The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Bloody Typical Semantic Shifts

Do you know the difference between the clouds and the sky? If you do, you’re lucky, because if you live in England, the two are pretty much synonymous. The clouds aren’t lined with silver. The weather is just miserable. It always has been and it always will be.

Our word sky comes from the Viking word for cloud, but in England there’s simply no difference between the two concepts, and so the word changed its meaning because of the awful weather.

If there’s one thing that etymology proves conclusively, it’s that the world is a wretched place. We may dream of better things, but the word dream comes from the Anglo-Saxon for happiness. There’s a moral in that.

It has always rained, happiness has always been a dream, and people have always been lazy. I should know, I’m lazy myself. Ask me to do something like the washing up or a tax return and I’ll reply that I’ll do it in five minutes.

Five minutes usually means never.

If the task that I have been assigned is absolutely essential for my survival then I might say that I’ll do it in a minute. That usually­ means within an hour, but I’m not guaranteeing anything.

Do not condemn me. Remember that a moment is the smallest conceivable amount of time. Now, turn on the radio or the television and wait. Soon enough an announcer will come on and say that ‘In a moment we’ll be showing’ this, that or the other, ‘but first the news and weather’.

There’s an old pop song by The Smiths called ‘How Soon is Now?’ The writers of the song must have been even lazier than I am, because the answer is available in any etymological dictionary. Soon was the Anglo-Saxon word for now.

It’s just that after a thousand years of people saying ‘I’ll do that soon’, soon has ended up meaning what it does today.

These days, now has to have a right stuck on the front or it doesn’t mean a thing. The same happened to the word anon (not the shortening for anonymous, but the synonym for soon). It derives from the Old English phrase on an, which meant on one or instantly. But humans don’t do things instantly, we just promise to. And the word instantly will, of course, go the way of its siblings.

And people are nasty, condemnatory creatures. The way people overstate the faults of others is, frankly, demonic. There’s a lovely bit in King Lear where the Duke of Gloucester is having his eyes gouged out by Regan and responds by calling her a ‘naughty lady’.

Naughty used to be a much more serious word than it is now, but it has been overused and lost its power. So many stern parents have called their children naughty that the power has slowly drained from the word. If you were naughty it used to mean that you were a no-human. It comes from exactly the same root as nought or nothing. Now it just means that you’re mischievous.

Every weakness of human nature comes out in the history of etymology. Probably the most damning word is probably. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word probabilis. If something was probabilis then it could be proved by experiment, because the two words come from the same root: probare.

But probabilis got overused. People are always more certain of things than they really should be, and that applied to the Romans just as much as to us. Roman lawyers would claim that their case was probabilis, when it wasn’t. Roman astrologers would say that their predictions were probabilis when they weren’t. And absolutely any sane Roman would tell you that it was probabilis that the Sun went round the Earth. So by the time poor probably first turned up in English in 1387 it was already a poor, exhausted word whose best days were behind it, and only meant likely.

Now, if probable comes from the same root as prove, can you guess why the proof of the pudding is in the eating?