A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 291
faculty in a college. But it has come to be used as a designation for the senior or foremost
person of any group or class, so that we may speak of the dean of American critics or,
indeed, of sportswriters.
The opposite tendency is for a word gradually to acquire a more restricted sense, or to
be chiefly used in one special connection. A classic example of this practice is the word
doctor. There are doctors (i.e., learned men and women) in theology, law, and many other
fields beside medicine, but nowadays when we send for the doctor we mean a member of
only one profession. In some of the preceding paragraphs, especially that in which were
presented examples of old words in new meanings, will be found a number of similar
instances. The verb to park as applied to automobiles and the war word tank are cases in
point. The use of a word in a restricted sense does not preclude its use also in other
meanings. There was a time in the 1890s when the word wheel suggested to most people
a bicycle, but it could still be used of the wheel of a cart or a carriage. Often the restricted
sense of a word belongs to a special or class vocabulary. An enlargement means to a
photographer a large print made from a small negative, and in educational circles a senior
is a member of the graduating class. Consequently, it sometimes happens that the same
word will acquire different restricted meanings for different people. The word gas is an
inclusive term for the chemist, but it calls up a more restricted idea in the kitchen and a
still different one in the garage. Narrowing of meaning may be confined to one locality
under the influence of local conditions. Nickel in America means a coin, and for a
number of years the word prohibition in this country generally suggested the prohibition
of alcohol. In the same way the terms democrat and republican seldom have their broader
significance to an American but rather imply adherence to one or the other of the two
chief political parties in the United States.
Degeneration of meaning may take several forms. It may take the form of the gradual
extension to so many senses that any particular meaning which a word may have had is
completely lost. This is one form of generalization already illustrated in the words lovely
and great. 3 Awful and terrible have undergone a similar deterioration. In other cases a
word has retained a very specific meaning but a less favorable one than it originally had.
Phillips in his New World of Words (1658) defines garble as “to purifie, to sort out the
bad from the good, an expression borrowed from Grocers, who are said to garble their
Spices, i.e. to purifie them from the dross and dirt.” The word was still used in this sense
3
Chesterfield has an interesting comment on this development in the word vast in his time: “Not
contented with enriching our language by words absolutely new, my fair countrywomen have gone
still farther, and improved it by the application and extension of old ones to various and very
different significations. They take a word and change it, like a guinea into shillings for pocketmoney,
to be employed in the several occasional purposes of the day. For instance, the adjective
vast, and its adverb vastly, mean anything, and are the fashionable words of the most fashionable
people. A fine woman, under this head I comprehend all fine gentlemen too, not knowing in truth
where to place them properly, is vastly obliged, or vastly offended, vastly glad, or vastly sorry.
Large objects are vastly great, small ones are vastly little; and I had lately the pleasure to hear a fine
woman pronounce, by a happy metonymy, a very small gold snuff-box that was produced in
company to be vastly pretty, because it was vastly little.” (The World, No. 101, December 5, 1754.)