ff0: semantic drift
June 24, 2024 3:20 AM Subscribe
"Having worked out the different stages of this development we are now in a
much better position to understand how the word silly could have developed from
‘blessed’ or ‘blissful’, which were very positive (especially in the Middle Ages), into
something as negative as its present-day meaning of ‘foolish’. The key is to realise
that while the development as a whole is very drastic, the individual steps are not.
Thus, ‘blissful/blessed’ is not that far removed from ‘innocent/harmless’. More
precisely, blissful or blessed people and things are often also innocent and harmless,
and (again particularly in a medieval mindset) vice versa." [pdf: Lancaster] previously
The change of meaning for ‘silly’ is unfortunate for the English county known as Silly Sussex since the Middle Ages
posted by Phanx at 4:39 AM on June 24 [2 favorites]
posted by Phanx at 4:39 AM on June 24 [2 favorites]
I had to stop and check the etymology of very--I wish he'd said more about that evolution!
posted by mittens at 4:51 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]
posted by mittens at 4:51 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]
I had to stop and check the etymology of very--I wish he'd said more about that evolution!
Are you truly curious?
Semantic drift is really (heh) interesting but I'm a bit surprised at the choice of "silly" as an example of that - the semantic distance between silliness and blissfulness does not seem particularly large to me, or the connection between them surprising. Etymologies are often way more head-scratching - off the top of my head "villain" is only somewhere in the middle of my "how the hell are those things connected?!" range.
Interestingly, even though the author lumps "blessed" and "blissful" together, those words aren't from the same source, though at some point they started influencing each other. "Bless" apparently comes from a root meaning "blood" (seriously, is that not a little more surprising than blissful->silly?) Meanwhile "bliss" apparently comes from a root meaning "gentle" or "kind" -- same as the word "blithe", which today can describe behavior that's not gentle or kind at all.
Still, I think the word "silly" is unusual and interesting because it has a kind of slippery sense that can be hard to pin down or define without a lot of examples. If you're a native speaker of another language that has a word with the same meaning as "silly", I'd love to hear about it; in most languages I have any familiarity with the usual substitute is "stupid", but that doesn't capture the full meaning at all. (Among other things, the elements of gentleness and happiness - which do show up in the etymology of the English word - are missing. The element of fun is also missing, and that thought made me look up the etymology of "fun", which it turns out may also be related to foolishness. Check out also "fond", which apparently at one point meant "deranged, insane".)
Ancestors leave behind so many rabbit holes.
For anyone wondering whether to read the OP link -- it's a chapter from an introductory academic book on English linguistics. The first part of the chapter is a short introduction to some theories about semantics, and the second part, starting on p. 527, is an introduction to different kinds of processes by which word meanings can change.
posted by trig at 5:59 AM on June 24 [4 favorites]
Are you truly curious?
Semantic drift is really (heh) interesting but I'm a bit surprised at the choice of "silly" as an example of that - the semantic distance between silliness and blissfulness does not seem particularly large to me, or the connection between them surprising. Etymologies are often way more head-scratching - off the top of my head "villain" is only somewhere in the middle of my "how the hell are those things connected?!" range.
Interestingly, even though the author lumps "blessed" and "blissful" together, those words aren't from the same source, though at some point they started influencing each other. "Bless" apparently comes from a root meaning "blood" (seriously, is that not a little more surprising than blissful->silly?) Meanwhile "bliss" apparently comes from a root meaning "gentle" or "kind" -- same as the word "blithe", which today can describe behavior that's not gentle or kind at all.
Still, I think the word "silly" is unusual and interesting because it has a kind of slippery sense that can be hard to pin down or define without a lot of examples. If you're a native speaker of another language that has a word with the same meaning as "silly", I'd love to hear about it; in most languages I have any familiarity with the usual substitute is "stupid", but that doesn't capture the full meaning at all. (Among other things, the elements of gentleness and happiness - which do show up in the etymology of the English word - are missing. The element of fun is also missing, and that thought made me look up the etymology of "fun", which it turns out may also be related to foolishness. Check out also "fond", which apparently at one point meant "deranged, insane".)
Ancestors leave behind so many rabbit holes.
For anyone wondering whether to read the OP link -- it's a chapter from an introductory academic book on English linguistics. The first part of the chapter is a short introduction to some theories about semantics, and the second part, starting on p. 527, is an introduction to different kinds of processes by which word meanings can change.
posted by trig at 5:59 AM on June 24 [4 favorites]
holy Sussex, Phanx! [sussexexclusive]
how the hell are those things connected?!
blithe’s spirit, trig? suppose it’s not embodied in Noël Coward’s play after all. D. H. Lawrence is the origin of the term’s derogatory turn, per the OED: England My England [hathitrust]
girl, interestingly, is what Lawrence turns the term with; cf. the top link:
“For our purposes, we may divide the history of the study of semantics in linguistics, as well as in cognate disciplines such as philosophy and psychology, into roughly two stages. Traditionally, linguistic expressions have been said to be meaningful because they are connected to aspects of the world in some objective way. That is to say, the connections in question are either there, or they are not. Let us consider a simple example. If we describe the differences in meaning between the words man, woman, boy and girl in terms of the properties [+/- male] and [+/- adult], we can take a human being, and use those properties (often called semantic components [semanticscholar]) to decide objectively whether to refer to them as a man, woman, boy or girl. This is the basis of the so-called objectivist or truth-conditional theory of semantics.
“Among a multitude of other problems, one of the things that critics of the objectivist view of linguistic meaning have pointed out is that it would fail to explain how we are able to produce and — quite literally — make sense of examples such as the following: (1) I agree that maybe Robben is a girl… More suited to ballet
...
“In Middle English any young person could be called a girl; the restriction to female young persons is a development that occurred in the early Modern period.”
villain? hierarchy’s embodied in villenage: lordship, so villainous.
so, silly, so silly
to get the drift, you might need to shift gears. clutch? *clutches pearls* [reddit:] clutch is perils, overcome
tl;dr: clutch is clutch is clutch
posted by HearHere at 8:10 AM on June 24 [2 favorites]
how the hell are those things connected?!
blithe’s spirit, trig? suppose it’s not embodied in Noël Coward’s play after all. D. H. Lawrence is the origin of the term’s derogatory turn, per the OED: England My England [hathitrust]
girl, interestingly, is what Lawrence turns the term with; cf. the top link:
“For our purposes, we may divide the history of the study of semantics in linguistics, as well as in cognate disciplines such as philosophy and psychology, into roughly two stages. Traditionally, linguistic expressions have been said to be meaningful because they are connected to aspects of the world in some objective way. That is to say, the connections in question are either there, or they are not. Let us consider a simple example. If we describe the differences in meaning between the words man, woman, boy and girl in terms of the properties [+/- male] and [+/- adult], we can take a human being, and use those properties (often called semantic components [semanticscholar]) to decide objectively whether to refer to them as a man, woman, boy or girl. This is the basis of the so-called objectivist or truth-conditional theory of semantics.
“Among a multitude of other problems, one of the things that critics of the objectivist view of linguistic meaning have pointed out is that it would fail to explain how we are able to produce and — quite literally — make sense of examples such as the following: (1) I agree that maybe Robben is a girl… More suited to ballet
...
“In Middle English any young person could be called a girl; the restriction to female young persons is a development that occurred in the early Modern period.”
villain? hierarchy’s embodied in villenage: lordship, so villainous.
so, silly, so silly
to get the drift, you might need to shift gears. clutch? *clutches pearls* [reddit:] clutch is perils, overcome
tl;dr: clutch is clutch is clutch
posted by HearHere at 8:10 AM on June 24 [2 favorites]
When my brother and I went through German in high school, some of our English words got permanently replaced with their Deutsche counterparts, and silly/foolish was one of them -- in our vocabulary, it's läppisch!
[Another possible substitute, with emphasis on the childish, would be hincky but the definition understood for that one, even its spelling is slippery, with geographic variations.]
posted by Rash at 9:48 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]
[Another possible substitute, with emphasis on the childish, would be hincky but the definition understood for that one, even its spelling is slippery, with geographic variations.]
posted by Rash at 9:48 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]
I had to stop and check the etymology of very--I wish he'd said more about that evolution!
The fact that "very" made the jump from "true" to an intensifier may be what makes me finally accept that people are going to do the same thing to "literally".
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 11:23 AM on June 24 [5 favorites]
The fact that "very" made the jump from "true" to an intensifier may be what makes me finally accept that people are going to do the same thing to "literally".
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 11:23 AM on June 24 [5 favorites]
alternatives to literally I am trying to popularize: verily, figuratively, friggin'
posted by es_de_bah at 5:42 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
posted by es_de_bah at 5:42 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
figuratively, literally how is 'figuratively' an alternative?
posted by HearHere at 2:12 PM on June 25
posted by HearHere at 2:12 PM on June 25
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posted by HearHere at 4:36 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]