going to think that sentence means that he picked up a book and a pen. Through
metaphorical usage, “grasp” has come to also mean “understand”.
Another type of semantic change is when a word gets a meaning that's more positive
than it was originally. “Nice” is a good example. If you tell me that Eustace
is “nice”, you probably mean that The Boy is agreeable and pleasant. But dial
it back a few centuries, and you'd be telling me that he’s foolish, which might
not actually be wrong, but it's probably not what you meant.
“Nice” passed through all kinds of meanings to get to the one we have today, but overall,
the direction was from negative to positive. This linguistic process is called Amelioration,
and as you might imagine, it also happens in other languages too. In German today, “Pumpernickel”
is a kind of coarse whole-grain brown bread. It’s sold around the world, so you might
have heard of it.
But before it was a sandwich favourite, it used to refer to an uncouth and unrefined
person: “Pumper” was a word for fart, and “Nickel” short for Nicholas, so “Farting
Nick”. The bread, which was once considered fairly unrefined itself, got slapped with
this term, because only a boorish fellow would like it. The shift only became full amelioration
when those brown loaves gained in popularity.
Okay, but, the opposite also happens! Sometimes a perfectly nice or neutral word takes on
a more negative meaning. So, let’s say your friend Tim invents a time-traveling teapot. If you
want to tell him how silly that is, make sure you haven’t already traveled back to the Middle
Ages first, because back then “silly” meant “blessed” and “prosperous”, and you
wouldn't want Tim to get the wrong idea.
When a word’s meaning gets more negative over time, that’s called Pejoration. We
get another toxic from French, where the word “poison” used to mean “potion.”
It used to be something good for you! And then it referred to any deadly beverage, and
then to an ingredient you slip into something to make it a little more lethal. And we got
our word “poison” from there!
Okay, so, but what if your meaning isn’t becoming more or less good, or more or
less general? What if it’s just changing? Well, another pretty common pattern is when a word with
a really intense meaning becomes less extreme over time because of Weakening. Now, this happens all the time!
Just think about all the words that you have to say how good something is.
You can tell people that your favourite flavour of jam is awesome, amazing, fantastic, incredible,
fabulous, stupendous, spectacular! Hyperbole like that is really common across languages.
But one thing it does is cause the weakening of the meaning of the original words. After all,
does jam really fill you with a sense of awe? Or does it seem like something that's out of a fantasy or
a fable? Probably not, unless you really really like jam.
And one of our favourite words, LITERALLY, has undergone weakening from meaning, well,
“LITERALLY” to meaning more like “figuratively”. Language! It’s awesome. So, does Weakening
get its opposite too? I mean, we have broadening and narrowing, and we have amelioration
and pejoration, so, is Strengthening a thing? Well… not really.
You’ve probably used hyperbole a lot to exaggerate how much you like something. But did
you ever really do the opposite? How often do you talk about a band that you love by
saying they're “tolerable” or “okay”? Semantic change doesn’t just occur by itself.
People fuel it by the ways that they have of talking. So, Strengthening doesn’t really exist.
Finally, you sometimes end up with words just losing one meaning and taking on another, which
tends to be related. This is usually just called Shift. So, “immoral” used to just
mean that something wasn’t customary. Or that didn’t correspond to that community's
regular way of doing things - so, outside of its mores. The word took on its sense of
“unethical” only through our unfortunate tendency to equate “different” with “bad”.
Language doesn’t have any rules about how many times a word can change meanings, either.
Semantic shift can happen over and over again to the same word. Like, take “hearse”! So a hearse
now is the kind of car that coffins get carted around in, like, to funerals. But originally, a
hearse was a kind of farming tool, with a triangular shape. Later, it became a candle-holder
used in churches, with the same triangular shape.
Then the word was used for a candle-holder placed over coffins, specifically, and then
just the coffin itself. Finally, it came to mean the vehicle used in coffin transport. So language
changes all the time, as people keep using it generation after generation. And it’s
not just the grammar that evolves - it’s the regular meat of the language, the
words, that shift, too.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you followed the shifts
in my meaning, you learned words can change their senses over time; that this happens
because of how people use language; and that meanings can get narrower or broader, better
or worse, weaker, or just plain different.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our production assistants are Georges Coulombe and Stephan
Hurtubise, our music and sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we have some extra materials on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter
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And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Tuonane tena!