My link concerning idioms earlier today set me thinking about the evolution of language. I read, years back, a marvelous essay by C. S. Lewis’ friend Owen Barfield, in which he demonstrated the process (he was bold enough to call it “incarnation”) by which words which originally had concrete, mundane meanings gradually changed to express more abstract ideas.

For instance, a search of my etymological dictionary tells me that our word “hope” goes back to an old Germanic word which we’ve preserved in English—“hop.” One hops in order to elevate one’s body. We might hop in order reach an apple that hangs on a branch a little out of our reach. We might also hop to get a look at someone coming down a road, to see if they’re the person we’re expecting. In either case we might say, “I desire this so much that I’m hopping up and down in expectation.” Gradually, “hop” developed the auxiliary meaning of “looking forward to.” It was distinguished from the old word by adding an “e,” and we now had a very useful word for a state of mind.

One that’s always amused me was “villain.” I suspect that for most of us, the first picture we get when we hear, “villain,” is of a black-garbed, oily type with a handlebar mustache and a top hat. Snidely Whiplash, the cliché bad guy from a melodrama.

But the English word actually goes back to the Middle French villein, which means “someone who lives in a country village.”

How did it come to mean a person of evil character?

I hate to agree with Marx on anything, but it goes back to class.

In the Middle Ages, it was taken for granted that people of the upper classes were morally superior to the lower classes. Think how many of our positive descriptions come out of this system—“noble,” “gentleman,” “chivalrous.” All those words originally meant “someone of the upper classes.”

None of these people lived in villages. Villages were where peasants and serfs lived. Peasants weren’t “our kind of people.” They were shiftless, they stole things, and they lied about it when caught. So when the baron said to the esquire, “You, sir, are a villein!” he was insulting him.

As time passed and our social views became more enlightened, the class meaning of the word was lost, but the moral meaning persisted.

Just think of a modern liberal describing somebody who lives in the Midwest. You get the idea.

I may be trying to seize the moon by the teeth, but I’m not hanging noodles on your ears when I say that language idioms are more important than anybody ever thought.

This article from The Guardian discusses what is being learned about idiomatic expressions (like “kicked the bucket,” or “pulling your leg”), and how language scholars are being forced to reevaluate their assumptions on the basis of idiom studies.

Chomsky’s view of language evolution, based on his word-centric, rule-driven generative grammar model of language can’t explain some of the observable properties of idiom use. The specifics get quite technical (it is all about compositionality, what is held in memory and how sentences are constructed). However they aren’t too important, the main point is that idioms and other stock expressions aren’t peripheral language oddities – they are central to how we communicate.

Well, we never miss a chance to rag on (“ragging on” is another idiom) Noam Chomsky whenever we can.

But really, when you think of it, isn’t most of language essentially idiomatic? Except for words like “splash” or “thud,” which sound like the things they describe, most words in every language are pretty arbitrary, it seems to me. So idioms are just ordinary language, dressed up in a clown suit.

Tip: Mirabilis.