Back in 2010 I posted about the death of Sol Steinmetz, rabbi and etymologist; now a longtime LH reader has sent me a copy of his 2008 book Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, and it’s a pure delight. In the introduction, he says:
Changes in meanings make language flexible and malleable. But how do words take on new meanings? The study of meanings and the changes of meaning that words undergo is called semantics (from Greek sēmantikos “having meaning, signifying”). I’ve titled this work Semantic Antics because many English words have changed meaning in fascinating, unusual, and unexpected ways. Those are the words I focus on in this book.
[…]As a language consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, I was fortunate to have had access to the OED’s treasury of historical citations, which I used to trace and illustrate the development of meanings discussed in this book.
His very first entry, about “A1,” taught me something I didn’t know; after citing the first use in the sense ‘first-class, outstanding’ in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837) — “‘He must be a first-rater,’ said Sam. ‘A, 1,’ replied Mr. Roker.” — he explains:
Dickens adopted a technical shipping term, A1, and used it figuratively. The shipping term was created by Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, a British publication founded in 1760 by Edward Lloyd to circulate and exchange shipping news among merchants and underwriters. Lloyd published his first Register of Ships in 1764, and in it he devised a system for classifying the condition of every registered ship. In this system, the top classification was A1, the letter A denoting a first-class condition of a ship’s hull, and the number 1, a top condition of the ship’s stores. When shipping merchants would describe a ship’s condition as being “A1,” it was the highest praise they could assign to it, and so inevitably the term passed into figurative use as a synonym of “first-class, excellent.”
And paging through it I see all sorts of entries I look forward to exploring; many thanks, Brian!
(Not “Al”.)
(Ha!)
(Was that languagehat’s typo? I can see that page in Steinmetz on Google Books, and it has distinguishable 1, I, and l.)
(It was an OCR error. I caught several others but missed that one; I’ve fixed it now.)
Perfect title since “antics” itself had a bizarre semantic evolution, discussed here at ANTICK.
Nice to see a popular book celebrating semantic evolution instead of whining. I looked up aggravate in Steinmetz: his entry observes that its first meaning in English was “to add weight” (grav as in gravity); then “to make worse, exacerbate”; and finally “The current meaning, ‘to irritate, exasperate, annoy,’ was popularized in the 1700s and 1800s in works like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa … and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Virginians”. Take that, Fowler! (Fowler’s entry on aggravate is him at his worst, saying that the last sense “should be left to the uneducated. It is for the most part a feminine or childish colloquialism”. As Ben Yagoda said last year, Fowler’s sexist attitudes have aged badly.)
@ktschwarz “Fowler’s entry on aggravate is him at his worst, saying that the last sense ‘should be left to the uneducated.'”
The first edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, published in 1926, indeed so says, but the second one, undertaken by Ernest Gowers and published in 1965 (a little more than thirty years after Fowler’s death), fully accepts the word in the sense of ‘annoy, exasperate’ (p. 14).
As a lawyer’s joke goes “I was sent down for aggravated assault and I am still aggravated”.
Which made me wonder about the expression “send down,” and to my surprise the OED tells me it’s originally American (I think of it as quintessentially British):
And then there’s “6. send her down, Davy (also Hughie, etc.) and variants: expressing a wish for rain to fall. Cf. Hughie n. slang (chiefly Australian and New Zealand).”
While I definitely do think of send down as primarily British, the usage that I would consider quintessentially British is, “Take him [or ‘her’,* or ‘them’]** down”—instructions from a judge to return a convicted defendant to the cells. Part of what makes that locution particularly affecting is that it combines the down of the send down phrasal verb with the fact that defendants in Anglo-Welsh (or all British?) courts (hearing cases above some threshold of seriousness?) enter and leave the courtroom via a staircase to a holding area below. At the end of “Rumpole and Portia,” Rumpole tells his former protege and now judge Phyllida (the other title character in the episode) that, while he would like to have been a judge, he is glad that he will never have to order: “Take him down.”
* I felt I should punctuate this in the British (and, frankly, more logical) fashion, with the comma outside the quotation marks,*** since it represented quintessentially British speech.
** In fact, I feel like the whole punctuation of this bracketed section is questionable.*** Should I have used italics? A semicolon?
*** Should I really have used single quotes here?
The title reminds me of Chace’s Anguish Languish:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130106192610/http://www.justanyone.com/allanguish.html#_Toc505953306
While I definitely do think of send down as primarily British, the usage that I would consider quintessentially British is, “Take him [or ‘her’,* or ‘them’]** down”—instructions from a judge to return a convicted defendant to the cells. .
Quintessentially British indeed. For contrast only, consider the quintessentially American ’send him up the river’. The river is the Hudson. It flows between, among other spots, New York City and Ossining, NY. The later is the site of a maximum security prison, known colloquially as Sing Sing. Hence ‘sent up the river’ has come to mean sentenced to a prison term.
To be “sent up the river” should not be confused with being “sold down the river,” which etymologically references a different river.
I am somewhat skeptical that all English-and-Welsh courthouse(s) had the holding cell(s) on a separate and lower level than the courtroom(s), but maybe all that would have been needed for an idiom to arise was for the most prominent one in London to be configured that way? The largest criminal courthouse in New York City is the high-rise affair at 100 Centre St. in Manhattan (note archaic-or-British spelling), with courtrooms on multiple floors. Whether the “backstage” holding cell used for a particular defendant is on the same level as the courtroom that defendant is appearing in may vary, I believe, plus for overnight purposes you traditionally needed to take the defendant* (generally down) to the second floor where the connecting “bridge” (making it unnecessary to go outside) over to the detention facility traditionally-but-unofficially known as The Tombs was located. (The Tombs themselves have been recently demolished and a replacement which may or may not attract the same nickname is under construction – I don’t know where they’re stashing defendants-not-out-on-bail in the meantime.)
*This for defendants who are not free on bail pending the outcome of the trial. Those who made bail enter and leave the courthouse and courtroom through the regular front doors just like their lawyers or members of the general public.
The title reminds me of Chace’s Anguish Languish
It reminds me as an American of this linguistic classic:
“Conjunction Junction,
What’s your function?
Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.”
sell down the river
Betray, as in They kept the merger a secret until the last minute, so the employees who were laid off felt they’d been sold down the river. This expression, dating from the mid-1800s, alludes to slaves being sold down the Mississippi River to work as laborers on cotton plantations. Its figurative use dates from the late 1800s.
source: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sell-down-the-river
The above is a pretty mild telling of the horrors of slavery.