meaning changes and can even fade away

[miriam_e]

Strange how words shift and change in English. People who use computers often talk about their computers booting, or that they boot their computer up. Ask them what they think it means and they realise they have no idea beyond the immediate meaning of starting the computer.

It actually has a really nice, almost metaphysical meaning. In the very early days of computers we had to enter code by hand as a set of switches in binary numbers, each representing a very simple instruction to the microprocessor. It was slow and tedious, stepping through memory positions, entering in these numbers by hand. Then when the code was run it would start reading a program from a punched tape reader or some other device. This was considered to be rather an awesome feat, somewhat like lifting yourself by your own bootstraps. Later it became referred to as bootstrapping the machine, and still later it was simplified to just 'boot'. I love the idea of starting the machine being like someone lifting themself up by their own bootlaces. :)

There are lots of words that change in strange ways in English. The word 'let' is an especially odd one. It originally had the opposite meaning. These days it means to enable. It originally meant to obstruct or hinder. You can find it still being used in its ancient meaning in law, because legalese is so... modern.

This is one of the things I love about English. It is crazy and illogical, but it is a truly democratic language -- the most flexible in the world. It is constantly changing. English is defined, not by stuffy professors of language, but by the ordinary people who use it... us.

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of "right" having multiple meanings in that way. Cool!

Confusion can arise from more than just meaning too. Have you noticed people, when talking over radios (especially military types) say "affirmative" instead of "yes", and "negative" instead of "no"? I used to think this was simply due to officialdom's love for needless complication of simple things, but some years back I learned a more likely reason.

I was programming my Amiga computer's speech output (amazingly advanced, that computer was, even today) and found that careful use of redundancy actually increases understanding. Simple single syllable words are much harder to understand in difficult circumstances (imperfect computer-generated voice, noisy radio communications, etc.) than multi-syllable words. "Yes" gives a single shot at understanding, and is a single syllable like "no". "Affirmative" gives more chances to hear what is being said, and even if the sounds are unclear, it is nevertheless obvious that it has 4 syllables. "Negative" has 3 syllables.

So flowery language can actually have great communication benefits in certain situations. "She sat on the chair" can then be far less useful than "the woman reclined upon the armchair". ("He what on the bear??") It became a neat challenge to program the computer's speech in ways to boost intelligibility without becoming awkward. Some words carry more of the meaning in a sentence than others, so expanding them selectively can be much more effective than simply lengthening all words, which can get tedious.

If you ever have to talk on a noisy phone line this info can be very useful.