Three ways we transform language without realising

Bad. It’s a strange old word.

Strange, in that it can refer to something awful, but there was also a time when it meant something was brilliant too. Like a new pair of trainers.

But how can one word mean one thing, and then the complete opposite? How can the word iconic have gone from describing sacred Christian artworks to, well, an impressive new pair of trainers? And how do words invented for secret or covert purposes wind up in the dictionary?

The answer is simple - us. Throughout history, people have thrown the language rulebook out of the window, very often without realising. However, those throwaway moments can also lead to words going down a whole new path of meaning. Here are just a few examples.

Bleach is the word

The word iconic hails from Greek (εικόνα) and was used to describe sacred depictions of religious imagery. Over time, its meaning has broadened. Iconic was subsequently used to describe items or individuals which best represent an era or genre, such as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in portrait painting, Elvis Presley in rock’n’roll, or Rosa Parks in the civil rights movement.

Log on to social media in 2020 and iconic is used to describe anything which impresses a post’s author, no matter how obscure it may be to the reader. But how can a word once reserved for religious artwork have changed so much? Dr Tine Breban, head of linguistics at the University of Manchester says the word’s ‘superpositive’ meaning is a factor in this change.

She told BBC Bitesize: “This type of meaning change is even more frequent in words that express positive feelings. Speakers want to express how positive they feel about something by using hyperbolic expressions.”

If we take hyperbolic as meaning ‘over the top’, then iconic is a superpositive description that fits the bill when someone wants to show their enthusiasm for something, no matter how everyday it may appear to others.

Dr Breban continued: “When words like iconic are used in these hyperbolic contexts, many times by many speakers, they lose part of their expressive meaning. The process is called bleaching and you can compare it to a new bright red top which quickly becomes your favourite. You wear it lots, so you have to wash it lots. The red will fade over time and you will, inevitably, change it for a new favourite.”

That means iconic could one day lose favour as a much-used indicator of positivity and another word will take its place. But when that happens, the bleaching won’t disappear, and its widened use in recent years means the definition of iconic has been changed, perhaps forever.

It’s bad to be different

Slang has a rich history of off-the-cuff choices which end up in common usage. Those choices can include taking words with one meaning and ‘flipping’ them to mean another. For example, the aforementioned ‘bad’, along with ‘wicked’ and ‘sick’ are words with negative connotations, but their meaning was reversed by slang users to indicate something positive - ‘a sick new band’, for example.

Dr Breban noted: “The fact that these words originally had a negative meaning… makes them subversive and attractive to language users wanting to create and ‘in-group - out-group’ identity. So there’s definitely deliberateness in their adoption by certain groups.”

It's not just slang where this happens. For example, ‘sanction’ can mean to allow something in one context, or to ban it in another. Such words can be called auto-antonyms, contranyms or Janus words, named after the Roman god with two heads which looked in opposite directions to each other.

A positive use of ‘sick’ was first officially recorded in 1983, as campus slang in the University of North Carolina. While its ‘Janus’ version is not yet recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), its new usage as a buzzword was noted on the Macmillan Dictionary website as far back as 2011.

'Wicked', popular in the 1980s as a positive word, was first coined in its auto-antonym form by the acclaimed author F Scott Fitzgerald in his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise. Little could he have realised how his wordplay would be used more than 60 years later to describe a slick breakdancing move. Or how this flipped definition of wicked is now recorded in the OED.

Codewords going rogue

Similar to slang, language can be deliberately turned on its head within certain jobs and social situations, to confuse outsiders. Those words usually remain within that world but, occasionally, they grow legs.

Dr Laura Wright, a reader of English Language at Cambridge University, explained: “Deliberately confusing people by changing words around is nothing new. For example, ‘rouf yenap’ - roughly ‘four penny’ backwards - meant ‘fourpence’ in the 19th Century in racing, gambling and market contexts.” These became known as back slang, in that words were reversed and shared on a strictly need-to-know basis.

Back slang was popular in prisons, as it helped inmates mask their conversations from the wardens. In the early 20th Century, they described a prison term of seven years as a ‘nevis’. Nothing to do with the mountain (although you could argue such a sentence would have felt as challenging a journey), it was a tweaked version of ‘seven’ spelled backwards.

But ‘yob’ is perhaps the most famous example of back slang there is. It was used by tradespeople, particularly butchers, in the 19th Century, a trade where back slang thrived. In a busy shop, staff could discuss the quality of the meat on sale, and other topics, in front of customers without the potential buyers realising what was being talked about.

In back slang, yob came about by spelling boy backwards. It became a term used for a butcher's boy, or a young lad working for other traders. But rather than confuse people, it entered common usage, and is still spoken today to describe a young man displaying unacceptable behaviour. The derogatory definition began to take hold after the First World War.

From someone who worked with sausages to an undesirable citizen. Perhaps not the common usage a yob’s employer was originally aiming for.