In his recent collection of essays The End of Solitude, William Deresiewicz has a fun little piece on watching “the decline of the English language,” with “all the old interesting meanings . . . dying off one at a time.” He begins with a few of what have become stand-bys:

“Vagaries” now means, vaguely, “vague bits.” “Penultimate,” of course, means “really ultimate” (to go along with “very unique”). “Hoi polloi” is now the upper crust, rather than its opposite, presumably by assimilation of hoi (Greek for “the” – polloi means “many”) to “high.” “Beg the question” is a lost cause; the universal definition is “raise the question,” not “takes the answer for granted.” As for “disinterested,” that lovely not-quite-synonym for “impartial,” forget it.

I love stuff like this, but I think to play along I have to be fair and admit to my own failings. I don’t think I have ever used the word “vagaries” and was unclear of its exact meaning (“unexpected or inexplicable changes in a situation or someone’s behaviour”). The others I was all clear on, though I agree very much with “beg the question” being a lost cause, to the point where its original meaning can now be taken as obsolete. I don’t think anyone except maybe a professional philosopher uses it in its proper, technical sense any longer. We may now say that “raises the question” is now the correct definition.

I guess everyone has their list of other favourite examples. My own would have “travesty” somewhere near the top, which I think is used everywhere today as an intensified form of “tragedy.” But Deresiewicz goes on:

I especially relish the errors of experts – the blunders committed by well-known writers and/or authoritative outlets. Writing in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lehmann, then the dean of Columbia School of Journalism, used “locus classicus” to refer to a person (though one would think that “locus” would be clear enough). The New York Times has given us “probative” to mean “representative,” “full boar” in a column by Maureen Dowd that was not about pigs, and “apologist” to signify “one who apologizes” (in an editorial, no less). Like everybody else, the New York Review of Books believes that “bemused” means “amused” (not “confused”) and “willy-nilly,” “higgledy-piggledy” (not “by compulsion”). NPR has perpetrated “notoriety” for “fame,” “misnomer” for “misconception,” and “per se” for “so to speak” – all of them now apparently ubiquitous. The Nation has offered “bugaboo” for “taboo”: Sandra Tsing Loh, in the Atlantic, has equated “wax” with “talk” (an increasingly common howler that derives from “wax eloquent”); and Ann Beattie has contributed “reticent” for “hesitant” or “diffident,” which is well on its way to becoming the standard meaning. I told you I’m a pedant.

Nothing pedantic about it! All of these are worth pointing out. The transformation of “reticent” is one of my own favourites, to go along with “travesty.”

Unfortunately, while we have spell-check and (a semi-functional) grammar-check we don’t really have a usage-check yet to catch these slips. That is, if they are still slips, which some of them probably aren’t anymore.

One corrective is to look up words you don’t know or that you’re not sure how to use. I do that regularly around here, and damn the embarrassment! Deresiewicz got me, in this same book, in his essay on the literary critic Harold Bloom. “Bloom doesn’t explicate,” Deresiewicz writes, “he davens.” This completely mystified me, sending me to various dictionaries for help. “Daven” (which is pronounced dah-ven and not, as I would have said it, day-ven) is the Yiddish word for “pray” and so has the meaning of “to recite the prescribed prayers in a Jewish liturgy.” Which is, in turn, something a little different than what may be a more familiar (or Christian) understanding of sending up a prayer. Apparently the origins of “daven” are obscure. It is not a word I will ever use, but I still found it interesting, and worth adding to my little list.

Words, words, words