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I learned in college that languages are living and that linguistic change is inevitable. Also, by helping its speakers adapt to changing surrounding conditions, change in language is probably even good. (As for English, the fact that Norman and Saxon could essentially merge over time actually shaped the world itself.) The protests and the efforts to resist language changes by the French Academy, old-line English teachers and librarians, and other old fuddy-duddies, we learned, were appropriately the objects of satire.
I learned to feel superior to those who said, "Why, tsk-tsk, you are using 'improper English.'" Americans generally seemed less resistant to changes in English than our British contemporaries, we thought, and in that respect we on our side of the Atlantic were actually better than they, even though clearly they did not think so.
Well, I am now old enough to have seen quite a few linguistic changes myself - not passing fads or trendy phraseology, but lasting changes in our language. And, I confess, I find it easier to sympathize with the Academy or our European forbears than I used to. Egad, I've become an old fuddy-duddy myself!
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Another thing I learned 50 years ago is that many lasting language changes over the centuries have resulted from confusions of one word or phrase with another, similar one. The similarity may come from usage of both terms' appropriately taking place in the same context - let's say, hypothetically, in discussions of logic and debate - or the similarity may be in the way the words sound or (I imagine) in the way the written word looks on the page.
When the original meanings of the two words that become confused for one another are different, then for us to begin to use them interchangeably impoverishes our language at least slightly since that would mean we would be likely to not notice differences that exist in "reality," thus diminishing the world that we live in itself. But we are coming up with new words all the time to refer to the new things we experience or observe, or differences within experiences that we had not perceived before... so the variety and complexity of our world remain as rich as ever.
Oh, how sweet, appropriate, and normal... just as I learned it.
But when two words whose meanings used to be the opposite of each to come to mean the same thing? (old fuddy-duddy speaking) How is that okay?
Yes, I am talking about the two words: imply and infer. Within my lifetime, the contrasting meanings of these two words have just about finished merging into the same, one meaning. Imply has flat out won; infer is used now as often as not to refer to exactly the same action that once - in my own lifetime! - referred only to imply.
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Back when I was learning how people come to communicate with each other, I learned that to imply something meant to lead someone to understand that information indirectly, by hinting at it, or by providing sufficient cause for one's reader or listener to - yes - to infer it for herself or himself! To imply meant to communicate indirectly; to infer meant to deduce what was implied from what was explicitly stated. You imply; I infer.
Yes, originally, these two words referred to exactly the opposite ends of the process of transferring information from one person to another, when the communication is not direct.
Infer still exists in our language, but if you look it up you will find that one of its meanings is imply. When you hear infer used, you will find the speaker means imply, which you already knew, didn't you?! But you may not have known that infer used to mean the opposite of imply: infer meant to deduce, to derive by reasoning, to conclude from evidence observed.
Yes, it seems to me that we have confused ourselves unnecessarily, and we have reduced the clarity of our understanding of how we communicate among each other.
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Yes, it bugs me, old fuddy-duddy that I am. And there is another confusion between two words of originally opposite meanings that for some reason doesn't irritate me as much, but which I still notice whenever I hear it. It's the phrase "to beg the question."
It seems that when speakers want to impress us with how clever they are at uncovering hidden truths, that phrase is likely to appear. From some source, we are told, we hear X stated; well then, the clever speaker points out that X, if you think about it, should make you wonder about Y. This is phrased: "If X is true, as we are told, that begs the question Y." In other words, by X being stated, the question Y is raised; we must find the answer to Y in order to fully understand X.
That is often true, of course. A political commentator, for instance, might say, "The economy under President A has been lousy," which raises the question, "Is that President A's fault?" And we hear people say that or see them write it today by stating "That statement begs the question, 'Is that the President's fault?'"
That's as common a usage today, I would say, as using infer to mean imply.
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When I was teaching English to a class of French-speakers, following my school's practice I gave them exercises translating single sentences from English into French. Using the required text, I gave them this sentence for translating: "The man walked down the hall and turned into a room."
After only a moment of silence, everyone laughed. Can you tell why? To "turn into," they had learned in vocabulary classes meant to "become." My sentence, to them, was the same as "The man went down the hall and became a room."
The sentence might have asked this man to "step" into the room, which would not have provoked a laugh (but I suspect would have sent my students scrambling through their English-to-French dictionaries). If I had been telling them a story, I might have said that our nameless man had previously been forbidden to go into that room for some reason.
In fact, the story might say he had been warned that if he ever "set foot" into that room, he would risk arrest and criminal prosecution. Now, to step into a room (or into anywhere) is the same thing as to set foot into that place, but to step in seems simply to go into the room while to set foot into the room would focus on the first tiny part of the process of going in. So, both phrases mean pretty much the same thing although the second one implies there is something special about this particular entrance.
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Recently, I have begun to hear individuals, when talking about one such special "going in," as to "step foot into" the place. Maybe it was a deported Egyptian activist, for instance, who had been forbidden by the Mubarak administration from even beginning to return to her homeland. After the Arab Spring, she could "step foot" again onto her native soil.
The speakers I have heard using this phrase, in other words, were correct to call attention to what was special in the context here... But they are making the simplest (and among the silliest) confusion between "step" and "set," no doubt because of the way the words sound alike.
It seems as though, however, that to "step foot" into something is going to be joining all the other phrases in our language. This one at least makes me laugh.
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