English 370-373 (Vaughan: Winter 2005)

A Word Biography

(Due: Thursday, 17 February)

As we investigate different areas in the field of “language” and specifically of the history of the English language, we are tracing changes in the form and pronunciation of certain words. Along with the changes in the words’ phonological and graphemic shapes, we may also notice how meanings alter and adapt. We can get a fuller understanding of the development of the English language by paying attention to the “semantics” of words, the ways in which their meanings develop and change in the course of time and use. Some changes are slight; others are more dramatic. Some are related to differences in register or style; others reflect the adaptation of words to entirely new linguistic and cultural circumstances.

This exercise has as its overall goal to provide you with a specific, detailed example of an English word, one that will allow to develop a concrete understanding of some of the linguistic and historical principles we are covering in the course. Tracing the history of a single word will alert you to some of the details, in form and meaning, that define the historical changes in a single word. It will allow you to have on call a specific case that you might be able to use (in the final exam, say) to mark concrete and specific some of the dynamic features found in the history of the English language.

Your immediate goal, then, is to produce for me and the rest of the class, a brief “biography” of your assigned word. This will be due at class on Thursday, 17 February. It should fill no more than a single sheet of paper (about 1200-1500 words: you can use both sides, single-space if you wish, but please don’t use a font smaller than 10-point). Send me an electronic copy (as an email attachment). I have set up a class email list, so that you can deliver your biographies to others in electronic form.

Most dictionaries—even those like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) that pay detailed attention to historical developments of words— organize their entries around categories of meaning; these are often arranged in ways that make logical sense but they do not usually correspond to the order in which those meanings appear as the word develops over time. Your biography, however, should focus particularly on those chronological developments, and try to explain as well as you can how the recorded historical usages of the word evolved. This will require you to pay attention to the dates of citations (commonly given in OED, MED and some others), and to the word’s changes in nuance or even in more basic meaning, develops or evolves in the records of its appearances in English.

With the electronic dictionaries and other databases available online, with the books and articles that can be found on the shelves of our libraries, and with your own familiarity with early twenty-first-century American English, you should be able to detail the biography of the word from its first appearance in English down to today.

You best place to start is probably the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is available electronically as well as in Suzzallo (and OUGL) Reference. Examining your word there will provide you with a trustworthy and relatively up to date discussion of the word’s etymology and meanings, and it will offer you a rich (though by no means complete) selection of historical examples of word’s varied use (and spelling). This will provide you with the skeleton (at least) of your biography: the OED will give you many examples and allow you to trace and even explain your word’s patterns of semantic change. It may also provide meanings or quotations that look interesting or odd.

Your biography should give some account of the English word’s ancestry, its ‘parents’ and ‘grandparents.’ From which language did the word come into English (if it was not already present in Old English)? What is the earliest ancestor of the word we know about? In most cases this last will turn out to be an Indo-European word or word-root, such as those detailed in the American Heritage Dictionary; some, however, may be non-Indo-European, or subject to speculation. Tell what you can find out about these origins from the dictionaries/databases.

While you focus on the meanings of the word, pay attention to historical spelling variation and develop some sense of the kinds of phonological changes they might indicate. And for words that appear as more than one part of speech, try to determine which form/usage came first and watch for when the word appears to undergo a functional shift from, say, noun to verb. This is part of the word’s biography. (In some cases, however, words with the same spelling derive from radically different origins and are not otherwise related. If they stay separate, you can ignore the secondary word[s]. However, if at some point in the two distinct words get confused as a result of their similarity in form, be sure to include that.)

What did the word mean in its earliest appearance, and how and when did the other meanings appear? Your job as ‘biographer’ is to try to describe and justify these new meanings. What sort of logical explanation can you come up with? Was the meaning transferred from one situation to another and so have to be adjusted? Was the literal meaning of the word given a metaphoric interpretation, which resulted in yet a further change occurring when the metaphorical sense of the word took over from the original literal sense? Different dictionaries may give different definitions, so you’ll need to process those differences for yourself.. You may find it useful to do electronic searches of your word, and supplement these dictionary definitions if necessary. (COBUILD and the BNC are good databases to use here.)

There are other resources (electronic and hard copy) for you to consult, but remember that these only provide the information for you for organization and interpretation. You will need to describe and make sense of the historical sequence of meanings. To do so, you’ll probably have to speculate about how these semantic changes may have occurred. Merely regurgitating in chronological form the information from the OED won’t get us far enough. Supplement the OED with investigations of the earlier forms/meanings of the word that you can find in Old English and Middle English. (Again, there are dictionaries of these online and in the UW Libraries. Some are listed below.) In addition to looking at dictionaries of earlier English, you should also look at one or more dictionaries of modern English and investigate possible dialect usages in regional or other dialects of American English.

SOME IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT THE FORMAT OF YOUR WORD BIOGRAPHY:

Cite your sources. It must be clear what dictionaries the definitions your are using come from and what other sources you have used. You may use short titles for those in the bibliography below(they are given in parentheses); others will need fuller citation.

For clarity’s sake, when you refer to words as words, put them in italics; if you are citing the word’s meaning, put it in ‘single quotation marks’; put quotations and examples in “double quotation marks.” For example:

The word science frequently means ‘wisdom,’ as in these lines about the Trinity from Piers Plowman: “Right so is the Sone the science of the Fader / And ful God as is the Fader, no febler ne no bettre” (B 17.172, ed. Schmidt).

The term cock ‘rooster’ has fallen out of use because it is homophonous with a taboo word.

Be interesting! Make this more than a dry chronology of the word’s uses.

I am happy to be of whatever help I can be as you work on this exercise. Please come visit during office hours or email me a note with questions or observations about your words as you work on them.

A FEW RELEVANT RESOURCES

(Look for others, online and in the libraries—even journal articles)

Faye Christenberry’s links http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/English/BI300/ENGL370.html

In the Suzzallo Reference stacks:

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) PE1625 O87 (also OUGL)

Middle English Dictionary (MED) PE679 M54

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AH) PE1628 A623 (also OUGL)

Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (HDAS) PE2846 H57 (also OUGL)

Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) PE2843 D52 (also OUGL)

Online:

Middle English Dictionary (e-MED) http://www.hti.umich.edu/dict/med/

Oxford English Dictionary (e-OED) www.washington.edu/home/oed/

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (e-AH) www.bartleby.com/61/

COBUILD http://web.quick.cz/jaedth/Introduction to CCS.htm

The British National Corpus (BNC) www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

Bosworth-Toller, Old English Dictionary (original [BT] in Suzzallo and OUGL Reference: PE279 B5)
(e-BT) www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/oe_bosworthtoller_about.html

The University of Toronto Dictionary of Old English (DOE) http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/o/oec/

Authorized Biographers

Here are your assigned words. If it is mutually agreeable, you may exchange words with someone else. Please let me know if you do make a translation.

*Biographer’s Name*	*Word*	*Part(s) of Speech*
Brasefield, David	weird	*noun, adj. verb*
Butzner, Alexis	dream	*noun, verb*
Campbell, Tania	stink	*verb, noun*
Christiansen, April	cool	*verb, adj. (noun)*
Conley, Valerie	craft	*noun, verb*
Dent, Patrick	starve	*verb*
Gilmore, Paul	cruddy	*adj.*
Grayson, Sara	disease	*noun*
Haney, Lindsay	cleave	*verb*
Hanson, Megan	burn	*verb*
Hawryluk, Justin	silly	*adj., adv. (noun)*
Jones, Carolyn	flatter	*verb*
Koehler, Amber	engine	*noun, verb*
Koo, Tina	eerie	*adj.*
Laing, Heather	worm	*noun*
Loewen, Bree	fond	*adj., noun*
Martinez, Jessica	gay	*adj., adv.*
Mayer, Tara	gentle	*adj.*
McCulloch, Scott	girl	*noun*
Morita, Maki	giddy	*adj.*
Nielsen, Renea	lewd	*adj.*
Ordóñez, Christy	write	*verb*
Ryan, Keegan	nice	*adj., adv. (noun, verb)*
Schlicher, Jill	dreary	*adj., verb (noun)*
Silverman, Tracy	sad	*adj., adv.*
Spencer, Deidre	slay	*verb*
Thorson, Dana	crooked	*adj.*
Wilcox, Hunter	dizzy	*adj., verb*