The Unexpected Evolution of Language (2 page)

Men who accost the women in their lives by leaving the toilet seat up, farting at will, and believing that picking up after themselves is “women’s work” will meet their match if the “little woman” turns into an agitatrix. This rarely used word means “female agitator.” She’s the type who won’t accept Neanderthal behavior from her mate. She’ll push right back.

Whenever you see “trix” at the end of a word, it denotes the “feminine” version of a better-known word. Here are some others you’ve probably never heard:

• administratrix: female administrator
  
• creatrix: female creator
  
• fornicatrix: female fornicator
  
• imitatrix: female imitator
  
• janitrix: female janitor
  
• oratrix: female orator
  
• victrix: female conqueror (female form of victor)
  

acorn

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
generic nut

NEW DEFINITION:
“nut” from an oak tree

If you want to say somebody’s crazy, you might say he’s “nuts.” Once upon a time, you could simply have said he was an “acorn.” Prior to the sixteenth century, “acorn” was generic for nut.

In Old English, “acorn” had a slightly different spelling, and its roots contained a word meaning “fruit.” Just as people once called pinecones pineapples (see entry for “pineapple”) because they are the “fruit” of a pine tree, folks called nuts “fruits” since they are the “fruit” of various trees.

From the Old English and well into the Middle English period of our language, an “acorn” was the generic word given to the “fruits” of the forest trees, from which farm animals gained sustenance.

By the sixteenth century, “acorn” came to be associated exclusively with the oak tree because the mighty oak was the king of feeding swine. It’s comparable to the way some modern trademarks have become synonyms for various products. For example, Band-Aid is a generic term for an adhesive bandage and Kleenex refers to facial tissue.

The various root spellings of “acorn” were “akarn” or “akram,” but since the Old English word for “oak” was “ac” and the object was used like “corn” to feed the animals, the spelling of the word shifted to the present-day “acorn.”

acquit

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
to pay off a debt

NEW DEFINITION:
to declare innocent or not guilty in a court of law

Long before “acquit” became part of an oh-so-ripe-for-punning piece of courtroom doggerel, it had a different, though related, meaning.

In the early thirteenth century, “acquit” meant to satisfy a debt or claim. For example, let’s say your neighbor loaned you twenty-five guinea fowl, and you repaid him a year later with thirty-five geese. You had “acquitted” your debt. The word carried with it the sense that something had been done. You had to actively do something to cause the debt in the first place, then do something to pay it off.

By the late fourteenth century, “acquit” began to suggest that no debt or claim rightfully existed to begin with. People associated it with wiping out a debt or claim, so they emphasized the fact that the debt was gone. By the seventeenth century, the word was dragged into the courts in the form of “acquitted,” which meant that, though you had been accused of bearing responsibility for some action or debt, a jury found that you were not, in fact, responsible for it.

The late defense attorney Johnnie Cochran breathed new life into this stale legal term by making it part of an immortal couplet during the O. J. Simpson murder trial: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

acre

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
open, tillable land

NEW DEFINITION:
a unit of measure equal to 43,560 square feet

Originally, an acre meant open space that a team of yoked oxen could till in one day. For several hundred years, an acre had no specific measurement. Thus, the Old English word “acre” meant almost any expanse of arable land.

Yet some oxen clearly covered more land than others. As time went on, and people began to want ownership quantified, the acre measurement became more standardized. By the tail end of the Middle Ages, an acre was equal to about 40 rods × 4 rods (a rod measuring 16.5 feet). You do the math.

By the time people started homesteading in the western United States, an acre was equal to its current measure of 43,560 feet, which is just a little smaller than a football field. Who knows what people of old would have thought of today’s “zero-lot-line” homes.

God’s Acre

To this day, some church graveyards are referred to as “God’s acre” because they are “sown” with the bodies of believers. The expression is a modern embodiment of “acre’s” original meaning, “field,” and has nothing to do with the modern measurement.

actual

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
active

NEW DEFINITION:
real; existing in fact

“Actual” was once a vital, action-packed word. It was a mover and shaker. Over time, thanks to the French language, it became a couch potato.

Originally, “actual” was to acts as “factual” is to facts or “natural” is to nature. Something factual has to do with facts, and something natural has at least a tenuous relationship with nature. Something actual was something active.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, you might have spoken of an “actual” plow horse, meaning one used on a regular basis. Or you might have had an “actual,” on-the-side relationship with thy neighbor’s wife, which meant you were, um, visiting her regularly.

English is a mutt, however, so before long, an old French word (“les actualités”) with a similar construction got intermingled with “actual.” The French word meant “news”—as in, the report of a fact. This commingling is the likely reason “actual” stopped being active and became passive.

Thus, something actual now means something already accomplished, something real, something factual that exists. It’s “old news.”

adamant

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
mythical, unbreakable stone

NEW DEFINITION:
dogged in maintaining a position

Scientists of the Middle Ages believed in a mythical mineral that was unbreakable. They called it adamant. If found, they believed it would have been useful for any number of purposes: defense, construction, prisons, etc.

Various minerals and hard materials were called “adamant” in medieval times, including white sapphires, magnets, and steel. Ultimately, most associated the mythical adamant with real diamonds.

Once the identity of adamant was settled, people began to use the word metaphorically. As a noun, “adamant” meant an unbreakable stone, so when people transformed it into an adjective, “adamant” meant hard, unbreakable, unconquerable, and invincible. Thus, the adjectival form of “adamant” has had a wider scope than the noun form.

By the nineteenth century, “adamant” began to take on a mostly negative connotation. Pundits and wags commonly referred to people whose ideas—some might say whose heads—were hard and unbreakable as being “adamant.”

To this day, “adamant’s” synonyms are a stubborn bunch, including such hardheaded words as: headstrong, truculent, mulish, tenacious, inflexible, obstinate, and recalcitrant.

addict

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
to deliver over to, as a slave (verb)

NEW DEFINITION:
one who is dependent on narcotics; one who is dependent on anything (noun)

When you hear the word “addict,” you are likely to think of B-list celebrities who, once again, are taking up residence for “exhaustion” in some tony rehab center. But “addict” didn’t become associated with narcotics—nor did it become a noun—until the dawn of the twentieth century.

For more than 2,000 years, “addict” was a verb with many dark meanings: to sacrifice (as in, on an altar, not as in doing something selfless for others), sell out, betray, give over. Most definitions suggested slavery or enslavement in some way. You would “addict”—or sell into slavery—someone whom you bested in battle, for example.

Thus, the path from ancient “addict” to modern “addict” traces a smooth metaphorical groove. To “addict” was to enslave someone. An addict is someone enslaved to narcotics. After that connection was made around 1900, the newly minted noun eventually went on to describe people “enslaved” to everything from pornography to television to video games.

addle

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
urine; filth

NEW DEFINITION:
to confuse; mix up

What does “addle” have to do with rotten eggs? Quite a bit, actually.

The Old English word from which “addle” derives meant urine or liquid filth. Eew, gross. In the 1100s, you might have walked into your house and stepped in addle left by your dog or your small child.

By the thirteenth century, a connection was made between liquid filth and rotten eggs, likely because both are gross things that smell bad. A common expression of the day was “addle egg,” which meant hen fruit (eggs) that had become putrid. Folks in medieval times didn’t exactly follow today’s food pyramid religiously, but even they knew to avoid addled eggs.

By the 1600s, “addle” changed meaning and parts of speech. The noun became an adjective describing anything putrid, not just eggs. Then, the word broadened even more. First, it designated something useless, which makes sense. Urine is a waste product, after all.

Finally, thanks in part to seventeenth-century poet and critic John Dryden, “addle” began to take on its modern meaning of “confuse” or, more specifically, the adjectival form of the word, “addled,” which means confused or mixed-up.

Dryden is credited with coining the expression “addlepated,” which he intended to mean, “a head filled with unsound, mixed-up, putrid ideas.”

aftermath

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
second growth of grass, after the first growth has been harvested

NEW DEFINITION:
that which follows; often associated with disasters

Originally, in the sixteenth century, “aftermath” was farmer jargon for a second growth of grass. The first crop, harvested for feed and grain or hay, was gone. If the season stretched into the fall, a second growth of grass popped up. Thus it was “after” the “math,” which was an updated version of an Old English word for “mowing.”

By the seventeenth century, “aftermath” extended metaphorically to mean “that which follows,” just as the original meaning described the patch of grass that sprang up after the first had been harvested. It was a neutral word and technically still is, though its association with man-made and natural-made disasters (see entry for “disaster”) has given it a seamy reputation.

“Aftermath” is one of those words that, today, has a negative connotation because it’s so often used by reporters to describe the chaos following a disaster. For example, Jane Smith of Channel 2 News will explain how, “The aftermath of the hurricane left dozens dead and caused millions of dollars of damage.” By contrast, you don’t usually hear about the “aftermath” of a delightful picnic or an enjoyable day in the country.

The Aftermath of Discordianism