A word that has shown similar semantic degeneration to gaudy is tawdry. This act of sacrifice and her subsequent holiness prompted others to revere her as a saint. Legend has it that she died of a disease of the throat, a disease that she regarded as judgment upon the vanity of her youth, when she loved to wear beautiful necklaces in court.
An annual fair was held in her memory each October 17th, and at the fair were sold cheap souvenirs, including a neck lace called St. Albans in Hertfordshire is locally pronounced as [talbans] by some. As a result of this process, by the s, the necklaces were called tawdry laces.
Silly are the goddy tawdry maudlin. Audrey, who has had his name spawn many new words. Of course, this is Jesus Christ, whose name has become an oath. Because swearing is considered inappropriate in polite society, people slightly changed the sound of the invective. Damn it! These euphemistic changes are called minced oaths. The word paternoster also came to mean any word-formula spoken as a prayer or magic spell.
Since the Paternoster was in Latin, and in Medieval times Latin was no longer the native language of any of the reciters, the prayer was often recited quickly and with little regard for the sense of the words. Because of this, paternoster came to mean meaningless chatter, words empty of meaning — this sense of the word gave rise to the form patter. The word pitter-patter , though used by Suffield in his poem, is actually etymologically unrelated to the word patter with this meaning.
Patter has the sense of meaningless words, and sharp words can become rounded and dull. But although Suffield laments that no word is still the Word [of God], some words do assume a dignity they had not before possessed. Two words that have undergone amelioration are priest and prester. The different forms represent borrowings made at different times, with priest being the oldest English form, followed by prester , followed by the learned borrowing of presbyter. Over time, the word has been used of not just any head of household but of princes and nobility; this sense was extended to include the Prince of Light, God.
For Suffield, this extension of lord makes a fitting appellation for Christ, given that Christ was the keeper of the bread of communion. The word lord , which ends the poem, stands in start contrast to the demeaning phrase christgeewhiz used earlier in the poem as an example of pejoration.
By ending the poem with the word lord , Suffield offers a hope for redemption for all words. In fact, semantic drift is as natural as continental drift and almost as inexorable.
The meanings of words change, sometimes for the worse, but sometimes providing useful distinctions. Some words, like lord , are even inspired. As the above discussion shows, many people view semantic change with strong emotions.
Some, like Suffield, may even perceive it as an almost diabolical force. This next section will attempt to provide a more clinical overview of how words change meanings. Try this: flip through the dictionary and look at random for a word with four or more meanings, preferably a word you think you know.
Chances are you will find that it has an unlikely hodge-podge of meanings, at least one of which will surprise you. The last sense makes me want to write a short story, The Daughter of Fat Man , in which I could use the word daughter in at least three of its senses. How does a word come to have such broad, often very different, meanings? Also known as extension, generalization is the use of a word in a broader realm of meaning than it originally possessed, often referring to all items in a class, rather than one specific item.
In the process, the word place displaced! When my son Alexander was two, he used the word oinju from orange juice to refer to any type of juice, including grape juice and apple juice; wawa from water referred to water and hoses, among other things. The opposite of generalization, specialization is the narrowing of a word to refer to what previously would have been but one example of what it referred to.
When developing your model language, it is meet to leave compounds untouched, even if one of their morphemes has undergone specialization or any other meaning change. All other semantic change can be discussed in either terms of generalization or specialization. The following diagram shows different subtypes of meaning change. A shift in meaning results from the subsequent action of generalization and specialization over time: a word that has extended into a new area then undergoes narrowing to exclude its original meaning.
Metonymy is a figure of speech where one word is substituted for a related word; the relationship might be that of cause and effect, container and contained, part and whole. Grace Murray Hopper, the late Admiral and computer pioneer, told a story of an early computer that kept calculating incorrectly. That moth was the first of its kind to achieve immortality. The use of bug to refer to an error in computer logic was a metaphorical extension that became so popular that it is now part of the regular meaning of bug.
The computer industry has a host of words whose meaning has been extended through such metaphors, including mouse for that now ubiquitous computer input device so named because the cord connecting it to the computer made it resemble that cutest of rodents. Metaphorical extension is the extension of meaning in a new direction through popular adoption of an originally metaphorical meaning.
The crane at a construction site was given its name by comparison to the long-necked bird of the same name. Metaphorical extension is almost a natural process undergone by every word. Metaphor certainly also plays a big part in changing how we begin to view words differently and invent other uses for them. So this linguistic fashion of the ladies plays a part in how we get the different intensifiers we all use today, in standard language as well as in slang.
Oddly, modern intensifiers can often be bad words, made frightfully, terribly, horribly, awfully good. How did this trend of bad words becoming good intensifiers come to be? Curiously, bad words can often develop good meanings amelioration and vice versa pejoration.
The use of certain intensifiers is a major signal of group identification. Intensifiers are constantly changing. Privacy Policy Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message. But familiarity breeds contempt. As these strong words are used in weaker contexts, or more widely used outside of the group in standard language, they become less useful as an indicator of the group.
The more familiar the words, the less expressively emphatic they are, and new styles and trends need to be found. Not only do these new words have to be strong, emphatic, and extreme, they have to be original enough and attention grabbing, perhaps even shocking, as words lose their potency. In the end, we all have our linguistic preferences, which is perfectly valid as long as we understand it comes down to personal taste.
If we only consider correct the strict and sterile rules laid out by guardians of linguistic taste, those gatekeepers who tidy up the language of everyone except those already notable enough to break the rules, we may just miss out on the richness, versatility, and inventive fun of the language of the people.
Even bad words have a chance to be good. JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. Lingua Obscura. Definition In linguistics , amelioration is the upgrading or elevation of a word's meaning , as when a word with a negative sense develops a positive one. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Nordquist, Richard. Amelioration word meanings. Definition and Examples of Dysphemisms in English. The Power of Connotations: Definition and Examples.
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