If I asked you to come up with a word that means “cunning, artful, ingenious or proud”, one word I’m certain you wouldn’t think of is quaint. But around 1200, that was exactly what quaint meant.
How did it get all the way from that dubious status to its current, almost opposite, meaning?
The somewhat tautological answer is semantic shift, a term for words changing their meaning over time. It happens a lot - far more than you and I are aware of because it generally happens slowly.
But happen it does. Consider this seriously incomplete list of words that today mean something close to the polar opposite of what they originally meant: Awesome, terrible, terrific, nice, knight, egregious, gay, fond, tremendous, grin, smart, smug, sad, facetious, bully and silly.
One of the pastimes that keeps etymologists busy is enumerating the forces behind semantic shift. Perhaps the world champion here is German etymologist Joachim Grzega, who came up with no fewer than 20, most of them beyond my feeble understanding. Here’s one example: “difficulties in classifying the referent or attributing the right word to the referent, thus mixing up designations”.
Born in 1971, Grzega did a most ambitious thing about 20 years ago when he developed Basic Global English. His idea was to come up with something that was easier to learn than the versions of English usually taught (generally either British or US English), and could also be used and understood globally.
Basic Global English minimises rules of grammar (it’s okay, for example, to treat all verbs as regular) and provides lots of leeway for variations in pronunciation as long as they don’t mess up the speaker’s intended meaning. In some respects, that makes it more like the English spoken by non-native speakers than that used by people in so-called English-speaking countries.
Basic Global English also has a limited vocabulary - just 750 essential words. Compared with the 20,000-35,000 words native speakers know, that’s a drop in the ocean. In addition, each person learning Basic Global English should learn 250 other words in line with their own interests and needs.
Grzega is not the first person to attempt a global form of English. English linguist Charles Kay Ogden tried and failed with Basic English, which he introduced in the early 1930s. His hope was that all languages but one (guess which) would die out, and the world would be able to communicate freely as a result. One suspects he would not be welcomed as a speaker on many university campuses today, but the man was a creature of his time and his aim was fundamentally laudable. He wanted to make English easier to learn for everyone.
Nonetheless, Grzega’s aim is different from Ogden’s; rather than seeking a form of English that dominates the globe, he’s out to “allow learners to quickly acquire a level of global communicative competence characterized by tolerance and empathy.” There’s plenty of room in there for people to speak more than one language, and thank heavens for that.
On the face of it, Ogden’s version doesn’t look wildly different from Grzega’s. But whereas GBE has 20 rules of grammar, Ogden tried to get by with just five. His choice of vocabulary was also curious, with words like want, can, and must regarded as superfluous. One result of his limited number of grammar rules and odd vocabulary is that Basic English often sounds plain weird.
Whether Grzega will fare any better than Ogden remains to be seen, however. All the academic papers I’ve been able to find on Global Basic English were authored or co-authored by him, and the latest was published a little over 10 years ago. Maybe efforts to create a version of universal English are simply doomed.
But I digress.
Quaint - remember that’s where we started? - derives from the Old French cointe or queinte, which in turn came down from the Latin cognitus, “known, approved”. Hence modern words like cognition, cognisance, recognise and so on.
Like most English words with qu in them, quaint obtained its modern spelling following the Norman Conquest. Before that, cw was the usual (and, it has to be said, more natural) spelling. In Anglo-Saxon times, however, qu was very much in vogue, so all the Normans were doing was telling Old English that its predecessor had the right idea and it should revert.
Turns out it’s not just history that’s written by the victors.
Quaint’s shift in meaning over time wasn’t purely random. When you think about it, it’s not a huge leap from the meanings at the top of this post to “elaborate, skillfully made” (the accepted meaning by about 1300), and from there to “strange and clever, fanciful, odd, whimsical” (which is where quaint had found its way to by around 1350).
By the late 1700s, quaint was firmly ensconced in its modern - and quintessentially English - sense of “unusual or old-fashioned but charming or agreeable”.
Which sense dominates depends on context. If someone describes your delightful English village as quaint, they’re probably impressed with it. But if someone at your next team meeting calls your brilliant idea to expand sales quaint, don’t go sending them flowers as a thank you.
In fact, you might want to respond with one or two choice words of very basic English.
Bits and specious
The reason hand dryers always feel cold at first is not because their designers are idiots. It’s because evaporation cools your skin, so until your hands are dry the hot air from them feels cool.
A thoughtful article here on English imperialism (the language, not the country).
Despite his failure with Basic English, Ogden is no tragic footnote in language history. His belief that only a limited vocabulary is needed for most practical purposes is now widely accepted. What’s more, the man wrote an important philosophical work called The Meaning of Meaning and played an important role in Wittgenstein’s work being made available to English speakers. Respect.
Quote of the week
Liberals have a quaint and touching faith that truth is on their side and an even quainter faith that journalists are on the side of truth.
PJ O’Rourke