Inaccurate and outdated, but still good

Yesterday's article had me thinking (yes, once more) about languages and the evolution of their usage over time, how words are invented as the need for them arises, and then they get embedded in the common use and can stay there for decades or centuries even if the context in which they appeared is long gone. Of course, the real power of words and idioms lies in the shared used that speakers of the language make of them: as long as they keep serving the communication function, there is no reason to give them up, even if they require some cultural knowledge to be understood. In fact, most native speakers get to learn the meaning of their idiomatic expressions as a block, understanding that the group has a different meaning than the sum of the words, but never scratch the surface to reconstruct how the expression came to be.

The starting point of this line of thought was, as you have probably guessed, "burning the midnight oil" as an expression to represent working late and in a rather desperate way to try to keep a deadline. The idiom dates back to the times before gas lighting, when all the illumination was based on oil lamps, so if you wanted to work late into the night you ended up burning the midnight oil. These days nobody burns oil for illumination anymore and most people gravitate towards the alternative expression of "pulling an all-nighter" but the old one is still understandable and in use almost four hundred years later.

Photo: simpleinsomnia

A slightly older age can be attributed to "do not throw out the baby with the bath water", which was in use in its original German version in the early 1500s and then was adopted in English in the 19th century. The expression has such a strong visual impact that it is still common use. With the widespread access to running water the once-frequent practice of bathing in a big tin or wooden bucket has been replaced with built-in bathtubs and most people even clean themselves almost exclusively in a shower, which uses significantly less water. And yet anyone can imagine the horrified surprise that one can be subject to if, when turning over the bath, they find that the baby was still inside it.

Even if it is not an idiomatic expression, the word dial sports an even longer and more convoluted history. Its origin can be traced back to dies, the Latin word for "day", in particular to the sundial, which uses the shadow cast by a stick on a semicircular surface to determine the time (literally, the part of the day). The concept was then transfer to clock (and watch) faces, which soon became whole circles for mechanical simplicity but were still linked to the representation of the daily transit of the Sun in the sky and the duration of a day. From the watch faces, the word then applied to any circular display of numerical information, such as the speedometer of a car. As technology progressed, some dials became linear, as in many radio receivers, and they were incorporated to the telephones to signal the intended recipient of a call by means of the rotary wheel. Even today, when most phones are key-operated (or even key-less if we talk about a touchscreen), we still dial a number when we want to call someone.

There are hundreds and thousands of these examples, not only in English but essentially in every language, and each example tells a story of how humans adapted the tools they had at hand to serve the purpose of communication. The speakers of the language do not need to know any of these stories to be able to make full use of these expressions, because the daily practice, the repeated example of their parents and other adults as they grow, and the occasional correction by their teachers makes for a very robust assimilation of the meaning even in the absence of an explanation. When the situation is frequent enough, the expression solidifies itself out of simple repetition.

The frequency of these situations explains that many languages have equivalent expressions. However, because the story of the expression is heavily influenced by the culture in which it evolves, the figures of speech vary wildly from one language to another. Cartoonist James Chapman has compiled (and created really hilarious pictures for) several of these equivalent expressions. The book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in languages and their different histories.

Chances are that this is not the last time you read my thoughts about languages, because I am simply fascinated by them. The ingenuity of the human mind knows almost no end when it comes to finding ways to describe events and ideas. And whenever we happen to hit the edge, to find ourselves without the right word, we can simply invent a new one. I recently saw the screen capture of an internet forum conversation where someone was complaining about "all those new words that are just invented", to which someone replied that all words are invented, they do not grow on trees or come out of the ground. The fact that some words are older than others does not mean that they were not invented back then, only that they were invented very well, so much so that we still use them today. Have a nice evening.