ArcaMax

Imagine a bizarre world where vegetarians eat meat, corpses come alive, a ceiling is a wall and a deer is a mouse.

This may seem like a 1950s horror flick based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," but it actually represents something even scarier -- the world of English circa 1300. The meanings of "meat," "corpse," "ceiling" and "deer" have slimmed down over the centuries. And this was before Ozempic.

Until the 1300s, "meat" referred to any kind of food and this broad meaning survived well into the 1700s. When Shakespeare's Hamlet spoke of the "funeral baked meats," he was referring, not to baked hams and roasts, but to bread, cakes and pies. And in 1775, when Samuel Johnson wrote, "The horses could not travel all day without rest or meat," he didn't think horses were carnivores.

Likewise, "corpse," derived from the Latin "corpus" (body), originally meant "a living body or a person." So the references in the King James Bible to "dead corpses" and in Shakespeare's "Henry VI" to "a breathless corpse" weren't redundant because "corpse" didn't narrow in meaning to denote a dead body until the mid-1600s.

Before 1500, "ceiling" referred to the lining of any inside surface of a room -- its walls as well as its upper covering. Back then, someone who became so angry he punched his fist through a wall was literally hitting the ceiling. For a while, "ceiling" came to mean "a screen or curtain," but by 1600 its meaning had tightened further to "the top surface of a room."

Another word that trimmed its meaning is "deer," which originally denoted all kinds of animals, not just the Bambi set. Likewise, "adder," which once referred to any type of snake, soon coiled itself around a more constricted meaning: "a venomous viper."

("Adder," by the way, was originally "nadder," but so many people misheard "a nadder" as "an adder," that it became "adder.")

Until 1400, "coast" denoted any region of a country, not necessarily one near the sea. So back then, a shoreline area was called a "coast of the sea," a term that would be redundant today.

In the United States and Canada, "coast" also came to mean "a hillside," especially one covered with ice and snow. This eventually gave us the verb "coast," meaning "to sled down a hill" or "to glide without power on a bike or in a car."

Finally, to get to the bottom of all this, consider "cellar." Originally denoting any type of storeroom, "cellar," which is derived from the Latin "cellarium" (pantry), gradually descended to mean "basement."

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Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to Wordguy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

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