In 1548 England’s King Edward VI issued a “Proclamation Against Those That Doeth Innovate.” Theological innovators, this proclamation warned, “shall incur his highness’ indignation, and suffer imprisonment, and other grievous punishments.”
The king was not alone in this concern. As historian Benoit Godin has determined, for long periods of Western history innovation was considered synonymous with heresy. When an English theologian named Henry Burton was accused of propagating innovation in 1636, his ears were cut off and he was sent to prison. Edmund Burke later disparaged the French Revolution as “a revolt of innovation.” American Federalists called themselves “enemies to innovation.” It wasn’t until the late 20th century that the reputation of this term was redeemed, as management gurus began touting innovation as the key to prosperity.
Today innovation is one of the most hallowed words in the contemporary lexicon. That onetime pariah term is now revered. Linguists call this process one of “semantic shift,” a significant change in a word’s meaning. Examples of such shifts are no further than Google News: cookie, cancel, gay, pod. Surge has gone from referring to a swell of seawater to a military buildup, to large groups of undocumented immigrants at our borders and outbreaks of Covid-19.
Redefined terms are all around. Lest we forget, hook up at one time meant little more than getting together with someone. Now it means getting together for sex. There is a constant market for chaste words that can be repurposed to describe sexual activity without being vulgar. Before being pressed into service as a synonym for copulation, intercourse referred simply to innocent human interaction. A predecessor, occupy, enjoyed a centuries-long run as a euphemism for sex before it became the name of an anti-Wall Street movement. Tart originally referred to a type of baked dish with a crust, then to a small pastry, as it still does. In the late 19th century, tart became affectionate slang for a young woman. (“You are such a sweet tart.”) Toward the end of that century the word took on erotic connotations; the sweet young lass became sexually alluring. Alluring lassies then became promiscuous: they were lascivious tarts. Finally tart referred to a woman who today we’d call a sex worker. At best she was a “tart with a heart.”
As we’ve seen with innovate, innocent-to-suggestive isn’t the only route taken by words whose meaning shifts. In the opposite trajectory, pejorative words become positive ones as part of a process linguists call “semantic bleaching.” They’re scrubbed clean. Nice, for example, once suggested being rather dim. Dude has gone from referring to a dandy to characterizing any man at all. Guy does too, even though it originally referred contemptuously to malefactors like the rebellious Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up Britain’s Parliament in 1605. Such miscreants were guys. In the colonies, however, guy became synonymous simply with chap, bloke, or fellow. Among Americans, a regular guy was an admirable person. When G. K. Chesterton was called a regular guy while visiting the United States in 1921, it took the British writer a while to figure out that this was meant as a compliment.
Sometimes a word’s dramatic shift in meaning is intended. Such is the case with innovation’s close cousin disrupt. In its 1974 edition, the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary said this word meant “to break apart,” “to throw into disorder,” “to cause to break down.” Not good. Back then disruptors caused a commotion. They made life difficult. Parents who were summoned for a chat with the principal about their child’s disruptive behavior did not look forward to this meeting. Disruptors of any age were considered antisocial nuisances. Street-corner haranguers. Unruly soccer fans. Rowdy dissidents at stockholder meetings. Disruption was what happened when such troublemakers held sway. After Harvard’s Clayton Christensen began to preach the gospel of “innovative disruption” in the mid-1990s, however, the status of this word changed dramatically. Now it referred to heroic innovators. During revival-style disruption gatherings, participants began to worship at the altar of disruption as speakers exhorted them to “Let me hear it: disss-ruppttt!” In a few short years, Christensen’s repositioning gave fresh, positive meaning to the terms disrupt, disruptive, disruption, and disruptor.
One could call the intentional redefining of existing words “recoining” (as I have in The Hidden History of Coined Words). Recoining refers not just to broadening the scope of a word but giving it a new meaning altogether. This is not as easy as it sounds. In his book Word-Coinage, Leon Mead suggested that redefining existing words “involves as much conscious effort as coining new ones.”
In many cases, that calls for semantic bleaching. Take whisperer. At one time this word referred to a snitch, a tattletale, a spreader of rumors. Such lowlifes whispered. In the wake of Nicholas Evans’s 1995 best seller, The Horse Whisperer, however, this word was rehabilitated. Like the trainers who gently calm skittish horses by whispering in their ear, a whisperer became someone to admire. It isn’t just Cesar Millan, the “dog whisperer,” who’s favorably described with this word but also Tracy Hogg, the “baby whisperer,” and chef Jeremy Fox, the “vegetable whisperer” (as well as sundry “trout whisperers,” “tortoise whisperers,” and “tech whisperers” I’ve read about). In Portland, Oregon, a renowned brewmaster is known as a “hop whisperer.”
Recoiners like Nicholas Evans aren’t always pleased with the way their reborn terms are used and misused. Like unruly offspring, coined and recoined words alike go their own way, in the process developing meanings never intended by their creators. Linguists take this for granted. They assume that the meaning of neologisms will grow, diversify, and careen in unexpected directions. Such semantic shifting is inherent in the growth of language. That’s small comfort to those who midwifed new terms, however. They’re far more likely to be perturbed than pleased by this inevitable process of definition diffusion.
Consider the humble snowflake. When used figuratively, the meaning of this word has continually shape-shifted. In antebellum America, pro-slavery zealots were called “snowflakes.” After the war, that term referred to a type of weaving, the spring blossom Leucojum, and hairline fractures in steel casings. All were snowflakes. So were the memos onetime Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld continually sent to underlings.
Nowadays snowflake is most commonly applied to those considered hypersensitive and fragile. Its modern guise first appeared in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. In that 1996 best seller, a character tells a group of eco-activists whom he thinks are taking themselves too seriously, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” During the years that followed, snowflake became a popular insult, especially among those who use it to denigrate members of a generation whom they consider overly sensitive (ergo, “The Snowflake Generation”). Yet far from giving us a synonym for those we used to call fragile flowers, Palahniuk says he meant something completely different. His emphasis was more on the presumed uniqueness of human snowflakes, not their frailty. When using snowflake this way, the author said, he had himself in mind, someone who’d been too easily snowed by unearned accolades.
Of course, neologizers like Palahniuk have responses other than dismay to the varied ways their neologisms and neo-neologisms are used. When science fiction writer William Gibson was asked if he minded being so closely associated with the now-ubiquitous term cyberspace, a new word he’d created by mashing together two older ones, Gibson said he didn’t. In fact, the author responded, “I think I’d miss it if it went away.”
