Word Play: An ever-shifting language

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, August 15th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Quick reminder: Tomorrow we’ll have the extended version of Lindsay Mast’s interview with Clare Morell. You may have heard part of it on Wednesday, but there’s more to say and the full conversation is worth hearing.

It’s all about smartphones and screen detox for families … a topic that resonated with many listeners. You’ll find the complete interview this weekend on The World and Everything in It podcast feed … wherever you get your podcasts.

BROWN: Up next, Word Play for August. George Grant has been rummaging through the dictionary again … and has uncovered a curious phenomenon: good words breaking bad … words once noble and uplifting, now demoted, downgraded, maybe even a little disgraced.

GEORGE GRANT: Pejoration is an expression linguists use to describe the process of etymological degeneration. It is a kind of semantic entropy, grammatical erosion, or philological regression. Simply put, it is when a word’s positive meaning gradually morphs into a negative one.

Examples of pejoration abound. The word silly for instance comes to us from Middle English. It originally meant someone who was “happy, blessed, or fortunate.” In some contexts, it was even used to describe someone who was “pious, holy, or good.” But by the time of William Shakespeare, the term’s use had declined to its present-day meaning of “lacking good sense, trite, or foolish.” Crafty is derived from an Old English root meaning “strong, adept, or skillful,” but in some contexts it now connotes “dishonest, sneaky, or duplicitous.” Cunning is a word that has come to have negative connotations in modern English, but it once meant “wise, learned, or having notable expertise.” Hierarchy has suffered a similar deterioration. Originally it denoted the rank upon rank of angels in the heavenly host. John Milton used the term somewhat pejoratively to describe the elite status of secular or ecclesiastical authorities. In modern English nuances of egalitarian envy or even hostility can sometimes adhere to the word. Other examples of pejoration include knave, egregious, awful, gay, spinster, mistress, wench, naughty, hussy, and tart—all once perfectly acceptable, positive terms, but no longer.

Only rarely do the meanings of words improve over time. When it does occur, it is called amelioration—the very opposite of pejoration. For example, the word nice once meant “foolish, simple, or absurd.” It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that it came to mean “kind, considerate, or friendly.” Likewise, ambitious and aggressive are words that once had adverse connotations but have now been largely rehabilitated. In regional colloquial slang, sick, wicked, and bad can be used to mean “good, cool, or desirable.” As film critic Roger Ebert once quipped, “When bad is good and good is bad it’s hard to know which way is up.”

C.S. Lewis illustrated pejoration and amelioration in what he called “the moralization of status words.” This is the process, he said, of terms originally denoting status and class slowly acquiring the moral connotations, favorable or otherwise, of the ethics attributed to that class. Thus, villains and ceorls, which originally simply meant medieval serfs, deteriorated to “churlish rogues.” Meanwhile noble and gentle, rose in moral connotation.

Mario Andrew Pei the Italian-born American etymologist asserted that, “Of all the words that exist in any language only a small minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are coined words, forms that have been in one way or another created, augmented, cut down, combined, and recombined to convey new meanings. The language mint is more than a mint; it is a great manufacturing center, where all sorts of activities go on unceasingly.”

The English language is always on the move. It never sits still. As Phil Lord has said, “We constantly risk people misunderstanding us—if only because plain English never seems to stay plain.”

I’m George Grant.

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