Complex Numbers

A Word, Please

There's a scattering of actual writing-related articles in my queue, and as luck would have it, we get another one today.

25 Words That Don’t Mean What They Used To  

As usual, I'm not going to reiterate all 25 of them here, but I have a few highlights to comment on.

When the English clergyman Thomas Fuller used the word unfriended in a letter dating from 1659, we can be pretty sure he wasn’t talking about his Facebook page. Instead, Fuller used the word to mean something like “estranged” or “fallen out,” a straightforward literal meaning that has long since “fallen out” of the language.

Yeah, I don't know, I think Shakespeare was more of a Twitter guy.

How many times have I noted in here that language changes over time? I can't recall. It's been a lot. Some of those changes are happening before our eyes right now, like the word "woke" and the use of "literally" for emphasis (WHICH IS STILL WRONG).

1. ALIENATE

Alienate, like alien, is derived from the Latin word alienus, which was used to describe anything that was unfamiliar, unconnected, or foreign. And when alienate first appeared in English as a legal term in the mid-1400s, it meant to transfer ownership of some property over to someone else, so that it is now “foreign” or “unconnected” to you. It’s from here that the modern meaning of “estrangement” or “distance” eventually developed.

Pretty sure the use of a version of that word in the Declaration of Independence was an example of the former usage.

3. BUNNY

Bunny derives from bun—which was an old English word for a squirrel, not a rabbit.

Fun fact: "bunny" isn't the term for a baby rabbit (at least not anymore), but rather an alternate word for rabbit. But "rabbit" used to mean young examples of the species; adults were called "coneys" (as in Coney Island, which I was very disappointed as a child to find wasn't an island filled with interesting three-dimensional geometric shapes, or even rabbits). Baby bunnies are now called - no shit - kittens.

7. FANTASTIC

The link between fantastic things and absolute fantasy was once much closer than it is today. Fantastic originally meant “existing only in the imagination,” or in other words “unreal” or “based on fantasy.”

You still see the adjective used in the old way occasionally; its meaning can usually be deduced from context. Or be a deliberate pun, as in "Fantastic Four" (the movies featuring that team have been less than fantastic).

17. NAUGHTY

Naughty is etymologically related to nought, and meant “to have nothing” when it first appeared in the language around 600 years ago. Soon afterward, it came to mean “to have no morals,” and, by extension, “wicked,” “depraved,” or “vicious,” before its meaning softened in the late Middle Ages.

Well, I've often suspected that, but never could be arsed to look into it. My word for the first decade of this century - the "noughties" - plays on the similarity of those words.

19. NICE

Nice derives from a Latin word, nescius, meaning “ignorant” or “not knowing”—and that was its original meaning when it was first adopted into English from French around the turn of the 14th century. Over the years that followed, nice was knocked around the language picking up an impressively wide range of meanings along the way—including “wanton,” “ostentatious,” “punctilious,” “prim,” “hard to please,” “cultured,” “cowardly,” “lazy,” “pampered,” “shy,” “insubstantial,” and “dainty”—before it finally settled on its current meaning in the early 1700s.

This one, I basically already knew -- but I am moved to add that "nice" is often used sarcastically to mean "shitty."

21. QUEEN

The word queen apparently started life as a general name for a woman or a wife, before its meaning specialized to “the wife of a king” in the middle of the Old English period. It has remained unchanged ever since.

Another fun fact: "queen" is also the term for a female housecat. Female cat: queen. Female dog: bitch. And they ask me why I'm a cat person.

I would also be remiss if I didn't note that "queen" can also refer to the sovereign of a country, independent of whether she's married or not. And y'all know the other use of the word.

24. THRILL

To thrill originally meant “to piece a hole in something”—your nostrils, etymologically, are your “nose-thrills.”

Now this was new to me, and I had to get off my arse (figuratively; I've literally been sitting on it the whole time) to check. Are "thrill" and "drill" related? Sources point to "no." But there may be an older linguistic connection that the etymology doesn't go into. The words are just too similar; it may be a coincidence, but it's not impossible for a Þ sound to morph into a d sound. Or vice-versa.

Anyway, obviously there are more at the source. It's fun to learn new words, but it's also fun (well, for nerds like me anyway) to learn how some words changed over time.