The influence of a new generation is also seen in those cases in which formerly separate words coalesce into one, as when he breakfasts, he breakfasted, is said instead of he breaks fast, he broke fast; cf. vouchsafe, don (third person, vouchsafes, dons), instead of vouch safe, do on (third person, vouches safe, does on). Here, too, it is not probable that a person who has once learnt the real form of a word, and thus knows where it begins and where it ends, should have subsequently changed it: it is much more likely that all such changes originate with children who have once made a wrong analysis of what they have heard and then go on repeating the new forms all their lives.
X.—§ 3. Shiftings of Meanings.
Changes in the meaning of words are often so gradual that one cannot detect the different steps of the process, and changes of this sort, like the corresponding changes in the sounds of words, are to be ascribed quite as much to people already acquainted with the language as to the new generation. As examples we may mention the laxity that has changed the meaning of soon, which in OE. meant ‘at once,’ and in the same way of presently, originally ‘at present, now,’ and of the old anon. Dinner comes from OF. disner, which is the infinitive of the verb which in other forms was desjeun, whence modern French déjeune (Lat. *desjejunare); it thus meant ‘breakfast,’ but the hour of the meal thus termed was gradually shifted in the course of centuries, so that now we may have dinner twelve hours after breakfast. When picture, which originally meant ‘painting,’ came to be applied to drawings, photographs and other images; when hard came to be used as an epithet not only of nuts and stones, etc., but of words and labour; when fair, besides the old sense of ‘beautiful,’ acquired those of ‘blond’ and ‘morally just’; when meat, from meaning all kinds of food (as in sweetmeats, meat and drink), came to be restricted practically to one kind of food (butcher’s meat); when the verb grow, which at first was used only of plants, came to be used of animals, hairs, nails, feelings, etc., and, instead of implying always increase, might even be combined with such a predicative as smaller and smaller; when pretty, from the meaning ‘skilful, ingenious,’ came to be a general epithet of approval (cf. the modern American, a cunning child = ‘sweet’), and, besides meaning good-looking, became an adverb of degree, as in pretty bad: neither these nor countless similar shiftings need be ascribed to any influence on the part of the learners of English; they can easily be accounted for as the product of innumerable small extensions and restrictions on the part of the users of the language after they have once acquired it.
But along with changes of this sort we have others that have come about with a leap, and in which it is impossible to find intermediate stages between two seemingly heterogeneous meanings, as when bead, from meaning a ‘prayer,’ comes to mean ‘a perforated ball of glass or amber.’ In these cases the change is occasioned by certain connexions, where the whole sense can only be taken in one way, but the syntactical construction admits of various interpretations, so that an ambiguity at one point gives occasion for a new conception of the meaning of the word. The phrase to count your beads originally meant ‘to count your prayers,’ but because the prayers were reckoned by little balls, the word beads came to be transferred to these objects, and lost its original sense.[39] It seems clear that this misapprehension could not take place in the brains of those who had already associated the word with the original signification, while it was quite natural on the part of children who heard and understood the phrase as a whole, but unconsciously analyzed it differently from the previous generation.
There is another word which also meant ‘prayer’ originally, but has lost that meaning, viz. boon; through such phrases as ‘ask a boon’ and ‘grant a boon’ it came to be taken as meaning ‘a favour’ or ‘a good thing received.’
Orient was frequently used in such connexions as ‘orient pearl’ and ‘orient gem,’ and as these were lustrous, orient became an adjective meaning ‘shining,’ without any connexion with the geographical orient, as in Shakespeare, Venus 981, “an orient drop” (a tear), and Milton, PL i. 546, “Ten thousand banners rise into the air, With orient colours waving.”
There are no connecting links between the meanings of ‘glad’ and ‘obliged,’ ‘forced,’ but when fain came to be chiefly used in combinations like ‘he was fain to leave the country,’ it was natural for the younger generation to interpret the whole phrase as implying necessity instead of gladness.
We have similar phenomena in certain syntactical changes. When me thinks and me likes gave place to I think and I like, the chief cause of the change was that the child heard combinations like Mother thinks or Father likes, where mother and father can be either nominative or accusative-dative, and the construction is thus syntactically ambiguous. This leads to a ‘shunting’ of the meaning as well as of the construction of the verbs, which must have come about in a new brain which was not originally acquainted with the old construction.
As one of the factors bringing about changes in meaning many scholars mention forgetfulness; but it is important to keep in view that what happens is not real forgetting, that is, snapping of threads of thought that had already existed within the same consciousness, but the fact that the new individual never develops the threads of thought which in the elder generation bound one word to another. Sometimes there is no connexion of ideas in the child’s brain: a word is viewed quite singly as a whole and isolated, till later perhaps it is seen in its etymological relation. A little girl of six asked when she was born. “You were born on the 2nd of October.” “Why, then, I was born on my birthday!” she cried, her eyes beaming with joy at this wonderfully happy coincidence. Originally Fare well was only said to some one going away. If now the departing guest says Farewell to his friend who is staying at home, it can only be because the word Farewell has been conceived as a fixed formula, without any consciousness of the meaning of its parts.