Dear Readers, the guest post by Uma Shashikant on her Iceland travel experience was much appreciated by many of you. Here are some of the comments:
Lynn Weiss says: “Sounds very enticing. Love to share.”
Manivannan says: “Excellent travelogue. Never imagined that Iceland is so beautiful. Hard not to add it to my bucket list. Thanks, Uma”
Laksmi Raman says: “I enjoyed reading this week’s FC, especially the last bit on Icelandic sayings.”
Lalitha Belur says: “Beautifully written article on Iceland! Could be published in a travel magazine! :)”
💬 The Shifting Semantics
Simply put, semantics is the study of the meaning of words in language, and is not confined to just the English language. For instance, if you are travelling by train you can use expressions like ‘terminus’, ‘last stop’ or ‘destination’. The terminus is where the train terminates, but your destination may be different from the terminus. The last stop may not always mean terminus but may have a reference to the previous stop. Imagine this being said by a traveller “My destination was the station before the last stop, but having missed it I have to get off at the terminus and take another train”.
The arrangement of words which we refer to as syntax can also convey different meanings depending on how the sentence is constructed. A chauvinist would say: ‘A woman without her man is nothing’ but a feminist would say ‘A woman. Without her, man is nothing’. This sentence is even more interesting: ‘I love cooking, my cat and my dog’. Without the comma after cooking, the meaning can be quite different and scary too 😲. It is the same in the vernacular. If you translate the sentence ‘don’t stop let him go’ into Hindi, it would read ‘roko mat jaane do’. A comma after roko will change the meaning dramatically.
Of all the languages, the English language has the greatest potential for semantics. It is known as ‘lingua franca’, or a language adopted as a common tongue between speakers whose native language differer. It has its roots in various other languages, and found its way to Britain in the 5th century. Today, it is the third most spoken language in the world. Interestingly, the English language is spoken by many people who speak their native language, as their second language. There are innumerable instances of English usurping the place of the mother tongue, or making it a blend of English and any given native language. The spoken language of Kannada is one such where it is interspersed with English words. I am sure that is the case with many other Indian languages.
The influence of other languages on English continues unabated. New words are added to it and new meanings are ascribed to its existing words making them completely different.
The meaning of the word ‘semantics’ has changed. When someone says or promises many things without any sincerity of intention or purpose, people react and say “Oh! It is all semantics”, implying that they are mere words devoid of intent. As I mentioned in my post, it would be mere semantics if there’s no commitment to walking the talk. If you have missed it, please see 🔗Filter Coffee #140 - by M R Prasanna
If you fear something you would say, you are in awe of it. But awful does not mean fearful and awesome does not mean fearsome. Today, awful means very bad and awesome means something very good. But colloquially, awesome is used randomly as a natural reaction to any good news or achievement. It could well mean ‘fantastic’ in a given context.
The meanings of many English words have changed literally. That leads us to the change in the meaning of ‘literally’. It was originally used to refer to something in its true and literal sense. It was synonymous with the words ‘perfectly or exactly’. For instance, one can be heard to say “This book is a literal translation of the original” or “The two narratives are literally the same”. In my field of law, we refer to literal interpretation as the means of reading the law as it is without interpreting it in any other way.
Literally is now used as an emphasis. Some examples are these sentences: “I literally fell off the chair when I heard the news”, “Don’t take his words literally”, “I literally missed the train” and so on. The word ‘literally’ in these sentences could mean ‘almost’.
There are many such words which have been ascribed meanings different from their original meanings. The dictionaries of the world have also included those meanings. Now we have Scrabble dictionaries. Scrabble game was originally called Lexico, later called ‘Criss-Cross Words’ and like many other words this too slowly mutated to ‘Scrabble’.
Scrabble, in its first avatar, was invented as a board game way back in 1938 by Alfred Mosher Butts. Collins is rated as the best Scrabble dictionary. Check it out 🔗here. People who play Scrabble regularly may frustrate a rookie with all kinds of two-lettered words. I play quite often, and have learnt many words such as Qat, which is a shrub that grows in the Middle East, and Qi which means the energy of life flowing through the body. The word that stumped me was ‘Syzygy’ which means ‘an alignment of three celestial bodies’.
The mutation of English words with Hindi words has been an ongoing process. More than 300 Hindi/Urdu words have found their way into the OED. If you are a word-buff please check this link out 🔗Commonly used Hindi words in the Oxford English Dictionary. Recently some Hindi words like bindass & jugad have also found a place in the dictionaries. That doesn’t make them English words, but gives them that accreditation by their use in the course of English conversation.
Slang words have become so popular that there is a dictionary of slang words. See Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang. I was not aware that ‘Za’ is a slang word for Pizza. Slang is an ever-evolving trend, My friend Debu’s two sons use many of them, and they shared with me some of the slang words they use:
NPC (non-playable character)
OG (original thought or look)
Top G (top original)
Bottom G (lacking originality)
Jit (juvenile in training)
On Jah or On God (really! I promise)
Rizz master (one with sexy charisma)
L Take (losing or bad opinion)
W Take (winning or good opinion)
No cap (I am not lying)
Frl (for real, it really happened)
Bffr (be for real, be genuine)
Idk (I don’t know)
IDRC (I don’t really care)
No Kizzy (no kidding, expressing surprise)
Some of the above are used when sending an SMS. They are also known as textism or textese, a form of slang.
I was unaware that during the Middle Ages ‘spinster’ referred to a woman who spun yarn. Apparently, in those times, married women could easily get jobs while unmarried women were left home to spin yarn. So much so, ‘spinster’ soon came to refer to an unmarried woman.
Let me end this in a lighter vein:
A politician went to an African tribe, and each time he promised them something, the crowd would say in unison “Ooom gala gala”. At the end of the speech the Tribal Chief escorted the politician to his car and as they walked the Chief says ‘Be careful Sir. Don’t step on the Ooom gala gala”. The politician goes red in the face as he looks at a pile of dung at his feet.
Hope you liked this post which is all about lingua franca. Take good care of yourself. See you next week!
Enjoyed reading this !
It is always interesting to read about semantics. Given its geographical extent, English is surely the language with the most interesting stories behind the words. But also because it is such a flexible language, which is always ready to include within its fold foreign words.
An interesting word I discovered recently is 'Micawberish': It literally means to be like Mr. Micawber, a character in David Copperfield, who used to idle around and trust fortune to make everything right. It is now used for somebody who is irresponsibly optimistic.
Another word with interesting semantic origins is 'Gauche' which means someone awkward, tactless or lacking social polish. It is a loan word from French, where it simply means left hand. Back when the word was transported, left-handed people were considered as being awkward and tactless, giving rise to the current meaning.
I would like to recommend 'The Meaning of Everything' by Simon Winchester, which is on the origins of English, its words, and how the Oxford English Dictionary was created, a monumental achievement of the modern era.