Download Where Words Come From – Written Task

CULTURE & LANGUAGE
Where Words Come From –
How they are created and changed over time.
By Jemima Cooper
Friday 22 February 2013 12:30 GMT+9
Floccinaucinihilipilification. Noun. “The action or habit of estimating
something as worthless.” (from oxforddictionaries.com). The longest non-technical
word in the Oxford Dictionary closely followed by antidisestablishmentarianism.
Words have come into existence from all around the world from famous playwrights
and poets, to scientists and computer nerds. Many of the words we use in these
modern times can be traced back hundreds of years ago through their Latin roots,
yet some words that have become mainstream were only created in the last decade.
Take for example a recent addition to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘OMG’. This is one word
that you would not be very likely to find back in Shakespeare’s time when most
words were coming into existence, yet most people from all corners of the Earth
would be able to tell you the definition in a second! They would not however be able
to tell you what ‘alas’ means, even though it has been around for centuries, rather
than just a few decades. This article will look at words and how they are created and
changed over time.
Words are created with ease, you could make up a word right now whilst
reading this, yet the difference between your made word and thousands of others, is
no-one in the world knows the word you just made up, except perhaps your dog if
you just told him. One of the most prolific ‘creators of words’ was the playwright
William Shakespeare, and he had an obvious advantage when creating words, as his
new words has a lot of exposure from the audiences who watched his plays, so they
came into general practice very quickly. In his time, Shakespeare is estimated to
have generated over 17,000 words in his writings, as is discussed in the book ‘The
Mother Tongue’, by American author Bill Bryson, or in other words every tenth word
in his writing was original, and many of them are still in use today! Of course the
type of words that he composed, so to speak, were all mainly poetic and descriptive
words, and were more focused on passion and the expression of emotion, rather
than the technological words being generated nowadays in this electronic era.
Words are not all established to articulate emotions though, as they can be
created for the purpose of expressing an experience. Shakespeare himself made up
the word brittle to describe the feeling that he had when touching a certain object.
Another example of a word being spawned to signify an experience is the now
slightly old-fashioned, yet wonderful word: codswallop. The word codswallop was
coined sometime in the 1950s to 1960s and it came about due to a terrible beverage.
There was a drink produced in England that was called ‘Codswallop’ and it tasted so
bad that people began to use it as a synonym for the words rubbish and terrible. For
example if someone said to you “What you just said is a load of codswallop!” they
would be using codswallop to mean that what you just said was a load of rubbish or
nonsense. Not all words come into existence so simply or in such a manner, but
there are many words which have come from an obscure origin.
Once words are generated, they do not always stay the same over time. Their
meanings can become changed and sometimes there can even be a complete
reversal of the meaning for no apparent reason! An example some of these words is
described in The Mother Tongue. Two quite astonishing transformations whereby
the words had entirely changed in their connotations were the words ‘counterfeit’
and ‘brave’. Counterfeit now refers to a fake copy of an authentic good, like the fake
Gucci bags they sell in China, or fake currency, but in the past it actually meant a
legitimate copy. Brave also changed entirely, as previously it alluded to a person
who was cowardly, and now it describes a person who is valiant and not at all
cowardly! These two examples show a very clear change in definition, but not all
words changed so concretely from one meaning to another. An example of this is the
word ‘nice’. Nice was first noted in 1290, and was used with the connotation of
stupid and foolish, but changed greatly over the next 500 years though. “Seventyfive years later (after 1290) Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton.
Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant,
strange, slothful, dainty, and by 1769 – pleasant and agreeable,” as is written in Bill
Bryson’s The Mother Tongue. This just goes to show how much a word can change
over a short period of time (in relation to how long language has been around).
In conclusion then, we manage to create, change, and destroy words, but
even the words that are no longer in use in our current era, all have an origin, and a
story behind them. Time and people add meanings to words and take them away.
New technology leads to the creation of new words, unlike the poetic times of
Shakespeare, where words were formed from emotions almost exclusively. One
thing remains constant though, language, and words in particular, have all come
from some place and some time, and they have an unimaginably large presence.
People’s floccinaucinihilipilification of words is apparent in this day and age, and it’s
a shame for: “Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care, for people will
hear them and be influence by them for good or evil.” – Siddhartha Gotoma or
Buddha (563-483 B.C).
Bibliography
Bryson, B. (1990). The Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way. New York:
Harper Perennial.
floccinaucinihilipilification. (2013). Retrieved February 20, 2013, from Oxford
Dictionaries:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/floccinaucinihilipilification?q=Flo
ccinaucinihilipilification
Rasmussen, C. (2013). Quotes of Famous and Wise People on the Power of Words.
Retrieved February 21, 2013, from Power of Words:
http://www.powerofwords.org/resouces/quotes-of-famous-and-wise-people-onthe-power-of-words/