In 1857 a group of scholars gathered for a meeting of the
Philological Society in London and decided that the current dictionaries
(mostly Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary) were not sufficient to cover all the
advancements in knowledge of historical linguistics. This was the impetus for work
on a New English Dictionary (the NED) that would be a complete historical
record of all the words that existed in the language from the year 1100 to the
present. When Oxford University Press
agreed to publish the dictionary it became known instead as the Oxford English Dictionary, or more
simply, the OED.

In order to explain how the OED arranges its entries, and
the best use of it, imagine you are reading Shakespeare’s Henry V, and in Act 3, scene 6 you come across the line “A soldier,
one of buxom valor.” This is an odd
line, since the word “buxom” today generally means “plump” or more often,
“large-breasted,” and describes women rather than men. Describing a male soldier’s valor as “buxom”
would make no sense at all today. Using
the OED, however, we can see what the word meant when Shakespeare was writing;
in fact, we can see what the word has meant throughout the entire history of
English.

You can access the OED here. If you are off campus you will need to enter
your password. If the
link does not work, go to the UNLV Library website and search in the catalog
for “Oxford English Dictionary online.”

Once you have access, look up the word “buxom.” If for some reason you cannot get access to
the dictionary online, the library has physical copies of it as well, but if
you use the hard copy, then you must use the complete 20-volume edition, not
the shorter OED, which is a 2-volume set.

After the pronunciation, the first list contains all the
spelling variations of the words from 1175 on, a good reminder that English
spelling was only recently standardized.
Next comes the word’s etymology. If you read through the etymology, you can see that the word is formed
from a free morpheme “bow” (to bend at the waist), combined with the adjectival
suffix “–some” (the same as in handsome,
winsome, burdensome,
etc.). In other words, the word started
as an adjective to describe something that was “easily bent.”

The definitions of the dictionary go in chronological
order. In order to compile the OED,
readers read everything that they could find written in English, from Middle
English up to contemporary writings, looking for examples of words (they often
do include Old English as well). In the
early days they would write these examples on slips of paper, along with the
entire sentence it occurred in, and the source of the quotation, and then send
these slips to the editors of the dictionary. The earliest example of “buxom” found in
English was in 1175 in a sermon from the so-called Lambeth Manuscript: “Beo buhsum toward gode” (“be buxom
towards God”). In this first usage we
can see that the meaning of the word has already been modified. It has made a
metaphorical shift from a physical object that could be easily bent, to a
person’s action or will which is easily persuaded; in other words,
“obedient.” This type of shift would
fall under the “transfer of meaning”
category, since it involves a metaphor: “just as an object is easily bent, so this person’s will is easily
bent.”

The second development of the word’s meaning appears in definition 1b,
“submissive, humble, meek,” first recorded in around 1300. In other words, we have moved from describing
an action to a person’s general character.
Although it is perhaps difficult to see a real difference between
meaning 1a and 1b, we could perhaps think of it as more of a generalized term.

About 60 years later, William Langland, a contemporary of
Chaucer and a great English poet in his own right, gives a positive spin to the
notion of being obedient or meek, using the word to mean “gracious, indulgent,
favorable, amiable.” In other words, someone
who was “obedient” was someone who was not “argumentative or cantankerous or
unfriendly.” The word’s meaning has
undergone amelioration.

If we move down a bit to the definition II “blithe, jolly,
well-favored,” we see that in the seventeenth century the word has continued
its amelioration, but the editors have added a note suggesting that there was a new
meaning developing with a slight pejoration, but only in certain uses: “The explanation in Bailey and Johnson [other dictionaries], ‘amorous,
wanton’, is apparently only contextual.”

Finally, also in the seventeenth century, the word developed
a new meaning through concretization,
when the abstract character of someone who was jolly and good-natured was
applied to that person’s physical characteristics: someone who looks healthy,
and therefore is “plump” and “comely” or “jolly.”

Today this meaning has been further specialized, where the word “buxom” only refers to one aspect of
plumpness on a woman’s body, her breasts, and it is purely a physical
characteristic. This is evident in the
latest quotation given, from 1873: “A slight gathering in of her dress … to
exhibit her buxom figure to full perfection.”
There is no hint in this quotation of the earliest meaning of obedient,
or even of the more general “jolly” personality of the woman being described.

So, although Shakespeare could refer to a soldier’s lively
valor as buxom, suggesting that the soldier was ready to obey, and to do so willingly,
today such a usage would be entirely foreign.

As formulated by Saussure, a linguistic sign is the combination of the
sound pattern of the word (the signifier) and the mental concept which it
invokes (the signified). The connection
between the two is purely arbitrary, or conventional. Because there
is no intrinsic connection between the sound pattern and the concept being signified,
changes in either the signifier or the signified are able to occur over time. The
sound pattern of a signifier can change over time through processes like assimilation,
metathesis, reduction, and so on. But the concept referred to by the signifier may also
change.

A current example of how the concept referred to by a particular sound pattern
can change can be seen in the word “literally.” For many speakers, this word means
“non-figuratively,” while for others it now can mean the exact opposite, that is,
“figuratively” as in a sentence like “My head literally exploded.” For many people
today this sentence makes no sense, since it violates the meaning they ascribe to
the sound pattern “literally.” Others, however, accept this new usage of “literally.”
simply because many people use it this way. Once you grant that the connection
between the sound pattern [lɪtərəli] and the concept it signifies, whether
“non-figuratively” or “figuratively,” is conventional and arbitrary, then you must grant
that either meaning is allowable if there is a group of speakers who have agreed
upon the conventional connection between the two. In fact, this change is
not even a new one: English speakers have been using the sound pattern [lɪtərəli]
to signify “non-figuratively” for several centuries. We can find examples of it
as far back as the 1700’s. If you are speaking from a personal point of
view as a speaker of English, then you are free either to accept or not accept
that usage in your own version of English. But the reason you do not accept
it will not be because of any supposed violation of the word’s etymology, since we violate the
etymological meanings of words in almost every sentence we utter. The same goes
for other “commonly misused words” such as irregardless, disinterested, or
ironic, which of course, are not “misused” at all.

Generalization and specialization (also called widening and narrowing)

It is quite common for us to “narrow” the scope of meaning of a particular word.
An example for this is the word corn. In Old English it could refer
to any type of grain at all, a fairly wide meaning. It was eventually narrowed to
mean “wheat” specifically. Today, in the U.S., it refers only to one specific type
of plant, elsewhere called “maize.” Another food term that has narrowed its
meaning is the word meat, which in Old English referred to any sort
of food at all (except liquids). Today, it is used to refer specifically to what
was once called “flesh” (as it still is in German, Fleisch). The word
“flesh” has also narrowed in some uses to refer only to the skin.

Somewhat less common is “generalization,” or “widening,” where the referents become
less specific. One example is the Old English compound bere-ærn, “barley-building.”
This is modern English “barn,” a word that can refer to buildings that hold much
more than only barley. We also tend to take certain brand names and generalize
them. “Band-Aid” can refer to any sort of adhesive bandage, and “Kleenex” can
refer to any number of “tissues,” not only those made by Kleenex.

Amelioration and Pejoration

This shift is not necessarily one of a change in the denotation of the word (i.e.,
the literal object or concept it refers to), but in the connotation, that is,
the associations or feelings the word implies: some words take on positive connotations (ameliorization),
while others take on negative ones (pejoration). Take the word lewd, for
example. In Old English it simply referred to someone who had not been taught
to read Latin, i.e., the uneducated, and thus it referred to the majority of the
population. Today, it refers to someone who is crude, often sexually. On the other
hand, the word cniht in Old English meant a “boy” or even a “servant.”
Today, as the word knight, it has much more positive connotations of
heroism and chivalry.

Intensification, Strengthening, and Weakening

The word awesome is a common example of weakening. It used to mean something
that was capable of inspiring awe, and was often used to describe various deities or
religious experiences. This would be true of the word today if you are describing a
view of the Grand Canyon, but if you are describing the latest episode of some sit-com,
the meaning has been someone weakened. Another example is the word soon,
which in Old English meant “immediately,” but now could be several hours away if
not longer. Many curse words have also undergone weakening. Few people today who say “Damn
it” are really thinking of confining whatever object to eternal hellfire. It is
much rarer to find examples of strengthening. One is the word decimate. Its root
is from Latin decem, meaning “ten,” and it originally meant to destroy or diminish
only one-tenth of something. In fact, it often meant to tithe, which is giving
one-tenth of one’s income to the church. Today, to decimate means to destroy something completely.

Transfer of Meaning

This is a large category and includes metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor,
abstraction, and concretization. Synecdoche
(this word has four syllables; the end rhymes with “key”) is when we refer to something by just
a part of it, for example, calling a sword a “blade,” or an old person a “graybeard,”
or a car “wheels.” Metonymy is similar, but instead of referring
to an object by something which is physically attached to it, we refer to it by
something with which it is associated. Thus, the press might report an announcement
by the Pentagon or the White House, when they mean the military or the president; or
someone might refer to executives as “suits.” We also use metaphor
quite often in our speech; for example, we metaphorically refer to the parts of the
table that hold it up as the “leg,” and we speak of the “hands” of a clock. Some
words have lost their original meanings and only preserved the metaphorical one,
such as “ridge,” which originally referred to the back of a person but was
metaphorically extended to the crest of a mountain range, since it looks like the
bumps of the spine. We use “spine” to refer to the back of a book, like a person’s back.
Originally a spine refered to a sharp point, like the thorns of a plant, but this was
metaphorically extended to refer to the sharp points of a person’s backbone.
Other metaphorical transfers of meaning involve abstraction,
such as using the word “grasp” to mean “comprehend” a concept rather than to grab
something with one’s hands. Metaphorical concretization is less
common. One example would be “spectacles,” referring to glasses with which you
view some type of show, rather than the show itself.

Taboo or Euphemistic Alterations

Words can often change because they are thought to refer to something that is taboo and to which therefore
it is best not to refer. Common semantic fields in which this occurs
are related to death, sex, and scatology. There are two common methods for dealing with taboo terms. One is taboo deformation in which the term itself is altered, such as darn instead of damn. More common is the use of a euphemism, that is, the substitution of another phrase for the taboo term. For example, bathroom, a room with a bathtub
in it is a euphemism for toilet. In Old English one way
to refer to a toilet was gangsetl, literally, a “seat on which one goes.”
There are numerous non-literal ways to say “die” or “to have sex with.” It is in fact
hard to trace the origins of a number of such words, since the monks who were the
only ones to write in the Old English period apparently thought they were taboo
words as well. The word “die” does not appear in Old English at all; they most commonly
refer to people as “going forth” or “lying down.” There are several words in Old English for sexual
intercourse, but the one known euphemistically today as “the F-word” never appears even though
scholars assume it must have existed then.