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.)