George McKnight

English words and their background

Tropes

In the development of language it is well established that the things first to receive names were the definite, tangible things coming most close in everyday experience.

The less tangible elements in life were named by means of figurative shifts of earlier names. Thus the concrete names of space relations, which were appreciable by sight and touch, were made to serve in expressing the relations of time, matters outside the direct range of fine senses.

Thus long and short applied to time, are words originally expressing spatial dimension. The adjective brief, now associated with time, comes from the Latin brevis originally applied to space... Most of the names for divisions of time may be traced back to words expressing physical facts: minute (Lat. minutus, "small"); second (Med. Lat. secunda minuta, "second minute", i.e. further subdivision);... month (moon); year (underlying meaning "spring")...

The verb last, "to endure", in earlier English applied to spatial continuance. Endure goes back to a physical meaning "to become hard". Fast in the sense of "rapid", is derived from an earlier meaning "firmly fixed". Rapid, in turn, goes back to an earlier physical meaning "snatching"; it is related in origin to such words as rapacious and rapine. Quick, a native English word, had an original meaning "living", a meaning surviving in such combinations as quicksilver, quick line, cut to the quick, the quick and the dead.

In like manner moral conceptions have had to appropriate names from the physical world. Even the fundamental words, right and wrong, originally meant physically "straight" and "crooked", respectively (cf. right angle, right away, etc., and О. Е. wringan, "to twist"), and it will be noted that in modern colloquial language the shift in meaning has been repeated in the case of the words, straight and crooked. The fundamental meaning of good is supposed to be "fitting" or "suitable"; that of evil is supposed to be "excessive". The word bad, which somewhat mysteriously makes its first appearance in the Middle English period, it is supposed, applied originally to a form of physical abnormality... True, as it is pointed out elsewhere, in its remote origin, probably applied to the oak tree.

The way in which a simple set of words may be made to express a complex variety of meanings is illustrated further by the use made of names of such elemental conceptions as the parts of the body, the names of which are shifted to express a remarkably varied set of meanings in the inanimate world or in the world of thought. The name head appears in bridgehead, head of a pin, head of an institution, head of a class, fountain head, head of a coin, head of cattle, headland. The Latin caput "head", and its French derivative, chief, appear in a series of meanings equally varied, in such words as captain, capital (city), capital (property), chief (noun and adjective) and chef (of kitchen).

2. Read the following text and answer the questions:

1. What are the three types of motivation found in words?

2. Why is etymological motivation relative?

3. What is meant by the mutability of motivation?

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