Nancy's Notes

It’s not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, but when I ran across this list of “Words that don’t mean what they used to,” I thought my readers might find this interesting, too. For example, way back in 1659, when the English clergyman Thomas Fuller used the word “unfriended” in a letter, it’s a safe bet that 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.

When we use the word “ambidextrous,” we are describing a person who is able to use both hands equally well. But when the word first began to be used in English in the mid-16th century, an “ambixter” was someone who took bribes from both sides in a legal action, and as such “ambidextrous” originally meant “duplicitous” or “two-faced.”

Using the word “cheap” to mean “low-cost” is a relatively recent invention that dates back about 500 years. That might not sound all that recent, but compare that to the fact that the earliest record of the word cheap in any context dates from the 9th century, when it originally meant something along the lines of simply “trade” or “bargaining” or “marketplace.” Likewise, to “cheapen” something originally meant to ask how much it costs.

Describing something as “livid” originally meant that it was a grey-blue color, like the color of slate. In this sense, it originally meant “bruised” or “discoloured” when it first began to be used in English in the early 1600s, and it wasn’t until the 1920s that it came to mean “furiously angry,” in the sense of all of the color draining from someone’s face.

“Naughty” people in the 1300s were those who had “naught” or nothing. It meant they were either needy or poor. A millennium later, the meaning shifted to “someone morally wicked” or bad or “someone who was worth nothing.” So the meaning changed from “having nothing” to “someone sexually provocative, promiscuous or licentious.” But in the late 17th century other meanings were added to naughty. These are gentler terms, often used to refer to children who display misbehavior, disobedience or mischievousness.

And on the flip side, “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 the 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.

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.

The word “volatile” comes from the Latin verb “volare,” meaning “to fly” (the same root as “volleyball, incidentally) and first described any creature capable of flight, in particular water birds like ducks, geese, and waders. From this original meaning came the chemical meaning of “volatile”—originally “liable to disperse in fumes”—which eventually gave rise to the figurative meaning of “fickle” or “changeable” in the mid-1600s.

Our language and usage of words is ever changing, evolving even though we don’t stop to think about it. I don’t know why, but it fascinates me; I hope it didn’t bore you.