'The World of Words'

By Chitra Badrinarayan, Masters Student

A study on the evolution of words.

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

THE WORLD OF WORDS

“U.S.A may wage war on Iraq.”
This sentence is a likely newspaper headline that one might read nowadays. It is also a good example to show the importance of words in today’s day and age. If the modal 'may' were to have an extra word 'not' added to it, the sense of the sentence would have changed altogether.
“U.S.A may not wage war on Iraq.”
Though ‘may’ and ‘may not’ both indicate uncertainty, the second sentence somehow has a positive notion to it. We can clearly see how a single word can change the sense of the entire meaning of the sentence. As headlines, it is likely that the first one would have created tension while the second one would have seen people heaving sighs of relief.
Such is the power of words. They condition attitudes, they condition emotions and they change the world.

Lexical semantics aims at studying word meanings, not just as individual units, but also the manner in which the meanings of different words are related. In trying to understand the meaning of a sentence, it is necessary to understand the grammatical structure of the sentence, as well as the meaning of the words in the sentence. It is thus essential to understand the meaning of a word in trying to understand the bigger framework of semantics. So what is a word?
Ø A word is the basic element of a sentence, which is formed by the combination of speech sounds or syllables.
Ø At times a single speech sound can represent a word. For example, ‘oh’
Ø Words do not have meaning in isolation. For example, the word ‘young’ has meaning only in relation to the word ‘old’.
Ø At times words need to be used in combination with other words to make sense. For example, the meaning of the word ‘a’ makes better sense when combined with an object such as ‘bat’.
Ø A single word may signify more than one meaning.
Ø Words combine to form a phrase or a sentence.
Ø The meanings of some words depend upon the subjectivity of the speaker or listener. For example, “Leave me alone” may signify “Don’t bother me” rather than “I want to be by myself.”
Ø Words are evolving and new words keep getting created over time.
Ø The meaning of word also keeps changing over time.

Saussere says that words are “the arbitrary nature of the sign” meaning that a word is really a name that has been coined arbitrarily. The meaning of a word though, has a specific, purposeful role to play.

Frege says, “Only in the context of a sentence do words have meaning.” For example, when one says, “He hit the ball with the bat” it is obvious that ‘bat’ here refers to a cricket bat and not the animal with the same name.

Bloomfield defined a word in the following manner: “A minimum form is a morpheme. A form that may be uttered alone is free. A word is a minimum free form.” Thus a word is a form that may be uttered alone, but it cannot be analysed in parts that may be uttered alone.

Yakov Malkiel says, “Words are migratory in nature. Most languages have been adapted from a whole spectrum of foreign tongues.” To illustrate,
‘Faux pas’ is a French term used in English.
Essay is derived from the French word ‘assay’
Chit is derived from the Hindi word 'chitti'
Prefixes such as extra, infra, inter, intra super, supra are derived from Latin.

Otto Jesperson suggests that words have to be arranged in a logical, linear order for it to make sense in a sentence. He also adds that the “blending of synonyms played a great role in the development of language.” The following words are illustrations:
Blunt = blind + stunt.
Blot = blemish/black + spot.
Goodbye = good night/morning + godbye (God be with ye)
Slash = slay + gash.
Gruff = grim + rough.
Slender = slight (slim) + tender.
Twirl = twist + whirl.

I would like to draw special attention to the fact that new words are evolving almost everyday, and so are their meanings. The O.E.D defines a woman as “an adult, female human being”, but the connotative meaning of the same word keeps changing over time. In the 18th century, woman signified fair, sweet and charming. In the 1950's she was defined as a homemaker who was unwilling to do any repair work. In the 1970's she was a feminist, and in the 1990’s, she was defined as smart, active, adventurous and willing to do repair work! The feminist movement brought about a major change not only in the definition of certain words, but also in the creation of new ones.
Workman was replaced with worker.
Chairman as replaced with chairperson.
Mankind was replaced with people.
Such an evolution in language clearly indicates the role it plays in determining biases. For example, the words left and right are ideally only directions, but they also indicate biases in the cases of:
Right ahead, right on, you’re right as against left out or left alone.

Words have been changing and evolving for several centuries now. A commonly used word like silly has meant different things over time. In old English (700 - 1100 A.D.) it meant ‘happy or blessed’. In Middle English (1200 - 1400) it meant ‘innocent’. In the Elizabethan age it meant ‘deserving of compassion or weak’. Today it means ‘foolish or empty headed.’ Several other English words used to connote different meanings in the past. For instance,
Purchase once meant ‘to acquire by force.’
Luxury once meant ‘lust, lasciviousness or General self indulgence.’
Aristocracy once meant ‘rule by the best.’
Seduce was once a feudal term meaning ‘to take labour from another man’s service.’
Security once meant ‘a sense of anxiety or carelessness’.
Botch once meant ‘to repair’.

Even in modern times, words no longer mean what they used to suggest. For example,
Terrific means wonderful. (O.E.D meaning - causing terror.)
Awesome also means wonderful. (O.E.D meaning -inspiring awe.)
Cute means attractive, pretty. (O.E.D. meaning - ugly but bearable.)
Freak indicates a drug addict. (O.E.D meaning - monstrosity or caprice.)
Gay is a homosexual man. (O.E.D. meaning - happy.)
Such words are today considered to be Slang words.

Slang words are a result of dialect and local lingo. Many times, the meaning of a certain word is lost in translation. Slang helps to bridge such a gap on many occasions. Though its function is very useful in terms of expression, it is a restricted form of language both to the speaker and listener, and most of the time considered too colloquial to be part of a proper language. At times, slang is also a misuse of the traditional meaning of a word. For example,
Cowabunga is a cry of exhilaration, which was popularised by the cartoon series ‘Teenage mutant ninja turtles.’
Inside job suggests a crime committed by the people working within an organisation.
Pot/ Indian hay/ grass all mean marijuana.
Lallapaloosameans something outstandingly good.
Schlep/shmuck/ schlock/shlub/ shmutz/ shnook are names for someone contemptuous, like a fool or a beggar.
Green means money. (as American dollars are green in colour.)
Tyre is a roll of fat around the stomach.
Yumcilicious is a combination of ‘yummy’ and ‘delicious’.
Sexy means attractive and sometimes provocative.
Snoggable is the British equivalent of the American word ‘sexy’.
Brunch is a meal in between breakfast and lunch.
Cool/ hot are terms used to describe fashionable people.
Hooligans/ rockers/ skinheads/ punks/ dudes are names used to describe the youth.

It is interesting to know that several words that are in common usage nowadays, once suggested sexual meanings. The words occupy, conversation and intrigue all suggested sexual meanings in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries respectively. Naughty in present day Australian slang has a sexual connotation to it!

Many words that are present in English today are terms that have been lifted from other fields such as science or religion. For instance, words such as:
Virtue, modesty and honour resulted due to Christianity.
Trauma, psychosis, mania and sublimation are all terms used in Psychology.
All these words got absorbed in the stream of language over time. Many neologisms have also been coined by literarians and have become a part of the English language today. For example,
Glaze meaning to gaze and glare was created by Shakespeare.
Brobdingnagian suggests a huge person which is adapted from Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s travels’.
Yahoo is a cry of joy, again adapted from Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s travels’.
Cotter means a cottager, coined by Burns.
Snarky, derived from snark which is a snake and a shark, is adapted from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s adventures in Wonderland’.
Whizz-bang means an explosive device, coined by Wilfred Owen.

Several words are a result of political propaganda. For example, the word barbarian took on the meaning of a savage due to xenophobia. The Latin word ‘balbus’ means ‘to stammer’, which was used to deride any foreign language spoken by an outsider. The word bugger, which is a politically incorrect term that degrades homosexuals, is originally derived from ‘Bulgarus’ meaning Bulgarian, who was, (like the ‘barbarian’), a heathen or a heretic in 16th century England. ‘Bugger’ and ‘barbarian’ are thus words that were used to call people names.

To comment on this phenomenon, John C. Condor says, “One of the popular propaganda devices is called ‘name-calling’ and students sometimes are taught that it is a nasty practice, but all labelling is ‘name-calling’, just as the choice of the word ‘propaganda’.
Still, a demarcation must be made between derision and ‘name-calling’. To combat this sort of problem, the phenomenon of ‘politically correct words’ came into existence. For example, Conversational minimalist substitues ‘quiet’,
Follicle regression substitues ‘balding’,
Anatomically compact substitutes ‘short’ and
Reverse bulimia could replace ‘gluttony.’
Nowadays the word model to describe a person on the fashion ramp is being debated, as the word ‘model’ means ‘an ideal example’, thus degrading all human beings who are not fashion models.

Euphemisms, or mild expressions used to substitute blunt ones, are another method of making language acceptable. For example,
White lie is a contradiction in terms of what the individual words white and lie connote.
Industrial action means strike.
Recession means depression
Explosive device means anything ranging from a firecracker to a bomb.
Big brother indicates the might of the United States of America.

Saussere suggested that words are arbitrary names given to objects, but this theory does not hold true for all words. For example,
U-boat, D-day, nazi, concentration camp and holocaust were coined after the world wars.
Freedom fighter, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and Uncle Sam resulted due to de-colonisation.
Money-back guarantee, Rastafarian, Raelian (a cult that worships extra terrestrials) along with the previous set of words have all been coined in the recent past, with a specific purpose, or even story, behind their coinage. They thus contradict Saussere’s theory.

Affixation sometimes helps to create ideologies and this can be illustrated by looking at a wide range of words with the suffix ‘ism’ - Marxism, Nazism, Communism, Feminism, Chauvinism or the suffix ‘ian’ - Shavian, Shakespearean, Orwellian, Wordsworthian.
‘Osamaism’ or ‘Ladenism’ may soon become neologisms owing to the current political scenario!

Though propaganda has been one of the most important influences in the development of a language in modern times, there are other influences on language as well. The field of sports, for instance, has contributed a great deal to the formation of new words:
Screwball which means eccentric, is a term derived from baseball.
Bodyline was a cricketing tactic used by the team of England to injure the players from the opposing team in ‘the line of their body.’
Freestyle is a stroke in swimming, but nowadays also means ‘doing your own thing’ in slang. (As in freestyler)
Run out and no ball are new words as a result of cricket.

Flibbertigibbet means a silly person who chatters a lot, and the word is onomatopoeic in its nature and creation.

Songsters have also played their role in creating new words such as Californication (by the rock group Red Hot Chilli Peppers) or Synchronicity (by the pop artiste Sting.) Triphop is a type of music that is a combination of trance and hip-hop.

The ‘dotcom’ age has been witness to a whole new trend of words and morphemes such as emoticon, spam, hacker, window, icon, web, net-surfing, cyber-space, cyber-war etc.

Accidental gaps are also being filled up in English with words such as inspirator (someone who inspires you), copyrighteous, audiophile (someone who loves to collect audio equipment) and earwitness.

Here is a list of some of the newest words that have been cited in English:
Cosmoceutical - a cosmetic with active pharmaceutical ingredients.
To google - to search for information on the net (owing to the popularity of google.com)
Cryptohypochondriac - a person who tries to hide his/ her feelings of depression by almost maniacally pursuing activities.
Detailistic - the style of rendering something in great detail.
Anecdotage- that age when you only relate incidents from your childhood.
Japanimation - animation from Japan. (A highly popular trend in most music videos today.)
Slanguage - the language of slang.
Nucleate - to destroy using nuclear bombs.

There are many more words that could be included in the English language, but they fail to make their way into the mainstream language for specific reasons. Medical terminologies for instance, belong to a separate dictionary, as it would become a matter of inconvenience if all medical terms became a part of the O.E.D, considering that words such as Oligoasthenoteratozoospermia and Pnuemonoultramicroscopicsilicovulanoconiosis actually exist!

To conclude, one may ask whether some of the neologisms that have been created are agreeable or not. Dr. Johnson has said in the preface to his dictionary, “Tongues like governments have a natural tendency to degeneration.” Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term verbicide to suggest a weakening or distortion of words. It is hard to ascertain then, whether English is a language of degeneration or construction.

Daniel Defoe once wrote “Your Roman-Saxon-Danish- Norman English” suggesting that English has always been a pot-pourri. When Shakespeare created new words, it was never appreciated in his time, yet most of his neologisms are popularly used today in English. No language is fixed to begin with, it keeps getting inputs from other languages and fields. Nowadays the trends of emails and short message services have added to the vocabulary of English. As Geoffrey Hughes says, words have “ a remarkably close relationship between social change as well as semantic change.” It is then unfair to accuse any language or its words of degeneration. It is, rather, evolving. To sum up, I would like to quote Aldous Huxley when he says, “neither agreeable or disagreeable, it just is.”


BIBLIOGRAPHY.

1. Semantics and Communication, 2nd edition, John C. Condor Jr, Macmillan publishers, 1975.
2. Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics, Genero Churcha and Sally McConnell-Ginnet, The M.I.T press, 1993.
3. Words in Time: A Social History of the English Vocabulary, Geoffrey Hughes, Blackwell publishers, 1988.
4. Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin, Otto Jesperson, Allen and Unwin ltd, 1922.
5. Language, The Basics, 2nd edition, R. L. Trask, Routledge publishers, 1999.
6. Etymology, Yakov Malkiel, Cambridge University press, 1993.
7. The Oxford English Dictionary
8. The Oxford English Dictionary of Modern Slang, 1992.
9. ‘Doors of perception’, Aldous Huxley.
10. ‘A True Born Englishman’, Daniel Defoe.
11. www.wordspy.com.