Friday, April 18, 2025

Welcome to Wordilicious Words of the Week: Intro and Mission Statement

Hello, and welcome to Wordilicious Words of the Week:

Many words in the English language have had their meaning transmogrified, sometimes into perversion, over the two or three hundred years since modern English established itself as the language du jour. This series of Wordilicious Words of the Day is a humble attempt to fix or rediscover the meanings of these words. 

It is important to remember what we mean by the words we use. One man's uncommon can easily be another man's bizarre, or even grotesque, another man's regular can be another man's normal, and yet another man's happy can be another man's glad, or even joyous, or exuberant, and there would be simply no way to know which is which, unless we hold on to the root meanings of words, the meaning they were meant to have in the first place.

Vocabulary is a far bigger tool than most people realize.

The tonal differences between the original meanings of words and their present-day application, or between the multiple shades of a single sentiment each expressed in separate, distinct words, may not seem like much, but these small differences can build up into hideous misunderstandings on not just the interpersonal but also the intrapersonal and social scale.

How else is an individual to build up and maintain a healthy dialog with oneself if all the words he's using are wrong? How else are the ruled and the rulers to maintain a mutual trust if they are both saying different things than what they actually mean? Supreme executive power, as Monty Python put it, derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

How else is a guru to connect with a shishya, if all the words he's using feel like not just a foreign language but like an alien language to the pupil? The same applies to basically every human relationship, as communication with words referring to things rather than the things being right there to point at wordlessly is pretty much the only USP of humanity over the rest of the natural world.

Over the coming weeks, I will try to put up one Wordilicious Word per week up on my blog. This is meant to be a linguistic connoisseur's look into the live, breathing nature of language, and what it refers to. The weekly rather than daily nature of this project is so that I can delve into the details of not just the word's origins, but the social, psychological, and material conditions at the time the word was formed, giving us a helpful window into what the people who first said the word may have actually meant when they said it.

As I write this piece, Google has given me a stern reminder of what I am fighting against by providing the definition of "connoisseur" to be "an expert judge in matters of taste", a most horrible definition that is not only divorced but distastefully antagonistic to the word's original meaning, which can be derived from other related words like "reconnaissance", "cognition", or "cognizant", and is meant to be something akin to "someone who likes to get to know (things)", "someone who likes to explore and find out new things", "someone who appreciates knowledge (possibly about a certain subject) for its own sake, as a pursuit of passion, not of scholarly interest".

As is often the case with progressivism, the process-oriented, active, dynamic part of a word is left behind, leaving behind an incomplete end result in the form of the pungent-smelling definition, "someone who definitively knows (things about a subject)". The word "amateur" has also undergone a very similar, fairly tragic trajectory, and will of course be covered in the coming weeks.

In the next week, we will be starting with a still-beloved, still fairly meaningful, but slightly derailed word : companion. Look forward to it!

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