It’s just that words move. Compact to Shakespeare meant “constructed.” By implication, something well constructed is packed well, set nice and tight, and something with that quality often takes up less space than it could otherwise. Those realities have ooched compact away from what someone four hundred years ago could have imagined. Generous, meanwhile, meant noble, of all things. This explains why Edmund would note his mind as “generous” in response to being dismissed as low-class. In a 1607 “historie of four-footed beastes,”* on said beastes, the author decries that which “weakeneth their bodies, and dulleth in them all generosity,” which clearly couldn’t have meant that the animals were less likely to donate to charity. Generosity here meant noble quality, majesty. To the extent that nobility was associated with providing for a community, or at least having the wherewithal to do so, our modern sense of generous was a later development, via implication from the one that Shakespeare meant. And madam, of course, could still refer to women outside the oldest profession, as we see in the term of address “Madam” holding on by a thread today.
“If this letter speed / and my invention thrive, Edmund the base / shall top th’ legitimate!”—definitely one can get used to speed meaning “to hurry,” as we can still use the word that way. But then comes another one of those patches of incomprehension that we are taught to consider lapses in our poetic sensibility *: invention. Edmund hasn’t mentioned fashioning a lightbulb or a steam engine. By invention, he meant “plan.” It makes sense: for invention to refer only to handy objects created in the basement and registered for patent is actually quite a narrowing of what invention could mean, and in fact once did mean. Drift happens—the words were at different places when Shakespeare was writing.
Way back in 1898, the Shakespearean scholar Mark H. Liddell argued in the Atlantic Monthly that these false friends in Shakespeare were such an impediment to understanding his language delivered live that it was time to include instruction in Elizabethan English in America’s national secondary school curriculum. Of course, given the dazzling array of problems with public education in America, few could be under any impression that this could ever happen today or in any kind of foreseeable future. As such, others have argued that after four hundred years, because of normal processes of change, Shakespeare’s language has become different enough from ours that the time has come to offer new versions of the plays translated into today’s English.
Yes, I have been one of those people, and have experienced resistance (and even dribbles of vitriol) in response. However, most of this resistance has been based on the idea that the difference between our language and Shakespeare’s is only one of poetry, density, or elevation. The reason Shakespeare’s prose sounds so “poetic” is partly because it is. But it is also partly for the more mundane reason that his language is now, to a larger extent than we might prefer to know, inaccessible to us without careful study on the page.
Many assume that the translation I refer to would have to be into slang. I suspect this is because it can be so hard to perceive that the very meanings of even the most mundane of words have often changed so much—if one thinks the difficulty of the language is merely a matter of “poetry,” then it’s easy to think that no translation in neutral current English could be at issue, and hence the notion of “Yo, whaddup, Calpurnia?” as a serious literary suggestion.
But I, for one, intend no such thing. The translations could easily be better termed adjustments. Here is Macbeth planning to kill Duncan:
Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off.
English, yes—but let’s pause for a bit: just how does one “bear one’s faculties” or be “clear” in one’s office? “Taking-off”—where to? And remember, this is about hearing these lines spoken live. What follows is the passage in Conrad Spoke’s translation, changing only those words that can no longer speak to us (about 10 percent, according to the linguist David Crystal and his son, the actor Ben Crystal, who have advised the Globe Theatre in London on the original pronunciation of Shakespeare’s plays):
Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne authority so meek, hath been
So pure in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his knocking-off.
This is hardly a desecration. The language is still challenging and even beautiful, especially since most of it is the original. The difference is simply that words that today only a scholar can hear live and understand have been replaced with ones that all educated people can hear with meaning. The translation is not “pure Shakespeare,” but there is an argument that the trade-off is worth it: quite simply, authority and knocking-off allow us to understand what the man is saying.*
Neither I nor anyone else wants to see the original plays withdrawn from circulation. However, a world where the usual experience of a Shakespeare play outside universities was in today’s English would be one where, quite simply, more people were capable of truly understanding and enjoying the Bard’s work rather than genuflecting to it. Seeing Shakespeare shouldn’t be like eating your vegetables—even tasty vegetables. Nor is it much more inspiring for us to treat Shakespeare as a kind of verbal wallpaper or scent that we sit back and allow to “wash over” us. I highly suspect Shakespeare himself, hearing so many today espousing this approach to his words, would have been at best bemused and at worst disappointed. Shakespeare translated into today’s English wouldn’t be exactly Shakespeare, no. But given a choice between Shakespeare as an elite taste and Shakespeare engaged the way Russians engage Chekhov and Americans engage Scorsese films and Arrested Development, some may judge Shakespeare that isn’t always exactly what Shakespeare wrote as less than a tragedy.
I have been pleased to see that since the 1990s, when I first laid down my own case for the translation of Shakespeare, the notion seems to have gained a certain amount of traction. Mr. Spoke, as well as Kent Richmond of California State University, Long Beach, have actually executed translated versions of the plays, and as I write, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned modern translations of the entire corpus. To the extent that the approach gathers steam, many will certainly decry it as desecration, a symptom of the dumbing down of American society. However, others will feel that translating Shakespeare is a pragmatic response to the fact that language always changes, and that when it comes to Shakespeare, quite simply, it’s been a while.
In the Present: “What’s the Ask?” over “What’s the Request?”
To understand that words are always moving along also helps us understand things happening in the language today. In America, an interesting novelty especially popular among young corporate types is the use of basic verbs as nouns, as in “What’s the ask?” about business transactions, “Is there a solve?” instead of “Is there a solution?,” and “Epic fail.” The last has spread far beyond the cubicle realm, and “I know that feel” (instead of “I know how that feels” or “I know that feeling”) is even associated with “bros” rather than Dilberts.
A linguist’s first observation must be that English speakers have been transforming verbs into nouns this way for a good thousand years. English is low on endings that show what part of speech a word is; in French the -er in parler shows that it is a verb and in Spanish the -ar in hablar shows the same thing, but in English, nothing about the word talk shows that it is a verb. This means that it’s easy to use English verbs as nouns—they don’t seem as out of place in the role as would a French or Spanish verb, with its verbal ending hanging out inconveniently. Those who assail turning verbs into nouns as inappropriate may not realize that they should also, to be consistent, disapprove of sentences like “She had a funny walk,” “He has a scratch next to his eye,” and “They simply had t
oo much work.” Walk, scratch, and work all started as verbs.
Yet one might still feel that “What’s the ask?” is different, in that the word request already exists. Why “Epic fail” when we have failure, or “What’s the solve?” when we have solution? However, today’s nouns from verbs are not substitutes for older nouns; they are new words entirely. This is because the older words, as words, have always been drifting in their meanings, and therefore no longer mean exactly what their “vanilla” definition suggests.
Solution, for instance, technically means “a solving.” However, the word has, in its journey as a normal word, taken on certain implications. Solution brings to mind, for one, math, and overall has an air of the schoolroom about it, as in solutions to science class homework. Those unspoken associations are not what the modern adult in the flinty, competitive atmosphere of a business meeting means. Subconsciously that person reaches for a word that really does mean, in clean fashion, a “solving.” What handier way is there to do this than using solve itself? But this means that a solve and a solution are subtly different things, in terms of how the words feel in an intimate way to native speakers.
In the same way, a failure and a fail are not the same thing. Failure is not, in terms of how it is used in actual speech, simply the act of failing. It once was, but over time it has taken on a whiff of personal condemnation. Failure suggests, most readily, a rather large-scale, tragic kind of failing; one thinks of an assessment of a person’s entire career, marriage, or life, of a head hung low, and the plays of Arthur Miller. “Epic failure!” then, is a little mean. In modern English, the actual word for simply “a failing,” with no ominous hint of therapy sessions or a gun going off offstage, is “a fail.” It’s certainly handier for people playing video games or rating one another’s sales volume.
It’s no surprise that men are best known for “I know that feel.” Feeling has associations with vulnerability, for one. Plus, the word feeling is probably most spontaneously associated with the idiom “That hurt my feelings,” which is these days, for better or worse, often associated with a certain triviality or tinniness. Feel lends a way to use the same feel root without the distracting associations. Call it “bro’ly love,” also extendable to other younger people wary of excess sentiment (i.e., seeking the “cool”—and note that cool and coolness, too, have different meanings).
In the Future: Making Peace with the Euphemism Treadmill
When we understand that words inevitably drift in their meanings, then we know why terminology fashioned for euphemistic reasons tends to require constant replacement. What begins as a willfully objective designation is quickly associated in the mind with the phenomenon it refers to, complete with the less savory resonances thereof. As a result, that term comes to have a different meaning than what was intended. In response, a new, faceless term is created—which naturally itself becomes accreted with the same associations and must in time yield to a new term.
It’s easy to see some kind of shell game going on, but really, it’s just words behaving the way they always have and always will. In a distant day long ago, when a family survived on money from the government, it was popularly called home relief, a neutral and benevolent term. However, anyone old enough to have known that term will have to work to imagine home relief in its “dictionary” meaning, because quickly home relief took on connotations associated with uncomplimentary assumptions about the poor. Welfare was thought to be a less pejorative term and became the preferred usage in the 1960s. Again, however, these days it can be sobering to imagine that the word welfare refers technically to, simply, being okay. Welfare became rusted with so many associations amid the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s that, since then, cash assistance has been making new strides into the language as yet another attempt to refer to, well, home relief without setting off alarms.
Note that if you are too young to have known the time when home relief was a common term, today it sounds quite handy as a replacement for welfare. Perhaps it should be recycled as the next term of art when cash assistance takes on abusive tones and becomes dispreferred. We can be quite sure it will—for the same reason that Shakespeare meant “knowledge” by wit, and epic failure would not mean the same thing as epic fail. All these things are of a piece.
In the same way, we must expect that designations for various groups will turn over regularly: the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has perfectly titled this “the euphemism treadmill.” Long ago, crippled was thought a humane way to describe a person—it had the ring, roughly, that hindered would today. However, once it became associated with the kind of ridicule tragically common among members of our species, handicapped was thought to be a kinder term—less loaded, it sounded like a title rather than a slur. But while words change, people often don’t—naturally, after a while, handicapped seemed as smudged by realities as crippled had. Hence: disabled, which is now getting old, as in having taken on many of the same negative associations as crippled and handicapped. Of late, some prefer differently abled, which is fine in itself. Yet all should know that in roughly a generation’s time, even that term will carry the very associations it is designed to rise above, just as special needs now does. Note the effort now required to imagine how objective and inclusive even special needs was fashioned to be.
And here’s the rub: since words cannot help drifting in their meanings, we need not worry that people are deliberately keeping us off guard or are given to indecision. The euphemism treadmill must be accepted as an inevitable and unexceptionable result of what a word is: not only a bundle of sounds linked to a meaning, but also one that naturally piles up with implications over time because it is used by human beings living lives. Since words can’t sit still, and the implications they attract will sometimes be unpleasant, civility will require changing some of them regularly, like underwear.
But That Isn’t What It’s Supposed to Mean!
A word is a thing on the move. This means wrapping our heads around something that cannot feel right at first, but that simple logic requires us to accept. To wit, any claim that people in general are using a word “erroneously” is illogical. Of course if the issue is just one person using a word in an unprecedented way, then we might classify it as a mistake. A language is a contract under which there is general, although unconscious, agreement as to where words are moving. To use a word in a fashion that impedes communication with others is therefore a foul. However, mistakes of that kind will usually come from children or foreigners. If a significant proportion of the people speaking a language are using a word in a way that dictionaries tend not to mention, it means that the word is moving—as we would expect, since words always do.
A quick example: Decimate, it is true, first meant killing one in ten of an army’s men as a postvictory punishment. The source was the Latin word for ten, such that the truly original meaning may actually have been “tithe,” as in a tax of 10 percent of one’s earnings. Either way, decimate originally had a very particular meaning, the knowledge of which pleases a person who knows Latin.
This, however, is strictly a historical matter. There are those given to treating it as “wrong” for someone to say, “A virus decimated the ladybug population and after a few years there were none to be found.” They complain that the word should not be used to mean general destruction, but only the subtraction of precisely a tenth. That today destruction is pretty much the only usage of decimate is, according to this complaint, beside the point. Majority does not entail truth, after all: there is a general waywardness afoot, with the flock losing touch with that real meaning of “to subtract by a tenth.” H. W. Fowler’s doughty old A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, cherished over generations as authoritative, intoned that sentences like A single frosty night decimated the currants by as much as 80 percent “must be avoided.”
Okay—but only if you want to avoid using merry to mean “jolly” and will be okay with talking about someone who, after slimming down on a diet, after a while red
uced back up to his former weight. What’s the difference between then and now, except that the older things happened when nobody was complaining? Decimate moved—it broadened from meaning “to shave off by a tenth” to referring to more general destruction. Part of the reason, one suspects, is that since ancient times, with their rather barbaric attitudes toward human life, existence offers relatively little need for the concept of reducing something by specifically a tenth: “Oh, sweetie, make sure to decimate the cake so that Maude can have her slice before the other nine of us!”
So, one answer to the observation “But wasn’t it nice to have a way to express that concept?” is: not really, and anyone who wants one anyway has it at the ready. One can say “reduce by a tenth.” Hopefully one will do so in comfort with the knowledge that reduce once had a different meaning—while comfort was once “to make strong,” and strong once meant “narrow”!
It’s always a safe bet that a word will not be tomorrow what it is today. In fact, sometimes words don’t just change their meaning—they lose their independence and become parts of brand-new words entirely.
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When Words Stop Being Words
Where Does Grammar Come From?
There was a time when to name a girl Amber was like naming her Isabella or Chloe today. It had a hint of novelty and panache, rather than the tinnier air it has taken on since. Starting in the late 1940s, the name Amber was a novelty because of a best-selling novel, which a prim lady on a park bench is reading in a Sylvester and Tweety cartoon of the era. The woman is repeatedly shocked by what she is reading (titled just Amber in the cartoon, but audiences would have gotten the reference), in line with Forever Amber’s notoriety as a “dirty” book. The novel made the name Amber fashionable. There’s a reason there was no such thing as a flapper, Gilded Age matron, or early First Lady named Amber.
Words on the Move Page 8