You may have noticed in the previous chapter that it seemed helpful here and there to dip briefly into the histories of one or two words, or their ‘etymologies’. And it is perhaps tempting to imagine that where there is a disagreement about what a word really means (whatever ‘really means’ means), an appeal to its origins, if they are known, will settle the matter. But what a shame it would be if that were true; and how lucky for you that it is not true. With your suddenly acquired purpose of challenging the defences set up around Good English, it can only be splendid news that the meaning of our words is above all a matter of custom.
When C. S. Lewis addressed this topic in 1960, in his book Studies in Words, he raised the excellent question of why anyone would ever bother to go round insisting on what a word did not mean. He noted that people display this kind of resistance only when a word has already picked up its new, supposedly wrong sense. The naysayers, he explained, were engaged in acts of ‘tactical definition’.
In the following passage, Simon Heffer demonstrates perfectly what Lewis was on about: ‘Many believe that for a person to be an orphan he [sic] must have neither parent alive. This is not so. An orphan is someone who has lost either parent; those who have lost both are double orphans’. What a pity Mr Heffer did not swish confidently past boring old orphan to seize on the word it replaced in the language: stepchild. Would he not have had more fun, and could he not have become even more indignant, if he had been exhorting us to unpick the etymology of stepchild instead, trying to make us understand it as it always used to be understood (some thousand years ago), when stéop meant bereaved? He could be fighting for printers to worry about ‘widows and stepchildren’; for orphanages to become ‘stepchildrenages’, and so on.
He could be, but the truth is that the meanings of words can alter. Imagine the chatter when the first actor to play the lead in Coriolanus spoke of ‘the Pibbles on the hungry beach’. Foh! In the standard English of the time, the word beach meant—pebbles. To the agitated griper of Shakespeare’s day, Coriolanus might as well have been saying, ‘the Pibbles on the hungry pibbles’. It is in part because of Shakespeare’s own writing that the meaning of beach has shifted since, sparing our current gripers the need to gnash their teeth at this line.
Then again, the word beach happens to have no known origin, so that its meaning might be thought to be up for grabs. Where, by contrast, a word has unquestioned roots, there are those who pretend that these roots should be, in all senses, definitive (linguists call this the ‘etymological fallacy’). This sort of thinking evidently underlies the declaration by Graham King, author of the Collins Complete Writing Guide, 2009, that it is a ‘common misconception’ that to condone means to ‘allow or approve’, when really it means to ‘forgive’. Bill Bryson is with him on this, explaining that condone means ‘forgive’, and ‘does not mean to approve or endorse’. It is plain that they have in mind condone’s Latin origin, more directly reflected in the English word pardon. However, their ruling would come as a shock to Rev. Albert Curry Winn, who in his work of 1990, A Christian Primer, boldly wrote that ‘To forgive is not to condone’. To Messrs King and Bryson, the cleric’s humdrum yet important observation must seem unfathomably philosophical. To the rest of us, it is presumably straightforward enough.
In a similar mood, Mr King writes that pristine does not mean ‘spotlessly clean’ but ‘uncorrupted, original’. The Economist Style Guide agrees: pristine ‘means original or former; it does not mean clean’. Mr Heffer likewise declares: ‘It means original’. How so? Again, they are adhering to the word’s Latin roots—the Latin pristinus means ‘former’ or ‘ancient’. You can bet, however, that when the Telegraph newspaper—whose use of English Mr Heffer officially monitors—flags ‘three steps to achieve a pristine lawn’, it is explaining how to remove moss and clover from a neglected patch of grass, not proposing that its readers should abandon their morsels of sward to the most primitive of our native weeds.
If you have been using condone to mean ‘approve’, or pristine to mean ‘clean’ or ‘sparkly’, and if, despite the scales now being torn from your eyes, you secretly doubt that you will ever revise this habit, then you have all the evidence you need that usage is happy to trample etymology into the dust. Once again, if a ‘common misconception’ about the meaning of an English word is common enough, how the meaning came about will be irrelevant to whether or not it is, in practice, for now, correct. Nor are our advisers consistent about their etymological imperatives when it does not suit them to be. Mr Heffer, in his discussion of orphan, must have taken account of the origin of the word, yet cannot have found it convenient to note that in this case the Latin was against him. Orphanus, in its use by Saint Augustine, Venantius Fortunatus, et al., meant someone with neither parent alive.
But the fact that no English speaker uses every word of English in strict accord with its earliest known history does not mean that the general English speaker is impervious to the lure of etymological argument—a point perhaps best illustrated by instances of etymological reasoning being popularly misapplied. Changes in the use of the words noisome and fruition, for example, have arisen through false but mesmerising assumptions about how their parts fit together:
Given a gun and told to bring his plans to fruition himself, would the meek Ross Ulbricht ever pull the trigger? (Independent)
Antonio Pappano conducted with his habitual gusto, and the show ended with a noisome mass rendition of the Sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor, some of the parts being doubled. (Telegraph)
The eye can be deceived. The ‘nois’ in noisome is related, not to noise, as that of massed opera singers, but to the ‘noy’ in annoy. Many people do still use noisome to mean disgusting and repellent, but many do not. Similarly, fruition, by its etymology, should mean, not coming to full ‘fruit’, but rather ‘enjoyment’—the Latin verb frui meaning enjoy. Three centuries ago, the poet Thomas Yalden could write, drearily yet plausibly, ‘Fruition only cloys the appetite; / More does the conquest, than the prize delight’. Fruit-like ripeness appears to have overtaken the word completely since.
It is one thing for countless speakers to misconstrue a word’s origin, and so to conspire to alter its meaning. It is quite another for this process to put so much pressure on a word that it actually changes form. Many people make such adaptations privately, for fun. Jane Austen, for example, used ‘noonshine’ as a pet substitute for nuncheon, the ‘noon-drink’ or midday snack of the time. (Browning, in ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, writes cheerfully: ‘So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon’.) But from time to time, a reworked word will gain a much wider currency.
When this happens, the dictionaries explain it as an example of ‘folk etymology’. There is a notorious instance of this phenomenon built on the Old English word shamefast. By putting together shame and the idea of ‘fastness’—the state of being caught or restrained, as in steadfast, fast friends, or being fast asleep—a word was created that initially meant ‘caught by shame’, often used in the virtuous senses of ‘bashful’ or ‘modest’. Shamefast survived in this form for roughly six hundred years before becoming entangled with the idea of a person whose cheeks are flooded with a blush. It is true that this is a potent image: in the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, King Arthur is said to have been so humiliated by the ruthless green stranger that ‘The blod schot for scham into his schyre** face’. At any rate, in the sixteenth century shamefast was suddenly up against shamefaced; and perhaps there were some who decried the new, illiterate usage. But all in vain: the original form was done for, and duly disappeared.**
Another instance of a popular struggle after meaning can be traced in alterations to the expression upside down. It first appeared in the 1300s as up-swa-doune. Two centuries later, newer versions came into use, such as vp set downe and upset downe. But it was a yet more explanatory form, found in Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible—where a tent is turned vpsyde downe by a barley loaf—that would come to vanquish the rest.**
The spelling hiccough for hiccup is a particularly odd example, given that we all still pronounce the word hiccup. We have had hiccups since the late sixteenth century; hiccoughs, from about a hundred years after that. An out-of-date OED entry, failing to acknowledge the long history of the later spelling, contains the stern judgement that hiccough ‘ought to be abandoned as a mere error’. Yet whoever wrote its much more recent entry on miniscule was perfectly prepared to accept the popularity of this word. Not so the gripers, however. The original form minuscule is ‘frequently misspelled’, notes Mr Bryson. It is one of the ‘most troublesome’ challenges to spelling, writes Mr Heffer. In this instance, it would seem to be the ear that has misconstrued the original word, not the eye. Translated on to the page, however, the war over minuscule and miniscule hinges on whether you understand the word to be minus plus the diminutive suffix -cule, as in molecule, or mini- attached to ‘scule’—meaning who knows quite what. (Those who write of groupuscules—political splinter groups—might be able to explain.)
Another word currently under pressure of this kind is sacrilegious, an adjective derived from the term sacrilege, but commonly now spelled ‘sacreligious’** by those who wish to invoke some idea of religion: ‘… train tracks of diminishing width seems indecent, almost sacreligious …’ (Independent). Meanwhile, ‘commeasurate’ is starting to be used for commensurate: ‘O’Dell’s attorneys attempted to get DNA analysis of the semen in the case commeasurate with scientific advances of the times’.** (It happens that measure, no less than commensurate, derives from the Latin verb mensurare.) Yet another word under threat of this sort of change is remuneration, ‘pay’. Many people feel compelled to plant within it an echo of numerals or enumerate, not caring that munus, from which the component ‘mun’ is derived, is the Latin for a gift (as in munificent):
It had already been criticised for offering free health insurance to a small number of senior staff as part of their renumeration. (Telegraph)
… do we need to introduce public sector renumeration committees to prune fat cat salaries? (Guardian)
… despite a growing controversy over the size of the payout it had ‘no serious issues’ with BP’s renumeration policy. (The Times)
To those who still use the word remuneration, this writing will sound dismally untutored, though the earliest example of the switch cited by the OED is from 1572: ‘the godly are afflicted without anye renumeration’.** All the same, it is not beyond imagining that our descendants will properly be ‘renumerated’ for their labours, with nary a purist eyebrow raised.
Perhaps even more offensive to the griper than commeasurate or renumeration will be the word harbringer: ‘Edades is without question the harbringer of the new grammar to the land’; ‘Callaghan so refined the political mechanism of former French operatives that many believed him the harbringer of a new age’; ‘Non-violence is the harbringer of justice all round’.** What is this? The form harbinger is itself a descendant of the twelfth-century herbergere—originally a provider of lodgings—and is a word whose current meaning (of a sign of something greater to come) was arrived at only after it had started to be used to denote a person sent scouting ahead to find lodgings or camping grounds for a party of followers, knights, an army. The word herbergere mutated into harbinger on the same model as the word passenger (which originally meant ‘ferryman’). It has had the forms herbegeour, harbesher, harbiger. One might wonder whether, with so much muddle behind it, the recent jump to harbringer is really such a crime.
It is not inevitable that sacreligious will write sacrilegious out of the language, nor that renumeration, now 450 years into its campaign, will ultimately kill off remuneration. Sometimes a mutation simply goes away again. In the late seventeenth century, the word honeymonth jostled competitively with the older honeymoon. The new form interpreted the ‘moon’ in honeymoon as implying a month’s span, whereas what it had originally conveyed was the quality of being—as the moon is—changeable: how long two people might continue to like each other after marriage had been deemed hard to predict (it certainly is). And we now know that it was the open-ended interpretation—and the original form of the word—that would come to prevail, as when we speak today of a new government’s enjoying a ‘honeymoon period’ with the voters.** Just as honeymonth fell right out of use, so too did the folk interpretation wretchless. In his dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson writes accusingly, ‘This is, by I know not whose corruption, written for reckless’. The OED cites many examples, including the following by the Irish bishop George Rust, who wrote in 1661 of people ‘wretchless and insensible of all wholesome counsels’. But at just the time of Johnson’s verdict, use of wretchless began to decline, and today it has vanished entirely.
Let us assume that, from a griper’s perspective, you too—with your desire to enlarge the scope of Good English—appear ‘wretchless and insensible of all wholesome counsels’. It may not be within the compass of your abilities to dream up a new etymological botch job worthy of the examples listed above; and if so, sad as that is, never mind. You could nevertheless set about promoting any words you encounter whose origins are already being overwritten. Adopt one or two of these—so powerfully offensive to purist sensibilities—and you are bound to be dismissed by your foes as susceptible and weak. Yet they will also fear you as a lexical harbringer of doom.