correct meanings

It is astonishing how old some ideas are and how they linger on as an undercurrent of contemporary thought.  There are undoubtedly people who still believe the world is flat despite all evidence to the contrary.  In language there are assumptions that, though scorned by linguists, nevertheless survive in popular thinking.

One of these is the notion that a word has a ‘correct’ meaning and that any deviation from this right and proper meaning is to be resisted.  This idea is planted in the origin of the word etymology, which comes from the Greek etymon — literally, ‘true meaning’.

There is a discussion of this concept in Plato’s Cratylus.  The very reasonable Hermogenes puts forward the idea that the meanings which words have are arrived at by convention.  Cratylus states in opposition that words have a correct meaning which we should undertake to discover.

Socrates, called in to adjudicate, argues that everything has a character that is regarded as natural to it — a tree grows into a certain shape, a horse runs a certain way, a flute makes a certain noise.  So a word has a certain meaning.  And just as the gardener, the jockey and the flautist know what’s best for their domain, so the name-maker (who is also — surprise, surprise! — the lawgiver, the best of all mortals) knows what the right name for something is.

This is mind-boggling prescriptivism.  For a modern example of how it operates, take the word sophisticated.  In Greek philosophy the Sophists were, rightly or wrongly, discredited as using clever stratagems to win arguments without regard for the truth of the matter.  Sophistry still has bad connotations in English.  The OED gives this related sense of sophisticated — ‘falsified in a greater or less degree; not plain, honest, or straightforward’.  The last example of use is dated 1861.

But sophisticated went from meaning ‘contrived’ to meaning ‘removed from a simple and natural state’. This cultivation from a raw state, far from being seem as corrupting and devious, came to be seen as a good thing. So the word these days has a good connotation.

There are those who have learned the progression and who maintain that the earlier meaning of sophisticated is the right one.  This is one of those little crazes that affect the world of letters — the same people would not insist that nice (from the Latin nescius, literally ‘not knowing’) should mean ‘insane’, or that enamelled should mean ‘brightly coloured’.  It would be an interesting project to take all our words back to their origins and see if we could still talk to each other.

The real difficulty comes with words in a state of transition — words such as gay,  fulsome and infamous.  I still encounter people who want gay to mean ‘merry and light-hearted’ and are obstinately refusing to accept the other meaning it has acquired — ‘homosexual’.  If you use fulsome to mean ‘lavish’, some of your listeners will wince because they still hold that it means ‘excessive’.  If you describe a conquering hero as infamous, some of us will be outraged.

Some people may not have encountered the new meaning in their formative years and resist it when they do.  The familiar argument brought to bear in this situation is that the old meaning is the right one and the new meaning is a corruption.  This selection of ‘right meanings’ is ad hoc and opportunistic.  Remember the debate about misogyny?

Nevertheless, the argument is usually presented with conviction.  People really do believe that somewhere over the rainbow is the perfect land where words are matched up with the meanings that they were always meant to have.