The meaning of a word

The meaning of a word is a type of semantic change, also known as "pejoration" (alternately "peioration"), in which the word moves from being positive or neutral to being neutral or negative. This is more than just a change in connotation; the words affected need not simply pick out the same things, but with a grimier cast to them. The reverse process is known as meliorization.  Hans Heinrich Hoch, in illustrating the former in his textbook Principles of Historical Linguistics, engages in a little compositional sleight of hand:

An even farther-reaching development is found in OE cnafa 'child, youth' which via 'servant' eventually turned into NE knave 'villain'. And note that the word villain, used to gloss NE knave, likewise is a pejorization of a word whose original meaning was 'belonging to the villa/estate or to the village', i.e. 'servant, serf' or 'peasant = serf'.

Note the way he slips in that "And note that" as if using "villain" to glosse knave were merely some happy coincidence that he just noticed as he was typing, or something like that (and as if no other word could be used to gloss knave). Not that I begrudge him this way of slipping in the information, of course.

The tour of meaning and melioration in the textbook is brief but contains numerous interesting examples; he mentions silly, which developed from a word that, as its descendant in German and cognate of "silly", selig, still does, meant "blessed/blissful", though he does not mention Auden's (famous, or notorious) deliberately anachronistic use of the word in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats": "You were silly like us"—certainly an odd thing to say in an elegy, if "silly" is taken as we tend to take it today.  (There is a paper about it, of which I have read the first page.) He closes the section with a consideration of the many negative terms for women of whom society disapproves (listing hussy, quean, Dirne (Old High German, that one), slut, slattern, and whore, though explicitly marking only the first three as instances of meaning), and notes that both meaning and meliorization are of interest in part (in fact he goes further than that, saying "evidently") because they can reveal past cultural and sociological history and the social attitudes that (one presumes) led to the particular changes. But it's not clear, at least from Hock's examples and short exposition, at how high a level any of this can proceed. Take hussy, from housewife, 'housewife' (hence the conceit of the metaphysical poem "Huswifery"): are we supposed to believe that people thought ill of housewives, or that they were slatterns? Presumably not; what is of interest is rather the fact that the change in meaning occurred. We can deduce, perhaps, that women were looked down on, and, from the extension of the already-demeaned "hussy", something of the terms in which the looks went down, and perhaps also why. But from the process itself, the intermediary stages, why this origin concept, etc., what can we learn? Similarly regarding his analyses of meliorization, which I have not mentioned.) The fact that cognate words in predecessors of English and German wound up as the meliorized "knight" and the demeaned "Knecht" might be worth considering.

Incidentally, "mean" itself appears to have undergone meaning; this makes it one of those terms in linguistics that, like "haplology", whose first or second "lo" is often deleted, has a sort of self-application. The OED explains:

The semantic development shown by the Old English spec. sense of I-MENE adj. was carried further with Middle English mene, mean (as with Dutch gemeen and German gemein; compare COMMON adj.), so that the word acquired the general senses of ‘ordinary’, ‘not exceptionally good’, ‘inferior’. In English this development was aided by the fact that the native word coincided in form with MEAN adj.2, which was often used in a disparaging or reproachful sense. The uses in branch II. might be referred almost equally well to the native or to the foreign adjective; the truth is probably that the meanings of two originally quite distinct words have merged.

Pretty neat.

Comments

[rone]

The construction of words that describe the sound of the meaning of a word is called "onomatopeioration".

[rone]

Also, observe the change in "nice".

[ben wolfson]

Interesting! From Latin nescius, "ignorant" (and enshrined in the motto supra). And the OED sez: “The semantic development of this word from ‘foolish, silly’ to ‘pleasing’ is unparalleled in Latin or in the Romance languages. The precise sense development in English is unclear. N.E.D. (1906) s.v. notes that ‘in many examples from the 16th and 17th cent. it is difficult to say in what particular sense the writer intended it to be taken’.”