This week, Susie Dent has found ten of her favourite examples of semantic bleaching. ‘What is semantic bleaching?’, we hear you ask. Well, keep reading and find out.
The thing about language is that many of its greatest features go by quite unappetizing names. Collective nouns may sound like a snoozefest, but they occupy a category that immediately kickstarts a conversation. As for the fizzing databases that lexicographers study to draft dictionary entries, consisting of as many grabs from current language that they can muster – song lyrics, novels, text exchanges, news feeds, poetry, and more – these are known as ‘corpora’, not exactly something to get the pulse racing.
There is another category that – to my eyes at least – is utterly fascinating, yet which goes by the crumbly name of ‘semantic bleaching’. Essentially this is a linguistic phenomenon involving a dramatic loss in a word’s intensity, so that it loses its original mojo, or at least shifts it to a lower level. Some examples are quite awesome, though admittedly not in that word’s original sense, which involved deep feelings of awe, reverence, or terror. Ultimately (there’s another: I don’t mean ‘at the very end’), there are hundreds of bleaches to choose from, but here are ten of the best.
1. Thing
The thing is, ‘thing’ that can mean all things to all people, yet the thing of the past was something special indeed. in Old English, a þing was a meeting or assembly, where important matters were brought to a community’s attention. The supreme national parliament of Iceland, to this day, is called the ‘Althing’ (‘general meeting’). Over time, however, ‘thing’ moved from a significant gathering to a matter or concern that was brought in front of an assembly or court, before landing on its more general modern senses of, well, just about anything.
2. Maudlin
Anyone described as ‘maudlin’ today is feeling melancholy, with perhaps a bit of self-pity thrown in. In its earliest forms, the adjective was a tribute to Mary Magdalene, the repentant sinner whose forgiveness by Jesus is recounted in the Bible. In paintings she is frequently depicted as weeping, hence the use of ‘maudlin’ (Magdalene was often pronounced with a silent ‘g’) to mean sentimentally tearful.
3. Disastrous
While the word ‘disaster’ can still pack a punch despite being used for any mildy unfortunate incident as well as a true calamity, it was once associated with heavenly influence. At its heart is the Latin aster, ‘star’, since any great misfortune was thought to be caused by an unlucky alignment of the constellations, hence Romeo and Juliet being ‘star-cross’d lovers’.
4. Parting shot
A parting shot usually involves some final remark or witticism lobbed into a situation as we are leaving it. In its earliest days, however, it was once both literal and potentially lethal. For it began as a ‘Parthian shot’, so named because of a battle trick used by the horsemen from the ancient kingdom of Parthia, in present-day Iran. The resourceful fighters would pretend to flee by galloping away, only to turn in their saddles and shoot their arrows backwards, taking the enemy by complete surprise.
5. Upsadaisy
We have been saying this to soften the blow of our children’s falls for over two hundred years. In its original form, however, the expression looked very different, and it had nothing to do with flowers. ‘Alack the day’! was a common exclamation of lament over some misfortune, akin to ‘Woe is me!’. Over time, we not only gave the phrase a flowery embellishment, but also softened its edges so that ‘upsadaisy’ today involves zero hint of brow-mopping indulgence.
6. Gone for a Burton
If something has gone for a Burton it is irredeemably lost. During the Second World War, the expression was applied to fighter pilots who crashed into the ocean, a probable nod to Burton’s Ale, produced in Burton upon Trent, with the darkly humorous suggestion that the pilots had ‘gone into the drink’.
7. Moot point
Like ‘thing’, ‘moot’ was used in Old English for any meeting or assembly. It eventually took on a specific meaning of a place where law students could argue imaginary cases as a form of training. A discussion of this kind was known as a moot, which eventually also gave us a ‘moot point’ – strictly speaking one that is subject to debate, or of little purpose. These days, this regularly gets mangled to a ‘mute point’.
Read More: Susie Dent’s Top Tens: 10 ‘Americanisms’ that aren’t actually American
8. Geek
Today’s geeks, thankfully, are usually considered cool thanks to their passion and expertise. In their earliest days, however, you would have found them performing at freak shows, where they would execute bizarre acts such as biting the heads of live snakes. This association with extreme behaviour pushed the word into a descriptor of anyone considered obsessive.
9. Bluetooth
Where would we be without the connectivity of Bluetooth? You’d expect this to have highly modern origins given it is a fairly recent technology, yet its name references events that took place over a millennium ago. In the 10th century, Scandinavia was ruled over by King Harald Gormsson, who apparently had one conspicuously dead and bluish tooth and was therefore widely known as Harald Blåtand, or Bluetooth. Harald is credited in history with uniting Denmark and Norway, which made his name a fitting choice for a technology that unifies our devices and the telecommunications and computing industries. The Bluetooth logo is a merger of the runes representing an H and a B, for Harald’s name.
10. Literally…
The crowning example of semantic bleaching this century is surely the demise (or rise, depending on your point of view) of the word ‘literally’. For where it once meant ‘in actual fact’, it is now freely used as an intensifier (‘I literally bit his head off’), and is recognised in today’s dictionaries as such. I mean, you can literally say any old thing these days, don’t you think?
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