Language changes in form and meaning all the time. English, for example, began as the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) language of Beowulf, transformed over centuries into the Middle English of The Canterbury Tales, wended its way through Hamlet, and emerged as the mechanism by which you communicate. Those large changes in form make the syntax of Anglo-Saxon different from yours, as evidenced by its placement of past participles at the end of a sentence as in German, the language to which it owes its origin. Along its journey through history, English also acquired numerous Latin cognates, all entering the language through the influence of first the Romans, who had invaded England, and then under the influence of the Church, for which Latin was a universal and official language.
The etymology of the first word in this essay, language, exemplifies how words change: Going backward in history, it derives from 1) Middle English langage, 2) Old French language, 3) Vulgar Latin linguaticum, 4) Latin lingua, 5) Old Latin dingua, and on back to Proto-Indo-European roots. In meaning, the word changed from “tongue” to “system of communication through words.” The second word in this essay, changes, has a similar history, working its way through time as Old French changier, Late Latin cambiare, and on back to Proto-Indo-European kemb-. Cambire meant “barter, exchange.”
How do words acquire different meanings? Modern science and technology are two avenues to altered meaning. Politics is a third avenue. Take the word progressive, for example. Leftists, starting with late 1920's and early 1930’s Communists, have adopted the term as a hallmark of their politics. But in the 1920s, progressive had a different meaning, and progressives were “traditional liberals,” not rabid or moderately rabid socialists or Communists. In the 1929 a motley group of Left-leaning ideologists gathered under the guidance of clergyman A. J. Muste to foster unionism. The Conference for Progressive Labor Action became a turning point in the meaning of progressive. Literary critic and essayist Edmund Wilson, who was drawn to the study of Marx and Lenin, commented on the conference by writing, “curious to think about what being progressive meant fo the different ones!” If Wilson had lived to witness the 2019 Democratic Socialists of America National Convention, he might have used harsher words. That convention broke into a series of complaints over pronouns, loud voices, and clapping. *
Wilson, enamored with what he believed to be the great potential of the Soviet Union, discovered to his dismay what a Communist dictatorship and a socialist politics can engender: A quashing of truly progressive thinking. Wilson asked, “Why should we suppose that man’s brutal and selfish impulses will all evaporate with a socialist dictatorship?”
The socialist and communist word thieves have somehow come to the conclusion that their form of progressivism will result in a society superior to that of today’s free enterprise capitalism. But when we look around our world, we see places steeped in Marxism and socialism to be locations deprived of free speech and individual freedoms. We see that today’s progressivism frees no one, makes government more powerful, and suppresses free action and thought.
The avenue of changing language seems to have taken us not forward in a sense that the word progress once meant, but backward to a time when emperors and kings controlled lives at a whim. One of the earlier meanings of the word was “a state journey by royalty,” a meaning antithetical to the term as it was used by the Conference for Progressive Labor Action in support of “common workers.”
If either A. J. Muste or Edmund Wilson were alive during this time of mandates, closures, loss of union jobs as in the shutdown of the Keystone Pipeline, censorship, and even, as in Austria in 2021 some enforced confinements of the unvaccinated, I wonder what both might think of the current meaning of progressive.
*You can see for yourself by going to DSA convention on YouTube.
The etymology of the first word in this essay, language, exemplifies how words change: Going backward in history, it derives from 1) Middle English langage, 2) Old French language, 3) Vulgar Latin linguaticum, 4) Latin lingua, 5) Old Latin dingua, and on back to Proto-Indo-European roots. In meaning, the word changed from “tongue” to “system of communication through words.” The second word in this essay, changes, has a similar history, working its way through time as Old French changier, Late Latin cambiare, and on back to Proto-Indo-European kemb-. Cambire meant “barter, exchange.”
How do words acquire different meanings? Modern science and technology are two avenues to altered meaning. Politics is a third avenue. Take the word progressive, for example. Leftists, starting with late 1920's and early 1930’s Communists, have adopted the term as a hallmark of their politics. But in the 1920s, progressive had a different meaning, and progressives were “traditional liberals,” not rabid or moderately rabid socialists or Communists. In the 1929 a motley group of Left-leaning ideologists gathered under the guidance of clergyman A. J. Muste to foster unionism. The Conference for Progressive Labor Action became a turning point in the meaning of progressive. Literary critic and essayist Edmund Wilson, who was drawn to the study of Marx and Lenin, commented on the conference by writing, “curious to think about what being progressive meant fo the different ones!” If Wilson had lived to witness the 2019 Democratic Socialists of America National Convention, he might have used harsher words. That convention broke into a series of complaints over pronouns, loud voices, and clapping. *
Wilson, enamored with what he believed to be the great potential of the Soviet Union, discovered to his dismay what a Communist dictatorship and a socialist politics can engender: A quashing of truly progressive thinking. Wilson asked, “Why should we suppose that man’s brutal and selfish impulses will all evaporate with a socialist dictatorship?”
The socialist and communist word thieves have somehow come to the conclusion that their form of progressivism will result in a society superior to that of today’s free enterprise capitalism. But when we look around our world, we see places steeped in Marxism and socialism to be locations deprived of free speech and individual freedoms. We see that today’s progressivism frees no one, makes government more powerful, and suppresses free action and thought.
The avenue of changing language seems to have taken us not forward in a sense that the word progress once meant, but backward to a time when emperors and kings controlled lives at a whim. One of the earlier meanings of the word was “a state journey by royalty,” a meaning antithetical to the term as it was used by the Conference for Progressive Labor Action in support of “common workers.”
If either A. J. Muste or Edmund Wilson were alive during this time of mandates, closures, loss of union jobs as in the shutdown of the Keystone Pipeline, censorship, and even, as in Austria in 2021 some enforced confinements of the unvaccinated, I wonder what both might think of the current meaning of progressive.
*You can see for yourself by going to DSA convention on YouTube.
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