I know I’ve seen some of these on dictionary sites - can y’all think of any words whose history include a complete turnaround in meaning due to sarcasm, or taken an odd turn because of misunderstanding?
The closest I can come is the Pennsylvania Dutch, who were really from Germany.
I enjoy the fact that “to cleave” means both “to separate” and “to join together”.
Once, terrific was to terror as horrific is to horror. Now, if you tell somebody, “You look terrific,” you’ll get a “thank you!”
When Muhammed Ali told the cameras, “I’m a baaad man,” he didn’t mean evil.
Geezer, codger, coot and fart are all words for “old man,” but they once meant:
Geezer=sneaky fellow who isn’t what he seems.
Codger=dishonest dealer of falcons
Coot=diving waterfowl, a hud-hen
Fart=digestive gas, upon exit
How about the fish “marlin?” It was originally a “marlinspike,” but got shortened to must “marlin.” A marlinspike (moor line spike) was (is) a tool for for handling ropes (like mooring ropes), and the marlin’s bill was thought to resemble it. But the “spike” part was dropped along the way, so today, the fish name now means “mooring rope.”
Along that line, awful used to be like “awe-ful” as in, full of awe, referring to something good.
“Nice” used to mean “overly finicky”, a meaning only preserved in the phrase “a nice distinction” meaning a very small difference.
“Proof” used to mean “test” rather than “definitive evidence”, a meaning only preserved in “the exception proves the rule”.
And Jane Austen novels, of course, where you’ll sometimes find both senses on the same page.
Gymnast/Gymnasium: Nudist/Place of nudity. Mmmmmm.
FtG’s nonce word of the day:
etmology: a word derived from another by dropping a letter. E.g., “napron” to “apron”.
Oh yeah-- Pumpernickel: “Fart demon.”
Because rye bread gives you gas, I guess. 
IIRC, a homely girl in Britain is a desirable one.
“I could care less” presumably once meant that it was possible to care not as much as I do now…? 
I may not be right on the button, but I would have described our usage as meaning “like a home.” So, I would normally only use it to describe a place which felt, well, like a home - perhaps, warm, cosy, comfortable… I wouldn’t say ‘a homely girl’ but would take it to mean a mothery type, or possibly more ‘girl next door’ depending on context.
‘homely=like home’ seemed so self evident I was very puzzled when I first heard Americans using it
I’ve always found this one slightly amusing and simultaneously creepy…
I work in the mortgage business. Have you ever looked up “mortgage” in the dictionary?
“Turtle” was originally the name of a bird (preserved as “2 turtle doves”). After the Norman Invasion, the French brought the word “tortue” for what the Anglo-Saxons called a “tortoise.” It became “tortle,” and then the name for the bird (named after the sound it makes) took over. Later, “dove” was added to “turtle” to indicate the bird.
Speaking of “bird,” etymologists have no idea where the word comes from. The Anglo-Saxon was “fowle.” It’s believed to come from “brood” – a bunch of young birds – which became “brid.” However, no one knows how or why the “r” and “i” were reversed.
In Shakespeare’s time, the word “occupy” was considered too rude for polite company; one of its meanings was “to have sex with someone.”
Along that same line, is the words ravel and unravel, which both have approximately identical meanings.
Word History: To say that we will ravel the history of ravel is an ambiguous statement, given that history. Ravel comes from the obsolete Dutch verb ravelen,“to tangle, fray out, unweave,” which comes in turn from the noun ravel,“a loose thread.” We can see the ambiguity of ravel already in the notion of a loose thread, because threads can be loose when they are tangled or when they are untangling. The Dutch verb has both notions present in it, denoting both tangling and unweaving. In one of its earliest recorded uses in English (before 1585) the verb means “to become entangled or confused,” and in 1598 we find a use in the sense “to entangle.” But in 1611 the word is used with reference to a fabric in the sense “to fray out,” and in 1607 in the sense “to unwind, unweave, or unravel.” In 1582 we already have an author using the word in a figurative way to mean “to take to pieces or disentangle,” while in a work written before 1656 we have a figurative instance of the sense “to entangle or confuse.” Clearly there was a need for the word unravel, which is first found in 1603, but strangely enough it did not solve the problem, ravel retaining up to this day both “entangling” and “disentangling” senses.
Excerpted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V., further reproduction and distribution restricted in accordance with the Copyright Law of the United States. All rights reserved.
This may have been an error, but I was puzzled when reading a newspaper article following the capture of Saddam Hussein. They reported that an unwrapped shirt lay on his bed. I had to read it several times to realize that they meant a shirt still in its wrappings from the store, not one that had BEEN unwrapped. I’m still puzzling over that one.
This infuriates me, but ‘literally’ has been so misused that one of its definitions is now the equivalent of ‘figuratively.’
From the dictionary.com site:
Rape, which comes from a Latin verb rapeo, rapere, raptus, [fourth form I don’t remember], means to carry off or snatch. “The Rape of Lucrece” (sp) is the example most people know for that one.
Rape in the modern sense carries, as we all know, a somewhat graver definition. It is derived from the same verb. Rapture (the religious sense here as well) comes from same verb yet is, how shall we say, more desirable to those who believe they will be affected by it (straying dangerously close to GD territory here).
I am currently trying to find out what connection, if any, exists between the Hebrew Adonai and the Greek Adonis. So far the rigorous scholarship of m-w.com has failed me, and I do not exactly have $50 to shell out to the OED’s online site just to find out that one fact.
Ellen Cherry, you will no doubt be as pleased as I was to find out, more than a year or two ago, that infer and imply have, thanks to the education of the masses, become synonyms. Forgetting for the moment that infer means to guess from what someone else says and that imply means to mean for something to be gleaned from what one is saying…
Be careful in asserting that words can actually have determinable definitions. There are those who will argue that, as soon as it is set in print, ‘literally’ will be a synonym for ‘figuratively’ and ‘infer’ will mean the same as ‘imply.’ If you have the audacity to claim that certain words, through established usage, actually mean certain things you might be set upon by the living-languagers as if by a pack of wild dogs.
I dared to make a claim of misuse once and received this clever reply from RealityChuck: “Now, let’s have a rule for this thread: before you post, look up the goddamn word in a dictionary!” You understand Ellen Cherry? If it’s in goddamn print then it must be goddamn right.
Of course you and I know this is not true. Keep up the good fight.
Not a turnaround in meaning, exactly, but “big bang” was coined by astrophysicists as a snide dismissal of the idea that the universe exploded from a singularity; it was supposed to sound stupid and lame. But when it turned out to be (more or less) correct, the original term stuck around and lost its sarcastic connotations.
I have to admit, I see nothing odd about the Pennsylvania Dutch coming from Germany. After all, how do you say “German” in German? There ya go.
I think the rape thing is pretty straightforward, too–the abduction referred to was assumed to be for a specific purpose. Back in the day (waaay back), one way to force a woman to marry you (or force her parents to let you marry her, if she was willing and they weren’t) was to abduct her–it was then assumed that you’d slept with her. When the Catholic Church codified its rules about marriage, it forbade marrying someone you’d abducted, in an attempt to put an end to the practice by invalidating marriages made this way.
One meaning change that still gives me pause, even though I understand more or less how it happened, is the word “bowels.”
I used to know a whole list of words like this. A few:
[ul]
[li]strike (baseball) - to miss[/li][li]strike (bowling or general use) - to hit[/li][li]quantum leap - a very huge discovery[/li][li]quantum space or time - a very small amount[/li]li bill - a way of paying off a debt[/li][li]bill - an indication that there is a debt[/li][li]check - a way of paying off a debt[/li][li]check (in a restaurant) - a bill :rolleyes: [/li][/ul]
Um, I have now… what did I miss?