Semantic anachronism

Hamlet asks permission

A student writes in an essay on Hamlet: “When Hamlet’s friends hold him back from following the Ghost, he shouts ‘I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!’ It’s a strange threat: he promises to kill whoever allows him to go, which shows how confused he is.”

In Shakespeare’s English, “let” could also mean “hinder, prevent, stand in the way”, which is how David and Ben Crystal’s glossary Shakespeare’s Words reads this very line. Hamlet is threatening whoever stops him, and the scene makes sense. That “let” was a separate verb which has since dropped out of use, surviving in phrases like “without let or hindrance”. The student supplied the only “let” they knew, and then drew a conclusion about Hamlet’s state of mind from a meaning the line never had.

The enthusiastic curate

A local historian finds a 1760 letter recommending a young curate, which describes him as “a zealous man, and something of an enthusiast”. She writes: “His sponsor clearly admired his energy and passion for his work.”

The letter may be praising him, but the historian can’t tell that from the modern meaning. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) gives the first sense of “enthusiasm” as “a vain belief of private revelation”, and of “enthusiast” as “one who vainly imagines a private revelation”. In that sense the word is an accusation, not a compliment. Johnson also lists milder senses (“heat of imagination”, “elevation of fancy”), so the right reading depends on the rest of the letter. The error is skipping that question because the word looks familiar. This case is harder to spot than Hamlet’s, because the modern reading makes perfect sense and nothing in the sentence signals a problem.

• Within one language: a word in an old text read with a meaning that developed later, as in both examples above. Carson’s own first example is from the history of the church: the early church fathers used the Greek word for “overseer” (the source of “bishop”) for a leader with oversight of several local churches, a use he says has no obvious warrant in the New Testament.
• Across languages, through a borrowed word: reading an ancient word through a modern word that descends from it. Carson’s main example is preachers glossing the Greek dunamis (“power”) in Paul’s letter to the Romans as “dynamite”, and the Greek for “cheerful” as “hilarious”. He calls it “an appeal to a kind of reverse etymology, the root fallacy compounded by anachronism”: Paul could not have meant dynamite, which was invented eighteen centuries later.
• Reading in modern knowledge: treating a term in an old text as if it carried what we now know about the thing it names. Carson’s third level of the problem is a set of magazine articles that read modern physiology, blood’s role in flushing impurities from the body’s cells, into an ancient phrase about blood that referred to a violent death.

Names and neighbors. Carson, in Exegetical Fallacies (1984), lists semantic anachronism among the errors of interpreting words. He calls a second fallacy, “semantic obsolescence”, its “mirror image”: assigning to a word in a text “a meaning that the word in question used to have in earlier times”, but no longer had when the text was written. The Etymological fallacy is the everyday form of that mirror: it holds a word’s current use to an older meaning. Semantic anachronism runs the other way, holding an older text to a current meaning. Both make the same mistake, taking a meaning from one time and applying it to language from another.

• The meaning hasn’t changed. Many words mean today what they meant centuries ago. Reading an old text with the modern sense is right when the modern sense was already current; the error is assuming it without checking.
• The question is how the text reads now. Noting that an old line sounds different to a modern audience, or that a modern word grew out of an ancient one, is a claim about the present or about history. It becomes the fallacy only when the modern sense is attributed to the original writer.
• A modern translation or paraphrase. Rendering an old word with a modern one that has the old meaning (“hinders” for Hamlet’s “lets”) is the opposite of the error.

The test: is there evidence that the word had this meaning when the text was written, or only that it has it now?

Catherine’s “nice” book

A reader of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (published in 1817) takes Catherine Morland’s remark that a novel is “a nice book” to mean simply that she enjoyed it.

That’s the modern loose meaning of “nice”, and “nice” has changed a great deal over the centuries. But here the novel itself shows that the loose sense was already current: Henry Tilney teases Catherine for it, saying it is “a very nice word indeed! it does for everything”, and that “now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.” The evidence is from the time of writing, which is exactly what the test asks for. (Tilney’s own complaint, that the word originally expressed “neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement”, is a playful version of the etymological fallacy.)

Readers bring their own language to every text, and most of the time that works. A changed word usually looks exactly like the familiar one, so nothing prompts a second look: the modern reading comes first and feels like no reading at all. It’s most persuasive when the modern sense still makes a sentence sound sensible, as with the curate.

The cross-language form has an extra appeal. Tracing a modern word back to an ancient one feels like uncovering a hidden depth, and the borrowed word (dynamite, hilarious) is vivid in a way the original (“power”, “cheerful”) is not. Carson notes that the move is often made “as if something profound or even esoteric has been uttered.”

• Check a historical dictionary or a period glossary (the Oxford English Dictionary, Johnson, an annotated edition) for the senses current when the text was written.
• Read the word in its context. Does the modern reading fit the rest of the passage, or does something feel slightly off, like Hamlet threatening the people who let him go?
• Ask when the modern meaning appeared. If the word or the sense arrived after the text, the writer couldn’t have meant it.