Common words that used to have other meanings

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
121

I’ve always assumed it to be a British exclamation of joy/praise. In fact, in a poem which came out in 1963 in an American magazine (you can find more information about it in my TV Tropes article about the poem here), a character “who affected the British” cries out “Bully! Good show and all that!”

It certainly can be: “I beg you not to do XYZ”.

But does it ever mean a kidnap in the general sense, and not one that will end up in being forcibly made someone’s spouse/sexual partner? The Sabine women were taken by the Romans as an instance of marriage by capture. Ditto for Persephone, the daughter of the goddess Demeter, with whom Hades, the god of the realm of the dead, fell in love and then kidnapped and made his wife in collusion with his brother and Persephone’s father, Zeus, the king of the gods. Another similar mythological theme is the “Rape of Ganymede”, where Zeus spied a young Trojan prince of that name, and was so enraptured by his beauty, that he had his eagle (or himself in the guise of an eagle) come down and seize him and take him to Mount Olympus, whereupon Gannymede was made his wine pourer. There is debate on the question of whether Zeus only used this as an excuse to bugger him or not (bisexuality was allegedly common, if not ubiquitous, in ancient Greece and Rome, at least in the form of pederasty, where an older mentor would be doing it with an adolescent he had taken under his wing). Plato records the claim that pederasty was involved, whereas Xenophon records Socrates as denying it, claiming that Zeus loved Ganymede for his mind / soul.

122

Here’s another example of a British vs. North American usage, though I imagine the British usage of said word in said sense is obsolete now too. Using master to refer to one’s employer / boss.

Using “boss” in this sense is apparently American in origin. In the days when Canada was a group of British colonies, Upper Canada (modern Ontario) was settled by United Empire Loyalists, that is, Americans who, after the Revolutionary War, decided not to be Americans but to remain British subjects. This is why Canadian English is similar to American, rather than to British English. There was a case, I don’t remember the details, where a certain Briton came to colonial Canada and in some official report or something, criticized the language of the colonists (IIRC he was trying to press for adopting a British language standard for education in Canada) for the Americanisms they used, like saying “boss” instead of “master”.

My understanding is that labor relations in England, Canada, etc. used to be governed by “Master and Servant Acts”, where in a legal sense the master was the employer and the servant was the employee, even if the employee was not a house servant, etc but a white-collar worker or basically anything else. Now, in Canada, we have different laws called “Labour Codes”.

I actually have a relatively recent example of this usage by a Briton, albeit in a Hollywood film. In the 1965 Strange Bedfellows, Rock Hudson plays Carter, an American businessman sent on business to London, where he must attempt to get back together with his estranged Italian wife, played by Gina Lollobrigida (with whom there’s still mutual attraction despite their tendency to fight), in order to put on a good face before his American boss, who is also present in London. At one point, one of the British characters refers to Carter’s boss as “your master”.

Awhile back, there was a lively discussion on SD about whether the term “master bedroom” was offensive and connoted slavery. Here’s another facet of the term to consider.

123

In that sentence, does the phrase “not to do XYZ” function as the direct object and “you” as the indirect object?

124

I’m not sure - it can be confusing. A well known example of trying to figure out direct and indirect object is the verb “forgive”.

I forgive you.
I forgive you your sins.

In the first one, you is the direct object. In the second, your sins are the direct object, you are the indirect object.

I think you are correct that this is analogous to the second case, where “not to do XYZ” is the direct object.

So there’s also…

I beg you for forgiveness.
I beg forgiveness from you.

In the second one, I think forgiveness is the direct object?

125

This is a fossilized archaic structure. If we were to write this in modern natural language we would say something like “I forgive you for your sins.”

126

How about:

I forgive your debt.

It seems to me pretty clear that “your debt” is the direct object. Which would indicate that the action in the verb forgive can sometimes be directed toward the thing that the person has done, rather than always the person.

127

I didn’t mean to criticize you specifically, but this is something that kinds of sticks in my craw. I’ve seen it stated before that the words idiot, imbecile, and moron “originally” had clinical meanings. Implying that they started out as neutral scientific terms, and it was only mean kids on the playground that turned them into insults.

I think it’s important to keep in mind what really happened: that in dealing with people with developmental disabilities, the medical establishment was just fine with using insults as if they were neutral scientific terms.

128

I mean, we can just go to the dictionary and see:

The next verbal definition is intransitive uses.

129

Your instincts are correct. The term ‘master’ is effectively obsolete in an employment context in the UK, and, and is even obsolete in the context of domestic employees. Master has been almost completely replaced by ‘employer’, or (informally) ‘boss’, in almost every context.

If someone accuses someone else of having a ‘master’, it is usually perjorative.

130

A limitation there is that it doesn’t give (for comparison) any transitive examples where the direct object is the person involved.

I beg *you for **forgiveness.
I beg *forgiveness from **you.
I forgive *you for **sinning.
I forgive *[your debt].

Do you agree that all of these are transitive, *=direct object and **=indirect object?

And in:

Your claim begs *[that the question be asked]

I’m pretty sure that the entire phrase is the direct object, right?

131

I believe I would agree with all of that.

132

re: “bully for you”

My sense [Brit] is that has survived today only in sarcastic usage, perhaps with the allusion that it’s the kind of thing a posh person might have said unironically >50 years ago adding to the bite. If you asked me where I might still perhaps expect to hear it used unsarcastically… my first though would be a geriatric peer in the House of Lords.

133

In sentences like “I beg you not to do XYZ,” I would argue that there is a usage error, and it should be “I beg OF you…” However, I would say that for formal writing only-- and only when asked to proofread something. Sloppy speech is normal. Also, I don’t go around correcting people mid-conversation, except for a couple of friends who a second-language English speakers who have specifically asked me to.

I’m probably not a good example of anything, though, because I still say that I “was graduated from” high school in 1985, and I don’t clean behind my refrigerator.

I’m also not married to this issue, and I’m not going to defend it any longer. I’m going to do what I wish the anti-abortion people would do-- simply not avail myself of it, and leave others alone.

Now, back to the thread title. “Rape” used to mean simply “theft.” Cf. Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, which was published first in 1712.

The English word “rape” is derived from a Latin word that meant, more or less, “to grab,” as in, before anyone else has a chance.

134

I would have thought that, since “you” functions as the indirect object, it’s perfectly cromulent to leave off the “of.”

Compare “She asked him where the bathroom was” vs. “She asked of him where the bathroom was,” or “She gave him her phone number” vs. “She gave to him her phone number.”

135

“Hospice” and “hospitality” and “host” are related, as well, all associated with the idea of sheltering guests. According to Bill Bryson, there is a medieval pub in London, the Ostrich Inn, that probably originated as the Hospice Inn.

A similar word is “harbor”, which originally meant “shelter, place of refuge”. I’d say this meaning is extinct, save in the fossil phrases “safe harbor” and the verb “harboring”. In antebellum Virginia, a “cold harbor” was a place that offered shelter but not food, which is why the Battle of Cold Harbor, during the American Civil War, didn’t involve any warships whatever.

136

And when the Vikings used to rape and pillage, they weren’t sex criminals.

137

The OED has a bunch of citations, including some recent ones, for “rape” meaning “to take something by force”:

1807 J. Barlow Columbiad v. 198 So Leda’s Twins from Colchis raped the Fleece.
1863 C. C. Clarke Shakespeare-characters xvii. 421 Steadily clutching all that he had raped.
1882 Century Dec. 222 The river raped their little herd away.
1927 Blackwood’s Mag. Apr. 494/2 The stone walls on either side pressed close, threatening to rape from us our faithful caravan.
1978 G. Vidal Kalki ii. 30 Dr Ashok’s eyes had a tendency to pop whenever he wanted to rape your attention.
1994 Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) (Nexis) 19 Apr. 1 a To think you can have your happiness raped away by three kids playing with matches.

And a bunch more for “to carry off a person by force”, although it adds “usually for the purpose of sexual violation”, athough clearly this is not the meaning in all cases:

1772 R. Warner tr. Plautus Twin Brothers Prol., in B. Thornton et al. tr. Plautus Comedies III. 6 Th’rapid river rap’d him off his legs, And snatch’d him to destruction.
1886 E. Nesbit Lays & Legends 154 Raped from the world of air where warm loves glow, She bears him through her water-world below.
1928 E. W. Hopkins tr. Legends India 117 Claim thou the warrior’s right And rape her from the suitors’ ranks, as still beseems a knight.
1934 Times 14 Feb. 13/6 Not a day dawned in the dry season when a pagan could be sure that he or his womenfolk or his children might not be raped away to slavery before the sun went down.
a1982 K. Rexroth More Classics Revisited (1989) i. 9 Phaedra, after all, is a princess raped away from the old decaying Minoan civilization of Crete by Theseus, the representative of barbaric Athens.
2003 Independent (Nexis) 30 Dec. Nearly a million of those burnt and raped from their homes during the war have gone back.

138

Well, in The Fantastiks, the father wanted the daughter only kidnapped, not “married” to El Gallo. Spoiler: The daughter was to be kidnapped, so the neighbor’s son would rescue her, in order to facilitate a romance between the daughter and the neighbor’s son.. The father (and the other characters) use the word “rape” probably a dozen times.

139

There’s even a song about it, called “The Rape Ballet.”

140

“Molest” didn’t originally refer to sexual misconduct. It referred to annoying or harassing behavior.