"Silly" Knowledge - Understanding begets Learning

When it comes to words -- their meanings, and their proper use -- I care. I enjoy learning words, and using them properly. I don't study them; I don't go out of my way to find new words. I like to encounter them in my reading -- in the wild, in their natural habitats, as it were -- and then relish them as they become part of my vocabulary.

If you've read my blog for a while, you know that I don't want to be a pedant -- making an excessive or inappropriate display of learning -- but I sometimes comment when people use words incorrectly (see "thence," "sojourn," "beg the question," "solution") or use non-words when there are perfectly good words for the concepts they are trying to get across ("doable," "mentee.")

I suppose I have an internal desire for there to be "right" and "wrong" in various areas of life, and for some reason, proper use of words is among those.

Well, my current Great Course is "The Story of Human Language" by Dr. John McWhorter, and it is teaching me that "right" and "wrong" is far more variable than I once thought. The course has already taught me quite a bit, but the word which inspired me to write is the word "Silly."

Why "Silly?" Because McWhorter uses it as a clear example of how a word can change its meaning from one thing to something completely different.

Here is a quote from English in 1400, spelled as it was a the time.

"Cely art thou, hooli virgyne marie"

which would be spelled today as

"Silly are you, holy virgin Mary."

Between 1400 and today, "Silly" actually transformed several times. The word "Cely/Silly" meant something completely different in 1400. It meant "Blessed" and then "Innocent." Either meaning might have been used here to describe the mother of Jesus, and this quote was probably a transitional use. From its "blessed" meaning, it moved to "innocent" and was further modified to mean "deserving of compassion" by the time Shakespeare used it in 1591 in The Two Gentlemen of Verona:

"I take your offer and will live with you,/Provided that you do no outrages/On silly women or poor passengers."

Its current meaning is an evolution which followed this long, convoluted, but strangely logical line of changing usage.

Oh, language changes in many other ways, as I am learning, but this specific example has taught me that I should not be so caught up in "right" or "wrong." I am not sure I can move past my "prescriptivist" tendencies to an acceptance of true "descriptivism" when it comes to word meanings, but I have a deeper appreciation for how seeming "misuse" of a word might actually be a step in the development of the language.

Yet there is a part of me that will still be sad when "comprise" completes its change to mean its opposite.

Silly me!