12. Words are Created by Errors
Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—
the length of a short novel—to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused
for thinking that to know set is to know English.
Generally polysemy happens because one word sprouts a variety of meanings,
but sometimes it is the other way around—similar but quite separate words
evolve identical spellings. Boil in the sense of heating a pan of water and boil in
the sense of an irruption of the skin are two unrelated words that simply happen
to be spelled the same way. So are policy in the sense of a strategy or plan and
the policy in a life insurance policy. Excise, meaning "to cut," is quite distinct in
origin from excise in the sense of a customs duty.
Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up with
contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a con-tronym. Sanction, forinstance, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding
it to be done. Cleave can mean cut in half or stick together. A sanguine person is
either hotheaded and bloodthirsty or calm and cheerful. Something that is fast is
either stuck firmly or moving quickly. A door that is bolted is secure, but a horse
that has bolted has taken off. If you wind up a meeting you finish it; if you wind
up a watch, you start it. To ravish means to rape or to enrapture. Quinquennial
describes something that lasts for five years or happens only once in five years.
Trying one's best is a good thing, but trying one's patience is a bad thing.
A blunt instrument is dull, but a blunt remark is pointed. Occasionally when this
happens the dictionary makers give us different spellings to differentiate the two
meanings—as with flour and flower, discrete and discreet—but such orthological
thoughtfulness is rare.
So where do all these words come from? According to the great Danish linguist
Otto Jespersen words are for the most part formed in one of four ways: by
adding to them, by subtracting from them, by making them up, and by doing
nothing to them. Neat as that formula is, I would venture to suggest that it
overlooks two other prolific sources of new words: borrowing them from other
languages and creating them by mistake. Let us look at each in turn.
WORDS ARE CREATED BY ERROR - One kind of these is called ghost
words. The most famous of these perhaps is dord, which appeared in the 1934
Merriam-Webster International Dictionary as another word for density. In fact, it
was a misreading of the scribbled "D or d," meaning that "density" could be
abbreviated either to a capital or lowercase letter. The people at Merriam-
Webster quickly removed it, but not before it found its way into other
dictionaries. Such occurrences are more common than you might suppose.
According to the First Supplement of the OED, there are at least 350 words in
English dictionaries that owe their existence to typographical errors or other
misrenderings. For the most part they are fairly obscure. One such is messuage, a
legal term used to describe a house, its land, and buildings. It is thought to be
simply a careless transcription of the French menage.
Many other words owe their existence to mishearing. Button-hole was once
buttonhold. Sweetheart was originally sweetard, as in dullard and dotard.
Bridegroom was in Old English bryd-guma, but the context made people think
of groom and an r was added.By a similar process an 1 found its way into belfrey. Asparagus was for zoo
years called sparrow-grass. Pentice became penthouse.
Shamefaced was originally shamefast (fast here having the sense of lodged
firmly, as in "stuck fast"). The process can still be seen today in the tendency
among many people to turn catercorner into catty-corner and chaise longue into
chaise lounge.
Sometimes words are created by false analogy or back-formation.
One example of this is the word pea. Originally the word was pease, as in the
nursery rhyme "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold." But this was
mistakenly thought to signify a plural and the word pea was back-formed to
denote singularity. A similar misunderstanding gave us cherry (from cerise).
Etymologically cherries ought to be both singular and plural—and indeed it once
was. The words grovel and sidle similarly came into English because the original
adverbs, groveling and sideling, were assumed to contain the participle -ing, as
in walking and seeing. In fact, it was the suffix -ling, but this did not stop people
from adding a pair of useful verbs to the language. Other back-formations are
laze (from lazy), rove, burgle, greed (from greedy), beg (from beggar), and
difficult (from difficulty). Given the handiness and venerability of the process, it
is curious to note that language authorities still generally squirm at the addition
of new ones to the language. Among those that still attract occasional
opprobrium are enthuse and donate.
Finally, erroneous words are sometimes introduced by respected users of the
language who simply make a mistake. Shakespeare thought illustrious was the
opposite of lustrous and thus for a time gave it a sense that wasn't called for.
Rather more alarmingly, the poet Robert Browning caused considerable
consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an
innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now
remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it
also contains this disconcerting passage: Then owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat—which meant
precisely the same then as it does now—but pronounced it with a flat a and
somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a
source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial
embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was
allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think
of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him