Semantic Changes and Trends

Semantic changes, or the changes of meaning undergone by words over time, are a fairly obvious linguistic fact. Many of them seem random and difficult to explain: for instance, how does one relate the modern sense of gossip to its origins in Anglo-Saxon godsib meaning “godparent”? Similarly, why should bloody , with its gory origin, have become such a general-purpose intensifier? Semantic trends describe similar changes of meaning shown by groups of related words as their meanings become narrower or wider, stronger or weaker, better or worse, and so on. These changes, commonly apparent to individuals in the course of a single lifetime, become very pronounced as the centuries pass. As Samuel Beckett wrote more specifically on emotive language, “The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener” ( Waiting for Godot 1959, 91). Beckett was using layman’s language to describe what semanticists call the trends of generalization, whereby emotive words become used with less specificity, and especially that of loss of impact also covered in the entry for loss of intensity, weakening, or verbicide. These trends apply clearly to many categories of swearing and foul language. The entries for bastard, bitch, bugger, cunt, fuck, God, and hell detail this development. Furthermore, adjectives of such differing literal meanings as bloody, damned, fucking , and awful can now qualify almost any other quality, such as, good, bad, stupid, clever , and so on. Devilish was used with similar breadth in the eighteenth century. The more common the word, the wider its range of uses, an axiom that G.K. Zipf corroborated with the alarming statistic that, apart from a few core words, “different meanings of a word will tend to be equal to the square root of its relative frequency” (1945, 255). General works on semantic change by Michel Bréal (1900), Hans Sperber (1922), and Gustav Stern (1931), discussed in Stephen Ullmann (1957, 254-55) and Hughes (1988), sought to formulate certain “laws” of semantic development.

From the start of semantics as a serious discipline over a century ago, a number of scholars noted the trend of deterioration or pejoration in terms relating to women, some attributing it to malicious innuendo, possibly misogynistic in origin, others to false delicacy or tactful vagueness. This aspect is covered in the entry for stereotypes of women. Religious oaths and ejaculations provide clear cases of both generalization and loss of intensity. Over the centuries animal terms like pig, swine, sow, shrew , and bitch have become powerful insults, but then generalized and weakened. Obviously context, including the directness of the insult, and social and personal factors form important determiners of the force of a term. These issues are discussed further in the entry for impact. But the general semantic trend of weakening undergone by the terms in question can hardly be disputed. Few have remained genuinely taboo as modern speech communities have become desensitized to the impact of religious, genital, and excretory terms. The principal exceptions to the trend are terms of ethnic and racial abuse, although the taboo is relaxed in certain contexts within the speech community, becoming “jocular” or “familiar.” The table below shows certain patterns in semantic development, from the specific to the general, and from particular categories such as the genital and the excretory. The black squares indicate current meaning.

While four of the seven terms in the first two categories listed ( prick, cunt, shit , and turd ) can now mean a worthless person, the semantic changes are not entirely predictable, in that shit, cock, balls , and crap have developed the sense of “rubbish,” the first two being more prevalent in British English. Uniquely, shit has developed both senses. All the racial terms have generalized, but have intensified in taboo quality, which is against the general trend of loss of intensity. The labels have become insulting since they dehumanize individuals and imply that the person described is inferior or worthless.

Although the dominant semantic trends in swearing are deterioration and loss of intensity, the countertrend of amelioration can be seen in the development of bastard and bugger , which used to be entirely critical, but can now be used in British and Australian English with a sense of sympathy and even affection—for example, “He’s really a good bastard” and “He’s a nice old bugger.” More striking examples are bad, bitching, hell , and wicked , all of which are used as positive terms in Black English in the United States. Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive (1994) defines bad as “positive to the extreme,” bitching as “anything good or wonderful,” hell as “excellent; good; an impressive person,” and wicked as “superb; wonderful; intense.”