English is full of words that don’t quite make sense, at least at first glance. Take George Carlin’s famous comedy bit:
“Why do we park on a driveway but drive on a parkway?” _ George Carlin
I’ll give you a moment to laugh, it is funny.
The truth is, language drift explains everything. It’s not that funny when you really think about it.
And yes, this is going to be a blog about spoiling word jokes, misunderstandings surrounding English words, and then a bit more. If that sounds like it ruins the mystique of a good joke to you, probably stop reading here.
However, that same history and background information can be fascinating. Often, it’s about words changing based on (time and place) local context and then later losing that context.
For example, the word park is of Germanic origin, meaning fence. It moved into English through old French (parc) and German (pferch). The first went on to become “Park” and the latter went on to become pen (pigpen) and fold (to cover or wrap something).
From about 450 CE, British commoners had access to land that was known as commons. This happened as Anglo Saxon invaders seized land and parceled it out amongst themselves. Large allotments of land were handed to the lord of the parcel or manor. These were then independently divided between each household, with a haga (a private garden) for each home. In addition, a large main field was shared out amongst the village, with allotments per household plus access rights to the forest for harvesting timber, keeping pigs, and sometimes even to hunt.
That “commons” system held until the 14th-17th centuries, where a series of reforms turned that land over to local nobility and wealthy landowners. The first of those I am aware of was the Statute of Merton in 1235, which privatized local fields, literally handing them over to wealthy landowners for use to graze sheep. The “enclosure” of the commons continued across the country, sparking a series of revolts. The 1381 Peasants Revolt, Jack Kade’s rebellion of 1450, Kett’s rebellion of 1549, and Captain Pouch revolts of 1604-1607 all cited land access as major demands. In the latter, terms like “digger” and “leveler” referred to individuals who dug under fences or flattened them completely.
All of this was, of course, legitimized by the dominant idea that the poor were not good at managing land for themselves. As John Hales said in 1581, “that which is possessed of manie in common is neglected by all.”
Those “enclosed” commons quickly took on another name, which, was park. A word that meant “enclosed” or “fenced”. The word quickly went on to become a term to refer to the land inside those fences, set aside to preserve forest or game, to be used for hunting, riding, and ornament (if you were privileged to access it).
The park was born.
By the 1700s, mercantilism and capitalism had greatly increased the number of people wealthy enough to own carriages for leisure and transport. Green spaces were popular destinations for the leisure class, and those same socialites would often store their carriages and coaches on the green, especially when walking in said gardens. The word came to refer to the act of storing a vehicle, with an accompanying verb “parking”.
Parkway itself is an amalgamation of “park” (green space for recreation) and “driveway”. Here, it first came into play in the 19th century as landscape architects (urban planners in today’s language), most notably Frederick Olmstead, tried to design greener and more beautiful cities. Designs included setbacks alongside roads to create separate lanes for pedestrians, cyclists, equestrians, and carriages. The setback was a green space, typically lined with trees. A way by a park. Today, parkway refers to any road lined by a green belt of land. Though it’s not a protected term and you’ll sometimes see it slapped onto just any old road.
That was a lot of words to explain a 20-year-old joke right? But, this is a case of English using multiple very distinct words, which both descend from the same root, but branching off based in contextual changes in language use.
Stories like this are all too common. It’s pretty normal for any language to build up meaning around a word and then, when the original meaning is lost, it becomes contextually difficult to explain.
One of my favorite examples is this 2020 Twitter post:
Let’s take a look at a few more fun ones:
Would a fly that loses its wings be called a “walk?” – No, because the word “fly” for the insect is separate from the word “fly” meaning to move through the air. Flies are etymologically descended from the Old English word flēoge (the insect) and the word fly (to move through the air) descends from flēogan. Clearly the same root (cognates) but different words.
If flying is so safe, why is the airport called ‘terminal’? – Well, terminal means end-point. It’s not even language drift.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things? – Originally, overlook also meant “to examine carefully”. However, it also meant to view from a high place, meaning you’re far away and you miss a lot of details. As the word became more and more linked with viewing from a battlement, it became more and more linked with distance. The word “oversee” conversely stems from Old English ofersēon, to observe, survey or see, or to neglect and to despise. These words were probably first used interchangeably and then as overlook came to be used for lords and nobility and oversee for field mangers, the terms switched meanings.
If horrific is akin to horrible, why isn’t terrific akin to terrible? – Because the word terrific drifted in meaning. Terrific stems from the root Latin Terrere, to frighten (terror causing). This was used as a direct synonym to awesome (to cause awe) in the context of the Christian church. All of those words (magnificent, awesome, terrific, sublime) shifted meaning as the concept of the Christian god moved from one of terror to the modern concept of a gentler god. That, compared with the human tendency to use hyperbole, and the terror-causing quickly moves to be merely a superlative.
All of those examples have things in common. They’re all either cognates (words having the same linguistic derivation as another) or simply attributed to language drift.
However, the English language can also be confusing for other reasons. For example, we have plenty of false cognates (where words look like they have the same root, but they don’t)
Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker? – Broker is descended from Anglo-Norman French, brocour. Essentially, it replaced the existing Old English words pedlar (a seller of goods) and monger (a dealer or seller in a specific commodity) from daily English. You still see it in modern English as real estate broker and stock broker, and monger, as I’ve recently learned, in Maltese English (a vendor). Broke descends from the Old English/German Brecan/breken/Brechen (one of which is still used in Dutch) meaning. (it’s also from the same root as bray, the sound donkeys make). This term was roughly used to mean to fracture or crack, which then was popularized in the sense of the Christian bible (to break one’s spirit) and from there transformed into a word meaning to be broken as in “to be rendered helpless or ill”. In the 1600s, the term began to be associated with money when the term “break the bank” arose to refer to when a gambler won more money than the house could afford to pay.
Or the word scale, which comes in three completely separate variants:
- Scale, to climb, stemming from Latin scala (ladder)
- Scale, a device to measure weight or length (skal, a drinking vessel that was commonly used as a unit of weight)
- Scale, the exterior plating of fish and many reptiles, from Old French escale (shell/husk)
All three appear to be false cognates, but that also gets pretty complicated if you go back far enough (words in green are in modern English):
Then compare that to the relatively simple progression of the word scale (to climb):
Cognates and (false) cognates mean that sometimes words look like they mean one thing when they might mean something entirely different. Sometimes that’s also a result of idiom and metaphor, which might be lost as language drifts. For example, in the case of buttress, which shifted from being a metaphor about supporting something from the architectural term to being its own word meaning such.
Or take man, as in mankind, human.
I recently read Formations of Belief, a collection of essays edited by Philip Nord, and ran across a pet peeve of mine. Multiple authors quoted “man” as a gendered term and suggested that we use ungendered alternatives like “people”.
Man, of course, coming from the root “man-” from proto-indo-european, means people. In fact, Old English used wer to mean male and wif to mean female. Wif as in wife is still present in modern English. By middle English, words like gumo and gome (Proto-West Germanic in origin) are still in words like bridgegroom and goon, weld, arrai, iholden, werre (werewolf), were all used to refer to “a male of the human race”. Over time, that shifted, probably especially in relation to words like liegeman, holdman, steerman, alderman, etc. People were referred to by their profession with “man” on the end, leading to requesting “men” instead of laborers and soldiers, leading to this significantly male workforce to shift the usage of the name.
More importantly, you can see that same pattern in other languages. For example, in romance languages, the root word “homo” almost universally shifted to mean simply “male”. E.g., Hombre, homme, homen, uomo. Language shifts occur based on the context of the words as they are actually used. Which can become confusing when we leave those contexts behind.
Cultural shifts also mean that we can lose the contexts for ideas. Even when those ideas were major influences on society at the time. For example, I had to look up why Jesus is represented with a pelican. Another concept, the idea of “immortalized in song and verse” is also alien to most modern readers.
Take Sonnet 18, probably one of the most famous poems out there:
Shall I compare thee to a winter’s day?
Rough winds do shake the buds of may
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines
And often is his gold complexion dimmed
And every fair from fair sometimes declines
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair which thou owst
Nor shall death brag thou wanderst in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou growst
So long as men can breathe and eyes can see
So long lives this and this gives life to thee
Ah yes, I could compare you to a summer’s day, it’s beautiful – but then the weather’s not always perfect, the sun is hot the wind is harsh and every summer comes to an end. And you, here you are, far more perfect, only being immortalized in the written word, by my pen, could ever do you justice.
The interesting thing about that little bit of what sounds like ego is that it was actually the common belief at the time that being preserved in writing preserved the record of you for all eternity. After all, the works of Herodotus, Aristotle, and Plato were so renowned as to shape the education of every modern man at the time. The concept of writing for pleasure, writing to be thrown away, writing where a book sells an average of just 2,500 copies before being consigned to be forgotten forever was unknown to Shakespeare. His statement is merely that he has written about his paramour and therefore they will be remembered for all time, not because he wrote it but because it was written down.
Or, take “One Day I Wrote Her Name” better known as Sonnet 75 by Edmund Spenser,
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
“Vain man,” said she, “that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.”
“Not so,” (quoth I) “let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”
Or, again, Shakespeare, with Sonnet 55:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
Compare to today, where words are so much cheap trash to be thrown away, and the impact of that steadfast believe that something you wrote today would be read not just now but 1000 years in the future, is gone. The Greek temples sunk and broken, while the words of Aristotle live on.
Where now is Regulus, or Romulus, or Remus? / Primordial Rome abides only in its name; we hold only naked names.
