The M-W dictionary at the top of the page defines the word 'ornery', which I now understand, but says, mysteriously, of the etymology that the word comes from 'ordinary'. How did a word that generally means 'normal' 'unexceptional' and the like become a word meaning irritable or cantankerous?
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05-21-03, 08:35 AM
maiku
The key to this change in the ordinary sense of the word ordinary could well lie in another synonym you omitted, Fred, viz. common. Consider what can happen to that word, or even better, the related word vulgar, which is now almost entirely negative in connotation in English.

Meaning change of this sort is not frequent, but it is common enough to have a name of its own in historical linguistics--pejoration. The word silly comes from Old English sælig, which originally meant blessed or good, as it still does in the Modern High German cognate selig. The word creature has undergone pejoration, too, but interestingly enough, in the altered form critter this pejoration has proceeded even further and faster. Critter, by the way, seems to have been introduced at nearly the same time as ornery was. (Whatever that observation is worth.)

The German equivalent of our word ordinary (ordinär) has undergone pejoration, too, and now means nothing but low, mean, and vulgar. The German word kavalier, as an adjective, is still very positive: it means gentlemanly, refined, and so on. But look at what has become of the cognate cavalier in English.

05-21-03, 09:37 AM
FredPuli
So that is pejoration. Is there a term for the way in which the word 'terrific' has come to mean 'really good, excellent' ? A similar word in French 'terrible' has changed in the same way.In both languages the word may still mean what it originally did but is rapidly ceasing to be used for that in everyday speech and writing.
05-21-03, 10:06 AM

methos
terrible, terrific, terrify... all from to frighten, originally...

formidable ... also from fear...

And then there's the case of awesome and awful. Apparently, awe is good, but not if you are full of it Wink.

There seem to be a number of words with their roots in fright that have forms that are positive and negative (from something that is great inspiring fear, I suppose).

[This message was edited by methos5000 on 05-21-03 at 10:15 AM.]

[This message was edited by methos5000 on 05-21-03 at 10:15 AM.]

05-21-03, 10:30 AM
maiku
Fred: What else but the term melioration?

People being what they are, instances of this kind of change are rarer than the opposite, pejoration. But they do happen, and the change in the meaning of terrific you cite above, Fred, is one such case.

It is interesting that methos has pointed to the words awesome and awful in the same connection. Awesome means originally awe inspiring, of course, and what was particularly awesome in this sense was also awful, hence in a way also terrifying. Nowadays, awful is never used in this way. Because of pejoration, it now means nothing more than very bad. But awesome, particularly in current teenage slang in America, has acquired the sense of--guess what?--terrific, i.e., very, very good.

Another example of melioration I suppose would be the word fond. To be fond was originally to behave like a fool. Now, to be fond of at least some things in life is considered a mark of good psychological adjustment. Go figure.

05-21-03, 03:18 PM
FredPuli
I was expecting you to doubt , maiku , whether anybody did use terrific to mean even 'frightening', let alone 'terrifying 'nowadays.Even a 'terrific' fighter or opponent is only a very good one, no more. I could think of just one instance of it. Here people still say 'There was a terrific storm last night !' meaning 'alarming, frightening' not 'good'.This is a cliche; the words go as a pair, the adjective comes to mind without any conscious choice . Big, frightening,thunderstorms are, it seems, always witnessed as 'terrific storms'.So in one case the word is surviving with a meaning close to its original one, simply because we and everyone we know has 'always' said it and can't see a reason to change.

05-21-03, 04:22 PM
maiku
I don't find your example of a "terrific storm" at all convincing, Fred. We say the same thing over here. But if we meant it was really a horrible, frightening, awful storm, we'd no doubt say instead that it was a terrifying storm. I can't be sure, of course, of how you want to take the word "terrific" in your own idiolect, but why can't a "terrific storm" be one which is an awfully good one in the way of being a storm? That's the way I usually understand it myself.

Besides being a terrifyingly criminal act, the explosion that Timothy McVeigh set off to destroy the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was a terrific one--meaning perhaps only that it was a very good example, in its way, of pyrotechnics.

You do see the problem with your analysis, don't you? Offhand, I can't think of a single instance in which I would understand the word "terrific" in the same way as "terrifying."
Face it, the word "terrific" has become just another intensifier in English, and a pretty weak one at that.

I can't challenge your private understanding of this word, of course, and I don't mean to. And yes, it does happen that after a semantic change is essentially complete there may remain certain contexts in which the unchanged meaning is preserved. The following example isn't a very good one, but it may illustrate what I'm talking about. In America (I don't know about the usage in the U.K.), the word nauseous, meaning originally "sickening" or "nauseating," is rapidly coming to mean simply and merely "nauseated." I don't like this usage myself, but there's little I can do about it. Still, nauseous fumes will be commonly understood even in these degenerate times over here to refer to fumes that induce nausea, rather than to fumes which are sick of themselves. It is a puzzlement.

[This message was edited by maiku on 05-21-03 at 04:42 PM.]

05-21-03, 05:01 PM
juanruiz
Pejoratives are also at work in the obsession with "left": sinister and gauche. In heraldry the bar sinister, e.g., was a mark of illegitimacy, which is why the diagonal stripes on a tie never go from left to right.
On the other hand, the bar sinister could be where blam suffered his last hangover.

[This message was edited by juanruiz on 05-21-03 at 05:12 PM.]

05-21-03, 05:39 PM
FredPuli
Ah, we do not get 'terrifying storms',here maiku. The last was in 1987 in the South East of England and was and is still referred to as the 'Hurricane' ( which it was not)! Do people enjoy their storms that much ? Why have they long chosen this word for their cliche of choice and not some other ? As you say it may simply be personal ; the impression I get here is that it remains a favoured saying of those who find storms anything but enjoyable and are disinclined to give them such amiable ratings.However I can readily understand that the people who drive over the southern USA in pursuit of tornadoes must hope to find what they term a terrific one even if the rest of us would find it terrifying to be near.

05-21-03, 06:53 PM
maiku
You misunderstand me yet again, Fred. I did not say that a "terrific" storm was a good thing altogether, I only said it was good as far as being a storm goes.

Do you perhaps remember an earlier thread where I talked about syncategorematic constructions? Perhaps that was somewhere else entirely. In any case, an adjective is said to be used "syncategorematically" if the precise meaning of the whole construction depends on the noun which is modified. Thus, a good cop is different from a good robber, a good shepherd is different from a good sheep rustler, and a good Al Quaida operative is a lot different from a good person (though the Al Quaida operative may think he's a good person, too, and will wind up in paradise with 72 virgins attending on him.)

Similarly, a really, really good storm is not necessarily a good thing to be caught out in. And as I tried to show above, a terrifying terrorist attack like that of Timothy McVeigh's could even be considered a terrifically good example of its kind of thing. I feel certain McVeigh thought so, up to the very moment when his life was extinguished by a terrifying lethal injection, terrifically satisfying to nearly everyone but him.

I know you don't have the kinds of truly terrifying storms in Britain that we have here in the U.S. where I live. I'm speaking primarily of tornadoes, the most terrifying of all natural curses in my book. These things generate winds that are truly terrifying, and terrific ones, too. I'm understanding "a terrific wind" to mean here a very good blow, indeed, with speeds far better than those of your average hurricane.

Good enough? Or not terribly so? Wink

05-22-03, 03:47 AM
FredPuli
'Good as far as being a storm goes' Yes you've lost me there!

05-22-03, 09:00 AM
maiku
Have you never seen someone flinch at the sound of a terrifically loud and close-by thunder clap and then say something like, "My, that was a good one"? A storm can be intensely scary and yet, qua storm, a very excellent example of the worst of them.

Or how about a good (enemy) sniper, a great hit man, an excellent double agent, or a consummate assassin?

05-22-03, 12:22 PM
FredPuli
Dear me, maiku !You've lost ME because I don't think of storms, that way; it struck me that the words quoted were amusing in the context, that's all. It's a light hearted reply. I refer you to my earlier post ; some people here do use the word because they think it indicates that the event caused anxiety to them, poor souls.There's an end. I'm beginning to wish I'd never met any of 'em ( I could do without being related to some too,some days, but that's not for this forum...!) . I knew some already but research was called for. Stressful, or what ? Well, you try going into a pub and yelling 'How are your idiolects' at seated peasants. A fellow can get misunderstood. Could've turned nasty. Anyway I beg to report that there are anxious Britons who still think they are expressing anxiety in those circumstances and think they convey it by the word, the poor reactionary souls. A startling glimpse of the obvious to some. Can't speak for the rest of the Anglophone world or indeed the rest of us.I think I'll go back tomorrow and try them on, say, 'terrific noise' ( any excuse to get out, see)! {LOL or something...)

05-22-03, 12:59 PM
teeceeum
My favorite is "fantastic". When did grotesque become a good thing?

05-22-03, 01:18 PM
maiku

quote:Originally posted by FredPuli:
... some people here do use the word [terrific] because they think it indicates that the event caused anxiety to them, poor souls.There's an end...



Well, perhaps not quite, Fred! I will be understood!

Let go the objection that your gloss of "terrific storm" would seem to require mind reading rather than mere lexicography (the kind of thing Humpty-Dumpty demanded of Alice, in fact, in Through the Looking Glass, where he said that words "mean" just what I want them to mean, nothing more.)

There is, of course, some truth to this Humpty-Dumpty theory of meaning. In the field of semiotics, it is dealt with by distinguishing "semantic" meaning from "pragmatic" meaning. The latter is what the speaker intends to convey. So it is entirely possible that Britons who say, "That was a terrific storm" intend, pragmatically, to convey the idea that it scared them silly. Indeed, the sentence I used in reference to an especially frightening thunder clap, "My, that
was a good one," can be also be used to indicate that it caused the speaker anxiety, as you say.

At the same time, the words good and terrific in these contexts don't mean anything like "terrifying," semantically.

I very much enjoy this kind of verbal joust with you, Fred. I think there may be a close relation in our professions. As a barrister, you no doubt have to depend a lot on legal precedents. In something like the same way, my science of linguistics depends upon precedents, too: what the speakers of a given language have been observed to say in the past, and our best quesses at trying to interpret what they meant by what they said. That's why I always try my best to bring relevant examples into my replies to questions about language.

If I should get into trouble next time I visit the United Kingdom (not all that unlikely an eventuality, alas) could I look you up, Fred, and have you as my barrister? Smile

05-29-03, 05:32 AM
Fourbrick
Just to go back to the original question, I always understood that "ornery" was derived from "hornery" which is what the old time cowboys called bad tempered cattle in the Wild west. As the definition of ornery is cantankerous, I wondered whether the derivation from a bad tempered cow is rather better than from "ordinary" which I don't see related to cantankerous. I know the M-W gives the origin as "ordinary" but just wondered.
05-29-03, 11:31 AM
maiku
Well, fourbrick, a derivation from hornery for a bad tempered cow might be better, if only we knew where the word hornery itself might have come from (or why its existence doesn't seem to be documented anywhere).


Better yet, you might have suggested that hornery was originally applied to a bad tempered bull rather than a cow....

Nah, I'm not going to go there. Wink

[This message was edited by maiku on 05-29-03 at 11:53 AM.]

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