The Unexpected Evolution of Language (20 page)

In the “notorious” scene, Hitchcock shows Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kissing for the requisite three seconds, separating lips, nuzzling each other, then diving back to lip-lock land. The scene ultimately lasted almost three minutes and was probably sexier than a simple ten-second kiss might have been.

O

obsession

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
act of besieging

NEW DEFINITION:
unhealthy fixation

Before it became the purview of stalkers and perverts, “obsession” was a word of war. But first, it took a trip through the paranormal.

The Latin word that gave rise to “obsession” literally means “a besieging.” Thus, a warring king would stage an “obsession” at the gates of a rival’s castle, for example. Perhaps, even then, a man might focus his interest on a woman to the point that it became a besieging, or an “obsession.”

As the Middle Ages gave way to the early modern era, “obsession” became a word akin to “exorcism” (see entry for “exorcise”). With an exorcism, spirits have entered an unfortunate soul’s body. During an “obsession,” by contrast, an evil spirit stayed “on the outside” but besieged the victim(s) unmercifully.

These meanings of “obsession” aren’t too far from the modern concept of a fixation, especially one that’s unseemly. The word still suggests a besieging, albeit an internal one, and the adjective that seems most at home in front of “obsession” is “unhealthy.” For that matter, sometimes people with obsessions “besiege” those with whom they are obsessed.

occupy

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
euphemism for sexual intercourse

NEW DEFINITION:
to fill space or time

The word “occupy” has always meant to “fill space and time.” But for 300 years or so, “occupy” had an interesting, sexual, chapter in its life.

From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, “occupy” meant to occupy someone sexually. For example, “Did you hear that Robert is occupying the daughter of the yeoman who owns the farm next to his?” During this period, “occupy” also meant, as it always had, to fill in space or time. But it became so associated with sex that people practically stopped using the word.

Eventually, people stopped associating “occupy” with sex, and the word has returned to its original meaning. But you might want to think twice the next time you tell someone you’ve been “occupying yourself for a while.”

OK

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
deliberately misspelled abbreviation for “all correct”; nickname of Martin Van Buren

NEW DEFINITION:
all right

For a brief period in the 1830s, Boston newspapers outdid themselves coming up with “humorous” acronyms based on misspellings. Why did this become a fad? You might as well ask why planking became a fad. It just did, that’s all.

The
Boston Morning Post
debuted “OK” in its March 23, 1839 edition. It stood for “oll korrect,” a “humorous” misspelling of “all correct.” But the reason “OK” survived, and many other of these wacky acronyms didn’t, is because of Martin Van Buren.

Our not-so-illustrious eighth U.S. president, Martin Van Buren, had the nickname “Old Kinderhook.” He was running for re-election not long after the invention of “OK,” so the two acronyms got conflated—people began to associate the “oll korrect” type of “OK” with the Martin Van Buren type of “OK.” Van Buren lost his re-election bid, by the way. Americans couldn’t forgive him for the Panic of 1837 (an ancestor of the Great Depression).

Van Buren wasn’t OK, but “OK” was. Before long, people forgot where “OK” came from, stopped using it to refer to Van Buren, and it just became a generic way to say everything’s all right.

orient

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
to face east

NEW DEFINITION:
to find one’s bearings; face a certain direction

First came the Orient, that location to which so many European explorers sought an easy all-water passage. Columbus was seeking the Orient when he went in completely the opposite direction and “discovered” North America.

The Orient earned its name because the Latin word at its root means “place where the sun rises.” For most Europeans, that direction was east. When Europeans’ exploration became widespread, that’s the direction most people sought. Thus, the Orient
—the area most people today associate with the Middle East and the Far East—was on many people’s minds.

By the eighteenth century, “orient” (with a lowercase “o”) was a generic term for facing east or designing something to face east. By the nineteenth century, “orient” lost its explicit relationship to the east and suggested facing any specific, desired direction. By extension, it has come to mean finding one’s bearings and thus heading in the right direction … whichever direction that might be.

Avoid the Oriental

When first used to refer to a specific geographical region, “Oriental” was associated with the Near East, which has been called the Middle East since the first half of the twentieth century. By the nineteenth century, “Oriental” was equivalent to the Far East: Japan, Korea, China, etc.

As the twentieth century progressed, the word “Oriental” fell into disrepute. Why? If Westerners include diverse cultures like Korea, China, and Japan under one umbrella, it’s the semantic equivalent of saying, “They all look alike to me.” Thus, the term typically is not used today.

P

paraphernalia

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
woman’s property, other than her dowry

NEW DEFINITION:
assortment of odds and ends

Women don’t typically have dowries anymore, but they used to be one of the “advantages” of marriage. If you were a man, you might choose a wife based on her dowry, which was goods—money, farm animals, slaves if you were below the Mason-Dixon Line—a father would give to his new son-in-law.

Anything a woman owned that was not part of her dowry was called “paraphernalia.” The root word, “paraphernal,” was Latin for just that: stuff a woman owned independent of her dowry. Since women didn’t tend to work outside of the house much until the twentieth century, their “paraphernalia” probably didn’t amount to much. They probably had some clothing, some childhood mementos, some small items of furniture, etc.

By the close of the eighteenth century, “paraphernalia” stopped being explicitly connected to a woman’s property. The word, instead, focused on the fact that much of that property consisted of assorted odds and ends, a mishmash of stuff.

pariah

ORIGINAL MEANING:
drummer

NEW MEANING:
social outcast

“Pariah” is one of those words—like villain (see entry for “villain”)—that comes to the English language via social snobbery.

From an East Indian word meaning “drummer” or “one who drums,” early “pariahs” belonged to the Indian labor caste. In other words, “pariahs” were at the very bottom of the social ladder. Actually, they were not even on the first rung. Traditionally, they were field workers. Some of them were employed to beat drums to keep people awake and working hard.

India was effectively a European colony from 1613, when the East India Trading Company was one of the world’s largest conglomerates, until 1947. During this time, Europeans often employed members of this “drumming” class as domestics and personal servants.

The British, in power for many of those years, were no strangers to rigid social stratification. They considered these “pariahs” socially inferior. Thus, through the magic of metaphor, “pariah” began to refer to anyone considered a social outcast, regardless of his or her income or station.

pencil

ORIGINAL DEFINITION:
paintbrush

NEW DEFINITION:
writing instrument containing graphite

One of the “roots” of this word is the Latin “penis,” which used to mean “tail” but also always had the meaning of “dangling male appendage.”

A later root word meant “brush,” and that’s what “pencil” meant for most of the Middle Ages. It was a very fine (as in “thin”) brush, often made from camel hair, which was used for everyday writing. Then, in 1565, a huge graphite deposit was found in England. Early scientists mistakenly thought it was actually lead.

Someone—surely a millionaire in his day—came up with the bright idea of using the graphite to make sturdy writing utensils that didn’t have to be dipped in ink or to rely on the shearing of camels. Thus, by the turn of the seventeenth century, “pencil” began to mean “graphite-containing writing instrument.”

By the way, the pencil could for many years cause lead poisoning, even though it contained no lead … in its writing component. The lead was in the paint used to decorate the pencil.

I Made These Pencils Because
I Wish to Write Deliberately

Henry David Thoreau is considered by many to be the godfather of the modern ecology movement. He famously spent time in a cabin he built on Walden Pond, in a nineteenth-century version of living off the grid, writing in
Walden
that he “wished to live deliberately.”

Yet, Thoreau wasn’t just a guy who spent all his spare time dreaming and writing. The pencils you use today are a variation of the type created more than a century ago by this Transcendentalist.

Thoreau’s father, John Thoreau, began a pencil business with his brother-in-law after a large deposit of graphite was discovered in New Hampshire. Their pencils sold fairly well, but their quality was poor. Their graphite smeared easily on the page. Something was needed to bind the graphite securely to the wood of the pencil.

Enter Henry David. He figured out that clay would work perfectly as a binder. After that, their pencils wrote flawlessly and sold well. But Thoreau refused to make any money from his discovery.