All about words!
From your residence to your workplace, from simple tasks such as ordering a meal to crucial laws and treaties that keep our world in order, we are reliant on words. Words, in any language, are the building blocks of all communications. They form the basis of a majority of human experiences, be it conveying one’s thoughts and feelings or any materialistic exchanges. These words, with all the power that they hold, often go undiscussed or overlooked. Since words play such an important role in our lives, making our life easy or difficult depending on which words we choose on a given occasion, exploring their nature and origin should provide an interesting adventure.
To understand words, it is vital to understand where words actually come from. Words originate when there is a need of expressing something but we don’t have an existing word for it. This is called having a vocabulary gap. These gaps can be filled with new words. One way to derive new words is to borrow them from different places where it is already in use. Words such as altar and jury were borrowed from ancient Rome where they were first conceptualized and used. The English word clone came from the Greek word klon, meaning a twig, to describe creating a new plant from a piece of the old. Another way words can be formed is by joining two existing words. Examples of such words are airport, starfish, spork (spoon and fork), and brunch (breakfast and lunch).
So how do these words enter our vocabulary? Words are spread by common usage among people. When they can sufficiently convey the users’ needs they become a part of our vernacular. Words can have a life of their own. They are born, change, and reproduced by morphing into new words and spreading into other languages. Words can get old and die too. Some are reborn. Take for example the word villain, which originally meant a peasant farmer. In olden times a peasant was regarded to be someone with a boorish nature by the aristocrats. The word gradually changed over time and caught on with its meaning in current usage i.e. a bad person.
Languages are continuously evolving by borrowing and lending words. Words like pizza, latte, and buffalo (Italian), sushi, manga and haiku (Japanese), and schadenfreude and delicatessen (German) have been adapted in English. In return, English has given other languages words such as software. The British, on the other hand, didn’t just take back tea from their period of colonization in India but they also took with them words like Cashmere, pajamas, bangles, shampoo, and jungle which originated in India.
Let’s look at the word nice to understand how words change over time. Nice, it turns out, began as a negative term derived from the Latin nescius, meaning unaware or ignorant. This sense of “ignorant” was carried over into English when the word was first borrowed (via French) in the early 1300s. And for almost a century, nice was used to characterize an as stupid, ignorant, or foolish person. With each century, the word started to change. It went from meaning conduct to a person who was finely dressed. By the late 1500s, nice was further softening, describing something as refined or cultured.
Another interesting word is the word meme. It was first coined in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his work The Selfish Gene. The word was taken from the Greek Word Mimesis, meaning to imitate. Dawkins used the word to describe how ideas and thoughts are spread among people like genes propagate through a culture. In the 21st century, this phenomenon could be observed in how jokes and images were popularized at lightning speed. Eventually, memes came to refer to a certain kind of image. It is interesting to note here that the word meme is a meme itself. Ok?
Wait a minute. Ok? Why do we say ok? It all actually started as a joke. Young Americas in the 1830s had a fad wherein they would humorously use abbreviations for small phrases. Ok comes from Oll Korrect simply meaning that everything was in place. On March 23rd, 1839, ok was first printed in the Boston Morning Post. Soon other papers picked up on the joke. Later it was immensely popularized by President Van Buren’s re-election campaign of 1840 in the US for his nickname Old Kinderhook (derived from his birthplace) provided the initials ‘OK’. If we dig deeper we will find many such interesting words in the English language.
English is originally a Germanic language although it borrows heavily from Latin through French. Close to 60% of all English words have a Latin origin. But if English borrowed from Latin, then where did Latin come from? Etymologists (those who study etymology: the study of words and their origins) believe that if we were to trace back to the very beginnings of the spoken or written word we would reach what’s called a proto-language, meaning the earliest form of language and they called this language Proto-Indo-European or PIE. They believe that all the languages of the world have been derived from this ancient language. A Business Insider video clip demonstrates how this proto-language spread.
So whether we speak English, French, Arabic, German, Bengali, Tamil, or Hindi we are all speaking the decedents of this proto-language.
We would hardly find a minute during a day in our life when we aren’t surrounded by words. We don’t necessarily pay attention to them yet they have their origin story, history, and a personality, so to say, of their own. Words help not only carry languages forward but also carry with them cultures and ethnicities. They can also be regarded as testaments of human progress and changing times. These bits of letters clubbed together are one of the most powerful tools humankind has. If you ever decide to explore the vast world of words you will not be disappointed. You can take my word for it.
