watching a frozen form develop
Do you use the Ngram viewer much? It does word searches for every word in every book in its database, which is by now most books between 1800 and today. It's only books, so it doesn't give you the roiling world of newspapers and magazines, but it's still addictively enlightening, and I find it a great way to put hard numbers to my questions. Last night I came up with a very interesting couple of results.
Someone mentioned a profession that had "a stigma attached to it," which always jars me — how do scars attach? It's the classic sign of a frozen form to use a word that way. That is, a word goes out of use except for being frozen into a certain phrase, and you're not really in control of the metaphor because you just think of it as a phrase. ("One fell swoop": what exactly does "fell" mean? Swift? Angry? Destructive? Amazing? Wicked? If you had to bet would you win? Actually, it means something like "ferociously evil and deadly.")
I looked it up in Ngram, and discovered that you can see it happen in front of your eyes: as we lose the meaning of the word "stigma," our use of it as a metaphor changes. The decline of the term "stigma on" very neatly precedes the rise of "stigma attached."
It's especially interesting to note that it actually gets to a low before the frozen form rises. As long as the mental image of a scar is ... attached ... to the word "stigma," it acts as an antibody, a protection against weird uses of the word. When the antibodies die out, only then does the virus have room to grow.
I tried to think of other frozen forms in which there's a stock phrase that actually gets the meaning of the word wrong like this. Hmmmm — I finally hit on "shambles." You often hear people say something is "in shambles," instead of "a shambles."
In fact, "a shambles" acts as a stepping-stone. Look at how our use of the term "a shambles" ("this place is a shambles") rises just as the phrase "the shambles" ("go down to the shambles to get some meat") is falling. Then, once the literal meaning has died, its uneducated cousin "in shambles" has room to rise.
Not as dramatic a dip as with "stigma," but it's definitely there. This way, using the stepping-stone, we never stop using the word "shambles," and it retains its usefulness smoothly as its meat-market meaning fades. (The combined number stays near 0.0000300% for nearly a century before World War II apparently gives us more reason to reach for this word.)
Someone mentioned a profession that had "a stigma attached to it," which always jars me — how do scars attach? It's the classic sign of a frozen form to use a word that way. That is, a word goes out of use except for being frozen into a certain phrase, and you're not really in control of the metaphor because you just think of it as a phrase. ("One fell swoop": what exactly does "fell" mean? Swift? Angry? Destructive? Amazing? Wicked? If you had to bet would you win? Actually, it means something like "ferociously evil and deadly.")
I looked it up in Ngram, and discovered that you can see it happen in front of your eyes: as we lose the meaning of the word "stigma," our use of it as a metaphor changes. The decline of the term "stigma on" very neatly precedes the rise of "stigma attached."
It's especially interesting to note that it actually gets to a low before the frozen form rises. As long as the mental image of a scar is ... attached ... to the word "stigma," it acts as an antibody, a protection against weird uses of the word. When the antibodies die out, only then does the virus have room to grow.
I tried to think of other frozen forms in which there's a stock phrase that actually gets the meaning of the word wrong like this. Hmmmm — I finally hit on "shambles." You often hear people say something is "in shambles," instead of "a shambles."
In fact, "a shambles" acts as a stepping-stone. Look at how our use of the term "a shambles" ("this place is a shambles") rises just as the phrase "the shambles" ("go down to the shambles to get some meat") is falling. Then, once the literal meaning has died, its uneducated cousin "in shambles" has room to rise.
Not as dramatic a dip as with "stigma," but it's definitely there. This way, using the stepping-stone, we never stop using the word "shambles," and it retains its usefulness smoothly as its meat-market meaning fades. (The combined number stays near 0.0000300% for nearly a century before World War II apparently gives us more reason to reach for this word.)
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