Semantic Changes: "He Was a Happy and Sad Girl . . ."

If you want evidence that the meanings of even the simplest words change over time, try deciphering this passage composed by linguistics professor John Algeo:

He was a happy and sad girl who lived in a town forty miles from the closest neighbor. His unmarried sister, a wife who was a vegetarian teetotaler, ate meat and drank liquor three times a day. She was so fond of oatmeal bread made from the corn her brother grew that she starved from overeating. He fed nuts to the deer that lived in the branches of an apple tree which bore pears. He was a silly and wise boor, a knave and a villain, and everyone liked him. Moreover, he was a lewd man whom the general censure held to be a model of chastity.
(John Algeo, Problems in the Origins and Development of the English Language, 4th ed., Harcourt, 1993)

Pure nonsense? Sure--if you insist on attaching contemporary definitions to every word in the passage. But if you assign an older meaning to each of the italicized words, you can eliminate all the inconsistencies.

That's not to say that this paragraph would have been logically coherent during any single period in the history of the English language. The now obsolete meanings of some of the words date back to Old English (OE), the others to Middle English (ME).

To save you a trip to the Oxford English Dictionary, here's the key to deciphering the passage.

• sad: steadfast, mature, trustworthy (ME)


• girl: a young person of either sex (ME)


• town: a farmstead, a homestead, a house on an area of enclosed land (OE)


• wife: a woman (OE)


• meat: a meal (ME)


• liquor: beverage, drink (ME)


• corn: cereal plant, grain (OE)


• starve: die (OE)


• deer: any animal (OE)


• apple: any fruit (OE)


• silly: deserving of pity, compassion, or sympathy (ME)


• boor: peasant (ME)


• knave: a fellow, chap (ME)


• villain: a simple person (ME)


• lewd: a layperson, not in holy orders (OE)


• censure: opinion (ME)

A new edition of Algeo's workbook, a companion to his text The Origins and Development of the English Language, has recently been published by Cengage Learning/Wadsworth.

More About Words:

• Introduction to Etymology: Word Histories
• Key Dates in the History of the English Language
• The American Dialect Society's Words of the Year

Image: Problems in the Origins and Development of the English Language, 5th edition, by John Algeo and Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Cengage Learning/Wadsworth, 2009)