Language
Words Evolve Faster Than Genes
Illuminating the changes that the meanings of the words undergo over a period of time
I have been reading Hamlet.
*Looks down snobbishly*
And to double the pleasure, I am also watching its portrayal in the National Theatre, London, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
Trust me, reading Shakespeare is a profound experience. The sheer weight of the words that come out of the paper, dawns upon you an epiphany so wild and so surreal that your spirits change for the good.
While indulging in the hedonistic pleasure of the reader, kissing the rim of my cup of coffee every now and then, I made an observation.
Act 1, Scene 2
CLAUDIUS: What wouldst thou have, Laertes?
LAERTES: My dread lord,
Your leave and favour to return to France,
‘Dread’, here, in “My dread lord” means ‘deeply revered’.
Shakespearean English dates back to the 16th century. Since then, the word has evolved to mean ‘fear’.
It is not difficult to imagine how the series of events would have unfolded. Respect and fear were separated by a thin boundary when it came to the social stature befitting a King. The formidable personality and power that a ruler possesses is often mistaken for the ‘respect’ that he evokes. Certainly, the two feelings aren’t mutually exclusive and could co-exist together but somewhere down the line, the meaning shifted quite subtly; and gradually, the word ‘dread’ lost its original reference.
I say this with confidence backed by many such examples wherein the words have lost their originally intended meaning.
Do you remember the old horror movie cliche where a boy and a girl are stranded amidst a ghostly setting? Both of them hear a spooky noise and the boy tells the girl, “You wait here. I will go check it and come back soon”.
While you go cursing that boy for stepping on the stupid side of bravery, your fear turns into reality and the boy never comes back. Or he does, without a head.
The ‘soon’ turned into a lie cast in the furnace of circumstance. But what if I tell you that the meaning of ‘soon’ was even stronger than what it implies now?
Yes, its original meaning was ‘now’ in the Anglo-Saxon times.
After thousands of years of people remarking “I’ll do it soon”, the word has evolved to mean what it does today.
This just shows how lazy and procrastinating humans are that one generation started picking up the meaning wrongly. Seeing their parents saying ‘soon’ and doing it after a while must have imprinted in their minds that it really meant ‘after a while’.
Even the word ‘now’ has started to lose its strength. The urgency has to be emphasized by prefixing a ‘right’ in front of it. An even angrier version of your mom would say “Do the dishes right now!!” than just “Do the dishes now”.
In the Shakespearean tragedy King Lear, when the Duke of Gloucester gets his eyes gouged out by Regan, he calls her a ‘naughty lady’.
Pretty confusing if you ask anyone not aware of the Shakespearean vocabulary. This just lends the scene a sexual undertone of masochism.
The truth is, naughty carried a much greater seriousness than what it does now. It was a powerfully negative remark meaning ‘no-human’. It comes from the word rood nought meaning nothing. It’s just that the word has been overused so many times by parents that it has lost its power and has come down to mean simply mischievous.
Two millennia back, Romans used the word ‘probabilis’ to mean ‘something that could be proved by experiment’.
But as you may have guessed, it got overused. The case with us humans is that we think we are veritably certain of things when in fact we are not.
Roman lawyers would often claim that their case was probabilis when it was not.
Roman astrologers would claim that their predictions were probabilis when they were not.
Every Roman citizen would claim that it was probabilis that the Sun revolved around the Earth when it was not.
Hence, by the time the word ‘probably’ surfaced in English (English is derived from Latin and German), in 1387, it already meant ‘likely’.
Nevertheless, the Romans were brilliant people. They would formulate a theory and then proceed to test it.
Sometimes, they would test a theory, and it would be found to work. Other times, the theory would be declared incorrect.
The word root for ‘test’ was ‘probare’. That’s the same root the word ‘prove’ is derived from. That’s why we have the saying, “Exception proves the rule.” Exception cannot ‘prove’ the rule in its contemporary sense. It ‘tests’ the rule. And that’s why we say, “Proof of a pudding is in the eating” which actually means that the test of a good dessert is in the eating. That’s the old sense of the word ‘prove’.
However, somewhere down the line, the meaning of ‘to prove’ changed from ‘to test’ to ‘to show beyond doubt to be true’.
Now, I won’t exploit your time into giving you a mile-long list of such examples but before we call it off, here’s the last one for my Indian friends.
Sesame originated in India. Its Sanskrit word root was ‘tila’.
Sesame seed oil has been commonly used for cooking purposes since the time of the Indus Valley Civilization. It was called ‘taila’.
Over a period of time, the word ‘taila’ came to mean any oil derived from any source.
Interesting enough? I shall bring you more such trivia soon (in the newer sense of the word).
TheUnknownDoktor
Sources:
- ‘The Etymologicon’ by Mark Forsyth.
- ‘The Story of Our Food’ by K T Achaya.
