Adventures in English Word Change: Amelioration and Pejoration

As we live, we witness and experience change: Our looks (*sigh*), our circumstances, our thoughts and feelings are in constant flux. The same applies to words. Words have lives of their own. During the lifetime of a word, change appears to be the only constant. Change affects the way words look (spelling), the way they sound (pronunciation), and what they mean (semantics). The meaning of words can change so much in a relatively short time, that the same word can mean quite different things to speakers separated even by a few decades of language change.

Is this supposed to be a compliment?

Apocryphal rumor has it, that when King James II of England saw the restored St. Paul's cathedral, he described it with the following words: "amusing, awful, and artificial". Now, Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul's, did not take any offense; on the contrary, he was flattered by the king's remarks. A modern-day English speaker, however, might have something of a hard time figuring out what to make of the royal comment.

Some move up in the world and some move down:

You see, the words amusing, awful, and artificial meant one thing in the late 1600s, when King James visited the restored cathedral, but mean quite another nowadays. Back then, amusing meant "riveting", awful meant "awe-inspiring", and artificial meant "of true artistic value". Compared with their current meanings, these three words seem to have moved down, so to speak, in the world of semantics. This process of language change, whereby a word meaning "worsens", i.e. becomes less favorable, is called pejoration.

The opposite process is amelioration, i.e. a word meaning gradually becomes more favorable. For example, the words brave, knight, and fond have all come a long way from their less than elevated origins: The word brave used to mean "uncivilized" (cf. barbarous); long before attaining nobility, knight denoted "a male servant"; while fond (maybe related to fun) originally meant "foolish". Who would've thought?

Isn't that nice?

The word nice may very well be the most notorious example of linguistic amelioration, as it started out meaning "stupid, ignorant" and ended up (and none the worse of wear) meaning "pleasant". Nice derives from Latin nescius (ignorant; from ne- (non) and scire, to know). Not surprisingly, it arrived in English via French. From then on, it was an endless semantic adventure, vividly described by Bill Bryson in "Mother Tongue" (p. 72) as follows: "[nice] is first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and - by 1769 - pleasant and agreeable."

Historical linguists have ventured even further back in the history of nice and have connected it with the Indo-European root *skei- that signified "cutting", "separation". This little root, *skei-, has spawned an interesting assortment of words, including shear, scissors, incision, rescind, skill, schism, decide, concise, nice (think in terms of a nice distinction), and - I kid you not - s**t (this latter fitting in the notion of "separation" as waste material removed from the body). One thing's for sure: If you ever stumble upon a time machine and decide to take it for a spin, beware who you say nice to, and, very importantly, when.

Sources:

Merriam-Webster Online: http://www.m-w.com

Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (Penguin Books 1991)