words keep changing--6/4/25

04 Jun 2025

words keep changing--6/4/25

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Today's selection-- from The Language Puzzle by Steven Mithen. Renowned archaeologist explains how shifts in language reflect broader cultural, social, and psychological dynamics.

“The meanings of words are constantly changing and multiplying— a process termed by linguists as semantic change. We have a hint of this from our own lifetimes: is a wicked mouse an evil rodent or an excellent hand-held input device for a computer? The word table once only referred to a piece of furniture with a flat top, but has not only become a verb, but one with two opposing meanings. In the UK, 'to table' means the process of presenting a proposal, while in the US, 'to table' means postponing the consideration of a proposal. We can, however, only appreciate the scale and significance of word change when comparing historical sequences of written texts of the same language.

“English is an ideal case study because we can compare word meanings in texts written in Old English between the seventh and eleventh centuries, such as Beowulf, with those of the seventeenth century by considering Shakespeare's plays, and then with their present-day usage. Even better, we can follow the same text, and hence words in their written context, through time by using different versions of Bible passages. These can be tracked from the original Latin to Ælfric of Eynsham's Old English translations of the tenth century, and John Wycliffe's Middle English translation of the Bible of 1382 to those within the Early Modern English King James Bible of 16n and finally to their modern-day versions. We might be more ambitious, beginning with words before their adoption into Old English, such as in Latin and even the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) of 4500 BC (6,500 years ago).

“While historical texts are a critical resource for exploring semantic change, they lack the contextual evidence that is essential for inferring the nuances of meaning from the spoken word: the prosody, accompanying gestures, age, gender and status of the speaker, their surroundings, props and social relationships with whoever is listening. As we will see, these so-called pragmatics of language partly drive the process of semantic change. Moreover, written language that lacks any pragmatics is inherently conservative - it is slower to change and will lag behind the way people talk to each other.

“Three examples of how the meaning of words have changed

“The Old English word sœlig meant 'blessed'. By c.1200 its meaning had changed to 'innocent'; by c.1300, it had further changed to 'harmless' and then 'weak'; by the 1570s it had come to mean 'feeble in mind and lacking in reason', which is close to the meaning of scelig's modern spelling: silly.

“Nescius in Latin means 'ignorant'. This word was carried into English via French in the early fourteenth century as the word nice, after which a new meaning emerged: 'a person or clothing that is luxurious'. Nice then began to mean 'a person who is finely dressed' or 'something that is precise or fussy'. By the late 1500s nice was used to describe something that was 'refined', from which a catch-all word for something which is 'pleasant' or 'agreeable' emerged—the meaning of our present-day word, nice.

“A more recent example is the word woke. This emerged within American Black slang in the 1930s as in the phrase 'best stay woke', meaning to stay alert to racial prejudice, especially from the police. It was first defined in print in 1962, with a subtle change in meaning to someone who was 'well informed and up to date'. But stay woke continued as a warning against racial discrimination and became pervasive in the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killing of teenager Michael Brown in St. Louis on 9 August 2014. With the hashtag #staywoke, the word spread via the internet where its meaning began to change. Woke came to signify 'a progressive outlook on a host of issues as well as on race', becoming associated with people of varied races on social media rather than BLM activists. Its meaning continued to change, largely under the influence of the conservative right wing in the United States who found that targeting 'woke' as a byword for 'smug liberal entitlement', and then promoting the notion that it stood for an intolerant and moralising ideology, was an effective way to foment political division and garner support. The word is now used differently by different people, with all meanings still in play.

“Further examples of semantic change can easily be found within an etymological dictionary, with some of the most surprising described in John McWhorter's excellent 2016 book Words on the Move. Virtually any word in any language appears to have a history of semantic change. The most frequently used words have the greatest turnover in meanings. There are some exceptions: brother is a frequently used word but appears not to have changed its meaning since its use in Proto-Indo-European 6,500 years ago. In their attempt to find order in what appears to be a suite of meandering if not random changes in semantics, linguists have identified three key axes of change and a pile of so-called 'dead metaphors'.

“Axes of semantic change and dead metaphors

“The first axis is that words can become either narrower or broader in their meaning. The Old English words mete, deor, steorfan and gyrle had broad meanings of food, animal, die and

young person respectively. Their modern-day versions have much narrower meanings: meat, deer, starve and girl. Conversely, the present-day word holiday has a broader meaning than when used in Old English as haligdœg, which meant 'Holy day'. Some words have mirrored each other; as one narrowed, the other broadened: in Old English the generic word for dog was hund, while a dogge was a particularly large and fierce type of hund; today the hound is a type of dog.

“A second axis of change is that the meaning of a word can become either more positive or more negative, referred to as amelioration and pejoration. Nice is an example of the former, changing from meaning ignorant to something that is pleasant. Pejoration is more common, illustrated by silly deriving from blessed, and the transformation of woke from a concern with injustice to a negative term for those who are intolerant of right-wing values. Villains are scoundrels or criminals, but the word derives from that for a fully respectable medieval serf; similarly, being cunning has overtones of trickery and deceitfulness, whereas the fourteenth-century meaning of conning was being learned, knowledgeable and skillful.

“A third axis of change concerns the weakening or strengthening of meaning, with the former being more frequent. Literally was once used to indicate that one should interpret any following words according to their exact meaning, but we now use the word as a means of emphasis. The word awesome was once restricted to having emotions of great reverence or dread, but now means merely impressive.

“As we noted, frequently used words are most prone to change. Words of greeting and farewell tend to become formulaic, both weakening and broadening their original meaning. We casually say goodbye without appreciating that this had once been God be with you. This is the same in all languages. It has been said that 'Hello, Good morning, How are you?, Bonjour, Ciao, Szervusz, Zdravstvujte, Shalom, Goodbye, So long, Adieu, 10-4, Arrivederci, Do svidaniya, Güle güle and their kind, are a 'graveyard of forgotten or neglected meanings'.

“Dead metaphors are words that were originally used to elaborate on the meaning of another word or phrase but lost their metaphorical use to become an ordinary word. While the word field maintains a similar meaning to its Old English counterpart of feld (a large tract of open country), we now use it to refer to a field of study or a field of vision without appreciating any metaphorical implications from the physical landscape. Similarly, we use the word broadcaster about a radio or TV presenter without needing to appreciate that this is ultimately a metaphorical use of the eighteenth-century word for scattering seed.

“Changes in word meaning can also arise from metonymy — by simply being associated with the meaning of another word. A crown is a physical object worn by the monarch, but the Crown now means the monarchy and its associated processes of governance, and more recently a renowned Netflix series. Similarly, the White House is a building in Washington but these words can also mean the US president and his administration.

“Word conversion

“The changes of meaning so far considered have referred to words remaining within the same category, primarily nouns remaining as nouns. Another dimension of change is known as word conversion by which a word can take on all or some properties of another class of word, as we saw with table. The most common is when nouns become verbs, but adjectives can also become verbs, while verbs can become nouns, and nouns can become adjectives.

Verbification — a noun becoming a verb — is the most common, with the resulting verb being described by linguists as a denominal verb or a gerund. This is likely to have occurred throughout the history of every language and is a process that English speakers are readily familiar with, even if a new verb has an infrequent use and soon disappears. Many remain as steadfast elements of the language. To rain, to snow, to pocket, to father, to parrot, to mirror and to captain are just a few examples we use frequently without appreciating their source; likewise, when we are buttering our bread, lacing our shoes and elbowing our way out of a crowd.

“One of the striking features of denominal verbs is that they can be so easily invented and understood by others. This also applies to the use of proper nouns as verbs. If I said to my wife that 'my friend Houdinied his way out of the mess he was in' she would understand, knowing that Harry Houdini was a famous escapologist of the early twentieth century. My grandson, however, never having heard of Houdini, would be perplexed. Similarly, if in the summer of 2022 I said to someone that I had been totally Borised they would readily understand this meant I had been lied to (in a jovial manner). Within a few years, however, someone might be as puzzled as my grandson because the reputation of Boris Johnson, the former British prime minister, may have faded away. As these examples illustrate, turning nouns into verbs in English is easy, and often accomplished simply by adding an -ed suffix.

“Verbs can also become nouns: we can refer to someone as a bore or a cheat. As with nouns, verbs can be converted by adding a suffix, often an -ance, -ment or -tion, as in appearance from to appear, an appointment from to appoint, and information from to inform. When verbs with two syllables are converted to a noun, the first syllable becomes emphasised. For instance, when the word suspect is used as a verb, emphasis is placed on the -pect; we say sus-PECT. When used as a noun, however, we say SUS-pect. This sound change was noted by the linguist John Mc Whorter who calls it a backshift. As he explains, someone who re-BELS is a REB-el, whose crimes you can re-CORD and thereby leave them on REC-ord for all to see.

“Nouns can be easily changed to adjectives by adding a -y suffix, as in icy from ice and bloody from blood. Sometimes it is not clear which came first: is the noun spy derived from the verb to spy or the converse? Moreover, the process can operate in reverse. That the nouns grot and greed are derived from the adjectives grotty and greedy assumes that a suffix had once been applied to the noun; in fact, these adjectives arose by a different process.”