Semantic Antics.
Our take
Okay, let’s dive into this. It’s delightful, isn't it? The sheer *elasticity* of language. The way a word can slip and slide, morph and meander its way through time. We’re revisiting the work of Sol Steinmetz, a rabbi and etymologist—a combination I find utterly charming—and his book *Semantic Antics*, which reminds us that language isn’t some rigid, ossified structure, but a breathing, evolving thing. It’s a welcome counterpoint to the prescriptive grammarians who insist on rules and boundaries, those folks who’d have you believe language is a perfectly ordered garden. But language is more like a sprawling, overgrown forest, full of unexpected detours and hidden glades. It's a sentiment echoing the playful exploration of food origins we saw in The Science of Bruschetta—that same curiosity about how things *become* what they are. And thinking about human movement across continents, as we explored in How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look, reminds you that language, too, is a migratory force, carried and transformed by those who travel and settle.
Steinmetz's core point – that change is inherent to language – feels especially pertinent now. We’re living in an era of rapid technological and social shifts, and language is, as he so aptly put it, “flexible and malleable” in response. New words are coined practically daily—think “doomscrolling,” “cancel culture,” “meta”—and existing words are accruing layers of new meaning, often in highly contested ways. It's not just about adding new terms, either. It's about the subtle shifts in connotation, the way a word's emotional weight can alter over time. Consider the etymological roots of "shell"— Proto-Germanic *skel*, meaning to split, hide, or cover—and you start to see how it conceptually relates to protection, concealment, and the secrets held within something seemingly solid. That's a fascinating resonance, isn't it? And a perfect example of how digging into the history of a word can illuminate its present-day usage. It’s about uncovering the slippery, narrow things just below the surface, the razor clams of meaning.
The beauty of Steinmetz’s work, as celebrated by this piece, is its celebration of this chaotic process. He doesn’t lament the loss of “correct” usage or mourn the demise of older meanings. He embraces the dynamism, the constant re-negotiation of language. This perspective feels aligned with the spirit of our community, those who revel in the quirks and eccentricities of language, who appreciate a well-placed neologism, and who aren’t afraid to challenge conventional wisdom. The ongoing Q&A threads we host, Q&A weekly thread - June 08, 2026 - post all questions here!, are a testament to this very curiosity. People are actively *seeking* to understand how language works, how it changes, and how it reflects our evolving world.
Ultimately, Steinmetz’s *Semantic Antics* offers a refreshing reminder that language is not a static entity to be preserved in amber, but a living, breathing organism. It's a constant conversation, a negotiation between past, present, and future. And as language continues to evolve, shaped by technology, migration, and cultural shifts, what new semantic landscapes will emerge? Will we see a resurgence of older forms, re-appropriated with new meanings? Or will language fragment even further, spawning dialects and sub-languages tailored to increasingly niche online communities? It’s a question worth watching, a linguistic frontier ripe for exploration.
Back in 2010 I posted about the death of Sol Steinmetz, rabbi and etymologist; now a longtime LH reader has sent me a copy of his 2008 book Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, and it’s a pure delight. In the introduction, he says:
Changes in meanings make language flexible and malleable. But how do words take on new meanings? The study of meanings and the changes of meaning that words undergo is called semantics (from Greek sēmantikos “having meaning, signifying”). I’ve titled this work Semantic Antics because many English words have changed meaning in fascinating, unusual, and unexpected ways. Those are the words I focus on in this book.
[…]As a language consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, I was fortunate to have had access to the OED’s treasury of historical citations, which I used to trace and illustrate the development of meanings discussed in this book.
His very first entry, about “A1,” taught me something I didn’t know; after citing the first use in the sense ‘first-class, outstanding’ in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837) — “‘He must be a first-rater,’ said Sam. ‘A, 1,’ replied Mr. Roker.” — he explains:
Dickens adopted a technical shipping term, A1, and used it figuratively. The shipping term was created by Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, a British publication founded in 1760 by Edward Lloyd to circulate and exchange shipping news among merchants and underwriters. Lloyd published his first Register of Ships in 1764, and in it he devised a system for classifying the condition of every registered ship. In this system, the top classification was A1, the letter A denoting a first-class condition of a ship’s hull, and the number 1, a top condition of the ship’s stores. When shipping merchants would describe a ship’s condition as being “A1,” it was the highest praise they could assign to it, and so inevitably the term passed into figurative use as a synonym of “first-class, excellent.”
And paging through it I see all sorts of entries I look forward to exploring; many thanks, Brian!
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