Receive Our Writing Tips via EmailAccidental Shifts in Meaning
Words often slowly change their meanings over time — and sometimes, as in the case of fulsome, flip-flop — but occasionally popular culture inadvertently puts them on the fast track to transformation.
Movies and television shows introduce or popularize new senses for words all the time, but there are at least two cases in which filmed entertainment unintentionally created new senses for words that supplanted the original usage.
In the first instance, it was actually the print version of The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett, in which the author dared to have protagonist Sam Spade refer to a member of antagonist Kasper Gutman’s entourage as “your gunsel.” That word, probably from the Yiddish term for “young goose,” originally was hobo slang for a boy in a sexual relationship with an older man. Lore has it that Hammett intended that meaning and inserted it in the original short story to put one over on a prissy magazine editor.
When screenwriter and first-time director John Huston adapted Hammett’s tale for the big screen — supposedly by merely transcribing the story’s dialogue — he retained the term, and the movie-going public, like the editor, assumed that the word refers to a gunman. Ever since then, writers searching for an evocative slang term for a hired gun have passed the viral error on.
A similar transmogrification occurred with the word nimrod, a generic reference to the biblical character of that name, who in the Good Book is referred to as “a mighty hunter.” How, then, did the word become a synonym for jerk or idiot? We have none other a personage (or, more accurately, a rabbitage) than Bugs Bunny to thank for this significant shift in meaning.
In a Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Bugs’s fumbling nemesis Elmer Fudd as a hunter on the rabbit’s trail, the carrot-chomping coney sardonically refers to Fudd as a nimrod — insulting him by derisively comparing him to a biblical personage renowned for his hunting skills. Apparently, later generations of Looney Tunes fans who hadn’t kept up with their Scripture picked up on Bugs’s attitude without understanding the ironic allusion, and the word acquired a new meaning, while its original sense faded into the background.
The moral of these stories? If you come across a mystery word in your reading and are tempted to employ it in your own writing, first be sure you understand its implications.
Related Articles
Share
Join Over 50,000 Email Subscribers and Get a Free eBook!
- Subscribe to DailyWritingTips.com via email and you'll be able to download our ebook, "Basic English Grammar."
- You will also get all our writing tips delivered to your email inbox, completely free!
- The download link will go along with the first email (you might need to wait up to 24 hours).
6 Responses to “Accidental Shifts in Meaning”
Have something to say?
Popular Articles
- 40 Yiddish Words You Should Know
- 10 Rules for Writing Numbers
- Vocabulary Test 1
- Passed vs Past
- Writing a Reference Letter
- Creative Writing 101
- 44 Resume Writing Tips
- Among vs. Amongst
- 6 Foreign Expressions You Should Know
- Let the Word Do the Work
- How to Format a US Business Letter
- That vs. Which
- 50 Incorrect Pronunciations To Avoid
- The Writing Process
- Inquire vs. Enquire
- 25 Pieces of Writing Software
- 12 Greek Words You Should Know
- Cannot or Can Not?
- What Does Sic Mean?
- 100 Small But Expressive Interjections
- Wether, Weather, Whether
- 34 Writing Tips To Write Better
- Yours Faithfully or Yours Sincerely?
- Latin Words and Expressions
- Grammar Test 1
- Program vs. Programme
- Writing Prompts 101
- 7 Essay Writing Tips To Ace Your Exam
- What Is Irony? (With Examples)
- 100 Beautiful and Ugly Words
- 7 Grammatical Errors That Aren't
This was really interesting — especially the nimrod allusion. Thanks, Mark!
What perfect timing! I was wondering only a few days ago about how “nimrod” came to be the slangy insult it is today. (I think I just happen to like the word, actually.)
Now that I think of it, there were an awful lot of classical allusions in those old Bugs Bunny cartoons, and I imagine that most modern viewers would never catch on. We’ve abandoned our classics!
Note that “nimrod” as an insult doesn’t exist in British English (in my experience, anyway). We associate the word with the Elgar music of the same name, and the Royal Air Force’s famous “spy” planes that were recently decommissioned as part of the defence cuts, but I’ve never heard it used as an insult!
First of all I love the title of this article – sounds like a good title for a book of poems or a short film.
Second – thanks for sharing a bit of gay history – and not editing it out existence. We’re here now and we were there then.
Finally – hoyden. Not sure if it’s an apt example. I just like the word and it came to mind while I was reading.
Thus we find ourselves offered seemingly conflicting meanings in dictionaries, such as this entry:
non·plussed/nänˈpləst/
Adjective:
1. (of a person) Surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react.
2. (of a person) Unperturbed.
I once try to explain to someone the true origin and meaning of “Nimrod,” but the only feedback I received was a blank stare. Now when I meet people like that, I feel a desire to hand them a lit cigarette and send them to stand next to a leaky tank marked “INFLAMMABLE.”
Interesting. I’ve encountered nimrod exclusively as an insult, and just assumed it was no more complex than it sounds like an insult. Calling someone a nimrod simply doesn’t sound anything but pejoritive. Probably false association with nincumpoop (various spellings), dimwit, nitwit, numbnuts, etc. Likewise nonplussed just sounds like it means nearly the opposite of what it does. Non-plussed, not-perturbed, non-surprised, etc. Not excuses for such illitieracy, mind you, just explanations. Likewise enormity means large in size. Noisome means noisy. Errant means mistaken, or wrongdoing. Potable means it is kept in a pot. Crapulent…