LEND ME YOUR EAR; LANGUAGE IS NOT THE ONLY THING THAT CHANGES

Studying word changes may seem a trivial pursuit in wartime, but nothing is more important than the ability to communicate in war or peace. Poor word choice has always caused more breakups than breakthroughs. (We've added breakthroughs to our list of buzz words.)

An article by a retired educator on the history and changes in word meanings has reached me via Dr. Don Higginbotham of Chapel Hill. The author, Jesse Grumette, writes for the Chapel Hill Herald. In the article at hand, he points out that some changes are for the better, others for the worse: sometimes words fall into bad company and lose status, other times good company improves their image.

One word influenced by bad company is the British word knave. A knave used to be a boy, and still is in German. But in England, slaves and servants sometimes misbehaved, and their masters began to call them knaves, presumably because they acted more like unruly schoolboys than grownups. It was a short trip from unruly to unprincipled.

Remember when gentlemen used to be called dapper? If a man wore well-creased trousers, patent-leather hair and polished shoes, we considered him dapper. In Shakespeare's day, it was the elves who were dapper because they were quick, lively, and always busy. Ivor Brown, author of that delightful book "A Word in Your Ear" (a title I lifted unintentionally for the first two of these columns), considered it a pity that so vital a word as dapper had been annexed by haberdashery!

Buxom, vowed wordmaster Brown, turned a somersault. Originally, it meant gracious, hospitable, flexible, and always busy. For a reason no one understood, the poet Byron used buxom to describe a middle-aged, healthily plump lady and in so doing changed the meaning for the whole English-speaking world.

Notorious formerly meant well-known, even famous. But as far back as I can recall, a notorious woman was one of ill repute in famous. We find uninformed speakers and writers using the word in the original sense today but not because they are striving for accuracy. They've heard it, and understood it to be an expression of praise. If it is, it shouldn't be.

When I was a child, and for some years after, my father was an undertaker. Somewhere along the line, I've no notion when, undertakers became funeral directors or morticians, or both.

In olden times, people died. About the end of the 18th century, they began to depart this life, pass away (or on), go home, fall asleep anything but the plain fact of death. However, I note an increasing use these days of "dead on arrival" especially among our policy-makers in Washington and newsmen.

In my childhood, our family doctor scattered sugar pills over the sidewalk for us to retrieve and eat. (Germs? Who thought of germs? Not our horse-and-buggy doctor!) Nowadays, sugar pills are called placebos: pills with no medication in them, prescribed to humor patients who have convinced themselves they won't survive without medication.

Thrill, we have discovered, used to mean a shiver down the back, causing one to shudder. But the entertainment world and its boosters murdered thrill, and today it covers pleasure as well as pain. (Psychiatrists and Kahlil Gibrahn have told us pleasure and pain are inseparable, but theirs was another field. Or was it?)

Traffic was once a respectable term denoting trade or communication. In our time, we are protesting drug traffic, liquor traffic, traffic jams, all signalling abuse.

Prime now reminds us of the British Minister of State or the better cuts of meat, wrote Ivor Brown in 1945. Today, it signifies the best hours for television, and the squabbles among networks for prime time. Originally, it meant the first hour of the day.

My lifelong friend Lela Dunn of Detroit has sent an amusing article called "We are survivors", detailing changes in life and language in our time. Remember when pot was a utensil for cooking in, grass was something that had to be mowed, Coke was a cold drink, and rock music was grandma's lullaby?

Time was when a young man in love gave his bride-to-be an engagement ring. Today, young girls still in high school tell the world how long they've had their promise rings, and how long they and their sweethearts have "been together." As the author of "We are survivors" reminds us, young couples of our day got married and then slept together. And we were the last generation who were so stupid as to think we needed a husband to have a baby!