person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (per-haps, on second thought, it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.
This drift of meaning, technically called catachresis, is as wide-spread as it is curious. Egregious once meant eminent or admira-ble. In the sixteenth century, for no reason we know of, it began to take on the opposite sense of badness and unworthiness (it is in this sense that Shakespeare employs it in Cymbeline) and has retained that sense since. Now, however, it seems that people are increas-ingly using it in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being pointless and unconstructive.
According to Mario Pei, more than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones. A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 40o years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and—by 1769—pleasant and agree-able. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to a friend, "You scold me so much in a nice long letter . . . which I have received from you."
Sometimes the changing connotations of a word can give a new and startling sense to literary passages, as in The Mayor of Cas- WHERE WORDS COME FROM
terbridge where Thomas Hardy has one of his characters gaze upon
"the unattractive exterior of Farfrae's erection" or in Bleak House where Dickens writes that "Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates." [Taken from "Red Pants," by Robert M. Sebastian, in the Winter 198 9 issue of Verbatim]
This drift of meaning can happen with almost anything, even our clothes. There is a curious but not often noted tendency for the names of articles of apparel to drift around the body. This is par-ticularly apparent to Americans in Britain (and vice versa) who discover that the names for clothes have moved around at different rates and now often signify quite separate things. An American going into a London department store with a shopping list consist-ing of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from what he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an American undershirt. Our vest is their waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties. To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore dress. Our suspenders are their braces. They don't need suspenders to hold up their pants because to them pants are un-derwear and clearly you don't need suspenders for that, so instead they employ suspenders to hold up their stockings. Is that clear?) Sometimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or expres-sion. Neck was once widely used to describe a parcel of land, but that meaning has died out except in the expression "neck of the woods." Tell once meant to count. This meaning died out but is preserved in the expression bank teller and in the term for people who count votes. When this happens, the word is called a fossil.
Other examples of fossils are the italicized words in the following list:
short shrift
hem and haw
rank and file
raring to go
not a whit
out of kilter
newfangled
79
THE MOTHER TONGUE
at bay
spick-and-span
to and fro
kith and kin
Occasionally,
This drift of meaning, technically called catachresis, is as wide-spread as it is curious. Egregious once meant eminent or admira-ble. In the sixteenth century, for no reason we know of, it began to take on the opposite sense of badness and unworthiness (it is in this sense that Shakespeare employs it in Cymbeline) and has retained that sense since. Now, however, it seems that people are increas-ingly using it in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being pointless and unconstructive.
According to Mario Pei, more than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones. A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 40o years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and—by 1769—pleasant and agree-able. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to a friend, "You scold me so much in a nice long letter . . . which I have received from you."
Sometimes the changing connotations of a word can give a new and startling sense to literary passages, as in The Mayor of Cas- WHERE WORDS COME FROM
terbridge where Thomas Hardy has one of his characters gaze upon
"the unattractive exterior of Farfrae's erection" or in Bleak House where Dickens writes that "Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates." [Taken from "Red Pants," by Robert M. Sebastian, in the Winter 198 9 issue of Verbatim]
This drift of meaning can happen with almost anything, even our clothes. There is a curious but not often noted tendency for the names of articles of apparel to drift around the body. This is par-ticularly apparent to Americans in Britain (and vice versa) who discover that the names for clothes have moved around at different rates and now often signify quite separate things. An American going into a London department store with a shopping list consist-ing of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from what he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an American undershirt. Our vest is their waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties. To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore dress. Our suspenders are their braces. They don't need suspenders to hold up their pants because to them pants are un-derwear and clearly you don't need suspenders for that, so instead they employ suspenders to hold up their stockings. Is that clear?) Sometimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or expres-sion. Neck was once widely used to describe a parcel of land, but that meaning has died out except in the expression "neck of the woods." Tell once meant to count. This meaning died out but is preserved in the expression bank teller and in the term for people who count votes. When this happens, the word is called a fossil.
Other examples of fossils are the italicized words in the following list:
short shrift
hem and haw
rank and file
raring to go
not a whit
out of kilter
newfangled
79
THE MOTHER TONGUE
at bay
spick-and-span
to and fro
kith and kin
Occasionally,
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