By James Currie and Dr. Karen Wieland Whatever to Wear? If you’ve ever read any of Shakespeare’s plays, or even better – seen – a production of a Shakespeare play, you’ve probably heard about – or seen – a doublet. In the Renaissance, doublets were standard fashion of men – a short jacket, often […]
Lexicon & Word Meaning Change
Dust, Fast, See, Sanction – More Contronyms
by James Currie and Dr. Karen Wieland Welcome back! In this post, we want to finish up with the contronyms, and with that, our little series on word meanings. Recap about Janus In the last post, we (re)introduced you to the Roman god Janus, the god of transitions, beginnings and endings. And the idea of […]
Word Meaning Changes Over Time – I am My Own Opposite!
by Dr. Karen Wieland and James Currie And finally, we’ve arrived at the last of our 5 Word Meaning Change topics. And it’s such an amusing one, in a head scratching kind of way, we’re going to break it into two posts. Almighty Janus! As a winding, sideways introduction to the topic, let’s first […]
Word Meaning Changes Over Time – From Better to Worse
By Dr. Karen Wieland and James Currie And as promised, for better and for worse. In our last word meaning post, we talked about amelioration, when a word’s meaning changes over time from negative to positive. Now, let’s talk a little about the exact opposite – pejoration, when a word’s meaning goes in the […]
Word Meaning Changes Over Time- It Only Gets Better
by Dr. Karen Wieland and James Currie So far we have taken brief looks at a related pair of word-meaning shifts: from an earlier narrow meaning to a broader, more general meaning (generalization) and its semantic opposite, as it were, from a broader, general meaning to a narrow, specific meaning (specialization). With this […]
Word Meaning Changes over Time: Part Two – Specialization
by Dr. Karen Wieland and James Currie In this post, we would like to pick up where we left off talking about word-meaning changes. In a previous post, we began this series explaining Generalization, where the meaning of a word changes from a historically narrower meaning to a broader meaning: think “Kleenex” – […]