Weep for Words

7 April 2002

Reading my delicious Dickens again -- one of my favorites, =Our Mutual
Friend=.  Now I vaguely remembered some language quibble involving the
title of this novel, so I looked up what I could.  Interestingly, the
usage of "mutual" meaning common (as in "in common") or shared, seems to
have lodged itself quite respectably in the dictionary.  However, once
upon a time, "mutual" had the extra requirement of reciprocity.  As in the
phrases "mutually assured destruction" or "the feeling is mutual".  I
don't quite see how "our mutual friend" doesn't live up to this, as
friendship is usually a reciprocal condition.  This is a logical
hair-splitting that I don't quite follow.  Perhaps it's because the friend
in common was their only link, and they were not friends as of yet.  
Okay, that's just getting silly.

Still, I had been intending to write about lost meanings of words,
meanings which are there to be had if one were only to stop, look, and
listen (is that the s.o.p. in crossing the street?) at the words
themselves.  Some of the words I have in mind: fatal, terrific, awesome,
and fabulous.  You can see the original intent of these words in their
stems -- fatal was related to fate, prophecy, and not necessarily
entailing death.  Now, prophecy tends to be negative, so that's not to say
the word ever had a happy connotation.  I'm just saying the word has lost
its scope from encompassing all possible destinies to the final one.

Terrific and awesome have both lost any oomph they once had.  Terrific had
simply meant terrifying - a terrific storm, a terrific monster.  Heck, go
back to the Latin - fic comes from facere, to make and terri comes from
terrere, to frighten.  To make fright.  To inspire terror.  This word was
corrupted, I expect, from the same impulse that changed the word "bad"  
into something good.  How something that started as hideousness turned
into superbness is just the mundane working of English speakers (well, all
language speakers, I expect) from time immemorial.  People get caught up
in their slang, applying an old word in a different sense sometimes to
provide linguistic potentcy, sometimes to exclude those not in the know,
sometimes to create a cozy world of gushing and mutual admiration (hah!)

Awesome, degraded by its overuse by brain-dead Bill 'n' Ted types, once
could accurately describe one's reaction to something really astounding
and possibly terrific.  Tremendous acts of God, intricate and majestic
fjords, towering icebergs, a mountaintop vista -- whatever froze your
brain and let it slowly melt in wonder -- these were the monumental things
to which "awesome" was to be applied.  Now it just means that one really,
really likes something.

Now associated with fey interior designers (and for some reason, George
Bush), fabulous used to have the same sense of wonder as awesome.  It
comes from "fable" -- something that one would likely hear in fairy tales,
like talking animals, mythical beasts, and the birth of Athena (=pop= from
Daddy's head -- Bayer didn't take =that= headache away), that was in the
set of all things fabulous.  Now it can simply apply to the dress of an
Academy Award winner.

There are some others, like horrid and nice, which I have given up
entirely.  We don't have English words close to their original meanings.  
Horrid once meant bristling, or rough -- a beard can be horrid, and a
porcupine definitely is.  Nice has had a panoply of meanings in its
English lifetime, starting out meaning ignorant, then passing through
coyness and profligacy (I beg pardon?  And it held these contradictory
meanings roughly during the same period.) My favorite meaning, indicating
intricacy and delicacy and to an offensive degree, fastidiousness, is seen
in Austen.  I fancy I shall never see the like again.

I don't find it surprising that our "best" words, the ones indicating
power and impression, are the ones most likely to lose their power.  
People exagerrate the enormousness of a situation or the quality of a
person or item too often -- perhaps to get the attention or approbation of
others ("approbation" comes from "approve"), perhaps to pander or
politicize (=How= many dictators have been compared to Hitler? How many
wars or massacres to the Holocaust?)  The problem is that when people
imprecisely use powerful words in order to eke out some power for their
own petty interests, and other people see what "a good idea" it is,
through repeated use for smaller things the words themselves become small.
It really is difficult to lie to people with words, for a reality
discordant with those words is much more powerful than the words
themselves, and the words will be warped to the reality.

So keep that in mind.  Linguistic change is pointless to try to stem, to a
certain extent; however, linguistic lies will eventually out and sloppy
semantic habits will undermine themselves.  If you =must= tell lies, use
nonverbal cues, use actions, but please don't use words; don't be the Boy
Who Cried "Word!"