Semantic change.

A. On the Jack Benny show in the 1940s, Phil Harris said, “Nobody makes love better than me.” Obviously he was not using the expression in the meaning it has today—at the time, make love meant to court and kiss. Since then, its meaning has drifted. This is an example of semantic change, and despite how uncomfortable many are to see words’ meanings shifting over their lifetimes, this kind of change is a central part of how one language became our 6,000.

B. Semantic drift. Often a word’s meaning drifts in various directions over time. The word silly began in Old English meaning “blessed.” But to be blessed implies innocence, and by the Middle Ages, the word meant “innocent”:

1400: Cely art thou, hooli virgyne marie

But innocence tends to elicit compassion and, thus, the meaning of the word became “deserving of compassion”:

1470: Sely Scotland, that of helpe has gret neide.

There is a fine line, however, between eliciting compassion and seeming weak; as a result, silly meant “weak” by the 1600s:

1633: Thou onely art The mightie God, but I a sillie worm.

From here, it was short step to “simple” or “ignorant,” and next came the word as we know it, silly!

In the following quote from Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we tend to assume that Valentine is making a crack about women, but when the play was written in 1591, he meant that women deserved compassion and help, just like the “poor passengers” he refers to immediately afterward.

I take your offer and will live with you,

Provided that you do no outrages

On silly women or poor passengers.

(The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1591 [iv, i, 70–2])

C. Semantic narrowing. Words often come to have more specific meanings than they start with. Meat in Old English referred to all food and only later came to refer to animal flesh. We keep a remnant of the old meaning in sweetmeat, which refers to candy and fruit, not flesh.

D. Semantic broadening. Words also often come to have more general meaning. In Old English, the word bird (brid at that point) referred only to young birds. The word for birds in general was fugol, just as the same root in German, Vogel, is today. But brid broadened to refer to all birds over time, while fugol narrowed and became today’s fowl, referring only to game birds.

E. The bigger picture. Proto-Indo-European had a word b^her, which meant to carry or to bear children. This one word now permeates English in a wide range of meanings that have changed from its original one.

1. Basic changes. We bear a nuisance—because toleration is a kind of “carrying.” The bh er root is also in what one bears, a burden. Further, the root has come down to us in a narrowed form, referring to one kind of burden, birth.

2. Changes in combination with other words. Proto-Indo-European speakers often combined bh er with the word enk, which meant “to get to”—to carry something over to something was to bring it, and bring is exactly the word that came from this: bh er -enk became bring over time.

3. Changes in other languages, and back to us. Meanwhile, sound change turned bh er into ferre in Latin, and English borrowed Latin words with ferre in them, all with semantically changed descendants of bh er, such as transfer, prefer, and back to the birthing realm, fertile. Greek inherited bh er as pherein and shunted it into such words as pheremone—chemicals that the air “carries”—paraphernalia, and amphorae, because things are carried in bottles.