Classical Greek, unlike any
modern western language, was spoken with the pitch of words and phrases varying
according to a set pattern. It's been
suggested that listening to, say, Socrates talk in the streets of Athens would
have sounded rather like an opera singer performing recitative. But, in the 2nd century, Greek speakers were
ignoring this in favour of a stress accent of the kind we use in English.
Aristophanes's solution was
to invent a series of accents — such as è, é and ê — to use in written Greek
and indicate how the pitch should go.
However, the unruly youngsters continued to ignore him, and Greek gradually
developed into the language spoken by millions today. The accents weren't even much help to classicists, since
Aristophanes didn't leave a clear enough explanation of how exactly the accents
should be used, and there isn't a complete consensus about how the language
should sound, although the same accents have been used for a variety of
purposes in other languages.
The point about this story
is that languages change, regardless of the horror of pedants, and often in
unexpected ways. Of course they
do. If not, I'd be writing this blog in
Anglo-Saxon. Or perhaps in
Proto-Germanic; or in Proto-Indo-European; or in the unknown language that
derived from; or even in the monosyllabic calls some early hominid species used
to coordinate their hunts. Come to
that, what was wrong with when we just used to get on with the hunting, without
all this new-fangled language nonsense?
Nevertheless, as writers,
we're not utterly helpless in the face of language change. Of course, we can't all be Shakespeare or
the translators of the King James Bible, who had a profound effect on how
English developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, but to some extent we can try
to encourage changes that feel useful and graceful over those that don't, and
maintain usages that, while not needed on a regular basis, are valuable to keep
for when they are needed.
I thought I'd have a look at
some of the words whose meanings have changed over the centuries, for good or
ill, and some of the reasons why this would happen. Sometimes, of course, it's for purely practical reasons. Most computing terms, for instance, are new,
specialist meaning for existing words - booting, menu, icon and the like.
Some words just drift,
though. The word nice originally
meant precise, and it's still occasionally used in that sense — a nice distinction,
for instance. Gradually, though, it
came to mean pleasant, and more recently can even be used to mean the opposite
in a "damning through faint praise" way. To describe something as very nice can be the kiss of
death.
Sometimes, changes of meaning
can create confusion. We all know the
expression the exception that proves the rule, which appears to be an
absurd statement — an exception challenges a rule, it doesn't validate it. In fact, that's precisely what it means,
since prove originally meant to test, as in a military proving
ground. We have such faith in sayings,
though, that many people assume it must be true in its modern sense.
A euphemistic meaning might
take a word over for a while.
Shakespeare's Falstaff refers somewhere to how accommodate used
to be an excellent word until it fell into bad company, a reference to a
temporary slang meaning at the time of having sex. Even when it isn't bad company a word falls into, slang meanings
can overwhelm the normal meaning. A
century ago, or less, a single man addicted to wine, women and song would be
described as a gay bachelor.
Nowadays, that would mean something completely different.
So should we just go with
any change that's in the air? And if
not, what makes one change good and another bad? That's partly a matter of taste, but I'd like to give my view by
contrasting two words.
The original meaning of mutual
is reciprocal, but it's gradually acquired the new meaning of shared, as in the
Dickens novel Our Mutual Friend.
In the "real" sense, mutual friend is a tautology — it
means I'm your friend and your my friend — but the alternative has become
established now.
My biggest hate in
"wrong" meanings, on the other hand, is disinterested. It does not mean indifferent, it
means impartial or neutral. The Concise
Oxford Dictionary does list the meaning uninterested, but describes it
as "disputed" - dictionaryese for a meaning that's used but the
dictionary isn't convinced by — and represents pure failure to learn what the
word really means.
There are two particular
differences between these cases. One is
that the change in mutual is an understandable mutation — shared isn't
the same as reciprocal, but there's a connection between them — whereas the
change in disinterested is purely an error. The other is that the difference between the two meanings of mutual
is fairly obvious, and there's unlikely to be an misunderstanding. The spread of the misunderstanding about disinterested,
on the other hand, makes it difficult to use the word correctly. If I were to announce I was going to be a
disinterested judge of a contest, you could pretty much guarantee someone would
tell me I ought to be interested. So
I'd have to hit the person over the head and introduce them to a dictionary.
The meaning of any word, of
course, is what's understood by it, and maybe eventually the meaning of disinterested
will change, but I'd regret that.
Although both meanings have synonyms, it seems to me that the correct
meaning is a more useful one. I'll
continue using it that way — and any editor who suggests otherwise will receive
a lecture.
This is just a tiny sample
of how the English language has changed, and the only thing we can know for
sure about its future course is that it'll continue to change in ways no-one
will guess until it happens. In the
unlikely event of this piece still existing in a couple of hundred years, I
wonder how much amusement it'll cause because the meanings of some of the words
are different. I hope you have a good
laugh.
_-_n._11141_-_Museo_di_Napoli_-_Strumenti_di_chirurgia.jpg)
