When Good Words Get Bent

Language is a funny thing. Perfectly good words can live for centuries with simple, innocent meanings, and then somewhere along the way, people twist them into something else. Sometimes the change is harmless. Sometimes it’s not. And sometimes the original meaning gets pushed so far into the shadows that you can’t use it anymore without raising eyebrows.

Take a few examples:

• Bitch once meant nothing more than a female dog, the same way a cow is a female in cattle.
• Gay meant happy or joyful. When I was a boy, I went to school with three different girls named Gay, and nobody thought twice about it.
• Queer simply meant strange or unusual.

And it doesn’t stop there. Here are a few more words that lost their innocence over time:

• Hussy — once meant “housewife” or “mistress of the household.”
• Silly — originally meant “blessed” or “innocent.”
• Naughty — meant “having nothing.”
• Villain — a farm worker or someone from a rural village.
• Bully — a term of affection meaning “sweetheart.”
• Artificial — meant “skillfully made.”
• Awful — meant “full of awe,” inspiring wonder.
• Meat — used to mean any kind of food.
• Manufacture — meant “made by hand.”

It’s surprising how many words started out clean and harmless, only to be bent by the way people used them.

A friend told me something last week that made me smile. His grandparents came from Latvia — I hope I’m spelling that right — a little country that touches Russia. He said they spoke their native language at home, except when they wanted to use vulgarity. Then they’d switch to English. It struck me as funny and a little sad: even in a different tongue, some words carry more sting than others. Sometimes the weight of a word depends on the language you say it in.

And then I heard a man with a PhD in gospel studies say something that tied all of this together for me. He was talking about the Adamic language, and he said that any language can carry the spirit of it — English, Latvian, or anything else — if we choose to speak with truth, without calling people names, without lying, and without vulgarity.

That stayed with me. It reminded me that words themselves aren’t the problem.
It’s what we pour into them.

A language becomes holy or unholy by the way we use it. And maybe the real work isn’t trying to rescue old meanings, but choosing better ones going forward.