И. В. Арнольд лексикология современного английского языка Издание

When people say “I’ve told you fifty times,”
They mean to scold and very often do.

The reader will note that Byron’s intonation is distinctly colloquial, the poet is giving us his observations concerning colloquial expressions. So the hyperbole here, though used in verse, is not poetic but linguistic.

The same may be said about expressions like: It’s absolutely maddening, You’ll be the death of me, I hate troubling you, It’s monstrous, It’s a nightmare, A thousand pardons, A thousand thanks, Haven’t seen you for ages, I'd give the world to, I shall be eternally grateful, I'd love to do it, etc.

The most important difference between a poetic hyperbole and a linguistic one lies in the fact that the former creates an image, whereas in the latter the denotative meaning quickly fades out and the corresponding exaggerating words serve only as general signs of emotion without specifying the emotion itself. Some of the most frequent emphatic words are: absolutely! lovely! magnificent! splendid! marvellous! wonderful! amazing! incredible! and so on.¹

The reverse figure is called litotes (from Gr litos ‘plain’, ‘meagre’) or understatement. It might be defined as expressing the affirmative by the negative of its contrary, e. g. not bad or not half bad for ‘good’, not small for ‘great’, no coward for ‘brave’. Some

¹ See awfully and terribly on p. 63.

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understatements do not contain negations, e. g. rather decent; I could do with a cup of tea. It is, however, doubtful whether litotes should be considered under the heading of semantic change at all, because as a rule it creates no permanent change in the sense of the word used and concerns mostly usage and contextual meaning of words. Understatement expresses a desire to conceal or suppress one’s feelings, according to the code of reserve, and to seem indifferent and calm. E. g.:

“But this is frightful, Jeeves!”

“Certainly somewhat disturbing, sir.” (Wodehouse)

“Long time since we met.”

“It is a bit, isn’t it?” (Wodehouse)

The indifference may be superficial and suggest that the speaker’s emotions are too strong to be explicitly stated.

Understatement is considered to be a typically British way of putting things and is more characteristic of male colloquial speech: so when a woman calls a concert absolutely fabulous using a hyperbole a man would say it was not too bad or that it was some concert.

Understatement is rich in connotations: it may convey irony, disparagement and add expressiveness. E. g. rather unwise (about somebody very silly) or rather pushing (about somebody quite unscrupulous).

The term irony is also taken from rhetoric, it is the expression of one’s meaning by words of opposite sense, especially a simulated adoption of the opposite point of view for the purpose of ridicule or disparagement. One of the meanings of the adjective nice is ‘bad’, ‘unsatisfactory’; it is marked off as ironical and illustrated by the example: You’ve got us into a nice mess! The same may be said about the adjective pretty: A pretty mess you’ve made of it!

As to the euphemisms, that is referring to something unpleasant by using milder words and phrases so that a formerly unoffensive word receives a disagreeable meaning (e. g. pass away ‘die’), they will be discussed later in connection with extralinguistic causes of semantic change and later still as the origin of synonyms.

Changes depending on the social attitude to the object named, connected with social evaluation and emotional tone, are called amelioration and pejoration of meaning, and we shall also return to them when speaking about semantic shifts undergone by words, because their referents come up or down the social scale. Examples of amelioration are OE cwen ‘a woman’ >ModE queen, OE cniht ‘a young servant’ > ModE knight. The meaning of some adjectives has been elevated through associations with aristocratic life or town life. This is true about such words as civil, chivalrous, urbane. The word gentle had already acquired an evaluation of approval by the time it was borrowed into English from French in the meaning ‘well-born’. Later its meaning included those characteristics that the high-born considered appropriate to their social status: good breeding, gracious behaviour, affability. Hence the noun gentleman, a kind of key-word in the history of English, that originally meant ‘a man of gentle (high) birth’ came to mean ‘an honourable and well-bred person’.

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The meaning of the adjective gentle which at first included only social values now belongs to the ethical domain and denotes ‘kind’, ‘not rough’, ‘polite’. A similar process of amelioration in the direction of high moral qualities is observed in the adjective noble — originally ‘belonging to the nobility’.

The reverse process is called pejoration or degradation; it involves a lowering in social scale connected with the appearance of a derogatory and scornful emotive tone reflecting the disdain of the upper classes towards the lower ones. E. g.: ModE knavecnafa || Germ Knabe meant at first ‘boy’, then ‘servant’, and finally became a term of abuse and scorn. Another example of the same kind is blackguard. In the lord’s retinue of Middle Ages served among others the guard of iron pots and other kitchen utensils, black with soot. From the immoral features attributed to these servants by their masters comes the present scornful meaning of the word blackguard ‘scoundrel’. A similar history is traced for the words: boor, churl, clown, villain. Boor (originally ‘peasant’ || Germ Bauer) came to mean ‘a rude, awkward, ill-mannered person’. Churl is now a synonym to boor. It means ‘an ill-mannered and surly fellow’. The cognate German word is Kerl which is emotionally and evaluatory neutral. Up to the thirteenth century ceorl denoted the lowest rank of a freeman, later — a serf. In present-day English the social component is superseded by the evaluative meaning. A similar case is present in the history of the word clown: the original meaning was also ‘peasant’ or ‘farmer’. Now it is used in two variants: ‘a clumsy, boorish, uncouth and ignorant man’ and also ‘one who entertains, as in a circus, by jokes, antics, etc’. The French borrowing villain has sustained an even stronger pejorisation: from ‘farm servant’ it gradually passed to its present meaning ‘scoundrel’.

The material of this chapter shows that semantic changes are not arbitrary. They proceed in accordance with the logical and psychological laws of thought, otherwise changed words would never be understood and could not serve the purpose of communication. The various attempts at classification undertaken by traditional linguistics, although inconsistent and often subjective, are useful, since they permit the linguist to find his way about an immense accumulation of semantic facts. However, they say nothing or almost nothing about the causes of these changes.